[lbo-talk] A History of Violence

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Alexander Nekvasil wrote:
> 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".

For that take, too, there are better movies than David Lynch's: Safe,  
Welcome to the Dollhouse, etc., in which violence is banal, familiar,  
and mundane, rather than self-consciously (and even self-parodically)  
outre (thus allowing the audience to enjoy it safely) as in the Lynch  
films.


> 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.

The Searchers was not representative of the genre -- rather it stood  
at its end.  And it is no wonder: it got released in 1956, around the  
end of an era (recall that Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate  
in 1954).

Yoshie Furuhashi
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