Mirror, Mirror: Twinhood and the Heroic Protagonist in Day of the Fight

Consider a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s debut short, Day of the Fight. Moments before the eponymous fight, boxer Walter Cartier sits backstage, wrapping his hand in protective bandages. The camera focuses on Walter’s hand as another man, Walter’s identical twin Vincent, appears in the background. Their bodies act in tandem–while Walter flexes his newly-bandaged hand, Vincent punches his gloved hands lightly against each other, as if training. Only one of the men will actually appear in the ring, yet at this moment it seems like both of them prepare for the fight. Or perhaps we should think of the camera as joining them symbiotically; when Vincent punches, it appears no different as if Walter himself (whose face is not longer in frame) trains for the fight. And indeed, in an extended, alternate version of Day of the Fight, the narrator states “every blow that Walter takes’ is ‘going to land on Vince too,” making them not merely double, but unit. 

“This is a story of a fight and of a fighter, Walter Cartier,” says the narrator of Day of the Fight in the very first spoken line of Kubrick’s short film. In this clunky exposition, the film seems to simplistically, though efficiently, reveal its subject matter and protagonist. Yet the visual language of Day of the Fight will challenge the simple narrative that the voice over provides us with. At nearly every turn in the short film, Kubrick will undermine the uniqueness of his fighter protagonist, whether that be by drawing attention towards his quotidian life, deemphasizing the climactic fight, and, most importantly, by staging Walter next to his identical twin brother Vincent. Even hearing the narrator’s voice introduce the film as a “story about a fighter” reads as strange, as the film is often not about a single fighter, but two of them. Thus, I want to explore how Kubrick’s focus on Walter as twin–that is, Walter as same, Walter as like, and Walter as not unique–reveals Kubrick’s interest in deconstructing the heroic filmic protagonist, an idea that will reappear most notably in the 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If one were only to hear the audio of Day of the Fight, or only read the dialogue, given in the form of a narrative voice-over, one would have the sense that the film were a rather conventional slice-of-life biopic. The short film begins by recounting Walter Cartier’s background; we learn that his mother died when he was a child, he began boxing “at the age of three,” and he served in the Navy, continuing his boxing exhibitions while on duty. As the film progresses, the narrator takes us through Walter’s day up through the fight: he wakes, takes communion, eats, and trains. What emerges, through both background and narrative, is the story of a plucky young man, who, despite early tragedy, formed a toughened exterior and excelled in boxing. Walter thus has the characteristics of a good, easy-to-identify-with protagonist: he’s an underdog with a sympathetic backstory, he’s devout with a dangerous edge. 

Walter’s brother Vincent emerges as a minor, though present part of this narrative.  Through the voice over, we learn that Vincent is a lawyer and Walter’s manager. Like Walter, he too learned to box at a young age. And although he normally resides in New Jersey, he has come to visit his brother to help prepare in the hours before the fight. In the audio alone (and this is important) Vincent is present, but secondary to his brother, the protagonist. He appears in the narrative as a source of support for Walter, making him breakfast and staying with him before the fight, but the script’s interest in him does not progress far past that. Walter may have a twin, but their lives diverge, and Walter is the unique hero of Day of the Fight. 

Now, let’s open our eyes. Play the film back again. “This is the story of a fight and of a fighter, Walter Cartier,” the narrator says, and we watch as the camera zooms in on a flier advertising Walter’s fight. But the first time we see Walter is not as a lone hero, but in bed with his identical twin brother. They rise together. Then receive communion together. Then make breakfast together, and ride in a car together, and train for the fight together. Leading up to the fight, Kubrick stages the two brothers side by side in many–if not most–frames, even when Vincent’s presence has little relevance to the plot. On the one hand, we might think of Vincent as merely an accessory; he acts as a visual quirk which Kubrick uses to lend intrigue to his more important protagonist. But on the other hand, we can think of Vincent as serving a more important purpose, rupturing the idea that Day of the Fight is a “story of a fighter.” Afterall, his appearance to some extent always draws our attention away from Walter, forcing us to think of him as simply a part of a unit rather than an individual. 

Kubrick will further deconstruct Walter’s role as protagonist within the film. The film’s visual language is disinterested in attempting to differentiate between the two brothers, and in fact, intentionally stages the brothers in the same frame, wearing the same outfits. Let us return to the scene in bed. When Walter and Vincent rise, they not only carry the same face, but wear the same pajama sets. Only a note by the narrator lets us know that “Walter is on the right.” In another shot, the two men march side by side in the same suits, the only marker of their individual identity being ties: Walter wears a bowtie, while Vincent’s is full length. Such blocking and costuming is hyper stylized and constructed; there is nothing natural or spontaneous about it. Are we to believe that Vincent and Walter, who do not regularly live in the same state, happen to own the same pajamas? Or the same suits? Of course not, Kubrick clearly wants the two to look as similar as possible and accordingly costumes them to achieve a unified effect. 

The dissonance between the film’s audio and imagery is perhaps at its most pronounced during a scene in which the two brothers travel to the fight in a car. Here, more than anywhere else in the film, Walter and Vincent look indistinguishable; once again, they wear the exact same shade of suit. Yet while Kubrick had earlier instructed us to notice the men’s ties, he now shoots the two men from the shoulder up. One has a pipe in his mouth, but which one? If we look hard enough, we can see the beginning of a long tie on the right man’s chest–Vincent! Yet it seems unlikely that the film wants us to do this kind of sleuthing; it no longer gives us easy visual or audio cues to tell the men apart. If we give in to its visual language, we completely lose sight of Walter. 

But at the same time that the men are at visually at their most indistinguishable, the audio refuses to treat them as a unit in the same way that the camera does, narrating Walter’s thoughts:

“Above anything else in the world, Walter Cartier wants to be champion. Unlike a lot of people, he’s got something to move towards all the time. And that thing’s the championship. Nothing is going to keep him back from it. He goes ahead and he never stops.”  

There are a number of things that are of note in this audio. First, there are few other points in the movie in which Walter is given this much interiority. This is where we learn about Walter’s greatest desire (he wants to “be a champion”) and why (it’s something he can constantly work towards). Paradoxically, the moment in which we visually lose sight of Walter is the moment in which his thoughts emerge most strongly. Second, this passage ironically posits Walter as a unique protagonist. We might think of this sentence as the film’s justification for Walter as its subject. He is “unlike a lot of people,” imbued with a special drive that keeps him boxing. Of course, here is where the gap between voice over and image is most clear: the audio insists that Walter is unique, however, we can barely differentiate him from the man sitting next to him in the car. It is precisely this uncanny effect–Walter’s paradoxical uniqueness and sameness, or perhaps I should say Walter’s “unique sameness”–that makes Walter interesting for Kubrick, not his individuality alone. 

I want to end this article by looking ahead at another one of Kubrick’s films, 2001: A Space Odyssey and to its own pair of astronaut twins. Attempting to speak in secret from the ship’s all-hearing supercomputer HAL, two astronauts, Dave and Frank, take refuge in a pod. The camera frames their faces symmetrically, two profiles meeting. They both wear the same, gray jumpsuit. They both have shortly cropped brown hair, white skin, and strong noses. They are, like Walter and Vincent, mirror images of each other. In casting look-alikes, in dressing the men in similar costumes, and in giving them few distinguishing characteristics, Kubrick draws attention to how fundamentally interchangeable the two characters are. In fact, when one of the men dies, it is not initially clear which one–nor does it even seem to matter. 

When reviews of 2001 first came out, many critics focused on the movie’s lack of identifiable characters as a major flaw. Even in his positive review, Roger Ebert said that 2001 “Fails on a human level.” And for Pauline Kael, “Kubrick has made his people so uninteresting.” Yet, critics like Kael and Ebert seem to be mistaken when they assume that Kubrick fails to render his characters as flat rather than intentionally draws them as so.  In 2001, mechanical, undistinguishable characters play a role in the film’s anti–or, more accurately–post-human message. 2001 tells us: once the tools that man built progress beyond his own self, man loses his importance, even within narrative.  Thus, if Day of the Fight begins Kubrick’s dismantling of the individual subject instantiated by the Enlightenment and valorized by Hollywood, 2001 sees its apotheosis:  we are no longer living in the age of man. Long live the twin.