"A History Of Violence" : The Emerging Role of Special Effects Violence in the Composition of Transcendental Film

“Never assume the enemy will not come; rather rely on one’s readiness to meet him. Never presume he will not attack, but rather make oneself invincible.”
-Sun Tzu The Art of War, 114

“All armed prophets conquer; all unarmed prophets come to ruin.”
-Machiavelli The Prince, 24

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The debate between realist and formalist filmmakers over the function and duty of film as an art is rapidly becoming obsolete. This is not because one side has triumphed over the other, but rather because the world itself has moved on. Advanced technologies, particularly advances in computers and prosthetics, now allow filmmakers to create a reality that is indistinguishable from the world outside the movie screen. The realms of special effects (SFX) and make-up effects (MFX) are now not only used in action thrillers that span galaxies, but can be found in many films in which no aliens come to steal our brains or no army comes to bloody our streets. A film that is set in small town Michigan can be shot in Canada and on a sound stage in Los Angeles and no one in the audience is the wiser. Furthermore, violence can now be depicted in disturbingly realistic fashion, or in hyperbolic extravaganzas that bend the laws of physics and anatomy while completely fooling the eye of the beholder. The ramifications of this evolution in the technology of filmmaking ripple across all styles of film. The style which may benefit the most from the technological advances of SFX and MFX is the “transcendental style” as described by Paul Schrader in his book Transcendental Style in Film, and Michael Bird in his article “Film as Hierophany.” While these works expertly outline the style itself, they do not delve completely into the possibilities now open to transcendental style films due to advances in believable effects technologies. The proof of the ability of special and make-up effects to express the transcendent is found in the realism of the surreal situation that composes the plot and action of David Cronenberg’s film A History of Violence (2005).

Tucked in the ending of his book on transcendental style is Paul Schrader’s discussion of the failure of special effects in religious films to adequately convey the transcendental. As an example he uses Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). He condemns the special effects, using as his example the giving of the ten commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai, as “chicanery.” “After some premonitory thundering,” Schrader writes, “God literally pitches the commandments, one by one, onto the screen and the awaiting blank tablets. The commandments first appear as small whirling fireballs accompanied by the sound of a rushing wind, and then quickly – building in size all the while – zip across the screen and collide with the blank tablets” (163). The problem with the special effects in DeMille’s film is that they do not have the technological capability to be believed by the audience – they look like the creation of a special effects department, not like the real life manifestation of the holy. This is true of all the effects in The Ten Commandments save one: the parting of the Red Sea. The execution of the parting of the waters is awe-inspiring and if not for the ridiculous “pillar of fire” display proceeding it, it is quite possible that this effect could lead to a transcendence of the mundane into the realm of the holy on the part of the audience.

Why is the parting of the Red Sea – by far the most difficult special effects task of the movie – more effective in hinting at the presence of the transcendent than the burning bush or the pillar of fire or the ten plagues or the Angel of Death? The answer lies in Michael Bird’s discussion of film as hierophany; however, before we approach that subject, it is necessary to understand the parameters set out by Schrader concerning the delineation of transcendental style. After gaining a comprehension of the style itself we can move on to discuss the role of film in expressing the transcendental, the need to encounter violence in order to transcend the reality of human nature, and finally the execution of this transcendence achieved by Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.

Transcendental style, according to Schrader, represents the method, the way of approaching the transcendent, but is not itself intrinsically transcendent or religious (3). This is because works completed by human beings, using temporally grounded tools created by humans “cannot inform one about the transcendent, they can only be expressive of the Transcendent” (Schrader 6). The goal is not to depict the signified, but only to act as a signifier and point the way towards the transcendent. Schrader claims that transcendental style makes certain choices in its expressive agents – irrationalism over rationalism; repetition over variation, the sacred over the profane, and intellectual realism over optical realism (11). Yet what if those choices did not have to be made in order for a film to be expressive of the transcendent? What if a film could follow rational steps through the realm of the profane and depict both intellectual realism and optical realism? Michael Bird believes that this is possible by understanding film via Mircea Eliade’s concept of the “hierophany.”

In order to depict the transcendent one need look no further than through the real. While this may appear to be a nonsensical statement, this is precisely the purpose of a hierophany. Mircea Eliade’s hierophany is “the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world” – a disclosure of the transcendent through the “material of reality” (Bird 3). Furthermore, a hierophany can occur anywhere and can be anything -- even “the cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany” (Bird 3). Certainly films may then fall into this category, and films that attempt to accurately re-create reality make for perfectly acceptable hierophanies.

So the question then becomes: how would an artist/filmmaker craft a hierophany? That is, “how does the artist render visible that which is inherently invisible” (Bird 4)? The answer Bird comes to is that while the holy or transcendent cannot be directly represented, a film can “disclose those spaces and those moments in culture where the experience of finitude and the encounter with the transcendent dimension are felt and expressed within culture itself” (4). It is human’s striving for the infinite, to grasp the transcendent (which is the reason why we strive to create art itself) that becomes the focal point of the transcendent style of hierophanies. So the film must use an examination of all that is worldly to portray the search for the otherworldly, which in turn signifies the otherworldly itself.

If the search for the transcendent is able to disclose the transcendent in a way, then the search must be grounded in reality – if we start at the abstract there will be nothing to hold on to. Michael Bird now turns to Paul Tillich, whose conception of reality is one that is more or less paradoxical. Reality, for Tillich, is concerned with the finite while open to the infinite – it is self-sufficient (real discloses real) and self-transcendent (real discloses the transcendent real). This vacillation “between the desire to be the mere vessel and the desire to be the content” leads culture to a moment where it is “driven beyond itself to an awareness of its ‘depth’” (Bird 5).

It is these moments – when reality looks itself in the face and sees beyond itself – that fulfill the demands of a hierophany. A History of Violence is no stranger to such moments. One of the more impressive of these moments of transcendent clarity is between Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) and his son, Jack (Ashton Holmes). After the bloodbath on the Stalls’ front lawn, where Tom kills the mobster Fogarty’s henchmen and Jack saves his father’s life by shooting Fogarty (Ed Harris) through the back with a shotgun. The reality of the situation is that three men are killed on the Stalls’ property. The underlying elements that force the characters and the audience to transcend this reality are that 1) Jack has just killed a human being – completing his transformation from the timid, though cynical, diplomat into a person capable of violently ending someone else’s life, a moment described by Cronenberg’s DVD commentary as life-changing: “You’re suddenly somebody who has killed someone else, and it changes you forever, there’s no going back, you cannot be that person that you were anymore. And the son is realizing it.” 2) Jack’s violent transformation is completed at the exact moment when the audience (as well as Tom’s family) knows for certain that Tom Stall is actually (or was, depending on your outlook on human nature) Joey Cusack, an ex-mobster from Philly. 3) This moment therefore is the moment when the history of violence of Joey Cusack intersects with the history of violence of the human species and with the revelation that the cycle of violence in the Cusack family has now fallen onto the next generation, Jack.

The short and powerful scene leads the audience to ask whether is it possible to outrun one’s past and whether some people are naturally inclined to have an expert skill with violence (the audience will recall the beating Jack administers to the school bully, Bobby Jordan and his crony). After all, even if Tom as Joey was bred to be violent and trained, Jack grew up in a peaceful, “Christian,” model American home; he appears to be just as adept at violence as his father. What does this mean in terms of the nature of the human species? What is the person in the next seat capable of? While these questions are floating through the minds of the audience, Tom and Jack are coming to grips with them as well. Cronenberg explains that in the wordless exchange between the father and the son the issues pertaining to the violence of human nature are being thoroughly investigated, and possibly understood fully by the characters for the first time: “The father -who is more Joey here than Tom, and who looks quite scary – we’re not quite sure what he’s going to do…there’s a real battle here between the Tom and the Joey part of this man. He is disturbed by the fact that he has introduced his son to that part of himself, and yet has a feeling, perhaps, of inevitability – that it had to happen since he is his son.”

According to Tillich, the combination of two opposing ideas – that faith (in the transcendent) transcends everyday reality, but that realism rejects any notion of transcending the real – mesh in his notion of “belief-ful realism.” This mesh occurs as a result of Tillich’s rejection of idealism. Idealism, for Tillich, is flawed because it “fails to attain the fullness of a genuinely religious understanding because it idealizes the real, rather than transcends it by looking within it” (Bird 5-6). So, his “belief-ful realism” is neither a “technical realism” – one based solely on the visible world – or a “mystical realism” – one that eliminates the material world in order to free the mind (Bird 6). It is artistic expression that can achieve belief-ful realism for the artist’s work is the result of the struggle to grasp the transcendental through the everyday. Made up of temporal pieces – whether film or paint or words or musical notes – the work strives for the eternal. In other words, art is the “soul of culture” (Bird 7). Since culture’s soul is made up entirely of temporal items, a film that relies upon believable stand-ins for the real item, such as prosthetic limbs, wounds, and features should possess the capability of signifying the transcendent. Yet what about a reality created by computers? Even if it is decided that digital manipulation is an artistic expression, and if it is accepted that MFX also are forms of artistic expression, the work can still fail to bring about a transcendence through the everyday.

The success or failure of a work of art to achieve a signification of the transcendent lies within the realm of belief. By belief we do not mean that the work of art engenders a belief in a supernatural being, but that the presentation of reality is believable to the audience. Think back to The Ten Commandments. The majority of the effects in the movie are unbelievable as expressions of the transcendent. They are obviously not the depiction of God, but the manipulation of elements to adhere to the human creator’s conception of God. It is a fallacy to assume that the special effects artist’s conception of God is the same as the conception held by each member of the audience. Michael Bird turns to Mikel Dufrenne and his concept of a “sensual realism” to explore the issue of audience subjectivity. Sensual realism is “a means by which the viewer is brought into an encounter with a ‘depth’ in the world,” much like Eliade’s hierophany (Bird 7). Dufrenne, however, placed the subjectivity of a work “within the reality of the art object itself” (Bird 7). The work is understood through the spectator, and therefore must be as clear as possible in the expression of the artist’s idea in order for the spectator, or the majority of spectators to grasp the transcendent that is being signified by the object itself. The most effective way of achieving this level of understanding is to speak to the spectators in terms which they understand – that is, through a use of everyday reality.

In order for the violence in A History of Violence to attain a transcendent level, it must speak to the audience in a common vernacular. There are two methods of achieving this vernacular – a sensual method based on the audience’s empathetic understanding of the physical actions and reactions on the screen, and a method based on cultivating a familiarity in the audience with the environment depicted on screen. These methods do not function independent of one another, but synthesize in order to make the film product easier to swallow conceptually.

It is unlikely that many members in the audience of a screening of A History of Violence have ever been shot with a gun, taken a pot of hot coffee to the face, or had their nose cartilage shoved back into their brain, so Cronenberg has some work to do in order to get the audience to identify with the violence in the film. Cronenberg’s success or failure in terms of achieving success on a sensual level lies in the hands of his SFX and MFX teams. The Ten Commandments is evidence to the dangers inherent in attempting to use SFX and MFX as a believable stand-in, but Cronenberg’s film does not stumble upon the same pitfalls as did DeMille’s picture.

Cronenberg chooses to focus the audience’s attention on the ramifications of violence, emotionally and mentally within the growth of his characters, but on a more physical level by showing the results of violent acts upon the victim. Since the “victims” of violence in the movie are in the vast majority the “bad guys” – Fogarty and his men, Ritchie Cusack’s henchmen, Bobby Jordan the bully and his crony – Cronenberg will have the audience on his side as they cheer on the hero. Cheering on the violent acts of the hero is only half-way towards gaining a peek at the transcendence of violence however, a fact not lost on Cronenberg: “The violence is exhilarating…completely justified…I wanted the audience to see the results of the violence…the violence in this move is intimate, physical…no car crashes etc…so that in the middle of exhilaration is the disturbance” (Cronenberg 2005).

What the “disturbance” is that underlies the exhilaration of witnessing a truly violent act is the key to violence’s transcendence. Paul Schrader argues that the transcendent is eternal, it is repetition, it does not change. “Transcendental style stylizes reality by eliminating (or nearly eliminating) those elements which are primarily expressive of human experience, thereby robbing the conventional interpretations of reality of their relevance and power” Schrader asserts, explaining that the decorations of the scene – like “right,” “wrong,” “moral,” et cetera are meaningless in the face of the vision of the transcendent (11). This effect is can be achieved by showing the horrifying effects of violent actions – seeing Leland Jones gurgling blood and spittle on the floor of Tom’s diner with his jaw shattered open and half of his face blown off with a bullet for example. It does not matter that Jones and his sidekick were about to rob Tom and kill all the workers at his diner (and possibly rape Tom’s waitress), the horrible physical suffering Jones is subject to is not lessened by his status as a no-good outlaw. However, our feeling towards that violence does. Coming face to face with the reality that we can excuse, and even revel in such abuse of the human body at the hands of another human being is a disturbing thing – one that Cronenberg repeatedly refuses to let us shirk as he shoves the camera right up against the horror of violence. The only point in the movie where he does shy away comes when William Orser, Leland Jones’ side-kick shoots the little girl at the motel, but seeing the horror of human violence enacted upon the innocent does not raise the same ethical war within an audience member as the horror of human violence enacted upon the guilty. A good analog to the effect created by Cronenberg could be the scenes of abuse of the “cured” criminal Alex De Large in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Just choosing to show the physical ramifications of violent actions upon the bodies of wicked men is not enough. Cronenberg must be certain that his depictions appear completely realistic and not cheap or tawdry or laughable. A failure to present the wounds in a realistic manner would cause the film to lose any chance at achieving transcendence by constantly reminding the audience that they are, in fact, watching a movie. Cronenberg succeeds by expertly relying on two separate means of conveying violence: MFX and research into street fighting techniques. Through these two means, Cronenberg is able to present realistic violence with realistic consequences. Make-up used to show the wounds – both fresh, like Jones’ blown-off face, and old, like Fogarty’s lost eye and facial scarring is the most effective method Cronenberg relies upon in his film. If when Fogarty whips his sunglasses off and reveals his dead eye to Tom the scarring looks wrong – either too grotesque, not grotesque enough, or just plain fake – than the metaphorical weight of the situation – the confrontation with Tom and a threatening ghost from his past – dissolves. We, as an audience, will not understand just how utterly violent and terrible Tom may have been in the past.

When shooting fight scenes in a film there is always the danger that the choreography of the violence will appear to be so ridiculous that the audience will laugh when they are supposed to squirm in their seats. As realistic as the MFX are, the choreography of Cronenberg’s fight scenes could lose the audience completely. Tom Stall, although he was a mobster, would not approach a fight like Jet Li or Bruce Lee, and if he did, then the audience would cease to believe that Tom as a character could represent a “real” person. An “Everyman” doesn’t deliver screaming round-house kicks to the face. He may, however use objects at hand, like a coffee pot, to save one of his employees from certain death.

Even the fight scene between Jack Stall and Bobby Jordan resists the temptation to choreograph either a Kung-Fu style or boxing style fight scene. With the exception of Tom’s melee against Ritchie’s henchmen all of the fighting in the film appears realistically in a street fight fashion. The melee comes at a point when Tom is no longer Tom, but has once again become Joey, the professional hit man, so the more choreographed nature of his violence is still believable. In the DVD commentary Cronenberg discusses his technique for crafting the violence in A History of Violence:

The violence in this movie…was developed from watching DVD’s
that teach you how to kill people on the street…because I wanted it
to be very realistic, the violence in this movie, and not very
balletic [sic], but like a street fight –like a vicious nasty awkward,
dirty street fight in which the social contract has been completely cancelled.

Cronenberg’s comment on the cancellation of the social contract leads us into the second method of achieving a common vernacular with the audience: identification with the environment. Cronenberg has to follow the social codes that underlie the setting of the film in order for the audience to “believe” it. In order to transcend it, Cronenberg must get the audience to accept the visual depictions of violence on the screen as well as the questions about ethical, moral, and instinctual codes that those depictions raise. Cronenberg continues explicating the violence of the show-down on the Stalls’ lawn:

There’s no question of rules or what is fair/not fair. Everything,
anything goes in a situation like that. And I found what to be the
most valuable thing that I learned from those DVD’s is, “Oh
yes, when someone comes up to a gun the social contract of
civility, of discussion, of conversation, of reason – all of that is
gone. The only thing remaining is survival and killing. And that
is something obviously here that Jack is learning very quickly,
but like the audience who are exhilarated when Fogarty is killed,
now the aftermath is a lot more difficult to swallow.

Of course, having the same situation work itself out on the surface of the moon, or at the bottom of the ocean drastically reduces Cronenberg’s chance of success. In order to succeed, he must understand and utilize the mythologies and complexes that underlie our species.

A History of Violence presents the viewer with a classic example of American mythology. Cronenberg points out in his commentary that the basic elements to the movie are all found in westerns – from the music to the theme of “the homesteader defending his family from the bad men.” We are presented with the archetypal upstanding American family; then Cronenberg appears to tear it apart all the way up until Tom returns to his family at the end of the movie, but more on this later. Cronenberg speaks to the audience, at least his American audience, in a language that they clearly understand: the language of small town American mythology. There is the bully and his cronies; the Edward Hopper-style small town; the mean bad men from out of town; the local hero; the neighborly sheriff, etc.; and there is violence.

Michael Bird points out that achieving transcendence in films is not simply representing reality as is. While a few viewers may achieve some level of transcendence by watching reality with no manipulation on screen, most of the audience would be bored to tears or miss the boat. Anyone who has studied realism in the theatre is well aware of the results on presenting a work in such a manner. For Bird, the consequence of the formalist theories is that “film becomes art only when it moves beyond its recording potential and makes use of its manipulative devices” (11). Here is where a director who hopes to create a transcendent film turns to effects.

Cronenberg’s creative team (Peter Suschitzky – Cinematographer; James McAteer – Art Direction; Peter P. Nicklakakos – Set Decoration; Howard Shore – Original Music) is quite adept at creating a reality through manipulative devices such as lighting, sound, and set construction that speaks in the language of everyday experience. In his commentary, Cronenberg points out that in the locker room confrontation scene between Jack and Bobby the lighting is expressionistic – a feature he believes heightens the yearning of an American audience for an idealized past. This yearning is present in many aspects of the film – from the friendly people at Tom Stall’s diner to the Stalls themselves. Cronenberg’s team is completely engrossed with creating a realistic small town. Although Tom Stall’s diner is actually a built set, the outside is impeccably crafted and the lighting is a perfect imitation of sunlight. There is no way that anyone who was not told would know that when they look out of the window at the front of Tom’s diner they are not looking at a small town street.

The hyper-realism of the artistic crew allows for Cronenberg to concentrate his directorial efforts in elucidating the transcendent present underneath Tom Stall, the Stalls, the small town of Millbrook, American society as a whole, and finally human nature itself. One way of approaching the transcendent is to manipulate the realistic depiction of events slightly while adhering to the underlying precepts of American mythology. Cronenberg points out that Millbrook and its inhabitants play with the American dream. “This town is maybe too perfect,” Cronenberg speculates. This may be so, but the fact that the town is rooted strongly in the American dream (Edie Stall [Maria Bello] and Tom even enact the classic nerd high school fantasy when she wears a high school cheerleader’s outfit for a sexual encounter) allows for Cronenberg and his team to move towards the transcendent through a manipulation of technological devices. While the set, lighting, and music are one example of the way in which A History of Violence can transcend reality through reality, the real “magic” is created by the imaginations of the heads of the make-up artist staff, Patrick Baxter and Sean Sansom. It is on their shoulders that the ability of the film to transcend rests, for they are responsible for accurately and believably depicting the vehicle that will propel the audience from the realm of the profane into the realm of the transcendent: the result of violence.

Before we can assess the success of the make-up effects in portraying the transcendental dimension of violence, its viability as a transcendent entity must be established. It is common to believe that because the western world is considered to be “civilized” that it has moved beyond the need to resort to violence. Of course, a history lesson of the past hundred years would quickly dispel that notion. The truth is that no matter how hard one tries to avoid violence, sometimes violence will simply not be ignored. In his work, On War, Carl von Clausewitz points out that even though the western world has decided that “savage peoples are ruled by passions” and “civilized peoples by the mind, even the most civilized of peoples can be fired with a passionate hatred for one another” (76). Even though Jack Stall prefers to eschew violent confrontation with Bobby Jordan, the bully will simply not leave him alone until he physically stands up for himself; even though Tom Stall has completely reformed his life since leaving the mob, the mob is not done with him and he must deal violently with both Fogarty and his own brother, Ritchie, in order to protect his family.

Clausewitz continues by tying violence to human nature as both an inherited trait from our phylogenic past and a tool of interpersonal politics: “Violence’s dominant nature makes war a paradoxical trinity – composed of 1) primordial violence, hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force;…of 3) its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason” (89). In order for Tom Stall to protect his family from an unrelenting threat, whether animal or man, he must bring the threat under his power – he must make the threat submit to his will, or die. For Clausewitz and Tom Stall, violence is the natural progression of politics – when reasoning breaks down, then you must fight. As he puts it, “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means” (87). Tom tries to reason with both Fogarty and his brother – “I have come to make peace” he tells his brother – but in the end, violence cannot be avoided. “I should have killed you back in Philly,” Tom tells Fogarty, as the mobster stands over him pointing a gun at his head. Tom knows that what is happening right now is a continuation of an unfinished violent act on his part years earlier. Violence does not just go away.
The chain of violence – past violence leading to future violence and on to separate generations – is another manner in which violence is transcendent. This is true in the case of Tom’s violent actions in the past haunting him in the present, but it is also true within Tom’s genetics, a fact revealed through the transformation of his son, Jack. The notion of a genetic tendency for violence is not a creation conceived in the graphic novel upon which A History of Violence is based, but has its roots within the writings of Sigmund Freud. “The individual organism,” Freud states in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, “which through the ego’s instincts regards itself as the center of the universe – is, from the point of biology only an episode in a succession of generations, a short-loved appendage to a germ-plasm endowed with virtual immortality” (514). Not only do Tom’s violent actions as Joey come back to haunt him in the physical form of Fogarty, but also through the actions of his son. The discussion between the elder and younger Stall after Jack demolishes Bobby Jordan in a fight at school highlights this very issue. Upset over his son’s violent actions, Tom tells Jack, “In this family we do not solve our problems by hitting someone” to which his son responds, “No, in this family we shoot them,” prompting a reflexive slap across the face from Tom. …… The question Fogarty poses to Edie Stall, “Ask him, Edie, how come he’s so good at killing people” should be rephrased in the mind of the viewer as “Ask him, Edie, how come the Stalls are so good at engaging in physical violence?”

One of the more brilliant ways Cronenberg approaches the concept of violence as transcendent is in the connection between sex and violence. Tom and Edie Stall have two extremely intimate scenes – one before Fogarty’s return and one when Edie is certain that Tom is, in fact, Joey. The second scene is by far the more violent of the two, and would be a rape scene if not for the brief moment Cronenberg shows where Tom tries to pull away and Edie pulls him right back. The human psyche is undergoing a constant process of sublimation of instincts. “The ego instincts,” Freud states, “as the organism struggles to survive, come into conflict with the libidinal instincts; as the organism reproduces or as the organism turns part of the libido’s energy into sublimated forms and creates culture and civilization, even as excess libido fixates upon disturbing, perverse pleasures” this conflict continues (Freud 515). This conflict is being enacted in each member of the audience – for example a person’s urge may be to punch the jerk with the cell phone two rows behind him, but he sublimates this urge in the name of civilization. The physical threat of violence has been averted, but the psychical intention of violence is still present, a point Cronenberg shows through the transformation of Jack and through the re-transformation of Tom. Although Tom has “gone to the desert and killed Joey,” the urges and skills that made Joey who he was are evidently still present in Tom. Perhaps it is this knowledge that causes Edie to become violently ill when Tom tells her that he in fact used to be Joey. Perhaps it is the savagery that underlies Tom in the person of Joey that causes Edie to pull him back down on top of her on those wooden stairs. Freud continues: “Yet it is through this conflict [ego and libido] that the sexual impulses make contributions to the highest cultural, artistic and social creations of the human spirit” (26). The whole point of the final scene of the movie, when Tom returns to his family to ask for (and is granted) forgiveness, is total acceptance of the total human being – capable of great evil and great good; of powerful hate and awe-inspiring love. The two sex scenes are not as far apart as people first may assume, and even more terrifying is the ultimate transcendental truth that the violent scenes themselves are not that far from the sex scenes. “Extremely important in repression,” Freud argues, “are excessively strong sadistic impulses that unquestionable link sex and violence, and that serve as a defense against disturbing impulses” (382).

Through a use of realistic make-up, a study and implementation of street-fighting to the combat scenes, the construction of a realistic setting with realistic characters who ultimately follow the psychological lines of real human beings, Cronenberg presents his history of violence. The skill with which he and his cast and crew implement these ideas turn Cronenberg’s history of violence into the transcended A History of Violence. A film that serves as a stunning, if deceptively simple hierophany into the transcendence of violence, expressed flawlessly through the mediums of special effects and make-up effects.

Works Cited
Bird, Michael. “Film as Hierophany.” Religion in Film. ed. John R. May and Michael
Bird. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. 3-22

Clausewitz, Carl von On War. Lecture Series delivered by Cpt. Rick Blackwood January
-May, 2006

Cronenberg, David “DVD Director’s Commentary”. A History of Violence. Los Angeles:
New Line Cinema, 2005

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1966

Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film. Berkely: University of California Press,
1972

Random Literature Thoughts 1

Disclaimer: This piece is pure rambling and has not been edited or even re-read for logical errors or spelling/grammatical errors. And it probably won't ever be.

Four periods of American life have given rise to explosive literary output: Civil War, Roaring 20s/Great Depression, Post War Era (post WWII - I am including the mid 40's-60's here), and (dovetailing on the last one), Vietnam. The thing about the Civil War is that outside of the politically charged niche of slave narratives, most work on the Civil War that is considered to be of much quality was released co-terminously with the great writing of the 1920's and 30's. I have no causal relation here, although I imagine that the co-terminous existence of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck has something to do with it. Perhaps it is because the 20th century is the first time when a nation of letters was formed in the United States (not just New England/Baltimore, as was the first run at literary greatness on American soil (See: Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau, Poe, etc)). There have been renegade authors of note in the Gilded Age (how American is that?), most notably Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and Frank Norris.

The common theme to our literary success is fairly clear: loss. This is nothing new in terms of the grand scheme of western literature (Faust, Paradise Lost, the Inferno, King Lear and on and on and on and on), particularly since the major source of all our literature is the book of Genesis and the greatest loss that there could be - the loss of the ability to communicate on a level plane with the divine. However, for a society like outs that prides itself on being a Winner, such a self-reflective artistic trend is somewhat surprising. Perhaps this is the reason for our absurd adoration of ignorance. Do any of you read books any more? Let me rephrase that: do any of you read any books that are a) not assigned to you and/or b) That have not been approved by society's watchdogs by landing on the NY Times best sellar list (See: The DiVinci Code)? Why not? Is it because of the uncomfortable feeling that can only come from having a mirror placed in front of us as a people that shows everything that is unflattering as well as those aspects that are?

I don't really blame you - I mean, how masochistic do you have to be to want to curl up under the reading light and spend hours thrashing your schema and paradigm for our little life? All I can tell you is that if Odysseus never journed to the underworld, he never would have gotten home. I will end with a two quotes from T.S. Eliot, which I have found myself pondering quite a bit lately:

We will shall not cease from exploring, and the end of our exploration, we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time.
*
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.


PS:
Here are some authors/books from some of the eras discussed above that I find to be exceptional

Ishmael Reed: Flight to Canada; Mumbo Jumbo
William Faulkner: Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; The Sound and the
Fury
Carolivia Herron: Thereafter Johnnie
Alice Walker: Meridian [(Beware of any of her later works though, neo-feminist dogma does little to aid and expand (and mostly hinders) the feminist argument, which at its core is an interesting and strong one)]
Lan Cao: Monkey Bridge
Tim O'Brien: Going After Cacciato; The Things They Carried (short story); Tomcat in Love
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle
William S. Burroughs: Junky; Naked Lunch; My Education
William S. Burroughs Jr.: Speed; Kentucky Ham
Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky
Frank Norris: McTeague

There are a ton more that warrant mention, but it just occured to me that you really don't give a shit, so I am going to shut up now.

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