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Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Cronenberg as Complete Darwinian
Let us hear from Roger Ebert:
David Cronenberg says his title “A History of Violence” has three levels: It refers (1) to a suspect with a long history of violence; (2) to the historical use of violence as a means of settling disputes, and (3) to the innate violence of Darwinian evolution, in which better-adapted organisms replace those less able to cope. “I am a complete Darwinian,” says Cronenberg, whose new film is in many ways about the survival of the fittest—at all costs.
I taught eXistenZ today and have just watched the aforementioned film, and I don’t think matters are quite as simple as they seem here. My favorite EP argument is that ovulating women prefer rugged, rakish men just then*--perhaps even to the point of straying in hope that a less roguish provider might mistake these wandering rocky genes as his own: The World as Will and General Hospital.
And you could say that A History of Violence illustrates this idea. The trick, however, is that both masculine types are in the same person. As burgher Stall, sex is wholesome reward with cheerleader outfits while the kids are safely engaged in nurturing activities. As thug Cusack, sex is violent thrashing on hard wooden steps. The former’s gratuitous, the latter necessary. (There’s also the matter, mentioned by Ebert, of his son manifesting his genetic violent destiny; but this is an ancillary case.)
The film is adapted from a graphic novel, and this has influenced its style. The characters are similar to the flat and affectless types seen within the gameworlds of eXistenZ, and this is not a criticism of the representative capacity or intellectual depth of the medium (speaking of which, has anyone noticed what short shrift Alan Moore seems to have gotten from reviewers of V for Vendetta? Is this just me?). And this pastel-wash scenery and stilted dialogue reveals the essentially sardonic quality of Cronenberg’s remark. There is no complete Darwinism. Ed Harris’s character speaks with the voice of Teiresian wisdom and is shot in the back for his efforts. Everything that he says about Cusack is true. His wife and family, we have to think, would have been better off listening to him. And they would have, had their acquiescence not been required by the film’s symbolic economy. What Cronenberg means by “complete Darwinian” is cinematic awareness of and clinical detachment from the wretched atavism around every dinner table.
*Penton-Voak IS, Perrett DI, Castles DL, Kobayashi T, Burt DM, Murray LK, Minamisawa R. “Menstrual Cycle Alters Face Preference” Nature 399 (1999): 741-742. (Only one of many.)
Comments
A recent scientific study found that women find different male faces attractive depending on where they are in their menstrual cycle.
For example, when a woman is ovulating she will prefer a man with rugged, masculine features.
And when she is menstruating, she prefers a man doused in petrol, set on fire, with scissors stuck in his eye and a cricket stump up his arse.
Sorry about that. I really tried to resist, really I did.
Ebert’s interpretation here is of the “nature red in tooth and claw with ravine” variety, but Viggo Mortensen’s character just exchanges one pathology for another - the ‘Joey Cusack’ persona isn’t any closer to nature than ‘Tom Stall’, is he? Cronenberg says he never saw the graphic novel, but the small town family man and the renegade mobster are equally cartoonish figures (I don’t mean that judgementally), which does seem likely to have come out of something in the construction of the source, but translated to the movie it means that, as you say, both are flat characters, neither one is rounder. I would argue that we can’t even trace a genealogy or a line of descent from Joey to Tom (or back) - there is that line about how he spent time ‘in the desert’, making the transition. To me that implies total erasure and rebuilding from the ground up, the more so as the info about how exactly he changed his identity is minimal.
What that erasure / rebuild trope sidesteps is the continuity of the body. (so I don’t know, really, about the transmutation to Rough Man with Rough Man genes thing.) But the one consistent piece of information in a movie of this kind is that the body of the actor is real while everything else is imaginary, especially what the movie tells you about that body, like who it belongs to.
So I don’t know that what’s being passed around the table with the carrots and meatloaf is anything atavistic.
Would it be drawing too long a bow to suggest this? What the movie casts a superbly cool eye upon is not reversion (to violence, brutalism) per se, but the psychological setting that allows violence to be narrated in terms of ‘reversion’: a cultural climate that countenances & even endorses sadism & vengefulness by explaining it in terms of irresistible, impersonal urges?
I just saw A History of Violence last week, it only recently opened here. Afterward I poked round and read a few US critics’ reviews; not nearly enough of them seemed to understand how much the movie depends on those two marital sex scenes, more precisely on there being two of them. (Those scenes & other violent fantastical erotic contagions.) So I think you’re on to something there. The brilliance of the film is in superimposing sex and violence in the way that it does; it makes it very difficult for the spectator to maintain his or her cool disinterested onlooker stance. So the movie is diagnosing us as well as them. I think this new movie does that a whole lot better than Crash, just because the body portals etc in Crash are always verging on ridiculous.
I think that when filmmakers or lyricists get hold of **Big Ideas** something terrible usually happens.
I had a friend once who though that “violence” should be abolished entirely as an analytic category, since it’s used to lump so many different kinds of things, all of which are quite dramatic and vivid, and the temptation to identify them all with one another and then use the mushed-together concept to convey deep meaning is virtually irresistable. Sounds like he foresaw Cronenberg.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough about this, but I agree with Laura (I think) in that Cronenberg’s undermining what Ebert’s quote suggets is his apparent intent here. I think the film highlights the gaucherie and inadequacy of the (particularly pop) EP hypothesis I mentioned.
Moore’s not getting any credit because he hated the script and has distanced himself from all adaptations of his work.
But still. That’s just posturing.
I’m not sure. He’s asked to have his name removed from the film and the DC reprints, and he’s asked for whatever money he would’ve made be redistributed to Lloyd--so if it’s posturing, it’s incredibly expensive posturing.
To put this another way: the reason many reviewers--not Ebert, but generally speaking--don’t discuss Moore is that there’s nothing to indicate that they should in the official press packet and they don’t know any better.
Since the comic book was also called “A History of Violence”, it takes a pretty big credit hog of a director to call the film title “his” then explain the levels of meaning intended by “his” title.
Movie violence isn’t particularly darwinian. There is no evolutionary advantage to being a violent loner fighting overwellming odds.
I see that as a kind of potlatch, conspicuous and aggressive sacrifice. Martyrdom.
Not a loner, exactly, is he? That’s part of the point re mate selection and “critique” of simplistic views thereof, above.
I see where you’re coming from there Joe, but on the other hand, any speaker can make a quotation serve his or her own purposes, wouldn’t you say?