A History of Violence

A History of Violence
A Review by John David Ebert

Behind every Norman Rockwell painting of small town sentiment there lies an Edward Hopper reality, for whereas Rockwell painted Americans as they wanted to see themselves, Hopper painted them as they really were: lonely, brooding individuals swallowed up by the emptiness and impersonality of big cities. In the paintings of Hopper, nobody is ever depicted actually saying anything to anyone else, for each individual is portrayed as an island of silence in an ocean of empty space. Likewise, in David Cronenberg’s new film A History of Violence, a man named Tom Stall who seems at first glance to be a middle class family man in reality turns out to be separated from everyone else around him by the chasm of a violent past. In this film, Cronenberg attempts no less than an archaeology of the American psyche, for as a Canadian he is an outsider to the United States and is therefore capable of looking objectively at us, and in A History of Violence he holds up a mirror in which Americans are invited to see themselves as they really are.

For Tom Stall is no mere small business owner with a wife and two children. It turns out that he has a history of violence working as a hitman for a group of criminals whom he had long thought to have left behind in the crumbling city of Philadelphia (significantly, one of America’s first big cities). When two of these former acquaintances catches up with him and try to rob his diner, he kills them both, but when the national media spreads word of his bravery, his old acquaintances come calling. Tom is forced to reveal his former identity to his family, who are of course horrified by it, for the man whom they had assumed to be their loving father was once a professional murderer. When the villains, led by Ed Harris, come back to claim their due, Tom’s past draws his family into a maelstrom of violence in which they must fight for their lives. Eventually he realizes that if he is to ensure his family’s safety, he must return to Philadelphia in order to fight the demons on their own ground.

Thus, like some solar hero out of mythology, Tom must descend into Hell in order to do battle with the demons of ancient night. But what is interesting here is how the modern incarnation of Hell is equated with the big city, whereas small towns are painted as idyllic. There is a deep pessimism in this film–as there was in the graphic novel upon which it is based–regarding the value of life in big cities, and this attitude marks it as part of a wave of recent films sharing the same skepticism of megalopolitan life, films such as Lord of the Rings, Batman Begins, War of the Worlds and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. For like the Elders in Shyamalan’s film, Tom has presumably withdrawn from the big city because of how cheap human life is regarded there by contrast with its fundamental value in a small town. “We take care of our own here,” says the town’s sheriff in Cronenberg’s film, by which he means to imply that the town is basically a large family in which everyone looks out for everyone else. Such an attitude is not possible in a megalopolitan environment in which there are so many people, and where the individual disappears into the anonymity of a mere statistic on the morning’s front page. In a small town Tom’s act of violent self-defense turns him into a “hero,” whereas a similar act in a big city would simply have been averaged out by so many other such acts, and therefore regarded as insignificant. Hence Cronenberg’s formula turns out to be the same as in Edward Hopper: the small town unites individuals into macrofamilies, while the big city sunders them into individual units of quantitative isolation and consequent meaninglessness.

But Cronenberg’s film is too rich thematically to boil it down into a single formula of small town = good, big city = bad, for the point of the contrast is to reiterate the history of the American psyche, which went from life on the frontier to small towns and onward into big cities, each stage being regarded as more civilized than the previous one. However, as Cronenberg’s film implies, a reversal of the overheated medium is now taking place, for big cities have become environments which breed ecologies of thriving criminality. This has, of course, been the case for a long time now, and in the 1920s and 30s, the solution to the problem was the invention of the comicbook superhero in New York simultaneously with the private detective in the hard boiled crime dramas of San Francisco and Los Angeles by Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. Cronenberg, in drawing from the now moribund genres of the Western, the gangster flick and the noir film, is designing his own urban hero in that very same mode and for the same reasons. The only difference now is that the hero is just as blood-soaked as the villains.

Tom Stall is the American psyche, for his history of violence is analogous to that of America’s. Though we have tried to settle down in our cities and towns and forget the violence we committed to get us here, it always comes back in the form of rampant crime. Maybe this is why Americans–in contrast to European cities, for instance–have such a high tolerance for crime: we are so guilt ridden with the blood of our Ancestors that some deep recess in our collective psyche believes that criminality is what we deserve and so we accept it as of the order of the day.

Cronenberg’s solar hero battles the demons and returns home to take his seat at the dinner table which his family has saved for him, as though he has just come home from a day at the office. And indeed, this is the very contradiction implicit in the American psyche, for we take our violence as casually and indifferently as a day at work. We have come to accept it as normal, whereas Canadians–in Canada, guns are illegal– see it for what it really is: a pathology that has so warped and distorted our way of seeing the world, that we seem incapable of living in any other way.

There is a telling clue in how Cronenberg has directed his sequences of violence, for where other directors will simply present the violence without comment, Cronenberg pauses to hold his camera on the ruins of a man’s bloody face, as though to comment on how strange this violence really is.

A History of Violence is not one of Cronenberg’s best films, but neither is it one of his weakest. His handling of familiar material that in the hands of other directors would immediately turn to cliche is a refreshing reminder that Hollywood does not have to make the same film over and over again, despite the trappings of the crime / gangster melodrama. There are fresh ways of looking at old material, as any real artist well knows. Again and again Cronenberg has been tempted by the Hollywood money machine to make films their way, and he has passed up such offers repeatedly in favor of following the integrity of his own personal vision. A History of Violence, along with one or two other efforts like The Fly and The Dead Zone, is the closest he has ever come to making movies in the Hollywood style, but in each case, the films are so uniquely stamped with his way of looking out upon the world as to be utterly alien to the Los Angeles vision of factory manufactured garbage.

Cronenberg’s films are hand made products like Shaker furniture in an age dominated by prefabricated molds. Every single one of them is worth seeing, if only because they are a true example of the work of an auteur who has never sold out. His vision is therefore testimony and encouragement that such artistic integrity is still possible.