A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE: DEFENDING EDIE STALL By Joel Johnson

For another POV see * THOUGHTS ON CRONENBERG’S A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE By Laurie Meunier Graves

Welcome to Wolf Moon Press Journal’s “tale of two critics.” Over the years, Wolf Moon’s editor Laurie Meunier Graves  and I have shared and compared opinions about many movies. While we have frequently agreed (or perhaps, mostly agreed) about particular films, we have also occasionally disagreed (sometimes quite emphatically), which readers of our MIFF reviews have probably noted. While we have often toyed with the idea of sharing our disagreements with the Wolf Moon Press Journal readership, we had never found the right film (or the wrong one for at least one of us) that generated within us both divergent opinions held with sufficient ferocity. Enter David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.

Graves has titled her article “Still Sexist After All These Years” and makes the case that the film—like the Hurricane Katrina disaster showing that racism and socioeconomic class still go hand in hand in determining one’s fate—shows how sexism has not been eliminated from our society. It is likely that sexism will never be totally eliminated from our consciousness because at its root, sexism is an awareness of the difference between the two genders. Since both boys and girls find misattribution of their gender to be offensive as a nullification of their nascent sense of self, distinguishing between the genders is likely to persist in perpetuity. However, Graves argues with considerable passion that the film is full of chauvinistic material that demeans the film’s primary female character Edie Stall (Maria Bello).

A History of Violence is based on a graphic novel by John Warner and Vince Locke. Graphic novels are increasingly source material for films like the popular Sin City, based on graphic novels by Frank Miller. In A History of Violence, instead of capturing a stylized noirish decadent 1940s metropolis, the setting is a contemporary Midwestern small town. This community represents the heartland of traditional apple pie American values. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is the owner-operator of that essential community institution: the local diner. Tom has a beautiful wife Edie, and they have two children. Jack (Ashton Holmes) is a high school student, and Sarah (Heidi Hayes) is in grade school. The blot on this peaceful landscape is the presence of schoolyard bullies—personified by Kyle Schmid’s Bobby Jordan.

Bobby is one of a series of the film’s examples of the nature of evil and its view of violence. Evil is implacable and primarily motivated by the desire to hurt and destroy other people. Violence is the means to both accomplish that and prevent it. The film opens with two men checking out of a motel in Anywhere, USA. After one kills (off-screen) the desk clerk and chambermaid, the second goes back to retrieve water and cold-bloodedly kills a little girl. It is a quintessential scene to show this view. It is the arrival of these two lowlifes that exposes mild-mannered Tom Stall as having the daring and skill to protect his friends and his business from vicious men who live by the gun. His remarkable heroism, of course, brings unwelcome attention from the media. This makes him known to those from his past and begins to peel away his Midwestern life to disclose his history of violence.

While this view of evil and violence has some currency in our post-9/11 world in which danger is represented by faceless terrorists who are willing to indiscriminately kill others as they kill themselves, it dangerously simplifies at the same time that it dehumanizes and demonizes others. In Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, McNamara cited empathizing with your opponent as lesson number one that he had learned from his time in public life. Understanding what your opponent needs can be crucial to succeeding in and surviving the conflict. Losing sight of the humanity of others is dangerous. Yet graphic novels are much better at showing what a character did than in revealing why he or she did it. I suspect that the readership for graphic novels expects violent content and doesn’t need a lot of analysis of the reasons for it. However, the two-dimensionality of the medium results in unmotivated (or insufficiently motivated) violence. This does carryover to the film.

What Cronenberg has accomplished—despite somewhat limited source material—is to allow the actors to create three-dimensional characters. Viggo Mortensen’s character is fully human. He cares about his wife, his family, his friends, and his community. He has done things for which he is not proud. Despite providing ample justification for each killing, the onus is on how did he become so good at killing, how does this affect him, and how will this affect his American Dream family. Cronenberg does this by not shying away from the reality of violent death. These are visuals that repel us even as we, the audience, are complicit in the act of killing. We see blood, we see horrendous wounds, and we see life ebbing from another human being. Awareness of the moral consequences of violence is absent from most action films. There is no concern in War of the Worlds for everyman Tom Cruise killing Tim Robbins’s character, despite the fact that the motivation for it is immediately undone by fleeing the cellar where they were holed up—Cruise could have done that without the killing.

Maria Bello creates a fully human woman for the film. She just doesn’t happen to be the kind of woman that Graves would like her to be. She is said to be an attorney, and Graves is correct that we see little to support that. She doesn’t dress like she is going to court, and we certainly don’t see her working at her law office or in court. The film, however, is not about Edie Stall, small-town attorney. We do see a woman who loves her husband and is fiercely protective of her family. She promptly summons the sheriff and seeks a protection order against the menacing Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) and his cronies. These certainly suggest a familiarity with the mechanics of the law that your average housewife might not have. She is willing to face down Fogarty but accepts that whatever the truth about her husband is, Fogarty truly believes him to be a former criminal associate. She calmly intervenes, suggesting to the sheriff that certain questions need not be asked. It is this complicity with concealing Tom Stall’s past that leads to the film’s most explosive scene.

The R-rating conferred on the film comes with a warning for graphic sexuality and nudity in addition to strong brutal violence, language, and some drug use. There are two sex scenes. Both are quite graphic and, in different ways, shocking. The first is a playful scene in which Edie dresses as a cheerleader to fulfill a fantasy—though it is not clear that this is her husband’s fantasy. While porn (as invoked by Graves) is full of similar types of fantasies, I suspect that many average couples may occasionally indulge in role-playing for fantasy sex-play. The mind is our most powerful sexual organ. Is Edie’s choice to enact this fantasy demeaning? This has, inevitably, an “eye of the beholder” answer. However, I don’t think there is anything in the portrayal of the character that makes this demeaning behavior in her own eyes. The shocking aspect to the scene is that it continues well beyond the point where most other similar scenes have turned away and focused on next morning’s eggs. The second scene is the explosive one and represents a very complex set of emotions. There is self-loathing, fear, revulsion, anxiety, anger, desire, and, in its waning moments, tenderness. The scene begins with the harsh words of an argument. Edie tries to run away, but Tom wants her to listen to him. He grabs her foot as she goes up the stairs, and she lashes out at him. They wrestle and he grabs her throat. Eventually, he finds himself between her legs. As if recognizing the incongruously sexual posture that their violent interaction has created, Tom seeks to pull away. It is then that Edie kisses him and changes the activity to a sexual encounter. The raw, conflicted emotions persist throughout the scene, and the sex can only be described as rough. Again, the camera does not look away. The only tenderness comes with his kisses just before she leaves him on the stairs. Whatever one calls what has transpired between them, Edie retains her spirit and is not submissive. It is Tom who spends the night sleeping on the couch. The entire scene is a tour de force of frightfully mixed emotions. I can’t say I’ve experienced any sexual encounter that began as a fight, but I believe they can, and certainly scenes like this have been a staple in cinema. The famous love scene in Gone With the Wind where Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs comes at the end of a violent argument.

Graves quotes John Berger: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at….The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object.” There’s probably a very impressive psychological research literature that addresses the role of perception, self-perception, and perception of being perceived by others in developing self-image and sex differences therein. How men perceive a woman is not inconsequential to a woman’s perception of herself, but I suspect that describing women as just internalizing male regard is simply not true. I will use a film as my evidence. In The Beauty Academy of Kabul, Afghan women were punished by husbands, fathers, brothers, and wider society for appearing too sexually alluring, yet the women still wanted to appear beautiful. This desire to look good and its relationship to self-esteem has to be innate—not based exclusively on how someone in the opposite sex views the person. It would seem perhaps even more demeaning to women to suggest that they have no ownership of their own perception of themselves as it is to say that women are viewed superficially by men.

A History of Violence is a good film, though not without its flaws. The story of good confronting evil is simplistic. Many of the characters have no more than two dimensions. Some scenes ring truer than others. Many viewers will find either the sex or the violence or both as being more graphic than desired. We don’t have a backstory. One suspects that an even more interesting story might be the transformation of Joey Cusack into Tom Stall. The one scene where we might get a glimpse of that process is cut short without revealing the secret. What we have is the story of how Joey Cusack allows Tom Stall to stay Tom Stall. Yet I feel that both Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello have delivered terrific performances. Their portrayal of an ordinary couple confronting an extraordinary situation is what makes the film work. Maria Bello has no need to apologize for Edie Stall.
 

 

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