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.