David Cronenberg, 2005
There's a moment early on in David Cronenberg's thriller A History of Violence where Tom Stall, the cherry pie and fishing tackle main character played by Viggo Mortensen, explains his recent heroic actions to a local TV news reporter. "What I did was," he mutters, "...Anybody would have done that." The act in question, an athletic execution of some common criminals terrorizing the patrons of his diner, was an act of violence familiar to audiences as a kind of common-man-cum-American-hero self defense. The peaceful homesteader defends his idyllic turf from those who would destroy it.
Stall's remark here is central to Cronenberg's interests in this film. Self defense is not only a permissible form of violence but practically an encouraged one. Society expects a man to defend himself when threatened with physical danger; moreover, when defending not only oneself but defenseless others (especially women), it is virtually mandated by the community in which one resides. To do otherwise would surely be interpreted as an act of cowardice. The line between cowardice (a kind of impotence, no?) and heroism turns on the (in)ability to employ an act of violence.
So, Stall's question becomes clearer as "Who wouldn't do that?" and, of course, the answer is that no red-blooded American male wouldn't. It is intrinsic to our understanding of the American spirit to defend the defenseless by any means necessary. Hearth and home and all that.
This is a rather long-winded way of explaining the scenario that Cronenberg establishes: a vision of American idealism, on the one hand, and of inner demons that conflict with this vision on the other. The story of A History of Violence begins with an idyllic American town and the healthy, happy home lives of its denizens, specifically the Stall family. In one early scene, the family gathers together to comfort youngest child Sarah, who has had a nightmare, in her bed.
Stall and his wife Edie practice a happy marriage. They are equally active in the raising of their two children, they are supportive of each other, they even practice a happy sex life. Before the events of the film begin to occur, Edie sends their children off to a sitter and picks up her husband from the diner he operates. When he inquires where they are going, Edie cryptically says, "We never got to be teenagers together... I'm gonna fix that."
In the next scene, Maria Bello (who plays Edie) reveals that even their sexual fantasies are all-American; hair wet, her best sultry eyes cast upon her husband, she appears as a high school cheerleader.
At this stage in the audience's relationship to the main characters, Edie and Tom's sexual role-playing is meant to be endearing. That a married couple still have sex at all is a unique conceit to most American cinema and ought to warm some hearts, and in particular the playfulness of the cheerleader-as-seductress imbues their eroticism with a naivete. This naivete turns out to be tremendously important, as does the role-playing aspect of it, as events unfold in their marriage.
So, we've got the first half of a joke, right?: Sweet American family. Obviously the punchline (given the film's title) must play something like: ...is turned upside-down by an act of violence. Well, we may know the joke already but, after all, punchlines are in the delivery.
The film's first five or six minutes are comprised of an eerily quiet, largely uncut sequence depicting two common criminals who have murdered the staff of a motel. (You can see it here.) Cronenberg shoots the first four minutes in one long take to build tension, like a great in-suck of breath. The camera's placidity reads both as extreme attention with its hesitancy to cut away from the men's movements but also as a sort of distancing - as though it hesitates to get too close.
Eventually, of course, the pace of the editing picks up. Cronenberg's camera seems attracted to violence at the beginning of this film. As the younger of the two men goes inside the motel lobby, the camera comes closer, the editing allows us closeups as one of the men murders a young girl.
These men arrive at the diner Tom Stall owns, attempt perhaps to rob it (although their intentions are unclear) and our heretofore sleepy hero launches into action and efficiently dispatches the criminals. Despite the bodies in the film's opening, this is the first bit of true violence we see, all at the hand of our American dad. This scene is shocking in how quickly, yet inexorably, it seems to unfold. We have no sooner gotten ourselves worked up for a pyrotechnic action sequence than it is over, ending with one of the very few instances of a trademark Cronenbergian bit of gore as one of the criminals lies barely conscious with his jaw blown out.
This action of defense is depicted realistically, by which I mean absent much of the glorification one might expect of such a typically masculine, neo-chivalrous action. It is also the catalyst for all of which follows; Cronenberg suggests that our hero has a history that may have inured him to the violence which he perpetrates - indeed, has perhaps seasoned him to the instinctual dexterity required of such an act.
It is here in the plot that Cronenberg introduce the theme of dualism, or of twinning. Tom Stall as we've met him is not who he claims to be. He is escaping a past of which he is ashamed and has taken refuge in the idyllic midwestern existence which the viewers take for granted in the film's exposition. The idea of twinning is not an unfamiliar concept in Cronenberg's films; the most obvious example is in Dead Ringers where Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists, but the idea of twinning is to some extent at the root of his bodily transmogrifications - Brundle/Brundlefly.
In the director commentary, Cronenberg mentions that the early scenes in the movie are not meant to play ironically (as in, he cites by way of example, Lynch's Blue Velvet; compare its opening sequence here). The sincerity with which Cronenberg portrays the family is integral to establishing its subsequent unraveling. In a different version of the film played for irony, the film's beginning would lead the viewer to consequently expect the reversal in the film's climax.
The idea played ironically is that an American family is blissfully unaware of its own inherent falsity until violence tears them apart. This baits an audience into a sort of self-satisfaction at knowing that the family is set up as perfect only to be proven its opposite.
And while Cronenberg's conceit here is very similar to the ironic premise, but the tongue-in-cheek aspects of, say, Lynch's work establish its subject specifically as unreal (idealized) whereas the Stall family is meant to be real. That is, the Stalls are a real family and the violence which it succumbs to is real, as well, not just a sinister semiotic function of its instability/falseness/illusion (as in Blue Velvet).
This redirects in a sort of way, the conversation from violence-as-metaphor to violence-qua-violence.
A History of Violence deals a great deal with violence itself. Cronenberg's exploration of violence turns out to be an especially complicated one; there are only a handful of violent acts in the film and each one seems to generate several possible readings.
On the most surface level, violence is meant to be disturbing in the film. Tom Stall's descent into the world of violence is meant to be frightening. His violent past upends his family dynamic, forcing his family to confront how little they truly know about him. The acts of violence Stall commits are initially addressed as by the community, and especially his family as valiant. "You're a hero, dad!" his son goofily shouts.
But this act of violence that is not only accepted but celebrated by his family leads only to more violence. In one especially difficult scene, Tom's son has taken a cue from his father and decided to use violence to solve a conflict in school. In an earlier scene, the son had defused the escalating conflict with wordplay that sets his antagonist askew. Where his tormentor (the classic high school bully) expects Stall's son Jack to retaliate, he does not. Or at least not yet.
Later in the film, Jack is once again confronted by his bully, but rather than try to undermine the violent overtures made towards him with humor, he retaliates. Viciously.
Suspended, he heads home where he and his father have an argument about it. The following bit of dialogue occurs:
Tom: "Listen, smartmouth. In this family we do not solve our problems by hitting people."
Jack: "No, in this family, we shoot them."
The line is played for laughs because the son makes his father's pacifist comments seem naive, but the laugh doesn't laugh long. Tom immediately strikes his son - hard. Naturally this moment is meant to be read as an ironic read on do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do, but the scene is imbued with something sinister as well. Where before, Tom's violent reflexes were in the defense of the innocent, now they are turned against his insolent-but-otherwise-innocent son.
When Tom strikes his son, surely Jack feels how complicated his relationship with violence has become. The slap is unjustified and a violation of the trust between father and son. And yet, not only has his father become a hero and defended innocent people through violence, but Jack himself has been empowered by it. Until Jack struck back at the bully at school, he was on some level impotent. The beating gave Jack unquestionable power - and even though extreme, his actions are equally justified given the incessant taunting he's endured.
On some level here, an act of violence has changed the son for the better, not the worse. Jack has tested his strength and successfully (and finally) resolved a conflict with an oppressive force. The son is seduced by the idea of justified aggression, and as the family dynamic unwinds with each further revelation of Tom's hidden past, it becomes apparent that his wife Edie is seduced by it as well.
As Tom's true identity is revealed, Edie becomes increasingly angry with her husband's deception. This leads her to lash out at him. In one of the film's more disturbing scenes, she slaps her husband, who in turn unleashes the same instinctual violent response he inflicted on his son. Tom grabs his wife by the throat and they wrestle each other in the stairs of their home.
Anger turns to lust as Edie and Tom grope each other. The scene, outside an expletive that begins the whole thing, is silent. Maria Bello's acting as Edie here is masterful. There is a pleading in her eyes that makes it clear what is occurring is not rape, but there is also profound disgust at her animalistic husband. It is as though Edie is discovering a heretofore unknown aspect of her sexuality that she is reluctant to mine but incapable of ignoring.
The scene plays in direct contrast to the film's earlier sex scene. Where what we saw before seemed healthy - even romantic - and what we see now is disturbing with its implications of domestic violence, suddenly these ideas are flipped upside down. The earlier sex act becomes a complete act of fantasy - Edie in her cheerleader costume and Tom in his harmless Midwesterner costume; both people in that scene are perpetrating a fraud of sorts. This second scene has both Tom and Edie acting as themselves sans fantasy or deception. This new definition of themselves inevitably includes violence. Violence has served as a catalyst for change. In this case, Edie is discovered a volatile facet of her sexuality. Is this a good or bad thing? The only thing that seems clear in the scene is that it is not an unambiguously bad discovery.
Violence in the film is clearly both seductive and empowering. If one considers the macro- level of the film, violence is also a catalyst. Because of the violence in the film, the Stall family learns more about each other. While this is also ambiguous in its benefits, it is clear that without it, the film is disinterested in existing. The film is driven by violence; all the character arcs develop remarkable complexity the more the violence accumulates.
The way Cronenberg depicts the effects of violence is horrifying, although on some level he must know that his audience is inured to violence even in his films. Consider this effect, created using a combination of green screen effects, pumps and sculpted prosthetics:
Is this effect meant to induce revulsion or glee? I lean towards glee, personally. It is a super cool effect that perhaps undermines Cronenberg's intentions by producing the kind of trademark Cronenberg gore that we saw above with the jaw prosthetic. So again, the film seems to be attracted to violence, providing each act with a lovingly crafted special effect and a close-up.
Part of the purpose of this blog is to find some auteuristic through-line in the work of a director and while violence is an integral component of Cronenberg's work, discussing the purpose of the violence itself does not fit into the larger framework of his films. So, how then does A History of Violence fit into the oeuvre? Let's reconsider violence as metaphor.
In our earlier discussion violence-as-metaphor played a hand in establishing (through irony) the fallacy of the American family. The family is set up to be perfect, then the violence which engulfs them represents the inaccuracy of this perfect image. This is clearly not the film Cronenberg is making, given his emphasis on violent actions in and of themselves.
But we can take violence metaphorically in the film as representing an interior rather than exterior schism. In other words, it is an issue not of image but of self-image.
Metaphorically speaking, the transition from idyllic American family to violence-plagued tenuousness hinges on Tom's transformation. Tom's identity in the film is warped through violence. A past he has decided to cast off in attempting to craft a new identity has resurfaced.
Where in past Cronenberg films, we've seen the exteriorization of internal evils through transformations like the Brundlefly in The Fly or Max Renn's cancer gun in Videodrome. In these films, the physical mutilation and transformation represents clearly what was in some ways in contrast with traditional horror films: fear of the self; and what is in direct agreement with horror films: fear of the body. Seth Brundle's transformation into his grotesque fly hybrid, for example, represents self-loathing and paranoia mixed together: the unequivocal evidence of one's true inner nature brought horrifyingly to the surface. Likewise Max Renn's descent into the underworld in Videodrome is made physical through his numerous hallucinatory transformations into alternately vaginal and phallic representations of his sexual transgression.
These films are classic Cronenberg, complete with monsters and special effects g(al)ore that cemented his reputation as an innovator in horror. A History of Violence was certainly not Cronenberg's first film to cast off the burden of overt horror in favor of something decidedly more understated.
But really A History of Violence fits closer with these early horror films than one might think. Instead of an overt physical transformation, we have a subtle emotional one but the end result is ostensibly the same.
Tom Stall's transformation is one of self-doubt and -loathing. The transition from Tom Stall, all-American dad, to a broken, turbulent man prone to violence is a literalization of Cronenberg's theme that the monster is always within, lurking just beneath the surface. The horror of the film is Stall's inability to control his impulses, that try as he might his past will doggedly pursue him.
A major difference is that where the revelation of the hidden, evil nature of the self in The Fly or Videodrome ends with the (self-)destruction of their main character, A History of Violence ends on a decidedly more ambiguous note. The violence that has ripped this family apart may not have proven their ultimate undoing. The empowering aspects of violence that have provided each member of the family a more firm grasp on one another's and their own identities that has opened them up to the possibility of more honest interaction, a more self-assured approach to one's place in the family dynamic.
In leaving the film, one might be tempted to think that the primary theme is how well can you ever truly know someone else, but this is a mis-read; where Cronenberg's film disturbs the most is in the thought that you can never truly know yourself. And that despite attempts to the contrary, it might not be possible to ever truly change.
