A Film Canon

Like most of Wiseman's explorations of quotidian American spaces, Boxing Gym is more interested in procedure than narrative. However, whereas his procedural approach has often tended towards a slow, pessimistic pace - procedure as a kind of failure, or foreclosure - Boxing Gym tends to be more kinetic and positive, elaborating the daily rhythm of a small boxing gym, run by Richard Lord, in Austin, Texas. In doing so, it draws out boxing's paradoxical relationship with individualism, or perhaps just the paradoxical nature of individualism, as the various patrons of the gym collaborate to move beyond the collaborative, communitarian texture of the gym itself, into a world that's never shown - virtually the entire film takes place in the gym - but only intrudes, at least contemporaneously, in the form of an incongruous Microsoft employee who prompts a chain of discussions about mass shootings. As a result, the gym feels like a retreat from the contemporary world, a kind of analog backwater, free from "contracts, initiation fees and plastic", as evinced in its extraordinary display of posters, photographs, paintings and other paraphernalia. None of these seem to date much beyond the 80s, while each one feels like a nascent or elliptical narrative, as Wiseman uses them to frame the gym patrons; or, rather, uses the gym patrons to frame them, in a kind of apotheosis of the vernacular poetry that forms his closest approximation of a self-consciously aesthetic signature. This poetry carries over to the interviews, which beautifully manage to draw out idiosyncrasy without ever devolving into the contrived, whimsical eccentricity that's so often the province of documentaries about 'ordinary' people. In part, it's because Wiseman doesn't even provide fully-fleshed interviews, preferring to relegate speech to just another iteration of the soundscape, making each utterance feel as incidental and intriguing as anything anybody might catch while training - and just as implicitly inclusive, as some of the more extended conversations demonstrate. In the same way, the majority of the gym can be seen from most vantage points, thanks to a couple of well-positioned mirrors, with the result that none of the patrons ever feel particularly abstracted from it. It's this inclusive, communitarian texture that ultimately transforms the gym into something like a classical gymnasium, and boxing into a mere extension of the dignity of manual labour. Not only does Richard Lord dissuade anyone joining who wants to fight, rather than box, but he teaches boxing itself as a kind of lesson in etiquette, a physical politeness that finds its logical conclusion in the astonishing penultimate scene, in which a man and a woman dance beautifully and obliquely in the ring, but never parry or aim blows at each other. By abstracting boxing from any combative or aggressive imperative, Lord simultaneously abstracts training from any narcissistic imperative; or, alternatively, makes the gym less about streamlining and regulating musculature than an exercise in demotic dexterity, with the result that there's less self-consciousness and, ultimately, paranoia about people - especially men - communicating and communing with their bodies. It's this laconic, generous openness to communication that ultimately constitutes the film's own caressing dexterity, its eschewal of any self-consciously privileged, documentary distance, as if Wiseman had just signed up his grainy, televisual eye as a gym member, or Lord were merely another hard-working, multitasking director, producer, editor and sound technician.