The moral core of the beginning of A History of Violence drew me in instantaneously as if the film was directly targeted towards me. Since I began to read philosophy I took to reading on ethics and have become interested in rehabilitation and its relationship with peace and violence, especially when it comes to justice and punishment; my favorite philosopher is Jeremy Bentham, whose writings cover mostly how justice should or could be doled out. The first few parts of the movie showed the juxtaposition of these ethical boundaries— the two amoral psychopathic criminals (played by Canadian actors Stephen McHattie and Greg Byrk) on the side of violence, and the perfect American family man, Tom (played by Viggo Mortensen), on the side of peace—even preaching to his own son, Jack, (played by Ashton Holmes) to deal with a bully nonviolently. Tom’s ethics and doctrine of peace are called into question when he defends his diner from the criminals with violence, but is still heralded by the town and broader media as a hero. The dilemma brought me back to the discussion brought up in my previous Peace Militancy class, as well as debates I’d had with my brother about justified violence in progressive social movements.
My favorite scenes from the film were the scenes after Tom kills the criminals, which explored the contradiction of being the good guy by way of murder. We see Tom react uncomfortably at the attention and praise for his violent acts. His son defies him and violently beats up the bully who has been baiting him rather than continuing to react nonviolently. The movie builds up and furthers the interpersonal tensions around the question: is there violence that is justified?
Then the movie lost me as it became an uncompelling and awkward mobster movie. All of the moral and philosophical concepts that were explored are thrown out in place of stock villains characters saying “I love killing.” The movie became caricaturish and Tom becomes close to a cliche bad depiction of dissociative identity disorder as his crazy and murderous Joey side is revealed. In class we talked about how Cronenenberg was exploring how movies glorify violence, and the audience revels in gore and violence through this film, similarly to how he explored it in Videodrome (1983). I think his vision is executed well in the beginning when the moral complexity is emphasized by the gore we see on the various corpses, but the last third morphs into the kind of pulpy action movie gorefest he was critiquing, with Joey becoming an invincible superhero and unstoppable killing machine against the inconsequential mobster goons. This shift lessens the impact of the earlier scenes of gore, and the Joey transformation simplifies Tom’s philosophical conundrum about violence to an unrealistic mental illness portrayal of DID.
I fell in love with the beginning of the movie and was disappointed at how it developed and ended; however, I still think I would recommend this movie. It failed to hold onto what I interpreted as the core of the film, but perhaps others can either find some other aspect that is more important or revel in the mobster violence that Cronenberg denounces yet displays. In the beginning I was hoping for it to be a movie about peace, shown with violence, but in the end it was just all about the violence.
"Eli Kurland (BFA Animation, Class of 2025) is an animator, writer, and artist from Los Angeles. His short story "The Countdowner" is also published in this issue. As the son of two comedy TV writers, he learned the elements of story and humor at an early age. He continues to use his passion for storytelling and narrative structure in his animations and writing."