We will not call upon the author to explain: Bart Beaty's history of A History of Violence heeds each of the film's brilliant disguises

Would you trust this man to explain his movies to you?

For my money, there are precious few filmmakers working in the popular genres these days whose movies reward repeat viewing with the same sort of intellectual/imaginative force as David Cronenberg’s. Even among those Cronenberg movies that initially strike the viewer as his weakest—perhaps especially those ones—there always lurks the promise of some rich, implied proposition, some biological, ontological, biographical or psychological notion coded to varying degrees in the many fleshy layers of filmic tissue. Crucially, these layers rarely trumpet their own significance in Cronenberg’s films but are left to be gleaned by us in our individual ways. His characters, like Cronenberg himself, are frequently articulate, yet they don’t have any privileged understanding of the full consequence of the story they’re traversing—as protagonists in good genre fare should be, they’re too busy dealing with what’s immediately at hand to give speeches explaining the movie’s themes to us.

By the same token, it is arguably precarious to invest too much authority in Cronenberg’s own statements about his work, which can be found in countless, imminently readable, often fascinating interviews—see Chris Rodley’s superb career-spanning book of conversations Cronenberg on Cronenberg for a full feast of them—and, more recently, audio commentaries. Martin Scorsese, Cronenberg’s nearly exact contemporary and an unabashed, vocal admirer, once said something to the effect of Cronenberg not knowing what his movies are about, and I think he has a good point. Cronenberg’s comments on his movies are always smart, often insightful, sometimes very witty—he’s memorably dubbed The Brood his version of Kramer vs. Kramer—but he himself is insistent on the intuitive nature of his creative work, stating that “understanding” his movies is for him a process that begins exclusively in the wake of a project’s completion. He’s an unusual artist in that he at once resists analysis and is so very compelling an analyst.

For this reason, the real lynchpin in the thesis of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (University of Toronto Press, $16.95), Bart Beaty’s captivating new monograph on the eponymous, widely acclaimed 2005 film, is Beaty’s overt skepticism regarding Cronenberg’s public statements about his work. This questioning is an elegant extension of Beaty’s thoughts on A History of Violence as a whole, a movie of proliferate disguises in which Cronenberg’s directorial role can be seen as yet one more form of clever misdirection. As Beaty states in the book’s introduction:

“The very foundation of A History of Violence is a network of lies… Nothing here is what it seems, and all evidence points to the fact that the filmmakers are playing games when they talk about the movie. The concept of masquerade, of pretending to be something that one is not, has a long and close affinity with filmmaking, precisely because actors put on roles. Yet in A History of Violence, I would suggest, it is also Cronenberg who is playing a role: the Hollywood filmmaker.”

Indeed, the “Hollywoodness” of Cronenberg’s recent return to commercial cred after 20 years in the art house ghetto is embedded into its every intuitive/reflexive brushstroke, making it easily the most cinematically referential work in the director’s oeuvre, a movie which consistently dances between embracing and subverting filmgoers’ expectations, generating power through its always ambiguous relationship to tradition, genre and spectacle.

When I spoke with Cronenberg for Vue Weekly upon the release of Spider back in 2002, we mainly discussed his literary influences—his beloved Nabokov, and of course William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, novelists whose work he’s adapted—while he made virtually no mention of cinematic ones. Even when he mentioned Luis Buñuel, it was to cite the great Surrealist director’s memoir, not his movies. How interesting then to see in A History of Violence a movie so soaked in the history of cinema, and not art cinema, but the classical genres.

Beaty, following a great deal of critical groundwork, emphasizes throughout his book that A History of Violence is very much a genre hybrid, assuming the guise of the western, the thriller, the bully movie or serial killer movie, for as long as it serves a purpose before discarding it, usually in a dynamic, engaging, even shocking manner. I think his point is astute, yet the way Beaty arrives at his conclusion requires the reader to generalize genres to sometimes problematic degrees, like when Beaty defines the western as “the most triumphalist of genres” equating “technical proficiency with a weapon with moral superiority, justice, and righteousness.” Speaking of the western in such simplistic terms only holds water if we ignore the last 60 years or so of movies—more than half the medium’s lifespan. Westerns have been “revisionist” or dismissive of its own myths at least as far back as The Gunfighter (1950).

Likewise Beaty lists several reasons why A History of Violence isn’t a film noir, the lack of urban setting, femme fatale, expressionistic lighting and such, but besides the fact that many of the most iconic noirs also lack these same ingredients—Border Incident (49), with its rural setting, Born to Kill (47), with its homme fatale—I don’t think anyone has ever made a convincing case for noir as a genre in the first place. Crime dramas and thrillers are genres, whereas noir is alternately best labeled a style or cycle. And Cronenberg’s film, in all its ambiguity, subversion and self-consciousness, is perhaps quintessentially noir, or more precisely neo-noir.

Anyway, my nitpicking is if anything a testament to just how solid Beaty’s book is. Not once in its entirety does he survey any single established idea about what A History of Violence is really all about—especially where its thorny political subtexts are concerned—and simply accept it at face value. His a restlessly inquisitive critical mind, driven by some real passion for the possibilities of movies. Light on jargon, heavy on analysis and—especially considering that this is the product of an academic press—shot through with a real sense of voice, Beaty’s provocative take on our country’s most provocative mainstream director is pretty much exactly the sort of writing on movies we can always use more of.

The sublime, the sanguine, and the verbose: three classic Fox westerns ride into town

Though only 35-years-old, Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck), the notorious killer with the unmatched quickdraw, seems to have outgrown what could be regarded as normal mortal existence. As he moves from town to town, an unassuming, solitary figure, his appearances are treated as apparitions. Hardly anyone actually sees Ringo, who is of course just an ordinary man. Rather, their eyes are betrayed by the grandiose abstraction of legend, blinded by the presence of some force they’re only heard of: a hero, a demon, a scapegoat, a target for every young punk looking to make a name for himself in the anarchy of the uncivilized West. But Ringo is preternaturally weary of this role and its trappings. He craves anonymity and domesticity. No longer wanting to live as a ghost, he explains, “I just want to be somewhere.”

The Gunfighter (1950), directed by Henry King, has been called the first adult western. It is indeed about the desires fostered by experience rather than innocence, and features an impressive line-up of characters that are each imbued with shadows, disappointments and inner conflicts, such as Marshall Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), the guardian of Cayenne, the town that flies into a frenzy of excitement when Ringo arrives to arrange a secret rendezvous with the family he abandoned years ago. Strett says little, and his features give away even less, but his explanation as to how he gave up outlawry is pointed and brutal, something about a little girl slain by accident. In many regards, this film can be seen as a natural precursor to Unforgiven (92).

But the gloomy nature of these attributes should not overshadow the fact that The Gunfighter is also immensely charming, suspenseful and beautifully crafted, most especially by Arthur Miller, the talented cinematographer whose prolific body of work includes How Green Was My Valley (41), Gentleman’s Agreement (47) and Whirlpool (49). Miller’s roaming camera continually gives us such a rich, layered sense of space, whether that space is the inside of a barroom, the main street of a frontier town, or a windswept mesa. He finds an ideal collaborator in the mustachioed visage of Peck, whose performance here is elegantly measured and genuinely tragic.

Something closer to pure genre entertainment can be found in Henry Hathaway’s Rawhide (51), about a desert stopover for the US mail service being laid siege by a quartet of bandits. Following the murder of its senior keep, the fate of the stopover, and of the valuable cargo coming its way, is left in the hands of the very green young Tom Owen (Tyrone Power) and the by contrast tough, determined and big-haired Vinnie Holt (Susan Hayward), a young, unaccompanied waiting for transport with her niece in tow. Power was clearly too old for the role but his youthfulness goes a long way to correcting this, while Hayward, with her immaculate poker face, is perfectly cast as a guarded, highly capable woman of unflaunted inner fortitude. Stealing the show however is googly-eyed character actor Jack Elam as the lecherous, naïve and finally sadistic criminal Tevis, whose nadir of bad behaviour finds him taking potshots at a toddler. Fun stuff. 

When their California-bound ship falls into disrepair along the Mexican coast, gold-seekers Hooker (Gary Cooper), Fiske (Richard Widmark) and Daly (Cameron Mitchell), virtual strangers to one and other, amble into sleepy Puerto Miguel in the thick of siesta, the only locals on view being a barkeep, a few guys with moustaches and big hats, and a kittenish Rita Moreno purring out ‘La Negra Noche’ to the stirrings of a quiet guitar. The heat-addled calm is broken by the arrival of Leah Fuller (Hayward, again playing the tough cookie, with big, tough-looking hair), desperately searching for able bodies to accompany her on a long journey into the forbidding Apache-controlled territory where her husband lies, perhaps dying, in a collapsed mine. As much for something to do as for the hefty reward promised, the gringo soldiers of fortune take the bait, along with a good-hearted Mexican named Vicente (Victor Manuel Mendoza).

Also directed by Hathaway, Garden of Evil (54) is neither the sanguine good time of Rawhide nor the iconoclastic character-driven drama of The Gunfighter. Talky, decidedly unhurried and in its way weirdly mysterious, it strikes me as a story that, whatever its intentions might have been, above all concerns the unknowability of others. The set-up feels essentially random, recalling The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (48) but lacking that films focused, delirious greed and moral perdition. The deeper motivations of Hayward’s secretive character remain obscure, and trust is an ongoing issue for all, with characters swerving from redemption back to selfishness, and only Cooper’s wizened leader seems led by the best intentions at the best of times.

Shot in colour and Cinemascope, the film’s desert expanses and decrepit haciendas are wondrously spectacular, and the narrative thread never less than compelling despite its lack of urgency. It doesn’t hurt that Widmark especially is so watchable in the role most burdened with dialogue, nor that the pacing is marvelously anchored by Bernard Herrmann’s typically portentous, darting score. In a welcome departure from the norm, the audio commentary on Fox’s disc from Nick Redman, John Morgan, Steven Smith and William Stromberg focuses almost exclusively on Herrmann’s contribution and process and on the role of the composer in both classic and contemporary movies in general.