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.