Anger Montage

"His cases have gone badly of late. He never got to the bottom of that Veilgarden soul ring. And now it sounds like he's rearranging the station furniture with a hammer."

— Fallen London, when confronting Da Chief having a meltdown

A character is angry. Very angry. They proceed to smash up a room. This montage shows it, often in stuttercuts or other fancy editing work to make it look even more dramatic.

Often closely related to Trash the Set. Compare Defenestrate and Berate.

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Examples:

Advertising

• This is what your family goes through!
  • Robot Chicken tells why Drugs Are Bad and Crosses the Line Twice (and a few more times after that), extending the montage to the point of Overly Long Gag.

Comic Books

• Daredevil: Daredevil did this after archenemy Bullseye killed his long time girlfriend Karen Page.
• The Incredible Hulk: Every time The Hulk goes on a rampage it's one of these.
• Superman:
  • "How Luthor Met Superboy": After his life-engineering experiment is destroyed by a fire which he (unfairly) blames Superboy for, Lex Luthor spends several panels smashing his Superboy memorabilia and trashing his room with a baseball bat.
  • "Last Daughter of Krypton": After finding her hometown Argo City, now a Ghost Town, and coming to the realization that Kal was right and her parents, her friends and her planet are gone, Supergirl spends several pages venting her pain and rage by smashing buildings down and punching craters in the ground.
  • There's a four-page special of Superman smashing up asteroids and suchlike, when he finds out that Lex Luthor has been elected President.

Fan Works

• The Rigel Black Chronicles: When Harry approaches the Malfoy library to collect her memories of the Chamber of Secrets, her first clue to Riddle's mood is an explosion, followed by the sound of angry Parseltongue, and then more sounds of furniture destruction. When she enters the room, she finds that all the chairs are ash, along with several bookcases, and she then sees Riddle torture another bookcase to death, setting it on fire and then making it twist and writhe before exploding into splinters.
  Harry: If I could get my memory back now, I'll be out of your hair right away.

Films — Animated

• Fantastic Mr. Fox: Mr. Bean does this in response to the title character's latest victory.
• The Little Mermaid: Done when King Triton, in a fit of blind rage, fires his Trident to destroy Ariel's grotto and everything in it. A bit of a variant from the norm in that he's not just venting, but does it to make a point to Ariel that anything to do with humans is strictly forbidden.
• In Turning Red, there is a short montage of Mei raging against her own body for continually transforming (or partially transforming) into her giant red panda form. Given that the transformations are fuelled by strong emotions, her getting angry and frustrated about transforming leads to her transforming more in a vicious cycle.

Films — Live-Action

• The movie Earth Girls Are Easy featured an Anger Montage that was also a musical number, in which Geena Davis sings as she systematically demolishes everything owned by her unfaithful fiancee. (A particular favorite is the moment where she rolls a bowling ball down a pair of skis into his computer's monitor.)
• In Fred The Movie, Fred angrily destroys his living room upon finding out that Judy moved houses. By the time he's completely cooled down, it cuts to him cleaning up the mess he made.
• Citizen Kane. The movie commentary tracks note that this scene was a bit of "method acting" that got out of control. Welles broke his hand very early in the sequence; you can see him favoring it at the end. Also different from the typical example in that it is shown in a couple of long master shots, rather than an actual montage of closeups: this is because they could only do one take.
• In Apocalypse Now, the opening montage shows Martin Sheen being randomly enraged/emotionally crippled in several ways, including punching a mirror, an injury which necessitated the bandage on his hand for much of the movie. The stuttercuts in this sequence were happened because the cameraman stopped filming when he saw Martin Sheen had been injured. Coppola told him to keep going, but the break in continuity made a montage necessary when editing it all together.
• Used in the film of Dreamgirls when Jennifer Hudson is just walking down a runway singing, "I am telling you, I'm not going!" The camera cuts away and back to her so fast it's like they're afraid of relying the scene solely on her performance. Jennifer Holliday's version has her just sitting down, and she's still astounding.
• Selina Kyle from Batman Returns furiously trashes her overly cutesy apartment as part of her Freak Out and transformation into the dark and dangerous Catwoman. She enters going through the motions with a vacant, almost zombie-like gait... and then absolutely snaps upon hearing a voicemail message requesting "candlelight staff meeting for two" with her boss. Who, for reference, had just tried to murder her.
  • A nice touch: she has a neon sign in her bedroom that reads "HELLO THERE", and we see her hit it twice. At the end of the montage, the camera pans out and we see the sign now reads "HELL HERE."
• The Room (2003) ends with quite possibly the wimpiest, most half-hearted Anger Montage in the history of film, where Johnny destroys the titular Room by knocking down some fixtures, pulling down drawers and throwing a TV out of the window. It may also be a Shout-Out to the Citizen Kane example above.
• Inverted in Zombieland, where the protagonists mess up an abandoned store in this manner just For the Lulz. Kinda like Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex, except with less sex and more smashing things.
• Master And Margarita: When Margarita found the apartment of the critic who ruined the Master, she rips ink on his pillows, makes the bath overflow, and smashes everything that can be smashed.
• In Walk the Line, Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) has a complete meltdown, in which he uproots a sink, smashes his guitar to pieces, and throws chairs around all because of an emotional breakdown.
• In the film of The Wall, Pink snaps and trashes his hotel room during the "One of My Turns" sequence after learning that his wife was cheating on him, culminating in him throwing one of his TVs out the window. This sudden display of anger and violence thoroughly freaks out the groupie that he had taken into said room.
• .45: After being beaten up by her boyfriend Big Al, Kat trashes the living room in the apartment: starting with all of her treasured souvenirs of the seaside.
• Waiting to Exhale's Bernadine Harris gets dumped by her husband for another woman, after she's spent the last eleven years sacrificing her dreams of owning her own business to help him build his. To say that she's pissed about this is an understatement. She proceeds to rip his entire very expensive wardrobe off the walls, stuff it into his very expensive car and set the whole shebang on fire. And what she couldn't get in the car, she sold. For a dollar.
• Me, Myself & Irene: When the main plot finally kicks off, we see Charlie being told by a neighbor, whose dog craps on Charlie's lawn, that his wife stole Charlie's newspaper and is reading on the toilet and tells Charlie to just buy a new one. When he goes to the barber shop, the barber and the patrons make fun of Charlie when he politely calls them out for ogling a breastfeeding mother, and one of the patrons orders Charlie to move and park his car for him. Right outside the local grocery store, Charlie tells a little girl to not play jump rope in the middle of the street, but she yells at him to "fuck off." Inside the store, a woman and her two kids cut in front of Charlie with two shopping carts full of groceries. This causes Hank to emerge and: publicly announces that she has a genital fungal infection; says a homophobic comment to a neighbor about his son; nearly drowns the little girl that told Charlie to "fuck off"; suckles on the breast of the lactating mother; takes the car of the patron that ordered Charlie to park it for him and smashes into the barber shop, destroying it, and and gives the patron a ticket for a busted headlight; takes back his stolen newspaper from his neighbors wife, who was reading it while sitting on the toilet, and, as payback for his neighbor not picking up after his dog goes on Charlie's lawn, pulls his pants down and defecates on the neighbor's lawn.
• Privilege: When Steve sees footage of his first conformity-promoting rally, he's so disgusted with what he's been forced to take part in that he trashes his room.

Live-Action TV

• In the Battlestar Galactica episode "Revelations", Admiral Adama has an epic one after discovering his best friend and XO, Saul Tigh, is a Cylon. It ends with the stoic and paternal Adama collapsed in an otherwise uncharacteristic emotional heap on the floor, simply unable to handle the decision facing him. For extra symbolism points, the first thing he smashes is the model ship he's been slowly building throughout the series.
• Done in an ITV two-part one-off drama called Lawless, where Trevor Eve's character trashes a house.
• Scrubs:
  • Elliot trashes her bedroom before going and getting her hair hacked up into the now-familiar "scarecrow" configuration (all to the tune of "American Girl").
  • Dr. Cox trashes rooms out of anger often.
• Cameron Mitchell has one of these in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Unending" thanks to the stress of being stuck in a time dilation bubble for years on end.
• In The Phantom of the Opera (1990), Erik does one of these after Christine unmasks him, smashing his creepy, childlike possessions.
• The How I Met Your Mother episode "Benefits" has Barney going back to the alley and smashing a TV set from the dumpster every time Ted mentions how he's having sex with Robin again, since Barney has fallen in love with her. Eventually the dumpster runs out of TVs, so he goes to the store and buys one (after doing some comparison shopping with a helpful salesman) just so he can smash it.
• In the Buffy episode "Blood Ties", Dawn destroys her room (and burns her diaries) after she learns that she is the Key. On Buffy's birthday.
• King Henry VIII does this a lot in The Tudors.
• Happens occasionally in Rescue Me when Tommy or Sheila goes on a rampage.
• Sue Sylvester on Glee has rampages all the time, frequently throwing students around.
• Subverted in a season 3 episode of Dexter. We see Dexter snapping and trashing his lab, throwing a chair through a window, smashing his laptop... except he's doing it entirely in his head. In the next shot, he's in his intact lab, even putting on a fake smile.
• On an episode of the short-lived Tenacious D series, Kyle briefly quits the band, setting Jack off on one of these. Including some particularly theatrical wall punches.
• Dean Winchester does this on "Supernatural" when Kevin dies. Also, the toll of the Mark of Cain leads to Dean doing this in a motel room after getting his hunter friend Rudy killed and beating up Castiel.
• On the final episode of the Syfy run of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Pearl loses it when she realizes the Satellite of Love is coming back down to Earth, and proceeded to smash the furniture in Castle Forrester, culminating with her slugging Bobo and slamming down on the pipe organ.
• Vikings: Rollo of Viking origin is married to Princess Gisla of France, Emperor Charles' daughter, and he has a lesson of Old French at court in Paris to overcome their Language Barrier. The lesson doesn't go well at all. Rollo gets increasingly fluent in Angrish resembling Old French, and then it just escalates to tearing a book page in tiny pieces and crumpling it, flipping his own table, grabbing his teacher by the collar, flinging said teacher across the room, knocking down a chair and storming out of the room.

Music

• In the Vocaloid series Parties Are for Losers, Sanya has a short version of this in False Disposition. She's shown knocking over and kicking trash cans to vent her frustration after she sees Yura flirting with another girl.
• In The Living Tombstone's Cut The Cord, the protagonist tears up her room after her idol plagiarizes her work.

Video Games

• In Splinter Cell: Conviction, Sam goes into one of these after learning that Lambert and Grimsdottir, the two people he thought he could trust in Third Echelon are both responsible for taking his daughter away from him.

Visual Novels

• Done in the VN of Turn of the golden witch. Jessica storms into the honored guest's room after the first twilight, only to find a note there taunting her and insulting her parents. She then proceeds to wreck the room in a fit

Web Original

• The Nostalgia Critic:
  • When he reviewed The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia, he is so angry about the end theme being replaced that he proceeds to destroy the DVD in this manner.
    "I'M FUCKING THE DVD! I'M FUCKING THE DVD!"
  • He also does it at the beginning of his review of Foodfight! as a Shout-Out to the Batman Returns example above.

Western Animation

• Angelina Ballerina: In "Angelina's Baby Sister", Angelina gets so jealous of her new baby sister getting all the attention that she trashes her room and throws items around in anger. Her family hears her and Mrs. Mouseling goes to her room to resolve the conflict.
• Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart: Badgerclops has a thermonuclear meltdown when he's told (the truth) about his terrible hygiene. It goes from flipping tables to throwing objects to destroying bonsai trees with his bad breath.
• Rugrats: In "Runaway Angelica", Angelica trashes her room in a screaming rage after her father grounds her.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Valentine's Day", after seeing that everyone got a cool gift from SpongeBob while he only got a mere handshake, Patrick goes absolutely berserk and thrashes the entire carnival, culminating in almost tackling the civilians. Fortunately, after he receives his real gift from Sandy, he finally calms down.
  Patrick: Heart on stick... MUST DIE!

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