Joey Gets A Whuppin’: Brown Wins The Showdown Hands Down
The Scott Brown showdown is clearly one of the most crowd pleasing moments of the movie; it is such a shame that the rules of narrative structure do not apply to real life. Because this is exactly what Fitz mourned in the final ever Cracker about 9/11; “first the Twin Towers, then the Pentagon and then Shanksville.”
Had 9/11 been executed like a movie, they’d have reversed the order to finish on the biggest possible bang.
Brown’s dominance of Barton is well out of sequence.
It comes at the end of Act 2 rather than at the end of Act 3 where it belongs.
You could change things, but then it wouldn’t make any sense in terms of the overall arc.
These things can’t be helped.
What a climax to the movie it would have been though; such was Brown’s dominance that day that Barton would have looked like a broken man at the end of it … except that it, too, was all out of sequence because he looked psychologically shattered before it even started.
Look at the picture atop this segment; that’s a man who’s already beaten.
Brown absolutely owns him in this game; that has to be reflected in the film.
Barton, lying on the deck, looking up, as Brown breezes past him would be a lovely way to articulate the dominance.
If you wanted to get all surreal you could do a fantasy-style sequence where Brown has taken Barton home and has him living in a wee dolls house like that great moment in The Incredible Shrinking Man; all the better to keep him in his back pocket.
I’ll let the writer or the director decide that. What has to be emphasised over and over again was Brown’s total superiority and Barton’s humiliation. From that moment before kick-off when he stands with his head bowed so he doesn’t have to meet Brown’s gaze, he was overmatched in every way. At the end of the game, Brown says something to him.
“I was just making sure he was all right,” Brown said when asked later.
That has to be part of the story; people can script it however they like.
Celtic’s barn-storming display wrecked more than just Barton’s psychology.
It wrecked his teams as well, and that segues nicely into the next big set-piece.
But before we even get to that, Brown’s post-match interview would have to be featured. Whoever plays Brown shouldn’t even need script pages; let him say it exactly as Brown did in the aftermath, with that look of utter disdain on his face.
“Easy, yeah it was fine, there was no battle whatsoever. I think the score line talks for itself, it was pretty much men against boys at the end of the day.”
If you wanted to add a little fictional touch, you could have Jailbird Joey tossing an empty beer bottle at his telly watching that later.
