Fitzgerald Fortune
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A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (David Cronenberg 2005)
Thoughts on David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE:
Rampant spoilers
As stated in many responses to the movie, Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE has got a 'flat' and 'cool' tone, but this is something that a lot of Cronenberg's movies have: the curious 'flatness' is reinforced by some very deliberate performances (watch how Cronenberg and the actors stretch out the scene in which Tom's daughter awakes from a nightmare--perhaps the key scene of the film; 'There are monsters', for sure) matches the flatness of the lives of its protagonists, until the shot hits the fan and Tom is found out to be Joey (or is he?), and then everything appears to return to normal at film's end.
The closing sequence moved me almost to tears: there's something about it that's very powerful. It tore into something deep inside me, and I'm not quite sure what.
The movie has some common Cronenberg themes: a fascination with the body and its fragility (witness the scene in which Tom/Joey kills the two guys in his diner, and the various shoot-outs); some riotous black humour (in the theatre in which I watched the movie, there were only a couple of other people present, who sat stone-faced throughout the film, even during the very funny moments); a fascination with the periphery of family life and the threat posed to it by the behaviour of men (think how many Cronenberg movies deal with single men, or with men whose masculine identity poses a threat to their relationships with women--this is really the firs D.C. movie to bring this back directly to the family); and the denial of any sense of resolution (the ending has strong shades of irony--is anything really resolved in this sequence: was Tom 'really' Joey; did Joey 'really' exist; where do the 'shadow monsters' end and the 'real monsters' begin).
It's the introduction of the mob aspect that really got to me: to what extent do the mobsters (and the whole fantastic mob suplot) 'really' exist within the narrative? The mobsters are pure caricature, comic-book mobsters brought to life (fittingly from the pages of a real comic-book) and dragged into the naturalistic representation of small-town life that Cronenberg so carefully develops in the movie's first act. Should we take these mobsters seriously; bearing in mind that we're talking about a filmmaker who uses a lot of abstract symbolism, I reckon the mobsters are either {a} a classic piece of filmmaker's misdirection, drawing our attention from the core of the narrative (the family), or {b} an example of Cronenberg's use of symbolism.
But if it's the latter, what do they symbolise? Well, in the film, Cronenberg sets up an opposition between two types of masculinity: the 'family man' persona of Tom and the 'alpha male' persona of Joey (consider how this theme is foregrounded in the faceoff between Jack and the school bully, with its talk of 'alpha male' superiority). The mobsters are a more concrete representation of the second, 'darker' side of masculinity. The movie, therefore, is about the way in which men are pulled in very different directions, given increasingly contradictory directions as to how they should behave.
The ending is extraordinarily ambiguous; in fact, the ambiguity really kicks in with the arrival of Ed Harris' caricature of a mobster, and takes off into orbit with Mortensen's trip to Philadelphia. Cronenberg's playing with layers/levels of reality again, as he did in EXISTENZ and VIDEODROME, I reckon. And it's this ambiguity that undercuts any sense of resolution that the closing sequence might have achieved.
Any thoughts?
Last edited by Fitzgerald Fortune, 10/22/2005, 1:54 am
--- 'Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy'.
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10/22/2005, 1:48 am
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