‘Dawg Fight’ Director Pulls No Punches With His Brutal New Film
With films like Cocaine Cowboys, Limelight and The U, director Billy Corben has documented the lives of cavalier drug smugglers, unrepentant nightclub impresarios and swaggering college athletes – subjects who rose to power and, inevitably, fell from grace.
But his new film, Dawg Fight, is different. A documentary about the brutal backyard fights staged in the impoverished community of West Perrine, Florida, it is less about the rise to the top as it is the permanent social stasis that keeps people on the bottom. The fight footage is plentiful, gory and uniformly horrifying, yet this is actually a film about people, poverty and the push to succeed against all odds.
Corben, who resides in South Florida, began working on the project six years ago – during that time, two of the fighters featured in his film died – and struggled to find distribution. But today, Dawg Fight finally makes its debut on Netflix, and the director spoke to Rolling Stone about the men willing to risk it all in the ring, and why those who focus purely on the punching are missing the point.
Many of your films tend to focus on those on the fringes of society – drug dealers, iconoclastic football players, etc. Yet, to me, they all seem to be about the same thing: the pursuit of the American Dream. Do you agree?
The alternate American Dream is certainly a recurring theme in my docs, but the more I think about it, in terms of where we are in history, maybe these movies are about the death of the American Dream, and the kind of warped priorities and perverse incentives that have completely altered the perception and reality of the American Dream. Dawg Fight certainly feels that way. In Miami, there’s a whole underground economy – the flea markets, the fight clubs, the gambling – that exists outside the realm of what we, as a society, understand. There are people making a living below the poverty level by doing things that aren’t illegal, per se. That’s the reality of where they come from. People who have seen the film have told me, “Shit, that doesn’t even look like America, it looks like the Third World,” and it is, to a degree. Miami-Dade has the second-highest income disparity in the country, we have the second-highest rate of food stamp usage in the country. The Florida of today is the America of tomorrow – it’s a case study. You want to know what shit is going to go down in America over the next couple decades, just look at Miami: immigration, drugs, Medicare fraud, tax I.D. fraud, Ponzi schemes, mortgage fraud, sea-level rise – you name it, and it’s already happened here.
So this isn’t just a film about bare-knuckle brawls. It’s about the environment that encourages them.
I’d say so. Recently, someone said to me, “Oh, the children. They’re attending these fights” – because in the film, we use footage of kids sitting ringside, singing along to the more profane hip-hop verses that are being played in the backyard, shadowboxing with each other in the ring between fights – and this person was pearl clutching, talking about, “The cycle of violence in the inner city.” This film is about fighting, but in a larger sense, it’s about these poor black men who are trying to make a living and fight their way out of these circumstances. So to hear someone talk about “The cycle of violence,” and to turn on the TV and see rich old white men going to war for money or oil, it becomes apparent that, when young black men are involved, it’s an issue, but it’s not when it’s old, rich white dudes who send poor people to war for money.
We have a violent culture; it’s not indigenous to young black men. The real cycle of violence is like this: Baltimore is the seventh most-dangerous city in America, so they need a proactive police force; but because they have a proactive police force, they also have the seventh most-dangerous city in America. There’s no answer other than more policing, or locking human beings in cages, or killing them in the streets extrajudicially, without judges or juries. That’s our answer in this country, we’re meeting violence with violence. And that, to me, is the conversation I want to have after Dawg Fight – that America is headed towards Thunderdome.