We Need to Talk About We Need to Talk About Kevin

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There are films meant to scare, and there are films meant to disturb, and come Halloween I’m much more inclined toward the latter. The scariest films I know of aren’t actually meant for fright-fest marathons. The everyone-hits-rock-bottom sequence in Requiem for a Dream, for instance, unsettles me way more than Freddy Krueger wielding a glove of knives at some horny teenagers. I shut my eyes in fear of losing sleep when the dead baby crawls on Ewan McGregor’s ceiling in Trainspotting. Even in actual horror films, I find (for instance) the moment in The Shining when Shelley Duvall finds Jack’s endless pages of nonsense (and thus his lost mind) a lot creepier than the dead twins.

We Need to Talk About Kevin, likewise, is not supposed to be a spooky Halloween staple. And yet not only does it totally work as one, I think it only works as one. It certainly doesn’t work as what it’s set up to be, nee a psychological exploration of a disturbed son and his dispassionate mother. Critics for some reason praised it as just that when it came out. “It’s a hallmark of Kevin’s emotional bravery and intellectual honesty that the questions haunt us long after the credits roll,” glows one. “As a psychological study of a shattered mother struggling to make sense of a heinous crime carried out by her teenage son, it’s endlessly fascinating,” says another. “A captivating examination of parenthood and the nature vs nurture debate,” says yet another.

I’m not so sure. These reviews seem to say a lot more about the critics and society’s general misunderstanding of high school killing sprees than they do about the film itself. In its defense, the book (I’ve never read it) reportedly makes more considerable effort to challenge the fuzzy nature of nature vs nurture: Eva (Kevin’s mom) is a former travel writer, trapped into domesticity by the birth of her son, and she so resents him that there’s every possibility in the world that it’s her own doing that causes Kevin’s ultimate downfall.

But the film pretty firmly sides with “nature,” downplaying her role in his sociopathy. Her former career as a travel writer gets so tossed off that I was genuinely confused at the scene when her picture is in the window of a local bookstore. What’s more, Kevin in the film is so obviously evil–not psychotic, but evil–from so early on that it would take some serious rhetorical gymnastics to implicate Eva in the blame. He’s still in the womb (!) when he’s kicking her so hard that she can’t rest; he cries like a banshee until world’s-least-aware father Franklin (John C. Reilly) comes home, and then he stops, as if to turn the world against her by making her complaints look insane. Calling the film a psychological insight into the mind of a teenage killer is not only inaccurate but disturbing itself, since it suggests that we see bullied, alienated kids like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris as fantastically “evil” as Hannibal Lecter. It’s like hailing Rosemary’s Baby as a lacerating examination of the growing epidemic of women who are raped by Satan.

But, speaking of Rosemary’s Baby, it does work remarkably well as simply a horror film, once you recognize it has no footing in reality. It’s like Rosemary’s Baby continued after the credits rolled and you get to watch what the next sixteen years were like in Mia Farrow’s life. Kevin’s torture of his mother gets increasingly creative: he refuses to roll a ball back to her except to prove he could if he wanted to; he shits his diaper with a terrifying smile on his face, and uses the toilet only after she breaks his arm for it; his little sister owns a pet rabbit and we all know where that’s going.

Lynn Ramsay’s images are inventive, too, oppressively nasty stuff like the first shot of the daughter that establishes her as a cute little girl before having her head turn to reveal she’s lost an eye, or Eva swimming in a blood-red pool of tomato sauce (echoed in the supermarket scene where she leans against a giant display of ketchup bottles–though, again, it’s these images that prove it’s a nightmare with no grounds in reality; what supermarket sells that much kethcup?).

And the non-linear structure makes the whole thing terrifyingly claustrophobic. You never know when you are in time, just as, for Eva, life has become an inescapable ocean of events, days bleeding into each other with no progression or escape. The house is huge and the neighborhood sprawls, and yet just as time is walled-in and claustrophobic here, so too is space, since Eva can’t go anywhere in her town without someone shouting her down for what “she’s” done.

The wisest choice of all was to avoid a Carrie-like climax: we never see the killing spree (all the better, since it’s totally implausible that Kevin could take out the whole school with a bow and arrow, I mean come on), only Kevin’s fetishistic bow to an imaginary audience afterward. Likewise (spoiler), we don’t see Franklin or little sis get killed, only Eva finding them. That’s leagues better than the Saw- and Hostel-like torture porn of the past ten years, where “horror” equals cartoonish violence. Kevin only implies, and the rest is up to us.

If you want a psychological study in pathology, this ain’t it. But if you want to genuinely get unsettled this Halloween, skip Friday the 13thKevin will put your electric bill through the roof with how long it makes you sleep with the lights on.

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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