That F@%*ing Scene : Damian is Dancing
Too Old to Die Young is a weird show. Not weird in the sense that everything you see on screen has to be interpreted symbolically or allegorically (sometimes you have to, though), but weird in the sense that it seems to change its mind on what it’s trying to be about every episode and a half. For the uninitiated, it’s a very stylish cop show that never seems to decide on a) whether it has supernatural elements or not or b) whether it provides a metacommentary on anything.
It was co-written by film director Nicolas Winding-Refn and comic book artist Ed Brubaker, so that inherent tension was either by design or the result of unforeseen creative tensions. Whatever.
The scene I want to break down today is not exactly a scene people particularly appreciate from Too Old to Die Young, but a scene everyone seems to the clearest. In episode 6, local hoodlum and disposable character Damian is caught dancing near the ice skating rink by Mexican cartels. It goes one for WAY too long until an executioner finally drives by on a motorcycle and executes Damian’s lieutenant Celestino by mistake. Look at it. It IS weird.
Why can’t we forget such a weird, accessory and perhaps meaningless scene?
I’ve identified three reasons:
The tone it sets is more important than what it actually says. This is a quirky one. What happens in Damian’s dancing scene is rather straightforward and narratively set up in the previous and following scene: the cartel hitman is supposed to kill Damian and shoots Celestino instead because he received a confusing photo of his target The characters are basically having a two and a half minutes needless dance off until the plot-advancing elements kick in.
What makes this scene so surreal is that it could’ve entirely been cut. It was included in the episode solely based on its otherworldliness (and it IS otherworldly). Whenever Too Old to Die Young is told from the cartel perspective, it becomes fucking weird. Characters stop behaving like normal human beings. They are moody, contemplative. Caught between two worlds. No other scene in Too Old to Die Young expresses this better.
Because you had a baseline for who Damian was and he became suddenly weird. It’s a very Lynchian thing to do: completely altering reality based on who is experiencing it. I would say it is one of the most Lynchian scenes not actually filmed by David Lynch.
We’re not actually sure they’re dancing. Are Damian and the boys dancing? Are we sure of that or are they actually swaying with the airwaves like jellyfishes in a supernatural trance? Where is that freaking light coming from? At one point, there’s a shot from the hitman perspective from across the street and there is NO discernible source from the green, purple and blue shade dancing around. There is literally NOTHING facing the wall they’re dancing in front of.
Do they even hear the music or is it part of the soundtrack? Is Damian communicating with spirits of his own belief system? At this point in the series, it’s unclear whether the looming confrontation between Damian’s crew and the Mexican cartel is a street war or a spiritual crusade. I think that is the most intriguing and fascinating aspect of this scene: it makes you feel like the narrative is about to morph into something completely different.
Visual suspense. If we examine the more nuts-and-bolts aspect of the scene, it translates a sense of inherent suspense without even saying a word. From the hitman’s point of view, it looks like a difficult task: there are many people standing between him and Damian, the street he has to navigate is curvy and filled with uneven buildings, it’s freaking DARK outside and like we established before, it’s not that evident who he has to kill.
The questions create suspense because it’s not like the hitman’s work is cut out for him. Given the pseudo-occult nature of the scene we established in the previous point, you don’t know what he’s walking into either. Damian and the guys might have been setting a trap. A real sense of dread emerges from the scene because none of these characters are leads in the story and something really fucked up might happen to them. We learn that being a lead doesn’t spare you later in the show, but that’s beside the point.
