Tempting as it is, this interpretation is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. It is guilty of the same 'oneiric derealization' which has blighted responses to both Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Kubricks's Eyes Wide Shut, both of which have been interpreted as long dream sequences. Such readings ultimately amount to an attempt to put to rest the films' ontological threat, ironing out all their anomalies by attributing them to an interiorized delirium. The problem is that this denies both the libidinal reality of dreams - we wake ourselves from dreams, Lacan suggests, in order to flee the Real of our desires - at the same time as it ignores the way in which ordinary, everyday reality is dependent for its consistency on fantasy. It also makes the empiricist presupposition that the quotidian and the banal have more reality than violence; the message of the film is rather that the two are inextricable.

In the end, Stall as the fantasy of Cusack is much more interesting than Cusack as the fantasy of Stall. Is the American small-town idyll the fantasy of a psychopath? After Guantanamo Bay, after Abu Graib, this question has a special piquancy. The challenge that A History of Violence poses to the audience comes from the fact that we fully identify with Stall/ Joey's violence. We gain enormous enjoyment when the hoods are dispatched with maximum efficiency. When we dream, do we dream we're Joey? Do we dream as Joey? Do we dream of being Tom, innocent, regular people, no blood on our hands? Are our 'real', everyday lives really only this dream?

At the same time as we enjoy Joey's hyperviolent killing of the gangsters, we know that it is impossible for us to position them as the Outside and Stall/ Joey as the Inside, and the film reinforces the lesson that Zizek thought we should have learned in the aftermath of 9/11:

Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction into the "barbarian" Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the slaughter in Congo.