We all have a face that we hide away forever...
Billy Joel, "The Stranger"

It took me a while to get around to seeing this movie, A History of Violence. Given the title, I figured it had to have a pretty high "backpack quotient." The backpack quotient, or bq as I shall refer to it in the future, is a movie rating that a friend in graduate school came up with especially for my benefit after we went to see a movie whose excessive violence caused me to watch all but 40 minutes of it with my head in my backpack or, more likely, my backpack over my head.

Lest you think I am a complete wuss when it comes to violence, let me explain what I mean by excessive violence. For me, such violence has two aspects: an utter disregard for the realities of human anatomy, and, like gratuitous sex, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. Excessive violence in movies is the melodramatic equivalent of Three Stooges slapstick: it is funny (or compelling) simply because it is painful. Needless to say, when a movie comes right out and calls itself A History of Violence¹, it’s not going to be very high on my Netflix list.

There it was to remain until the evening I happened to have dinner with a group of philosophers. The discussion turned to this new and "provocative" movie with the glaringly alienating title. But, much to my surprise, the violence in A History of Violence was never mentioned. Rather, conversation revolved around the fact that no one seemed to know what the movie was about and that the ending was singularly vague, unsatisfying, and meaningless. The movie seemed to have no point, no message. It, quite literally, came to no conclusion.

Now, I was interested.

It seemed as if this movie, like Socrates of old, left its viewers in a state of aporia. aporia might best be described as an intellectual dead-end. It is definitely the end of reason—in two senses of the word "end." First, while reasoning may lead you to an end in the sense of a conclusion, such as your need to lose weight or to give up smoking or to start exercising, all the reasoning in the world will not move you to actually do any of those things. Second, this lack of power on the part of reason to overcome existential inertia demonstrates that there is an end to the process reason, that its domain of usefulness is limited. Thus, reason comes to an end (a conclusion) as well as runs out of steam (ends) as a process—it can go no further.² This state of things is called aporia.

Now, this state of knowing the good you should do and not doing it is pretty much the common denominator of human existence. We live in aporia. To escape aporia, we must act or we must feel or, most often, we say "what the hell!" and choose blindly. But philosophers, that rare species of human, are apt by way of occupational hazard to apply reason precisely to those areas of life least amenable to it. If only Aristotle (and others) could have appreciated the fact that Plato—in his writing of Socrates—was making fun of Aristotle’s incessant systematization, the world would be a different place. But, alas, Aristotle did not, and here we find ourselves. Or, at least, there I found myself sitting around a dinner table reasoning about a subject that is best approached through some other human faculty—namely, marriage.

-------------------------Warning: Spoilers ahead!-------------------------

The ending of A History of Violence leaves the viewer in a state of aporia about the marriage between Tom Stall and his wife, Edie. As a matter of fact, the film ends in good, post-modern style with nothing but a gaze. Lacan would be proud, for it is in and through the gaze that we know and are known. In old-fashioned, traditional parlance (without a trace of French insight), the eyes are "the windows of the soul." Through them I see you, but in them you see me. And what the viewer sees at the end of the movie in Tom Stall’s gaze will have a great deal to do with what that viewer has been watching (for) throughout the movie.