Conversations With Ben II

On the agenda: David Cronenberg's ouevre

Dan:

I saw two films that could not possibly be more unalike this weekend: Wallace and Gromit and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. The former was charming as hell (no surprise to a committed W & G fan), and a real film lover's delight (Nick Parks just loves dropping references to other films in his work). The latter is almost certainly going to be one of the more controversial and divisive films of the year. On the surface, a pretty straight ahead thriller, with a coupla wild and raunchy sex scenes and copious incidents of gruesome violence. But hidden beneath it all, a rather unflinching study of America's apparently primal need to cheer violence. It's a 21st century Taxi Driver, with a hero who at least appears to be a little kindler and gentler than Travis Bickle. Which is exactly how Cronenberg sucks us in, and ends up implicating us in all the violence--who doesn't wanna root for Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen plays the protagonist--he starred in the three Hobbit films that you haven't seen, which is me trying to explain my "Aragorn" reference). At least, that's the way I see it. William Hurt and Ed Harris get some meaty/pulpy roles, and they chew them into tiny little pieces. I suspect Hurt in particular is going to receive his fair share of awards next spring. Viggo is also pretty impressive as the all-American Dirty Harry as well. Definitely a film worth seeing, though not if you are at all squeamish.


Ben:

I too think the world of W&G and I'm glad to be informed that their feature length debut is up to the standard of their three shorts; Wrong Trousers is the best, followed by Close Shave and finally Grand Day Out. As for Cronenberg, I avoid him like the plague. For me he is yet another decadent director. Just because everyone likes this new one more than Atom Egoyan's latest, I'm still not interested. I almost took a look at the one he did years ago with Jeremy Irons because Irons is so excellent and it sounded bloody interesting. But I still passed. I will let you tell me otherwise, but I am prejudiced. No matter how much critical or ironic or inside-looking-out spin on the thing, for me it is middle-class slumming. But hey, what do I know? I think Tarantino is a bum too.

Dan:

All's I have to say about that is this: There's a difference between chronicling decadence and being decadent. Dead Ringers (the Irons film) is a pretty potent film, but if you ain't into Cronenberg, I doubt that I'll be able to talk you into seeing it.

Oh, and given your stated squeamishness, I doubt that Dead Ringers is the film for you. It curled my toes, and I'm pretty much desensitized thanks to years of watching Japanese horror, Sam Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino flicks. You migth find Spider more up your alley, but alas I do not possess Spider any longer--I passed it along to another "Cronenberger."

I will say that the grisliness of Cronenberg's ouevre is pretty much essential to his purpose, which in A History of Violence is to get us to try to understand what makes us so drawn to brutality. Much like Scorsese did in Taxi Driver (and that film's bloody climax is pretty fucking horrific), where he forces the audience to confront it's fetishism of guns, while also satirizing society's willingness to worship the most depraved acts of violence (it's all about context), Cronenberg is getting at some pretty interesting ideas about tribalism and audience (or societal) culpability in our vengeful rituals of bloodletting. The "hero" in A History of Violence is presented as not just a decent man, but as "the best man I've ever known" according to his beautiful and successful wife (she's a lawyer). So we're intended to not just like this guy, but to follow him to the ends of the earth (like those damned hobbits, which is why this is such great casting by Cronenberg.) Then, after giving us this wonderful hero, Cronenberg takes him away from us, one scene at a time, until the man we see at the end of the film couldn't be more opposite. Yet, we continue to pull for him, despite his clear depravity. It's a remarkable bit of trickery--akin to casting Jimmy Stewart as Travis Bickle--that really challenges us to think about just why we are cheering this deranged figure on his bloody way.And I'm not sure Cronenberg could have pulled it off if he hadn't forced us to look at all the violence dead in the eye.



Ben:

You compare A History of Violence to Taxi Driver. I haven't seen the former of course, but I notice in your comparison you don't mention what really explains and justifies Taxi Driver for me; namely, the context of the Vietnam War. Taxi Driver is not just a harsh condemnation of the violence prevalent in American society. It is much deeper than this because it connects the then-contemporary expression of this violence to be a manifestation of U.S. militarism generally speaking. Incidentally - since I'm raving - I do feel that for some time after Taxi Drive and Raging Bull and perhaps a few others, Scorcese was - not merely repeating himself - but going over to and becoming the very object he had previously criticized. So, in my estimation, Good Fellas is no better than a Brian DePalma picture, say, Scarface.

As for Cronenberg, once again I apologize for being so opinionated about something with which I have no experiential knowledge. But damn, it just sounds like titillation to me. I hope by now I have irritated you enough to compel you to compel me to watch some of his work.
[PAUSE TO TALK WITH MONICA] Turns out I have seen a few Cronenberg films. I have seen The Fly with Jeff Goldblum which I remember as sorta gross but not too bad, but quite funny, in a sort of a dark, Beetlejuice way. I have also seen Naked Lunch with Peter Coyote (?), no that's not right, which I remember as not exactly working but trying hard and besides, this was one of those occasions when I really had read the book, so it's not a fair fight. So what I need to catch up on is the stuff where people fuck the wounds of car crash victims and sinister gynecology with foreign instruments.

Dan:

Naked Lunch is with Peter Weller and Judy Davis, an interesting actress whose fragility and neuroses never fail to make me feel extremely nervous. The point-of-view experimentation he does here is what he also tries with Spider.

As for the context argument with Cronenberg, well, do we really need a specific war to blame for American's penchant for bloody resolutions for all conflicts? A History of Violence sets one tribe against another in a standard us vs. them dynamic--the cop in the innocuous midwestern town of the film's setting says at one point that "we take care of our own" while the Philly mobsters who later come looking for the protagonist are likewise folks who "take care of their own." Anybody who is not one of "us" is a suspect, and such folk can be violently dispatched without causing undue harm to one's position in society. And while I compare AHOV to Taxi Driver, I don't claim it is that film's equal. Viggo is no deNiro, Cronenberg no (young) Scorsese. It's just that the film asks similar questions about American's love affair with guns and violence, and packs a bit of a punch.

Ben:

Peter Weller, right! Robo Cop. Whatever happened to him? Judy Davis I remember from a number of shows, including work with Woody Allen. Yup, the roles I remember her in are definitely commercials for some pharmaceuticals or another or possibly every color of pill you can get your hands on all at once.

Listen, I am not so over the top as to continue riding my puritanical high horse about Cronenberg. Still, I do want to respond to your (rhetorical) question about context. I want to discuss historical context as it pertains to realism in general and political realism in particular.

If it were mandatory to draw on actual history in order to establish realism in art, well, this realistic art would pretty much cease to be art and would instead become the study of history itself. Same goes for current events and the example of Kieslowski's departure from documentaries to fiction is a case in point. Journalism. Making up stories. Not the same task. Fine. Having conceded this, however, I think we need also to acknowledge that the realism most meaningfully realistic is the realism that makes some use of socially experienced facts. Historically speaking, this is not simply a matter of setting, authentic period costumes, non-anachronistic technologies and such, although these details can sometimes pack a hell of a realistic punch. No, the facts I have in mind can be at a much more general level, having to do more abstractly with the ideas of the society as a whole, providing a context that some German labeled zeitgeist; except not necessarily with the happy unity this implies, possibly instead focusing on prominent tears in the social fabric. In short, realism requires that the story be historically located. Furthermore, I argue that the more overtly and intentionally political the work of realism, the more historically located it must be. It must be so because being political is all about entering into the conflict. Not necessarily taking a side, although usually, but not pretending to stand above the conflict with some bogus scientific or philosophic neutrality either. Of course, none of what I have just said has any bearing on work that is obviously and purposefully unrealistic. The criteria for this, indeed the degree to which truly fantastic tales are conceivable, is a related but different problem.

Now, I have just allowed for art that makes no claims on realism and therefore also on historically contextualized politics. Fine. This escape hatch is now open for any work that might get criticized for being inadequate in this regard. But work that does present itself in cultural categories and situations in order to make ostensibly realistic statements about violence, man's inhumanity to man, what have you - so often I find that this work claims to be apolitical but in fact is jam-packed with ideological assumptions and premises. These are not explicitly identified because the work would have us believe that it is apolitical. Yet, at the same time, it would have us believe that it is realistic. What is the essentially tricky step in this fancy footwork? The absence of historical context. The work is not historically located and this allows it to come across as "above politics" while simultaneously pouring out politics buried inside so much high theory about human nature or the existential predicament or whatever you will.

You ask, "do we really need a specific war to blame for American's penchant for bloody resolutions for all conflicts?" My response is: No we don't need a specific war, but on the other hand, wouldn't it take more than one movie to talk about every war started by the United States? Because if we are traveling in the realm of realism, we have to have some goddamn war when it comes to the United States. Because that is the history of the United States. (I won't attempt to paraphrase all of Howard Zinn here.) And with all due respect, if we do not draw on this history to provide context, we get your rationale for a film, i.e., that it "sets one tribe against another in a standard us vs. them dynamic." Dan, I am not convinced there ever was a standard tribal us vs. them dynamic but even if there ever was, it surely must have ceased to exist at least 5000 years ago. Once more, with all due respect, this kind of supposedly anthropological thinking tends to comes out of and feed back into the ruling class mobilization of populations for imperialist projects.

Again, I know nothing about and should therefore stop addressing Cronenberg in all of this. Seriously though, the title, "A History of Violence" - it should be A History of US Foreign Policy. I'm only partly joking. Taxi Driver touched on - just touch on history, that's all I'm asking for, just touch it man - the Vietnam War. Today we are desperate for a film-maker to touch on Iraq. Kieslowski's personal artistic evolution demonstrates in spades that Michael Moore is not enough. Documentaries are not enough. We need art. Historically located, politically engaged, morally committed art. Otherwise our art really is so much "entertainment," bread and circuses. For the educated, this takes the form of exercises in form itself, style for the sake of style... but I already subjected you to that speech this summer. Suffice to shut up now by adding that would-be deconstructions of violence-as-such fall into this camp. You get to go to the circus and feel morally superior to it at the same time,

Dan:

You must know that we are largely in agreement on these things, right? I can hardly wait to see an intelligent filmmaker take on the Iraqi war (David O. Russell made a tangential effort to deal with the 1st Gulf War in Three Kings, but he's a bit of a loose cannon intellectually speaking, and the film ended up being kinda incoherent, politically speaking.) I must take up one point, however. The "standard us v. them" dynamic I'm referring is not some global tribal animus, but rather the standard "yer either with us or agin' us" or "America, love it or leave it" false dichotomies that are run straight on through the U.S. cultural and political fabric. I don't think humans are naturally or instinctively so; far from it. I believe we are social creatures meant to live in communal cooperation (which is not to say we are meant to live harmoniously--discord is also necessary to prevent lapse into a comfortable reliance on stability and raising the status quo to some sorta godlike status, the way the fundies do with religion and the US Constitution.) I am, after all, nearly as big a Red as you are (few of us can claim to be as big as you, after all. /rimshot.) What's interesting (in a Confucian sense) is how many people, including many and, by and large, the most powerful, Americans have taken that natural instinct to huddle together and used it as a rationale for striking out at everything that is not them. And I think this is what Cronenberg is trying to get at in AHOV. Granted, he's no deep thinker, so his film is more visceral than philosophical, but I still think it has a place at the table where such issues are discussed. Even if it is at the kiddie table.


Ben:
For what it's worth, I have a bad case of devil's advocate. Hearing you agree with me makes me want to disagree with myself. Now that you have made it plain that the right-wing take on civilization is not being advertised by either of us, I must reveal that I have been very influenced by Sartre's existential interpretation of Marxism, i.e., "other-ness" in and of itself is a problem in the human condition and a genuine challenge to the formation of political solidarities in any circumstances. This is as close as I get to saying that there is a standard us vs. them dynamic. Now tell me that the moon is made of green cheese so we have something to debate.