November 2006

I rent movies from Netflix and they sit for sometimes months, waiting for an evening where my son is not watching “Monsters, Inc.” or playing Nintendo, or with me playing until it’s too late to watch a grownup movie. Tonight I drew a line, and asked him to hang around with Daddy while Mommy got to watch one of her movies. So, I watched “A History of Violence.”

I read little of the reviews of this movie, only enough to know it was good. We like violence in a box, and we like our movies to tell us what we want to know about ourselves. Some movies show us more, and this was one of those.

I never really liked David Lynch’s “dark side of the mundane” take because it seemed so utterly manufactured, digested, hackneyed, and consciously ironic. Not to mention the stylistic twists that seemed gratuitous. But I do remember seeing Blue Velvet when it first came out in the 1980s, and knowing that we were seeing something new, however clumsy. At least in those times, with Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” released around the same time, we seemed to be grappling in the post-Vietnam 80s with the meaning of violence in peacetime America.

What I liked about A History of Violence was the degree to which it seemed to integrate violence as part of a continuum of who we are, and extreme violence as part of a piece of humanity which is not beyond forgiveness, survival, and if not redemption, at least acceptance. We can actually feel his wife struggling, she is praying quietly to herself, not to survive this, but to love him still in spite of his past, and who is still clearly is insofar as our past is never truly escaped.

I thought of the women in my old subdivision in Fredericksburg. Most of them were married to Marines. They had every possible cliche of the American dream: The built-to-suit subdivision house, staying at home with the kids, gardening, church, the whole nine. And when their husbands were not deployed, they found it possible to sleep every night, and make love with, a cold blooded killing machine.

We are not shocked by that, since violence on behalf of the state seems so squeaky clean, so utterly normal, and positively heroic. A History of Violence shows a woman finding out after about 20 years that her husband had a history as a paid Mafia killer. You see her struggling to accept that which she probably always knew on some level, her husband struggling to accept the totality of who he is, and their son struggling to transcend his recent discovery of the violence within himself.

As powerful as this movie was, and as radical its message (forgiveness????), in these days of justified (and largely pragmatic) anti-violence sentiments with respect to family and popular culture, it is still a world of male violence that we address when we try to address it at all.

Female violence is a whole other animal. As a feminist, and a pro-choice voter, a former organizer of lobbying groups for reproductive rights, I have heard every argument on every side of the abortion debate. But it’s only the anti-choice right that acknowledges the inherent violence of the act. The pro-choicers are so busy trying to play the shell game of “look at the woman, not the fetus,” that their argument always comes up wanting, always sounding disengenuous. Even the pro-woman left cannot empower women to the point of saying that a woman should have the option to commit an act of lethal violence if it is the right act in her judgment. The man in this movie murdered several people to try to retrieve the second half of his life, built on love and commitment. Sometimes this business of being alive is messy.

I’ve had two abortions, in a long ago and far away part of my life that I’m still trying to reconcile myself with. At the age of 33, I got a soul breathed into me, truly, for the first time. I remember the day, and I’ve never been the same. I’m not born again, I’m not sure what my religion is, but I got a soul that day. I went to my first AA meeting, and haven’t had a drink in the nearly 14 years since.

There is a wisdom in the Big Book of AA. One of the sections has been nicknamed “The Promises,” and one of the promises reads, “We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.” This is hard for those of us who’ve done lots of things we are ashamed of. The language of my generation, the vapid 1970s, of “if it feels good, do it” cannot be countered with the language of religious redemption, which asks us to disown our past. The brilliance of true sobriety, if practiced the way the Big Book teaches, is that every choice in our lives needs to be examined and integrated. We cannot disown things by labelling them as mistakes. We can only move on from there, knowing that every cell in our body is still here as the product of ALL of our choices.

I worry about the tightness of the archetypes we are now constructing for ourselves in the 21st century. Violence is being cast as the bad guy, when, in fact, violence, in all its forms, is in all of us. We try to legislate, justify, condemn, and box it up neatly so we can handle it but, the dirty little secret is that it’s everywhere inside of us and around us. I think America’s utter unease with this notion, it’s addiction to the non-violent utopia of wives rendered infants and sheltered children to mirror back innocence to our crippled killing-machine souls, feeds the problem.

We cannot be redeemed from our violent selves. There may be times we have to choose it to save another, to save ourselves, or simply because our reflexes take over. Is it evil, a crime, a sin? That’s for society to decide, and it’s never been very consistent about that. If, however, on an individual basis, we were able to integrate our violent past, present, and future with our notion of being a forgivable human being, imagine how much more energy we could spend on more loving pursuits than shielding ourselves from reality.

The end of this movie saw the potential for true, real, honest, messy, stinky love to come out of all of this. Not as “pretty” as the love that preceded all the revelation, but deeper than it could have been without it. We are all forgiven, and forgivable, and lovable, and utterly horrible, too.