A History of Violence

One thing I remember thinking when I read Lyn Hejinian's My Life is that at twenty, it's still not to late for everything about me to have been temporary. A History of Violence is about how that couldn't be true. At the beginning of the film, Viggo's Robert Stall has been a success at shedding his old name. Joey Cusack was a violent mobster who tried to tear out someone's eye with barbed wire. Tom Stall picks up coke cans lying on the street; the cement of a small town's main drag looks spotless when he leaves it. But what seems like it could have been shed was only ever buried: when chance splashes Tom's face on the front of the paper, and on the soft, buzzing plastic of TV screens, Joey's friends appear like the puncture of torches in a dark room.

A DONUT

Robert Creeley, Pieces, 1969

Pieces reflects in its fragmented structure, and in the frayed-edge sensibility given off by its structuring, the imminence of travel – that undeniability of the onward drag. Unlike Words before it and In London after, Pieces refuses to make discrete its components, or to commit its islands of text to categories of either “poem” or “note.” The consequence is a run-on quality, where bodies are separated only by line breaks or dots, carrying in this crowdedness a sense of itinerance, perpetual preoccupation. Such rapidity is unusual for Creeley, whose work conveys above much else a suspension from the rush – juxtaposed with Charles Olson, with Jack Spicer, with, even, Larry Eigner, its dynamism is the quietest.

Yet, even in this rapidity of rushing from place to place, Creeley is able to disassemble the inevitability of the poem’s temporality with rigorousness. Admittedly, though, it’s a rigorousness matched by knowledge of its own futility. “A Step” echoes TS Eliot’s Prufrock for an instant (“Things / come and go”), carrying in that echo the great weight of Eliot’s page-eating poem, but only does so to drop the anticipation with a mix of resignation and acceptance (“Then / let them.”) As in the earlier “I Know a Man,” where Creeley pokes fun at his own vocation by reference to “always talking,” our awareness of Creeley as poet acquires an unweary knowledge of its ultimate impotence in the face of those “things” that must be “let.”

Although it can’t be called resignation, the metaphysical attitude conveyed in Creeley’s Pieces is a kind if acceptance not entirely too far from it. Here banality – or, should we say, the prosaic – stretches from line to line, unhurried: “Sit. Eat / a doughnut.” The drama of the world is placed elsewhere, not in the seeing-knowing action of observation and charting that so consumes, for instance, Olson’s Maximus Poems, but in the exacting dissection of the simplest words. Drama is conjured up by predisposing, by attuning the reader to the operations of language. On 388, the crescendo of a love (or sex) poem is held, slowed, and transformed into a question of language’s ability to mark the moment and transmit its urgency: “Here here / here. Here.” The hot, breathy, if elegant lust on page 387 becomes transposed onto Creeley’s examinations of language: “Here I / am. There / you are. / The head / of a / pin on . . .” Machinations and maneuvers that are set up as literally romantic are revealed or transformed into operations of language, both more and less concrete than before, for while they now address abstract concepts like the ability of a word to conjure or point, they do so by literally pointing at the shape and substance of ink on the page – the phrase “pin on,” for instance, seems present only to point at the emphatic, and evidently present, full stops that follow it.

The Counselor

The Counselor (dir. Ridley Scott, 2013, from a script by Cormac McCarthy), was underrated, and maybe more valuable for this reason: that it is an example of lazy reading – reviewing against expectation. The movie was misguidedly marketed as a thriller, a genre – in the laziest definition – cut from suspense if nothing else. This is entirely the obverse of the force Scott and McCarthy use to animate the movie. The Counselor's principle is the inevitable. In its universe, no threat becomes clear until its consequence is already too late to prevent.

Except, perhaps, in one case. The film's logic is disclosed early, gestured to in our encounter with the first of a ring of supporting characters spun in and out of the narrative. Reiner (Javier Bardem) is an ostentatious, sleazy, regrettably likable drug lord friend of Michael Fassbender's eponymous Counselor. His gated home is like a Miami clubhouse cut and pasted into the middle of the Texan desert. The excess is in more than just his bizarro Versace shirts and expensive furniture – it’s the liquid wealth of his deep blue pool, his verdant lawn that shimmers green enough to be mistaken for Long Island, which is, in certain vocabularies, about as far as you can get from Ciudad Juarez. What Reiner embodies is a spatial anachronism: what it looks like to fight against nature. “Nature”, that is, in the sense of the drought that surrounds him, but also the innate precariousness of border territory; palpable in everything of his is the sense of a world build for this: to fight inevitability.