Two weeks ago, I sustained two back-to-back concussions to the frontal lobe of my brain. I took off from work to convalesce, but I don’t have much to say about that. This is is because I was unconscious nearly the entire time. Sleep, I was told by the doctors, was the most surefire way to ensure a speedy and permanent recovery. So I slept. I took melatonin gummies and fish oil capsules and slept, and then woke up and did it all again. Occasionally I’d eat. Once or twice I went on a walk. But sleep was preferable… and not only because it was the thing guaranteed to return my brain to normal as quickly as possible. But also because I was extremely bored.
The thing about a concussion is that you can’t tax your brain in any way, while it’s healing. A concussion is a bruise, essentially, the result of your brain smashing into your own skull during moments of extreme impact or preposterous jostling. You can’t strain your vision, lest it slow recovery. Bright lights and focused watching will only make things work. So, no screen time, no reading, no writing… not even, the doctor told me, thinking too much.
This was shocking. Never before had a doctor advocated for “not thinking.” Never before had anyone. I don’t spend my time fraternizing with chauvinistic villains from Disney movie. What would I be like without being able to think?
I tried to heed these warnings as best I could, but some of them, like this last one, led to more questions. Occasionally, I’d sneak in a few glances at my computer. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I had to. And when I flipped open my laptop, the thing I wanted to do was learn about concussions. I learned from the Oxford English Dictionary Online that the word “concussion” in its meaning of “the shock of impact,” goes back at least to 1490, and the word in its meaning of “a brain injury caused by a sudden blow” goes back at least to 1541.
I learned from the writer Roger von Oech, the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, that there are two kinds of thinking: soft and hard. Soft thinking is light, observational, dreamy. Hard thinking is problem-solving. If I got a lot of sleep during the first few days of my concussion, my doctor told me, I’d be able to go back to soft thinking soon enough. This was appalling. “But,” I attempted to reason with my physician. “I’m a writer.” He looked at me. “Not right now, you aren’t.”
So, sleep became more enjoyable than lying awake, aware of what I was missing and yet bound from thinking about it. Duly, I slept.
And now I’m back. Mostly. I still need to rest a lot. But I’ve blown through soft thinking back to hard. And the first thing I did was use my mostly-rehabilitated faculties to put together a listicle about the only topic on my mind since I walked into that scaffolding pole: head injuries.
Yes, this is a list about the most intense head injuries in (crime) film.
Now, I should clarify… I’m not talking about cases and after-effects of grievous head trauma like in Memento or The Bourne Identity or Regarding Henry or even The Wizard of Oz. This isn’t a list about hallucinations, amnesiac episodes, or other brain conditions brought on by hits to the head. I’m simply talking about blows or knocks to the head: on-camera instances of “getting hit in the head” that are so painful-seeming, you can’t help but wince when you watch them. Like this list, but not specifically about noses. About the whole head.
I also don’t mean, like, savage beheadings or explosions. This isn’t a list where you’ll find the pane of glass thing from The Omen or ANY sequence from ANY Matthew Vaughn movie. I’m also not including moments where someone smashes their own head onto a table. No Talk to Me, no Longlegs, not *that* scene from Fight Club, no Hereditary, no The Lobster. I mean, this also clarifies what we’re doing about genre: this isn’t a list of horror movies; it’s a list of crime (or crime-adjacent) movies. I would love to include the scene from Chocolat where Lena Olin smashes Peter Stormare’s head with a frying pan when he attacks her and Juliet Binoche in a violent, alcoholic rage (“who says I can’t use a skillet?”), but it’s not a crime movie. I am permitting action-adventure movies and sci-fi adventure movies on this list, however. No boxing movies, though, unless they are very much about crime.
Now… are we including head injuries that kill? If it were a crime movie, would we include Dolph Lungren’s left hook that kills Apollo Creed in Rocky IV? I don’t think so. I think people need to be able to eventually wake up and walk/limp away?
This list is just moments of blunt force trauma to the skull! That’s all it is!
This list is not ranked. It is not comprehensive.
And if there are any gaping holes in this list… don’t get mad at me… I have a concussion.
OK, here we go:
Henry Cavill Smashing Liang Yang’s Face with a Laptop in Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018)
He breaks the computer… but he knocks the guy out. Turns out, they needed that computer to make a MASK of the guy’s face… so Tom Cruise is pretty annoyed.
John Wayne’s “What time is it?” door-breaking punch in The Quiet Man (1952)
Is The Quiet Man a crime movie? No. Is it about manslaughter? Yes! So it gets a pass. Welcome to the ring, TQM. The Quiet Man is about a boxer who kills a guy in the ring, and then goes to his homeland in Ireland to buy back his family’s property and live there in peace. But things go haywire when it turns out another man has designs on the land… and John Wayne begins a romance with that guy’s sister. Anyway, there’s a scene where John Wayne clocks a guy in the jaw so hard that he goes flying through a closed wooden door, Looney-Tunes style.
Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci Get Walloped By Swinging Paint Cans in Home Alone (1990)
I cannot imagine the pain experienced by Harry and Marv during the whole booby trap break-in sequence, but I really, really don’t envy their getting clocked in the head by the swinging paint cans.
Indiana Jones Punching the Nazi Out of the Blimp in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
You know the scene I mean: “No ticket!”
A Punch Makes Michael Biehn Go Flying in The Abyss (1989)
God I love The Abyss. I don’t want to spoil anything about it, so I’ll just say that there’s a part where Michael Biehn’s villain, Lt. Coffey (who is going crazy due to high-pressure nervous syndrome from being at such a lot altitude), tries to kill our hero Ed Harris, but he’s stopped by Leo Burmeister’s Catfish De Vries. And Catfish decks him in the face so hard that he goes flying through the air and lands in a puddle, his body making an enormous splash. That’s gotta hurt.
Rip Torn Hits Norman Mailer on the Head with a Hammer in Maidstone (1970)
Norman Mailer’s underground film Maidstone was a subversive, non-scripted fiction narrative film, captured documentary-style, about a chauvinist filmmaker named Norman T. Kingsley, who an exploitation film about a brothel, who simultaneously embarks on a presidential run and survives an assassination attempt, all on his rural New York compound. Rip Torn, who plays Kingsley’s brother, tries to kill him at the end by beating him over the head with a hammer. This was the least scripted part of an already non-scripted movie; Torn thought that Maidstone didn’t have a clear ending planned, so he thought he’d make one. He did this by literally hitting Mailer over the head with a hammer. Some sources online say it was a toy hammer, but this is incorrect… it was real, making this the only movie on the list where the head trauma sustained in a narrative is equal to that sustained by the performers. Speaking of hammers, there is an amazing corridor fight sequence in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), but there isn’t one particular clock in the head that is so bad it should go on this list. So, Maidstone is the Hammer Time entrant for this list.
Ed Norton Ruins Jared Leto’s Face in Fight Club (2000)
I certainly think that the “destroying something beautiful” scene from Fight Club counts for this list. Also most of Fight Club counts for this list. But the Leto-face-mutilation scene is definitely the worst head trauma we witness.
Joe Pantoliano’s Steel Beam to the Head in The Fugitive (1993)
The Fugitive normally tops all my lists, and this is no exception. There is one agonizingly painful-seeming head injury here, towards the end of the film, when good-guy U.S. Marshall Cosmo Renfro (Joe Pantoliano) is looking for a killer in a dark industrial floor of a hotel, the laundry room. The killer creeps up behind him and swings a suspended metal girder into his face, bringing him down instantly. His final words in the film speak volumes about his pain and exhaustion: “Tell Samuel Gerard I’m going home now. I’m taking my vacation.”
