60 Nights of Horror #22: We Need to Talk About Kevin

This was another one on the list of “things to watch” that we insisted on getting to this season. I am so glad that we finally worked “We Need to Talk About Kevin” into the viewing schedule.

I had a bilateral salpingectomy recently, that took four years of abnormal pap smears and ultrasounds to get approval for. Despite every woman on my mother’s side of the family needing hysterectomies by the age of 40, and my own body telling me something was off, every doctor visit was met with “well, your results are abnormal, but you don’t have cancer YET. And I know you’re concerned, but if we perform anything that could relieve this fear, it would result in you being unable to bear children. Let’s hold off and see if you still don’t want kids by next year. Who knows, you could have a baby by then! Wouldn’t that be great?”

Four years and five doctors later…

I met a nice lady surgeon that looked at my history and said “Yeah your cancer risk is reduced by like 95% if I just snip these bad boys out… you don’t want kids, do you? Aight, cool, cause you won’t be able to after I do this. Cool, cool, cool. You free in August?”

I didn’t realize just how much stress I’d been carrying until I removed the threat of accidental pregnancy from my life. The planner in my purse, kept specifically for taking notes of all menstrual symptoms, body temperatures, ovulation predictions, etc, was now rendered unnecessary. I got my first proper period a few weeks after the surgery, and instead of watching and waiting for it for the days preceding it, it just kind of showed up and I said “Oh yeah, it HAS been about 4 weeks, hasn’t it?” The threat of unwanted motherhood was gone. Because it WAS a threat, a threat that had been there since I was 12 years old.

We need to talk about Eva

We Need to Talk About Kevin begins with Eva Khatchadourian, an adventurous and free-spirited travel writer, crowd surfing during a tomatina festival. It is the one and only moment in this movie we see her truly experiencing joy. All of this disappears when she finds out she is pregnant. She keeps it, and it is a difficult nine months. We see her slowly disassociating during her Lamaze class, and walking the halls of the hospital while in labor is carefully cut a few times throughout the film with shots of her walking through the halls of the prison facility where her son resides.

We experience this movie in two timelines: one that begins at Kevin’s birth and continues for the first 16 years of his life, and one that begins after he has already gone to prison for committing an unknown atrocity. In both timelines we follow Eva specifically, staying inside her head while she tries to connect with a child who hates her from the moment he is born. Eva’s husband, Franklin, is oblivious, and even condescending whenever she tries to voice any concerns about their son. We are left with Eva, questioning her perception of events, questioning her own sanity, and questioning her interpretation of how this little shit seems to live specifically to make her life miserable.

eva, you’re not wrong

Kevin Khatchadourian is a smug little bastard from his first moments out of the womb, and this is not Eva’s fault. What IS her fault is her inability to fake or force connection when she feels none. Babe, sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. (I’m sure this is covered in the book, but why didn’t she just abort?) When you’re looking at the baby you didn’t want, the living breathing reminder of everything you’ve lost, nay, that you’ve GIVEN UP, the thing you should remember first is THIS IS LITERALLY A BABY. A baby who did nothing wrong.

You know who I expect little shit behavior from, more than anyone in the whole world? Fucking babies.

Kevin might have been a little sociopath, but Eva isn’t helping. I saw reflections of my own childhood in her early interactions with him. Not ME, but my younger sister, who has been at odds with our mom since she took her first breaths. This is a child who, upon being told “touche pas,” would look our mom in the eye while she knocked whatever it was right off the table. My younger sister is as defiant as a cat, far as Mothra is concerned. Sidebar: she’s a mother now. HA!

Baby toddler Kevin is perfectly capable of rolling the ball back. He’s perfectly capable of engaging with Eva, but even at this early age he has figured out:

• he makes his mother’s skin crawl

• he can exploit this

• he can manipulate her

• this is the only thing that gives him satisfaction

By the time Kevin is 7 or 8, he still refuses to be potty-trained, pretending to have a learning disability to keep Eva in the home and doting on him daily. She’s lost her career, and her life revolves around changing his diapers and attempting to teach him basic things. Unfortunately, her frustration is his only source of joy, and the only time they are truly connected. He won’t give her any positive reinforcement, so she doubts her connection to him, she doubts her ability to teach, she doubts her femininity and her capacity for mothering. He reveals he can count just fine, moments before filling his diaper with a massive load of shit, triggering an outburst from Eva, who breaks his arm in her rage. It’s only upon returning from the hospital that Kevin decides that it’s time to use the toilet, which overjoys Franklin. “Wow, whatever you did worked!”

Because Franklin has no idea what she’s doing, he has no idea what she goes through every day.

I’ve got a lot of friends with kids, so I’m an expert obviously

A thing that happens with mothers, I’ve heard from my own mother and from friends who are parents, is that the second it’s decided that the parasite is gonna be carried to term, the identity of the host becomes placed on the back burner. The career they had, the relationships they’re in, the way they see themselves, becomes usurped by a new identity: that of a parent. Theoretically, from now on, the kid comes first. Just facts. If you’re not a complete asshole, the kid comes first.

Not necessarily so for fathers. They contribute, sure, but it’s rare that their identity gets lost in parenthood. Franklin, a happy-go-lucky American dream type guy, is unchanged by the birth of his son. He is delighted by him, but he is so himself that he doesn’t even see how motherhood has driven his wife into a 180 from who she once was. He is happy to ignore her desire to stay in the big city in favor of a suburban McMansion on a 1/2 acre lot, for the sake of Kevin having the nuclear childhood. This further removes Eva from any chance at happiness, by chaining her to an isolated area with an extension of herself that she hates and actively hates her back, and it’s the only real connection either one of them has. Aside from being the breadwinner, Franklin might as well not even be involved.

if at first you don’t succeed…

It’s almost laughable when Eva turns up pregnant again, to Franklin’s chagrin. He asks when she was gonna tell him, and says he would have liked to have had a say in the matter. It’s like keeping this second kid is a punishment for him, because he had wanted Kevin so much. Who knows, maybe she’ll connect with this one.

Plot twist except not: She does! And it BURNS Kevin. Anything that takes attention from Kevin has a chance at making Eva happy, and it BURNS him. He won’t have it. Celia is a sweet little nugget and he calls her the R-word and bosses her around and kills her pet and pours drain cleaner in her eye, blinding her and scarring her face. Gets away with it, too. We’re just with Eva, silently suspecting that he had something to do with the destruction but having no proof. besides his flippant attitude and villainous lychee-peeling double entendres. Kevin suuuuuuucks. Especially because he doesn’t even care that it hurts Celia, he just wants to torment Eva.

You can’t have Kevin without Eva

One of the clever things that director Lynne Ramsay does is play on the physical similarities between Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller. She will often show Eva putting her face into water and quick-cut to show Kevin rising from the water, so you’re never really sure who you’re looking at sometimes, especially when seeing them from behind. They have such similar figures and physicality, even their hairstyles are interchangeable. This is something Kevin exploits in the park scene when Eva tries to connect with him in a new way: being a fatphobic cunt.

After a whole movie of Kevin’s smart mouth, she decides to make some rude ass comments of her own. Kevin immediately shuts her down, calling her harsh.* It’s a manipulative tactic meant to keep her on her toes, and it immediately makes her feel like shit. When she calls him out, saying “You’re one to talk,” he responds “Where do you think I get it?” It’s one of the few moments where even though it’s a bad connection, they are connected in their shittiness and self-awareness.

The significance of color

There's little actual blood in this movie, though the art director's use of the color red makes sure that the idea of blood constantly remains on our minds. From the exuberant tomato fight to Eva’s house getting vandalized with red paint, to the red emergency lights bathing the crowd when Kevin shoots up his school.

The color blue is everywhere as well, it’s the color of Kevin’s bedroom, it’s the color of most of his shirts, even his baby stroller. Maybe it was Eva’s “Ah, I’ve had a baby boy and blue is for baby boys,” but it’s also universally recognized as a calming color and it’s interesting that the source of all the conflict in this movie is coded in blue, and constantly getting overwhelmed by red.

The house Eva lives in, in the present day, is bright yellow. When it’s vandalized with red paint, it takes the whole movie to clean it up. Red is always present, under Eva’s fingernails, staining her clothes, inescapable, staining her like a scarlet woman, like a ruined fur coat, a reminder of a blame that hangs on her, though her responsibility for her son’s actions is really up in the air.

I personally don’t think she raised him to be violent. Plenty of people grow up with cold and distant mothers, they don’t shoot up their school gymnasiums, after sealing off all the doorways with bright yellow bike locks.

Target practice

The primary colors red, yellow and blue permeate this movie from beginning to end, as does the target motif which becomes more obvious once Kevin discovers an aptitude and love for archery. It’s the only thing, besides tormenting his mother, that he ever shows any enthusiasm for. And as cool as it is, it doesn’t make sense that he shoots up his school with a bow and arrow. I didn’t read the book, but I did go look up whether this was a choice made by the filmmakers. It was unclear as to how many people were hurt, what the circumstances are in the movie, so I’m glad I looked it up.

In the book, he lures 7 specific people into the gym and locks them in, and THEN shots them with his CROSSBOW. In the movie, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing when it appears as if he’s in the middle of a pep rally, standing on top of the bleachers, reaching into his quiver and taking potshots with a 4 second reload and aim time.

We were yelling “How did he get the bow and arrows into the pep rally? Did they let him in? What about the people who were sitting next to him? Oh hey Kevin, nice bow? OMG why are you shooting me?!” It just didn’t make sense. Apparently in the book he chose 7 different people for specific reasons and lured them there, so I was able to comprehend that better than what I’d seen onscreen.

Who do you love?

It was pretty obvious to me that this final act of violence came as a direct result of finding out his parents were getting a divorce. Franklin stated his desire to take custody of Kevin, since it was obvious that he and Eva had never gotten along, and that Celia would go with her mom. Understandable, doable, and practical. Right? WRONG! Kevin does not want to live with his dad. His dad likes him. Kevin knows his mother’s feelings toward him are because he’s a toxic little fuck. He knows it, she knows it, but Franklin does not.

Franklin loves Kevin with the kind of blind affection that comes with loving a cat. No matter what sounds the cat is making, Franklin’s meowing back and telling himself they just had a very nice conversation. This is unbearable for Kevin, who, remember, only derives joy from tormenting his mom. So before a big life change can happen and pull this family apart, he decides to take away the only source of, if not joy, contentment, that Eva has.

Eva doesn’t know Franklin and Celia are dead til she gets back from the fracas at the school, so she’s already in shock and horror at having seen all the blood and death and her son getting hauled away in cuffs. She gets home and is completely blindsided by the corpses of her husband and daughter in the yard, riddled with arrows.

let’s wrap this up

It’s important to remember that the book is 400-ish pages, and this is a 2 hour film, so there is naturally a LOT left out. From what I read from the book’s wiki, there is a full and complete story that can only be understood if you consume both. It’s not a question of whether one is better than the other, it’s that each one answers questions asked by the other. So I do plan on reading it.

There’s so so much that I’m worried about leaving out, like the striking use of sound, specifically the tch-tch-tch of sprinklers that we hear every time a conflict is happening. I remember thinking the tomatina festival couldn’t possibly be in America (and it wasn’t), but the next scene is a room drenched in blue light with the sprinkler sound, and I thought “this is America, because other places don’t make a point to showcase lawn care.” and then I just kept listening for the sprinkler sounds, and when we FINALLY DO see the sprinkler system, it’s the curtain kind that is a continuous tsssssssssss sound and doesn’t do the tch-tch-tch-tcccccccchhhhhhhhhh so I was like “AHA! This is a memory and she isn’t even sure of the details, it’s unreliable and she doubts herself!” And we hear the sprinklers at moments of conflict and moments of Eva’s self doubt.

I know I’m leaving things out. I seriously had so many thoughts about this film.

I can and will talk about this movie all day to anyone who’ll listen, so if you haven’t read the book or seen this movie and you DID read my notes on this, WHY?

I’m gonna close it in an unsatisfying way, right here. Because in Kevin’s words: “I used to think I knew, but now I’m not so sure.”

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* I have a friend who does this, a very close friend, and even though it pisses me off every time, I don’t say anything because whenever we fight, I always lose and then they don’t talk to me for days and days and I miss them, so I do my best not to take the bait. We’re both a couple of vipers, both extremely capable of being very very mean. I know I could easily say some friendship-ending shit, and that if they really wanted to attack me, they could and I’d forgive them, but they wouldn’t forgive me. And who am I to assume that they couldn’t forgive me, honestly, but like, why risk it? As mean as I could be, I know I’d only do it specifically to be mean and it wouldn’t make me feel any better and I wouldn’t be able to take it back. It’s not worth it to me to be hurtful to them, even if they occasionally stab me. And they can’t possibly ever be any meaner to me than I am to myself. I’m my own Kevin and always have been. My friend could never, LOL! They’re literally one of my favorite people on the planet. They don’t read this.