Great Moments in Cinematic Insanity

// posted January 4, 2009 by Lou Schuler

Doing some mindless channel-surfing yesterday, I came across A History of Violence on one of the cable channels.

I saw it on DVD whenever it first came out — early 2006, I think — and thought what everybody thought: damned good fight scenes, one great sex scene, some good dialogue, and some domestic scenes that don’t work quite as well as the rough bits. (The kid who plays Viggo Mortensen’s teenage son seems miscast.)

All that matched my memory of the movie from three years ago (except for the fact they couldn’t show the sex scene on basic cable). What I’d completely forgotten about is the over-the-top genius of William Hurt as gangster Richie Cusack.

Quick plot summary: Mortensen plays a small-town restaurant owner who calls himself Tom Stall. He lives in the middle of nowhere with his incredibly hot wife, annoying teenage son, and quietly adorable daughter. When he foils a robbery in his restaurant, killing the two perps in the process, he gets his face in the news, and that brings some unexpected and unwelcome visitors.

Turns out, Tom is really Joey Cusack, a vicious hit man for the Philly mob and younger brother of mob boss Richie Cusack, played by Hurt. Or, at least, he used to be Joey. After his last escapade, which involved the unfortunate intersection of barbed wire and another gangster’s eyeball, he fled the mob life, reinvented himself as a small-town family man, and lived in happy anonymity.

Which begs the question: Is it actually possible for a professional killer to just stop being a man of violence and, from pure force of will, turn himself into Ward Cleaver? 

One of the most memorable crime novels I’ve read is The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson. In that one, a boring small-town sheriff, Lou Ford, is actually a serial killer who hides in plain site by being so predictably dull. It’s a terrific conceit for a novel, although I’m not sure if anyone could really wear the mask of normalcy as well as Thompson’s protagonist does for much of the story. 

A real-world example of a serial murderer hiding in plain sight is Wichita’s BTK killer, who was a local city official and a leader in his church. He committed his final murder in 1991, and managed to go 13 years before he finally cracked and began drawing attention to himself again. 

But a serial killer isn’t the same as a hitman; no matter how much the mob enforcer enjoys his work, he’s still doing a job. So I guess it’s theoretically possible for that guy to settle down somewhere. But could he get married, raise a family, and run a business without any trace of his former occupation emerging until he thwarts a robbery many years later?

If so, I think it would be one for the psychology textbooks.

Another great psycho performance I caught on TV recently was Richard Mulligan as General Custer in Little Big Man. The real-life Custer wasn’t a guy who tried to hide from anybody; he was so fond of publicity that he brought a correspondent along with him to Little Bighorn. (It would’ve produced a great story, had either of them lived.) But as ego-driven as Custer was, it’s hard to make the case that he was clinically insane. 

Which isn’t a knock on Mulligan’s performance. If anything, creating a certifiably loony Custer is even more of an achievement, given how familiar the audience was with Custer’s story when the movie came out in 1970.

Still, if Custer really was even a bit unhinged, you’d expect his story to end badly, which it did. As for the fictional mob hitman played by Mortensen, whether he could really could become a new person is debatable.

That brings me back to the genius of Hurt’s performance as his unhinged brother. He makes it easy to understand why Mortensen’s character would want to get away. That’s good enough for me. 

 

 


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  • Lee

    This comment is unrelated to this blog entry. I just oculdn’t easily find an email address.

    I read your book on new rules, and your analysis of the abdominals has one glaring error. The thing that makes the bellows of your lungs move is the abdomen. It is the motor of the lungs. The diaphram is the muscle during quiet breathing but during any activity, due precisely to the mechanisms you describe aerobic and anaerobic metabolism the main byproduct is hydrogen which is converted to CO2 and water. The CO2 must be eliminated by the lungs or the body becomes acidodic and you will quickly die due to cardiac arrythmia. It is your abdominal muscles that do this trick. If your abdomen was a slab of concrete it would not be able to create the vacuum necessary to suck in the air. Air is passive and flows according to a pressure g radiant and that gradient swings wildly positive and wildly negative due to the abdominals. The chest wall muscles also participate as well as the neck strap muscles, but the king king of breathing is the belly, and the muscles that make the wild swings in airway pressure. The things that limit your ability to run away from animals is not just your ability to chin up, but your ability to rapidly excrete CO2 in conjunction with your ability to deliver oxygen to the mitochondria.

    So even though the babes dig the abs, and they act as a transfer station between the butt and the arm when you are swinging a golf club or what ever what they really do is far more critical. Do some hard intervals to where you can’t take another step and check out what your abs and other accessory breathing muscles do. It’ll give you a whole new perspective. It is also probably why there is a 6 pack and a transversalis. Think of how a bellows works. The six pack is like a bunch of coordinated fingers that can rapidly constrict and relax a vast area of belly. At max respirations you can breath about 40 to 60 times a minute. If you had big slabs of muscle on your belly instead of a few little well co-ordinated slabs you would never be able to move enough air because of the mass of muscle you would have to move.

    I like your book

    Lee A Crocker

  • http://www.louschuler.com Lou Schuler

    Thanks Lee! I always enjoy learning more about my favorite subject.

  • Russell M.

    Lou,

    Sorry to post another unrelated post, but I have a predicament that I think only you can help me with. For Christmas I was given two of your books by a bodybuilding friend: New Rules of Lifting and Home Workout Bible. He is a dedicated reader of yours and decided to (re)introduce me to the world of weights through your programs. I read through New Rules, and I was planning on starting The Eternal Beginner program. The first step was to get a gym membership. I decided to do the break-in program in my apartment’s “weight room,” which has dumbbells up to 50lbs, some machines, and a bench (but no rack). I was going to start Fat Loss I at my local gym, but the economy has not been too friendly to me and I decided the $37 a month gym fee can’t be part of my budget.

    So here is my long-winded question: Should I amend Fat Loss I (and the subsequent programs) to meet the limitations of my “weight room,” or should I create my own workout with the Home Workout Bible instead. The only problem with the latter is that I really don’t feel comfortable creating my own (it’s been 4 years since I worked out), and I’ve heard good things about you and Alwyn’s programs in New Rules. But also, I have yet to through the Home Workout Bible in entirety and you may perhaps provide some DB programs that mirror Fat Loss I.

    Sorry to bug you, but I’m just a confused newby to the weightlifting world and my friend who gifted me your books told me he was unsure of what I should do, as well.

    Thanks for any response,

    Russell

  • http://www.louschuler.com Lou Schuler

    I’d adjust Fat Loss I so you can use your weight room. If you’re confused about any particular exercise substitutions, use Home Workout Bible as a reference.

    You can get a great workout with DBs and a bench, and I assume at least one of the machines has cables.

    Good luck!

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