By Bob Clark
One of the great strengths of the comics medium that I’ve belabored upon is how any given panel on a page can stand on its own as a frozen moment in time, building sequences of linear action and non-sequitor stream of consciousness through static snapshots rather than the fluid, flowing continuities of motion pictures. As such, in a well conceived and executed graphic novel, every single image carries a heavy significance to it, remaining on its page and in the reader’s attention for as long as they wish to rest upon it. This gives the timespan of comics a subjective dimension– moments that take mere seconds in a story can be stretched out to minutes or hours if a viewer wishes to dwell there– and it makes the way that works of graphic fiction that deal explicitly with our experiences in time both present and past somewhat more unnerving. There’s perhaps no medium where flashbacks are more natural, where one’s experience of reading is already akin to leafing through the pages of a photo-album, all those pictures laid out just like comics panels (in a sense one could insist that they are a form of comics, themselves). As such, it makes telling a work dedicated to the secrets and lies of a person’s past that much more interesting an endeavor, and there’s few places to compare and contrast the way in which the medium holds advantage over others than in the case of the graphic novel A History of Violence and its film adaptation.
As written by Judge Dredd-creator John Wagner and illustrated by Sandman artist Vince Locke, the book offers a refreshingly unpretentious piece of straightforward pulp crime-thriller and two-fisted action, the kind that guys like Nick Ray or Sam Fuller would’ve gladly shot straight from the page back in the day. After defending his diner from a pair of blood-thirsty crooks with lethal efficiency, a small-town family man called Tom finds his world thrown upside-down by a sudden case of celebrity that turns sinister when it draws the attention of an aging gangster, insisting that the local hero is someone from his criminal past. Though at first Tom goes to great lengths to deny any association with the menacing mobster, anybody who’s seen or read a noir or two in any medium will already be winding up the egg-timer in their heads to see just how long it takes to find out the truth about this placid restauranteur. Yes, there’s always precedent for a Hitchcock-style Wrong Man, but from the first moment you see him on the page, squinting his narrow eyes through a pair of glasses so thick and plain they look as though he might’ve picked up Clark Kent’s prescription by mistake from a Smallville pharmacy, you can tell he’s got something to hide. Friendly neighbors congratulate the man, calling him “Rambo mixed with Superman”, hammering in deep the notion of this all-American hero in the mid-west, hiding in plain sight. By the end there’s even a Lex Luthor look-alike in the person of a ruthless mob boss with a score to settle against our almost superhuman protagonist, and if it weren’t all drawn in black-and-white you could almost be forgiven for expecting to see the green glow of kryptonite as his ace in the hole.
It makes sense for a graphic novel (especially one published under the DC imprint Vertigo) to appropriate the iconography of perhaps the most famous comic-book superhero in existence to express some of the psychological import of a man trying to hide away from his big-city past. It’s an instant way for comics fans to understand right away that there’s something this seemingly ordinary guy is hiding beneath his mild-mannered exterior, and that in a way we might have reason to suspect anyone who aspires for the mild-mannered smalltown lifestyle to begin with. Though he manages to dispatch his attackers throughout the book with an impressive efficiency, there’s a strangely reluctant, even hesitant and anxious air about him in all the sequences in between, as though he were constantly suppressing the urge to whip off his glasses and blast his foes with a healthy dose of heat-vision. He may have the ability to fight off his enemies with displays of strength that make you half believe that leaping a tall building in a single bound wouldn’t be that much of a challenge for him, but more often than not Tom’s first impulse is to play nice, hand over the money, or at the very worst call the police. Even during a threatening phone call from them, there’s an indignant quality to his sudden outburst, shouting about how he’s a “decent, law-abiding citizen”. It’s a bigger threat for him to lodge a “formal complaint” than it is to say he’ll kill them for coming near his wife and kids– this is the closet-case superhero as a bureaucrat and functionary, the one who believes in upholding all the rules instead of breaking the ones that restrict folks from turning vigilante. This isn’t just a Superman who poses as Clark Kent as a wry joke on the humanity he’s protecting (as per Tarantino’s paraphrasing of Jules Feiffer’s commentary in Kill Bill), but instead a Superman who genuinely wants to be Clark Kent, and nothing more.
It deserves noting that there’s a journalistic quality to Vince Locke’s art throughout the book that’s somehow in keeping with all the allusions to a superhero who poses as a reporter for the Daily Planet. Sketched with a simple pen-and-ink efficiency throughout that makes it look as though he could’ve drawn up the book in the confines of a steno-pad while drifting through rural America and listening to tall-tales shared amongst diner patrons, the book carries the same kind of documentary quality that hastily done courtroom paintings have, on cases where the media isn’t allowed to bring cameras, to better protect everyone involved. John Wagner’s writing favors more of the visual language of comics than an abundance of flowery prose in the manner of an Alan Moore or Frank Miller– you can almost see the old 2000 AD pro writing more to the page, more to the artist than he is to the word-balloons or captions, summing up whole lifetimes’ worth of drama and suspense with a few carefully selected moments in time for the artist to represent. You even sense that the two of them could’ve gotten away with adding a page at the beginning claiming the book was based on a true story, making it a graphic novel equivalent to Capote’s In Cold Blood, or at the very least a high-concept joke on the same level of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. There’s a credibility to the noir- trappings at work in this book, a sense you feel that it could be happening somewhere in the American countryside just beyond the borders of your town, that the pastoral landscape of the mid-west is still a territory where old gunslingers can retreat and make for themselves new lives and new beginnings at the drop of a hat, whatever color it might be.
As a graphic novel, A History of Violence may be printing the legend instead as all mythic-crime stories tend to do, but there’s a higher quotient of fact between the covers of this work than you tend to find in most tellings, and certainly more than one can find in the film adaptation as written by Josh Olsen and as directed by David Cronenberg, perhaps the least likely candidate in the world for this kind of genre-realism, at least until it managed to hijack his cinematic reputation for the past decade. While on page the biggest cultural cornerstone that Wagner and Locke touch upon is Superman, on film you can see Cronenberg and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky paying immediate and obvious homage to plenty of the great American painters, Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell, especially, for their depictions of the everyday novelty and malaise at the heart of the nation’s landscape in small and big towns alike. What’s interesting is how they intersect with the references of the book– Hopper, Rockwell and the Superman comics are all dealing, in a rather broad sense, with that particular stretch of time in the American consciousness from the Depression to a little after World War II, where things like civic-virtue, responsibility and patriotism were more than just hackneyed political catchphrases to be dropped at the first sign of a hat being tossed into an electoral ring, but deep and powerful reservoirs of emotional power to motivate whole populations towards ennobling goals. On the page, Wagner and Locke do their best to reveal so many of these quaint ideals as kinds of paper tigers, tearing them down at the first note of trouble and violence, only to make feeble attempts to patch them up again with nothing more than tape and glue. One of the things that’s interesting about the book is how immediate the action is– barely ten pages pass until the fateful encounter between Tom and the two crooks looking to rob his diner.
On film, however, no less than twenty minutes go by until the same sequence occurs, the time until then killed with attempts to build up the romantic ideal of the small-town setting as a kind of bygone era you’d have thought, or at least hoped, the country had outgrown its nostalgia for. On one level, this is a somewhat necessary choice if the film is going to work in the same kind of subtly subversive register as the graphic novel– in comics form, one can depend on the subjective nature of the reader’s experience through time to lengthen and deepen an opening that hits the ground running and doesn’t look back. In film, however, we need more time to set up even the most easily recognizable of sacred civic cows if we’re going to go out tipping them, at least if you want them to be more than just easily disposed of stereotypes. While Wagner and Lock expect the reader to take their time and add more dimension to the pared down story they supply, Olsen and Cronenberg take the time themselves to render a dream of the American mid-west that’s both expressionistic and cozily familiar. We know we’re in a heightened form of reality that we can’t necessarily buy as trustworthy, but it’s just close enough to the everyday and our desires of the norm to slip past our defenses subconsciously. Or at least that’s the intention– Cronenberg talks about a desire on his DVD commentary to offer something more genuine than the absurdist nightmares of David Lynch, and maybe it says something more about the superficial nature of cultural archetypes in general that they can become so difficult to take seriously, but it’s hard to suppress the automatic instinct to scoff at the sight of a middle-aged wife dressing up as a cheerleader for sex-games with the husband or various local color elements that establishes the town as a kind of lost Americana as mythical as the underwater city of Atlantis.
As such, there’s a queer kind of vertigo in the film, that isn’t quite there on the page. In Cronenberg’s hands, we’re presented with an ideal vision of an American landscape we know full well is either pure myth or something that belongs to the past, and we’re asked to take it seriously and respond to it on an emotional level so that the violence to come can feel all the more jarring and threatening, all to better reveal that ideal American vision as one that is utterly false. In other words, the film is going to extreme lengths to lead us to a conclusion that we very likely have already gotten to ahead of time, right at the sight of these cultural archetypes to begin with– putting all that effort to build up the idol just to tear it down seems something of a waste when the idol itself can almost do just as well. There’s something like this in Wagner and Locke’s approach, which wastes no time and pulls no punches in the way that it sets up its small-town roots not prior to the explosions of violence but through them, like the opening moments of a punctual Hollywood Western. On page, there’s more effort to build up the ideal picture of the town after Tom’s initial confrontation with the criminals, so that we have something of a baseline of risk and stakes to deal with as we take in all the friendly neighbors and baseball games. Both the book and the film open with the diner-crooks committing another set of unrelated murders on their way to the town, but these merely set up a kind of existential threat for the viewers, reminding us of the general dangers out there in the world and not ones that are tied directly to our protagonists. This makes the ways that our characters are introduced to us that much more important to pay attention to– on page, Tom is no sooner established as a Clark Kent wanna-be than he’s forced to display his fighting skills for all the world to see.
In the film, however, Cronenberg emphasizes Tom as a family man and clear-cut ideal of American masculinity, first and foremost. Far from the mild-mannered, bespectacled picture of the nebbishy weakling we get on the page, the film’s Tom, as played by Viggo Mortensen, looks as though he could’ve stepped off the package to a roll of Brawny paper-towels. He’s all lantern-jaw alpha-male, another play to the ideal of the American landscape rather than a subversion of it– yes, on the page the Clark Kent appearance that the character has makes a clear reference to the Man of Steel, but it’s telling that he so closely identifies with the mortal side of the superhero, with the scrawny alter-ego. Wagner and Locke are playing a double-con on the reader, giving Tom a subliminal reservoir of strength to rely upon behind his mild-mannered facade, but at the same time reinforcing that facade as the true aspiration for his character, investing him with just as much weakness and vulnerability as they are empowerment. His self-righteous demeanor and those ridiculous looking glasses call back to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, and the milquetoast nerd played by Dustin Hoffman, fending off a whole army of alpha-male Neanderthals in his unfinished home, earning the right to his masculinity by spilling the blood of others and his own. As such, the book’s Tom stands as a loaded, ironic figure from both directions, someone who doesn’t quite fit as the alpha or beta male. The film’s Tom, on the other hand, begins so assuredly as the Hollywood masculine ideal that it’s harder to take anything he does– from coolly dispatch his enemies to wrap himself in knots over lying to his family– quite as seriously. We even have a foil for his form in the person of his bullied son, who slowly begins adopting his father’s violent traits to assert his position in small-town adolescence. From start to finish, he’s always something of an archetype himself, but one that has enough cultural dominance to assert itself even when being pulled apart.
In a sense, you can almost see Cronenberg having some fun with taking the stalwart male role-model ideal and tearing it down a peg or two. A sequence where Viggo Mortensen’s Tom runs limpingly over hill and dale to his home, fearing a posse of gangsters is on the way, only to arrive out of breath and laughingly spent, feels like an elaborate parody of the same kind of epic marathons the actor ran in the Lord of the Rings films, complete with a robust score from Howard Shore. At some of its best moments, the director plays the film’s violence less as occasions for his typical body-horror gore (though there’s plenty of that) and more as matters of absurdist humor, especially during the climax with a scenery-chewing William Hurt. Here, the film succeeds in making an effort to genuinely tear down the cultural and genre institutions it props up by investing itself of its action, instead of its often lame-duck melodrama. Especially interesting is how Cronenberg cuts his fights into series of close-ups and mediums, without injecting any longer takes or masters to give us a sense of corresponding geography or spatial logic to the violence. It helps the explosions of action work on a visceral, emotional level without descending into the sheer incoherence of modern-era Bourne style shaky-cam and choppy editing and all the false docu-verite signals they represent. Even more importantly, however, it allows these sequences to thrive with the same kind of subjective experience through time that the graphic-novel does, subliminally slowing down the sequence in its bite-sized chunks without using actual slow-motion. Without the benefit of masters to provide maps to the terrain of the violence, each on-screen action has to stand on its own in a way that gives it a spatial and temporal independence from the moments it’s cut into.
It allows split-second fights to last longer on screen than they would in reality, and furthermore allows Cronenberg to play with the choreography in ways that don’t have to live up to actual logic– half of the things Tom does in the film would get him killed in real life, but the editing helps let him get away with it on an absurdist level that doesn’t completely undermine the plausibility of the events. It also allows Cronenberg to get away with an impressively ambiguous display of sexuality that’s on par with Peckinpah’s controversial Straw Dogs rape sequence as Tom and his wife shift abruptly from a scene of domestic violence to share an angry fuck on the stairs. Not present anywhere in Wagner and Locke’s book or Josh Olsen’s screenplay, the director’s invention here stands as one of his more intriguing displays of subversive sexual behavior, made all the more compelling for how it reaches for realism instead of the sci-fi perversion of films past. Framing and cutting the sequence with the same unpredictability as one of the film’s fight sequences, it looks and feels rather different from most of the director’s other displays of sexuality on screen, where events are dwelled upon and afforded ample focus and time to bask in the camera’s vision, the better to accommodate the high-concept taboos being broken onscreen. As impressive as all those fetishistic exercises are, there’s sometimes a fairly scripted quality to the eroticism, as though the partners are following the explicit instructions of a book of Kama Sutra for mutants, their perversely arranged biological and psychological hang-ups standing in the way of more passionate outbursts of improvised sexuality.
Here, Cronenberg lets it all hang out in an abrupt, unscheduled and unsettling manner, capturing each action with the same frenetic focus as his action sequences, and then capping it off with a post-coital moment of casual domestic nudity– Tom’s wife suddenly walking into their bedroom seemingly hours later wearing nothing but an open bathrobe, as if to remind the audience of everything the scene just prior wasn’t about. Though much of the film surrounding it doesn’t always work on the same sophisticated levels as the director has accomplished in the past, this scene alone helps pull the weight of its bulk and stands as a great example of the premature climax in modern mainstream cinema (pun only slightly intended), with everything that follows at William Hurt’s gangster-castle serving more as an extended comic denouement than a real final confrontation. It’s here where we see that Cronenberg’s main focus on the dramatic import of the film is the matter of trust– all the savage violence that Tom inflicts on his enemies is secondary to the hurt he inadvertently causes after his duplicity is revealed to his family. It’s something that the book never quite approaches, despite all the careful play with the iconography of secret identities– Tom may be many things over the course of the story, but on page he’s never a stranger to his wife and kids, something the becomes for the movie to such a regard that we even get lamely written speeches about multiple-personalities and born-again syndrome that sound as though they belong in an Incredible Hulk movie. Perhaps there’s a slick kind of synchronicity to that effect– on page Tom is something of a Clark Kent, and in film more of a Bruce Banner, the kind of guy who’s pleasant to friends but you wouldn’t like when he’s angry.
As another appropriation of comic-book iconography it works more or less, though on a much shallower level than the savvy subversion of pop-iconography that Wagner and Locke play with. Their vision of Tom’s secret past as the mysterious Joey is also something that’s dealt with in the book with a characteristically defter hand than the grotesque legend in Olsen’s script of an unrestrained, libidinous gangster who relishes in unprovoked sex and violence to such an extent that he seems less a fully fleshed character and more an abstractly personified representation of the Id. In the graphic novel, we’re treated to an extended flashback which serves to provide the rationale for Joey’s hiding out in the mid-west as Tom, under surprisingly guiltless circumstances, helping a childhood friend exact revenge against the made-men who executed his small-time hood of a brother. Their escalation from petty big-city thievery to full-scale urban warfare is rendered with a strange mixture of childish innocence and cold-blooded efficiency– planning the logistics of their hit with toy soldiers and cars on the living-room floor, and then carrying out their plans wearing Boy Scout uniforms to distract their enemies. Every element helps key back into the games the work as a whole plays with the iconography of American youth and the archetypes of comic-books in general (Superman himself is often labeled “the big blue Boy Scout”), in ways that both help undermine the hollow qualities of the pacifistic American dream at the narrative’s heart and take crucial look at the ways in which even the more mature examples of their chosen medium help to prop those artificial-constructs up.
When Joey and his vendetta-seeking friend seek to purchase a small arsenal of weapons, they seek out a rural arms-dealer who’s drawn as the spitting image of Alan Moore, the long-maned and bearded mad prophet of the comics-page, and one of the men who almost singlehandedly transformed the medium of Western comics from one aimed solely at children to one that produced works that were mostly appropriate only for adults. Wagner himself had something to do with that in his Judge Dredd stories, of course, and in the end his appropriation of the cultural elements of comics helps make the graphic novel telling of A History of Violence something of a treatise on the nature of comics themselves and the effect that they can have on audiences of any age. The film, by building up the idealized American image and focusing on the absurdist elements of its premise, works less as a whole in its efforts to dramatize the corrosive effects of violence on the community and a person’s image of themselves, but at its best moments it at least manages to capture something about the fracturing nature of force and archetypes on the family unit. It is by no means the best, or most incisive work by any of those involved– Wagner’s iconic work for 2000 AD rank as some of the most blisteringly entertaining works of comics-satire ever made, and Cronenberg has obviously gone deeper into this kind of well on his own and come up with far more promising and inventive works, but the results they both secure make the efforts feel at least somewhat worthwhile. Through experimenting in the graphic novel form here, Wagner and his body of work as a whole gains a literary respectability that’s sometimes lacking in the realm of the pure comic-book world, and Cronenberg gained a traction for mainstream success that he hadn’t quite had since they heyday of The Fly. For what they’re worth, both the comics and cinematic versions of A History of Violence at least make an honest attempt to penetrate the wholesome facade of the small-town, mid-western mythos. And though neither gets anywhere near as close as guys like David Lynch have routinely over the years, at least they deliver the same message– a wake-up call to the American dream.
It’s too bad that one of your most impressive essays (a masterpiece in fact) will languish with few responses. Even though I myself am checking in here, I can serve as little more than amazed cheerleader, since I have no background whatsoever with these comics. I think very highly of Cronenberg’s film of course, and particularly admired the way you examine it in this context. With any luck, some others will come here and see some fascinating work. It deserves no less.
A great piece for sure Sam. I marveled at Bob’s work here. Though I don’t agree with him about his criticism of Violence, his essay makes me want to investigate the comic which I have never read ( as I haven’t most of the works in this ignored art form). I wish he would just unleash his long anticipated sci-fi countdown already… even if we all know what would finish at number #1.
Mauriz, the next time we see something, remind me to bring the graphic novel and you can borrow it at your leisure. The film has scenes that still impress me, but they’re surrounded by a lot that weighs it down with a big mainstream sensibility that I can’t excuse as easily as others. Cronenberg and the original work itself are trying to subvert those sensibilities, but the script solidifies a lot of what’s being put into question, ostensibly. If he’d been adapting the work himself, rather than merely adjusting someone else’s screenplay, perhaps the movie would’ve worked in the ways you’ve talked about in more focused terms. As it is, the film’s best moments are where the graphic-novel is presented unabridged more or less, or when Cronenberg is inventing freely on his own (as in the staircase scene, the film’s best moment).
Yeah, I wonder too, the countdown?
Comedy goes first. Dunno when after that.
Sensational piece here BOB!!!!!!
I’m actually quite amazed by this as I didn’t recall the film deriving from a graphic novel. However, this seems to be more and more the trend. Like many a serious film, alot of the best have been taken from comics and its due to their bravery that some of the most lauded film-makers find inspiration for adaptation.
Have you compaired the comics version of ROAD TO PERDITION to the film as well?
Probably worth mentioning that Cronenberg didn’t even know the screenplay was based on a graphic novel until he had finished rewrites of the script–so it’s probably a stretch to say that he found too much inspiration in it–he stated he treated it as an original screenplay since that’s what he assumed it was for so long.
This is one of the problems with the film, for me. In the past, Cronenberg has proven himself a rather adept hand at adapting the work of others. In treating this film as though he were working from an original screenplay and not an adaptation just as things like “Crash”, “Naked Lunch” or “The Fly” were, he denied himself the same chance to go back to the source and work on the material himself, instead of merely supervising Josh Olsen’s rewrites. There’s a few bits here and there that are more original, of course, but by and large the script here feels too mainstream, as though it could’ve been handled by any number of other directors with similar, or at least qualitatively similar results.
That is a very important bit of information Peter. It throws the whole inspiration angle out the window if true. Like Dennis I would like to know about the Road To Perdition comic as well. I knew that the Mendes film was based upon one (which naturally I have never read), but I dare say that the movie is most likely far superior as the Jude Law character was created for it specifically. Not to mention, many of the pleasures of that 2002 picture are derived due to cinematic decisions slightly more than a simple retelling of a script/comic.
For me Bob, Violence is pure Cronenberg. I can’t imagine any other filmmaker creating a similar work than what he ended up with. Perhaps the script follows along the lines of many other neo noirs through the years, but the director surly added his own unique take to the finished product.
Mauriz, the finished product of the film is pure Cronenberg in part– the delivery of the gore, the sexual stuff, the absurdism of the ending– but the bulk of the film really does feel, to me, as though it could be coming from almost any contemporary filmmaker. If anything, I can imagine directors who might’ve come up with more idiosynchratic takes on a lot of the more mainstream sensibilities of the screenplay– Danny Boyle, Michael Mann, even Terry Gilliam I can see doing something like this and playing to their strengths. Again, if he’d been adapting the book the same way he did with guys like Ballard and Burroughs, the end result would be a fair deal more focused, I think. As it stands, the best I can say about the movie is that it feels as though it’s about 1/3 pure Cronenberg, and 2/3 mainstream. The stuff with the teenage son, especially, has a rather woefully generic feel to it, as though it could’ve been ripped from the pages of a teenager soap-opera TV script.
I’m doing “Road to Perdition” for next week, but suffice to say I think that it’s an underrated effort in comparison to the movie. The artwork, in particular, is rather stunning for pure black-and-white inkwork.
Maurizio, I’m sure this will be discussed a lot more next week, but you should really read the Perdition comic, which I think is a much, much better than the movie (which honestly doesn’t strike me as cinematic at all–I only stick around for the acting).
Peter–
I did send you an e mail, but I’m wondering if that gmail address has since been replaced with another that you may have sent be since.
Danny Boyle? Really?
I actually finished this essay with the impression you liked the film more than I thought you did. I really didn’t like it at all, and I haven’t read the comic so I can make no comparison. The suburban scenes felt both false and insufficiently archetypal (perhaps insufficiently archetypal because they are so bland – Rockwell illustrations are full of detail and conviction, whereas all the stereotypical scenes in the movie are, as you say, ripped from the pages of a teenager soap-opera TV script). Worse, the gangster element – which was supposed to subvert the false dream of Americana – was even phonier and more cliched than the rest; it felt like a cartoon intervening in a semi-realistic world, rather than a violent reality intervening in a fantasy.
There were two great scenes in the movie: the long, drawn-out opening and the brilliant sex scene. The rest was gratingly artificial and empty – like so many other 00s movies (it’s almost as if good directors think they have to enter this mode to be aesthetically up-to-date). The ending, with the anxious, distraught family sitting around the dinner table had potential, and could have been great if it was earned – if it hadn’t followed two hours of unconvincing drama, thin characterizations, and tepid situations and elements. Everything felt one-dimensional.
I haven’t seen the film since it came out, but I retain a very strong sense of distaste from that first viewing. Along with Mystic River, Sin City, and King Kong it stands as a barometer for me of what was wrong with the past decade of movies.
Also, you mention Lynch – the difference between Cronenberg’s take on the all-American small town/suburbs and Lynch’s or Spielberg’s in their own outside-forces-intervene-everyday-domesticity scenarios is that they seem invested in what they are subverting, which raises the stakes, whereas Cronenberg never seems to believe in it at all. Like American Beauty and a lot of other dark-side-of-suburbia pictures, then, History of Violence sets up a straw man to knock down and eliminates any pathos it could have had. I don’t think you can do real subversion with a smirk – you have to feel the horror and want to believe the illusion, even if you can’t. My understanding is that he presents himself as sincere in discussions of the movie (people who’ve heard him speak after screenings of HoV have told me he expresses a Lynchlike surprise at others’ perception of irony) but boy does it not come across onscreen.
I think that’s actually a great point. I like the film more than you, but there does seem to be a bit too much glee in “subverting” here. I’m more convinced by people like Lynch, Spielberg, Ford, or Hitchcock, whose sensibilities seem more sympathetic to the initial communities they create. (Heck, Stephen King is good at that, too.) There’s a real tension between the ideal and the reality, and you generally don’t feel the ideal is being trashed so much as questioned and perhaps broken by reality.
What’s also really odd is how, on the commentary, Cronenberg seems genuinely sincere about all the stuff in the early portions, even sounding self-defensive about it at times. Maybe it’s just easier for us jaded audience-members to react to it as though it’s a joke, and maybe he’s just not as adept at this kind of suburban-satire to pull it off quite as much, but you’re right, Joel, that a big part of the reason it doesn’t work is that we never really get a genuine, personal perspective of what makes the suburban everyday so quaint and ideal in the first place. All we ever get are these little overly romanticized tableaux, the cinematic equivalent of platitudes, that can’t really be taken seriously. What’s nice about Lynch and Spielberg is that they create genuinely amusing and surprising little subruban scenes that poke a little gentle fun at it while also making it feel real and lived in– I’m thinking of the blind salesmen in “Blue Velvet”, the whole town of oddballs in “Twin Peaks” (it also helps that Cooper, the out-of-towener, is the biggest and most lovable oddball of them all), or all the much-ado over train sets and goofy golf from “Close Encounter”. Even other guys who get accused of nostalgia in their stuff– like Lucas in “American Graffiti” and especially Capra in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, manage to subvert the ideal image in a more genuine and honest way than is done here. Hell, even Rockwell had a bit of that in him, when the magazines would let him.
I’ll give Cronenberg the benefit of the doubt and continue to think that this stuff all might’ve been ironed out if he’d taken a fresh crack at adapting the original graphic novel himself into a screenplay, instead of merely accepting Josh Olsen’s drafts with a little polish here and there on the side. Then again, all his best stuff really repreents an urban perspective, mroe than the suburban one, so maybe it’s just a problem with where he’s coming from, in general (that only makes it more frustrating that he doesn’t tackle the big-city portions of the original book– seriously, Boy Scouts with gas-masks and Uzis is cool stuff).
“Scenes felt both false and insufficiently archetypal”
“Worse, the gangster element – which was supposed to subvert the false dream of Americana-was even phonier and more cliched than the rest; it felt like a cartoon intervening in a semi-realistic world”
“The rest was gratingly artificial and empty”
Damn Joel for someone who loves Godard so much I’m shocked these elements bothered you
Ha, I can’t say I see the similarity – Godard’s films are inextricably bound up in the real world, one might almost say against his will since he seemed incapable of doing the “movie-movie” thing that he kind of wished he could with a soundstage and big budget. He couldn’t filter out reality even if he wanted to. Hence he never had the problem Cronenberg does with History of Violence, where he is able to, and does, create a completely artificial world. Which I think is a mistake…
In Godard’s 60′s films, the artifice is in plain sight, because he’s not even bothering to dress up the settings with any kind of cinematic fantasy. A perfect example is “Alphaville”, where he’s just letting contemporary Paris stand in for a Paris of the future, and not doing anything to make it look futuristic. The pastiche elements stand out, and their phoniness has a purposeful register. With Cronenberg, he and Suschitzky are framing and lighting the “reality” with a big expressionist calibre, so it’s phoniness on top of phoniness.
My, how the subjective mind plays tricks on us all. If Breathless doesn’t reside in a completely artificial world than I’m papa smurf.
Breathless is not my favorite Godard – in fact it’s one where I think the playacting gestures come off as a bit forced and unconvincing – but the parts of it I respond to most aren’t artificial at all, particularly the long conversation between Belmondo and Seberg.
Besides, how can you say it exists in an artificial world when every second of it has reality streaming in – from the passerby staring at the camera, to the cuts and movements puncturing the illusion, to the mixture of documentary and narrative techniques. You can criticize Godard for lacking discipline or focus if you like (he himself said he set out to make Scarface, and wound up with Alice in Wonderland) but to accuse him of establishing a completely artificial world seems strange. Frankly, he wasn’t capable of doing that under the circumstances or given his own working methods, even if he had wanted to. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but about a million miles from History of Violence, whose problem is that it is TOO papered over so that not the slightest fragment of reality can penetrate its cocoon. Since it seems to attempt some sort of narrative in which reality violently cuts through an illusion, that’s an issue. The illusion is not very believable to begin with, and the reality that cuts through is even worse.
It takes place in a real world. It’s just the characters and the events that are artificial. It’s the difference between, say, watching LOTR with all its pageantry and effects, and watching a bunch of LARPers play pretend in the woods (that could be a scene from a modern version of “Week End”…).
This is a fantastic article, Bob. It’s written the way I wish I could write.
I thought the film was pretty brilliant, and only read the comic afterwards. I read through it pretty fast since it was pretty much the same story as the film and didn’t seem to add anything else to the story. I thought the movie a lot better then the book, but you have convinced me to go back and take a second look.
Personally, what I liked best about the film was the way it became a psychological study of the effects of the violence and revelations on the family unit. I was, unlike you, charmed by the small-town trappings. I’m from small-town Indiana, and while my family doesn’t look quite like the one depicted here, certain family dynamics (*not* the sex scenes) and details of the setting seemed powerfully familiar. I knew it all had to end, but I really didn’t want it to. The fact that the whole story is so much about a subversion of this wholesome small-town myth is really the aspect of the story I like least. Why does pleasant rural Americana *have* to have a dark, violent underbelly? It seems to be a really common theme in movies in a way that has become cynical, annoying, and often willfully obtuse. Nevertheless, this movie works, and works well, on the backs of its performances and the way we feel the confusion and fear and disturbing undercurrents slowly pulling the family apart. I actually kind of wish the film had had a different title and had worked harder to conceal the fact of Tom’s past, because while it isn’t the point that it has a twist, the ambiguity would still have been good to exploit for stronger thematic exploration.
“the romantic ideal of the small-town setting as a kind of bygone era you’d have thought, or at least hoped, the country had outgrown its nostalgia for. ” I don’t see what’s so awful about this nostalgia–I kind of hope the country *doesn’t* ever grow out of it. There are certain virtues to this image that the postmodern city-life is simply foreign to, and I think it would be a shame to get rid of it.
The only other Cronenberg film I’ve seen is Eastern Promises, so I can’t really judge this based on his style. I would say–don’t knock the film based on Lynch’s superior resistance to nostalgia: Lynch’s The Straight Story is a wonderful piece of Americana, told with absolute sincerity.
Good point, Stephen. Though you may be coming at it from a more conservative angle, I think the big city/small town divide is often misrepresented as blue vs. red (and hence ripe for subversion from urban, sophisticated writers or artists). Corporate values are big-city values, and urban centers facilitate atomization and alienation – they certainly don’t incline one towards humility before nature or respect for a diverse community – yes, city life is supposed to be cosmopolitan but in my experience everyone just fragments into their little self-contained group; I interacted with a more widespread, differentiated set of people growing up in a small town than I did as an adult in the city. Cities have their benefit; I think I’ll certainly be orientated towards them for some time – but they also foster a sort of blinkered thinking which misses the bigger picture. History of Violence could have been complex and compelling if it saw the infiltration of the city into the country as something genuinely tragic or disturbing (as well as exciting and invigorating – it shouldn’t be all one thing or the other) instead of just regarding with a rather complacent smirk.
The only other Cronenberg film you’ve seen is “Eastern Promises”? Really? That’s a shame, and though a few others here would argue otherwise, I’d say it gives you the least possible idea of what he’s like as a director. Not even a fraction of his potential, just barely a decimal of the farthest reach from the period. It’s sad to think that back in the heyday of stuff like “Videodrome” and “The Fly” that he was impressive enough to become an adjective in the same register as Hitchcock, but that nowadays he can become known merely as “The Director of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises“.
Well personally I’ve seen all four and his latter two are far superior.
At best, I find “History” and “Promises” to be fair noirs, but not much else. “Videodrome” and “The Fly” don’t represent him at the apex of his technical or dramatic craft as a director– he certainly has grown more polished over the years– but if anything I prefer the raw quality in his talent there. They’re some of the most visceral and intellectual films (an odd combination, that) of the sci-fi genre, or just about any other.
Yeah, only those two so far, sorry. He is on my list, though! I’m only 22, I’ve only had 4-5 years to catch up with his freaky-deaky early stuff, and I’ve been focused on other people so far.
Oh, and I look forward to the Road to Perdition post with great interest. I think the graphic novel there is actually better than the movie. At least, it’s a better example of its medium than the movie: I think Mendes’ film looks beautiful and has a couple good supporting performances, but unlike Cronenberg here or Scorsese or Peckinpah or other classic ’70s directors, Mendes doesn’t have the guts to really bring out the ambiguities and moral complexities in the story and ends up with a movie that feels wimpy and sentimental when it’s about gangsters and murder, and consequently morally dubious. The comic, on the other hand, may be even more romantic about gangsters, but because it embraces this totally, it seems to live in a chivalrous, mythical world where this kind of thing is allowed, and the moral questions never seem to come up. (Possibly because it was inspired by the Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub, about samurai.) I don’t think the comic is brilliant, but for a comic it is very good, with remarkable art and a thrilling tale that doesn’t try to do more than it needs to.
Sigh…. but the movie is told from the perspective of a kid. I think the sentimental angle was the desired intent. This is a character looking back at his father and trying to make sense of that specific moment in time. There is less moral ambiguity because the son sees a side of his dad the rest of us can’t. To him, his vicious father is not some evil gangster like the rest of society would see him. This seems to be what Mendes is going for throughout the picture. Your reservations are understandable, but I don’t think they are accurate.
I’ll keep my comments on these two mostly for my next piece, but suffice to say that the book is even more from the kid’s perspective, and the exacting vision there makes the combination of realism and melodrama really potent in a way that the film doesn’t really aim for. But again, next week.
Well, I went back and read the graphic novel again and watched a few scenes from the movie on YouTube, so my opinion is revised somewhat.
First off, I agree that the book is fantastic, the art is much better than I remembered, and there is a real sense of menace created all the way through. Definitely one of the better crime comics I’ve read. But on reflection, I like the plot changes of the movie better, they seem to investigate the most interesting themes of the story in a much more in-depth and successful way.
In the comic, Tom’s back-story is exciting but not nearly as dark or shameful as that of the movie Tom. Movie-Tom’s past may be legendarily evil in an slightly over-the-top way, but it also holds a great deal of real guilt and shame there. There is a dichotomy between Joey and Tom, between who he is and who he wishes he could be, that just isn’t there in the book, where he’s really only scared about reprisals from the gangsters he ripped off (sure he feels a little guilt for his friend, but I never found that very compelling). It also leaves open the question of why he’s so good at killing people when he really only had one experience of doing it before as a teenager. The dynamics with his family and their difficulty with taking this news are also not very well exploited–the wife especially seems extremely passive in the book compared with Maria Bello’s tremendous, sexy, sympathetic performance in the movie. I also thought the small-town cliches of the book were much more blatant than in the movie–as you point out, this is probably on purpose, but it didn’t strike me as clever satire so much as awkward hokum.
Finally, I really didn’t like part of the ending of the book. [COMIC SPOILERS] The idea that Richie would be kept alive and tortured like that for 20 years is just gross and kind of ridiculous, the type of over-the-top pulp wackiness that comic books can specialize in, but that this particular book had done such a good job of avoiding up to this point. I suppose it was supposed to symbolize something about the past never being dead, but instead it just came off unbelievable, kind of silly, and gruesome for gruesomeness’ sake. And it was weird that the cops were so understanding about Tom’s killing sprees.
So yeah: Liked the comic, still think the movie’s better. Both have their flaws, both are worth checking out.
StephenM, I began writing a long response on my phone, but damned if those touch-screens are something of a nightmare to navigate when you want to write something more substantial than a tweet. My way of saying that this comment of yours is insightful as to how both the book and the film work, and that I’ve been itching to put together a proper reply to it for the better part of a couple of hours.
Anyway. I would say that between the film and the comic there’s a happy medium between which the disparate qualities of both work together, and I’m a little hopeful, perhaps, in liking to think that we might’ve gotten something akin to this “best of both worlds” scenario if Cronenberg had adapted the book himself, instead of merely making tailor-adjustments to Josh Olsen’s drafts. Suffice to say– yes, the various side-characters are for the most part deeper in the film, with the family benefiting especially. Maria Bello fleshes out the wife nicely, especially as she comes into starker and stronger conflict with Tom than she ever approaches in the book. I’m not fond of the son’s portrayal in the film, but he’s a tiny bit more developed than in the book, where he’s really nothing more than a kid who wears a baseball cap backwards. Some of the cops are sharper tacks in the book, but aren’t really terribly interesting, and don’t have the charm of the somewhat slower witted sheriff of the film.
Now. I do think that the one-dimensional qualities of some of these characters, in the book, is part of a key to the pastiche-parody that Wagner is writing. Remember, this is the guy who gave us “Judge Dredd” (more on that in a bit), so all of the thinner elements arrive to my eyes with the same kind of bitter sense of humor. Wagner pulls off the instinct to make a joke out of middle America far, far better than Cronenberg does, where most of the jokes feel rather hackneyed and insincere, which is especially telling when you consider his stance of trying to make a genuine piece of Americana, in parts, rather than a Lynchian satire of it. Wagner goes for the joke more often, and populates the book with a lot of thin, stereotype characters, but it all feels more real and emotional at times than the film– for me, at least. Cronenberg obviously doesn’t really know how to balance the tones quite that well here, with the small-town setting. His gangsters work a little better for being completely over the top and ridiculous– from Ed Harris’ Chicago-accent-with-a-dead-eye to William Hurtz’s scenery-chewing show stealer at the end, they’re all a bunch of despots that would make Pozzo seem tame by comparison.
Then there’s Tom backstory as Joey– in the book, it has a nicely passive quality to it, as though he’s merely observing Richie’s revenge instead of taking part in it. He turns out to be not that dissimilar from other literary passive-protagonists like the narrators of “The Great Gatsby” or “Fight Club”– a foil to another character’s epic traits, someone for us to identify with. The fact that the backstory itself feels like something of a mashup between “Goodfellas” (for the gangland aspirations) and “Sleepers” (for the childish quality of the plot gone wrong) emphasizes the somewhat derivative quality of the whole backstory idea in general– the movie does well to leave it a blank spot rather than defining it too well, leaving it up to our imagination. However, the grotesque hints we get at times make it feel a little implausible that their “Joey” could ever become the film’s “Tom”, even if you take into account the possibility of botched tones and identity-crises jokes at play. It just becomes another layer that makes the film hard to take seriously, along with his near superhuman ability to beat people to a bloody pulp.
I do much prefer the book’s Tom, on the whole. I love how indignant he gets about his position as a good, upstanding citizen, even as he hides a sordid history of crime, murder and betrayal. That self-righteousness, paired with his Clark Kent appearance and his adherence to going to the cops in the early portions of the story, help make the book more than anything a kind of extended joke on the whole notion of civic virtues in general. Again, coming from the creator of “Judge Dredd”, this stands out in a starker relief– in one story, “The Law” is despotically powerful and aggressive, while in the other it’s so impotent that it requires a man to go “Straw Dogs” on enemies just to keep his family safe. In that regard, maybe the biggest mistake that the book makes is making it so much about the backstory in the first place– Tom becomes less interesting to me when they talk about him as “Joey” in either story. The whole “Joey” thing feels less of a developed concept of its own, and really more of an excuse to string together the action sequences and notions of violence surrounding them. As such, whether or not the Richie denouement of the book lives up to its potential or seems somewhat over-the-top doesn’t faze me that much.