Welcome to my digital resume!

This blog contains works written by me, Jesse Woodrum. The purpose of this public display is to demonstrate my writing abilities to interested prospective employers. Some have asked for links to at least three writing samples so...here it is...and more! Lately most of my work has been academic in nature, but I will dig into the recesses of my digital closet to see what range of styles, purposes, and intended audiences I can find in my previous works. I notice considerable differences in my tone and style when I review my old work so for the sake of context, I will make sure everything is dated as accurately as possible. Thank you for looking and I hope you find something to enjoy in the following pages!
-Jesse Colin-

Vital stats (traditional resume)

Jesse Woodrum, Graduate in English, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

110 Burwash Avenue Apt. B

Savoy, IL 61874

217.840.2672

jesse.woodrum@gmail.com

Education
Parkland College 2009 – Deans List
Associate in Arts

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign 2010-2011 – 3.56 GPA
Bachelor’s in English

Work History:
Ø  Parkland Prospectus, staff writer
Ø  Parkland Prospectus, co-editor
Ø  Parkland Prospectus, editor-in-chief

At the Prospectus, I started out writing news stories freelance.  After one semester I was promoted to co-editor.  One semester later I was the sole editor-in-chief following the resignation of my former co-editor.  At the Prospectus I wrote stories, copy-edited, assigned stories, coordinated photo ops, organized the papers lay-out, and oversaw production.  Occasionally I would assist in layout and add sales.  John Eby, the Student Life Advisor gave me fairly free reign to run the newspaper how I wanted but it was his job to oversee and advise me.  He can answer questions about my time spent with the Prospectus.

       ·         John Eby
Activities and Programs Manager/Prospectus Advisor, Parkland College
217.353.2627

Ø  WPGU 107.1 fm the Planet, newscaster, reporter, talk show host
At WPGU, I wrote and live-read the evening news and weather and occasionally sports.  I also researched prepared notes for, and co-hosted the hour long Sunday morning talk show The Brain Freeze, later renamed The Sunday Edition.  I also researched and prepared feature news stories for the weekend news show.  The director of the news department, Sarah Jindra, went on to do field reporting for WCIA Champaign and now is a traffic reporter for Chicago Public Radio.  She can answer any questions about my tenure at WPGU.

·         Sarah Jindra 217.840.1738

Traffic Reporter, Chicago Public Radio

References
Besides the above references I will refer you to the following people who know me and my work.

·         Kirsten Wilcox

Senior Lecturer, English Department, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
217-333-7059
       ·         Aaron Geiger, Journalism Graduate Student at West Virginia University and my one-time editor at the Parkland Prospectus
815.535.7440
       ·         Tom Ramage, President, Parkland College
Dr. Ramage worked closely with me on much of my research for the Prospectus especially on articles related to the college’s building projects and finances.
217.351.2231

·         James L. Ayers, Parkland College Board of Trustees; President, Illinois Community College Trustees Association; CEO, Central Illinois Manufacturing Corporation; Former Mayor of Monticello, Illinois; partner, law firm Shonkwiler and Ayers.

              217.762.3661
Mr. Ayers has known me since childhood.  He was an advisor to me in the Boy Scouts in which I earned the distinction of Eagle Scout. 

Some of my newspaper work

Here are links to the digital publication of some of my works with the Prospectus newspaper. They were written early in 2009. I got to see some neat things and learned some cool stuff while I was researching these stories.  Additionally, most of the stories feature my own photography.

With students away, cops train for serious shooter threat

Borrows $25 million for expansion, maintenance

Eyes to the sky

Adcock, Rouseff-Baker share annual NISOD teaching award

Jakobsson, iStan are highlights in new healthcare venture

New club focuses on beauty of Japanese culture

Jesse Woodrum

17 November 2011

Acknowledging the Middle Class…Or Not

Dror Wahrman’s 1995 book Imagining the Middle Class has more of an antithesis than it does a thesis.  It seems that the primary concern of this work is to debunk, or at least problematize the common narrative about the rise of the middle class in industrialized society.  The story goes like this. 1) Late 18^th century- and early 19^th century-Britain saw the emergence of the industrial revolution: 2) which was accompanied by the introduction of a new “middle class,” among the economic landscape.  3) This middle class was a source of innovation and growing power and led to the Reform Bill of 1832 which granted them formal access to the political system.  Wahrman’s references to this story and its supposed over-simplicity begin on the first page and continue throughout.  His positive proposition is that the rise of the middle class or of its influence lies not in the aggregate economic picture of Britain, but in the story of the middle class as a mindset.  He argues that the emergence of the middle class was not an economic one as much as an intellectual one.  Although he admits that the two phenomena are mutually reinforcing.  Weaving his own narrative, Wahrman uses the motif of “political language” to trace changing attitudes about what the middle class constitutes and who chooses to self-identify as such from about the 1780s through the 1830s.  The differences between how we choose to characterize British society during this time and the actual lived experiences lies, according to the author, in the difference “between social reality and its representation.” (Wahrman pp 6)

            In any discussion of class in Europe of this time is incomplete without mentioning the enormous psychological effects of the French Revolution, and Wahrman argues that it foregrounds the idea of a middle class into English political dialogue.  Here a short review of political language concerning the middle class over a few short years shows changes in how it is used according to shifting popular British opinion.  Perhaps the Revolution’s most famous commentator, Edmund Burke, and Scottish writer James Macintosh have a disagreement over the nature of the “monied interest” (middle class) as they are manifested in the French National Assembly.  Wahrman summarizes Burke’s view of them as “inferior lawyers and medical practitioners, a few ‘country clowns,’ even more ‘traders, who…had never known anything beyond their counting-house... ‘who must be eager, at any expense, to change their ideal paper wealth for the more solid substance of land.’  Mackintosh says of the same group: “[They have] been less prejudiced, more liberal, and more intelligent, than the landed gentry. (Wahrman pp 24)  Elsewhere Mackintosh says they form “the majority of that middle rank among whom almost all the sense and virtue of society reside.” (Wahrman pp 24)

            After the Reign of Terror, when English attitudes toward the Revolution had mostly turned cold, writers had a different opinion of the class situation and its role in the events in France.  Suddenly the middle class disappears from the equation altogether and it is their absence which caused all the turmoil.  William Williams says in 1796 that the political problems arise because in France society “had been for ages in the situation of all despotic states, composed of only two classes of men, the rich and the poor.” Wahrman (pp 27)  An anonymous “British Merchant” writes in a 1794 treatise “Under the arbitrary government of France, there was no yeomanry, no middle class of people, all were either Princes or beggars, Lords or Vassals.” (Wahrman pp26)  The revolution was a source, alternately, of incredible anxiety and inspiration to the people of Britain, and Wahrman sees its thinkers as fusing their observations with the observation that something is changing in the economic and social orders of their own nation.  To Burke, the middle class was the overambitious social boogeyman.  To Mackintosh and others it was a crucial buffer in a society characterized by wealth imbalance. 

            The moment of historical importance in the British narrative of the middle class, as it is presented here, is the Reform Act of 1832 which redistributed seats in the House of Commons to recognize rising and falling economic centers.  By this decade the rhetoric regarding class had changed markedly and the middle class was taken for granted as a formidable political entity—what we would call in modern American politics a voting bloc.  The then-unknown Isaac Tompkins wrote a pamphlet in which he declared “The middle, not the upper class, are the part of the nation which is entitled to command respect…They read, they reflect, they reason, they think for themselves…They are the nation—the people—in every rational or correct sense of the word.” (Wahrman pp 334)  Two other writers would follow suit with similar rhetoric and praise for Tompkins.  All three (or at least the first two) turn out to be the pseudonyms of a high ranking aristocrat, Lord Henry Brougham. (Wahrman pp 335)  The irony is not lost on Wahrman as it is not lost on Brougham’s contemporary critics, but what is lost on this latter is the power Brougham commands in identifying as part of this important rising entity. 

            By now the middle class has arrived.  What Wahrman’s story does is demonstrate that it was not an economic phenomenon alone, but an intellectual effort—a dialogue—that created the middle class as a distinct part of the British political landscape.  He challenges us to avoid seeing the present teleologically, as a natural product of historical forces, but as a “charged and contingent historical invention.”  (Wahrman pp 408)

            The publication of Frances Burney’s Evelina was in 1778 (Burney, title page) and its events are contemporaneous with its publication.  It takes place during that time, according to Wahrman, that the middling class had been economically created but not politically or socially realized.  The stand-ins for the middle class in Burney’s novel are Evelina’s distant relative’s the Brangtons and their acquaintances Messrs Brown and Smith.  The Brangtons operate a silver shop in London and even rent out rooms.  Burney uses every opportunity to show how vulgar they are compared to the well-bred Evelina.  The salient characteristic of all of these people is pettiness.  Mr. Smith, who affects to be a gentlemen, toys with the desires of Miss Brangton in order to evoke jealousy from Evelina who remains unmoved by his transparency.  Young Mr. Brangton’s favorite hobby is laughing at people publicly and pointing out their folly—of course he has awkward designs on Evelina (his cousin) himself.  In the entire time Evelina spends outside of high-society she meets with no character presented as positive—with the exception of McCartney who is so poor he is separate from the middle class.  He is so destitute he cannot possibly present a threat to the upper class with which Burney identifies.  He effectively becomes an upper-class charity case. 

            One of the most devastating scenes for the character of the Brangton’s – and by implication the middling class at large—occurs in Volume II when Evelina has been forced into the company of Madame Duval and the Brangtons.  When they are caught in a  rainstorm the Brangtons and Madame. Duval abuses Evelina’s acquaintance with Lord Orville to make use of his coach to get them home.  Evelina is mortified and does everything she can to prevent this faux pas.  Their behavior in this episode is atrociously unmannerly from beginning to end.  They impertinently make demands of another’s servant.  Young Mr. Brangton foolishly breaks the glass in Orville’s carriage.  And finally, when he goes to apologize, he uses Evelina’s name against her will to speak to Orville and uses the meeting to try to advance his family’s business interests. (Burney pp 371-377)

            Every move by the Brangton’s is completely hapless and tactless.  Nowhere here is the innovative spirit Mackintosh observes among the middle class.  Absent is the learned reflection of Brougham’s observations on those same people.  It’s possible that Burney does not comment on innovation as a social value because, for her, it is not a personal one.  The mark of virtue in her universe is the aptitude with which one navigates the social landscape according to prescribed rules.  She is concerned with manners and not innovation.  Another virtue which enriches Evelina’s character is her sensuality—she is attuned to the value of the finer things in life like the opera and music in general—also she is more attuned to the suffering of other people.  Her compassion for McCartney is more about rounding out the character of Evelina and setting her against the drole attitude of the Brangtons toward McCartney than it is about altruism for its own sake. 

            To be sure, Burney does present aristocratic figures who are foolish and drole in their own right—Lady Louisa foremost among them—but she has to present a variety among the privileged class because that is her primary concern.  In about 600 pages over four volumes, Burney never takes any opportunity to comment positively on the emerging class of traders and craftsmen changing the economic landscape of her country. 

Works Cited

Wahrman, Dror. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840. New York, NY; University of Cambridge Press Syndicate, 1995. Print

Burney, Frances. Evelina. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press Ltd, 2000. Print.

Jesse Woodrum

5 December 2011

On the Horizon of Middle-Class Identity

The decade in which the 9 volumes of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy were published leads directly up to 1770.  Ten years short of when Wahrman asserts the beginning of the middle class as a identifiable group in Britain.  Though the scale of Sterne’s most famous work is intimate and largely not about major social issues, we can see some class interaction within it.  And for a writer who saw more of what was going on around him than most, a potential class upheaval did not seem to be on Stearn’s landscape.  One of the episode’s in Shandy­—and that’s really the only way to refer to the various digressive stories which constitute it—is called “The Story of Le Fever.”  In this episode, Tristram’s kind-hearted uncle Toby learns of the misfortune of a poor and sick Lieutenant who is staying at a nearby inn.  He is infinitely moved to compassion for the fellow soldier and offers him food and drink.  Deciding that is not enough he decides to martial all his resources to form a plan to help the poor Lieutenant recover his health.  The man soon dies and Toby sponsors the education and career of his surviving son becoming his adoptive father. 

            To offer this tale a political reading would be to see Toby as a representative of the benevolent father figure which conservative thinkers like Burke see as the function of the upper class within society.  Even one of Burke’s opponents, Thomas Cooper, whom Wahrman characterizes as a “Painite reformer,” in his defense of the poor sees them as “the most important Object of national Improvement.” (Wahrman pp. 79-80)  To our modern egalitarian sensibilities this may sound condescending, but he was in fact advocating a radical change in the perception of the lower classes.  Here he does not make a distinction between the uniquely industrious, emerging middle class, but to everyone who is not aristocracy—everyone else.  Certainly by 1792 this group was on the horizon, but his disagreement with Burke, who famously characterized everyone else as the “swinish multitude.” (Wahrman pp 79). 

            Sterne’s work—and his endearing portrayal of Uncle Toby—reveal him to be an incredibly sensible man in every 18^th century sense of the word.  And for all his tongue in cheek moments, he presents Toby and Le Fever genuinely as an example of Toby’s endless goodness.  He of course is writing about humanity in a grand sense which is more timeless than a novel about contemporary social issues.  But even to Sterne, everyone else, is to be pitied and cared for if necessary.  He never imagines the non-aristocracy as a powerful source of innovative ideas capable of its own (or even national) improvement. 

            While Sterne was discovering uniquely new modes of novelistic expression, many other writers were still imitating the Daniel Defoe’s influential Robinson Crusoe to tell more straight-forward, moralizing stories.  In one such “Robinsonade,” The Female American, an anonymous author continues Crusoe’s imperialist fantasy through a female character.  The characters in these novels find themselves in socially desolate locales and when they discover native inhabitants, they immediately form a society with a hierarchal class structure.  Unca’s interactions with the natives are presented as evangelical in purpose, but she finds it convenient—in the course of bringing them to the knowledge of the one, true God—to trick them into receiving her as a prophet.  Her summary of her changed circumstances indicates the strong bond between ideology and social structure.  “How greatly was my situation changed!  From a solitary being, obliged to seek my own food from day to day, I was attended by a whole nation, all ready to serve me…”  (Burnham pp. 118)

            A quarter century after the publication of The Female American, the French Revolution would foreground a debate about the nature of class, and the Burkean view that the upper classes are naturally superior and fulfill an important social role with their leadership would come under scrutiny.  While Unca is styled as the fountainhead of spiritual knowledge, the real-life parallel is the British landed-class’ figuring of themselves as the fountainhead of economic prosperity. This semi-feudal system of ownership and labor is at the heart of Burke’s (and others’) anxiety.  He is trying to shore up this ideology when he writes, at the close of the 18^th century, “The present war is, above all others...a war against landed property.  That description of property is in its nature the firm basis of every stable government.”  (Wahrman pp. 148) 

            Further, where religion does figure in the later public debate, it is typically used as a marker of middle class virtue.  Novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton writes “The middle classes, with us, have a greater veneration for religion.”  He elsewhere characterizes this class as “sober and provident conduct…in their domestic affairs,” and notes their “enthusiasm for diffusing religious knowledge among the negroes.” (Wahrman pp. 378)  This image of evangelism is separated from a power struggle and presented as genuine.  In the proto-society of The Female American the evangelism is intrinsically tied up with social power and material well-being.

            Near contemporary with the publication of The Female American was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.  It is even more fantastical, to the point of being allegorically fairy-tale-like.  The depiction of class is mostly bi-polar with people falling into the upper classes or the great mass.  Though Walpole places his narrative at a vaguely distant time and locale, the effect is of transforming the upper class into the ruling class.  The story is set up to ridicule patriarchal power through the despotic character of Manfred, and he has this King-Lear quality of political madness.  The novel’s hero, Theodore, fashioned as a “laborer” and “peasant,” in action and conversation is so gallant as to become a parody of chivalry.  It is mostly laughable when he defies the prince’s admonitions with, “I fear no man’s displeasure when a woman in distress puts herself under my protection.”  (Walpole pp. 48-49)  Of course when Manfred’s legitimacy is challenged the action reveals Theodore to be no mere laborer, but the rightful heir to Manfred’s estate and title.  His noble is justified, finally, through his lineage; and the Burkean association of privilege with heritage—as well as the classical perception that nobility is somehow innate—is confirmed. 

            The story of Otranto outside the text goes even farther to illustrating the mid 18^th century mindset.  Walpole’s first edition was tentatively anonymous ascribing the story to an ancient Italian text.  When the public discovered the contemporary source of the novel much of it was outraged that a wealthy aristocrat could have invented something so outrageously imaginative.  The then-novel genre of Gothic was seen as subversively invested in the supernatural.  That such imaginative themes were more acceptable when the source was so far removed from the audience than it was when the source turned out to be one of their own suggests a near-political fear of the unknown.  In the words of Michael Gamer asserts that Otranto struck “particular nerves” because of Walpole’s “social position” and “his relation to this historically specific question of imagination.”  (Walpole pp. xviii)  Though the text itself upholds traditional views of class and power, its complex reception reveals an anxiety about the proper ways for aristocrats to behave and about novelty in general. 

            In the pre-preface to his work Wahrman claims that “the British people [came] to see themselves as living in a society centered around d a middle class.” (title page)  But most of the literature leading up to is ideologically rooted in the classic picture of a two-part society consisting of the upper classes and the lower classes.  There seems to be little momentum for a middle-class identity until it burst onto the national conscience in the aftermath of the French Revolution.  The British were able to avoid their own revolution because they negotiated a new class-consciousness in a public debate which would change their perception of society until few were left to see the socio-economic landscape in the black and white terms it had previously been described with. 

Works Cited

Wahrman, Dror. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840. New York; University of Cambridge Press Syndicate, 1995. Print

Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003. Print.

Burnham, Michelle. The Female American. Ontario; Broadview, 2004. Print.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. New York; Penguin, 2001. Print.

Jesse Woodrum

English 429

14 December 2011

Putting the u in Labour

            Wahrman’s analysis of political language in these decades is intense and acute.  He identifies two conflicting conceptions of the macroeconomic picture—the descendants of which we can still recognize in contemporary economic theories.  The first theory, in the words of John Somers Cocks, is that “the rich furnish the means of industrious livelihood to the poor…the poor, in their turn, by their labour, are the instruments that increase the opulence of the rich, which necessarily flow back upon them.”  (Wahrman pp 83)  A pseudonymous pamphlet identified as the work of doctor and political activist James Parkinson sharply characterizes the second theory: “The whole business of the poor, is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich, and that of the rich in return is to find the best method of confirming the slavery and increasing the burthens of the poor.”  (Wahrman pp 83)

            Though the line of wealth separating the rich from the poor was and is both mobile and permeable, there is no definition of rich which does not include Vathek author William Beckford.  In his introduction to the novel Roger Lonsdale quotes Byron who describes Beckford as “England’s wealthiest son.”  (Beckford pp vii)  However, his depiction of the elite is a hyper-realized version of the wealthy as predatory.  Vathek’s supernatural appetite for everything from food to knowledge and power leads to his consumptive sacrifice of his on subjects. 

On pages 23-27 (the novel is without chapter separations or any other separations) the despot stages a beauty contest among the children of his subjects in order to actually sacrifice the youth to a demonical genie.  The sacrifice of fifty children is gruesome itself but the contest itself is perhaps a more interesting parallel of economic interaction.  “The fifty competitors were soon stripped, and presented to the admiration of the spectators the suppleness and grace of their delicate limbs.  Their eyes sparkled with a joy which those of their fond parents reflected.” (Beckford pp. 25-26)  The scene is one of exploitation for entertainment which parallels the theory of exploitation of labor.  It is more telling than the actual sacrifice because in this exploitation the parents (the subjugated) are gleefully complicit. 

Beckford’s summary moralizing on vice and excess seems to come with a wink and the reader has the sense that the author is torn between repugnance and fascination with the idea of extraordinary wealth and power.  Published within a decade of the Revolution, this novel seems to somehow hold both conflicting economic theories in the same hand.  Interestingly, Burney’s Evelina, which predates the composition of Vathek by only 4 years, also has a scene of exploitation for entertainment.  Two old peasant women are paid to compete in a footrace to resolve a dispute among two gentlemen so that they don’t have to engage in any dangerous sport themselves. (Burney pp 447-449)  The titular character ultimately interjects but the novel makes no gesture toward any radical theory of proletariat exploitation.  Vathek in its imaginative excess, cannot help but raise fundamental questions about power and privilege. 

Wahrman may call Beckford’s work proto-political, in order to make his claim that public debate becomes politicized in the years after the impact of the Revolution.  Whether or not he is correct about the dates, the important point is that politics has in fact invaded all most all aspects of discourse at large.  There is some kind of class commentary in Vathek which resonates with modern readers because we are so attuned to it.  And that most of the novelists leading up to this period are completely unaware of the implications of their works within an overarching and ongoing class struggle is good evidence that there was no real conception of the struggle at the time. 

Today the idea of a class struggle is so pervasive it has become invisible.  It is part of our contemporary zeitgeist.  Every work is written—if not with an over political statement—with the knowledge that it will be read for one; and Wahrman’s very smart recognition of the ascendency of  political language is very good evidence for anyone who wishes to make the claim that the middle class in fact emerged in the otherwise-nameless period of European history, the 18^th century.  Though the historical change in economic reality is relatively slow and continuous, the middle-class consciousness springs from a deliberate effort in a historically short burst of energy. 

One thing Wahrman could have done to increase the strength of his thesis (and which would have been interesting in its own right) would have been to include a parallel example of a thought construct which can be identified as deliberately created, and which corresponds to a part of social reality.  He does discuss the emerging language of natural rights via Paine and Wolstoncraft, (pp 75-77) but the issue is so tied up with the middle class as to be more of an ancillary than a parallel.  He could have used the rhetoric about abolition as an example.  Or he could have mentioned the rise of nationhood as our dominant model of political unity.  Another example, even briefly discussed, could have helped him to show that inventing constructs is what people do and that we use these constructs to make policy and to psychologically situate ourselves among other people in the world. 

            Though academic and largely impersonal, Wahrman’s tone is in line with our contemporary egalitarian view toward class; and readers get the sense—as he traces the narrative of political language—that he is rooting for the ideological and political recognition of the middle class.  Nonetheless, he demonstrates that the middle class is not a real thing, but a part of a mindset—a fiction, if still a very convenient one.  It leaves readers wondering what other facts of reality we live with that are really just constructs.  Imagining the Middle Class can alter the way people read the world even as it points out an important historical moment—a very important moment because we live every day with the legacy of an all-pervasive class consciousness. 

Works Cited

Wahrman, Dror. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840. New York, NY; University of Cambridge Press Syndicate, 1995. Print

Burney, Frances. Evelina. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press Ltd, 2000. Print.

Beckford, William. Vathek. New York, NY; Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

Several Histories of Violence

(Film class UIUC)

20 October 2011

            Late in his career, David Cronenberg made A History of Violence—a somewhat more conventional film than others in his repertoire, but still it is filled with the concerns he has been playing with for decades.  With Tom Stall, reformed killer and family man, Cronenberg asks what many of his other works ask, but in a different way: “How much control do we have over our identities, and what do we make of those instances where our identities seem to conflict?”  Cronenberg’s answer is that we don’t have as much as we would like, or as much as we are culturally encouraged to believe that we have.  Tom’s failure to outrun his past brings his violent world to a seemingly innocent family and town, and the effects of his lie eventually reach out to harm those around him.  The story does a great job of exploring the insidious nature of violence—a common theme for Cronenberg, but here tragically in the form of a repentant.  The cinematography does a great job of depicting the difference between appearances and reality.  Or perhaps it is more appropriate to say that it depicts dualities — liminal multiple identities which are unstable and impermanent and among which it is difficult to point to the real.  Tom’s Past (as Joey) is ultimately inescapable, and in his refusal to acknowledge it—his externalization of Joey—it wreaks havoc on others like a disease displaced from its host.  This retribution doesn’t differentiate between the guilty and the innocent.  In fact it suggests that a distinction may not be viable. 

            The narrative uses geography to tell the story and to frame characters.  Millbrook, Indiana is Tom’s adoptive town and represents the purity of Midwestern values: it is pastoral and idyllic and community is strong at all levels.  The family all comes together to comfort a child who has awakened from a nightmare; the local sheriff says “you know we take care of our own.”  Tom actually does a good job of playing his new character well, for many years.  He doesn’t relapse into Joey out of a personal weakness, but because violent elements come in from outside.  His short-lived fame attracts attention from the east coast, which is urban, and violent, and where community consists of competition and mistrust.  When Tom is coming clean to Edie, he says that he killed Joey in the desert.  He means that he changed his identity completely but the choice of words is perfect.  This fable invokes several systems of meaning.  Firstly the desert is biblical: it is the opposite of civilization and an opportunity to craft a new life like the Israelites in Exodus.  Within America’s mythological past, the west is where you can make a new life for yourself if things haven’t worked out the way you wanted them to in American proper.  The sheriff foregrounds the typical cultural contrast between the East and Midwest when he says of the mobsters who are stalking the Stalls:  “These guys are organized crime from the East coast…bad guys.”  When he tracks down Fogarty and his henchmen he says, “This is a nice town, with nice people.”  Of course the characterization turns out to be entirely superficial—there is nothing idyllic about the serous harassment Jack suffers at school, and he sees himself and other young people as future miserable adults.”

            Cronenberg’s attitude toward personal reinvention, if correct, seriously undermines a fundamental part of the American myth.  His approach to rebirth is often carried by Christian motifs.  The desert imagery is somewhat Biblical but, more overtly, Tom wear’s a cross which is often over his shirt and prominently displayed and well lighted.  In the Christian tradition, the violent death of Christ is crucial to his resurrection and the salvation of humanity.  The cross is a clear symbol of rebirth but also of forgiveness.  By the end of the film, Cronenberg has debunked the rebirth myth and the final scene is one big question mark over the question of forgiveness.  Arguably this is left open.  It is because his brother could not forgive him that his past did catch up with him.  Cronenberg suggests elsewhere that it is more than just Tom’s past which is haunting the residents of Millbrook.  

In the first school harassment scene, Jack’s comments encourage us to think about violence as an ingrained part of the natural order.  He says to Bobby the school bully, “you’ve established your alpha male position.”  This perspective frames violence as a part of evolutionary history which has attended us as a species through our transition from the state of nature to civilization.  This suggestion makes a violent personality not just a product of personal decisions but a collective fact of our DNA.  The unclear sources of guilt introduce a moral ambiguity into the discussion of violence.  This moral ambiguity is also played out in the overall spectatorial experience. 

            Cronenberg uses typical attitudes towards scenes of violence to mold and then subvert spectator desires.  When Leland and Billy visit the café, we recognize a scene where clearly bad people are threatening innocent people and we want to see them punished.  Tom dispatches them quickly but the celebratory moment is cut short when the camera puts Leland’s face full frame gasping for air through the enlarged hole in his face.  The camera doesn’t let the audience ignore the consequences of the violence they had hoped for.  The aftermath of Joey’s second attack is even more grisly—one of Fogarty’s henchmen is seizing with his nose smashed into his brain. 

            The dual character of Tom/Joey is equally disturbing to watch.  Mortensen displays different mannerisms, a different gait and different facial expressions when his is in character as Joey than he does when he is the mild-mannered Tom.  He even reverts to an east-coast accent when he needs to revive Joey’s talents.  During the early parts of the film, when the viewer is approaching the story’s mystery—is he really Joey?—we want the mobsters to be mistaken because Tom is presented so favorably.  We want the protagonist to be good, but we want him to kick ass when it’s necessary.  Typical genre heroes can give you the liminal figure you want but Cronenberg ultimately denies us Tom.  In many of Tom’s scenes his face is partially shaded—a cinematography technique which suggests a duality.  But he is not the only person with two different sides to him.

            The film contains many repeated scenes where the characters act differently and social situations play out differently.  An early scene of playful, loving sex between Tom and Edie is transformed into a violent, loveless, near-rape which takes place, not in bed like the first scene, but on the stairs—a liminal space—and Edie is not sure whether she is having sex with Tom or with Joey.  Early in the film Jack is humiliated at school and later his rage explodes in the violent beating that puts Bobby in the hospital.  A male bonding scene in the café talking about the crazy ex-girlfriends they eventually married is subverted in the scene when Joey goes go see his brother Richie, and they discuss sex more profanely and Richie expresses his disdain for marriage.  (It is appropriate to call him Joey at this point in the story, because Mortensen is depicting (and the narrative is calling for) Joey and his ability to kill people.)  When he holds these and other scenes up to each other, Cronenberg is suggesting that there is a duality to all the characters, not just Tom with his criminal past. 

The first sex scene, if read closely, anticipates the complications of duality which are more explicit later.  In another level of make-believe Edie is pretending to be a teenage cheerleader, seducing her boyfriend while her parents are in the next room.  This role-play shows us our characters assuming identities, which may be really all we ever do.  Edie is trying to recreate a past the two missed out on.  “We never got to be teenagers together,” she says.  This playful obfuscation of appearance and reality will become more sinister when Edie finds out about Tom and her whole identity is shattered. 

The repeated-scenes motif is related to a major part of Cronenberg’s project.  In a meta-level, the film is analyzing the ways that we expect to experience films.  This is part of why the film was perceived, by some, as a more mainstream film.  It shows you the scenes you expect and then shows you the flip side of what you expect.  The contrast highlights the expectation itself.  The final scene as a question: “Will Edie live with Tom?” reflects the question the viewers are left with: “How do we live with ourselves?”  This motif, then, is able to carry out two of Cronenberg’s ideological tasks—to analyze the nature of violence and to analyze an established viewer experience. 

            In his contemporary review of the film, critic Roger Ebert quoted Cronenberg himself on the film’s title: “It refers (1) to a suspect with a long history of violence; (2) to the historical use of violence as a means of settling disputes, and (3) to the innate violence of Darwinian evolution, in which better-adapted organisms replace those less able to cope.” (Sun Times, paragraph 1)  Cronenberg cashes out all three levels of understanding as a story of identity which is inescapable through personal reinvention, historical myth-making, or the achievement of civilization.  Millbrook and Tom Stahl are both temporary states suppressing a reality which eventually manifests in a serious disruption of family and society. 

            To be sure, Joey and the other mobsters are extreme cases of human psychology and behavior.  But the point of making movies about criminals for non-criminals is to take a characteristic of humanity as a whole and to blow it up to proportions large enough to analyze.  Eventually, Jack and Edie show us that even apparently normal characters have a darker side, and their various reactions to similar situations remind us that we all act differently in different situations and in different company.  The difference between our acting and Tom’s is really only a matter of degree.  If Cronenberg is right that our lives and identities are created by violence in the recent and distant past, then our conception of ourselves as civilized beings is really just an elaborate illusion or worse, a delusion—a costume we put on to become more likeable to ourselves.  As he debunks the liminal character in film he also denies us our liminal identities in real life.  As he makes America, humanity, and civilization an ongoing product of bodily violence he gives us our cake but won’t let us eat it.  This is one film with a few projects going on, but what they suggest can get viewers looking at many parts of the human experience to see what part is the myth and what part is the historical reality.  The reality, Cronenberg keeps reminding us, will come back someday to reclaim recognition over the myth. 

Works Cited:

Ebert, Roger. “A History of Violence.” Rogerebert.com. Sun Times, 23 September 2005. Web.