> Well, there is always David Cronenberg -- who is clearly more
> talented than David Lynch -- for leftists with a fetish for having
> mind and flesh invaded by all manner of things.
David Cronenberg has talent, but what does he _see_? What does he _hear_? It is the film, not the story in the film, that must invade people's flesh and mind.
Call me a formalist.
> Cronenberg's latest, A History of Violence, is a fine deconstruction
> of the Western and film noir in his "realist" turn.
I'd say it's a deconstruction of the petit-bourgeois revenge drama. There was a review here in Vienna that said the Western has always investigated the question of what to do with the violence experts, and answered that you can't live with them ("The Searchers", to name just one), and then withered away.
> In a feminist twist of film noir, in this film it is a man, not a
> woman, who has "the past," The past that the man, well played by
> Viggo Mortensen, thought he left behind in the East catches up with
> him in the West. The past in question is a history of violence, his
> service as a violent foot soldier for a gangster capitalist (who
> happens to be his brother). To defend his family and home from the
> long arms of the gangster capitalist, however, he ends up
> resurrecting an extremely efficient killing machine that he once was
> and finds himself at odds with his wife and teenage son, who feel
> betrayed by his secrecy and abhor the newly resurrected violent
> masculinity in him (which begins to bleed into his sex with his
> wife), though they love one another. The man overcomes the gangster
> capitalist's underlings in the West (and in the process makes his
> son an accomplice in violence) and the capitalist himself in the
> East. Then, he comes back home. The film's ending is a tense and
> ambiguous scene of homecoming. His wife, son, and daughter are at
> dinner table. When he comes in, there is silence. After a moment
> that feels longer than it is, his daughter (who is too young to
> fully understand the meaning of trust and betrayal) makes place for
> him at the table. He and his wife look into each other's eyes,
> wordlessly, as she passes a plate to him. Fade to black.
In a David Lynch film, that neat separation of the nice guy and the killing machine (or the farewell to the latter by the former) would not work. (It wouldn't, in the real world, neither.) Rather, the psychic wall between the two would become porous very soon, and what you call the "bleeding into" would be studied extensively and hauntingly, and, of course, from the inside.
And, David Lynch would never show us the killer at work, the feline swiftness and smoothness of his movements, the sleepwalking tactical intelligence, the deadly effectiveness of his blows. Never.
In Lynch's world, violence is always ugly, excessive, ridiculous -- and it's everywhere. David Cronenberg may show us how violence is _intruding_ into the family, but David Lynch shows how the family is itself a violent _institution_, "cherry pie and barbed wire".
cheers AN