The man who knew too much?

Last night, I dreamed that DW and I were being hunted down by the U.S. military because we had uncovered something scandalous about Vice-President Cheney. I don't remember what exactly it was we discovered--I don't even remember whether I knew in the dream--but Cheney wanted us dead. We were staying in a large, high-rise hotel, and someone gave us a heads-up that we were about to be attacked. We made it to the roof, only to see a Navy FA-18 launch two missles into our hotel room. The missles destroyed the room, blasted holes through the windows and walls, and sent dust flying everywhere, but the hotel still stood, and we survived. However, we were still in fear, and I don't recall us exposing Cheney.

Also during that dream, DW and I somehow were tending to one of the gentle readers of this blog (not DW's brother Bill, btw). We knew this individual's true name--which, in fact, is his actual name--but he insisted that his name was something else.

So I got up this morning and popped David Cronenberg's excellent "A History of Violence" into the DVD player. It was only after watching it that I noted the parallel between the film and the mistaken identity part of my dream.

Incidentally, if you haven't seen "A History of Violence," it really is a must-see film. Violent behavior is the exception in middle-class America, but it is a fact of everyday life in much of the world, where murder remains a leading cause of death and violence is an important political tool employed by both the ruling elites and those attempting to dislodge those elites. In the movie, one act of justifiable violence creates increasingly nasty ripple effects for a perfect American family. The violence is corrosive and destructive, yet strangely appealing. You feel somehow complicit in the savagery before the movie is over, and, indeed, there is a key scene in the film regarding that complicity. The DVD has better than average special features, and the key scenes in the movie are nicely dissected and explained. I suspect that the complicity scene I mentioned above disqualified the film from Academy Award best-picture consideration (the scene is horrendously politically incorrect); you'll know it when you see it.