A History of Violence

This isn’t a great film. The dialogue is stilted, the tone of certain scenes feels forced (particularly in the first half hour), many of the performances are excrutiatingly one-dimensional, and the film is visually flat (lacking the strong compositions and use of shadow and light in Spider and Crash, for example). What exactly did I expect from another graphic novel adaptation? But as a particular kind of American allegory, A History of Violence makes for an extremely potent piece of cinema (and there are scenes and moments that are just about as good as it gets). I can see why this was such a hit at Cannes. As I was watching, however, I wondered what David Lynch could have done with this material, and I guess that’s not such a great endorsement of Cronenberg’s work.

51 thoughts on “A History of Violence”

  1. the question is, can jeff be trusted with movies that aren’t about two lovable bunnies, preferably of different races, who solve the world’s problems while discovering their true selves and the way to grandma’s house?

    i keed, jeff, i keed. will probably watch this over the weekend and crash tonight.

  2. It’s a good film but not a great one. Can there be such a distinction in a world where such adjectives have lost all specificity. Speaking of bunnies, has anyone seen The Brown Bunny?

  3. I don’t know if I wondered how Lynch would have handled it, as this film plays so well into Cronenberg’s particular obsessions: the transformation (and evolution) of the individual, the struggle between different aspects of one’s self…

    However, the first act – minus the first scene – is a bit of a parody of the Mayberry lifestyle. It is stilted and far too content. It made me want to start shooting up midwest cafes.

    In the end though, the film gives you some stuff to think about. How do we partition off our lives, ignore our traumas or early mistakes, and make conscious decisions to start over? How much of that stuff can we really ever do? And maybe just the facade of such a benign peaceful life is maybe enough on its own to get us through. Or are we just fooling ourselves and acting a part?

    When Tom’s son snaps at the school bully, did that have anything to do with what his father had done? Or did it have more to do with the genes his father passed on to him? Or maybe that explosion is just there in each of us, waiting for the fuse to be lit?

    I don’t think Cronenberg gives us the answer at all, and that last scene in the film where absolutely no one is sure what to do now shows that the characters are bewildered about how to go forward with their lives.

    I liked this movie a lot. Cronenberg, as he gets older, seems to be using more and more realistic stories to explore his themes, no longer relying on sci-fi tricks to get at the meat of it. In some ways, the tension building reminded me of Dead Zone as much as any of his other films.

    I also admired how he decided to play out the two sex scenes much longer than anyone in the audience would expect. Whereas most other directors would make his point, flash some tit, and then fade to black, Cronenberg goes ahead with an extended scene of oral sex, then has the actors go into a full 69. Viva cinema! Although the 69 scene made the two bodies look like some sort of huge soft pink insect, which of course is very Cronenberg, and might have been his goal the whole time.

    Finally, I’ll mention that I knew nothing about this film going in except the title and that Viggo was in it. I had seen no previews, and read nothing about it. That helped tremendously I think. This film didn’t have incredibly tricky surprises, but it was nice not to know that certain actos were going to show up later, and not have any idea what the character was supposed to be at the beginning. I am going to try to keep myself in the dark more often on films by directors that I know I want to see.

  4. I walked in completely unknowing as well–worked really hard to avoid all summaries and critiques. And I do expect a certain amount of flat affect in a Cronenberg film. But the first twenty minutes just felt so tonally awkward (this Norman Rockwell portrait of a mid-western family whose values reflect our own blah, blah, blah . . . and one can extend the conceit to suggest that underneath the surface lurks a far more revealing “truth” but such a reading would make the film more schematic, yes). That opening tracking shot that so many critics and film geeks have praised–it felt too, too studied (not surreal and certainly not real; not ominous in a good way but more . . . alright, alright already cut to the money shot already cause I know its coming). The vaguely polymorphous sexual tension at work in this sequence was interesting, but I’m not really sure I wasn’t projecting such desires for complexity onto the screen just to find something interesting to attach myself to. Young Jack’s outburst in the high school was an incredibly shocking and truly ambivalent moment (and precient) yet the high school bully was straight out of central casting (via the Fox Network). I certainly had a hard time keeping a straight face whenever he showed up. And the yahoos who worked at the diner . . . did they have to be so damned stereotypical. And I’ll also point a caustic finger at William Hurt’s scenery chewing as well as Ed Harris and his crew (who would be laughed off the screen if they showed up at Tony Soprano’s house). Now I write all this because (minus the blonde girl child robot) the scenes between Viggo and Maria Bello and Ashton Holmes are really fine and the way the emergent violence penetrates their safe cocoon is viscerally potent. I just wanted the film to work for that richness of moral ambiguity throughout. As for the sex scenes between Viggo and Maria. #2 was profoundly complex and as good a scene as I have seen on the big screen in many, many moons. Sex scene #1, however, seemed forced (where were they–their cabin away from their farm house) and dropped into the narrative to make sex scene #2 work. I also read that these scenes were not in the original script (nor were they worked up during pre-production) and that one of the writers encouraged Cronenberg to add them during filming. There is probably more to this anecdote.

  6. I have to agree with Jeff on many things. First, where were they in sex scene #1? I was very distracted by that until the oral sex started and then I immediately dropped such concerns. Admittedly, I have an insane desire to always find exactly where I am on maps, which Mark can confirm.

    Scene #2 was the most intricate, complex sex scene I have ever watched. I couldn’t stop replaying in my mind the array of emotions conveyed by their bodies. It took a lot of work to get that all on the screen – Cronenberg said that it took a day and a half to film it, and that the actors did get bruised from the wooden stairs they were on. I thought it worked perfectly to convey what Edie was thinking without a word having to be said.

    Blond love child was a robot and seemed to be a prop in the family. The rest of them were fully fleshed out, interesting chracters who were fascinating to watch. This made blond child unbearable in comparison.

    The tone in the beginning of the film seemed … wrong. I knew who the director was, so had this terrible sense that something horrific was going to happen to ruin this idyll. Perhaps the tv was going to start breathing? Maybe strange gynelogical implements were going to show up in the diner? Anyway, I found myself laughing inappropriately, sarcastically at the Stall’s sheer gaiety. Perhaps this comes from living with Mark for so long. Or maybe the sheer giddiness of their familial interludes was so over the top that it actually *was* laughable. I think after the violence started and that giddiness got tempered, I settled in to the movie. I think this is also the reason why sex scene #1 seems forced; it’s part of the establishment of the happy, happy family at the beginning of the film.

    I also detected [if I may steal the phrase] “polymorphous sexual tension” in that first scene. I wondered if I was just a perv by inserting sexual tension where none was meant to be, or if it was directed that way. So, thanks, Jeff, either we both have the same active imagination or Cronenberg wanted many a weird vibe percolating throughout that scene.

    Having said all this, I can’t stop thinking about this film. What do you have to do to prove you have changed? Can you truly change? Is it even worth it as the “true self” [your genes] will win in the end? Can every misstep be forgiven by those who love you? Should it be? What would you do for the people you love?

  7. Just got out of the flick, and wanted to get a few thoughts quickly scribbled out. So…

    –It’s psych 101, but there are very few other directors so uncomfortably familiar with (or so adept at revealing, and revelling in) the way those things we desire and those things which repel us co-exist, even correlate or coincide, in our fantasies. Sex scene #2 seems a textbook illustration, sure–but not just for the Stalls; what the scene so dangerously reveals is how much more thrilling the sexual fantasy on-screen is when there is a persistent anxiety about whether Tom will come, or Joey will show up. And–then–it’s Edie we see rapt, enraptured. I’m not sure how I’d unravel this except to say, I think Cronenberg’s lens is pointed at the audience.

    (Obviously the other director of note–when you’re talking about desire and repulsion–is Lynch. But I was trying to unravel, as I drove away from the film, why I see Lynch and Cronenberg in such different universes, despite this ability. One reason is pedigree: Lynch’s aesthetic emerges from a high-modernist highbrow, ironically detached from the cinematic fantasies that Cronenberg, on the other hand, seems at home with; Cronenberg starts in lurid strange low-budget horror, films I love. Or put another way: for me, Cronenberg’s aesthetic is uncanny–he makes the familiarities of genre films unpredictable, unsettling. Lynch’s aesthetic may use the stuff of genre, but it’s (merely?) grist for the auteur. Or maybe the best way to put their difference is this: in Lynch’s movies, what we see is his unconscious, evocative perhaps of our own–but he’s the guy on the couch. When I watch Cronenberg, I get the feeling that I’m on the couch, and he’s carefully, cruelly peeling away my conscious defenses….)

    –The film isn’t stilted in the beginning–it’s thin. The fantasies early in the film have no depth of field (and, it seems, neither do the shots): the killers on the road, and the somewhat flat, pat panning camera toward the violent tableaux in the motel office, are overly familiar, affectless–and so is the culminating gunshot; the family Stall are stuck in still life, and even the sex is based on meager fantasies (cheerleaders?). But when the fantasies collide–damn, the film grabs hold. And the actors seem to undergo a sea-change: Mortensen’s eyes slowly skate away from contact with others, and suggest some vivid collision between the two worlds/two fantasies. Bello is suddenly always within a flinch of a shout, of falling into helpless rage.

    What this suggests to me is a slight counter-reading to the stuff I’ve seen in many reviews–less a critique of the desire for violence in our films/fantasies, and more a complex revelation of how central violence is to our fantasies, of how vital the rage and destruction are. I don’t mean that the film celebrates violence: I mean that the movie suggests that real life is much more indebted to the interplay of deep unconscious undercurrents of desire and repulsion, violence and love. The film–as a fantasy–seems more real as a result of this collision.

    –Or, tie it back to Cronenberg’s constant themes, the film gets more real (and alluring, and revelatory) whenever it steps back from the (thin) fantasies and grounds the imagined actions in bodies. The first sex scene does come to life when Tom’s head disappears between Edie’s thighs; the much-commented-upon violent scenes are textbook–if grandly, gloriously perfect–Hollywood, right up until we cut to some visceral close-up, held just a couple moments too long, of viscera; when Edie cries on Tom’s shoulder, a thin line of snot snakes down from her nose, catches for a moment.

    –Why does it look “flat”, following Jeff’s initial post? This film looked *exactly* like one of his earlier flicks, the low-budget stuff–particularly like Rabid or Scanners or The Dead Zone. As if everything was shot with heavy cloud cover, as if the lights on set were all somewhat evenly set up, as if the films were made to be shown on television. I used to think that D.C. just had no money early on–but I’ve grown to think that, instead, he is weeding away much of the ‘affective’ power of film–and in those early films the acting and dialogue also seem just this side of canned, not surreal nor unreal but artificial in some hard to name manner–turning our attention to the only vital thing left on-screen, the impact of the bodies exploding, the bodies desiring, the bodies struggling….

    Okay. Semi-coherent, but I wanted to get these ideas down before going to bed.

    When you dream, are you Joey?

  8. “the much-commented-upon violent scenes are textbook–if grandly, gloriously perfect–Hollywood,”

    Not meaning to pick on a small part of your critique, but it seems Cron. went out of his way NOT to make the violence scenes perfect-Hollywood. They are shot in real time – no music, no slow-mo, no zillion multiple angels in the space of three seconds. Though the scene in his brother’s office was a bit over the top, I liked how the action happened fast, in real time, b/c we don’t see that much in films.

  9. Okay–point taken. How about this: grandly, gloriously, CLASSICALLY Hollywood. I thought a lot about John Ford–and got there via Eastwood (who seems to have appropriated some of the best bits of Ford for Unforgiven).

    I agree–these scenes run counter to both bad Hollywood (Michael Bay’s editing cuisinart) and some good Hollywood. Re that latter kind: for instance, even though the scene between the brothers was over the top, and Hurt is hamming–imagine merely the dialogue, what’s on the page, which seems to invite a kind of Pacino-esque, Scarfacey extravaganza of operatic emotion and violence. But what plays out is … strange. The camera keeps closing in on Hurt’s face, because his eyebrows keep tilting off-intention, his mouth (always a small little slit) compresses, drops down into his chin–it’s really a dazzling little bit of physical acting, but it’s all on the face. And he reads the dialogue off-key, as well–not Walkenizing it, but also avoiding the opera. Instead, it’s petulant, whiny, wheedling…

    (And as to fast action–compare to Nolan’s Batman, which I sort of complained about as being cut/shot so fast as to be unclear. By contrast, these while cut perhaps a couple frames faster than normal, were compellingly choreographed.)

  10. I remember The Dead Zone having a much more visually pleasing mise-en-scene than you do, and I always figured that was due to the fact that Cronenberg had more money to play with. Where does Spider, Crash, The Fly, Dead Ringers, M. Butterfly and/or eXistenZ fit into your thesis–not to mention Naked Lunch.

    I agree, sex scene #2 is so compelling because it is so full of life in a film that often feels forced (in the same way that those death scenes seem so humanly horrific as opposed to the kick-ass scene in Hurt’s mansion which plays out like an episode of Alias or maybe a better Chuck Norris flick). But why does it have to be so black and white?

    So now you are utilizing an auterist paradigmn to argue why Cronenberg is not an auteur. I don’t buy your Cronenberg/Lynch argument but I’ll accept it–especially if it gets you on the couch.

    You say the film is thin (lacking content, I imagine); I say its’ stilted (awkwardly formal)–either way I don’t think the film gives us a reason to care for the Stalls (or for Indiana or midwest American values because it’s nothing more than wallpaper). This family doesn’t come to life until they have a little blood on their hands (or bruises on their backs). That’s why robot girl does not compute (though I don’t want to see her in another film for two years imagine what Dakota Fanning could have done in that role). In fact, the film ultimately wants us to desire Joey. Fair enough, in Cronenberg’s schematic universe American arrogance is the culprit. Its family values provide only a thin veneer to cover the more “authentic” desires and impulses that lurk between the surface. That plays really well post 9/11 but I think its a thin and unoriginal thesis (we are a nation of Joey/Tom). If the Norman Rockwell world Cronenberg sketches out for us had been in any way complex, alluring, interesting, multi-dimensional then the stakes would have been higher (the world Tom wanted to maintain might have been more flawed but I think I would have rooted to see him fight harder to maintain it).

  12. J said:
    “This family doesn’t come to life until they have a little blood on their hands (or bruises on their backs)”

    Yeah–that’s it exactly. But I don’t think that it’s only, or just, or maybe even at all a matter of exposing the “real” Joey behind the “false” Tom. I think you *can* read the movie that way, but it seems to me there are lines of dialogue throughout, particularly between Richie and Joey/Tom, that suggest otherwise: namely, I could have strangled you in the crib; when you dream, are you Joey? Deep in our cribbed psyches, there’s a lot of shoving, strangling, devouring going on–and those desires are not easily divorced from fucking, pissing, loving. Our divorce of revulsion from desire is a conscious action; Joey heads out into the desert and destroys Joey, producing Tom. But Tom is thin gruel–thematically, psychologically, AND formally–and it is the interplay of Tom/Joey which brings the actor to life.

    I think the film does want us to desire Joey–but, like the family at the end, recognizing his place at the table, not simply affirming/valuing his utility for fantasy, nor as a replacement for Tom. (Again, I think Richie and particularly the two baddies early on in the film represent the alternative ‘thin’ fantasy of the id unleashed.)

  13. I agree . . . I guess what I’m really missing is the inner conflict at work in Viggo’s character work or dialogue. He seems so blank most of the time (except when he hits violent superdrive for a few moments). I got more complexity from his wife and son and brother (however histrionic I might have found Hurt’s performance) than from the man himself.

    I like it when you get all Freudian on me. I feel like I need to grab a literary dictionary but its still a tingly sensation.

  14. Mike – did you even like the film? I honestly don’t know from reading your posts.

    “I remember The Dead Zone having a much more visually pleasing mise-en-scene than you do” – I agree with Jeff; it was not only polished in a Hollywood way, but it had a lot of nice angles over balconies, and some camera-work that made good use of Walken’s post-coma limp; several shots from above looking down on walking Walken. It didn’t strike me as “flat” at all.

    In fact, I saw most of this film a year ago or so, and I was really pleased with how good it was: With the exception of William Hurt in this film, Cronenberg is very good at taking campy actors and keeping them on a tight acting leash: Walken, James Woods, even Goldblum in “The Fly” is as under control as his manic character could possibly be. It’s a fascinating quality of his work I think. Especially when it’s taken to a staggering extreme, as in Spider, where it can be difficult to know if the main character is even awake.

  15. You Hungarians need everything spelled out. Yes, I liked it. Didn’t love it. But, hell, it got me very engaged on these questions of violence, identity, representation–Cronenberg rarely just thrills me, more often couples a restrained excess to a cool intellectual vigor.

    By that I mean, when you’re shooting a movie where a guy vomits his fly-dna acid onto another guy’s hand, thereby melting it, you’d assume that the visuals would highlight the thrill and dazzle, that the scene would be nothing but gut-punch gratuitous-gore glee…. in keeping with the genre. But (again, from woebegotten memory) that scene plays out without much flashy camera motion, maybe without any–and not too much editing. Stop the camera, and stare as the flesh disintegrates. I like crappy (and good) horror films, and the tonal approach to violence in D.C.–despite comparable moments of fx excess, and loopy plot extremism–is far more unsettlingly “realist” than the norm. Sensory and intellectually stimulating, rather than (merely) sensational. Cronenberg’s old horror flicks–including Zone, and Fly, and I think I’d tie the style to this newest one–let the bodies speak for themselves, and the machinery of cinematic vision seems to step back. (Even in Zone, when the serial killing deputy puts scissors through his own head, the camera shot is not stark angle; we get a medium shot, from a slight distance. And hold, as the body jerks a little. Do I misremember that?)

    Maybe. I probably misremember Zone, barring a few key scenes; I have far stronger memories of Scanners, thanks to an issue of Fangoria that I probably shouldn’t have snuck out and bought, and which compelled me to see the flick. By the same token, I wouldn’t–and hopefully didn’t–overstate the “flatness” of Violence’s look. I was mostly just kicking back at Jeff’s original post–the visuals seemed understated, less flashy, and this reminded me of his earlier budget-bound work.

    I disagree with you about Hurt in this movie. I thought he was good. Again, it’s written like Tony Montana; Hurt, by comparison, spins it inward in interesting fashion, and in keeping with the film’s concerns.

    I thought Mortensen was very strong, too. Again, the eyes.

    But by far the best performance was Bello. She and Alec Baldwin are the only things that made The Cooler remotely bearable, and she’s great here.

  16. we just got back from seeing the movie (yes, we left the house for cinema). i’m with mike for the most part. i really liked this film and i have to say i think jeff’s critique (at least in his first post–i haven’t read the long essays that follow very carefully) misses the point. i think the error is of trying to place this film entirely in a naturalist and realist mode–i think the film actually works to undercut these expectations. i was struck by how cronenberg juxtaposes the cartoon-thin mode with the realist-thick mode, and how he leaves the tensions between these modes in, rather than trying to resolve them. this i think mirrors his treatment of tom/joey’s character. the dialog, the performances, the casting–all of these seem perfectly attuned.

    what is it with you americans and violence anyway? why are you always trying to allegorize violence? i am not talking about canadian cronenberg here, but all of you here in these comments. violence seemed incidental to me in this film, despite the title, as it has in all cronenberg films: violence is not metaphor or a central focus of analysis, it is merely a way of spilling bodies open and making them messily mix.

    by the way, there was a very chatty couple behind us at the theater. well, the man was chatty. at first i was annoyed but then i began to enjoy his take on the film, as whispered loudly to his wife: to him this was a simple story of a home-invasion and a man protecting himself and his family. he constantly exhorted viggo and son to shoot and kill people, pointed out helpfully that the shotgun only had one full clip, noted that the son didn’t assault the bully but merely fought back, and that viggo needed to be left alone by his wife and the sheriff since all he was trying to do was lead a new life. in a weird way i think his reading is actually somewhat true to the film.

    sunhee liked it too–but i think she might have exhausted her blog energies with her “oldboy” post from yesterday. oh, she also made a comment about “3-iron” (which i have no idea when she saw)–i don’t think we’ll hear from her again for a couple of years.

  17. my modesty makes it essential that I make my reappearance as the 17th post in a thread that has obviously played itself out. nevertheless, two things: A History of Violence can’t be Blue Velvet for the Nascar crowd because Blue Velvet is about the love of watching violence; the power of its violence requires being one step away from it.

    and secondly a really great film about violence Straw Dogs makes A History of Violence look like a student thesis film, though generally I am a fan of cronenberg.

  18. Michael, good to hear from you again. Especially good to hear your praise of Straw Dogs which, as you rightly point out, a really great film. I’m hoping to finally have some time to go out and see this film. Can’t say I’ll come up with anything worth posting.

  19. and secondly a really great film about violence Straw Dogs makes A History of Violence look like a student thesis film, though generally I am a fan of cronenberg.

    but again, this comparison hinges on the idea that both films are about violence…

    by the way, i remember a bunch of us watching straw dogs together at john and my old apartment in le chateau at rue portland. at the end michael observed drily that “peckinpah wasn’t exactly a feminist”.

  20. mmmmm, not about violence, eh? can you clarify that enigmatic comment, arnab?

    ah, rue Portland, that strange place about a 1000 years ago. arnab and john’s grotto–a lot like the playboy mansion without the luxury, bunnies, celebrities, food, etc. though James Caan did come by now and then, mostly to show me his new tae kwon do moves. i’m glad to figure in an anecdote saying something “drily”–makes me feel like noel coward…but i still like chicks, so don’t get the wrong idea, matey.

    my most memorable film viewing experience at portland was watching Shock Corridor drunk…kept falling asleep, waking up and feeling like I was IN the movie! so far i have resisted seeing it again sober, so it won’t ruin the memory. ditto for Cliffhanger which seemed like a masterpiece after 6 guiness.

    hey john—let us know what you think of the film….

  21. see comment 16 above, michael. i don’t think cronenberg is particularly interested in what violence reveals about anything or anyone–unlike say in peckinpah where violence is THE male ritual. i think his interests in this film continue to be, as mark noted above, metamorphosis, the possibility of being multiple things at once, the ambivalence all this causes etc. violence is a way to get into these things, whereas in peckinpah violence is one of the things, if not the thing.

    thing, thingy, thingification.

    (frisoli and noel coward: separated at birth?)

  22. Thank God Michael’s posting again. Even if it means more Peckinpah fanboy gushing. At least it’s witty Noel-Coward-ly Peckinpah fanboy gushing.

  24. and don’t forget egg-suckin’ guttertrash. and, yes, thank god indeed.

    i’m not sure I find “History” that interesting either as a film about violence or one about metamorphosis. but yes I did like Ed Harris and his funky eye–now I go around in a black suit and try to talk in a Philly accent with dialogue out of Hemingway’s The Killers. He’s a smart boy, ain’t he? Arnab, I see you point–but then I wonder what the point is of all that eager humping in the movie, if not something to do with the sexiness of violence. I admired the construction of the movie, but I just didn’t get it, and i’m puzzled by all the critical acclaim. as for metamorphosis, I think Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers is a brilliant movie, far more powerful than this one. and what’s up with William Hurt, was he doing a Tony Soprano or what?

  25. michael, i think the fact that bello’s character is ambivalently turned on by the fact that her husband turns out to be a professional killer is only incidentally about the attraction of violence/violent people and more directly about the fact that she herself is more multiple than she would seem at first glance.

    now, you might well ask me why if violence is not important there is so much of it in the film or why it is in the title. i realize i’m being somewhat bloody-minded here, but consciously so. i think in american culture any discussion of violence very quickly leads down a moralistic path: what does it reveal about us? about america? etc. where violence is seen as some sort of special mode of revelation. unfortunately, the answers to these questions are usually terribly trite (or have become so): uh oh, we like violence more than we say we do, america is founded on violence etc.. i think this film is less interested in the violence itself than in the other stuff that gets exposed once the violence blows things open. violence is neither transformative nor (re)generative here (as it is in different ways in peckinpah or scorsese,) it just takes the lid off. viggo dismantling hurt and his thugs is cool to look at, but what i remember most about that scene is the line mike quoted: “when you dream are you joey?”. that’s the kind of stuff that makes cronenberg different from other people who make movies about violence.

  26. I’ll reiterate some of what Arnab just said (about Bello’s character’s multiplicity, in particular) and return to an idea poorly-defined in my own mumblings above: the history of violence should be construed as everyone’s history. Violence is not just something that provokes metamorphosis (after it happens to you) or is buried subsequent to/through metamorphosis, but is instead a part of the history of selfhood that we all conceal, seal away, disavow and bury.

    [This lends itself to a read of “America,” too, but I’m not so interested in that here.]

    Violence isn’t something that happens to the self, it’s something that makes up the self. When Bello’s character or the son or Viggo himself get turned on, revved up–or when we do in the audience–I don’t think the film is moralizing, nor is it giddily appreciating such desire. I think Cronenberg is interested in dissecting the desires and identity. So, yeah, it can be “regenerative” but… again, “When you dream are you Joey?” is the key, as Arnab says. It’s more interesting thinking about how and why (and who) we dream, than trying to analyze those dreams.

    And I say again, damn you all, that Hurt was fun. If only just because his name is Hurt, he needed to be in the movie.

    Thank God John called me a peckerwood.

  27. Finally saw the film. Gave myself a double feature: this and GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK. I had followed somewhat carefully the comments about the film, and I think I might be able to add a few thoughts.

    First, I liked the film a great deal.

    As far as the debate about whether or not this film is about violence or just has some incidental violence in it. I’m leaning towards thinking of this film as about violence, certainly, but it doesn’t seem as high pitched as Arnab says most “films about violence” are (or said to be). I think it’s rather simple in this film–perhaps, to take Arnab’s side, simpler than in American films (and let’s make it clear, this is not an American film. It’s shot in Canada with a mostly Canadian crew–did you catch the outrageous Canadian accents some of the minor characters had?).

    Let me begin with an example. When Tom comes home from the hospital for the first time, he is ambused by a single TV news crew. Now, in an American film the filmmakers would insist on a swarm of media–no matter how small the town in which the story takes place (even when he leaves the hospital, the crowd that has gathered is small. It’s not a frenzy: there’s a spirit of quiet congratulation). The reason is not to giuve us a glimpse of “real” middle America. As Arnab says, this film is not in the naturalist/realist mode. I think the reason that the news crew is there is to help establish the central problem of the film. When the family finally gets inside this house, Jack, staring through the window, remarks upon the presence of the news crew: “they’re here because of what you did.”

    I remember that this line struck me as odd. Isn’t it obvious why they’re there? Why put special emphasis on “what you did”?

    I think the line is significant because when the TV crew drives away, another car pulls up. By now, Tom is looking out the window. He stares at it for a while, and it slowly pulls away (we later learn it is Fogarty). One might say, using Jack’s phrasing, THOSE guys are here not because of what he did, but because of WHO HE IS. And this becomes the central idea of the film. Is violence something one does, or does it define who you are. Or, more generally, is one’s history made up of what someone does, or is it made up of who one is?

    So this film is about violence, but it avoids the Amerimoralizing that tires Arnab so. Could it be that the question of violence is recast in less specifically American terms in Cronenberg’s film? After all, the film deals with a relatively modern set of questions about character. Is it something that you have? Is it innate? Or is it something that you build, that you add to, like a bank account–a question that is more English (think Jane Austen) than American.

    It seems to me that violence itself is not the concern. What seems to be the real threat is that violence will return, will happen once more. Again: violence is not something that is (i.e., Tom is Joey, and Joey is violent, therefore Tom is violent). Rather, Tom is Joey, and Joey has mob ties, and it is likely that the mob will continue to reach for Joey.

    This leads me to my other idea: can we see this film as firmly within an American subgenre: the rural gangster film? The point of most rural gangster films (think Nicholas Ray’s THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, and the extended sequence in GODFATHER, PART I when Michael is in Sicily), is that one cannot escape the reach of urban violence. No matter how hard he may try, the hero (or hero and heroine–usually, in the rural gangster film, what drives the gangster out of the city is the allure of domesticity, of normalcy, of nature and purity) cannot escape the reach of urban mob violence. It may appear that the point of the rural gansgter film is to put the gangster back where he belongs: the city. But what is even more likely is that the rural gangster film dissolves the boundary between urban and rural.

    Cronenberg is giving us a wonderful twist on the subgenre. What’s most interesting is that Tom’s talents are far superior to those of his urban counterparts. Usually, in the rural gangster film, the opposite is true. That is, the rural gangster is doomed because he is weakened, softened–not by the his landscape: the land, the good, honest, decent road he thinks he’s travelling, but by his desire for such a landscape.

    In A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, Tom’s skills are as lethal on the floor of a local diner, on the front lawn of his home in Millbrook, Indiana, as they are in Philadelphia. And he is no match for his more urban (suburban?) brother. I have to say, I laughed out loud when Richie’s henchman got killed (by the way, I was all by myself in the theater…I had the place to myself).

    And Richie has Joey all wrong. He mocks his younger brother’s desire for wanting to lead the quiet life, with the wife and kids (he mistakenly thinks he lives on a farm–even one of his henchmen is convinced he smelled pigs). Sure, Tom has this desire, but it never seems to me that it’s because he is trying to avoid some innate truth about what his real identity is: violence itself. Rather, violence just happens to be in his personal history. Things happened. There are things he did that have certain consequences. He himself said he took the identity of Tom Stall because it was available. This statement strikes Edie (and us?) as cold because we think he is escaping his past, or who he really is, but he’s not. He’s just escaping men who want to kill him.

    I hope to God this makes sense, because I’m pooped and I don’t want to go back and edit. Any thoughts?

  28. Cronenberg on The History of Violence and what attracted him to the script:

    Well, first of all, it was the iconic Americana aspect of it, the sense that we’re dealing here with America’s mythology of itself. It’s a perfect small town, the perfect little family. What does it take to support that? What goes on outside that small town to make that possible? And then, of course, the question of whether that is enough. Would you be really happy living there? Do we actually call in these other forces to liberate us in a way? And that leads to other questions about the complex nature of violence and our relationship to it. How much of it do we love? How much do we need? We can imagine a world with no violence, but would we really want to live in that world? Really? The answer is, perhaps, disturbing. No. We really wouldn’t. The kids would leave that small town. Not enough danger. Not enough titillation. So the movie also has those reverberations of the American Western and gangster movies. It’s not a retro… it’s not a Quentin Tarantino sort of a pastiche…

    see more at:
    http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=21756

  30. mark, to paraphrase mr bumble (he’s in “oliver twist”–that’s a book, by dickens with one k), if mr. cronenberg disagrees with my reading then mr. cronenberg is a ass, a idiot.

    but actually i went and read the whole interview and i don’t think what he says is really at odds with what i say about it. not that i care anyway.

  31. I agree with Arnab, Mark. What Cronenberg says doesn’t seem out of line with our comments. Especially mine, which is genius. And Arnab, don’t scare Mark with books. Remember: he got his MA in Communications.

  32. watched dead ringers last night. really, really good. i mention it here because in the extras cronenberg talks briefly about his attraction to characters who seem normal on the outside but have something else going on inside and the processes by which the inside moves to the outside. immediately reminded me of our discussion of violence. i wish i could remember more of what he said but it was late.

  33. wow. some thirty posts on this mediocre movie, and only a handful on sally potter’s incredibly nuanced Yes, which i suspect only two of you have watched.

    saw it just last night (no, the janitors have not yet won, but there is a tiny, temporary lull in the action. check out picketline for an update. if you don’t care, make yourself care. next time it could be YOUR university) and have already half forgotten it, it was so riveting (not). at some point, simon and i even considered stopping and going to sleep.

    i agree with arnab, of course. this is not a realistic film. it’s, again, a film that draws attention to itself, a little stagey, a little stilted (i think the same people who liked the staginess of this film decried the staginess of Yes — not that i think you are all a bunch of sexist bastards). but how interesting is it to watch another movie in which the main character has a dark, hidden past? i wish my memory were better, because i can only think of The Long Kiss Goodnight, but hasn’t this been done a thousand times?

    nice guy (gosh, isn’t that overdone) used to be a psycho gangster and cannot resist resorting to the old ways when his nice female employee in the nice town cafe’ he owns gets threatened with rape by some psychos like his ex-self. then of course the dark past catches up with him, and his nice family is a wee bit shell-shocked. they have a hard time adapting to the idea of nice father/husband being an ex-psycho gangster who whacked people away like cockroaches. at the end, they sit at the table and, we assume, try to figure it out.

    people, that’s it! this is the whole movie. nuances? subtleties? forget it. how does one change oneself from psycho to nice? we’re not told, except that he goes 3 years in the desert. why should one change oneself from psycho to nice? we’re not told either, except that he meets gorgeous maria bello. how does one confront his dark past? by going back to being psycho only long enough to whack all the people who were there. gee whiz. can you spell SUBTLE?

    one of you, i think it was john, suggested that this film has to do with one’s willingness to live with someone else’s dark “other.” that would be maria bello’s role. except cronenberg doesn’t tell us anything about how she goes about it. he only shows us, as if we didn’t already know, that “every woman likes a fascist” (the usual “c’mon, c’mon, i know you like it” rape motif). she fucks him hard on the stairs. she gets bruised.

    and here’s the real message of the film: she likes violence, too. just like the nice kid jack. we are all attracted to violence. nicey nice doesn’t cut it. it’s boring. god is it boring.

  34. oh, something i forgot. it’s not americans’ (canadians’, whatever) obsession with violence, arnab. it’s american males’ obsession with violence.

  35. So, you didn’t like it?

    I’m gathering a defense of the film wouldn’t matter to you, nor probably a defense of Cronenberg. But … whatever conventional approach the film took, for me it was so much colored by the long, long history of unconventional and really damn interesting approaches to desire, violence, and identity in Cronenberg that the film perhaps seemed even stronger.

  36. In other words you’re projecting what you want the film to be onto a somewhat mediocre and/or watered-down Cronenberg effort. And Gio, you’ll have noticed I expressed my dislike of this film on a number of occasions . . . for the record.

  37. Somewhat mediocre Cronenberg is superior Hollywood entertainment. I stand by my earlier comments. For instance, even a slick little number that I enjoyed–like Red Eye–is about half as interesting as History was. And I’d rather watch The Sopranos than either.

    And, although my appreciations for Yes and History are about equivalent, in general yeah I’m a fan of those flicks immersed in violence. Maybe there is a gender distinction to be drawn, but… simply liking or disliking either of these particular films doesn’t go far enough to make such a case for a gendered critical reaction to the issues represented respectively. I.e., maybe a male critical establishment does lean toward affirming Cronenberg and dissing Potter. But I’m not sure that’s been persuasively fleshed out here–Gio, you want to take that further? (I think, rightly or wrongly, Cronenberg’s been taken by feminist critics as intriguingly subversive about the intersections of gender and violence, hasn’t he?)

  38. gio, you acknowledge that the film is not realistic, but then criticize it for failing to give you things that a realistic film would give you: believable transformations etc.

  39. no arnab, i expect it to give me something that an interesting and deep film would give me. you don’t need to be realistic to be deep. i’m accusing this film of being superficial.

    jeff, you know i love you.

    mike, i’m just one person here, just one woman, but yes, i do think this blog (i take this is what we’re talking about) is very much a boy blog. it’s a very good boy blog, don’t get me wrong, and i love (i do!) reading it and writing in it. but it’s a boy blog. i don’t know why or whether boys are more attracted to violence than girls. if History had been a better film, it might perhaps have addressed this issues. heck, even Mr and Mrs Smith addresses it! or Red Eye, in its own little way.

    i’m really annoyed that women were basically absent from these year’s oscars and i’m really annoyed that movies made by women or about women receive such paltry critical attention, whereas people go overboard in trying to find deep significances in a silly and cliched film such as History.

    anyway, no, mike, you don’t need to defend the film. you’ve already said why you like it and i’ve said why i don’t (though you’ve certainly spent a lot more words than i!). we can chalk it up to taste and go no further. but do you see where i’m coming from? and no, i don’t know anything about feminist critics and cronenberg, and i haven’t seen any other of his films. i have never found him attractive. but if you say that his other films are better than this, i can give him a shot.

  40. gio, we don’t need to agree about the film. i obviously don’t think it is superficial in the sense you mean (though i think it is superficial in a very literal sense, as in, concerned with surfaces and missing depths). you should watch other cronenberg though before writing him off. as for identity and marginalization, i’ll misquote another canadian (buddy cole): “it is hard enough being black and queer, imagine if he was also canadian.” but yes, it would be nice if the women who can post on this blog did actually post on the blog. and i’m not talking about the englishmen.

    jeff, didn’t you open your review by saying that you thought this was a good, if not great film. if that’s your response to films you dislike i’d hate to see a really positive review.

  41. I always say too much–“more words” from me is like saying more poop jokes from Arnab. I liked your challenge–I was trying to understand its focus, even as I kind of disagree about whether this film (or Cronenberg) is a good place to make the argument. For instance, shift over to our endless discussions of action flicks, or my own defense of sleaze, and have at us.

    I’ll be honest–I was more than willing, even eager to accept the reviews of Yes and dismiss it, until I read your review, which made me interested in the movie. [Not because you’re a woman, nor because you’re you (although you know I like ya, ya lug)–because the post made the movie sound interesting.] What’s intriguing, and I think it was what you were challenging, is how gender creeps into the basic tools we’re all employing to appreciate, dislike, or just plain dismiss stuff.

    A comparison from literature, to piss Arnab off: When Jonathan Franzen wrote _The Corrections_, reviews fell all over themselves about its brilliance, its worth as a novel of ideas; the same year, Jennifer Egan wrote a brilliant, equally funny novel of ideas called _Look at Me_, but while it got good press and a big nomination it also wasn’t trumpeted the same way. The phenomenon is, I think you’re arguing, the same here–Cronenberg gets buzz for this less-brilliant version of his old themes, while Potter slips away from theaters and even the eyes of this site’s whole crew of film nuts, even if that film isn’t so grand.

    Do I follow you? I do think it’s a good point, and a good challenge.

    That said, part of me thinks Cronenberg is just a far more interesting director–in his themes and his style–than Potter usually is. I thought History *did* some interesting gender stuff, and you’re right mostly confined to Bello’s character, but … I wasn’t as convinced it was some same-old rape-fantasy bullshit as you. And I will write, oh, 10 paragraphs on even weak Cronenberg, ’cause I’ve watched just about everything he’s done, even the lousy adaptation of M. Butterfly. So mainly I was trying to dissociate your challenge about gender from your challenge to Cronenberg–the former makes me more uncomfortable and requires me to push against some of my cherished presuppositions, while the latter tends to get me arguing about the director or this film… and sidestepping the gender stuff.

    Make sense? Sorry if I came off petulant–I appreciated you snapping at the flick, and the love for it expressed here.

    Oh, and Jeff was just sucking up. But you knew that, right? He hates women.

  42. mike, you totally follow me.

    i didn’t mean to dismiss cronenberg tout court. i couldn’t, not having watched any other of his films.

    what’s the interesting gender stuff that History does? i’ve read all of the comments here (it took me two days) and i don’t remember seeing one on this topic. please don’t ask me to re-read them!

    (i’m really bummed that i missed messing up the html in my post, and that arnab’ stupid 15-mins rule doesn’t allow me to fix it. the least you can do it fix it for me, ‘nab).

  43. forgive me, but i need to bring up the close up of the shotgun on the day when tom warns edie to retrieve it from the closet and get it ready. at some point tom puts the shotgun down on the living room coffee table, and the camera stays with the shotgun a second.

    let us not start another back and forth on this movie in general, but did you not find that shot naive and crass?

  44. thank you ‘nab for fixing my italics!

    today the janitors and the students (10 and 7, respectively) started a hunger strike. thought you’d want to know. yikes.

  46. Interesting gender stuff. Or “interesting.” Or “in-tuh-rest-ink” (in an Arte Johnson voice):

    I recently had a similar debate to the one Gio raised about the second sex scene (at a conference last week), so I’ll finally get back to the question G raised–in a nutshell, what gender stuff?

    Well, earlier (post 25) I think Arnab nails what I thought about the film: as opposed to the conventional violence film, where women’s desires are entirely by-products of male obsessions and interests, or merely ways to further illustrate male desires (on-screen and off-), Bello’s character seems to have desires that DO play into conventions (both narrative and social) but also are complicated by the fact that they seem to be hers. It’s less that Viggo is now more attractive, or that him roughing her up is what she really wanted, or that the (American? straight? male) audience can be pleased by her submission to and ultimate appreciation of a violent male desire. It’s that she has some complicated investments and agency and desires of her own.

    In the lead-in to this scene, we see many close-ups of Bello’s face, watch her sizing up the “new” (or is it old?) Viggo, and I read her gazes as complicated by a lust for difference as well as anxiety about loss of the familiar. Right before she heads up the stairs, even in yelling at or dismissing him, she seems to catch and pause at odd moments. Even on the stairs, as he brutally grabs and pushes and punches, and she resists violently, I don’t read it as physically or psychologically one-sided, with the subject Male beating taking controlling the object Female. It’s harder to parse than that.

    I think the earlier sex scene gives us the tools to read this second scene. She comes out in a cheerleader outfit, ostensibly a ‘pure’ fantasy for the (straight, American) male — his desires, not hers. And then the scene intensely and in a long take indicates how mutual the desires and physical interactions are. Similarly, the second scene’s seemingly uncomfortable and one-sided repetition of a conventional trope of male desire might–if not ought to–be read as interactive in some complex fashion, rather than entirely male-centered.

    That make any sense? I realize that this seems like a very complicated way to reiterate the old “she really wanted it” story of male violence and rape. I’ll be frank: I think that’s what interested Cronenberg about this particular, seemingly “thin” film, and in his movies generally — our tired cliched generic potboiler narratives (our horror films, our thrillers) reveal not simplistic social power structures (or not only those) but the very tangled psychological structures which underpin personal and social identity. And I think he’d say that resistance comes not from refutation of such desires or narratives, but by a much more complicated eye for reading them.

    So when I see the long shot of the shotgun, I do not see something stupid or mistimed. I see a “bad aesthetic choice” which replicates absurdly so as to undermine (or at least estrange us from) a common aesthetic/narrative convention — the long, loving shots of guns in violent films.

  47. Interesting readings, all. I plan to steal them outright for my graduate class this Monday evening. I set aside a week in our syllabus for us to discuss a new/recent film. We voted for A History of Violence. No readings, no prep. I simply instructed them to see the film on their own and be prepared to discuss in a roundtable-type forum.

    I plan to rehash all my stuff about genre, but no doubt issues of gender will come up.

    I’ll let you know what we come up with.

  48. “I’ll be frank: I think that’s what interested Cronenberg about this particular, seemingly “thin” film, and in his movies generally — our tired cliched generic potboiler narratives (our horror films, our thrillers) reveal not simplistic social power structures (or not only those) but the very tangled psychological structures which underpin personal and social identity.”

    hey mike, why “i’ll be frank?” you’re paying crononberg a compliment.

    you know, i think you may be right. i don’t even know what right means, actually, so i’ll say that your interpretation is interesting and engaging. i now only wish wish wish such detailed, nuanced, and, frankly, generous readings were granted women’s films. i may be a broken bell, but i know what i’m sayin’.

    workers’ hunger strike day number 11 at UM. monday the faculty and community (thank goodness they are not counting on the faculty alone!!!) will join, in (whimpy) relays — two or three days each. gotta give those janitors a break, before they fucking die.

    i know, i know: this is only about films. hey jeff, what have you been reading recently? i’ve almost finished yehoshua’s Journey to the End of the Milliennium. excellent.

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