The Sigla Blog

This week the BBC are showing all three predecessors to George Romero’s latest Zombie instalment, Land of the Dead, which opened last week on the same day as Ireland’s contribution to the Zombie canon, Boy Eats Girl. Last night, watching Dawn of the Dead, I was reminded of the fact that it was re-released in the US in 1981 as a double bill with David Cronenberg’s The Brood, which I saw one night babysitting as a teenager.

The Brood is a Hitchcockian tale of an unorthodox shrink, mutant children and a woman whose violent urges turn towards her children. On many levels, the film delves in to the murkier aspects of the psyche, inverting behavioural norms. Like Hitchcock, the characters’ internal, psychological turmoil is represented in physical acts perpetrated on the body. This obsession with the physical marks all of Cronenberg’s films from Dead Ringers, where Jeremy Irons plays disturbed twin gynaecologists to Crash, his controversial Cannes prizewinner about auto-erotomania (no, not the Michael Hutchence kind, the one where people are made desirous by car crashes and injuries). In The Dead Zone, his Stephen King adaptation, Christopher Walken’s psychic gift is accentuated further when by tactile contact with people. Many people think of Cronenberg’s work - as Harry Guerin says in his review of A History of Violence - as “films that wouldn’t trouble the masses, but would trouble the masses”. He occupies an uneasy periphery, not quite macabre but full of gory expectations oozing philosophical puss. For me, his films are out there only in the way he externalises his themes, linking them to the corporeal. His films do, what I think Kazuo Ishiguro does in his novel Never Let Me Go. They hold a mirror up to a society that seems normal, but the actuality of what is reflected back is frightening. It’s not completely unrecognisable and this strange-but-familiar sense echoes Freud’s classic theory of the uncanny which he dubbed unheimlich.

In his latest film, A History of Violence, Cronenberg does just this, but without the trademark OTT tics. In fact, it’s his most commercial and accessible film to date. Journalists have been warned not to focus too much on the film’s plot twist, but it gives nothing away to say that Cronenberg’s theme of appearance versus reality resurfaces. Viggo Mortenson is Tom Stall, an average American Joe. Living in a small town where he runs a diner, attends church and is surprised by his wife wearing a cheerleader costume to bed one night. He’s an honest, unremarkable man, at least until he foils a robbery at his diner, killing two men in the process. Overnight, he transforms from anonymous blue collar guy to American Hero. In a world where it seems everyone craves the limelight, Stall discovers that his 15 minutes of fame could potentially cost him the life he has built for himself.

Cronenberg once summed up the thematic elements of his film as: “Disintegration, aging, death, separation, the meaning of life. All that stuff.” A History of Violence doesn’t buck this trend, but the most interesting aspects of it are the way it approaches violence itself. In the US (Cronenberg is Canadian), where gun culture is a integral part of life and the constitution not only allows but encourages people to bear arms, Cronenberg focuses not on the effects of violence, but the motivations. In the film the men of violence, represented by William Hurt and Ed Harris, seem to contrast with the shiny, law-abiding figure of Tom Stall. What we come to realise, is that Tom Stall represents the potential for violence in all of us, and if unchecked that violence breeds more physical aggression. In one disturbing scene, which will no doubt solidify accusations of misogyny from many of Cronenberg’s detractors, he gets it wrong. Up until then, what is being said and unsaid about violence, is acutely observed. In the scene, Stall and his wife Edie (Maria Bello) grapple on the stairs after an argument. Instead of maintaining her anger, she submits to him mid-tussle in a bout of aggressive sex. On RTE’s The View last Tuesday, Mannix Flynn went as far as to call it a “rape scene”. It’s not the only low in the film. Cronenberg peaks too soon with the story and at just an hour an half, it seems as if there is a large chunk missing, which affects the tautness of the narrative.

Where it works, is in exploring the dark side of deception and the knock-on effect of violence. Thankfully, Cronenberg doesn’t polemicise about the subject in the film. He merely suggests that it can be a necessary evil when dealing with people who don’t care to debate - forcing us to make up our own minds on the ethics of that.

Martin Scorsese, an old friend of David Cronenberg, once told the director, after reading some of his interactions with the press, that he (Cronenberg) obviously doesn’t understand his own films. His work always stands at an oblique angle, so perhaps they’re meant to be experienced more than comprehended.