A History of Violence

Even if we inveterate cinéastes shun all interpretative methods in favor of pure enjoyment, we still have our expectations.  We know what happens to people who claim on the phone to know a secret that they can only discuss in private; we know what lovers forbidden to see one another by class, race, family or religion will choose to do with their fates; and we know what eventually happens to the gun we see in the first act hanging innocuously on the wall.  Cinema, more than literature, grooms our expectations by playing with what we know about human tendencies and what we yearn for in artistic expression.  In books, a character may dream or rant in the most abstract of colors and shapes, and a talented author will make us dream or rant along with him.  In film, however, we are invariably subjected to the ineluctable modality of whatever stage set the director has selected (or whatever computerized mirages corral our imagination, although those films are generally of lesser quality).  So even if we do recognize all the actors in the trailer, what is shown of the characters' personalities in the trailer should be a minute sliver of what is revealed in the film.  We may pique ourselves on our ability to glean the alpha and omega of what will happen from a two-minute foretaste – but that just makes a complete reversal of expectation all the more appealing.  It also brings us to this fine film.

The stage is Millbrook, Indiana, which might not exist under precisely that appellation but exists under thousands of others.  Millbrook and its working-class name embody the prototypical small town, the last bastion of purity in an urbanized world given to decay, dissolute whims, and Darwinian struggle.  Towns such as Millbrook need humble venues where everyone can make sure that nothing has changed, or if something has, that everyone knows about it.  One such nexus is a harmless diner run by a mild-mannered man named Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen).  Tom has a loving and attractive wife, Edie (Maria Bello), an intelligent teenage son, Jack (Ashton Holmes), and Sarah, a young daughter in blonde curls.  Edie's work as an attorney relieves Tom of having to beef up the diner's clientele, a near-impossibility given the town's size and Tom's curious lack of ambition.  Indeed, Edie's attraction to a man who was allegedly raised in Seattle by adoptive parents and has gone essentially nowhere in life tips us off that matters may not be what they seem.  That and one notable incident: two hoodlums, arguably a father-and-son duo, truck into town and decide to make the diner their latest example of bloodthirsty mayhem.  Talking to each other before they enter, and in a horrific scene at the film's beginning, they appear to be financially motivated.  But the evil they display suggests otherwise, and there is no small gleam in their eyes when they hold up the diner (to no one's protests; small-town pacifism must be maintained) and threaten to kill one of the customers for no reason whatsoever.  That is, until Tom springs into action and shoots them both as any trained soldier might.  Except that, to the best of anyone's knowledge, he has had no such training. 

Tom quickly becomes a hero and his face reluctantly makes every local news program and paper in the greater Millbrook area and, as we will soon find out, beyond.  How on earth did he pull it off?  "Anyone would have done the same thing," he mumbles as he walks by a disappointed journalist, who knows that is precisely what no one else would have done.  On the heels of Tom's fifteen minutes of heroism, three men in expensive suits pull up to the diner in one of those large, dark, American cars produced in small towns but never driven in them.  They hail from Philadelphia and are fronted by a nasty piece of work named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris).  Fogarty and his goons obviously care little for the rule of law, which would explain why they do not hesitate to tell their server that while his legal name might indeed be Tom Stall, he was born Joey Cusack.  After this new name seems to punctuate every one of Fogarty's statements, Tom corrects him, as does Edie.  Chuckling smugly, Fogarty then removes his sunglasses to unveil a scar we would not wish on our worst enemy, the handiwork of barbed wire and, well, Joey.  The visitors leave only to shadow the family until Jack runs into a bit of trouble in school.  After having fended off bullies with his wits for so long, he beats the onions out of them in front of a hallway of awed coevals.  Suspended for this act of violence, a lack of self-control that appalls Tom, Jack shows neither pride nor remorse: what he did was just ("the best thing that could ever happen to those two").  Yet Tom sees the matter differently, and every inch of his face seems to cry out "How could my son do this?"  Then Fogarty and company show up on the Stalls' front lawn with Jack in hand and we learn more about what Tom can and cannot do.

There is a third act, and it involves Joey's brother Richie (a Donegaled William Hurt), a dyed-in-the-wool Mafioso who has the mansion and armed detail to prove it.  My strict policy of non-disclosure prevents me from talking at length, but a few sidelights prior to this encounter are worth mentioning.  Lesser films would have the local sheriff gunned down in the middle of the deserted country road on which he pulls over Fogarty's Lincoln towncar; instead, the sheriff is allowed to have the last word ("This is a nice town with nice people; we take care of our people here") and walk away righteously.  When Edie begins to have her doubts about Tom, she asks him whether he used to kill for pleasure or money, a question to which no answer is ever provided.  Nor do we ever know what other impressionable teenagers ever thought of Jack's outburst or whether they chalked it up to his family's tendency to rage when cornered since, after the fight scene, Jack is never again shown in school – almost as if he has now become a man.  But before the fantastic final scene when Tom returns home to a wordless dinner with his stunned family (any other film would have saturated the moment with histrionics), there is the matter of Richie.  Joey and Richie, the names of two little boys who obviously mean no harm.  Joey and Richie greet each other in a way that is so unusual they must be related, because they forget that anyone else could be watching.  When Richie boasts of having decided Joey's fate, he means exactly the opposite of what he says, and Joey understands the charade but disagrees with the method.  Yet what really sets A History of Violence apart is its refusal to condone, glamorize, or celebrate the criminal life.  Criminality is merely treated the way it should be, as an irrevocable pact with dark forces.  Once certain facts seem to implicate Tom his family does not defend him or love him any more, because who they loved never really existed.  So if you believe the accusations that Tom used to be Joey and Joey used to kill people, and that Joey killed himself and became Tom, the logic becomes devastating.  Never once do we really feel bad for Tom, because in truth, we shouldn't.  He may have chosen one path and then another, but in the end he has had one soul and one life, regardless of who he thinks he is.  "When you dream, are you still Joey?" asks Richie, who already has his answer.   But we don't need to see Tom's dreams to have ours.

The Insoluble Problem

The heat and weight and obscurity of the thunderous sky seemed to be pressing yet more closely on the landscape; the clouds had conquered the sun which, above, in a narrowing clearance, stood up paler than the moon. There was a thrill of thunder in the air, but now no more stirring of wind or breeze; and even the colours of the garden seemed only like richer shades of darkness. But one colour still glowed with a certain dusky vividness; and that was the red hair of the woman of that house, who was standing with a sort of rigidity, staring, with her hands thrust up into her hair. That scene of eclipse, with something deeper in his own doubts about its significance, brought to the surface the memory of haunting and mystical lines; and he found himself murmuring: ‘A secret spot, as savage and enchanted as e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover.’ 

What is an insoluble problem? Philosophers – that is to say, wisdom-lovers, not those whose idea of philosophy comprises cigarettes, pretty women, and anarchical manifestoes – will affirm that the grandest problems do not really have any solutions, that is why they have remained both grand and problems. Some, far wiser than any philosopher, will acknowledge that there is only One problem, and that this One is, in fact, no problem at all. We cannot convince everyone of such a view, nor should we: uniformity breeds as much contempt as familiarity. But perhaps, during the long course of a bright summer's eve, we can admit that there do exist puzzles, wonders, and riddles that merit our distraction. And as any Romantic poet might tell you, few bedevilments are of greater charm than the literary mystery. Which brings us to this well-known tale.

Our hero you will know by his cassock, his assistant by his gargantuan shadow. Their assignment will be bland in comparison to what Flambeau would prefer to do, namely track down a notorious jewel thief thought to be amidst a most daring plan. Instead of that adventure, one of mortal danger and little philosophical interest (notorious jewel thieves tend to be kleptomatons), the sleuths are summoned to the Green Dragon, "a certain hotel ... some forty-five miles on the road to a neighbouring cathedral town." As they progress "through a densely wooded but sparsely inhabited landscape, in which inns and all other buildings seemed to grow rarer and rarer," they note that they have arrived at a special time:

The daylight began to take on the character of a stormy twilight even in the heat of noon; and dark purple clouds gathered over dark grey forests. As is common under the lurid quietude of that kind of light, what colour there was in the landscape gained a sort of secretive glow which is not found in objects under the full sunlight; and ragged red leaves or golden or orange fungi seemed to burn with a dark fire of their own.

What happens in "that kind of light"? We may survey various languages for their expressions of dusk and find a collection of doubts and suspicions, half-lit and half-formed, although the old Latin chestnut inter canem et lupum might still be the finest (I also nurture a personal fondness for "gloaming"). But we are only at dusk morally – the cloak of shadows conspiring in crime time – not physically. It is then perhaps appropriate that, after meeting the red-haired "woman of the house," as mentioned in the quote that begins this review, they next encounter someone out of the corner of their joint memory:

Both Flambeau and Father Brown felt that they had hardly ever clapped eyes on a man who was so difficult to place. He was not what is called a gentleman; yet he had something of the dusty refinement of a scholar; there was something faintly disreputable or déclassé about him; and yet the smell of him was rather bookish than Bohemian. He was thin and pale, with a pointed nose and a dark pointed beard; his brow was bald, but his hair behind long and lank and stringy; and the expression of his eyes was almost entirely masked by a pair of blue spectacles. Father Brown felt that he had met something of the sort somewhere, and a long time ago; but he could no longer put a name to it. The lumber he sat among was largely literary lumber; especially bundles of seventeenth-century pamphlets.

A ghost, or simply another shadow? A wolf or a dog? O, the questions we could ask ourselves were it not for the corpse hanging on the tree outside, the beloved old man of the house (and grandfather of the woman of the house), the "sacrilege" of having a body already dead before it is hanged and impaled! You will be relieved to learn, dear reader, that this crime sounds as putrid to our detectives as a faint whiff of it smells to us. More importantly, it also sounds ridiculous and trivial (earlier, "the telephone seemed to be possessed of a demon of triviality"), an aspect explained in satisfactory detail as the sun finally sets, both morally and physically, on the Green Dragon inn.

Those who love wisdom should undoubtedly love Chesterton: in the English language at least, no author is as consistently and profoundly correct. And while one need not adhere to his system of beliefs to appreciate the breadth of his genius, a fair and open mind regardless of creed will be necessary. What Father Brown has given literature cannot be quantified simply because he, this fictive monk, has never sought renown or repute. He would have been more than happy to submit the solution on a small and anonymous leaflet, which in our skeptical times might recur to the image of a fortune cookie (those who seek guidance inside a vanilla cracker will likely not have made it this far down the page). But what then of the very scenic scene of the crime itself?

The garden bed was dotted with tulips that looked like drops of dark blood, and some of which one might have sworn were truly black; and the line ended appropriately with a tulip tree, which Father Brown was disposed, if partly by some confused memory, to identify with what is commonly called the Judas tree. What assisted the association was the fact that there was hanging from one of the branches, like a dried fruit, the dry, thin body of an old man, with a long beard that wagged grotesquely in the wind. There lay on it something more than the horror of darkness, the horror of sunlight; for the fitful sun painted tree and man in gay colours like a stage property.

We may dread the casualness of such an image, even if experience has taught us not to mock death in its endless manifestations. Yet blood-like tulips bespeak an alternative to our expectations, even if experience has taught us not to mock flowers, blood-like or otherwise. And who or what, then, is Tiger Tyrone? O powerful love that, in some respects, makes a beast a man, in some other, a man a beast.  

Blok, "Так. Буря этих лет прошла"

A work ("So now the storm of these wild years is through") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

So now the storm of these wild years is through;   
Here trudg'd the peasant's furrow, black and grey.  
Above me would my senses chance to stray,
Where I might hear the vernal wings anew ... 

O Spring, with whispers you bid me to rise,  
Words horrible and painful, yet so light: 
Gorged on sweet prayer, I will then delight 
To kiss your fabric, unseen to all eyes.   

Too rapidly my lonely heart does beat, 
With too much youth is my old blood endowed, 
When from behind a gently feathered cloud, 
My very first love glides on sprightly feet ... 

Forget this fearful world, my love, forget;
Lift forth your wings and to our place now home;
At that great feast I did not eat alone!  
And you I never, never shall forget!    

Borges, "Sobre los clásicos"

A short essay ("On the classics") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Few disciplines could be of greater interest than etymology; this is owing to the unforeseeable transformation, over the long course of time, of a word's original meaning.  Given such transformations, which may border on the paradoxical, a word's origin is of little or no value in the clarification of a concept.  Knowing that, in Latin, "calculus" means a small stone, and that the Pythagoreans used such stones before the invention of numbers, does not allow us to master the mysteries of algebra.  To learn that a "hypocrite" is an actor and a "person" a mask is hardly a valuable tool for the study of ethics.  Similarly, to understand our current designation of a "classic," it is of no utility that this adjective comes from the Latin classis, a fleet, which later would assume the meaning of order.  (Let us recall in passing the analogous information contained in the term "ship-shape.")  

So what is now a "classic" book?  Within arm's reach I have the definitions furnished by Eliot, Arnold, and Sainte-Beuve, undoubtedly reasonable and luminous, and I would be grateful to concur with these illustrious authors, but I did not consult them.  I am now sixty-odd years old; at my age, coincidences or novelties matter less than what one believes to be true.  Therefore I will limit myself to my own thoughts on the subject.

My first stimulus was A History of Chinese Literature (1901) by Herbert Allen Giles.  In his second chapter I read that one of the five canonical texts which Confucius edited was The Book of Changes or I Ching, composed of sixty-four hexagrams which exhaust possible combinations of six whole or partial lines.  One of the schemes, for example, consists of two whole lines, one partial line, and three whole lines, laid out vertically.  A prehistoric emperor had discovered them in the carapace of one of the sacred turtles.  Leibniz thought he detected a binary system of numeration in the hexagrams; others saw an enigmatic philosophy; still others, like Wilhelm, a tool for the divination of the future since the sixty-four figures correspond to the sixty-four phases of any undertaking or process; and while others espied the vocabulary of a particular tribe, some gazed upon a calendar.  I remember now that Xul Solar used to reconstruct this text with matches and toothpicks.  For foreigners The Book of Changes risks seeming like a mere chinoiserie; yet thousands of generations of very educated men have read it and referred to it with devotion, and will continue to read it.  Confucius told his disciples that if destiny granted him a hundred more years of life, he would consecrate half of it to its study and its commentaries or outgrowths.  

Quite deliberately I chose a simple example, a reading which requires an act of faith.  I arrive now at my thesis.  A classic book is that which a nation or a group of nations – or time itself in its length – has decided to read as if everything in its pages were deliberate, fatidic, as profound as the cosmos, and capable of endless interpretations.  Predictably, these decisions vary.  For Germans and Austrians Faust is a work of genius; for others, one of the most famous forms of tedium, such as Milton's second Paradise, or the work of Rabelais.  Works like The Book of Job, The Divine Comedy, and Macbeth (and, for me, some of the sagas of the North) promise long immortality.  Yet we do not know the future, apart from knowing that it will be different from the present.  A preference may well be a superstition.

I do not have the vocation of an iconoclast.  Until the age of thirty I believed, under the influence of Macedonio Fernández, that beauty was the privilege of very few authors; now I know that it is common, lurking even in the casual pages of the mediocre or the conversations of the street.  In this way, my ignorance of Malaysian and Hungarian literature is perfect; yet I am sure that if time were to grant me the chance to study these traditions, I would find in them everything the mind requires to nourish itself.  Linguistic barriers do not intervene as much as political and geographic ones.  Burns is a classic in Scotland; South of the River Tweed, however, he is of less interest than Dunbar or Stevenson.  In short, the glory of a poet depends on the excitement or apathy of the generations of anonymous men who put him to the test in the solitude of their libraries.    

Literature may evoke eternal emotions, yet how it does so, even without intention, must constantly vary for it not to lose its virtue.  These means persist to the extent that they are recognized by the reader.  Hence it is dangerous to confirm the existence of classic works, or their eternity as such.

Each of us loses faith in his art and his artifices.  I, who have resigned myself to doubting the indefinite persistence of Voltaire or Shakespeare, believe (this evening, on one of the last days of 1965) in that of Schopenhauer and Berkeley.

A classic book is not a book (I repeat) which necessarily possesses these or some other qualities; it is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.

Petrarch, "S'io credesse per morte essere scarco"

A work ("If I believed through death myself released") by this Italian poet.  You can read the original here. 

If I believed through death myself released, 
Of loving thoughts which bind me to this earth, 
Already placed would be my hands inert,
Each dull limb burdenless beneath the peat;   

But since I fear a passageway would bend
'Twixt crying eyes, from war to bloody war,  
So I remain, alas, behind a door,  
Amidst a serried path of doubtful end.   

Enough time's laps'd for final bowstrings drawn  
In arrows merciless, tint'd in their aim
With others' blood, nay bathed, my whole to breach;  

Yet deafest Love I still cannot beseech,
Who left me color'd in his painted frame,  
Forgetful now to call me to his pawn.