Venganza exquisita (Bianca) (Spanish Edition)

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Neither of these periodical genres was original or distinctive in an absolute sense. My thanks to both these organizations. Mexican periodicals often borrowed or purloined photographs from U. Nevertheless, the Quebec journaux jaunes and the Mexican nota roja each represent a distinctive national tradition with- in crime-oriented periodical publishing. That distinctiveness is evident, above all, in the particular combinations of visual materials assembled within each maga- zine. The magazines and newspapers of each national tradition show consistent and distinctive ratios between staged and genuine photographs, official and coun- terfeited documents, clean and cluttered layouts.

For each of these traditions, one may construct a genealogy consisting solely of those periodicals which made crime their overriding preoccupation, but to do so would offer a misleading account of the place played by crime in generating varieties of print culture. Since the late nineteenth century, criminality has been tied to broader questions concerning a public culture and associated controversies over morality and the limits of acceptable behavior.

That loosely-defined domain of activity —the French call it la mondaine— took shape within coverage of newly emergent worlds of public entertainment and sites of sociability such as variety the- atres and dance halls. An invisible frontier divided such coverage from the journal- istic documentation of crime, and la mondaine may be viewed broadly as a wide field of urban sensation crossed by historically specific practices designated as criminal. The coverage of criminality in the proper press found its place, as well, within another loosely bounded body of discourse, similarly defined most fully within French print culture: Crime, in this sense, is part of a generalized aestheticization of cities, one that draws nour- ishment from shadowy spaces like alleys or warehouses and sites of transition like ports or railroad stations.

Here, as with la mondaine, the emphasis of journalistic and fictional treatments of crime is on urban night worlds, whose distinct popula- tions and practices are heavily marked by crime but not reducible to it. In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to Mex- ican crime-oriented photojournalism, and, in particular, to the practice of photo- graphers who worked across a range of periodical genres.

The work of these photographers has been the focus of international museum retrospectives and monographs over the past decade e. The other medium pertinent to an understanding of the nota roja is the Mex- ican comic book. Detectives, September 14, Photos 1 and 2 show the front and back covers of the September 14, issue of Detectives, a weekly magazine launched in Mexico in The content of most issues of the Mexican Detec- tives was varied in tone and degrees of journalistic actuality. What unites all these is the inflection of a variety of social and political phenomena by a sense of physical or psychological violence.

The difference between the front and back covers of this issue of Detectives exemplifies a pattern that would mark this magazine throughout the s. Front covers were typically painted, in lurid colors akin to those of the U. From the s through the s, the front covers of true crime periodicals in Mexico would offer expressionistic imagery, drawn or painted, which suggested a fictionalization of crime, often in fantastic settings that evoked other visual genres like the theatrical poster or the comic strip. This imagery would contrast sharply with interior black and white photographs whose styles were either those of insti- tutional documentation mug shots and images of police work or an increasingly morbid photojournalism.

In his authoritative study of Mexican crime photography, Jesse Lerner shows the reliance of Detectives on the archives of the well-established Mexico City photo agency Casasola for the dozens of interior shots that illustrated the various articles in each issue Lerner, Often, Lerner notes, these photographs were assembled in disjointed montages that obscured their journalistic character. This reliance on archives and stock shot libraries was characteristic of magazines that could not afford full-time investigative reporters or photojournalists.

It was also typical of periodicals whose rhythms of publication were often irregular, or whose distribution patterns discouraged high levels of journalistic currency that might quickly make an issue seem dated. The spatial proximity of photographs to drawn or painted illustrations within these magazines, and the interweaving of these to tell ostensibly true stories of cri- minality, would characterize Mexican crime periodicals until the s.

The best-known use of sequentially-arranged photographs to tell stories with- in print media came in Italy in the s, with the emergence of what the French call the photoroman and the Italians the fotonovela. Evelyn Sullerot is among the many historians of the fotonovela who trace its origins to , when two Italian publishers, Stefano Reda and Damiano Damiani, simultaneously launched maga- zines in which stories were told using photographs of posed actors Sullero, Initially, these magazines used stills from live-action films.

Indeed, a common way of understanding the Italian fotonovela in its early years, Ar- mando Bartra suggests, was as a slowed-down version of a movie In his article on sequential narrative in the Mexican press, Armando Bartra sets out to counter the claim that the fotonovela was an Italian invention. Rather, the Mexican fotonovela moved to introduce a sense of narrative and movement to still photographs, placing them in sequence and animating them with word balloons. By the end of the s, Bartra suggests, the typical Mexican photo novela as the fotonovela was known in Spanish was, in fact, a work of photomontage, through the overlaying of backdrops, characters cut-outs, and other graphic materials to tell a story.

In the s, with the further development of the Mexican true crime mag- azine, eccentric overlays of human figures and photographed backdrops on the cov- ers of periodicals showed the migration of image-making strategies from fanciful fotonovelas to quasi-journalistic true crime magazines.

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Photos 3 and 4 show two cov- ers from issues of the Mexican true crime magazine Metropoliciaca. The 2 Historians of comic strips and other sequential narrative forms have gone far in recent years in uncov- ering predecessors of the fotonovela or photoroman. I am grateful to Lance Rickman for bringing this site to my attention. With their clashes and incongruities of color, scale, and perspective, these montages represent no conventional or possible photojournalistic vantage point. Such covers seemed increasingly residual, particularly as the interiors of these magazines were more and more filled with black and white photographs employing the codes of photojournalism.

In these magazines, one finds the familiar combination of stock photographs, police mug shots, and more conventional news photos, none of them credited. The significant development of the s, however, is the consolidation of the modern tabloid weekly newspaper as the key form of specialized crime periodical. Alarma, launched in , remains the best known of these and, after interruptions, is still published. In formal terms, the most striking characteristic of these publications is their increased reliance on the daily newspaper as a formal model. The covers of periodicals like Alarma and Alerta mix journalistic headlines and actuality photographs in a claim to currency that was rarely part of the self-presentation of earlier magazines like Detectives or Metropoliciaca.

For our purposes, the inter- est of these documentaries is as evidence of processes of image acquisition distinct from the logics of assembly of older, crime-oriented periodicals. It is clear from the most cursory examination of these earlier titles, like Detectives or Metropoliciaca, that they employed few, if any, photographers and that responsibility for their image content rested with personnel who combined archival photos or police mug shots in twisted collages to liven them up.

In contrast, the claim of posts Mex- ican crime newspapers on reader attention now depends on the fresh images of dead bodies or crime scenes from events of the previous day or week. The dramatic intensity of these images compensates, at least in part, for the high level of standardization that has come with their daily or weekly repetition. Until the s or s, as well, treatments of crime in newspapers and magazines had at least occasional recourse to versions of la mondaine or the social fantastic, which set crime in titillating nighttime worlds of moral transgression and experimenta- tion.

The domination of crime coverage in recent years by photographs of dead bod- ies, typically on daytime streets or fields, has closed off these lines of association. The effect of the traumatic death photograph, Barthes noted, is punctual, evacuating connotation even as one seeks, in a subsequent interpretive move, to situate it within a general diagnosis of social condition Crime coverage in Mexico, Lara Klahr and Barata suggest, now elicits new vocabularies of analysis born in a rupture be- tween such coverage and popular traditions of press-based entertainments.

The Quebec journaux jaunes Our account of the Quebec journal jaune begins in the s, when crime-orient- ed print culture in that Canadian province manifested itself across several genres and formats. In particular, a number of magazines published at the beginning of the decade bore a close resemblance to the American pulp magazine. One of the lead- ing titles in this group was Mon Magazine Policier, printed on cheap paper and con- taining fiction with very few other sorts of content. For the most part, Mon Magazine Policier consisted of fictional stories translated into French from U.

It would appear, for example, that the Quebec pulp fiction magazine endured slightly longer than its equivalents in the United States. In Quebec, both the comic book and paperback novel would take significantly longer to establish them- selves, leaving pulp-like magazines to occupy a cultural space that endured at least until the end of the s. Large numbers of romans en fascicules devoted to romance fiction were pub- lished in the s and s, but the format is best remembered for its crime and thriller fiction.

With popular periodicals from the United States and France now on the restricted list, Canadian publishers in both languages moved to pro- duce national equivalents to fill the gap.

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In one of his important studies of the roman en fascicule, Vincent Nadeau suggests that the Police-Journal Enrg. Photos 6 and 7 show two issues of Po- lice Journal, the flagship title of the publishing house that was responsible, as noted, for thousands of romans en fascicules and other publications. In the early s, issues of Police Journal dressed themselves up in the rhetorical and visual codes of journa- listic actuality but were, in fact, devoted almost entirely to crime-oriented fiction.

Police Journal, August 28, Police Journal, September 4, By , however, the content of Police Journal had changed remarkably; fic- tional content lingered, but was increasingly displaced by short reports on criminal activity written in journalistic style. One probable reason for the decline in fictional content was the lifting of wartime restrictions on foreign publications, and subse- quent return to the market of fiction magazines from France.

Just as plausibly, how- ever, the changed political context of Montreal and of Quebec more broadly re- sulted in a heightened public interest in criminality and the legal-judicial response to it. In historical developments I have described elsewhere Straw, and , the political context in Quebec had come to be more and more dominated by crime, particularly in Montreal, where the push for a crime commission and municipal re- form to eliminate vice and corruption was of significant public interest.

By the early s, these themes would resonate with those of a U. In these late s issues of Police Journal, one finds many things: Some of the most elaborate features in Police Journal during this period were the lists of broth- els and of prostitutes, offered in considerable detail. They named people and alleg- ed crimes but they served, as well, to map the corridors of perceived criminality in the city.

This emphasis on lists, itineraries, and detailed mappings across time and space is specific to this historical period.

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In earlier periods, it was common for mag- azines to focus on the concentrated crime spree, as a dramatic, specific event. Like- wise, by the s, true crime magazines would focus on singular, horrific crimes disconnected from broader problems of urban moral health. In the post-war Montreal print culture of criminality, as in North America more generally, the displacement of fictional narratives by ostensibly factual documen- tation also involved a displacement of the private eye or detective by the police pro- fessional.

The bilingual Montreal Police Reporter was published over several years in the early s with the aid of the police, and was full of articles on police pro- cedure and guides to good, honest citizenship. This was part of a broader move toward the localization of crime and a documentation of crime that linked it explic- itly to questions of municipal governance.

In this transformation, crime became further detached from the more fantastic forms of crime-oriented textuality, such as pulpy stories of masked super villains or detectives.

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In the s, the crime-ori- ented print culture of Quebec pulled its readers deeper into an urban fabric mark- ed by highly specific and local traditions of vice and patterns of corruption. The emergence of the journaux jaunes in a process of differentiation from other pe- riodical forms and the visual styles that made them distinct have received no schol- arly attention. In particular, no analysis has discussed the journaux jaunes in relation to patterns of periodical publishing unfolding in other countries during this period.

What might one say about these publications? It is now interwoven with stories of individual morality, of human oddities, of show business gossip and so on. This dispersion of themes is marked by the breaking up of covers and pages into assemblages of pictures, captions, isolated squares, and so on. By emptying out any logic of connection between disparate items, Terdiman suggests, the newspaper works to block any sense of conflict, tension, or causality among them Conversely, we might see this fragmentation as evidence of the multiplicity of social sites where social transformation then manifested itself, as Quebec underwent a process of rapid modernization.

As Line Chamberland and Ross Higgins have suggested, we might see these periodicals as gesturing coherently toward a recalibration of that morality, testing it through incident after incident of impropriety or illegality Cham- berland, ; Higgins and Chamberland, This turn itself mirrored developments in the United States, where Senator Estes Kefauver, having chaired the commission to investigate municipal corruption, then turned his attention to comic books and juvenile delinquency. The article then listed the estimated circulation of different titles.

Allo Police, launched in , led with a circulation of What par- ticularly outraged the Vrai reporter was the conviction that behind these publications stood hypocritical men who claimed social respectability, that, in fact, the lawyers and publishers of mainstream newspapers were also behind the new tabloids.

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By the early s, as Jeannette Walls recounts, some 40 imitations of the National Enquirer began publication Pope eventually determined that, with migration to the suburbs, and with the decline of the urban newsstand, new venues for selling news periodicals were required. In the late s, Pope decided to reorient his weekly paper toward supermarket sales and a predominantly female readership. The context of the supermarket required that the National Enquirer, and its dozens of imitators, play down violent crime and lurid vice in favor of the range of themes we still expect in the Enquirer and its competitors: In Montreal, this transition was less clear cut.

Only very few examples of the journal jaune, like Echo Vedettes would survive into the s and beyond through an almost exclusive focus on show business and celebrities. Allo Police, the dominant crime-oriented weekly paper throughout the s, endured until , but had long faced the main problem confronting such periodicals: In his study of French crime-oriented print culture, Dominique Kalifa sees such culture as a popular reaction to official projects of modernization.

University of Minneso - ta Press. Histoire et archives de la Police des Moeurs. Crime in Mexico City, The Inside Story on the World of Gossip. Se ha escrito que: La criminalidad femenina trastornaba ese idealista pano- rama. Devoradora de modernidad patriarcal: Oc- tavio Paz, al caracterizar el mito, escribe: Terenci Moix apoya el comentario: Nuevamente la estrella se impone al tipo y al produc- to final.

Debes entender este lenguaje. Ahora comprendo que nos une algo indestructible. Una moraleja que hace gozar, mientras alecciona al sujeto social moderno, pro- ductor y consumidor de cine, bajo una mirada que encuentra en la mujer moderna, al margen de los dominios del hombre, el origen de todos los males. Universidad de Baja California.

University of Ari- zona Press. Crime Films and Society. Cineteca Nacional Cuadernos de la Cineteca Nacional, 4. The other side of that argument sees the femme fatale as the misogynistic projection of male fear and longing. In classic noir, the femme fatale is punished for her transgressions, if she is not murdered Double Indemnity or, more rarely, jailed The Maltese Falcon , she is domesticated Laura. In her study of the femme fatale, Julie Grossman convincingly argues that such a traditional conception is frequently at odds with the affective tones of the majority of noir film, where the femme fatale is a much more nuanced and sympathetically portrayed character whose extreme actions and dazzling attractive force can be understood as a desperate response to an unlivable set of conditions that limit and oppress her.

Grossman suggests that the time has come to put the femme fatale in her place Instead, her per- formance is precisely what makes her vulnerable. Like a human record, she is forced to replay not only her nightly performances of Blue Velvet, but also her grotesque sexual encounters with Hopper, an endless audition for a role she needs but that is killing her.

Increasingly, the femme fatale is the actress or per- former for Lynch, endlessly auditioning at a crime scene. This re-animation occurs both in the sense of renew- ing her presence when she seems marginal to contemporary cinema, and in that again and again, the femme fatale is linked both to technological re-animations like lipsyncing and recording devices, and the re-animation of dead bodies.

Powers of Affection Re- figured as performance, the duplicity of the femme fatale is no longer a threat, nor measured against the standard of a pre-existing truth, but as a truly creative act. The first is the explicit link between the femme fatales as a creation and victim of the Hollywood system —his main female characters are all actresses— highlighting the femme fatale not only as represented in the Hollywood system, but as a specifically cin- ematic mode of embodiment.

Lynch re-imagines the moral and criminal place of performance and automatism in the femme fatale, turning the signs of her guilt into that which deflects death and guilt, to resituate her criminality against Hollywood. While this displaces questions of criminal actions at the level of narrative in a way that can be seen as glorifying violence against women and refusing the proper assig- nation of culpability, it opens up myriad possibilities at other levels that can lead to a renewed sense of what the power of the femme fatale might actually be, as well as to radically refocusing the question of crime in these films.

It is crucial to remember that this, however, is not the final scene of the film, which ends with the invitation to witness reanimation and the vital force of staged performance at Club Silencio. His deployment of the femme fatale is not a generic statement on unrealizable ideals of feminine icons and the impossi- bility of their attainment. Rather, he deploys the femme fatale as a specifically cin- ematic creative force that exceeds and can renew its institutionalized form. Part of the way that Lynch reroutes the criminality of the femme fatale into creativ- ity is by making apparent the violence in the stillness and stasis of iconic signs.

For critics like Martha Nochimson, Laura Dern in Inland Empire represents the liberation of a feminist creative energy, a figure in full con- trol of her creative powers who takes up arms to defeat the forces that would keep her down If in classic noir this has meant specific dreams of becoming another changing class position, escaping a dead end marriage, etc. I want to focus on the figure of the femme fatale as suggesting another way of reading crime and criminality.

In classic noir, the femme fatale is instantly legible as the incitement to criminality. Classically, the body that incites crime is also the victimized body in the end. The excessive place of the femme fatale, characterized by her affective potency, is inevitably dimmed. To briefly illustrate how Lynch reworks these characteristics, I want to take a look at scenes of performance and audition in the Hollywood trilogy to read them as privileged moments that reanimate the femme fatale, both announcing her presence and generating an affective uncertainty over identification.

In this pause is the potential for the femme fatale to become something other than what she was, for a certain automatism of performance and response to become the sign of the emergence of the new. In the valorization of the performance of the femme fatale, Lynch re-imagines criminality along Deleuzian lines as the powers of the false. Thus, what might seem to be the central questions of these films go unanswered: Who are these women, really? This dual performance sparks a multiplicity of doublings throughout the film as a whole. Here, the femme fatale initiates a contagion of duplicity that repeat- edly twists and folds characters, narrative progressions, and repetitions against each other.

While the second part of the film marks a clear break with the first half, swit- ching focalization from Fred to Pete, as an audience we cannot help but refer the events, actions, and characters of the second act back to the first. We look constantly for the play of doubles in order to try to reorient our sense of what has happened.

What is nor- mally closely coupled the present and past, the actor and role becomes enlarged by a suspended perception. As she steps out of the car, the soundtrack resonates with a sense of familiarity and disquiet. Even their names complicate the question. Likewise, Alice inverts the rabbit hole of the second half: As a figure of surfaces, though, she also resists notions of sense and of identity.

Her duplicity is evident; she always slips away. This is evident again during a later scene between Alice and Pete, the classic incitement to criminality. The lovers meet in a motel room; Alice is upset and tells Pete she thinks Mr. Eddy knows about them. Eddy never directly mistreats Alice, it is clear that she is under his thumb and a sort of possession.

Pete longs to escape with Alice and equally longs to hear that she is Mr. Alice tells Pete that they can leave together, change their iden- tities and begin anew. Eddy, to make space for a new identity via a grounding in truth. The scene cuts to Mr. And, ultimately, there is no way to know.

There is a curious, motivating literality to the voiceover. Des- cription is never what it seems; the images motivated by the words fail to line up. When she finally meets Mr. Eddy, he is seated in a chair, accompanied by his thugs. He looks at her and gestures, and when she hesitates, one of his henchmen holds a gun to her head. When Alice is left only in her panties, she walks over to Mr.

Eddy, and kneels in front of him. This containment of the non-diegetic music is often repeated throughout the film. If this scene throws the audience into a crisis of identification —Are we seeing Betty or Naomi Watts, and why is this a problem? As the performances unfold, the director of the film does a second take of Betty in slow motion, again suggesting an uncertain recognition that asks us to look again.

In that film, criminality is incited by the mysterious cursed film itself, and it is never certain whether the murders and violence we continually witness are contained by the fiction of the script, or topologically folding studio and set into lived realities. The entire finale of the film is a drawn out experience of resurrection, in which Nikki Grace reemerges as a kind of zombie or automaton from the corpse of Susan Blue on the floor when the camera pulls back to reveal the set.

Crime scene image 2 from Inland Empire. The first is when Nikki shoots the Phantom The figure of deathly terror in the film , only to be confronted with her own distorted and maniacally grinning visage.

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These encounters are consistently asymmetrical; here, the first Nikki is shot in extreme, fish-eye close-up, while the second is in an undistorted long shot. In the final sequence, when Nikki shoots the Phantom, he undergoes several transformations. The bullets that pierce him are simply beams of light; lighting changes throughout have signaled phase shifts or moments of collective becoming. Nikki sees her own face, a reminder of an earlier scene in which Dern approaches the camera slowly up a forest path, only to speed up dramatically as she reaches the camera. The second composite image as the Phantom dies is a distorted and soggy head, like a face decomposing underwater, suggestive of the fluid immersion of the environment previously signaled through the use of lighting.

Here, the compo- site image renders the surface of the image an entire world, mutable and connected, a body in de-and re-composition. Nikki looks out into an empty theatre space, the single eye of a spotlight her only witness. As she cries, the image of a slow motion ballerina bleeds through in a final composite image. It can be read as melancholic, in that the live performer will know a contact and approbation from their audience that Nikki, performing as femme fatale, will never know.

But it is crucial to recall that the ballerina moves in slow motion: Ready for her Close-up. In his com- mentary on the DVD, Cronenberg relates the fact that the last page of the shoot- ing script contained only two words: Indeed, one of the strongest conventions of film noir, and the source of its ability to engage in social criticism of any sort, is the ambigu- ous ending. The noir narrative confronts the hero with an awareness that things are not what they seem, and that people are not who they claim to be. So, just as Joey once again adopts the mask of Tom Stall, even for a family that can now see through the fiction, so too, does Cronenberg adopt the mask of a hopeful ending, even for an audience grown accustomed to his manipulations of convention.

To buy into the hopeful ending that Cronenberg describes is to believe that Joey Cusack can disavow his violent self in a way that he could not when chal- lenged to do so first by Leland and Billy, then by Fogarty and finally by Richie. A brand that sticks. Few film genres speak as plainly and directly to American mythologies as the western, which is, perhaps, why Cronenberg re - peatedly evokes the genre in his commentary, despite the lack of obvious western trappings in the film.

Indeed, as Robert B. Ray has highlighted, the western, more than many genres, is particularly flexible and available to transgenre experimentation The lack of formal narrative expectations and the reliance on visual idioms in the construction of the western highlight the way that it is easily evoked as a sensibility, an ideology, or a disposition toward notions of American individualism, family, and nation. The gunfighter logic that animates so many westerns plays a part in a partic- ularly fascinating moral sleight-of-hand. Inevitably, the western endorses a neo- Darwinian logic associated with the survival of the fastest.

This has the tendency to equate technical proficiency with a weapon with moral superiority, justice, and righteousness, even at the cost of some internal narrative coherence. Darwinism, of course, is a famously amoral worldview with survival going not to the righteous, but to the fittest and strongest. It is this amorality that the western seeks to disavow by placing power in the hands of the just. Turner argued that with every generation that moved westward from the coast, European traditions were lost and new distinctly Amer- ican ones were formed.

This popular and enduring equation of the frontier with America and American values as a whole has had the effect of reinforcing certain ideological associations common to the western.

Consequently, to make a western film, or even a partial pseudo-western as Cronen- berg has done here, is to make a film that has something to say about the American dream and national values. Yet, what precisely do these explo- rations lead to? In unsettling the traditions of the western, perhaps the most tri- umphalist of Hollywood genres, by combining it with the tropes of other genres of cinematic violence, what does the film have to say about the myth and mean- ing of America? Centrally, A History of Violence is concerned with the shifting nature of hero- ism in contemporary America.

When Tom kills Leland and Billy he is hailed as a national hero on a series of television stations, in newspaper head- lines and greeted as a champion by a crowd gathered outside the local hospital. In mobilizing the wrong- man scenario, the film allows us to imagine for a brief moment a film that is very much about the intersection of fame and heroism, and the consequences of glorifying violence for a community. Yet this is clearly not what the film is about at all.

As Joey walks back into the Stall household at the end of the film, the question of whether he was ever a hero is posed in important ways. Without his ruthless past as a hitman, he never would have had the speed and skill to dispatch the criminals in the diner.

In short, it is his violent past that saves both him and his family. Yet for Joey to remain a hero to his family, and, by extension, to the viewer, it is necessary that his acts of violence be condoned or sanctioned in some man- ner. Generally, both in movies and in real life, that sanction takes the form of God, country, and family, and this film is no exception. Joey kills Leland and Billy because they threaten his friends and his business. He later kills Fogarty because if he does not, he knows that Fogarty will kill his family.

But can the same be said of Richie and his men? Joey seems justified in his actions since, after all, they are in the pro- cess of trying to kill him. As in the execution of the unarmed Leland, the killing of Richie and his men exists on a different moral plane than the killings during the shoot-out. In this way the film suggests that violence is not the best solution, and is actually part of the problem. As we learn in retrospect, it is Joey, not Tom, who kills Billy, and it is Joey whose ruthless instincts kick in when Leland is killed as well.

Once the initial trigger is pulled and Joey is released into Millbrook, the entire moral equation is abandoned. Tom might like to think that he has acted to protect his family, but it is made clear from his actions in Philadelphia that Joey is protecting Joey. He fights the mob in Pennsylvania so that he does not have to fight the mob in Indiana. The shift from hero to vigilante happens in a heartbeat, so subtly that the audi- ence is left no time to reflect upon it, but it is crucial to the meaning of the film. Cronenberg relies on cinematic tropes to establish scenes in which it seems only natural that the villains should be dispatched by the fastest gun in the room, but on closer inspection the morality of these decisions appears deeply flawed.

In a film that relentlessly demonstrates how violence begets further violence, Cronenberg is also at pains to illustrate how easily we can be led to embrace violence and immorality to protect the things we cherish. In the end, Tom is not a hero in this film, nor is his cause just, and Cronenberg leaves us with the question: Just who are we rooting for in this film? This is, of course, the same question that Edie poses when she confronts her husband after the shoot-out with Fogarty.

The identity issue is of paramount im - portance in A History of Violence, and it raises the related question of whether or not a family can live with the cold, hard truth that their titular head is a killer. For Joey, adopting the identity of Tom was a painful undertaking that he equates with death and rebirth, a slow deliberate process of re- construction that is, in fact, one of the promises of America. For Edie, on the other hand, the sudden loss of identity is jarring: Did you just make that up?

Where did that name come from? By revealing the fact that her very name is, in fact, arbitrary, her own sense of identity is compromised. Yet by the end of the film, when we have been exposed to the full reality of who Joey is, it is easy to see that Tom Stall never existed except as a role that Joey succes- sfully played for decades. Just as his family begrudgingly lets him back into the home knowing what they know, the audience also realizes that we have always known we were watching Joey even when we hoped it was really Tom.

If Tom were who he said he was, he would have perished in his diner at the hands of Leland and Billy. Yet in retrospect, the question is simple to answer: The violence at the diner does not draw Joey out of Tom, but simply begins the process of un- masking Joey to the world. To that end, perhaps the most pressing question asked by the film concerns forgiveness. Living with killers, Klawans suggests, is not a difficulty.

What is trou- bling is when that killing is not sanctioned by a sense of a larger purpose. Absent that larger purpose, Joey Cusack is a man with little hope of redemption. He is, after all, a guilty man living with a family of innocents.

Further, his guilt has been visited upon the people he loves, and they have been scarred by the consequences of his choices, becoming liars, cheaters, and even killers themselves in order to help save him from himself. He is not, as the film so relentlessly teases in its first half, the wrong man, but they are the wrong family. They are singled out to pay for crimes they had nothing to do with, and which they could not possibly have known about.

In this way they recall the mute little girl killed in the opening scene, helpless victims of forces beyond their comprehension. It is no coincidence that the film concludes with a scene featuring another mute little girl that mirrors the opening. The cross he wears throughout the film initially leads us to see Tom as an in - nocent man, but by the end it more pertinently suggests that Joey will be crucified for his sins. While the initials J. There is no question that Joey makes a horribly inappropriate substitute for the Christian savior.

Yet the central question posed by the ending of the film is tremendously resonant with the Christian sen- sibility at the heart of so much American mythologizing: For this to happen, we would need the film-noir-style flashback that Cronenberg so conspicuously denies us, a denial that highlights a difference between the in- tentions of the filmmaker and the desires of the film critic.

A History of Violence, it seems, is not a film about the moral redemption of Tom Stall, but about the moral downfall of his family. More specifically, it asks us to consider the cost that must be paid to maintain the family as the moral center of the United States. Writ- ing in Rolling Stone, film critic Peter Travers describes the themes of the film as innately American: Without a hint of sermonizing, he shows how we secretly crave what we publicly condemn, and how we even make peace with it.

Sitting at their dinner table, the Stall family opts to ignore the violence that needs to occur elsewhere for them to be allowed to continue to live their lives in peace. In the end, A History of Violence is not a film about forgiving, but about forgetting. Indeed, the unreality of the film, its oc - casional lapses into implausible action sequences and other unlikely scenarios highlights the possibility that an entirely different sort of interpretation is required to get to the bottom of this film. Fuller suggests that the narrative of A History of Violence amounts to little more than a dream, or the daydreams of Tom and of his son Jack, each emasculated in reality but longing for a life in which they are virile men.

Tom, though he is a lowly diner owner with an ambitious and successful wife, imagines that he could be the type of man who stands up to his rich, dismissive brother, who ravishes his wife, and who is hailed as a national hero for his action-hero style gunplay. In short, he dreams that he could be Shane.

Central to the logic of A History of Violence is a sense of postmodern self-awareness, the assuredness that the type of violence the film addresses is movie violence, rather than that of the real world. From this point of view, Cronenberg has not made the most realist film of his career, but a movie that is itself a commentary on notions of cinematic real- ism. In short, if A History of Violence seems to lack a certain generic stability, this might be explained by the collision of its postmodern sensibility and art film aspira- tions.

Despite its large budget, it is clear that the film aspires to exist in the same rarified cinematic air as the non-commercial and critically lauded films that Cro- nenberg has focused upon since, at least, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. He has not, as many critics and arts writers maintain, returned to the Hollywood model in order to produce a typical blockbuster thriller, but has tied the conventions of the thriller to those of the western, the film noir, the gangster film, the high school bully movie, and the serial killer film in a way that comments upon each without ever fully embracing the conventions of any.

Cronenberg moves through each as a way of unsettling viewer expectations about narrative, but without ever fully departing from a cause and effect structure. To this end, the film might seem to be little more than a postmodern excavation of the history of cinematic violence. Or is it an art film, reflecting on the meaning, implications, and effects of its violence, and getting us to do the same? Following that line of reasoning, it might be fair to say that the movie seemingly evokes the traits of the art film, particularly the investigation of personal identity, without actually embracing them.

In this way, Cronenberg treats the art film as a genre like all the others. Certainly, auteurism holds out some hope as one such possibility. Indeed, sexuality is one of the most thoroughly mined avenues of investigation in Cronenberg schol- arship. In an interview with Chris Rodley, he explained the relationship of sex and death in his work: Life and death and sexuality are interlinked.

The first of these scenes occurs early in the film, preceding any suggestion that Tom Stall is not who he claims to be: Immediately following the scene in which Jack is terrorized by Bobby after gym class, the film shifts from the scary reality of high school to an erotic fan- tasy of the same.

The extended sex scene, with its focus on mutuality and a shared fantasy, is highly ironic in retrospect. Similarly, the post-coital scene, in which the couple spoons while talking about the depths of their love for each other, is filled with moments of dark foreshadowing. Again, Cronenberg introduces se- xuality into the film by coupling it with masquerade and role-playing, but in this scene that pretense is quickly abandoned.

As Edie moves to go upstairs, she is fol- lowed by Tom who attempts to talk to her. When she is pinned against the wall at the foot of the stairs, Edie whirls on her husband, slapping him in the face. He res- ponds by grabbing her by the throat, suddenly and dramatically reverting back to his Joey identity. Indeed, many critics read the scene as a rape.

Miller, for example, situates the scene, in which Edie seem- ingly consents, to a cinematic history that includes Gone with the Wind and The Fountainhead , films in which powerful men ravish the women that they love For his part, Cronenberg maintained in interviews that the scene was not a rape: The complexity of the scene is highlighted by the divergent readings that it generates. During the course of the scene Mortensen is transformed from Tom to Joey and, once he has finished, back to Tom, a performance that highlights the Cronenbergian association of sex and death to a tremendous degree.

The se- quence drives home the point that, stripped of all the illusions, Tom is a mere fic- tion, and Joey is the authentic personality. Reduced to primal urges in the face of sex and death, Joey is revealed to be no more Tom than Edie is still a cheerleader. The first sex scene demonstrates how people can agree to wear masks, while the second emphasizes that masks can only obscure the truth for so long. Notably, it asks the audience to reconsider their under- standing of Edie, and of her particular desires at this point in the film.

As the film plays with the conventions of the film noir, the two most noteworthy ge- neric absences are the revelatory flashback and the femme fatale. A common trope within the genre, the femme fatale is a noteworthy absence from A History of Vio- lence, problematizing its noir-ish aspirations. Yet, in the rough sex scene we are shown a very different vision of Edie Stall than has been presented up to that point in the film.

Significantly, she manipulates the local police officer with a cun- ningly calculated performance that she is able to turn on and off like any classic noir heroine. In an extreme- ly insightful commentary on this scene, Dargis highlights the way that Cronenberg places the camera in the most voyeuristic position possible, distancing the viewer from the sex, but also forcing the audience to reconsider not only Joey, but Edie as well: Cronenberg asks us to look at those who pick up guns in our name, protectors who whisper they love us with hands around our throats.

If Edie seals the fate of anyone, it is that of Tom, the man who first betrayed her with his lies. In accepting the truth about Joey, Edie dooms the part of him that is Tom to irrelevance. Certainly, the quick shot of Edie rocking herself in her bedroom, her back badly bruised, indicates that she has quickly lost the taste for rough trade identified by Dargis. The tension between fantasy and reality that lies at the heart of these two scenes is, obviously, crucial to the structure of the film as a whole.

Indeed, one could plau- sibly suggest that these scenes are the most important in the entire work. But the married sex is also a fantasy, where they decide to play roles to excite themselves, roles that they never played with each other. It is significant, therefore, that neither scene was included in the earliest drafts of the screenplay. Yet in attempt- ing to tie the script more closely to the style of the director who was now attached to the project, the issue of masquerading surfaced once again.

According to Olson, Cronenberg himself had reservations about this new direction in the screenplay. In writing scenes that will reveal the true spirit of his characters, Cronenberg suggests a desire to conceal his own nature in the pro- cess by not making a film that relies too much on his personal trademarks. The idea of concealing the truth about oneself is central to arguments about masquerade generally. In opposition, masculinity was assumed to be fixed and authentic, so that any use of the masquerade in the masculine tradition was assumed to lead to pro - cesses of the feminization of the male masquerader.

This notion aligns nicely with a figure like Joey Cusack, who, in adopting the mask of Tom Stall, allows himself to feminized to a large degree, opting for a life of quiet passivity with a wife who is the real breadwinner and head of the family. This separation of the individual from behavior was favored by sociologists like Talcott Parsons, who argued that feminine and masculine gen- der roles were complementary.

For Butler, the performance of gender is an artifice that does not mask a natural or true identity. It is possible to read A History of Violence as a film that is very acutely concerned about the masculine masquerade, and the transformation of Tom Stall from an inauthentic and therefore feminized man to someone who represents a naturalized form of aggressive masculine violence. Cohan argues that the s was a period when masculinity was seen to be in crisis, an era in which men had become weak as a result of a dependency on others, consequently placing the nation in danger dur- ing the Cold War.

That is to say, if Roger Thornhill typified the s male as an urban advertising exec- utive in need of toughening up, does Joey Cusack represent the s American male as a man of action who needs to be re-awakened? Or, on the other hand, is A History of Violence in fact a warning about rousing that sleeping beast? North by Northwest is largely unambiguous in its politics.

Tom Stall, on the other hand, loses everything because of his decision, whether considered or instinctual, to exert control over the threats to his life and to his family. Most critics see in A History of Violence some form of critique of the contemporary United States, and, particularly, its cultural love affair with violence and its geopolitical instincts toward imperialism; however, it is not always clear precisely what these critics think the film is saying.

Where does heroism end and vigilantism begin? But he offers no suggestion as to what answers the film might offer for these sorts of questions. You know the drill. Those are things that Viggo and I discussed a lot when I was trying to convince him to do the movie. It raises the question of retribution. And when you lose the subtlety, you are losing the human reality, because it is very subtle and complex, and I can see that in politics you maybe at times cannot afford to be bogged down, be - cause you would be forced into action if you had to address every complexity.

How can we reconcile these very different statements about the film? Cronenberg himself has emphasized the way that critics tend to misread his work because they are focused largely on the present: Following this logic, it is possible to see Cronenberg as a filmmaker who is masquerading as political, who is providing critics with a story upon which they can write their own political interests without an actual commitment from the director him - self. In this way, Cronenberg adopts another mask, one that allows his film to pass as something that it might not be, much as Joey passes for such a long time as Tom.

If this is the case, the question remains: To help answer that, it might be worth considering one final act of masquerade presented by the film: If there is one thing that critics were in unanimous agreement about as it pertains to A History of Violence, it is the fact that Millbrook does not seem in any way to be a real American town. The false sense of America created by location shooting in Canada has been a Cronenberg hallmark for some time. In an interview with Anne Billson, he suggested that this displacement made his work more eerily dreamlike: In A History of Violence, it is not entirely clear that Cronenberg is even at great pains to mask the substitution of Canada for the United States.

Of all the second unit footage shot for the film, it is difficult to imagine that the road sign wound up in the finished movie simply through a lack of attention to detail. Indeed, it is perhaps easier to believe that, like Tom when he kills Leland, there is a part of Cronenberg who wants to be found out, who toys with this mask in the hopes that his true identity will be freed to rise to the surface.

Gaea, Natur Und Leben, Volume 29...

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