The Divine Exhaustion of Myth and Parable in Cronenberg's A History of Violence (Movie Director David Cronenberg) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Article [1] Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) lives an idyllic life in the small town of Millbrook, Indiana. He owns a diner on Main Street, is loved by the community, and has a loving, perfect nuclear family: Edie (Maria Bello), his wife, Jack (Ashton Holmes), his teenage son, and Sarah (Heidi Hayes), his young daughter. Their life in Millbrook is seemingly perfect; it is interrupted by a random act of violence. Two sinister drifters attempt to rob Tom's store and rape one of his employees. Tom kills the two men, and the media attention attracts his past associates to Millbrook; we gradually discover that Tom was once a mobster named Joey Cusack from Philadelphia, that he changed his identity, and that he moved to Millbrook to escape his violent past. When the mafia does find him, he deals with it the only way the mafia understands: violently. Eventually Tom is summoned back to Philadelphia. His brother is the mafia boss and Tom is forced to kill his own brother to stop the violence. The repercussions of Tom's former, violent life disrupt the neat fabric of his life in Millbrook, permanently altering him and his family. David Cronenberg's A History of Violence exhausts the redemptive possibilities of mythic violence, resulting in a religious story that is neither "myth" nor "parable." The oscillation between myth and parable, mirrored thematically by the oscillation between religion and violence, is forced to its logical extreme in the film, thereby making the divine, which only enters only at the end of the film, necessary.