Benny Safdie’s film, The Smashing Machine, champions fighter Mark Kerr’s journey through the early days of the UFC. Kerr, now 56, found success in the late ‘90s, but faced challenges surrounding the sport’s stigma, and set his sights on Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships. 

Somewhere around this same time, my father began training in Jiu-Jitsu and remains a gigantic fan of the UFC. When my parents welcomed me in 2000, my mother documented the journey on a VHS tape that I watched for the first time in 2021. The disc reads: Lexi (then, in my mother’s handwriting) born interupted (with one R) by UFC need to remake. At the end of the pregnancy-to-toddler footage is, sure enough, a fight that my father filmed. 

The two divorced after I was born — with her chalking it up to different personalities. She tells a story of how shortly after their separation was decided, she came home to me helping him shave his head. It’s no surprise this made me laugh as a turning point for Mark (Dwayne Johnson) at the end of the film, almost like it’s an initiation for the fighters. My father remained more subdued, not speaking about the divorce, and working out his problems by fighting other men every Wednesday night. I suppose it’s for the best, as she also mentioned the time he put his fist through their drywall, just once. 

On the surface level, this is Mark’s story. Yet, it is also about Dawn Staples, played by Emily Blunt on-screen, and what it means to love an addict. 

The real-life Kerr has been open about his addiction, including how the two of them began dating at the height of it. While it’s unclear where exactly they first met, Dawn is portrayed as a partier — a bad thing once Kerr is trying to get sober. The two never manage to meet in the middle about how their lifestyles can work for each other. 

Dawn’s pain and emotions come to the forefront during a fight with Kerr in The Smashing Machine, resulting in her attempting suicide. The film gives Kerr a lot of sympathy when it comes to his mood swings and drug use. Yet, at least in the screening I attended, the men in the room laughed at Dawn’s behavior, never Mark’s. It might have meant nothing, but it did for me. 

After my father, my mother quickly married a man who was barely in his early twenties. They met at a casino bar in my hometown of Las Vegas — which should tell you a bit about how this story plays out. While he was always struggling with addiction, his preference changed from alcohol, to pain medication at the hands of a doctor, and most recently, meth. It feels a bit embarrassing to admit, both for the fact that it’s not my story to tell, and the stigma of it. 

But I did live with him for a little while at the height of the usage. No matter how hard my mother tried to hide it from me, the shift began to show. It started with a search on the family Amazon for a book aptly titled “How to Quit Meth” — and she was played off why this was there. By the time I was back home, he would sleep all day, if he was home at all. The nights were spent listening to him sit idly in the garage, as he opened and closed the garage door for hours on end. 

For over a decade, it was a constant battle of walking on eggshells. If my mother and I went out for a pasta dinner, he would complain once we got home about how restaurants overcharge for something you can make at home, and how dare we waste money. A million little smoothie battles that chip away at you. If she spent a few weeks in her hometown and spoke to her high school ex-boyfriend, he would wake my brother and I up in the middle of the night after punching the bedframe when he saw their photo together. Two examples expanded into fifteen plus years. 

This was part of the reason The Smashing Machine felt so jarring. Sure, aggression can show in loud gestures, like a “fuck off” where you can taste the hatred through his teeth. The movie also shows anger lies in the quiet moments. It’s when she makes him a smoothie and he complains about the fruit ratio. It doesn’t matter that you tried. 

The last time I saw him, save for a silent Christmas dinner as a failed olive branch, he was removed from our cop car-surrounded house for violating a temporary protective order. My mom moved again shortly after, and it is finally a quiet house she can make all her own. There is no one barging through the door to tell her they hate what she’s done with the decorations. (Except, maybe, my Gen Z teenage brother.)

And then, there’s me. I wish sometimes I was less like a product of chaos, and could match a contentment with a calm cultured evening. Yet, Paris was not-so-nice when he took too much nicotine, and by Cannes, I swore I needed CPR from crying my eyes out. I fell for an addict of a different kind, stuck chasing the thrill of MDMA and greener grass on the other side. “Come Fly with Me” turned into a fucked-up game of Catch Me If You Can. He wouldn’t give it up, no matter how bad it clearly hurt me. A crash-out so bad, I almost crashed the plane ride home myself. Par avion, pardon my French, and all the false promises in purple. Perhaps I can never learn from my best mistakes. 

I also learned that if you bury it, it will go away — not fully, but day by day. You will look at photos of yourself and think, “I can’t believe I hated that girl.” What should have been one of the happiest times of my life was eclipsed by brutal comparison, and I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror for a year. I would never be that. I could never be her.

In some of my childhood keepsakes, I see what my mother used to look like. There’s one photo, in particular, around her later-twenties, with me in a pool. For one of the rare times, her plastic surgery was absent. Her hair was a natural color. 

A few days had gone by since I watched The Smashing Machine, and I felt curious enough to revisit those childhood videos. As it turns out, the fight my father recorded was of the Hunter vs. Moskowitz match in 1997 — long before I was around. The tape was playing in the wrong direction all this time. 

The Smashing Machine is currently streaming on HBO Max.
You can find our review of the film here.