The best line in A History of Violence comes when
William Hurt, playing a sinister mafia boss, berates a hapless
underling who has just failed to strangle his, the boss’s brother,
with the old Godfather-garotte trick: you know, the cord
stretched tight between two hands and unexpectedly looped over the
neck and across the wind-pipe from behind the head. “How do you
f*** that up?” he screams at him. “How do you f*** that up?” And,
receiving no answer, shoots him dead. We might almost say the same
thing about the movie, which has a good story to tell which it
tells very well for most of its length — until it falls a victim
to its own portentousness and its belief in that great moral
bogeyman of our times, “violence.” How do you f*** that up?
Let me explain. The whole concept of “violence” is flawed from
the get-go, for it makes no distinction between legitimate and
illegitimate force. The use of the word in this generic sense
implies that the “violence” of the criminal is no different from
the “violence” of the policeman who subdues him. Originally a
Marxist idea, this worked its way into the mainstream beginning
about 50 or 60 years ago, when people began to think it very clever
and sophisticated to act as if there were no difference between the
two things, or that the difference was only a matter of how
“society” had distributed power between them. Since then, the idea
of “violence” as generic and not in its original sense — related
to “violate” — of criminal and illegitimate violence has steadily
gained ground until it is now a commonplace of moral debate, in
America as it is everywhere else in the Western world.
That is the real “history of violence” promised in the
title. But David Cronenberg, who directed the film, and Josh Olson,
who adapted it from a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke,
don’t take their history that far back. They want you to think that
that commonplace and its fashionable liberal corollary, America’s
unique propensity to “violence,” was there from the beginning. In
fact, the idea itself is really very recent and depends on the
intellectual sleight-of-hand mentioned above: the weasel-word,
“violence.” As a result, Cronenberg mystifies the whole subject by
taking the view that acts of violence, irrespective of their
context or justification, leave a permanent moral taint on those
who commit them, though they are also a permanent temptation —
both to the violent themselves and to those who are attracted to
their power.
Viggo Mortensen plays Tom Stall, who runs a diner in a small
Indiana town. He is happily married to Edie (Maria Bello), has two
attractive children, and is popular in town. One day, two very bad
bad guys (we have already been introduced to their methods) walk
into his diner at the close of the day and stick him up. He knows
at once what we already know, namely that these are not men who are
planning to leave any witnesses of their crime. As one of them is
about to kill his waitress, just to show that they mean business,
and the other is covering him with a gun, Tom smashes the carafe
full of hot coffee over the head of the one in front of him, vaults
the counter, seizes his gun, and shoots the other dead. As he turns
back to the coffee-covered one, he is stabbed in the foot, but
blows him away too. It is a striking scene and very well
choreographed.
All at once, Tom is a hero. He is on the TV news, not only in
Indiana but nationwide. “How did it feel when you saw the gun of
this deadly killer pointed at you?” asks the breathless TV
reporter.
“Not very good,” replies Tom.
“An American hero and a man of few words,” she says to the
camera and then, when it is off her, “I guess that’s all we’re
going to get.”
But the next day three more sinister men turn up in an expensive
out-of-state car and start following Tom around. Their leader, Carl
Fogarty (Ed Harris), calls him “Joey.” They know him from
Philadelphia, says Fogarty, where they were once in the underworld
together and “Joey” had badly injured him, Fogarty, with barbed
wire, taking away the sight of one eye. Now Fogarty is seeking
vengeance on this “Joey,” as he makes clear, though Tom keeps
insisting that he is not Joey but Tom and has never been to
Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Tom’s teenage son, Jack (Ashton Holmes),
is being mercilessly bullied at school. Perhaps inspired by his
father’s example in being proclaimed a hero, he finally fights back
against the bully — and puts him in the hospital. Naturally, the
school treats him as the aggressor and sends him home. Tom, like
any responsible parent these days, takes him to task. “In this
family, we do not solve our problems by hitting people,” he
says.
“No,” replies the boy. “In this family we shoot them” —
whereupon his father strikes him!
It’s a hilarious illustration of the sort of hypocrisies that
naturally arise from the film’s view of “violence” — which is also
that of the therapeutic culture that increasingly dominates our
educational and legal systems. But, presumably not understanding
the conceptual flaw in that view, Cronenberg takes it instead as
deeply significant and a further instance of his banal moral,
namely that violence begets violence. Well, perhaps you can see
where he’s going with that, so I won’t have to give away important
plot details of what happens later. As I say, it’s a good story,
but it only takes on meaning if you can bring yourself to believe
the frankly unbelievable proposition that forcefully defending
yourself makes you a thug.
