Read after Episode 15. Here be spoilers.

Gratuitous is one of those words that, in most people’s heads, just translates to “the bad stuff.” I wanted to refer to Fight Bar as gratuitous violence, but that made me consider the actual meaning, and whether you could apply that term to superhero violence in general.

Officially, gratuitous means “with no reason,” as with a gratuity. I suspect that most people think that the word is derivative of gratification. The problem with trying to use the word that way is that all entertainment exists for gratification. Is Bridgerton full of gratuitous drama? Using that definition devolves into tedious arguments around whose taste in film results in behavior harmful to society. I don’t like it, therefore you are morally obligated to also not like it. It’s the American way.

Sticking to the “pointless” definition, in most cases where gratuitous is applied, the sex and violence is the purpose of the film. If you aren’t watching John Wick for the fight scenes, there isn’t a lot to recommend the series. All martial arts films are like that. Any serious contemplation of the term must set aside cases where the expressed purpose of the video is sex and violence.

An obvious case is where a director thinks that “insert violence here” is a viable narrative technique. We see copy-paste fight scenes characterized by ad-hoc environments, unoriginal techniques, choppy cuts, and tight framing. It’s not necessarily purposeless, though. It’s just badly done. Artless.

Maybe a better case is violence that doesn’t relate to the story. You expect a bit of violence in a spy flick or a heist, but slotting a punch-fest into a slice-of-life drama can be jarring. The worst case of this I’ve seen was a French film that included two overweight guys slapping each outer around in slow motion while obviously bouncing off of a plexiglass wall. Interesting to watch, but it did nothing to advance the plot-line.

I think the gold standard for gratuitous is where the film makers throw a brief glimpse of bare breasts into a film to get an R rating, increasing a film’s revenue. It’s common to contort an entire scene around that one opportunity, briefly side-tracking the narrative for a single half-second shot. I can’t say that I don’t enjoy such shots, but they do nothing to advance the story line.

Advancing the story line is the key take-away here. If the story involves overcoming punch-happy goons, then violence isn’t really gratuitous. If gun-wielding enforcers are one of the hazards of our heroes’ jobs, then the violence serves a purpose. If acts of war are a natural part of the backdrop, then they belong in the story.

For the superhero genre, the entire point is to give the writers an opportunity to show off superpowers, and superpowers are generally combat-oriented, or at least conflict-oriented. In that context, is it even possible to have gratuitous violence? I think that such things defy the definition, even if people are in the habit of using the word that way.

This scene was fun to write because it’s the first time the team has run up against a physical opponent that could make them break a sweat. It’s no fun to write a series where the main characters never really seem to get injured. I’ve seen numerous cases where the concept of a bar fight was milked for satirical value, and had fun envisioning an environment where bar fights were a polite expectation.