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Training Day: the deleted scenes and how Alonzo Harris became ‘the wolf’

Training Day is a 2001 crime thriller starring Denzel Washington as Alonzo Harris, a veteran detective, who believes that “It takes a wolf to catch a wolf.”

Alonzo Harris, The Wolf

Ethan Hawke, who plays Jake Hoyt, is a rookie detective and Alonzo’s new partner.

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Alonzo has to show Hoyt how to become a good detective in a bad world filled by dirty cops cop. However, instead of learning anything good from Alonzo he learns Alonzo is the devil incarnate.

If evil is the absence of empathy, Detective Harris is evil.

The cutting room floor, however, provides the psychohistory as to why and how he became evil.

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In the deleted scenes of Training Day, we see the personal torment which turns Alonzo into a wolf.

Soon after Hoyt joins his department, Alonzo narrates to him how, when he was just one week on the job, he drives into the “hood” and witnesses somebody beating the hell out of a puppy dog. He loves dogs and can’t bear to witness the beating.

However, he can’t do anything about it since his training officer at the time is very “tight” with the person beating the dog and is right there in the police car with Alonzo. To make matters, Alonzo learns that the dog is being beaten so it can learn to hate ‘niggers.’

As if that wasn’t enough to make Alonzo’s stomach turn, the guy beating the puppy dog even smiles and waves at Alonzo and his training officer as the dog wails in pain.

This violence being meted out to the dog is a metaphor for all the violence Alonzo will witness through his 13 years on the force. It is this violence that turns Alonzo Harris into a wolf.

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The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche warned, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

This is clearly what happened to Detective Alonzo Harris from the moment he saw that guy mercilessly beating that helpless puppy dog in his first week on the job.

Thirteen years later, after probably witnessing even more brutality, he started to mirror the evil he witnessed as he first tried to contain it, only to have it consume him.

In the actual movie, Alonzo and Hoyt visit Roger.

He is a former Los Angeles Police Department Narcotics Officer-turned-drug dealer, Roger is good friends with Alonzo.

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Here’s part of what they say to each other:

Roger: Alonzo, think this greenhorn can handle undercover?

(Roger scrutinizes Jake. Smiles, nods and answers his own question: yes.)

Then Roger says to Alonzo: You were just like him.

Alonzo laughs and says: Bullshit.

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Roger then adds: Same silly-ass look and everything. Saving the Goddamn world.

Then Alonzo replies: That lasted a week.

His moral code is, by this scene, so convoluted that he thinks good is evil and evil is good.

From the deleted scenes of the movie, Alonzo drives Jake to the home of a mustachioed Latino called Smiley, a member of the Hillside Trece street gang.

He then abandons him after paying Smiley to kill him.

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Alonzo wanted you “destroyed”; Smiley says to Jake when Jake manages to convince him his not the enemy by proving to him how he saved his (Smiley’s) niece earlier in the movie.

To Alonzo Harris, it’s almost as if Jake is a reminder of who he once was and how far he has sunk into the abyss.

This reminder must be destroyed because somewhere deep inside Alonzo, the old innocent Alonzo lurches.

This can be seen in the way he suddenly decides it's time to leave Roger’s place when Roger starts talking about the innocence Alonzo once personified when he was just one week on the job.

It’s a reminder that leaves his vanishing conscience ill at ease.

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In the end, Training Day is a Morality Tale about how a broken world creates its own monsters. For, as writer Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Alonzo became strong at his broken places by becoming a wolf, until the abyss claimed its own when he was killed at the end of the movie.

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