If you’re anything like me, nothing gets the blood pumping like a good fight scene. We can all remember one that sticks out in our minds; maybe something we were wowed by at a sleepover as a kid, or something that made our jaws drop in cinemas. Be it 1v1, or 1v100, a quality fight scene can make or break an entire film, and with the proper choreography, lighting, and editing, two men moving in tandem in a warehouse can become a battle to the death before our eyes.
But, what is combat? Why do we not only enjoy watching a good fight, but seem to be hardwired to understand violence on an instinctual level? And why is that, thousands of years after having to fend for ourselves in the jungle, we still seemed to be itching for it more than ever?
I had the opportunity to interview fight choreography master Eric Jacobus for his new book If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take On Violence. Eric is a veteran stuntman, action designer, and owner and operator of SuperAlloy studios, which has designed the action for such hit games as God of War: Ragnarok, Sifu, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Destiny 2, Midnight Fight Express, Mortal Kombat 1, as well as films such as Zach Snyder’s Army of The Dead.
In his book If These Fists Could Talk, Eric discusses his early career; building a fight team in high, school, his hectic time in film school, his work within the film industry, and the chance he took opening SuperAlloy. He also breaks down his hypothesis of violence, which is a system that he designed that took the minimal mechanisms of human violence, which he called “reciprocal, object-based aggression” (ROBA).
Here is what Eric had to say about his career, about ROBA, and about which Hong Kong superstar he prefers.
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Spencer: Hey Eric; just get some quick information off the top, could you give a quick breakdown of exactly what ROBA is.
Eric: ROBA is an acronym for “reciprocal, object-based aggression,” which is the unique means humans engage in combat. In short, it summarizes the fact that in human combat, no antagonist can know for certain what the opponents’ weapons will be. Therefore, it’s in everyone’s interest to escalate to ensure victory, but since the antagonists also anticipate this escalation, the escalation goes to the extremes, which ventures into the apocalypse. Because animals do not have this issue and fight only with natural weapons (or don’t anticipate objects nor escalate with them), combat is not a crisis to them.
S: I think you give a great breakdown in your book, but was wondering if you could further breakdown the process of, in the creation of ROBA, the experience of having to break down the 170+ powerpoint presentation you had initially built and turn it into something leaner and presentable. Was it a process of just keeping what was most important and discarding the rest, or did you have to rethink the overall build?
E: The original theory was loaded with information about psychology and neuroscience all kinds of competing theories. All of it is useful, but it wasn’t the core of the ROBA Hypothesis. At its core, ROBA simply states that human violence has an exchange property like language, religion, economics, and all cultural forms.
S: From what you’ve described in your book, you have had quite the successful run in filmmaking, creating dozens upon dozens of short films. For people who are interested in learning more about action on screen, as well as the evolution of a fight choreographer, is there a way to view these films online anywhere still?
E: The best way to view my films is at my YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/ericjacobusofficial
S: Connected to the above question; With more and more people looking to start their own production companies or start making their own films, have you ever considered writing a book on your experiences in creating a production team and having such a high rate of film production?
E: A book on zero-budget action filmmaking is high on my to-do list, but it wouldn’t be just my story: I’d want to include the stories of other successful indie action filmmakers.
S: Do you think, in the modern era, with cameras on phones just as powerful as cinema grade cameras, and so many venues to promote and showcase your work, that it is now easier to create the type of success that you had, or harder, due to the way media is ingested nowadays?
E: I don’t attribute my success to the technology itself. My uncle did something similar in the 70s, except he used an old beta camcorder to make surf and skate videos. If you have a story to tell, just grab the tech that allows you to do it. A lot of us get hung up on the details about what “should be.” People used to say, “You can’t make an ‘action movie’ in your backyard, you should have a studio to do that.” They used to say, “You can’t just print a book. You need a publisher for that.” It seems people are saying that about social media now: “You can’t just put that on social media; you need to cater to the algorithm.” So maybe this generation will find a way around the big social media companies, or around the big apps, or big devices. Who knows? The attitude is all that matters: if you have a story to tell, then find the best way to tell it and don’t let any gatekeepers get in your way.
S: Moving back to your system, ROBA, do you think it was your naturally analytical way of thinking that led you to the creation of ROBA, or was it the years of working in the stage fighting industry that you naturally started to find yourself attuned to man’s capacity for violence?
E: My job involves designing action, typically for laughs. This means I have to transform what’s normally horrific – human violence – into something fun for the audience, so I suppose I always tended to humanize violence. But the more the sciences called violence “animalistic” the more it seemed they didn’t know what they were talking about, and the fact that they couldn’t even pinpoint what violence is made that even clearer.
S: I am fascinated with ROBA, and the evolution of violence all together, so I actually had a few questions that are specific to the theory, to see how you think they fit into it. What do you think is the turning point, the “missing link of violence” you could say, between animal and human violence, where we shifted into a more conscious way of fighting? Were we still living in caves, or had shifted into larger societies?
E: If there was a transition point between animal and human aggression, consciousness is a red herring. Humans can still use ROBA while unconscious. A blacked-out drunk can still grab a pistol and shoot a guy. This is beyond the capabilities of the smartest primate. I don’t even know if the capacity to use weapons is a good bridge point. Hermit crabs are arguably more advanced since they use armor, while chimps never bother. The only thing that might be considered a bridge point is the fact that chimps “point” to ROBA by waving sticks and throwing rocks in intimidation, but we can assume this is exactly how it’s always been for them. To imagine some kind of transition from them to us seems impossible. I could just as easily hypothesize that they are failed versions of people that still “point” to ROBA. All that is conjecture and it really doesn’t bear on what I’m studying, which is the human condition. Whether we acquired ROBA from primates or crabs or it just exploded in a big bang-like scenario (I like to call that the “ROBAng”) is way out of my expertise.
S: Would the wars that we know occurred between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals be considered part of this theory, due to Neanderthals intelligence, or would you consider that something closer to man hunting other species?
E: Do we know that these wars occurred any more than intra-tribal warfare occurred? The fact that we still retain some amount of Neanderthal DNA would indicate that, if we were different species, we were close enough to intermarry. The fact that Neanderthals had burials indicates that they used symbols, and since no such symbolic capacity exists in the animal kingdom, why should we assume they were any less human than sapiens? Of all people, Darwin was the one who argued that we should be cautious when ascribing new species to different breeds of animals and plants, so might be the case with us and Neanderthals and every other supposed “species” of protohuman. All of it points to them all being human.
S: As weapons improved over every age of man, from Bronze to Nuclear, do you feel that the ROBA system has evolved? Or that it still follows the same basic tenets, no matter if you are threatened with a stick or a bomb?
E: The same principle always applies: when you transfer ROBA to the symbolic realm, you defer violence, and in the symbolic realm, it can escalate to extremes safely for a period of time. New technology seems to always be symbolic first. Copper was for mirrors, bronze for ritual coverings… I’m not sure about iron, but gunpowder was first for scaring ghosts in China and for alchemy in Europe, and Einstein never anticipated his equation would be used to build a nuke. This is always the “unoptimized strategy” of human civilization: exchange ROBA for symbols, escalate to extremes, but there’s always a shock when ROBA wrests control of that technology. I think we’re really trying to get a handle on AI for that reason. It could dwarf the nuclear bomb in its destructive potential.
I’m inclined to propose that handaxes were no different – originally being means of exchange, since they offer no obvious affordance for usage as tools. This throws shade on the idea of “man the utilitarian,” which archaeologists seem to hate, but why would it be any different with stones than with gunpowder or uranium?
S: Where does your theory of violence fall when it comes to specific randomized violence, such as serial killers or school shooters? Would you consider people like this as apocalyptic, as they look to extend their violence as broadly as they can?
E: There’s nothing random about violence. Ask any murderer or psychopath why they do what they do. Madmen’s Manifestoes is a collection of these, and they’re eye-opening if you can stomach it. Their reasons are loftier than most new age religions. Again, this is something that an action designer and fight choreographer can (and must) understand intuitively: even the most heinous crimes have a human at the core. If we reject that then we run the same risk we always do: ignoring the obvious signs.
So, yes, I believe these killers and mass-murderers are apocalyptic because all violence anticipates the apocalypse. It’s a window into the infinite, a unique perspective we have that animals don’t (though they might have their own window that we’ll never understand). Just as language and religion and mass media seeks to be as distributed as possible, ROBA is no different. It’s simply a different exchange format.
S: Moving towards media and violence, do you think, in our modern landscape, we are actually hungrier for violence? Or are we just angrier, with violence being the end result of such anger?
E: I’m not sure how we could even measure something like this. But we can measure the sheer number of hours people spend consuming mass media, and how much of that mass media covers ROBA (be it violence, wars, police brutality, riots, etc.), or even just potential ROBA. The amount of time people spend anticipating alien attacks is probably higher than ever, and yet the actual coverage is inversely proportional to that. More cameras, less footage, more rumors.
It does beg the question, Are we angrier? Are political discussions more or less civil today? Are we more or less fragmented? It seems the parties are trending toward marrying only into their own, and their children are trending toward crossing the aisle. This is an American kinship network on a vast scale, and it might be soaking up hostility by building up massive political machines on both sides. They’re technically deferential, until someone uses one for ROBA I suppose.
The only thing that is certain is the expansion of mass media, which both defers ROBA and can be coopted by ROBA at any time. There’s no point in trying to pull it back, or trying to put a brake on technology. Each person simply needs to have a healthy relationship with it, and I think that’s what I’m most passionate about as someone who participates as a media producer.
S: Do you think America, in particular, is more prone to, or at least hungrier for, violence than other countries?
E: I talk about this in the “Violinguistics” section of the book: a highly deferential culture or caste might just be so removed from real violence that they dehumanize those at the bottom who have to deal with it on a daily basis. Meanwhile, a pugnatious culture might be more truthful in many ways. We have these and a huge spectrum of groups in between, but I’m not sure that’s unique to America.
What is different about America is its geography, and the flows of immigrants can attest to this, there being basically three: North and South Native Americans, the Eskimo, and then Europeans (and everyone else either with or after them). Before colonialism there were many displacements, but neolithic weaponry could only do so much, and there were really only three empires, none of which communicated much with the others. The Aztecs were still using fire-sharpened spears. The arrival of firearms was the equivalent of the nuclear bomb (arguably even more disruptive), and without even brass metallurgy, the natives had no hope of beating Europeans in war. It’s the same issue natives in Africa faced, even though they had iron metallurgy; the Zulu couldn’t make ammo, so what good were rifles? And since America is protected by oceans on both sides, it was easily defensible, and it became a natural hub of power in just 100 years, colonizing the entire hemisphere by the beginning of the 20th century. The geography lends itself to being one massive fortress. The New England-style corporation absolutely devastated the patrilineal plantation with its fast capital, so naturally it won the Civil War (and established the standard mode of kinship). It plowed its way west, etching into America a system of transportation, financial, and information networks that could corporatize warfare far more easily than anything anyone else had ever done (these basically being descended from the same groups who built the same networks in Europe from the 14th to the 18th century, which produced incessant warfare). So, the Northerners started to see war as a kind of joke: it became routine to turn our candle and canning factories into armor and weapon factories, and then back into candle and canning factories. The monolith of American mass media emerged because of all those networks, which brought the horrors of war home to everyday people during Vietnam, which was arguably when people started taking violence seriously on both sides. Only when 9/11 happened did we get a real wakeup call; it hit home, and I think the Bourne style of action spoke to that. Before 9/11, the top-selling games were Pokemon and Gran Turismo. After, it was Grand Theft Auto and a string of war games. Gun clubs suddenly became a thing.
I don’t know if this means Americans are “hungrier” for violence. GTA was just as popular in Germany. British soccer is far more violent than American football. It’s hard to gauge these things. Sometimes, it seems when you push one valve down, another one pops up over there. Anyway, this history lesson is pathetically incomplete, but I only want to show that there is a structure of violence that permeates everywhere. It really is universal to people, and we can’t blame this or that country or political platform for it taking different whatever course it does. Politics and entertainment point fingers when it comes to violence, but the sciences should study the structure, and I hope I’ve contributed to that study.
S: How do you see ROBA breaking down when it comes to outside influences on violence, specifically emotions, inebriates, like alcohol or drugs, or global elements, such as the lead-crime hypothesis? Do people ignore the reciprocal nature of violence when their minds are clouded or imbalanced?
E: Like anything it needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. I used to be better socially with alcohol, which would make me reciprocate more. This made me less stressed and, therefore, less aggressive. Then things changed, various crises hit, and alcohol became a problem, so I stopped, and I’ve been sober for over a year now. How can we really track these things? There are people who say the MAOA gene is responsible for violence. People will blame cast iron pans, chemtrails, and cell phone towers for violence. All this is beyond my expertise, but before we start poking around in the brain or modifying the genome or designing drugs to reduce aggression, we need to take a step back and rethink what it even means to be human. My little contribution is simply differentiating our combat from animals combat and playing out the implications of that.
S: Speaking about the reciprocal nature of violence, the fact that our violence can have apocalyptic ends, would you say the creation of the atomic bomb, and the specific threat they represent, has either helped usher world peace, as we now have the world’s largest wild card hanging over our heads, or will eventually lead to our destruction, as someone will one day play the wildcard?
E: How can anyone know? The Cold War had 0 casualties, but Hannah Arendt said it best in On Violence when describing the student protests as basically, “Why not riot, when there’s a nuke waiting to go off?” We should always be skeptical of the word “peace.” Peace is everyone’s goal, Hitler and Stalin wanted peace. Antinatalists want peace for the earth and its plants and animals via some self-extermination policy. Even death arguably ends in “peace,” so to me this isn’t a viable goal. The goal is to understand who we are and what to do about this crisis that is unique to us, to acknowledge the shared humanity in everyone, and stop thinking about ourselves (and other people) as animals.
S: One last question, to keep it light. As a Hong Kong superfan, a few hard decisions at the end here: Jackie or Sammo? The Killer or Hard Boiled? And who is your favorite stunt coordinator from the golden age of Hong Kong cinema?
E: I think Jackie’s the most Zen of the Hong Kong stars, but I don’t think anyone can do what he does. Sammo is the best technician, and anyone can take Sammo’s model and produce it anywhere, as they did. The Killer sticks out because of the story. I don’t even remember why; I just remember it hitting a nerve. And for my favorite stunt coordinator, I’ll throw a wrench into the machine and nominate Billy Chan Wu Ngai, who is awfully underrated. We see Sammo’s style change significantly when he started working with Billy Chan; suddenly he started exploiting the medium more and more, and Billy seemed to have done it first in Phantom Killer.
If These Fists Could Talk is available now!
