Blog From The Bench

All of David Cronenberg’s movies might be called histories of violence. The car accident. The deconstruction of the body. Violence in Cronenberg is not cathartic. There is no purging, no clean slate. Aristotle would find nothing redemptive about these collisions. Instead, violence in a Cronenberg film is transformative, additive. It doubles the self, produces an other inside oneself. All agents defect, and all resistors sell out, as Naked Lunch tells us. You play both sides, betray yourself, and thus open yourself up to the other. Only in becoming other, through the collision, can you approach the ethical connection with another subject.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a family man, an all-American good guy. He lives in middle America (Indiana, no less), runs a little diner where everyone knows his name, has a wonderful family. He is so nice that he even goes down on his wife without being asked. Good old Tom. He’s such a good WASP that his name is even an anagram for “lost lam(b).” So when Tom defends his friends from some “bad men,” gangsters who cruise into town looking to start trouble, even he is shocked by his aptitude for violence. He finds himself a stranger.

In recent years, David Cronenberg has shifted slowly away from dissecting bodies toward dissecting psyches. His work has always been underrated for its psychological insight, but nowadays he tends to get more credit for these things. A History of Violence is less about the violence itself than about the history, before and after. What are the consequences of violence on our own identities? On our wives and children? How does the cycle of violence perpetuate itself, even when we try to escape? Cronenberg might be making a sort of Western here, an updated version of The Gunfighter in which each act of violence (and Josh Olson’s exquisitely timed screenplay tightly wraps each of the film’s three shocking assaults in messy little packages) leads inexorably to another. And each one makes us a little more alien to ourselves and to one another. No wonder the shelf next to the Stall’s front door has little blocks displaying the letters “ET.”

These are all random thoughts right now, since it is both very late at night and I am still feeling rattled by Cronenberg’s fresh take on this material. I want to reconcile A History of Violence with all the previous writing I’ve done on his work (and the film fits in neatly with my analysis of his previous films in my book, summarized by the first paragraph of this review). I want to piece together a sustained review of this film, although that may have to wait until the DVD comes out (and perhaps I will have gotten some sleep by then). But for the moment, my initial reaction is that A History of Violence is the best film I have seen so far this year. Emotionally wrenching, tautly directed, and philosophically rich – was there any doubt Cronenberg would nail this one?