September 26, 2005

I was fascinated by a slew of reviews of A History of Violence, primarily out of the New York crit klatch, that seem to both wag a knowing finger at anyone who thinks that the film is more than just another thriller and to completely miss the subtext of the drama.

At the center of the argument is the notion that if you show violence, you can't really comment with complete purity on violence because you are indulging the audience's blood lust. But to poorly paraphrase Sky Masterson, "Where would you expect to find the sinners… in the church or at the craps game?'

There is a conversation to be had here, but it is one of the oddities of it that this particular objection always seems to come from people who are otherwise easily tagged as liberal. In a cultural moment that tags "I know what's best for you" as distinctly Bush-ian, I find this attitude about A History of Violence (and many other films) to be just as parental. Moreover, I find it shockingly closed-minded. The aesthetic of discussing violence (or sex or race or other hot button issues) by putting the audience into the conversation by showing the object of the discussion in the film is, it seems to me, not only legitimate, but virtually the only successful way of engaging an audience in a way that reaches beyond the exit doors of the theater.

In my career, the first time I hit on this flashpoint was on Fight Club. I argued then and I still am completely comfortable that the third act of the film was a clear anti-violent message. Two things about the second act of that film really enraged people. First, there were the pure images of fist-on-skin violence. The simple existence of those images were clearly incredibly disturbing for many people, far more so than bombs killing people in war scenes or endless movie gun violence. Second, there was the glamour of those images… the notion that because it was Brad Pitt in the fight, the message was that this was a wonderful thing to be doing. It was the success that David Fincher had in glamorizing those images, in spite of much damaged flesh, which irked many media critics.

But what many writers utterly missed was that the third act of the film actively denounced the ideal of the Pitt character. In fact, the people who were sucked into the glamour of Pitt in the film and couldn't see past it in the third act were exactly those who the story of the film was meant to scandalize.

If you, however subconsciously, would be happy to be the beautiful savage that Pitt played in the film, the third act would have to enrage you, as your entry into the film is devalued and then destroyed at great cost to the lead of the film, played by Ed Norton. It was so easy to feel good about Norton not wanting to live in the IKEA world of the first act. (We can have a discussion some other time about the cheap out that American Beauty took out of that same first act discussion. The punchline of the film, which we are in on from the first scene, has all the schmaltzy comfort of "Some Of These Days," a song that was perfectly used in both sincerity and cynicism in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz. But this is a whole different column…) But to ask you to admit that there is a true ugliness to Pitt's character that should shame us if we found it attractive was, I think, too much responsibility for some viewers to eat.

The year of Fight Club and American Beauty as well as Eyes Wide Shut, The Insider, Magnolia, Bringing Out The Dead, and The Matrix - which is the most audience connected version of the "stop wanking off" genre, perhaps because the answer to waking up was to be a superheroic "The One" - seems to have been a "great minds think alike" moment in film history with very different filmmakers essentially trawling the same ocean of the minute, breaking out of 12 years of The Reagan Era. Of course, when the Wachowskis later continued the discussion by arguing a fatalistic cause and effect in their sequels, arguing that only we could only change our world by taking personal responsibility, it was not well received by many of the Neo faithful. Critics mislabeled the effort as bad, unthought-out check cashing, when in fact, the Wachowskis "sinned" by taking way our capes and boots and, like Fight Club, putting the responsibility right where it makes us most uncomfortable… on us.

A decade earlier was All That Jazz and eight years before that, A Clockwork Orange, a movie that remains completely relevant today. What is "right" when the moral questions smash up against one another? Alex de Large was the Tyler Durden of his generation. He was attractive, did what he wanted, found sexual conquests easy and uncomplicated, and had a very, very dangerous level of testosterone. But when the state uses torture to achieve its seemingly noble goals, allowing the world to seek easy vengeance on him to a degree that makes us seriously consider the morality of whether someone once a predator can become a victim, it is a very hard question to chew on. But did Kubrick have to show such "ultraviolence" in order to make the point? I would say, "Yes." Because an issue as visceral as violence or sex or race, etc. has to speak to your heart before speaking to your head.

Which brings us to A History of Violence…

I had the good fortune of seeing this film without having a clue about what it was about. There were no billboards, no trailers, no ads, not junket interviews. The experience was pure. And I was disposed to going along for this ride.

When a critic as intelligent as David Edelstein calls an emotionally complex sex scene between a married couple that is struggling to wrestle a new set of emotional realities into some control a "rape," you can only wonder just how early in the picture he checked out and stopped really considering the issues. He goes on to use the word "shame" to describe Cronenberg's choice to make this film, which is a spectacularly self-indulgent finger wag.

As I wrote last week, I put some responsibility for this on the New Line marketing campaign. The studio, understandably, wants to turn a buck on the film. So they are selling the more traditional, expected Cronenberg elements to people who might want to see a movie about violence. But film critics are supposed to watch the movie, not review the advertising.

The choice that some critics have made to see, for instance, the history of violence of the teenaged son in the film, as an obvious comment when it is, I think, a question, is disturbing. How does violence come into our lives? What are we capable of? Where should we be drawing the line?

Another smart critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, has made these decisions in quick order. But as he writes about details like, for instance, the status of the Stall family at the end of the film, ending his sentence on them with a period instead of a question (metaphorically) suggests that he really wasn't connecting with the themes of the movie. So shooing them aside is not surprise. If all you expect to see is a Dirty Harry movie, smart people can make one out of virtually anything… much less a film that straddles the line like this one does.

Ironically, The Fly, which is given a curt backhand by Edelstein as Cronenberg's "biggest hit," is another film on the subject of breaking out of our limitations and then not finding it easy to return to a balance that allows us to be awake, but not superhuman, as in Fight Club, the Matrix, et al. And Cronenberg made that film far earlier than the others, in the midst of Reagan Mania. Cronenberg's take on The Fly was quite sophisticated, even if it still had the graphic hallmarks of genre pulp. BrundleFly is, in many ways, Tyler Durden. The ending of The Fly is far more tragic than Fight Club, which is perhaps why, like American Beauty (and King Kong, for that matter), it was accepted. The beast unleashed must die or who knows what havoc could ensue. But Cronenberg and screenwriter Josh Olson and the graphic novelists do not take the easy road and answer the questions for the Stall Family. And this, I think, is the source of unending discomfort.

In the end, I may be doing to these critics what they are doing to the film. I am not unsympathetic to their plight, especially in light of the emphasis on the violence in ads and such. But though was can stall (get it?!) our histories of violence - and all other creeping terrors in our closets - we cannot stall forever. What do we do with the excrement of life? Can we overcome our pasts… our futures? These are the questions that make the experience of A History of Violence one of the great movies of 2005.

And the cinematic indulgence of an occasional bloody pulp? Our reaction to those moments are what we, as an audience, bring to the film. Do we laugh uncomfortably? Are we truly horrified? Are we blood thirsty? Do we find ourselves considering how we process these images in our decades of film viewing?

Answers are cheap. Questioning is the challenge that makes art worth discussing, no?

E-ME.