Steven Shaviro comes in on A History of Violence: The Pinocchio Theory: A History of Violence.
In other words, A History of Violence is like a Moebius strip. At any given point, it seems to have two sides; but the two sides are really the same side, each is continuous with the other, and slides imperceptibly into the other. There is no way to separate the Capra/Spielberg side from the noir/revenge nocturnal side. The common interpretive tendency in cases like this is to see the ‘dark’ side as the deep, hidden underside of the ‘bright’ side, the depths beneath the seemingly cheerful surface. But in A History of Violence, everything is what it seems. Both sides, both identities, are surfaces; both are ’superficial’; and they blends into one other almost without our noticing. The small town, with its overly ostentatious friendliness, is a vision of the good life; but brother Richie’s enormous mansion, furnished with a nouveau-riche vulgarity that almost recalls Donald Trump’s penthouse, is also a vision of the good life. In their odd vacancy, they are both quintessentially American (this could be, as Cronenberg has hinted, an allegory of America’s current cultural divide: blue states and red states, which actually are more continuous with one another than anyone on either side recognizes… this is something, perhaps, that only a Canadian could see, as it is invisible both to us Americans, who are too caught up in it, and to people from outside North America, who are too far away).
See also, k-punk's response to my response. K-punk refers to Shaviro's view as 'definitive'--I wonder if this is because Shaviro agrees more with K-punk! K-punk writes:
I accept that, explicitly, she concedes that the Family reality has no ontological priority over the Gangster. But the point is that her interpretation of the film depends upon a clear implication inconsistent with that awareness. To say that the film is the son, Jack's, fantasy is, surely, to say that the entire Gangster plot is the product of his psychological conflicts.
My response on this is that the 'happy family,' so bizarrely, unrealistically happy is a product of his psychological conflicts. But, see this fantastic point (I like it very much, although I am not convinced that a 'psychological' interpretation necessarily subordinates the ontological;' at any rate, I think the point on the film is excellent):
. . .psychological interpretations not only privilege a particular psychology within the diegesis; they also privilege the epistemological over the ontological. A History of Violence, however, is a film which goes out of its way to expose the way in which genre is ontology, and demands that we pose to ourselves the question of our libidinal complicity in the realities cinema constructs. It is a film which invites us to confront the radical inconsistency of 'our' fantasmatic constructions and of our libidinal investments.
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