It’s been about ten years since I’ve seen that film, and I can’t really remember what happened in it. I kind of remember thinking that it looked pretty good when I saw it, but I may not like it now. If I have a chance to watch it again in the near future I’ll pop back in and say something.
The final fight in the first Lethal Weapon film was choerographed by Rorion Gracie. Watch for the triangle choke 
The grappling may make for a more “realistic” fight since the mechanics of faking a choke for the screen are different than faking a punch to the nose. The actors can go much more full contact without worrying about getting hurt.
The nose is cartilage. No bones to break.
More than likely, the “strike to the nose is deadly” came about from people being hit in the nose, being knocked unconscious and falling backward. They then aspirate the blood from their nose and choke.
Doesn’t the upper nose have a bone or two? I was under the impression that it does, having seen many skulls where such bones are present. The cartilage is lower down.
No, Ender’s Game definitely has the “punch-to-the-nose-and-drive-bones-into-the-brain” move described in it. It’s how Ender begins his career as a child in the military, IIRC.
I could be mistaken, but I think he was referring to the origin of the myth, not anything to do with Ender’s Game. (I’m not sure what it has to do with anything other than being an example in fiction, certainly not a cite…good book though)
Oh, I see what you mean. My bad.
I thought that the more effective hand-to-hand involved the use of pressure/pain points, where a good working knowledge of neuromuscular anatomy and quick reflexes yields an opponent impaired by lots’O’pain with a minimum of actual physical damage.
Of course, movie fights can get realistic - James Caan famously hospitalising Gianni Russo in their “Sonny beats up Carlo for beating up Connie fight” in “The Godfather” - he broke two of Russo’s ribs!
mm
Yeah, sure does. When I am inspecting people dead by violence I pinch the bridge of their noses between my gloved thumb and fingertip and wiggle. If nothing happens, I write on my noteboard, “Nasal skeleton intact to palpation.”
(Well, actually I write an incomprehensible squiggle that no one else can make sense of, but when I dictate, that’s what the squiggle is read as.)
You can easily palpate yours without pain. Index and thumbtip on the alae - er, the wings of your nose - side to side. Wiggle just enough to prove to yourself that it has wigglability. (New Word! New Word! Klaxon! Klaxon!) Proceed on up, and you will readily find the spot where wigglability ceases. Them’s the bones of the nose
Outer bones. There are inner bones, too (choanae). Fairly slim, looking like stabilizers held out into the breeze inside the nose, but take effort to break. Regularly broken by cosmetic surgeons when reshaping noses.
Now. The problem is not so much these bones - tough to break, and would take a heavy fist to do it; but a two-by-four would do it nicely. The problem is the skull above them. You see, the inner nose stops at the base of the skull. There is a perforated plate of bone there, called the cribriform plate. The perforations let through the myriad branches of the olfactory nerves. The olfactory nerves, being part of the oldest design of our basic brains, are very simply set up. Hundreds of axons creep through the cribriform plate, joining together into bundles, and become two largish nerves which track from the cribriform plate inside the skull over the undersurface of the brain until they can reach the designated spot to join up inside. No other nerve comes into the skull like this. All the rest come in as well protected bundles.
Now the cribriform plate is not thin and delicate, despite its perforations. When I have to go through one in a decedent I use the Stryker saw. It isn’t an instantaneous bit of sawing, either. The supraorbital plates (thin bones above the eye sockets) to either side of the cribriform plate are thin and delicate, but the cribriform plate is reinforced. I would not say anyone could break it in with any unarmed hand blow, because to get the impact to it, you’d have to go through the nasal bones, which would not transmit force effectively once they were smashed up and hanging from squishy soft tissue parts with blood lubricating them. And you’d have to work through a funnel – the nose gets narrower and narrower as it goes up to its root; and you’re trying to smash in the reinforced plate over the narrow part of the funnel. Hard to do efficiently. Hands would be particularly badly designed for it.
You could do it if you knocked the person out first and then used some appropriate tool like a steel pipe to fish around in the mess you made breaking his nose across the nasal bones, but by that time, you’d be better off just whacking him over the head with the steel pipe. That’ll kill somebody, particularly if you do it enough times. Leaves nice pipe-prints in the scalp and skull, too. God, I love patterned injury.
Add to this that in all the homicide victims and accident victims I’ve ever seen, I’ve never seen a depressed fracture of the cribriform plate, and I think we can judiciously ascribe this one to legend.
Great legend, though.
Two p.s. notes: One, I have seen depressed fractures of the skull responsible for death, but they were almost always of the temporal bones (over the sides of the head above the ears), and they were produced either by a tool like a two-by-four, hammer, or pipe, or they were produced by a fall against a stone or a brick corner or suchlike.
Two, I know a girl who suffered a cribriform plate fracture. She didn’t die. She did it by slipping off a concrete curb on ice, and whacking the back of her head. She whacked the back of her head so hard she lost consciousness and needed stitches in her scalp. The next day, she had two black eyes, and following the accident, she lost about half her sense of smell. Seems obvious to me that she ran an earthquake-type fracture line through the base of her skull that zagged through one side of her cribriform plate.
Still alive, though.
Damn, gabriela.
I have seen and heard folks discuss, debate, and argue over this “phantom killer nose punch” for decades, and I must say your post was more impressive than the sum total of everything else I have ever seen or heard written on the subject.
Do you mind if I post that info on a MA forum or two?
Beautiful, beautiful post!
Whaaa? How bout boxing, ultimate fighting, hockey? Maybe illegal to exploit drunk homeless men, but that statement is using too broad a brush.
Nope, unless Card has rewritten it for the version I’ve got. I just re-read that passage to be sure, and it squares with what I remember of the fight. Ender slips out of Bonzo’s grasp, Bonzo has anticipated a stamp-kick to the groin, so Ender launches off the floor, and headbutts him. That’s a pretty powerful blow with some of the hardest most solid bone in a person’s body, with the whole force of a 10 or 11 year old athletic kid’s body behind it, and from the description, he hit in-line with his spine, so basically all of the energy went into Bonzo’s face and none of it went into snapping Ender’s head back.
Bonzo’s still standing at that point, staggering and gasping in pain, still alive, still conscious (kind of). Ender finishes him with a double leg kick to the chest and stomach, and a kick to the groin while braced against the floor. I think that either Bonzo’s heart stopped from the kick to the chest, or he hit his head when he fell; he was already unconscious before he hit the floor. Ender later imagines that Bonzo was dead on his feet, but that’s Ender’s guilt and the author’s poetic license talking.
No, I’m not talking about the fight with Bonzo, although it has been over 10 years since I read the book, so my memory could be faulty. I’m talking about Ender’s pre-military days when he was in kindergarten and confronted a bully, dispatching said bully (and killing him inadvertently) with the blow I’ve described. Waaay before Bonzo ever showed up in the book.
Tho not for profit, reminded me of the most recent time I was in the ER, having my scalp stapled following a combination of an errant elbow and open-top boxing headgear during a women’s self-defense seminar. I remember multiple questions along the lines of: “You actually allowed someone to hit you in the head?” and “So you don’t want to file a police report?”
I figured that the reason they didn’t offer me any painkiller while they drove in the staples, was that they figured I didn’t need it if I was stupid enough to let someone hit me in the head… 
To get more bang out of your headbutt, grab him behind the head and pull it foreward into your headbutt! Doesn’t hurt (you) if your thumbs find their ways into his eyesockets as you reach around…
What if you grabbed someone by the back of the head and smashed your knee in their face? I don’t imagine it would actually drive the nose into the brain, but what sort of damage would that cause?
A wee pressie
Did that happen at Clayton Street Elementry? I have always claimed I won that fight by cleverly breaking your hand with my nose.
BIG damage!
But think about the mechanics a minute - how do you intend to get your knee up to the level of their face?
Now entertain this little scenario for your fun and enjoyment.
Clasp your hands together behind someone’s neck.
At the same time press your elbows towards each other, so that his/her/its neck is firmly clamped between your forearms.
Now bend and/or twist in one direction or another. (If doing this with a non-enemy, don’t jerk too quickly or drop your weight to and fro. If doing with an enemy, feel free to do just that!)
See how nicely they go wherever you want them to?
Now, if you wanted to slam a few knees into their thighs, groin, midsection and/or ribs, and then help them quickly to the ground, whereupon they happened to meet your knee on their way down…
Well, I suspect that is one person who might not be feeling tiptop the next morning.
sturmhauke, you’re my sort of poster. Keep it up.
And I guess I should point out that while your knees are some distance from your opponent’s face, your elbows are but a short distance away and nicely pointy.
Nature’s ballpeen hammers, if you will.
Good clean fun!