A History of Violence

David Cronenberg's most recent film begins by evoking a mythic midwestern America of small towns and fundamental values. Tense string music in the opening scene suggests some event is going to disrupt everything. In fact, in the opening scene we meet two small-time killers who themselves are the agents of disruption. This is one of the themes of the film--the old mythic America subverted by modern urban values.

There are two major themes in this film. One is the notion that violence and the potential for violence underlie every aspect of American life and history. The other theme is identity. What makes us the individuals that we believe ourselves to be? Can we change, in a truly fundamental way, and become someone else? Can we erase the past and its sins and enter into a new existence, a new beginning? This second theme is as basic to American history as the theme of violence, since America, the United States, is a nation that sought in its founding to erase the past and reconceive human nature.

The first theme is difficult to deny. The first European settlers in America encountered violence in every aspect of their lives--as agents as well as victims of violence. Yet violence hardly seems to be a characteristic only of the frontier. The successors of those first settlers, down to the present day, continue to find it useful. We can see it literally and metaphorically in every corner of our lives, in economic suffering, the war in Iraq, domestic violence, racism, Internet porn, the list goes on. And though some coyly want to argue that such violence is intrincsically American, it is more truly simply an aspect of the human condition.

Tom Stall (a suggestively allusive name--Stall?) some decades before the time of the film apparently sought to escape from his life as a mobster, probably a hit man, working under the thumb of his big brother. He escapes t the West, always a place of death and rebirth, and assumes another identity--is it an identity he invents, or an identity that he steals from one of his victims. We never know, and Cronenberg hints at several different possibilities. Tom moves to a small Indiana town, marries, runs a diner, fathers two children. When two thugs show up to rob his diner and brutalize the people there, the old Joey Cusack emerges and in a violent scene the thugs are murdered. Joey/Tom's old associates take notice and come looking for him.

The suggestion here is that you can never escape your past. It's always there, hidden perhaps, but liable to break out at any moment. When Tom's usually timid son brutally beats up a bully at his school, we discover that he too may have a violent dimension hidden within. And when Tom's wife enjoys a rough sex encounter with her husband, we discover her penchant for violence and brutality as well. This is a low estimation of human nature.

Cronenberg asks in this film whether, once you discover the truth that lies beneath the illusion of your life, you can continue to live. It is a question others have asked--for instance, Sam Peckinpaugh in Straw Dogs and Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. It is a theme of many war films as well.

There are points where A History of Violence seems inadequately developed, especially in character relationships. The ambiguous father-son relationship between Tom and his son Jack is a major example. After Tom kills the things in his diner and receives acclaim as a hero, Jack, who has to this point been more willing to turn the other cheek and suffer abuse than become physically involved in a conflict, becomes aggressive. He beats up a bully at his school and then uses a shot fun to kill a man about to kill his father. Though he seems to stand in awe of his father, he also stands at a distance, and when he learns that his father may not be who he has been pretending to be, he becomes hostile. It’s not clear what is happening here. Did watching his father's violent behavior awaken his own violent streak, or is he simply following his father's example? To a lesser extent, Tom’s relationship with his wife is also poorly developed. The film hints at a history for her. I found disturbing the scene in which she dresses up as a cheerleader to seduce her husband. What is she saying about their relationship? She tells him that she wants to make up for the fact that they did not share their adolescent years together, but does she think that, at his age, the masquerade is going to give him something he is not getting from their marriage? Maybe my own life has been more limited than I had thought, but this scene does suggest something awry with their marriage. In the extras on the DVD, Cronenberg makes clear that the rough sex scene later in the film is a deliberate parallel to this earlier, supposedly more innocent scene.

A related issue is the programmatic nature of the film. The themes drive the action, or sometimes seem to, rather than letting the action generate meaning. There is almost a schizophrenic quality to Tom Stall. When Joey begins to "come out" after so many years of suppression, prompted by the violent episode in the diner, Tom seems to withdraw. Sometimes Tom seems to disappear altogether, as in the scene when Joey/Tom attacks his wife on the stairs of their house. We know (as we knew in Eastwood's The Unforgiven) that Tom/Joey is going to confront those who are calling to him from his unresolved past: we can predict the outcome, the fated violent redemption, because it has been scripted for us by films and novels that preceded this one.

Cronenberg's attempt to depict the idyll of middle America sometimes approaches the verge of campy satire but never crosses that line. The people who work in Tom's diner are standard American types--good, solid, middle-of-the-road people whose lives have never wandered far outside the borders of their small town. This is apparently even true of Tom's wife. Sometimes you are tempted by the film, or by your own predispositions, to find satirical something that may not be. Perhaps this is the film's intention. In Blue Velvet, David Lynch leaves no doubt that the perfect middle-American world he portrays is an illusion cloaking a darker reality. Even the mechanical bird leaves no doubt. Here Cronenberg is more willing to let the reader contemplate possible meanings and ambiguities.

In the final scene, Tom Stall returns from Philadelphia to attempt to rejoin his family, seated at dinner around the iconic family dining table. When he walks through the door, everyone freezs at the table. No one moves. Are they relieved he is alive? Are they sorry he has come back? His wife won’t look at him, nor will his son. Finally his daughter pours him a drink of water. Then he and his wife stare into one another's eyes. Both are teary-eyed, and neither looks happy. Yet there is a suggestion that these two will work struggle towards some accomodation with one another.

Now that Tom has apparently killed everyone connected with the past that he tried to hide, will he and his family return to their idyllic American pastoral existence? Will no one be able to connect the dots that lead to Tom as the murderer of his brother and his henchmen?

All of this is left hanging--whether Tom escapes (in an unrealistic, fantasy ending) or is ultimately arrested for his crimes (more likely, given the film several message that you cannot escape your sins, they always catch up with you)--what the film really wants you to focus on in the concluding moments is what these characters have gone through and discovered about themselves and one another, how they will cope with these realities, how they must accept themselves and each other for what they really are, after all.

What is it the 19^th century abolitionist Wendell Phillips said about his desire to end slavery and redeem the land? “There is no remission of sins without the shedding of blood.”

A History of Violence suggests that the way to come to grips with a past of violence and murder is through violence and murder. The only way Tom can rid himself of Joey is to rid himself of all those people from his past who would call him to account. For them, especially for his brother, his blood kin, the new identity Joey has chosen for himself does not meld with the old. They will not relent. And it becomes clear in the final scene with his brother in Philadelphia that the way these people from the past want to deal with Joey is to kill him. This would appear to leave Tom/Joey no option, and he acts accordingly. You might think of this as a form of redemption through violence. But it is possible to think that Tom/Joey would not have chosen this redemption had he had a chance? This is one of the ambiguities with which the film leaves us. But I don’t really believe that we are meant to have this choice. In a violent world, violent redemption may be the only choice, and as the last scene with his family suggests, it is by no means certain that Tom Stall has redeemed himself.

For a number of reasons, then, the film’s ending is difficult and challenging.

Senses of Cinema profile on Cronenberg.