Ask Google how to kill a person and you'll get some pretty explicit results. That's what David Cronenberg discovered while making his new film, A History of Violence. His star, Viggo Mortensen, plays a small-town diner owner who comes face-to-face with a couple of criminals at closing time; suddenly, the friendly midwestern family man has to kill or be killed. What would he do? For the director of such gritty films as Spider and Crash, it was important to know the details of how people react in life-threatening situations.
Cronenberg's online search led him to the weird world of hardcore self-defense videos, a place where titles like Delta Seal Camp promise to exorcise your inner wimp. DVDs of this genre are supposedly made by retired Green Berets and the like. Though, as Cronenberg says, "you don't know where they really come from." In any case, they're loaded with tips on how to blow away your assailant. First, never let good manners stand in your way. "Once somebody comes at you with a knife or a gun, there's a cancellation of the social contract," he explains. "It's not a game. There are no rules. You need to kill this person." Another thing to keep in mind: "There's a certain intimacy involved. You have to get very close to the person who's threatening you. It's the opposite of what your instinct is."
In the movie, Mortensen's quick-thinking proprietor, Tom Stall, makes good use of the counterman's friend - a pot of scalding coffee - to disable one of the thugs long enough to grab his gun. Filming the villain being smashed in the face with a glass coffeepot wasn't easy. Cronenberg had to have a stunt double take the blow with his head wrapped in protective padding, then digitally combine that footage with a take of the actor's face. But fortunately for Tom Stall, the coffeepot gambit works: A few squeezes of the trigger and it's all over.
Meanwhile, Cronenberg's story - loosely based on the graphic novel of the same name by John Wagner and Vince Locke - is just getting started. Stall receives the requisite 15 minutes of fame for his bravery, but no sooner do the TV crews pack up than he gets a visit from a big-city gangster (Ed Harris) with an ugly scar across his face and an even uglier demeanor. The gangster keeps calling him Joey. Could it be that Tom Stall, with his ex-cheerleader wife and his picture-perfect kids, is not who he says he is?
Not atypically for Cronenberg, the cycle of slaughter that follows is riddled with existential paradox and filmed with unblinking intensity. Identity may be shed at will, but it still resides deep within the brain. Memory can be shut down but not erased. Violence explodes in a nanosecond, yielding a high that dies almost as quickly. This being a Cronenberg film, however, you don't get to cheer the hero and avoid the splatter. "It's not a ballet," Cronenberg says. "If you shoot somebody in the head, there's a very nasty result." His fidelity to the physics of violence left festival audiences stunned when the picture premiered at Cannes (it hit US theaters September 30). He points out, "if you want the exhilaration of seeing the bad guys go down, then you have to accept the consequences."
- Frank Rose
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Making Death True to Life
