Deep Thoughts: a high-minded critical debate on A History of Violence, director Cronenberg's latest movie

It's not often that an ostensibly populist film like A History of Violence gets jumped on by a number of intellectuals, and very spiritedly debated, with words like ontology and epistomology bandied about quite freely. But here is one.

To get with it, you should see the film, but meanwhile, this short summary will help:
In a small town, a good Dad, Tom Stall, is tracked down by former big-city gangster acquaintances with a score to settle. His wife and family don't know about his gangster past as Joey Cusack; he changed his name and life completely when he became a good Dad.

Now read on. My post starts with a few reviews, and then gets down to the high-minded debate. What the reviewers say about tone is right: the film's tone is so spare and 'objective,' that the movie never gives you a clue from inside itself as to how to read it -- and that is probably its great unsettling brilliance. Not even the actors give you a clue about what you're "supposed" to think of them (which is what all actors do), and that must have been a conscious decision; if it was, it shows an almost frightening brilliance on the part of everyone concerned. It's very refreshing to enter a movie, and exit it, without being cued what to think. Which is probably why these critics started thinking about it, because the movie left them so much space to have their own thoughts about it. It's as if their minds had to fill in the space the movie left in them: hungry because of not being told what to think.


1. TORONTO Film Festival--"A History Of Violence" -- by girish

Some movies, great though they might be, begin to recede in your memory in the days and weeks after you’ve seen them. Others inexplicably gain in strength and resonance, burrowing deep into your brain. This is definitely happening to me with David Cronenberg’s amazing new film, A History Of Violence.

Where to begin? There is a multitude of reasons why this movie is fascinating; here are just a few:

Personally, I have never liked the idea of art movies confined to their own little ghetto, cherished and admired by an elitist and incestuous cinephile community. A History Of Violence is that rare thing: a brilliant, canny hybrid of mainstream film and art film.

Another pet idea of mine: It’s exciting when art, like a subversive, saboteur virus, steals out of its ghetto and roams the world outside, infiltrating popular forms and making mainstream audiences stop and think every once in a while, “Wait a second, there's something funny going on here…”. If the mall crowd that goes to see A History Of Violence perceives it as nothing more than just a mainstream Hollywood thriller, the world will be no worse off. But, if the complexity of the film appeals to their intelligence and stops them short for just a single moment of self-inquiry, Cronenberg will have achieved his objective. And this is a prospect that thrills me.

One of the great things about this film is its tone — pure and steady and distanced and cool. The tone of a filmmaker often betrays his or her attitude toward the material by tipping it in a particular direction — think of the dark surrealism of David Lynch or the faint cynicism in some of the Coens’ movies. The miracle of Cronenberg’s uninflected tone is that it doesn’t cue us which way to go.

Like great pop music, this is a gloriously accessible film. But accessible as what? And to whom? These are the questions that Cronenberg poses to the audience.

For a movie with a sweeping, taxonomic title, very little of the screen time is spent on violence. Like every other thing in this film, the staging of the violence is downright brilliant. It occurs in brief staccato spasms, and is over in a flash, the way it is in real life. What really interests Cronenberg here is life lived before and after those acts of violence.

The violence struck me, by turns, as: horrifying, justified, tragic, cathartic, even occasionally comic-macabre. Cronenberg appears to be saying: Violence is a complex idea, and to do justice to it, you need to realize that it can provoke complex reactions from us when we witness it.

The movie implicates its audience, making it complicit.

The violence is shot intimately, in close-up. It’s not stylized or aestheticized or extended as in Sam Peckinpah or John Woo. Instead, it’s clinical and documentary.

Yes, the movie works powerfully as an allegory of post-9/11 America. This one aspect alone would make even lesser movies automatically interesting.

Cronenberg deadpans: “I think A History Of Violence can be seen as a red-state movie in a red state and a blue-state movie in a blue state.”

All my serious talk gives no clue about how darn funny this movie is. Its bone-dry absurdist wit would simply collapse into trivial hip irony in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. “I can’t believe you didn’t grow up in Portland,” says a character in the film’s funniest line. (Here is a sign of the movie’s sophistication: I would be at a hopeless loss to explain to you why this line is so funny. You’re just going to have to see it.)

I have already gone on too long. I just glanced at my yellow pad and realized that I’ve only touched on about half of my bullets. Here are some of the unfired ones: Rorschach; perversely idealized small town life; revenge western; body horror; graphic novel; two sex scenes, one a cheerleader fantasy and the other right out of J.G. Ballard; role playing; Millbrook, Indiana is actually Millbrook, Ontario; Norman Rockwell; and Robert Bresson.

Here’s what this long-winded post is trying to say: see the movie, will ya? And let’s talk about it in the comments section, okay?

Comments:
Brian said...
Couldn't agree enough about great film often being those that can appeal to a mainstream audience and still be appreciated at a more refined artistic level. Its always necessary for an artist, whatever the medium, to keep in mind that they are ultimately communicating something to an audience, and the larger the population the film can speak to, the more layers available to the audience, the more successful the work. Case in point: Shakespeare, whose plays have always appealed to both the elite and the masses.
Campaspe said...
I'm convinced, I'm convinced! though, frankly, all you needed to say was "It stars Vig--" and I would be halfway to the ticket booth. What can I say.
dvd said...
I hope to find time to write a review of my own in the near future that will deal with this more fully, but one of the (more minor but, to me, most fascinating) things that impressed me greatly about it were the levels of interplay between the title and the content of the film; as opposed to most films, where the title is the subject heading (or, in some cases, a postscript), here there is a continuous exchange - each consistently informing and changing the other.
Anonymous said...
I am ready and waiting to see this film. 'Crash' is one of my all-time favorite films, while 'Dead Ringers' and 'Videodrome' easily rank in my unofficial/unorganised second tier. (Do these admissions matter to anyone? No, of course not! And yet here they are...)


2. HISTORY repeats -- again by girish

Yes, it's that damn movie again, and I can't quite get it out of my mind. But I do promise to be less long-winded this time.

It's impossible to appreciate the richness of this film if one approaches it exclusively from a doctrinaire, art-movie-loving, cinephile vantage point.

Cinephiles often hold their nose when they approach genre movies, implicitly assuming the primacy of art cinema over genre cinema. This can often be very counter-productive, naive and reductive. Not to mention a lot less interesting and fun.

A History Of Violence itself does not place its status as an art film over its status as a genre film. It demands to be taken seriously as both.

There is a solid tradition in American cinema of thrillers that are also great art: Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, Howard Hawks' Scarface and The Big Sleep, etc. This movie, I'd like to think, will keep company with them one day.

Everyone wants to talk and write about this film. The last time I can remember this happening, it was four years ago with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

Two recent (and useful) essays on the movie: Jonathan Rosenbaum and K-Punk.

I've still only seen it once, but I'm heading to my local ugly megaplex to plunk down my nine bucks tomorrow for an encore.
 
Comments:
Joshua said...
I think you're exactly right in your treatment of the film as a genre piece. Cronenberg, obviously, is largely a genre filmmaker -- and he understands, like most great genre artists, that the genres offer a lot of excellent room to look at and think about ideas. eXistenZ is obviously a great example of how a science fiction film can illuminate philosophical concepts better than a bunch of tricky, postmodern arthouse films ever could. In genre art you can take the stock characters and ideas (in this film's case both "the Mob" and Norman Rockwell's America, plus a dash of teen angst bildungsroman) and use those instantly knowable quantities to create a kind of clarity and depth unseen in most 'sophisticated' cinema.
girish said...
Joshua, I've always been frustrated by the simplistic art/genre dichotomy. This is especially because so many of the old American directors I love (Hawks, Fuller, Lang, Sirk, Mann, Ray) made so many great movies that were reductively and condescendingly considered to be nothing more than genre movies at the time (and alas, sometimes even today).
dvd said...
Girish, I finally sat down to write my own review - I decided to go ahead and simply push my comment about the title from your previous post as far as I possibly could. It may be a bit over-the-top, but oh well...I really do think it's one of the best titles ever.
girish said...
David, I enjoyed your review. I particularly like your line: "any disagreement over the film will come from the audience's own position on certain issues." (political, aesthetic, etc.)
[SPOILERS AHEAD] About that first scene. I really love how in the first shot, one of the killers emerges through the hotel room door, pauses, and then (this is a small, weird but inspired gesture) straightens that chair. In a way, it telegraphs the precision of the rest of that movie. Also, when he shoots the kid, Cronenberg cuts to Stall's daughter waking from a nightmare and Stall telling her something like "There are no monsters". That one simple cut: (1) connects the world of the "monsters" to the safe world of Millbrook, (2) is hugely ironic since Joey/Tom is himself a monster, and (3) erases the distinctions between one (us) and "the other". This last one reminds me of other Cronenberg films like The Fly Or They Came From Within (which could in fact be an alternate title for this movie).
AAP said...
Saw the movie tonight, it was very good. The first hour was disturbing but slowly as Tom became Joey, I lost interest. The idea of violence interupting a peaceful home is more disturbing when it is random and there is no cause. It just is. That is scary. I want to remake that film but this time Tom has no past life, he is who he says he is but he and his family have to deal with raw violence. Random violence.


3. FROM Chuck: A History of Violence

I didn't intend to see David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (IMDB) until I read Girish's favorable comments about the film (I think the film was poorly marketed, but that's a rant for another day), and like him, I think it's a smart film that uses genre conventions in innovative ways to reflect on concepts such as America's myth of self-renewal and on the American Dream in general, as well as complicated questions about human identity (k-punk's treatment of genre is good here).

The film opens with a couple of criminals travelling through the heartland to avoid criminal prosecution. The more sympathetic of the two criminals, younger and more handsome commits a cold-blooded act of violence, and the film cuts to a young girl screaming in bed after a nightmare about monsters. Her father, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), comes in to comfort her, and soon, her brother and mother (Maria Bello) join them. It could be a scene out of any domestic sitcom, down to the cliched words of comfort the family provides if not for the violent opening sequence. (In this regard, I think Jonathan Rosenbaum's favorable comment that almost any shot in the film could be regarded as a "cliche" is absolutely right). Later, the same criminals enter Tom's smalltown, midwestern diner, seeking to rob him and threatening the life of the diner's waitress. Tom responds with a shocking brutality, made all the more shocking by Cronenberg's paradoxically close-up but clinical treatment of his violent repsonse (note: Girish's comments on the portrayal of violence are worth reading). Because of his swift response in rescuing his employees, Tom quickly becomes a "hero," with the waitress and his chef both emphatically stating, "he saved us." Here Cronenberg subtly treats the media's role in promoting this form of heroism without overdoing it. Rather than the mobs of reporters typical of many Hollywood films, only one enterprising reporter awaits him at home to cover the story. As Girish notes, to some extent, the film's positioning of Tom as a hero makes us complicit. After all, he's the good guy.

[Note: There are probably some serious spoilers in the next few paragraphs] Tom's passive acceptance of his newfound status as hero only deepens the viewer's sense that something isn't quite right (k-punk's use of the descriptive term "uncanny" seems to fit here, and Andrew O'Hehir's description of Cronenberg's "dislocation effect" also works). Juxtaposed against Tom's newfound popularity in the community, we see images of his family life. His son is an outsider, bullied by other students. Tom and his wife work to keep their marriage exciting. During an early sex scene, Edie dresses up in a cheerleader's costume to re-create the teen years they never had together, aperformance that, as k-punk reminds us, calls attention to the fact that cheerleading itself is already a "performance." But this concept of domestic tranquility is gradually challenged. A local police officer is mystified at Tom's quick response. A mysterious car stalks the family home. Soon a tough guy named Fogerty (Ed Harris) shows up at Tom's restaurant, identifying him as a gangster from Philadelphia. Tom denies that he's the guy, but it becomes increasingly clear that he has a past life that he's trying to bury.

Primarily in Tom's attempts to bury this past, I regarded A History of Violence as critiquing the American Dream narrative of self-reinvention. As Cronenberg himself notes in the Salon interview, "It really is about America's mythology of itself rather than attempting to be a slice of life as it's lived in America now, which is quite a different thing." Once "Tom" admits that he's "Joey," the Philly gangster, Tom consistently reiterates that he "buried" Joey or that Joey is dead, but it's clear that he's unable to entirely shake this part of his past. At the same time, the film can be read, as Cronenberg offers, as a meditation on America's ambivalence with violence (the cowboy myth that animates a certain version of foreign policy), and the film consistently places the viewer in a position of complicity with that violence, especially as Tom works to return to his wife and restore the "normal life" that has been shattered by the return of his (repressed) past.

I've already written far more about this film than I intended, which is testament to how deeply Cronenberg (and Mortensen, whom Cronenberg cites as a close collaborator) has engaged with some prominent myths about vioelnce and national identity. I think Violence is a film that will reward multiple viewings.

Comments
Violence in schools, how prevalent is it? From time to time children get upset and angry, teachers need to be able to de-escalate the situation. There's a vital need for training. Intervening physically is a predictable occurrence. It could be to hold a child to prevent them injuring themselves or others. But it is going to happen. I had a certain amount of training on Behavior Modification Strategies. But nothing that would have prepared me for the kind of violent outbursts that I encounter from some students. Nothing on restraint techniques, for example.
Will the movie give me some ideas as a teacher of ED students?
Posted by: Teacher Sol

The film only briefly deals with violence in schools (Tom's son is bullied in two separate scenes), and teachers are not relevant to either scene. The son's behavior is instead seen as a response to his relationship with and emulation of his father.
Posted by: Chuck


4. FROM Jonathan Rosenbaum: Cronenberg's latest is a masterful blend of thriller and art film

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a happy family man running a diner in idyllic small-town Indiana, with a lawyer wife (Maria Bello), a teenage son (Ashton Holmes), and a little girl (Heidi Hayes). One night he responds so deftly and definitively to the violent threats of two killers that he becomes a local hero. A Philadelphia mobster named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) hears of the story and soon arrives in town claiming that Tom has another name and background -- that he was once a gangster himself who mutilated one of Fogarty's eyes with barbed wire.

Is A History of Violence a popular genre movie, soliciting visceral, unthinking responses to its violence while evoking westerns and noirs? Or is it an art film, reflecting on the meaning, implications, and effects of its violence, and getting us to do the same? David Cronenberg's genius here is the way he makes it impossible to settle this question.

You can't logically claim that it's both kinds of movie at once -- the devices and intentions of one interfere with those of the other. Yet Cronenberg is so adept at tinkering with our thoughts about violence that he comes very close to pulling off this feat. He provokes confused emotional responses -- laughter at serious moments and spontaneous applause at some of the violent ones -- that might embarrass us, but Cronenberg isn't engaging in parody or irony. Nor is he nihilistically pandering to our worst impulses: the filmmaking is too measured and too intelligent. He implicitly respects us and our responses, even when those responses are silly or disturbing.

There's hardly a shot, setting, character, line of dialogue, or piece of action in A History of Violence that can't be seen as some sort of cliche. Its fantasies about how American small towns are paradise and big cities are hell are genre standbys that Cronenberg milks at every turn. But none of this plays like cliche; Cronenberg is such an uncommon master of tone that we're in a state of denial about our familiarity with the material -- a kind of willed innocence that resembles Tom Stall's own disavowals. (Warning: what follows is full of spoilers.)

Cronenberg keeps his camera too close to Stall's violence to let us feel detached from it. He also takes care to show the immediate consequences of violence -- such as what a shotgun can do to someone's face -- without rubbing our noses in it. But our proximity never allows for any simple identification with Stall -- or if it does, we eventually feel penalized because we don't really know who he is. (His elected surname surely isn't irrelevant.) There's a similar ambiguity in that Cronenberg has spent most of his life and career in Toronto; you might call him a next-door neighbor to the American dream, which includes the cherished idea that we can start our lives over again with a clean slate. We seem to believe and doubt that idea with equal conviction, and the uneasy laughs the film draws out reflect this familiar brand of doublethink.

So do the two remarkable sex scenes between Tom and his wife before and after she learns about his violent past (reportedly Cronenberg's main contributions to Josh Olson's script). In the first, she starts out dominant, playfully dressed as a cheerleader ("because we never got to be teenagers together"), though he winds up on top; the second is spurred by his rough aggression, and she's turned on even though she no longer wants to share the same bed with him. Both scenes testify to the uncommon skills of Mortensen and Bello: they expose more layers of personality than we can possibly keep up with.

At Cannes last May Alexander Horwath -- director of the Austrian Film Museum and one of Europe's best film critics -- caused a minor scandal by loudly berating his colleagues for laughing during a screening of the film. It's easy to feel superior to this behavior, especially since Cronenberg himself has said he doesn't regard laughter as an inappropriate response to certain scenes. But I think Horwath's anger is in some ways a sensitive response. Cronenberg isn't a posthumanist cynic like Lars von Trier, whose nihilism we honor by jeering along with him. Cronenberg is a troubled moralist who doesn't succumb to political correctness about violence, and the meaning of our laughter, however "appropriate," is part of what bothers him.

I've seen the film twice, with very different audiences -- at a gala in Toronto with the filmmakers and cast present and at a local preview with a mainly younger crowd -- and it was uncanny to hear both the laughter and spontaneous applause occur at precisely the same places. The most memorable instances followed two scenes in which Tom's teenage son, Jack, is taunted, insulted, and provoked at school by a classmate.

The first time, in a locker room, Jack defuses the tension, lightly mocking the insults by accepting and even embroidering them. The second time, in a hallway, he again tries to remain cool, but when that doesn't work he beats both the bully and his friend to a bloody pulp. The audience all but cheered -- boorishness won out. Even after we learn that both boys have landed in the hospital, their families might sue, Jack has been suspended from school, and Tom is furious, Jack's stupidity and momentary loss of control are still being celebrated. (A moment later, a similar point gets made when Tom says to Jack, "In this family, we don't solve problems by hitting people." Jack snaps back, "No, we shoot them," and Tom slaps him in response, immediately disproving his point. This time no one applauded, at either screening.)

Jack's comebacks in the locker room got some laughs, but certainly not applause. I'd wager this has to do with our programmed responses to genre; thoughtful responses (which you might call "art-house" responses) are likely to come later and more slowly. But in either case Cronenberg sets up our reactions, both simple and complex, with equal care. Combined with the visceral responses he creates, our thoughts become more than theoretical -- we wind up experiencing them in our gut.  


5. FROM k-punk: When we dream, do we dream we're Joey?
('When you dream, do you dream you're Joey'? - Carl Fogarty to Tom Stall, in A History of Violence)

'In a dream he is a butterfly. ... When Choang-tsu wakes up, he may ask himself whether it is not the butterfly who dreams that he is Choang-tsu. Indeed he is right, and doubly so, first because it proves he is not mad, he does not regard himself as fully identical with Choang-tsu and, secondly, because he doesn't fully understand how right he is. In fact, it is when he was the butterfly that he apprehended one of the roots of his identity - that he was, and is, in his essence, that butterfly who paints himself with his own colours - and it is because of this that, in the last resort, he is Choang-tsu.' - Lacan, 'The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze', The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

The key scene in Cronenberg's A History of Violence sees the local sheriff addressing the hero, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), after a series of violent killings have disrupted the life of the small midwest town in which they both live: 'It just doesn't all add up.'

Superficially, A History of Violence is Cronenberg's most accessible film since 1983's The Dead Zone . Yet it is a film whose surface plausiblity doesn't quite cohere. All the pieces are there but, when you look closely, they can't be made to fit together. Something sticks out....

What makes A History of Violence unsettling to the last is its uneasy relationship to genre: is it a thriller, a family drama, a bleak comedy, or a trans-generic allegory ( 'the Bush administration's foreign policy based upon a western' )? This generic hesitation means that it is a film suffused with the uncanny. Even when the standard motions of the thriller or the family drama are gone through, there is something awry, so that A History of Violence views like like a thriller assembled by a psychotic, someone who has learned the conventions of the genre off by heart but who can't make them work. Perversely, but appropriately for a Cronenberg picture, it is this 'not quite working' that makes the film so gripping.

The near total absence of the prosthetics and FX for which Cronenberg is renowned from A History of Violence (traces of his old schtick survive only in the excessive shots of corpses after they have been shot in the face) has been remarked upon by most critics. In fact, Cronenberg's renunciation of such imagery has been a gradual process, dating back at least as far as Crash (1998's Existenz may turn out to be the last hurrah for Cronenberg's pulsating, eroticized bio-machinery), but it has subtlized, rather than removed, his trademark ontological queasiness.

Myth is everywhere in A History of Violence: not only in the hoaky small-town normality which is threatened, nor in the urban underworld of organized crime that threatens to encroach upon it and destroy it, but also in the conflict between the two. A town like Millbrook, the Indiana setting for A History of Violence, has been as likely to feature in American cinema as an image of menaced innocence in its own right. Comparisons with Lynch are inevitable, but it is Hitchcock, not Lynch, who is the most compelling parallel. The Hitchcock comparison goes far beyond surface details, significant as they are, such at the fact that, as the Guardian review reminds us, A History of Violence's 'Main Street resembles the one in Phoenix, Arizona, where the real estate office is to be found in Psycho'. There is a much deeper affinity between A History of Violence and Hitchcock which can be readily identified when we recall Zizek's classic analysis of Hitchcock's methodology. In Looking Awry, Zizek compares Hitchcock's 'phallic' montage with the 'anal' montage of conventional cinema.

Let us take, for example, a scene depicting the isolated home of a rich family encircled by a gang of robbers threatening to attack it; the scene gains enormously in effectiveness if we contrast the idyllic everyday life within the house with the threatening preparations of the criminals outside: if we show in alternation the happy family at dinner, the boisterousness of the children, father's benevolent reprimands, etc., and the "sadistic" smile of a robber, another checking his knife or gun, a third grasping the house's balustrade.

In what would the passage to the "phallic" stage consist? In other words, how would Hitchcock shoot the same scene? The first thing to remark is that the content of this scene does not lend itself to Hitchcockian suspense insofar as it rests upon a simple counterpoint of idyllic interior and threatening exterior. We should therefore transpose this "flat", horizontal doubling of the action onto a vertical level: the menacing horror should be placed outside, next to the idyllic interior but well within it: under it, as its "repressed" underside. Let us imagine, for example, the same happy family dinner shown from the point of view of a rich uncle, their invited guest. In the midst of the dinner, the guest (and together with him ourselves, the public) suddenly "sees too much," observes what he was not supposed to notice, some incongruous detail arousing in him the suspicion that the hosts plan to poison him in order to inherit his fortune. Such a "surplus knowledge" has so to speak an abyssal effect ... the action is in a way redoubled in itself , endlessly reflected as in a double mirror play... things appear in a totally different light, though they stay the same.'

What is fascinating about A History of Violence is that it recapitulates this passage from the anal to the phallic within its own narrative development, entirely appropriate for a film that shows, as Graham Fuller puts it, 'the return of the phallus'. It begins, precisely, with a non-Hitchcockian contrast between a threatening Outside (a long, sultry tracking shot of two killers leaving a motel) and an idyllic Inside (the Stalls' family house, where the six-year old daughter is comforted by her parents and her brother after she is woken from a nightmare). But as the film develops, it effectively re-topologizes itself, interiorizing the Threat, or, more accurately, showing that the Outside has always been Inside.

The Hitchcockian blot, the Thing that doesn't fit, is the 'hero' himself. The film's central enigma - is the staid, pacific Tom Stall really the psychopathic assassin Joey Cusack? - can be resolved into the question: which Hitchcock film we are watching? Is A History of Violence a rehashing of The Wrong Man or Shadow of a Doubt ? Disturbingly, it turns out that it is both at the same time.

Shadow of a Doubt is the working out of a family scene much like the one described by Zizek above, although in that case, it is the guest, the rich uncle, who is the threat to the domestic idyll. The uncle (Joseph Cotten) is a killer of rich widows who has holed up in the house of his sister's family to hide from the police. The Wrong Man, meanwhile, sees a family destroyed when the father is falsely accused.

In Shadow of a Doubt, the uncle's malevolence means that he must die so that the family idyll can be preserved. Only the Teresa Wright character knows the truth; the rest of the family, and the big Other of the community, are kept in ignorance. But of the family members in A History of Violence, by the end of the film, only the youngest child could plausibly not be aware that the family scene has always been a simulation. Crucial in this respect is the response of Stall's wife, Edie (Maria Bello), as Ballard observed in his piece on A History of Violence in the Guardian:

A dark pit has opened in the floor of the living room, and she can see the appetite for cruelty and murder that underpins the foundations of her domestic life. Her husband's loving embraces hide brutal reflexes honed by aeons of archaic violence. This is a nightmare replay of The Desperate Hours, where escaping convicts seize a middle-class family in their sedate suburban home - but with the difference that the family must accept that their previous picture of their docile lives was a complete illusion. Now they know the truth and realise who they really are.

But this isn't so much a matter of accepting reality in the raw, as it were, but, very much to the contrary, it is a question of accepting that the only liveable reality is a simulation. Where at the start of the film, Edie play acts the role of a cheerleader for Tom's sexual delectation, by the end she is play-acting for real. (And of course, of course.... there are no authentic cheerleaders, 'real' cheerleaders are themselves playing a role.) If, as Zizek argued in Welcome to the Desert of the Real , 9/11 was already a recapitulation of the 'ultimate American paranoiac fantasy ... of an individual living in a small idyllic ... city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake', a kind of real life staging of The Matrix, then A History of Violence may be the first post 9/11 film in which the American idyll is deliberately and knowingly re-constructed AS simulation. (This is underscored by the fact that not one frame of the film was shot in America. In this respect, the film resembles Kubrick's Lolita, whose America of motels and dusty highways was entirely reconstructed in Britain. In his interview with Salon.com, Cronenberg pronounced himself proud of his ability to hoodwink American audiences into believing that they were really seeing the midwest and Philadelphia.)

'When you dream, do you dream you're Joey?' the mobster Fogarty (Ed Harris) asks Tom Stall, perhaps deliberately echoing Chuang Tzu's story of a man who dreamt he was a butterfly. Chuang Tzu famously no longer knows if he is a butterfly dreaming that he was Chuang Tzu or Chuang Tzu dreaming that he is a butterfly. Is Tom Stall the dream of Joey Cusack, or is Joey Cusack the bad dream of Tom Stall? It's no surprise that Lacan should have fixed upon this story, and Forgarty's question contains an analyst's assumption: the reality of Tom lies not at the level of the everyday-empirical but at the level of desire. The Real of Stall/Cusack is to be found, fittingly, in the desert, the space of subjective destitution where Stall says that he 'killed Joey'.

In an interesting but ultimately unconvincing piece in Sight and Sound, Graham Fuller argues that we should read the film as Stall's fantasy:

"Who is Joey Cusack?" the movie ponders at its midpoint as it leaves Western territory behind and plunges into a dark pool of noir. But the more fruitful question is "Who is Tom Stall, if not whom Fogarty claims he is, and why does he have a superegoic alter ego?" The name "Stall" indicates stasis. Though he is a diligent, caring husband and father, Tom knows he hasn't made much of himself in life, and, we learn, harbours resentment towards his estranged wealthy brother, who considers him a fool. This chip on Tom's shoulder explains his daydreaming which, born of repression, aligns him which such literary and movie dreamers as Walter Mitty and Billy Liar, whose fantasies of themselves as all-conquering heroes are redolent of crippling neuroses, even impotence...'

Tempting as it is, this interpretation is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. It is guilty of the same 'oneiric derealization' which has blighted responses to both Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Kubricks's Eyes Wide Shut, both of which have been interpreted as long dream sequences. Such readings ultimately amount to an attempt to put to rest the films' ontological threat, ironing out all their anomalies by attributing them to an interiorized delirium. The problem is that this denies both the libidinal reality of dreams - we wake ourselves from dreams, Lacan suggests, in order to flee the Real of our desires - at the same time as it ignores the way in which ordinary, everyday reality is dependent for its consistency on fantasy. It also makes the empiricist presupposition that the quotidian and the banal have more reality than violence; the message of the film is rather that the two are inextricable.

In the end, Stall as the fantasy of Cusack is much more interesting than Cusack as the fantasy of Stall. Is the American small-town idyll the fantasy of a psychopath? After Guantanamo Bay, after Abu Graib, this question has a special piquancy. The challenge that A History of Violence poses to the audience comes from the fact that we fully identify with Stall/ Joey's violence. We gain enormous enjoyment when the hoods are dispatched with maximum efficiency. When we dream, do we dream we're Joey? Do we dream as Joey? Do we dream of being Tom, innocent, regular people, no blood on our hands? Are our 'real', everyday lives really only this dream?

At the same time as we enjoy Joey's hyperviolent killing of the gangsters, we know that it is impossible for us to position them as the Outside and Stall/ Joey as the Inside, and the film reinforces the lesson that Zizek thought we should have learned in the aftermath of 9/11. 'Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the "barbarian" Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo.'

The most disturbing aspect about the film's violence is not the gore that results from it, but the reptilian mechanism of its execution. There are no wisecracking one-liners; instead, once the killings are completed with a coiled spring autonomic power, there is an entranced animal calm, a machine exhaustion. (A History of Violence is reflexive without ironic, entirely lacking in any PoMo swagger. It may have put the final bullet into Tarantino's career, if the spectacular indulgence of Kill Bill didn't already do that.)

A History of Violence suggests that 21C America is a less a country in which violence is a repressed underside than that it is moebian band where if you begin with ultraviolence you will eventually end up with homely banality, and vice versa. In the final scene, when Tom - now 'Tom' - returns to his house, 'everything appears in a totally different light, though it has stayed the same'. The images of domesticity have now become 'images of domesticity', the meat loaf and the mashed potato have become 'meat loaf' and 'mashed potato', reflexively-placed icons of American normality, the very defintion of the unhomely, the unheimlich, the uncanny. Such, as Zizek said in the 9/11 piece, is the nature of 'late capitalist consumerist society' where '"real social life" itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake'. This is a simulated scenario far bleaker than that of The Truman Show or Dick's 'Time Out of Joint', since it has been freely and knowingly embraced by the subjects themselves. There is no Them behind the scenes orchestrating and choreographing the simulation. At the end of the film, everyone is fooling but no-one is fooled.


6. FROM Jodi Dean, I Cite: A history of violence

I finally saw A History of Violence. It's the best movie I've seen in ages. I had been told the movie poses the problem of conversion: can one really be born again? I'm interested in conversion and will think about that, but to me this was not a key feature of the film at all. Rather, I see A History of Violence as a fantasy, or some interconnecting fantasies, of what it is to be a man, fantasies, in other words, of the father. And, most important: whose fantasies? K-punk is right to dismiss readings that see Tom (the suburban/rural/exurban father) as the fantasy of Joey (the Philadelphia mob killer) or Joey as the fantasy of Tom. But, in rejecting this view he far too quickly rejects fantasy altogether. In my view, the film should be read as fantasy--the fantasy of the son (who, by the way, is completely missing from K-punk's account of the film). I read the film, then, as the son's fantasy of violence underlying the passive, ordinary goodness of his father.

The son is in high school, moving from being a child to becoming a man. When we first see him he is part of a completely fantastic image of the perfect family: the teenage son concerned about his little sister's bad dream. The next morning, we see the family at breakfast. The son resists allowing his father to pour him some cereal; he can do it himself. The son is anxious about sports, a key arena for suburban masculinity. The father knows sports and tells the son what to do. In the baseball scene, the son catches the ball. He feels a sense of accomplishment. He can do it, like a real man. But, once he can perform like a man, he faces other would-be or becoming men: the bully who begins to harass him in the locker room, calling him names, demanding that he fight. In what seems to be a perfect Zizekian example of shooting oneself in the foot, taking the system at its word, the son immediately agrees, yes, he is a pussy, a faggot, all sorts of names, and then wouldn't it be a pathetic overkill for the bully to beat him up? What's the point? He's already conceded? To beat up someone unwilling to fight is no great achievement. The audience of boys is delighted, laughing, agreeing. And, the bully then looks like the moronic bully he is. The son then sinks down into the locker.

On the one hand, we can read this sinking down as a sign of the son's complete subjective destitution. He has completely denied himself as a man, given up the very masculinity he earned by catching the ball. On the other hand, his facility with language is so adept, so perfect, so witty and able, that he seems perfectly integrated into the Symbolic, in a way, without remainder: he controls language; he is a man. This perfect integration, finding the right word and controlling its effects, is too perfect: it, too, is a fantasy. (Likewise, the sex scene between his parents that follows soon thereafter, is fantastic, not simply because it stages a fantasy, a role playing which well figures the role playing of the father, Tom/Joey, but because it stages a high school fantasy: sex with a cheerleader, a sexually experienced cheerleader delighted to go into sixty-nine.) At any rate, the point here is that the initial scene of the son in the locker room suggests the perfect separation of language and violence, of the good man fully in control of language and the violent brute, that is replicated in the story of the father, in Tom/Joey.

When the father is faced with violence, when the bad guys come to his cafe, he kills them--in perfect comic book style. As if to accentuate the imaginary dimension of this violence, we see the father as a media image--on television, in the papers, an object for the media imagination of a hero. Rather than simply 'acting' (doing what one must, being acted through), these media images remind us of the fantasy of luck, contingency, and superhuman strength: I just found myself, unarmed, killing two armed bad guys! This superhero is the son's fantasy of a father, of what it is to be a man; not just to use words to confront violence, but to suppress it, overcome it, with one's own violence.

And this creates a problem: the son of course cannot live with the fantasy of the father as a superhero. It's too much. The bully at school taunts him: what would his hero dad think of his girly son? Wouldn't he be ashamed? Thus, the image of the father that the son sought as a way to escape the deadlock of perfect integration into the symbolic combined with subjective destitution (the two sides of his fantasy response to the bully in the locker room) becomes unbearable. To escape, the son himself acts out, lashing out at the bully in precisely the same comic book style as his father had killed the bad guys in the restaurant: he takes out 2 guys at once, demonstrating heretofore unimaginable superhuman abilities. Faced with the potential scorn of father-hero, the son himself embraces violence, now becoming himself a hero.

But, this won't work. It isn't enough. The father rejects this solution: violence is not the answer; the son's violence was excessive, he put one of the bullies into the hospital. What, then, to do with the excessive violence? Split the father into the good father of the symbolic and the obscene father of the mob, of underworld violence. Only will this split enable the son to grapple with his own dilemmas of becoming a man. Don't deny the violence, recognize that it is there, underneath the good world. The obscene mob-father, then, is the fantastic solution to the unbearable suffocating presence of the good father and the way that this father figures into the son's struggle to become a man. Thus, the son saves his father's life, killing for him, immediately after he hears his father acknowledge that he is Joey. Rather than violence suppressed and unacknowledged, violence is now explicit and acknowledged, an unavoidable, unerasable part of masculinity.

(In the interlocking fantasy of the wife, the acknowledgement of the heretofore repressed violence takes a different form; yes, the symbolic order collapses--what are their names? what is her name? who are they in the family now that their name is not their name, now that the paternal function has broken down?--but, in compensation she gets great sex with a mob killer; the sex scene on the stairs, one that plays like a rape fantasy, should thus be seen as correlative to the cheerleader fantasy in the beginning. The wife, a lawyer, enacts the fantasy of sex outside the law, obscene sex with a violent criminal. One might also consider whether this fantastic scene is also the son's fantasy of the violent sexual knowledge/experience of the obscene father of enjoyment).

The fantasy of the obscene father is elaborated in a fantastic scene with William Hurt as Joey's brother. The scene is played for all its comic book effects--it's very funny, clearly fantastic, and completely implausible: again, the violence is fantastic, like some of the best martial arts films. Hurt's character is also shocked at the implausibility of Joey's escape--how could his men screw this up so badly?

At the end, Joey returns. And, there is an empty place for him, the place he left empty but can now reoccupy. There is no dialogue, just a complete reproduction of the structure: the daughter gets his plate, fork, and knife (his place setting), the son passes him the meatloaf. The structure of the family is restored, again, perfect, perfect balance, perfect meal, perfect suffocating symmetry. Only now we know the fantasy of violence that sustains it.

Comments
That was invigorating.
The contrast of the sex scenes is even greater when we envision the considerate lover going down on the cheerleader almost immediately -- that, more than the fantasy of the "sexually experienced cheerleader" seemed to me to be the operative fantasy of that initial sex scene (that is, more could be done with the fantasy from the wife's perspective, in addition to the male fantasies that clearly do dominate the film).
Posted by: Adam Kotsko

Great point on the considerate lover. And, it could go a variety of ways: wife's fantasy; wife's reality (which is actually how I assumed it--probably because I take it for granted!--but your response is an appropriate challenge to that); son's fantasy of himself as a lover; son's fantasy of the experienced, loving, generous, considerate father.
Posted by: Jodi

I don't know what you guys were watching... shit, I only wish I enjoyed watching the movie as much as I did reading your comments. In truth, I found nothing of merit in the film, and found the experience like being stuck inside a ball of cotton... although an extremely putrid ball of cotton. I had an immediate, bodily reaction to this movie... it made me viscerally sick in my gut. Particularly the sex scenes, which I heard were supposed to be hot, but instead I found completely disgusting. In fact I've begun referring to the movie as "A History of Being Disgusting." Viggo is a retarded child that only knows how to kill and fuck (which is to say he ain't really one for book learning). Ostensibly, the book learning he leaves up to his wife... but we never see her in any capacity other than that of wanting to jump her retarded man-child's bones and alternately, wondering what life would be like without man-child (I assume it would involve a lot less corpses, but this thought never crosses her mind, cause she's fixated on the prospect of going without that sweet man-child loving). The only part of this movie that worked were the scenes where man-child kicks ass and takes names... but that was only like 3 minutes of the lame ass movie.


5. FROM k-punk -- AND NOW the debate starts): A seamless tissue of fantasies

Jodi Dean has an interesting reading of A History of Violence that is contrary to mine. She interprets the film as 'the son's fantasy of violence underlying the passive, ordinary goodness of his father'. (The son, as Jodi rightly says, was entirely absent from my account of the film). For Jodi, the film is a coming-of-age drama of an aberrant kind, in which, only by splitting 'the father into the good father of the symbolic and the obscene father of the mob, of underworld violence' can 'the son ... grapple with his own dilemmas of becoming a man.'

Ingenious as this reading is, I find it unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. First of all, A History of Violenc frustrates an 'epistemological' interpretation of this type at every turn. It is not a film like Fight Club, Memento and The Machinist , i.e. an enigma which resolves into questions of epistemological motivation. In those films, once we realise that what we have seen is the product of a psychiatrically and/or neurologically disordered mind, everything falls into place. They are jigsaw puzzles which can be put together, and Sense can be restored. A History of Violence, by contrast, is closer to Mulholland Drive and Eyes Wide Shut, films which scramble Sense and leave it scrambled. Appearances to the contrary, there is no moment of ultimate revelation in A History of Violence. The revelation at the level of diegesis - our discovery that Tom is Joey - does nothing to resolve the film's most troubling quandary, which is ontological rather than epistemological. At the end, nothing makes sense, because the questions the film has raised - not only 'what here is real?', but, more profoundly, 'what is (the) Real'? - have not been settled.

Part of the problem with Jodi's reading is that there is no clear ontological hierarchy in A History of Violence. Nothing is 'marked' as more real than anything else. This, again, is by contrast with Fight Club or The Machinist, which turn upon a discrepancy - concealed in the early parts of the films, but exposed by their end - between the psychotic delirium of the lead characters and a publicly-validated empirical reality. But there is no such discrepancy in A History of Violence, largely because there is no uncontested, convincing, empirical reality from which we can clearly differentiate the fantasmatic elements; there is only a seamless tissue of fantasies.

This is what makes the superficially conventional A History of Violence more ontologically unsettling than something like Existenz. Existenz presents a 'embedded' ontological hierarchy, in which different realities are contained within each other, the 'most real' being the one that embeds the rest. By the end of Existenz, this hierarchy has been disrupted, first, by the 'reality bleed' between ontological levels, so that supposedly 'inferior' realities come to contaminate 'superior', higher-level realities, and second, by the suggestion of an infinite regress of realities, with no ground level. A History of Violence gets to this sense of groundlessness or 'abgrund' without recourse to a 'vertical' model of nested realities. Realities are not placed one inside the other, but juxtaposed, one next to the other. A different kind of 'reality bleed' altogether.

As Jodi rightly observes, 'When we first see [the son] he is part of a completely fantastic image of the perfect family: the teenage son concerned about his little sister's bad dream.' This, then, would appear not to be 'real'. But what is? There is barely one situation in which the son finds himself that is not equally implausible: his verbal and then physical besting of the bully, like his shooting of the gangster to save his father's life, seem 'obviously' fantasmatic. But, then, so does everything else in the film. Jodi might argue that the film's 'real Real' is what is not depicted at the level of its diegesis - yet, her reading, of necessity, relies on privileging certain elements of what we DO see (most obviously, we have to accept that the son really is a son, really is at high school etc etc).

Jodi's reading also surreptitiously resolves the film's ontological tension, by assuming that the 'Joey reality' is ontologically inferior to the 'Tom reality'. On what grounds, though? As Jodi herself notes, the Stall domestic Paradiso is no more 'real'(istic) than the organized crime Inferno; it is just that, in the first case, the fantasies derive from melodrama, while in the second, they are taken from the gangster genre. (In this respect, A History of Violence can be compared with The Shining, which similarly mediates between the conventions of family drama and those of another genre, in that case, Horror. See Walter Metz's intertextual analysis here.) Paradoxically, the Stall family only seems realistic once it is menaced by mobsters who are no more realistic. If there is 'realism' at all, it is generated by the tensions between the conventions of two genres.

Jodi says that my reading was too quick to remove fantasy. But I would want to argue that Jodi, like Graham Fuller in Sight and Sound, contains fantasy by giving it a diegetic motivation. What this leaves out is in a way the most obvious fantasmatic level: that of our own fantasies. It is not that the events of the film can be reduced to the fantasy of one of the characters; no, the film forces us to confront the way in which the characters are OUR fantasies, the violence is the violence of OUR wish fulfillments.

Which is why I wholeheartedly concur with Jonathan Rosenbaum. 'There's hardly a shot, setting, character, line of dialogue, or piece of action in A History of Violence that can't be seen as some sort of cliche,' he writes. 'Its fantasies about how American small towns are paradise and big cities are hell are genre standbys that Cronenberg milks at every turn. But none of this plays like cliche; Cronenberg is such an uncommon master of tone that we're in a state of denial about our familiarity with the material -- a kind of willed innocence that resembles Tom Stall's own disavowal.'


6. FROM Jodi Dean, I cite: Response to K-punk: we are figures in our fantasies

K-punk's rejection of my reading of A History of Violence rests on one claim: that I "surrreptitiously resolve the film's ontological tension, by assuming that the 'Joey reality' is ontologically inferior to the 'Tom reality'. Yet, as he quickly concedes, I, in fact, do not do this: "As Jodi herself notes, the Stall domestic Paradiso is no more 'real'(istic) than the organized crime Inferno..."

Nothing in my reading of the film suggests this ontological prioritization. Rather, as I emphasize throughout my discussion, the film is a set of interlocking fantasies and I read these fantasies as primarily those of the son (the possible angle of the wife's fantasies are clearly subordinate in that we don't get any sense of what sort of dilemmas she may be encountering; thus, the fantastic quality of the long-term, sexually hot, loving relationship with a perfect man who is ultimately a stranger seems, in a way, stifling, already resolved; so, in whose world would marriage be so resolved? the fantasy world of the son).

The son faces, grapples with, what it is to become a man. He confronts, on one side, fantasies of the perfect family which provide unbearable, suffocating, impossible answers to the question of what it is to be a man. He confronts the obscene flipside of these fantasies in violence. Each side is as fantastic as the other--as I make clear in my reading of the film. Whatever symbolic resolution appears in the final scene is, of course, held together by fantasies.

With not much else to go on, K-punk resorts to a conventional flip/reflexivization--the fantasies are 'our' fantasies. OK. What isn't? That's what makes this sort of move so uninteresting and ultimately impossible: once that turn occurs every fantastic content appears at the same level, one doesn't need to talk about the film at all. The flip dissolves precisely the content it presumes to discuss.

K-punk rightly recognizes that nothing is more ontologically real in A History of Violence than anything else. And, he resists my reading because he falsely claims that I rely on an ontological given that can't be defended in terms of the film. But, what if one recognizes that we are figures in our own fantasies? At this point, it is easy to understand the film as the son's fantastic working through of the challenges of masculinity as it is split between the weak, passive father and obscene superego violence. The film doesn't reassure us with some 'reality' outside precisely because it 'is' (depicts/relates/forms) the fantastic subjectivity of the son; the reassurance of an external gaze is excluded precisely because it would rely on a master signifier the very possibility of which the film challenges.


7. FROM Steven Shaviro, The Pinocchio Theory: A History of Violence.

I’m not sure how much I can add, belatedly, to what k-punk, girish twice, Chuck, Jodi — followed by k-punk’s reply and Jodi’s counter-reply — Jonathan Rosenbaum, and others have already said about A History of Violence. But I do think that it is David Cronenberg’s best film since at least Dead Ringers (1988). Quite some time ago, I wrote extensively about the body horror in Cronenberg’s early films: which meant a lot, and still means a lot, to me. I was a bit disappointed, however, about the way that Cronenberg’s distancing himself from genre, in order to embrace “art film,” got in the way of his adaptations of writers with whom he shared a sensibility (William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard). And I was still more disappointed, when, in his more recent films, even though sometimes with increased artistic power, Cronenberg moved away from that explosive sensibility altogether, and towards an implosive concern with the anguish of wounded white male interiority — a subject with which I have little sympathy, as I think that we (since I have to be included as part of that “we”) need to get over it, and go on to more important things than whining over our supposed (more fantasmatic than actually real) loss of privilege. (In fairness, I should note that my friend Bill Beard, in his excellent book on Cronenberg, not only gives a far less pejorative account of this progress, but also argues that such a process was in fact already the real concern of Cronenberg’s earlier films as well, despite all the posthuman exploration that I, among others, have read into them).

The editing of A History of Violence is very tight and powerful, like that of Spider. But the important thing is that A History of Violence for me is that the film is not psychological, not about interiority, in the way Spider definitely still was (and the way many of the Cronenberg films of the last fifteen years or so have been). By “not psychological”, I don’t mean not affective, but that the affect in some way is impersonal or transpersonal. In Spider, dread was tied in to the protagonist’s point of view: a POV that we know is distorted and fantasmatic, but which we cannot escape from, or get an independent perspective on, despite this knowledge. The epistemological deadlock — or better, prison — that is at the heart of that film was reinforced by the way in which the adult protagonist (Ralph Fiennes) appears in the frame as a silent observer of his own psychotically distorted childhood memories.

The editing and pacing of A History of Violence create a similar sense of dread, even when what is explicitly going on (the members of a picture-perfect nuclear family eating breakfast, pouring the dry cereal, etc.) is entirely “normal” and banal. But Viggo Mortensen, playing the protagonist, is so closed off and opaque that we can’t really read (or more accurately: feel) what he’s going through as subjective anguish. (I’m assuming anyone who has read this far has seen the movie, or at least knows the basic premise: Tom Stall, exemplary small-town family man, turns out to have a dark past as Joey Cusack, psychotic mob hit man). As Tom, Mortensen is simply too blank to “identify” with; as Joey, he doesn’t display any of the self-congratulatory feeling that even Clint Eastwood (wonderfully minimal in expression as he is) does ultimately allow himself when he is in vengeful mode. In an email exchange, Bill Beard suggested to me that Cronenberg and Mortensen are operating by subtraction: “A History of Violence produces something radical simply by subtracting standard conduits of viewer empathy from what is unmistakably a mainstream-movie framework.” So we get, for instance, generic small-town Americana such as is found in the paintings of Norman Rockwell, and in the films of Frank Capra and (more recently) Steven Spielberg; everything is literally as it is supposed to be, but some dimension of warmth (or smarminess) is unaccountably missing, and this makes it all rather creepy. I’d only add to Beard’s account that the greatness of Mortensen’s acting, in particular, lies in the way he switches from one to the other of his two ‘characters’ or personalities, so that ultimately he seems to be trapped in a no-man’s-land between them. He’s a man without qualities, which is why both of his personas seem unpsychological. The conventional way to tell this story would be to make one of the personas more basic, more in depth, revealing the other persona to be just a mask; but this is precisely what Cronenberg refuses to do.

All this is even more evident in the two extraordinary sex scenes between Mortensen’s character and his wife Edie (Maria Bello), which are at the heart of the movie. The first involves play-acting, as Edie drags Mortensen-as-Tom off to a secret tryst in the course of which she dresses as a cheerleader, and they pretend to be making out while their (whose? hers, I think) parents are sleeping in the next room. The second is when Mortensen-as-Joey drags Edie down the stairs and brutally fucks her in what is at least a near-rape (she ultimately seems to consent, though it’s clear that she continues to feel loathing as much as desire). What unites these two opposed scenes is that they both seem similarly distanced and performative, except that there is no sense of any realer or truer self behind the mask of the performance. The first scene is a parody of what adolescence is supposed to be like; the second is a parody of what maturity or adulthood all too often turns out to be like. This is why I felt a bit queasy during the first scene, and found it almost as disturbing as the second one. Both scenes suggest a kind of void, and a failure of contact: the two people never really come together. (Is this what Lacan meant by declaring that “there is no sexual relation”?). It’s not a void that one can feel anguished about, however; for the selfhood, or sense of “thrownness” at least, that would allow one to feel anguish is precisely what is missing, what has been replaced by a void.

All this is to say that the split or doubling in A History of Violence is ontological, rather than existential or psychological. The split between Tom and Joey, and between the two sex scenes, of course corresponds to the two worlds of the film, both of which are themselves cinematic — and thereby social — fantasies: the wholesome, Capraesque or Spielbergesque small town (Ronald Reagan’s America, or George W. Bush’s red states) on the one hand, and the big-city-at-nighttime on the other. (I initially thought of film noir for these scenes; but on further reflection I’m reminded more of the big city in violent-revenge-fantasy films like Charles Bronson’s Death Wish, or, more recently, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City — it’s not irrelevant that A History of Violence, like Sin City, is an adaptation of material that first appeared in comic book form).

The result is that A History of Violence offers us a kind of spookily abstract modeling of cultural formations: of American fantasies about family, the good life, violence, empowerment, and self-reinvention: and in particular of how these participate in the construction of masculinity. This is very different from exploring the disintegration of masculinity — or of American culture, for that matter — from the inside. I call this ‘abstract modeling’ not just because Cronenberg’s presentation is so distanced and subtractive, but also because in a very real sense the abstraction is all that there is: the “inside” — something more personal and subjective, that would give the abstraction existential density and individual quirkiness and variability — simply doesn’t exist. This is Cronenberg’s version of postmodern flatness: the depths do not exist, everything is visible and apparent. This also explains the title of the film: this move really is a “history,” in the sense that it tracks the emergence of violence, and the different forms it takes at different times and in different circumstances. Violence is generated — almost as a autonomic effect — out of tiny rifts in the social fabric, or in the fabric of social myth (I mean, in the myth of noir as much as in the myth of wholesome “we take care of our own” Americana). This is why we get the story of Jack (Ashton Holmes), Tom’s teenage son, who erupts with violence in a parallel way to his father: as if what came back out of the past in the father’s case were generated as it were spontaneously, out of his very need to struggle, as an adolescent, with the (entirely stereotypical) problems of autonomy from the father and coming to terms with normative formations of masculinity. (I think that Jodi’s reading of the film as the son’s fantasy is valuable in the way it works out the son’s perspective; but I don’t accept it as an overall reading of the film, because it overly psychologizes the film and privileges the son’s perspective more than the film itself does, and thereby gives that perspective too much existential weight, ignoring how the film suggests it is just another social cliche, another purely superficial mode of articulating an otherwise blank subjectivity).

To say that A History of Violence is ontological and historical, rather than existential and psychological; and to say that it shows violence to be itself a surface or superficial effect of a structure or abstract model that is itself all surfaces (I’m calling it a “structure”, but the point of this is precisely that there is no underlying “deep structure” in any sense of the term): to say all this is also to say that the dichotomy or structural opposition that the film presents us with is false, and that the film ‘deconstructs’ the opposition, rather than affirming it. In other words, A History of Violence is like a Moebius strip. At any given point, it seems to have two sides; but the two sides are really the same side, each is continuous with the other, and slides imperceptibly into the other. There is no way to separate the Capra/Spielberg side from the noir/revenge nocturnal side. The common interpretive tendency in cases like this is to see the ‘dark’ side as the deep, hidden underside of the ‘bright’ side, the depths beneath the seemingly cheerful surface. But in A History of Violence, everything is what it seems. Both sides, both identities, are surfaces; both are ’superficial’; and they blends into one other almost without our noticing. The small town, with its overly ostentatious friendliness, is a vision of the good life; but brother Richie’s enormous mansion, furnished with a nouveau-riche vulgarity that almost recalls Donald Trump’s penthouse, is also a vision of the good life. In their odd vacancy, they are both quintessentially American (this could be, as Cronenberg has hinted, an allegory of America’s current cultural divide: blue states and red states, which actually are more continuous with one another than anyone on either side recognizes … this is something, perhaps, that only a Canadian could see, as it is invisible both to us Americans, who are too caught up in it, and to people from outside North America, who are too far away).

The Moebius strip would be Cronenberg’s version of the postmodern idea that there are no depths, only surfaces. Or (the same thing, to me) that there are affects, but not identities to be owners of those affects. And this two-sides-as-one would be why/how Cronenberg can be so unrelentingly grim, instead of having to resort to camp, in the ways that David Lynch and Guy Maddin both do (in the ways, I would say, that they are both forced to do, because of the extremities of their visions). K-Punk is right to assert that, for both Cronenberg and Lynch, it’s wrong to explain away the dualities and dichotomies of their films by saying that one side is the dream or fantasy or underside of the other. Rather, we have to grasp the total congruence of the film’s two halves (this comment would apply to Mulholland Drive as much as to A History of Violence. The difference is that where Lynch marks the two sides in the form of manic camp on the one hand and depressive bitterness and paranoia on the other, Cronenberg flattens both of them out, empties them both out. Lynch is thus a maximalist, Cronenberg a minimalist).

To say that Cronenberg’s vision in this film is ontological is also to say that he recognizes no hierarchy of levels. A History of Violence isn’t a film about existential male anguish, precisely because it works equally well, without privileging any one of these, as a study of the vacancy of the isolated inidividual, of the bourgeois nuclear family, of America as a fantasmatic formation or imaginary community, and of the “human condition” in the most general terms. But if it works most bitingly and corrosively on the level of family, this is because the Spielberg/revenge dichotomy-that-isn’t-one, which is Cronenberg’s largest cinematic reference point, tends to play out most overtly in terms of Family. The small town, of course, is grounded on the nuclear family, and its “family values”; Joey became Tom, in large part, by becoming a family man (which is why Edie worries, when she discovers the hidden identity, what the family really is, what their name is or could be). In Philadelphia, Richie makes a speech to Joey/Tom about why and how he never married & would never marry: it ties you down, makes difficulties, if you are married, then when you have a fling with somebody else (as you will inevitably want to do) you will have to do it with elaborate secrecy, etc. All this is a prelude to Richie’s trying to kill Joey, not in spite of, but precisely because of the fact that they are brothers (Richie never got as far in the mob as he wanted to, he says, because his family tie to his crazy brother held him back, just like getting married would). But by the end of the film — the last scene — being a married husband/father/family man is just as hollow as Richie’s life was — and retrospectively, it always was this hollow. Cronenberg rejects and undermines what is to me the one most absolutely offensive thing about all of Spielberg’s films (and about all of Spike Lee’s films too, for that matter): the absolute insistence on taking on the responsibilities of fatherhood, and thus restoration of a 1950s nuclear family, as an unquestionable and totally redemptive gesture. I hated that insistence before I had children; and now that I am a father, I hate it even more. The hollowness of the final scene of A History of Violence — the son getting out a setting for the place of the now-returned father at the dinner table — is devastating in its absolute oppressive rightness.


8. FROM K-punk again: ANOMALOUS SUPERFICIALITY

Hey! Old skool-style inter-blog bizniz; Jodi answers my objections to her reading of A History of Violence and now Steven Shaviro weighs in with what may turn out to be the definitive account.

Jodi complains that I have failed to take account of her acknowledgement that the Gangster elements of the film are no less real than the Family scenes. On the contrary, I think that it is her reading which contradicts that acknowledgement, and must do. I accept that, explicitly , she concedes that the Family reality has no ontological priority over the Gangster. But the point is that her interpretation of the film depends upon a clear implication inconsistent with that awareness. To say that the film is the son, Jack's, fantasy is, surely, to say that the entire Gangster plot is the product of his psychological conflicts. How could this not be treating Jack - and by extension the Family/ melodrama generic elements - as more 'basic', i.e. more real, than the Gangster generic elements? On this model, Jack's psychology is a stablizing epistemological baseline to which everything in the film can be indexed. Yet there seems to me to be no warrant in the film for such a privileging. On the contrary, what is remarkable about A History of Violence is its refusal of the possibility of this kind of hierarchical settling. Jack's psychological conflicts and 'struggles with manhood' are every bit as cliched as the hyperbolic violence of the Joey plot. To treat the Melodrama conventions as generative of the Gangster conventions is not only arbitrary, it misses what is most troubling, and most distinctive, about the film's ontological disturbances, which amount to a kind of Escherizing of genre.

A History of Violence is characterized by what we might call an anomalous superficiality . The film is pure surface, or rather, pure surfaces, limned together in such a way that we are aware of a structural inconsistency but are unable to 'see the joins'. The seamlessness of which I wrote in my last post is the seamlessness of the moebian band, about which Steven writes so well:

'At any given point, it seems to have two sides; but the two sides are really the same side, each is continuous with the other, and slides imperceptibly into the other. There is no way to separate the Capra/Spielberg side from the noir/revenge nocturnal side. The common interpretive tendency in cases like this is to see the ‘dark’ side as the deep, hidden underside of the ‘bright’ side, the depths beneath the seemingly cheerful surface. But in A History of Violence, everything is what it seems. Both sides, both identities, are surfaces; both are ’superficial’; and they blends into one other almost without our noticing. The small town, with its overly ostentatious friendliness, is a vision of the good life; but brother Richie’s enormous mansion, furnished with a nouveau-riche vulgarity that almost recalls Donald Trump’s penthouse, is also a vision of the good life.'

An important point here being that Trump's own penthouse - in 'real life' - is itself, of course, a fantasy, but so is small town family life. It, too, is a matter of actors occupying a stage-set. America, as Baudrillard, following Dick and Ballard, long ago realised is itself, in its 'actual reality', an assemblage of incommensurable 'reality options' given an illusory but performatively effective consistency only by fantasy. Yet fantasy precisely has no origin in interiority; on the contrary, all seeming interiority is the playing out of fantasies that are intrinsically social. Furthermore, it is not only that, as Steven rightly insists, cinematic fantasies are social; it is also that social fantasies are now deeply cinematic.

Hence to see the film as the playing out of our fantasies is at the same time to see ourselves as the playing out of fantasies which belong to no-one, which cannot be routed in any Inside. Jodi is right that this is to void any interpretation confined to the film's 'content'. Again, though, this is the point. For psychological interpretations not only privilege a particular psychology within the diegesis; they also privilege the epistemological over the ontological. A History of Violence , however, is a film which goes out of its way to expose the way in which genre is ontology, and demands that we pose to ourselves the question of our libidinal complicity in the realities cinema constructs. It is a film which invites us to confront the radical inconsistency of 'our' fantasmatic constructions and of our libidinal investments. Our desire for the family idyll is what produces our cheering for Jack and Tom's recourse to ultraviolence when that idyll is threatened, and this complicity is the 'glue' which joins the two 'sides' of the moebian band - the Capra/ Spielberg and the noir/ revenge worlds - together in a seamless loop. A film reduced to Jack's psychological conflicts could safely be externalized, but if we ourselves are Tom-Joey - animals with a taste for violence hiding in a simulation of domesticity - then the film has forced us to confront the flimsiness of the film sets we inhabit. A History of Violence would then belong to a kind of meta-generic ontological uncanny which performs that destruction of the homely that the Situationists were so fond of invoking.

'The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around…no more coats and no more home.' –Vasily Vasileyevich Rozanov, The Apocalypse of Our Time


9. FROM Jodi Dean, I cite: A History of Violence: Who doesn't like a moebius strip?

K-punk refers to Shaviro's view as 'definitive'--I wonder if this is because Shaviro agrees more with K-punk!  K-punk writes:

I accept that, explicitly, she concedes that the Family reality has no ontological priority over the Gangster. But the point is that her interpretation of the film depends upon a clear implication inconsistent with that awareness. To say that the film is the son, Jack's, fantasy is, surely, to say that the entire Gangster plot is the product of his psychological conflicts.

My response on this is that the 'happy family,' so bizarrely, unrealistically happy is a product of his psychological conflicts. But, see this fantastic point (I like it very much, although I am not convinced that a 'psychological' interpretation necessarily subordinates the ontological;' at any rate, I think the point on the film is excellent):
" ... psychological interpretations not only privilege a particular psychology within the diegesis; they also privilege the epistemological over the ontological. A History of Violence, however, is a film which goes out of its way to expose the way in which genre is ontology, and demands that we pose to ourselves the question of our libidinal complicity in the realities cinema constructs. It is a film which invites us to confront the radical inconsistency of 'our' fantasmatic constructions and of our libidinal investments."


10. FROM K-punk again. Now he thinks about another film: I filmed it so I didn't have to remember it myself

I was reminded of A History of Violence while watching Andrew Jarecki's ultra-disturbing documentary Capturing the Friedmans on C4's new digital service, more4, the other night.

Capturing the Friedmans is about a family from Great Neck, New York State, two of whose members (the father, Arnold, and one of the sons, Jesse, then only a teenager) pleaded guilty to serious sexual offences and were consequently jailed. Were they guilty? We can be reasonably confident only that Arnold had paedophiliac tendencies, and owned child pornography; he also confessed to having had some sort of sexual contact, short of sodomy, with two boys, but not in Great Neck. The rest is an enigma which makes Rashomon seem like an open and shut case. Jesse's role, for instance, is desperately unclear. The supposed victims claimed that Jesse had participated in, and assisted with, his father's violent abuses. But a campaigner cast doubt on the victims' testimony, none of which was corroborated by any physical evidence, and most of which seemed to have been 'recovered' after they had been hypnotized.

The gaps in the Friedman narrative are all the more glaring because of the plethora of recorded material that IS available. This was a family that seemed - like many now I suppose - to obsessively record itself. Part of the 'capturing' of the Friedmans is their capturing of themselves , on film and on tape. A documentary like this only became possible now that filming technology - cine cameras and later camcorders - had become widely available for the first time and kids are filmed from the moment of birth. The whole thing felt like a grim counterpoint to the proto-reality TV documentary of the Loud family Baudrillard discussed in 'Precession of Simulacra'. In a way, the most painful material consists of home movie footage of the Friedmans shot in the 1970s, in which they look for all the world like a perfectly happy family, the kids mugging and clowning for the cameras. Never has Deleuze's observation that 'family photos' are, by their very nature, profoundly misleading been more bitterly borne out. Later, as the trials start and the recriminations follow, the family fimed and audio-taped themselves ripping each other to shreds.

Why did they continue to film? 'How do they remember, those who do not film?' asks Chris Marker in Sans Soleil. But why would the Friedmans want to remember their journey into Hell? Who could possibly want to film this? In Lost Highway Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) claimed that he hated the thought of video-taping his own life because he 'liked to remember things in his own way'. In an uncanny complement to this, David Friedman, who recorded the events of the day Jesse was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment, said that he filmed 'so I didn't have to remember it myself'. The machines remember, so we don't have to.

THERE YOU HAVE IT. Hope you got some food for thought, and if you haven't see the A History of Violence yet, that you'll be in an aptly serious mood when you do. It is also, by the way, a gas -- very enjoyable as well as unsettling.