We will not call upon the author to explain: Bart Beaty's history of A History of Violence heeds each of the film's brilliant disguises

Would you trust this man to explain his movies to you?

For my money, there are precious few filmmakers working in the popular genres these days whose movies reward repeat viewing with the same sort of intellectual/imaginative force as David Cronenberg’s. Even among those Cronenberg movies that initially strike the viewer as his weakest—perhaps especially those ones—there always lurks the promise of some rich, implied proposition, some biological, ontological, biographical or psychological notion coded to varying degrees in the many fleshy layers of filmic tissue. Crucially, these layers rarely trumpet their own significance in Cronenberg’s films but are left to be gleaned by us in our individual ways. His characters, like Cronenberg himself, are frequently articulate, yet they don’t have any privileged understanding of the full consequence of the story they’re traversing—as protagonists in good genre fare should be, they’re too busy dealing with what’s immediately at hand to give speeches explaining the movie’s themes to us.

By the same token, it is arguably precarious to invest too much authority in Cronenberg’s own statements about his work, which can be found in countless, imminently readable, often fascinating interviews—see Chris Rodley’s superb career-spanning book of conversations Cronenberg on Cronenberg for a full feast of them—and, more recently, audio commentaries. Martin Scorsese, Cronenberg’s nearly exact contemporary and an unabashed, vocal admirer, once said something to the effect of Cronenberg not knowing what his movies are about, and I think he has a good point. Cronenberg’s comments on his movies are always smart, often insightful, sometimes very witty—he’s memorably dubbed The Brood his version of Kramer vs. Kramer—but he himself is insistent on the intuitive nature of his creative work, stating that “understanding” his movies is for him a process that begins exclusively in the wake of a project’s completion. He’s an unusual artist in that he at once resists analysis and is so very compelling an analyst.

For this reason, the real lynchpin in the thesis of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (University of Toronto Press, $16.95), Bart Beaty’s captivating new monograph on the eponymous, widely acclaimed 2005 film, is Beaty’s overt skepticism regarding Cronenberg’s public statements about his work. This questioning is an elegant extension of Beaty’s thoughts on A History of Violence as a whole, a movie of proliferate disguises in which Cronenberg’s directorial role can be seen as yet one more form of clever misdirection. As Beaty states in the book’s introduction:

“The very foundation of A History of Violence is a network of lies… Nothing here is what it seems, and all evidence points to the fact that the filmmakers are playing games when they talk about the movie. The concept of masquerade, of pretending to be something that one is not, has a long and close affinity with filmmaking, precisely because actors put on roles. Yet in A History of Violence, I would suggest, it is also Cronenberg who is playing a role: the Hollywood filmmaker.”

Indeed, the “Hollywoodness” of Cronenberg’s recent return to commercial cred after 20 years in the art house ghetto is embedded into its every intuitive/reflexive brushstroke, making it easily the most cinematically referential work in the director’s oeuvre, a movie which consistently dances between embracing and subverting filmgoers’ expectations, generating power through its always ambiguous relationship to tradition, genre and spectacle.

When I spoke with Cronenberg for Vue Weekly upon the release of Spider back in 2002, we mainly discussed his literary influences—his beloved Nabokov, and of course William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, novelists whose work he’s adapted—while he made virtually no mention of cinematic ones. Even when he mentioned Luis Buñuel, it was to cite the great Surrealist director’s memoir, not his movies. How interesting then to see in A History of Violence a movie so soaked in the history of cinema, and not art cinema, but the classical genres.

Beaty, following a great deal of critical groundwork, emphasizes throughout his book that A History of Violence is very much a genre hybrid, assuming the guise of the western, the thriller, the bully movie or serial killer movie, for as long as it serves a purpose before discarding it, usually in a dynamic, engaging, even shocking manner. I think his point is astute, yet the way Beaty arrives at his conclusion requires the reader to generalize genres to sometimes problematic degrees, like when Beaty defines the western as “the most triumphalist of genres” equating “technical proficiency with a weapon with moral superiority, justice, and righteousness.” Speaking of the western in such simplistic terms only holds water if we ignore the last 60 years or so of movies—more than half the medium’s lifespan. Westerns have been “revisionist” or dismissive of its own myths at least as far back as The Gunfighter (1950).

Likewise Beaty lists several reasons why A History of Violence isn’t a film noir, the lack of urban setting, femme fatale, expressionistic lighting and such, but besides the fact that many of the most iconic noirs also lack these same ingredients—Border Incident (49), with its rural setting, Born to Kill (47), with its homme fatale—I don’t think anyone has ever made a convincing case for noir as a genre in the first place. Crime dramas and thrillers are genres, whereas noir is alternately best labeled a style or cycle. And Cronenberg’s film, in all its ambiguity, subversion and self-consciousness, is perhaps quintessentially noir, or more precisely neo-noir.

Anyway, my nitpicking is if anything a testament to just how solid Beaty’s book is. Not once in its entirety does he survey any single established idea about what A History of Violence is really all about—especially where its thorny political subtexts are concerned—and simply accept it at face value. His a restlessly inquisitive critical mind, driven by some real passion for the possibilities of movies. Light on jargon, heavy on analysis and—especially considering that this is the product of an academic press—shot through with a real sense of voice, Beaty’s provocative take on our country’s most provocative mainstream director is pretty much exactly the sort of writing on movies we can always use more of.