In the Flesh: A History of Violence (Patreon)

Cronenberg’s work in the mid to late oughts is a fascinating puzzle, outwardly at odds with his seminally grotesque 80s and 90s filmography, inwardly pursuing many of the same ideas in quieter visual language, the things he spent decades sublimating into a noxious, swirling cloud condensing once again into cool and colorless beads of moisture. Codependency and compulsory connection. A particular panicky, flop sweat-stinking strain of misogyny. And of course the body. The body, the body, the body, that singular and fragile engine by which we connect with others and create our personhood. When family man Tom Stall’s (Viggo Mortensen) diner is robbed by spree-killers, he recovers his old self from the perforated remains of the assailants he guns down, as though he knelt down to pluck it from the ruined, oozing mouth of the elder of the two murderers.

A History of Violence takes the well-worn formula of the suburban dad power fantasy and turns it inside out as gruesomely as Cronenberg has ever done with anything. The sweaty, paternalistic machismo of movies like Breakdown and Taken is here transmuted into something at once far more intimate and also colder, less satisfying. Tom’s violence is not a heroic, conveniently justified reaction to his family’s endangerment; instead it completely destroys his family’s sense of safety. The film’s depiction of learning that your husband or father is capable of incredible violence is rock-solid, moving from emulation to fear to the desire to “touch the tiger”, as it were. That he once went by a different name, lived by the violent parasitism of the American gangster, is a form almost of rape, of home invasion by that same home’s patriarch. How many of us have felt that way about our fathers, awakened by some momentary flash of anger to the reality that our nominal protector is the single greatest danger in our lives?

Cronenberg’s direction preserves that tone with immaculate care, walking the high wire between idyllic family life and vicious fight-or-flight terror. In one memorable scene Tom and his wife have a physical altercation on the stairs, slapping and choking and shoving until their contest of strength becomes a violent sexual liaison. Later we glimpse the harsh, right-angled bruises left on Edie’s (Maria Bello) back by the steps. The architecture of the home pressed by force into impressionable flesh. She may run from Tom after they fuck, but escaping the little world they’ve built together, the sustained delusion of the American Dream, proves much more difficult. Even after Tom has slaughtered all the men from his old life who came sniffing after his exposure on local news, in the end all they have to fall back on as a couple is the family dinner table, silent and crushed, incapable of articulating its own pain. The plate his daughter sets for him upon his return stays empty, but we know what’s on it. Families, after all, are only meat.