A History of Violence: Dead in the Eye

Tom’s split identity was forged in one history of violence; the movie is concerned with others. Released amid George W. Bush’s “war on terror” and the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib atrocities, A History of Violence was widely recognized by American critics as a film whose spectacles of pain complicate the conventional pleasures of pulp fiction. The close-up of a mangled head bleeding out in Tom’s diner is narratively superfluous but textually imperative: this is what happens when you shoot a man in the head, the image declares, and it’s not very fun or cathartic. Cronenberg, of course, is famous for the intellectual tenor of his graphic imagery, leveraging subversive material to pose questions about the base materiality and speculative potentials of that most alien of creatures, the human being. A History of Violence turns such questions against itself and outward toward its spectator, interrogating the protocols of its genre and positioning the viewer to consider the pleasure we take from cinematic violence and the contexts in which that pleasure has been cultivated.

An abiding theme in Cronenberg’s work is the corruption of family structures, and A History of Violence trains its sights on one of their most toxic traits: the construction of patriarchal impunity. In the wake of his father’s macho triumph at the diner, Jack is again confronted by bullies but this time bashes back, landing his chief tormentor in the hospital. Sent home with a suspension, Jack and his father bicker. “In this family, we do not solve our problems by hitting people!” chides Tom, to which Jack claps back, “No, in this family we shoot them.” Tom instinctively whacks his son across the face, an act of aggression as startling as any in the film and one that unsettles them both. The facade has begun to crack.

The scene that follows, a spectacular showdown between “Tom” and Carl Fogarty at the Stall family homestead, is the linchpin of the movie—a “naked lunch” moment, as coined by William S. Burroughs, when you see for the first time what’s really on the end of your fork. Fogarty and his minions arrive at the house demanding Tom return with them to Philly, pulling Jack from their car and brandishing him for leverage. If we have reached the film’s naked-lunch moment, this is also, to cite another of Cronenberg’s literary influences, what Franz Kafka termed the point that must be reached: the one from which there is no turning back.

As the gangsters near the limit of their patience, there is an extraordinary shot where Tom takes a step forward and leaves himself behind, standing now, unequivocally, in the shoes of Joey. Mortensen signals this metamorphosis with a nearly imperceptible intensifying of affect, localized in the cock of his head and the look in his eyes, a gaze that Fogarty returns with silent recognition. With a slight but distinct change of vocal register, Joey tells Jack to go back to the house, and a flurry of mayhem ensues as Joey dispatches the interlopers. Or nearly does so: Fogarty survives the massacre, wounding Joey, but Jack, we discover, did not return to the house (a command, and act of disobedience, that reverberate with symbolic force), and he kills Fogarty with a shotgun blast to the back. In this family, we solve our problems by shooting people . . .

A History of Violence now advances toward its third-act showdown between the brothers Joey and Richie Cusack, with Hurt delivering a highly droll performance that amplifies the dark humor coursing through the film. Before Joey sets out, however, the movie reckons with Edie’s shock at the radical displacement of her husband by a strange new creature—a crisis as wrenching as a lover turning into a fly. Bello’s performance, superb throughout, here takes on a galvanic force, shifting the film’s structure of deceit and disclosure to the white-hot center of her rage and confusion. Having made one masterpiece about sexual duplicity with Dead Ringers (1988) and another about the unfathomable nature of desire with Crash (1996), Cronenberg nearly tops himself with a sex scene of astonishing complexity. Profoundly unmoored from the Stall-family mirage even as she begins to assimilate her complicity in sustaining it, Edie is at once furious at and aroused by the man she knows better than anyone but doesn’t know at all. They collide in a brutal fuck on the staircase, a tangle of passion and fury, charged by an erotic voltage that locks them in a circuit of power as seductive and enigmatic as any coupling in the Cronenberg oeuvre.

On returning from his blood-soaked brotherly reunion, Joey finds his family seated, silently, at the dinner table. Sarah, who opened the film dreaming of monsters and closes it in blissful innocence of the monster among them, quietly gets up and arranges a plate for Daddy at his empty chair. Everyone remains wordless as Joey takes his place. Edie slowly raises her averted eyes to face the thing in the room. Joey returns the gesture, locking eyes with Edie but leaving unopened the mystery box of their reconstituted domesticity. The movie abruptly cuts to black (Cronenberg is an Olympian auteur of nailing the landing), leaving us, every bit as much as the Stalls, in the dark.

A History of Violence is one of the great films about looking someone dead in the eye and not knowing who looks back. Like the multiple meanings embedded in the title, this primal theme is encoded in the narrative and expands with allegorical reach. We have seen how various histories of violence—personal, political, social, cultural—are coiled in this tightly wound, archetypally resonant genre film. Multiple meanings likewise operate in the movie’s interplay of the eyes: of Jack looking differently, defiantly, at his father; of the gaze Tom drills into Fogarty’s skull, and of Fogarty staring back at the materialization of Joey; of Edie, after the stairwell sex, exiting the bathroom fully nude, out of matrimonial habit, startled to find Joey looking at her exposed body.

One is reminded, as the movie takes shape around these visual linkages, of the clandestine organization called Spectacular Optical in Videodrome (1983). If a great deal of attention has been paid to the extreme spectacles invented by Cronenberg, the visual logics organizing his cinema are just as salient. There is a crucial, underexamined proposition running throughout his work that the film we are watching is, to a degree we cannot determine, the projection of a character’s psyche: the techno-psychosis of Videodrome, eXistenZ (1999), and The Shrouds (2024); the effort, and failure, to make consciousness cohere in Naked Lunch and Spider (2002), internal labors that construct each diegesis. Similarly, the ersatz Americana of A History of Violence is readable as the drive to sustain an illusion of innocence—at once a sign of the Stall family’s particular conundrum, a distinctly American mode of dissociation, and a universal imperative. Enjoy your symptom, as Slavoj Žižek would have it—or, in the pop parlance of Guns N’ Roses, use your illusion. The reflexive force of A History of Violence ultimately strikes beyond the terrain of the genre film. Cronenberg poses an ontological question that no plot can ever resolve: Who are you?