"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth- it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." – Jean Baudrillard
The Stall family lives in a small town paradise. Daddy runs a coffeehouse, mommy works at a courthouse, the kids go to school and the family home always looks pretty. One day some ridiculously clichéd bad men enter Daddy's store. They try to rob the place, but Daddy turns into an action hero and dispenses with them quickly. Turns out Daddy isn't an ordinary man. He once lived a past life as a "tough gangster" who ticked off some "nasty bad guys". Because of his heroism, and because of his appearances on TV news programs, these "bad guys" track Daddy down and force him to confront his "superhero identity". Shocked that she has been living a lie with a man she doesn't know, Mommy grows to resent Daddy. In order to return to normalcy, Daddy must enter an epic showdown with the "baddies" in a big city mansion. By killing the "baddies" he can destroy all attachments to his "past life". Once this is done, Daddy and Mommy can re-enter a fractured version of their idyllic small town lives.
While people think this is a film about violence, it's really a Lacanian treatise on Desire (Desire=Lack=Real). Like Cronenberg's "Existenz", the film asks not only "what here is real?" but "What is the Real"? But unlike "Existenz", there is no empirical reality from which we can clearly differentiate the fantasmatic elements. There is only a seamless fabric of fantasies. The film therefore alternates between small town drama and macho action movie, the great paradox being that the Stall family only seems realistic once it's menaced by mobsters who seem less real than they are. This generic confusion means that it is a film suffused with the uncanny. Things feel right but also wrong.
Consider Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt", a film in which an evil uncle essentially breeches the idyllic peace of a family home. When he sits down at the family dinner table his "threat" serves to destabilize the "peace" and "bliss" of the family home. This is a common film theme: the idyllic interior slowly breached by a threatening exterior.
With Cronenberg, however, the menacing horror is placed well within the idyllic interior as its "repressed" underside. In this respect, "Violence" has more to do with "Blue Velvet" and "Eyes Wide Shut", than Hitchcock. The film begins precisely with the contrast between a threatening Outside (a long tracking shot of two killers leaving a motel) and an idyllic Inside (the Stalls' family house, where a little girl wakes from a nightmare). But as the film develops, it essentially reverses itself, interiorizing the Threat, or more accurately, showing that the Outside has always been Inside and that the bad dream has always been desired.
By the second half of the film, a dark pit opens up beneath the family living room, the audience seeing/seeking the appetite for cruelty and murder that underpins the foundations of domestic life. The Stall family must accept that their previous picture of their docile lives was a complete illusion. Now they know the truth. But this isn't so much a matter of accepting reality in the raw, but rather, it is a question of accepting that the only liveable reality is a simulation. Consider the way the wife play acts the role of a cheerleader for her husband's sexual delectation at the start of the film, only to be violently played for real at the end. In this respect, "Violence" may be the first post 9/11 film in which the American idyll is deliberately and knowingly re-constructed as simulation, a desperate attempt to avoid the violent Real.
These themes are summarised when one gangster asks the father which persona he sees himself in when he dreams, the point being that daddy lies not at the level of the everyday-empirical but at the level of desire. The Real of all these characters is to be found, fittingly, in the desert, the space of subjective destitution where the father says he "killed" his past life. And so we wake ourselves from dreams, Cronenberg suggests, in order to flee the Real of our desires (the violent desires of son, the opposite desires of mom and dad). At the same time, it must be realised that everyday reality is dependent for its consistency on fantasy. The banal and the reality of violence are inextricable. In this way, the film highlights Lacan's distinction between the latent and the manifest, showing that the outer world has taken over the realm of fantasy and an externalisation of a social unconscious. IE- Desire desires that which is fantasized, repressed, wished for, or absent. Hence, "desire gives way to a representation" of that which is lacking.
8.5/10 - "Violence" suggests that 21C America is less a country in which violence is a repressed underside, than a land where if you begin with ultraviolence you eventually end up with homely banality, and vice versa. In the final scene, when the father returns to his house, everything appears in a totally different light, though it actually remains same. The images of domesticity have now become "images of domesticity", the mashed potato and juice have become "mashed potato" and "juice". They are empty signifiers, reflexively-placed icons of American normality, the very definition of the the uncanny. Such is the nature of late capitalist consumerist society, where "real social life" itself somehow acquires the features of a "staged fake". This is a simulated scenario far bleaker than that of "The Truman Show", since it has been freely and knowingly embraced by the subjects themselves. There is no Them behind the scenes orchestrating and choreographing the simulation, only Us. At the end of the film, everyone is fooling but no-one is fooled.
