(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
A History of Cronenberg
Cronenberg is as much an aesthetic brand as Lynch or Julie Taymor. Directors such as these often move from genre to genre, but they always leave their particular traces on whatever films they are making. There are always a few dusty corners in which even an amateur film sleuth can detect their fingerprints. A History of Violence though has proven to be quite the headscratcher for critics for many reasons, not least of which because it doesn’t even seem to be a film by David Cronenberg. Initially it doesn’t appear to share in his penchant for the absurd twist of phrase, stratospheric post-modern commentary, and startling or grotesque visual detail. This may be Cronenberg’s boldest move yet, after a career of defying expectations he decides to fly right in under the generic radar.
Cronenberg does start to leak through later in the film, but only in the briefest of glimpses.There really are only three or four traditional Cronenberg moments in the film, in which after quick sequences of choreographed violence he turns his camera down to the broken and bloody faces of the losers or lets us see the split-second first impact of fist or bullet. These are “traditional” Cronenberg moments because they involve violations of an unspoken contract between artist and audience that some things ought not be done to or with the human body. Crash, eXistenZ,Naked Lunch, The Fly and Videodrome, for example, all involve bits of the body being manipulated, added to, or taken away and extended into the films as cancerous metaphors for dislocation, anxiety, and misplaced desire. In A History of Violence these scenes are very brief close ups of traumatized human flesh. They are few and far between, flickering by in the blink of an eye. However, the marked difference in these “Cronenberg” scenes from those in his previous films is that his past violent use of the human body as a visual device occurs through things that happen to the characters and have a equal visceral and symbolic effect on the audience. In other films his characters are being acted upon for the sake of the audience, but in A History of Violence the audience itself is being viscerally acted upon. We are assaulted by these brutal glimpses from highly stylized and provactive angles.
A Classic Three Acts
The storyline has been well tread in other reviews, but few details other than hints that Tom is a Christian are really that relevant. Tom Stall kills two would-be armed robbers in his small town Indiana café with a stealth and panache that startles those around him. Soon a big town crime boss with a nasty disfigurement, Carl Fogerty, comes into town looking for Tom claiming he is actually Joey, an ex-mafia strong-arm gone incognito after ripping out his eye with barbed wire. In a wild-west showdown between Tom/Joey and Carl, Tom is spared execution by the quick thinking of his son, who blasts the crime-boss point-blank with a shotgun. This triggers the resentment of has family, who through this showdown discover his real past. The discovery of his history also leads to a confrontation between Tom and his crime boss brother, in which Tom escapes by shooting his brother between the eyes, effectively nailing the lid on coffin of his past forever.
Behind the Scenes.
There are a few moments in the film that dip beneath the generic opacity of this plotline. After Tom’s heroics in the café at the beginning of the film, his previously nerdy/pacifist son becomes emboldened enough to batter down two jocks that have bugging him at school. The skill and rapidity of this fight don’t fit our previous conception of Jack, as he takes care of these two punks as if he had been training for it for years. This story arc involving Jack comes to a hilt when he saves his father with a well-placed shotgun blast. After this Tom hugs his son, more a moment of bloody communion than comfort. It is as if the generational mantle has been passed, like father like son, and there is nothing Tom can do to stop it. A History of Violence implies that there is a story being told here that involves the past, present, and future.
There are also two intimate scenes between Tom and his wife. The first revels in the simple innocence of the marital bed, another point of idyll in Tom’s second chance at life. The second is a liaison that occurs between them after Edie lies to the Sheriff on Tom’s behalf to cover up his past. It is much like the scene between Sean Penn and his wife at the end of Mystic River (the infamous “You are the king” scene.) Tom’s wife accepts the violence of this second marital encounter, and it fully appears to be satisfying to her. Whether her combative actions after this encounter with her husband reflect her disgust at him, at herself, or at both, it doesn’t really matter. We see her in some way enjoying that sort of quick and brutal activity in the same way that the audience experiences the violent moments in the film. They are fast, flashy, even “orgasmic.” Could she be the stand-in for us? As if we have a love-hate relationship with violence cast as righteous revenge that often results in these dirty, yet desirable, little encounters?
A final note of interest is at the very end of the film. Tom returns from the final shootout at his brother’s house to find his family staring at him confusedly from the dinner table over a steaming meatloaf. The tension is cut when his cute little daughter grabs a plate and sets a place for him at the table. This remarkable, and predictable, finale offers a surprising range of readings, most of which are patently incorrect, and this ironical pseudo-multiplicity is Cronenberg’s crowning surrealist touch on the film. One could say: “Oh look, so there is hope after all, this family will heal and now that Tom has killed his last person the cycle of violence has been thwarted.” May it ever be that it was so simple. It is telling that this little girl is the only one that makes this move towards the acceptance of her father; she has been completely sheltered from the events of the storyline. She has no sense of the beastly violence that we have seen tearing this family apart. Her act of forgiveness in this last seen is therefore one of a cheap, almost absurdist, type of grace. It is a remarkable symbol that any forgiveness that could be offered to Tom is artificial, a sham that the family will be willing to accept to get on with their lives. And it is so much easier to accept fake forgiveness when it comes dressed up like a little girl in pigtails. This conclusion is haunting, doomed, and pointed.
Home on the Range.
I am having a hard time classifying this as ironical or satirical, as a lot of American viewers seem to be. The film is as straightfoward as Mystic River in its attempt to actually show us violence in a generational scope. Comparisons to Unforgiven also seem to be helpful; perhaps we could classify this as Cronenberg’s “western.” Tom certainly is the lone “white hat” going back into a world of outlaws, knowing that he has to be like them to defeat them. Eastwood is heavy handed at the end of Unforgiven with the idea that vengeance can send one straight to the living purgatory of unforgivable sins. And though Tom’s actions could be described as self-preservation or the protection of others, the ease with which violence comes to him easily places him within the moral scope of the gunslinger.
This is also Cronenberg’s send-up of small town America, one which eerily resembles the disturbing satire of Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Both films tool with our conception of all things suburban by placing intense acts of violence and obscenity within a space we typically reserve for things like peace and white picket fence prosperity. Our dignified notions of security and civility are upended by a confrontation with the “heart of darkness” in our own backyard. But by and large there are a range of genres that Cronenberg is straddling in the film, A History of Violence being a bit of a meta-commentary on all of them just by virtue of the way it shares the same semiotic past as all of them. Cronenberg has given a number of interviews in press on the film that do clear the theoretical air a bit. In one he says: “I think the main thing was the iconic Americana, which is to say it has elements of an American Western, elements of a gangster movie. But I’m not just thinking of movies. This isn’t really a movie about movies. It has to do with America’s mythology of itself – the small perfect town where everybody’s friendly and happy and what that really entails.”
Argh!
Side note: Peter T. Chattaway drew my attention to this reviewpublished here at Reveal.
At one point in the review, the reviewer states: “The true message of the film is not the sensual deployment of violence per se, but rather the messy notion that sometimes violence can be used as a vehicle that expedites redemption.”
That is couldn’t be farther from the truth. This sort of a statement is a great example of pushing that need for Christian critics to find “redemption” motifs in everything we watch way too far. If anything, this reviewer is falling into the trap Cronenberg has set in the film for unwary viewers. Cronenberg sets us up to see Tom as someone struggling on the way to redemption through some of the Christian language and symbology dropped as red herrings along the way. The doomed conclusion only highlights the irony, the artificiality, of notions like “redemption” in these particular circumstances. A History of Violence is about how we often mistake things for redemption that really just are the ethicizing (or even Christianizing) of actions and behaviors that in clearer contexts would be completely unwarranted. It is a bit odd that many of my fondest childhood memories involve excitedly watching Clint Eastwood gun people down in various westerns with my dad on Saturday afternoons. This is one facet of what Cronenberg is getting at in what he calls A History of Violence.
From the same perspective, this film is a great cultural discussion of John Milbank’s famous discovery of an “ontology of violence” at the root of Enlightenment politics and culture (good essay on this here). Milbank proposes that all things modern are based on transferal of the supposed struggle and competition inherent to nature over to politics, economics, and theology. It is only through the transparency of post-modern critique that this subtle cancerous tendency has been exposed as lurking at the heart of modern theologies and in the interaction between the church and the world (capitalism, the “Protestant work ethic,” colonialism, etc…). I bet Cronenberg didn’t know he was surfing the cutting edge of Christian thought in this film.