More Movies -- A History of Violence

Let me say, right from the start, “I am not a David “Deprave” Cronenberg fan.” I can remember youthful arguments with friends about Rabid [starring pron actress Marilyn Chambers], The Brood [really creepy kids], Scanners [bursting heads], or James Woods’ over the top performance in Videodrome [which I argued was simply an inferior remake of the Hans Conreid classic, The Twonky – shows you what kind of taste I had back in those days]. Eventually, I lost interest in the guy although I continued to see his films, mostly because I felt I had to [he is, you see, an “important” director]. A History of Violence, though, has reawakened my interest.

My problem with Cronenberg is that he is obsessed with things that disgust normal people. Disease, depravity, mutilation, madness, infection, corruption, sadism, violence; these are his métier. They have earned him the title “King of Venereal Horror” or, alternatively, the “Baron of Blood.” Naturally, he is a favorite of critics, film festivals, and pomo academicians -- a fact that brings to mind Truffaut’s observation that “film fans are very sick people.” Some familiarity with his work is de rigueur in many film circles.

Perhaps understandably, despite the awards and accolades heaped on him, Cronenberg has not found much of a popular audience, for which we can all be thankful. A History of Violence, though, may be his breakout effort. It has real potential to connect with a much larger audience than his fanboy cultists.

There are many good things about History of Violence. It is exceptionally well-made. Cronenberg has become a very precise filmmaker and each scene presents a coherent dramatic experience while still advancing the narrative drive of the film. His craftsmanship is on display throughout. The camerawork, the lighting, the color schemes, the faming of shots are all perfect. Even mores striking is his subtle use of sound to set the mood for scenes. The acting on the part of the adult characters is superb. Viggo Mortensen displays greater dramatic reach than I have seen in any of his earlier work. Maria Bello is solid throughout; so is Ed Harris. The real revelation is William Hurt, who is hilarious in his brief appearance – one that should get him an Oscar nomination. What makes all of this more remarkable is that the script, based on a comic book, delineates extremely shallow, unidimensional [or in the case of Mortensen’s character, bi-dimensional] characters. What depth they display is solely the function of the actors’ skill.

The theme of the film is violence [well, duh!], which Cronenberg himself has said is developed on three levels – the violent history of the characters, the recurrence of violence throughout history, and the violence inherent in a Darwinian struggle for existence. The story sets up an ideal dichotomy – between the safe and sane world of small town middle America and the brutal rapacity of urban organized crime. Tom/Joey [Viggo Mortensen] inhabits the first of these, but is rapidly drawn into the latter when it bleeds into his utopian existence. Liberal critics, repulsed by the violent response to evil, have seen the film as a commentary on the destructiveness of violence, the pervasiveness of violence in American culture, and how it is passed by example from father to son over many generations. Others, more perceptively, discern a Hitchcockian effort to seduce the audience into a guilty enjoyment of the things a normal person should hate, and expand this insight into a condemnation of Hollywood’s trivialization of violence. These are fair partial readings of the film, but Cronenberg’s mind runs in much deeper and darker channels than the left is willing to explore.

In Cronenberg’s view the safe, Capraesque life Tom/Joey and his family enjoy is a fragile illusion. Through the first half of the film Tom’s wife, Edie [Maria Bello] clings desperately to that illusion, expecting that local law enforcement, stern warnings, and a restraining order can hold evil at bay. They can’t. When evil intrudes, the community is helpless to deal with it, but Tom’s violent side, Joey, is awakened and he deals effectively, even heroically, with the crisis.

Here Cronenberg uses an interesting stylistic device. It has become fashionable to film scenes of violence close up, with hand-held cameras that move with the action and blur our understanding of what is happening. Cronenberg, though, pulls back to a medium shot that allows us to see the stylized, carefully choreographed moves of the actors, then when the violence ends moves in close to confront us in horrid detail with the gory effects of that violence.

The awakening of Tom’s violent side has terrible consequences. Soon a greater evil, rooted in Tom’s violent past, appears, drawn by the publicity resulting from the first confrontation. Dealing with this evil only attracts the attention of even greater evil, and Tom must leave his home and make a long journey to the “City of Brotherly Love” to deal with it. And, as the violence escalates, the solidarity of the community, and of the family, is undermined. Tom begins to lose the trust of everything he holds dear – his friends, his wife, his children. And, most disturbingly, his son begins to exhibit similar violent tendencies.

The filmic references are many. I have already mentioned Capra and Hitchcock. The early scenes could have easily been out-takes from Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction. There are obvious parallels with Witness, in which the evil of Philadelphia also intrudes into a peaceable rural community. But for me the most interesting resonance is with John Ford’s classic, The Searchers, which also explores many of the same themes as History. In the Searchers, Ford asks us to consider the iconic American hero, John Wayne, as a borderline psychopath. By casting Viggo Mortensen, fresh off his iconic role as Aragorn, the good warrior king, as Tom/Joey Cronenberg is making a similar point. And both films contemplate the relationship between the violent hero and the settled community, but in different ways, consideration of which illuminates Cronenberg’s main point.

At the end of the Searchers Ford makes it clear that the man of violence, no matter how heroic, cannot ever become a full member of the peaceable community. In the famous last scene the family Wayne has saved enters their home, closing the door forever on the hero outside, who is doomed to wander forever alone through the wastelands of the west.

By contrast, Cronenberg progressively reunites his hero with the community from which he was sundered by violence. First, acceptance comes from his wife – initially horrified by the realization that the man she loved was not what he seemed, she draws him to her during an episode of violent sex on a staircase that stands in dramatic contrast to the fantasy sex they had enjoyed earlier in the film. She confirms that acceptance in a confrontation with local law enforcement when she lies to protect Tom, and the sheriff, though dubious, accepts her validation of her husband and his right to remain a functioning member of the community. Then, when Tom returns home after his final confrontation with evil, the family at first sits around the dinner table apprehensively and we wonder if he is welcome, but then Tom’s daughter sets a place for him at the table and his son passes him food. He has been accepted back into the family. The journey into the wilderness is over.

But things are not as they were. In his resolution of the film Cronenberg has rejected Ford’s false distinction between the man of violence and the peaceable community. By accepting Tom back into their lives, his friends and family are reluctantly admitting that he is one of them, that they, too, are to some extent violent creatures, and that without that violence the peaceable community they all cherish could not exist. The actors’ demeanor makes it clear that this is a horrific realization, one that shatters all their deeply cherished illusions, but it is also the truth about human nature.

Cronenberg is ultimately saying that the Capraesque peaceable community is a comforting but infantile illusion. Time and again throughout the film he shows the ineffectiveness of alternatives to violence. If Tom had not killed the early intruders he, his wife, and his friends would all be dead. If he had not attacked the second group of intruders he and his son would have died and if the son had not acted violently, Tom would have been killed. His efforts to make peace in Philadelphia are brutally rejected and again he is left with no option other than to kill or be killed. Violence is not just a matter of family history. Whatever its dangers, and they are many, it is integral to our civilization.

Ultimately, what Tom, his family, and his community are all experiencing is a struggle to survive in the crudest Darwinian sense. In Cronenberg’s world, rejection of violence, or attempts to exclude the exercise of violence from our lives, is fatal. The communitarian ideal posited by Capra and Ford cannot exist in this world. We must learn to live with the realization that evil exists and cannot be accommodated and violence is, in the end, the only effective answer.

I'm starting to get interested in this guy again.