Prologue. Two youngsters wait in a car outside a motel. One goes inside “to settle the bill”, then returns (“I had a problem with the waitress”). The second goes back in to get water for the trip. Blood on the counter, the waitress’s corpse on the floor. A little girl appears: the man simply shoots her. (End of the long take.) Another little girl screams: “I saw the monsters”. Her father, Tom Stall, reassures her: “Monsters don’t exist, you had a bad dream”. It’s only a dream. So is the long take the girl’s nightmare? And do monsters exist? Undecidable. With this dreamlike touch, A History of Violence begins. The film is inspired by a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke (1997). Loosely faithful to the comic, it owes a debt to the Western genre (notably to The Fastest Gun Alive, 1956, by Russell Rouse). After The Fly, after Spider – really since ever, and ever after – A History of Violence adds another station to the usual obsessions (issues of Identity and Metamorphosis). Tom Stall’s fate is no different from Brundlefly – The Fly’s, from Saul Tenser’s in Crimes of the Future (failed mutations). Violence is violence upon bodies, even in love. Richie: “When you dream, tell me… are you still Joey?”. Richie and Joey Cusak are brothers. Richie is a boss in Philadelphia; Joey was a ruthless killer. He changed his name, he changed his life. He lives in a small town, runs a diner (finally without Edward Hopper), has a beautiful wife and two children – one a teenager, the sister a very blonde little girl (straight out of The Turn of the Screw). “An unsettlingly idealized landscape: a Twilight Zone” (Cronenberg). When the thugs from the prologue threaten his diner, Tom handles them with deadly skill. He becomes a “local hero”. No one in town suspects his history of violence. Living incognito doesn’t solve identity issues, doesn’t erase the past, doesn’t suppress impulses. Moreover, violence is contagious (his son shoots a mobster who came for revenge). The showdown. In Philadelphia, Richie tries to kill Joey, but Joey shoots him in the head. (The biblical theme of confrontation between brothers dates back to Scanners and returns with mirror-like perfection in Dead Ringers.) By suppressing his evil double, Joey can finally become Tom – or does he perpetuate his inescapable fate in the murder? He throws the gun into the pond. The family prepares to eat, silent. Joey appears. Little Sarah adds a place at the table.

Michele Canosa