The movie begins with a series of acts of gratuitous violence that I tend to associate with places in the Dakotas. Yes, this looked to be a high bq movie, and I began unzipping my backpack in alarm. Here was the kind of violence that grows out of the selfish pleasure of willfulness a child experiences when she destroys her doll just because it is hers or when he pulls the wings off a fly just because he can. "But the doll is mine!" is not a fact that can be reasoned against when you try to explain to the little girl why what she did was "wrong." And the little boy learns that torture and destruction of the voiceless and powerless is permissible in society as long as it is kept secret.
But a spree of such gratuitous violence cannot remain undiscovered long, as History demonstrates when the perpetrators make the mistake of entering Tom Stall’s rural Indiana diner at closing time and begin to molest the staff. After doing his best to avoid any violence whatsoever, Stall responds to the perpetrators with what my brother calls "absolute violence." Simply put, Stall takes no prisoners. He goes for the kill.
My brother, the military man—or, as he once put it, "a man of peace who just happens to be in the military"—and I had a long discussion about what Tom Stall’s violence meant. Even as I write this, I am not sure that my brother and I have really understood each other’s positions, but what I did take away from our conversation was that Tom Stall killed, directly and instantly, when such absoluteness (immediate death as opposed to disarming of the assailant) was not necessary.
But what is necessary violence?
To say that I have no idea is rather generous and, fortunately for me, the meaning of "necessary violence" is not the topic of this particular rumination. Whew!3
What does interest me, however, is that this act of absolute violence on Tom Stall’s part sets in motion the chain of events that occupies the rest of the movie. Here, then, begins a particular story of violence.
-------------------------Warning: BIG spoiler!-------------------------
Tom Stall4 was, in an earlier period of his life, a Philadelphia hit man named Joey Cusack, whose reputation was one of sadistic violence. For unknown reasons, he deliberately put this life behind him and attempted to start anew. But self-redemption is nearly impossible, as it is through others that we are redeemed5 (and condemned), and the attempt to hide or bury a part of ourselves is usually equally unsuccessful, if only because we cannot excise our history, for the very act of cutting it off acknowledges its existence, and no human being can live as a spiritual amputee.
Besides, our pasts, like persistent ghosts, will come back to haunt us, even when their reappearance is to our advantage, as when Tom Stall’s history of violence saves the lives of his diner employees. However, the reappearance of his past in his present also brings him to the attention of those who have never forgotten who he is, and the plot of the movie thereafter revolves around how Tom Stall will deal with these people from his past who, for the sake of what they view as justice, wish to destroy the future he has worked to build, by the grace of a second chance, with his wife.
These people from his past come to his diner in Small Town, America, and harass him. They come to his rural Indiana home and harass his family. Eventually, there is a confrontation with the Philadelphia mobsters of Joey’s past that removes any doubt from his wife and family that Tom Stall is not just Tom Stall but also Joey Cusack. As his wife, Edie, tells him, "I saw you turn into Joey right before my eyes." Tom Stall, husband and father, is not who his family thought he was. His son is even in doubt as to whether to call him dad, although it is not his parentage that is in question but rather the nature of his parent. His wife rejects him, for even though they got married, we assume, "for better or worse," it has gotten much worse than even she thought possible.
However, when the local sheriff comes to express his very accurate conclusions about the real nature of Tom Stall, his wife Edie covers for him at the very moment he is about to spill the beans. When Tom tries to thank her after the sheriff leaves, Edie turns on him. In her rage and frustration, she calls forth Joey Cusack. And he comes. In the resulting sexual confrontation, Edie Stall makes the startling discovery that there are aspects to Joey Cusack’s personality that are more pleasing to her than her husband’s. But this is not a discovery she is happy to have made, for Joey Cusack is not the man she married. Then, again, much to her chagrin, she is also no longer the woman that Tom Stall married, either.6
Well, the plot thickens, and Tom/Joey finds himself back in Philly for an inevitably violent confrontation with his violent past and his mobster brother, Richie. The violence of these scenes is also absolute violence. Joey leaves no survivors. But that isn’t what intrigued me about the scenes between Joey and his brother; rather, I was fascinated by the following almost non sequitur interchange between the brothers.
Richie (truly puzzled): "Do you like being married?... Does it work for you? [I don’t] see the upside. You see the upside, Joey?"
Joey (completely certain): "Yes, Richie, I do... I do now."
3 A subplot in the movie has to do with violence in the life of Tom Stall’s son, Jack. The contrast between the reasons for their violence is a conversation in its own right.
4 Tom Stall, by the way, is a great name for this character. This spelling of Stall--not the traditional German “Stahl”--reflects the fact that his life is, in essence, going nowhere, and he has also begun to run out of time. Thomas, as I am sure you know, is a doubter. Is the essential doubt of Tom Stall’s existence not the same as the one we all share: if you knew who I really was, would you still love me?
5 It is important to remember that to re-deem literally means to re-name, as in to give something a new name or meaning. Also, the character of Tom Stall explicitly tells his wife that, even though he spent “three years in the desert” killing Joey Cusack, he was not “born again” until he met her. I find it interesting that church history depicts St. Paul as having spent three years in the deserts of Arabia and Syria (Galatians 1:17) before meeting with the church in Jerusalem, which, under the name of Saul of Tarsus, he had been persecuting. I do not know whether the writers deliberately used these ideas or whether they were tapping intuitively into the unconscious world of human metaphor. An additional irony is that Galatians is a letter to the early church about freedom, faith, and the law as well as about those fruits by which we shall know the true nature of a person.
6 The role of violence in sexuality and power in gender roles versus sex roles is also well-portrayed in this movie. Edie, for example, is a small-town, high-powered lawyer. Her husband, when we first meet him, is the one who rushes to comfort their screaming daughter who has awakened from a nightmare. Whether these sex roles and gender expectations play a stereotypical or novel role in the film is a matter of debate.