Benny Safdie, director of The Smashing Machine, is reciting Springsteen lyrics to me over Zoom.
“There’s an opera out on the turnpike. That is something I wholeheartedly believe in,” Safdie says. “That everything outside is worthy of being on screen if it’s truthful and it’s emotional. You can find the opera out there on the street.”
We’re talking about “Jungleland,” the showstopping finale of Bruce’s 1975 classic Born to Run, but we’re also talking about The Smashing Machine, Safdie’s new film—which drops the needle on the Springsteen song in a key moment—and the greater Safdie project that has played out over the course of nearly two decades, across narrative films and documentaries and art that blurs the line between the two.
Benny’s work—with his brother Josh and now on his own—focuses on characters who don’t typically have movies made about them. The dope fiend, the obnoxious jeweler in the diamond district, the scumbag crook in a tracksuit in Queens, the washed-up high-school basketball phenom, the struggling mixed-martial-arts fighter. They’re characters torn from Springsteen songs, if Bruce had grown up in New York during the golden age of hip hop. But in addition to centering stories in the crevices of society, these films resist our ancient craving for schematic storytelling with pat resolutions. The walls closing in on the jeweler don’t miraculously part with a deus ex machina; the scumbag in a tracksuit is unceremoniously and anti-climatically dragged off in handcuffs. The Safdies’ films uncannily capture the disappointingly arbitrary and mundane nature of reality in ways that movies—on any level, from indie to blockbuster—and fictional storytelling in general rarely attempt.
“Jungleland” serves as a theme song for this body of work, and for Smashing Machine in particular. “Another thing he says is, The poets out here don’t write anything at all. You guys don’t think there’s anything important to talk about in this world? To me, it was so representative of what people write off with these fighters. Oh, their lives are just so cliché,” Benny says. “Guys, there is so much going on inside these people. Maybe you don’t look at them because they look so strong, and you just imagine that they can handle anything. But there’s a lot to say.”
You have seen other films like The Smashing Machine, a portrait of Mark Kerr—an almost-champion from the globetrotting, barnstorming early days of MMA, played in Safdie’s film by Dwayne Johnson—and his off-and-on girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt.) Films about fighters are one of Hollywood’s oldest genres: The violent man who makes a living with his fists, who uses substances to chase the demons, whose personal relationships are as messy and volcanic as their work in the ring.
