i will never be this much man. or snake, for that matter.
JCVD punches a rattlesnake
I rarely get a chance to use this gif but I’m always compelled to watch it for a few cycles. Think about what went into this from a filmmaking perspective. What is meant to be conveyed is that JCVD has punched the snake unconscious, but the actor can’t just hit the rubber snake and have it go limp, like a punched-out person would. To make it clear that the snake is punched out, the snake must gradually flop over, like it just fades into a faint, struggling and failing to cling to consciousness. And while this is happening JCVD watches it closely, fist cocked to hammer the snake again if the concussion doesn’t fully take with one pop. AND, the DP chose to pan around his subject while all this was going on to give the shot a little extra kinesis. The conceptual takeaway is that the JCVD solution to most problems — punching — has a heretofore unsuspected breadth of successful application well beyond JCVD’s own species. Could we also draw parallels to Schwarzenegger’s infamous drunken camel punch in the first Conan movie? Perhaps but not before the penumbra of related scholarship supports such a connection.
