“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”
Monsters, demons and killers that regularly appear in films are too varied and numerous to either count or imagine, while understanding and interpreting their appearance, behavior and evoked responses requires multiple perspectives and diverse theories. Among the methods of understanding monsters are psychoanalytically influenced theories of films in which the objects of fear have many possible psychic sources: developmentally archaic and buried wishes; anxieties and dread of death, sado –masochistic fantasies associated with violence, suffering and fear,” or descriptions of cultural, family or national collapse”. Recent analysis of such films seemingly followed the influential ideas of Robin Wood (1986) in which he overtly privileged the audience’s participation as both sharing and submitting to a ‘collective cinematic nightmare’. He assumed that the films mechanisms duplicate the mechanisms of “fright “dreams create an external cinematic neurosis while reflecting, as if a day residue, some aspects of the state of society that produces them. Wood’s theory, following Marcuse’s ideas of social repression, while sometimes illuminating film technique and narrative, badly misunderstands the creative process, the ambiguous and developmental meaning of monsters and views the products of creativity as formed exclusively by repressions or repressions lifted.
Monsters created by children and in dreams often represent a split off part or narcissistic aspect of the self which allows both distance from such impulses and enjoyment of the monsters activity. (Freud, 1940). Ekstein (Ekstein and Caruth, 1965) from his work with children described the child created monster as emerging out of internal conflict at a significant point of developmental mastery, while the child is under great internal pressure. A psychic solution to the conflict is attained by externalizing something concrete which then assumes a substitute (external) super-ego function for the child. From this developmental perspective the occurrence of monsters seems to indicate an attempt to harness both destructive impulses and the psychic and social consequences of destructive violence. Freud 1940ws both distance from such impulses and enjoyment of the monsters activity .personality Both explanations offer not only an inherent developmental logic to monsters repeated appearance in all kinds of media from fairy tales to films as well as an unquenched appetite for them. I assume if all the monsters were removed today from films and fiction, children and adults would recreate a new generation tomorrow
Like all cultural-artistic products, films are made, received and interpreted within particular psycho-historical contexts. Film analysis, either by cultural critics or psychoanalysts must take cognizance that the highly unique film images, source material and film technical advances are implicated in the larger cultural and creative processes and by contemporary symbols. Rather than internally originated symbolic or dynamic mental processes illuminated or changed by psychoanalytic insights or psycho-social interactions, films are fixed dynamic narrative processes in which meaning is made by its receivers of audio/visual stimulation, sent by and through specific sensory mechanisms. While we all see the same stimulating film, unique meanings arise from the personal significance mentally generated. Importantly, while the screen has an out there quality to it, viewing creates an internal space for both memory and meaning. This following paper will be an attempt to clarify some processes employed in making meaning of a narrative film by David Cronenberg suggestively titled “A History of Violence.”
Narrative Film
Since the 1920’s cinema has been dominated by an institutional and discursive complex referred to as classic realist cinema or classical Hollywood cinema. In this organizational system, the meanings and regressive pleasures of the viewing arise through the creation and viewing of narrative stories that seem to have a systemic logic and a sense of time being horizontal: the problems posed in the film opening are inevitably resolved by the end of the film and a fictive sense of time is created and conveyed which includes an imaginary past, present and future. This narrative model has been adopted through the international hegemony of the Hollywood movie establishment and has generally been adopted world wide.
The projected text of the film, its visual, spoken and musical simultaneous stimulations combine to present a system of multi-layered signs and actions that are often interpreted psychoanalytically. However, the medium of film itself creatively uses these elements to create, sustain and complete its narration resulting in an uneasy relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema (Villela, 1999. Michels, R.2003.) In particular I will assert that film must be treated differently than painting and literary texts and that psychoanalysis has failed to do so. Important to this thesis is that moving pictures directly imply action and that for many in the audiences that is its greatest appeal, while psychoanalytic understanding of film has ignored this important feature of film.
Considering Film Noir
History of Violence belongs to the Film Noir genre .Considering that film narrative and its derivative sources are interactively responsive to cultural values, one important example of this interaction is the emergence of the film noir genre in the 1940’s with co-development of the surge of interest in psychoanalysis in general and particularly in Hollywood (Krutnick, 1991.) Noir film, evolved at the time of the second World War, is characterized by the moody, expressionistically-lit black and white camera style, a “hard-boiled “ dialogue and representations of conflictual relationships with women that are not only sexual but often lethal. (Gabbard and Gabbard 1987, Kaplan 1999).Highly variable and a genre slippery to define in an absolute sense[1], the “Noir” label seems to be both recognizable and successful with triangular relationships cast along with some form of betrayal in the plot. The central characters of the narrative are ‘granted” some form of “psychic disturbance” or criminality that propels the plot in some form. One summary statement described this Post 1940’s French named genre, as one where the audience finds a continuing discourse on the role of dislocated or psychologically damaged men following combat, the emancipated role of sexualized women with role conflicts and in its new budding, a seeming attempt to repair the images of both. (Krutnick, 1991)
Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” generally follows the rules of narrative trajectory and seems to fit into the new Film Noir tradition; making cinematic use of certain Freudian cinematic devices in its narration and action. These devices appear regularly in “Noir” film but can be clearly seen starkly in “Out of the Past “; whose very title is psychoanalytically suggestive. Modern or new Noir Films appear to be adding both moral and narrative complexity to the dilemmas of the original Noir Classics. In the classic Noir film, the hero was alienated from conventional society; he worked in opposition to the police or authority and at best was morally ambiguous. He encountered a seductive, morally ambiguous female and his conflicts of abetting the woman plunge him into further conflict. In History of Violence the hero possesses many of these characteristics but he is also constructed with a deceptive identity from which his violent-murderous self emerges in sudden balletic violence as if an explosive choreographed “Id”. One aspect constant not repeated in this film, is the notorious female character as this protagonists “wife” is a good woman: the cinematic family is intact and the oedipal order is maintained if not honored.
Horror films
Cronenberg seems drawn to horror films, presenting himself as a cinematic Kafka, seeking to visually join together in this film both noir and the horror elements by using plot and cinematic devices from both genre. Horror films are designed to frighten and panic, arouse feelings of dread and alarm, and to invoke our hidden worst fears, often in a terrifying, shocking finale. While captivating and entertaining the audience at the same time they seek to provide a cathartic experience. Horror films effectively center on the dark side of life, the forbidden, and strange and alarming often violent events. They deal with our most primal nature and its fears: our nightmares, our psychic and physical vulnerability, our alienation, our revulsions, our terror of the unknown, our fear of death and dismemberment, loss of identity, or fear of sexuality. Horror films are as old a cinema going back over 100 years ago while horrific images, through special effects have continued to both entertain and scare audiences. Cronenberg has used murderous violence as a vehicle to propel the film.
Return of the repressed
In the classic suggestively titled Noir film “Out of the Past “, the bucolic almost hyper-real rural setting is first disturbed by potentially violent people returning to the present from a troubled time in the main characters past. This plot device is the cinematic representation of ‘return of the repressed’: something that has been suppressed (denied, avoided or left behind) in or by a significant characters history, returns to upset, clarify and threaten or destroy relations in the present. Film Noir has variously employed this device represented frequently by an amnesia, unconsciousness or people in flight from danger. The device often sets the stage for action by the violent resolution of the narrative by confrontation with the returned memory, its symbolic representation or its moral/judicial consequence.
There is a coincident occurrence of the dynamic of return of the repressed as a psychic dynamic related to “war neurosis” with the surge of Noir films up swell during and after World War II regularly employed its devices. Many different psychoanalytic perspectives fit into this schema .Classically, psychic material returns to consciousness either from an increase of instinctual tension to such a degree that the repressive forces, which had previously been sufficiently strong to maintain the state of repression, proved inadequate for the task. Or, alternatively, there is a weakening of ego defenses that allows repressed elements to re emerge; a re-traumatization of sorts. Fairbairn (1943, Beattie 2003) revised the basic concept to include the return of “bad object” in both internal and externalized forms. Accordingly, what is repressed is not the unpleasant or threatening memories, guilty impulses or humiliating experiences famously depicted in “ Suddenly Last Summer “ or the “Exorcist” but of repressed relationships with bad/dangerous internalized objects that have been denied their power from having an influence. Films are usually adept at “returning “the bad or threatening object” as an externalized character or animistic force. From a current psychoanalytic perspective, the representation of Tom Stall may be closer to Steiner’s (1982) use of splitting in the formulation of an inner sincere self caught in the grip of a hidden malevolent organization than to the earlier and simpler “Id “psychology. Steiner’s conceptualization has the power to explain the emergent malevolent objects seen in horror influenced films like “Alien” and “The Thing “ and to the action hero of the passive/ yet caring man made violent after an unwarranted attack as in the ‘ Death Wish “ series .
In well named “History of Violence” it is violence that returns and the consequences it releases results not in a symptom but in at least four very different violent actions. In order to describe this clearly the narrative plot must first be described.
“History of violence”
“A History of Violence,” whose script deviated in many ways from its graphic novel source (Wagner, J and Locke, V 1997), follows Tom Stall (Mortensen) as its central character. Stall is happily married man who lives an ordinary, quiet, small town life with his lawyer wife (Bello) and two children and “unfortunate truths” are revealed about his history. Borrowing both from the horror genre and film noir Cronenberg set this tale in a mythic small towns (Millbrook, Indiana) in which people lead a super normal life. The progression of intrusions from the opening off-screen violence, to Tom Stahl’s little girl with a nightmare, sets the scene for the appearance of (violent) monsters disrupting the town and family setting and comforting father. The off-screen action in the opening murderous scene allows the audience through foreshadowing to project into the child’s prescient dream and to only thrillingly imagine and anticipate what is about to happen in the narrative to disrupt this idyllic family. The symbolic small town is an icon for innocent America, a simple place that is to be threatened with danger: An American dream! Danger arrives in Milbrook in the form of the first name-less men who Tom Stall kills, followed by the men who believe they recognize him from an earlier time, and eventually Stalls’ brother. The Tom Stall character appears suddenly forced into violence (against men) when there was really not much of an alternative for him. It happens this way in the movie.
One evening while Tom’s going about his business serving food to the customers at his diner, a pair of violent drifters come in (ones that open the film with acts of casual violence rather than paying the bill for lodging) looking for money and indifferent to the harm they may do or have done. Tom fights the two off, efficiently killing both men, becoming a local hero and setting off a chain of events that threatens to rip his family apart and reveal his possible earlier subversive history. From this opening dilemma the tensions of the film’s narrative trajectory has to do with whether Tom Stall is telling the truth about who he is, and the fateful clashes that occur in the uncovering of and mastering his earlier violent life.
Violence seemingly stalks the Stall family. Fogarty (Ed Harris), a black-suited, dead-eyed, scar-faced Irish hood from Philadelphia, tries to pry Tom’s façade to reveal his sadistic history and exact revenge for an earlier beating. While in parallel development a bully stalks the younger Stall boy in high school. The narrative tension remains frighteningly unresolved for some time as to who Stall really is after twenty years of marriage. Is he authentic or is he false, is he a framed innocent falsely accused, a man in the witness protection program, or a common sadistic mob killer. These questions become family problems for his wife and son as much of the action is played out in and near the Stall home until Stall’s brother calls. Stall stoically returns to Philadelphia to resolve his past history; to return to his origins to reveal and face his actual past.
Film Analysis
Film analysis, from any theoretical vantage assumes the taking of a perspective (vertices) from which to view (see and understand), to make meaning of the film (Michels, R. 2003). For example, the psychoanalytic vertices might be centered on depiction of violence, the director Cronenberg’s oeuvre, or the direction of the plot, the genre of the film or the use of a seeming Freudian mechanism such as repression/suppression lifting. For my current purpose I will address first violent action in film, and then risk some insights into the narrative tensions presented. When the ‘selected fact’ of a film is highlighted, the effect is to uncover certain elements of the narrative allowing new possibilities of meaning to then exist and to reveal the sources of emotional of the film’s emotional impact. To begin generally, Greenacre (1963) supposed that the urge toward artistic creation seems to arise and be repeatedly associated with phallic urges in both men and women; and is inextricably bound to phallic and oedipal problems (Greenacre1963.) This phallic-destructive aggression finds easy graphic expression in scenes of sudden murderous violence regularly occurring in this genre /film.
Hollywood filmmakers have a deep commitment to portray violent conflicts through various special effect action, suspense, narratives of killers and serial killers. From Westerns to Gangster films, the Hollywood cinema has found it important and successful that films directed to male audiences have at their narrative/visual center the action of a man killing. The kill is often the manner of narrative resolution, or in the detective genre, the act of detecting and recreating in the script how the kill happened so as to deconstruct the violence in the service of American moral justice. Slotkin (1992) believes that the embodiment of the American male mythic hero of fiction specifically embodies the knowledge of the art and skill of killing directly descending from J.F. Cooper’s “Hawk-Eye”. In literature and subsequently in movies, this tradition is in part a larger repetitive cinematic discourse on the moral right to kill inherited from our Anglo Teutonic history while serving the regressive needs of the audience.
Tom Stall will enact his vigilante killing scenarios when he leaves his wife (and family) and returns to Philadelphia to rid himself of the dangerous persons that have returned from the past to threaten him. Where the movie “gangster” and the serial killer kill indiscriminately on the screen, the right to morally judge the killing of another person is left to be juried by the audience in the American Cinema for its correct moral judgment. Cronenberg openly acknowledged his intent in an interview that “The way the violence is structured in this movie narratively, the violence that the main character commits, is all justifiable,” While culture and judicial sentiment determine attitudes towards killing, film offers an imaginary landscape in which the audience must intellectually accept the narrative logic and final convergence of actions in killing. On the emotional/ responsive level, recent descriptions about imitative identification with psychomotor activity and motor neurons make it obvious that the depictions of killing in films are emotionally stimulating/identificatory to the audience.
An exemplary film of the vigilante discourse is the recent academy awarded film “Mystic River”; it conveys a multi-layered discourse on vigilantism following a murder set against the boyhood history of three men who have been affected by a childhood molestation of one of the three. The award wining “Unforgiven “carries a similar message (Roth, 1997.) History of Violence amplified some elements to this discourse but changes the location from a usual confrontation within the (modern) city, often the subject of Film Noir, to an imagined adversary world between the small town and the modern city (Philadelphia)
` A Double life.
Modern literary conceptualizations of maleness and fathers, upon which current movie narrative depends, have slowly embraced the conceptual frameworks of contemporary literature often the source material for the film. In this conceptualization of a modern narrative there is relationship between the modern city and those who feel beset by the forces of the city; this tension is cinematically conveyed by a dynamic conflict at the edges of the social interaction between rural and urban, cowboy and city Marshall. In addition modernism, and in particular the modern Noir Film ( Krupnick,1991), has taken as part of its domain the complexity of the character’s psychic conflicts so that the psychic “being“ or “self“ of a character becomes illuminated as compelling, complex and variable in the narrative action.
While the center of the film is the compelling character Tom Stall, Cronenberg’s script reveals a tension between cities and rural in the first remarks between the anonymous killers who open the narrative; “We will have to travel in the small towns”. The classic film noir “flight” into small town America is the device that sets up the confrontation with Tom Stall and the sadistic killers in his “Café”. From that point forward the violent men from the city intrude and engage in conflict with the seemingly all ready established rural romantic, simple, honest and sensual elements of the small town. This image represented by the characterization of Tom Stall as the “good sexual father“ and honest proprietor of a small town fixture, the Coffee shop.
However the narrative has misled the audience intentionally about Tom Stall’s “self” to both create ambiguity and tension about who he actually is and actually was: he is not the simple good protective father introduced to the audience who awkwardly comforts his child waking after a nightmare, the proprietor of a small town cafe, the smiling and willing recipient of his wife’s sexual advances dressed as a high school cheerleader. He is found to be not an “authentic” small town character or self. His psychic authenticity requires further exploration.
The “romantic” notion of man, (Trilling, 1975) is of a simple honesty of character: You are, or man is, who he appears to be. In other words, man is authentic, obvious and simple. And further, people in small towns throughout literature are supposed to be without the guile, without complexity, and to never be other than who they appear to be. Yet the confrontation between urban and modern life has spawned a different kind of complex character formation. Certain people have a darker and hidden self aspect (history) which can emerge when particular conditions or threats prevail. This image of a man with a hidden part or past, or of a monster impersonating men who are then revealed with a monster inside, is the classic image of horrid fiction and horror films as in the Jekyll and Hyde character. (Stevenson, 1987.) In contemporary realist films the monster is recast in moral terms either as the criminal perpetrator (serial killer) or the representative of a greater evil that must be both identified and countermanded so that narrative and moral stabilization is reconfigured by the films end.
Many comic book and fantasy heroes, especially those finding their way into films, show such narrative powers as if they are the representative of incarnate destructive or vengeful Id released. Horror and fantasy films and their comic book heroes may well be the last refuge of” Id” psychology and Jekyll and Hyde male personalities. Steiner’s (1982) insights reveals the representation as a romanticized depiction of splitting in the formulation of an inner sincere self caught in the grip of a hidden malevolent organization rather than the earlier and simpler “Id “psychology. Steiner’s conceptualization fits nicely into the malevolent objects seen in horror influenced films like “Alien” and “The Thing “ and to the action hero of the passive man made violent after an unwarranted attack as in the “Death Wish “ series or Spider Man. However it is Meltzer (1973) who most accurately describes the duplicity of the destructive element of the self appearing first as a protector, then as a servant to sexuality, vanity and then as destructively violent that neatly fits the character of Tom Stall
The explosions of violence
` The graphic novel from which A History of Violence was derived tells a different story with different locations. The comic book style plot narrates a young man on the run after stealing from the mob while his partner/friend has been their captive and subject to continuous and fantastic sadistic abuse. The character on the run is Tom Stalls, revealed as having a past that is explosively violent and cunningly effective. Somehow he has been redeemed and made whole on the surface by marrying, family and living in a rural town but returns to save his captured friend. So it is Cronenberg’s creative adaptation that includes the murderous conflict between violent brothers
The film’s on screen violent action visually centers on Stalls’ efficient and seemingly affectless killing of his adversaries. From a non judgmental perspective, the hero Stall actualizes his hidden and dramatic power to kill which makes him greater than his situations, while betraying his latent identity. He escalates his capacity to kill gradually from the Café until he leaves his wife and family for the final confrontation with his brother and his gang, where he kills all without expressing any noticeable feeling or emotion. I believe these scenes are the heart of this action movie and not the seeming narrative surface. The action scenes in which “Stall kills “are the situations created for him to suddenly demonstrate this previously hidden violent murderous capacity. The hero acts as a “machine like” killer, he kills without demonstrating any feeling, is violent without empathy for the victim or ambivalent about killing his brother. Importantly, the plots’ construction premise is designed to evoke that cliché “he had no choice “, that his behavior was inevitable because of external mortal threats. Almost as significant in this film is the final scene after the final killing scene, almost without spoken words in which Tom Stall returns to his wife and family and resumes his seat at the dinner table with “nothing “to reveal by words or feelings: a plate set for him by the daughter he comforted in the opening nightmare scene. The patriarchal family order is resumed without question, statement or emotion. And the killings are accepted.
Some Insights
As stated earlier film makers use violence in male genre films as part of the narrative. While my struggle to understand this film has enabled me to “see” that film analysis, particularly by psychoanalysts have been blind to the action of films and of violent treatment of other human beings in films. Film is unlike other art forms such as painting or a literary work and can not be reduced to narrative and static narrative representation. Film portrays graphic images that move and often act in violent ways with the aid of special effects. In many important ways films are much better at showing actions and violence than thoughts and feelings (Deleuze, G.1986). Action or activity is one of the major ways we organize and understand surface behavior: for example the Rorschach scoring of human movement and animal movement is considered significant while linguistically action is represented by verbs which are a major method of organizing realities. It appears in film analysis that psychoanalysis privileges representation and insight over action. The reasons for the absence of psychoanalysis of action, even action in dreams and their interpretation requires a further study. In “History of Violence” I believe the pivotal narrative sequences are violent action scenes and the effects of violence on his family. Violent action in this film is apparently sanctioned, sadistic, intentionally destructive behavior against a specifically selected individual or group, behavior that would ordinarily run against the most basic and essential assumptions of human concern for self and others, against basic principles of morality. It was Cronenberg’s intent to portray violence that occurs in response to direct violent threats against self and family. First the threat against the people in Stall’s café, then threats against Stalls family, and finally from his brother and his brothers gang. Not only is the violence sudden and lethal but it is enacted without emotion or concern. This violence, I believe was the center piece of the film and leads to understanding its title: that with a history of violence, violence is always potentially present.
Psychoanalytic theory has shunned acts of extreme violence initially confusing violence with aggression. While it is assumed (Freud, 1912) that through projection the world is peopled with monsters and internal mental processes are used against the self, even following WW I Freud (Einstein and Freud, 1932) returned to a death instinct to explain mortal violence where earlier he attempted to tie violence to libido as in sado-masochism. Mostly Klienians theorists have taken refuge in the arousal of the earliest regressive wishes and fantasies related to the infants’ relationship with the mother/breast to explain violence. However, it is Meltzer (1973) who comes closest to understanding the fictional Stall’s behavior when he emphasized the duplicity of the destructive component of self, appearing in turn as protector, then as a servant to one’s sensuality, and only finally as a brutish killer. I believe that one effect of psychoanalytic theorist’s failure to understand films is a collective disregard of what triggers violent responses in reality and such actions in films. Additionally, violent action, the purposeful and intentional killing of another posing a threat appearing in this film can not be reduced to the dynamics of the notion of a paranoid position.
And so in psychoanalytic understanding I am faced with a dilemma in understanding the murderous violence of this movie. The murderous violence occurring in the film appears in well choreographed plot situations when Stall (and the audience) believes that killing the intruder will lead directly to his survival. Certainly one immediate plot “trigger “is the threat to his female employee, then later to his family by the Philadelphia gangsters. Along the way Stall’s sexual behavior, in one scene, becomes more physically aggressive in contrast to his earlier fantasy bound “cheer-leader’ style encounter with his wife, suggesting Cronenberg’s awareness that Stall’s acts of violence has aggressively changed his sexual behavior: an obvious notation of a violence/sexual link. Finally, he must face his threatening sibling and former partner, the returned destructive person from his past referred to earlier, in his brother’s “ home “. So Tom Stall returns to violently meet his past in a film noir climax, the threat from his past must be eliminated and then he may return to his family. Once he has completed the dark task of killing of the dangerous (object) people from his past, and revealed who he actually is, he is accepted back into his family. One must ask with certain circumspection what Cronenberg’s intent was in this graphic film. To demonstrate that he has the courage to kill and the ability to maintain a good (oedipal -father) part of himself within the structure of the family? I think so.
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Films
A history of violence 30 September 2005 USA Directed by Cronenberg Produced by Kent Alderman New Line Productions.
Alien 25 May 1979 (USA) Directed by Ridley Scott. Produced by Gordon Carroll
Death Wish 24 July 1974 (USA Directed by Michael Winner. Produced by Hal Landers.
Excorcist 26 December 1973 (USA) Directed by William Friedkin Produced by William Blatty
Mystic River 15 October 2003 (USA) DIRECTED BY Clint Eastwood .Produced by Bruce Berman
Out of the Past 13 November 1947 directed by Jacques Tourneur Produced by Warren Duff
Unfgorgiven 7 August 1992 directed by Clint Eastwood .Produced by Clint Eastwood ..
[1] The classic Film Noir period is taken to run from The Maltese Falcon (1941) until A Touch of Evil (1958). Almost every dramatic film in that period had some Noir elements.