We Need to Talk About Kevin: A "Vision Apparent by Shock"

(Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

**NOTE: SPOILERS THROUGHOUT**

The surreal bumps up against the ordinary, and violence, death, and horror run as disturbing threads through all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction: in “Revelation” a pimply teenaged girl suddenly and viciously hurls her book at the middle-aged, happily complacent woman who sits across from her in the doctor’s waiting room; in “A Good Man Is Hard,” three men savagely, one by one, kill a stranded family with car trouble; “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” ends with a mother dying suddenly of a stroke in her son’s arms; in “Greenleaf” the main character is gored through the heart by a bull in the very last scene; in “Good Country People,” a Bible salesman woos a young woman and steals her artificial leg, leaving her, helpless, in a barn loft.  Not only do these kinds of violent, bizarre events run through O’Connor’s work, but her stories, set in such ordinary contexts, are also filled with “freaks,” as O’Connor called them, physically and spiritually ugly people.  And if we are honest as readers, we do not really sympathize with them in the violence and horror under which they suffer.  If we are even more honest, we might often even find the horror funny. A pimply girl hurling a book at a woman in a waiting room? A stolen leg? O’Connor’s stories are as stuffed with humor – dark though it is – as they are stuffed with horror.  The violence, the freakishness, the humor – all of these elements ultimately make for a very uncomfortable, provocative mix, and inevitably, when I assign O’Connor to my American literature students, the reactions I get from them are extreme: they come away either loving O’Connor’s work or hating it.  In both cases, the reactions are passionate, for O’Connor forces her readers into a confrontation, and some readers thrill to it while others are enraged. 

O’Connor felt that shocking her readers, provoking such reactions, was necessary: “If you want to show something that the majority don’t believe or wish to see, then you have to get and hold their attention usually by extreme means,” she wrote.  And further, “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do,” she said, “you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”   Hardly a very flattering portrait of her readers, the blind and the nearly deaf.  But O’Connor’s unapologetic bluntness about what she was doing stemmed from her assurance in herself as a writer (to the question, “why do you write?” she once said, simply, “Because I’m good at it”) and from her assurance in the importance of what she wanted to say.  For the combined effect of her stories’ violence, grotesqueness, and humor is not an end itself; her end is not merely to evoke a sensation; rather, it is to say something she felt was true about world as she saw it, and O’Connor’s violence always aims at some sort of revelation or redemption, both for her characters and, I think, she hoped, for her readers.  Through the shocking violence, her characters reach a crisis in which they are forced see themselves and the world afresh, even if that violence brings them to their deaths. In “Greenleaf,” for example, the main character’s new vision comes - her eyes literally open and staring - exactly as the bull gores into her; the new vision is tied to her death.   O’Connor’s grostequery and violence are ways of rending the physical world, so literally and ruthlessly ripping it apart, that her characters and her readers must see through to something deeper, to that thing that O’Connor called, “mystery” – a spiritual, invisible reality to which her characters had been previously blind.

Brutally shocking garish red screams its way through Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.
  

And the red is so very red, so very saturating that it is intensely uncomfortable, all the moreso, given the key bloody incident that hangs over the film, the incident the red forces us to look at, again and again.  We viewers are forced to confront the violence, to be rubbed with it until we are left smeared with something from which we naturally and instinctively recoil.  Ramsay’s film isn’t gentle.  It isn’t graceful.  It’s as grotesque a vision as anything in we might find in O’Connor.  And confronted with such a blatantly provocative viewing experience, an individual can only react as extremely as the film itself.  There is no neutral reaction possible here.  Ramsay’s violent red, a red heightened even more by her assaultive use of sound and by her darkly humorous and on-the-nose choices in music, demand a response, even from those whom O’Connor might have called the “blind” and “hard of hearing.” And truly, reviews of the film seem especially extreme: 100-rated reviews on metacritic and 0-rated reviews, reviews that claim it is “masterful” and “exquisitely realized” and reviews that claim it is “soulless” and “unwatchable.”  No one seems to be able to offer a ho-hum response.

Perhaps it is my adoration of one of Ramsay’s earlier films – the beautiful, sensitive, and heartbreaking Ratcatcher – or perhaps it is my love for Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant use of violence and of the grotesque – perhaps it is both of those things and perhaps it is neither, but whatever the case, my conclusion, as I consider the shocking experience that is We Need to Talk About Kevin, is that Ramsay’s film is deeply revelatory.  It shocks, by means of what some might call “camp,” but the shock rends a kind of veil – woven, perhaps, of complacency and long-held assumptions – and reveals to us a vision of motherhood that runs counter to everything comfortable, sweet, and cozy.  It is thus more nightmare than epiphany, but because it embraces the nightmare so fully, I believe it is all the more visionary.

The film’s title features a son, not a mother, and that fact, along with the fact of the horrific act committed by the son, perhaps tempts us on an initial viewing into the idea that the film is most interested in exploring Kevin and in exploring the history and psychology that led a boy from a privileged home towards his brutal actions.  From the very first frames, however, we are shown that this is Eva’s story, the mother’s story, not the son’s.  Not Kevin’s.  The film opens with a scene that, at first and for some time as the film runs, means very little.  It is evening, and we are in a dim house.  A sliding door stands open to the air; a white, sheer curtain moves gracefully; the ballooning fabric presses gently into the room.  
The sound of a pulsating sprinkler – ch-ch-ch–ch – permeates the scene.  These are images and sounds, as we learn much later in the film, from Eva’s memory – only she was privy to them.  And that evening – with the floating white curtain, the nighttime light, the sound of the sprinkler – is the evening that represents the bloody crux of Eva’s journey.  It is, for her, the turning point of her life, where she is forced to face not only literal violence – a moment where one privileged, complacent life ends and a new destitute life begins – but also a metaphorical, psychological violence that forces her, finally, from one identity, to which she’d been desperately clinging, into a new identity.  The film, then, is not primarily tied to literal, factual events that comprise a life journey, but rather to a more subjective journey of the mind and of the emotions – Eva’s mind and emotions.  

A great deal of the discomfort of the film stems from the fact that we are immersed so uncompromisingly into that fractured confusion of Eva’s being.  Her story, her self, is filtered for us through a series of disjointed, seemingly mismatched images and sounds, and both are linked equally to past and present.  Her story does have a clear present: she lives alone in a shabby, unkempt home, a place actively void of her personality or care.   
She herself seems numb or sleepwalking, living in the wake of what we soon realize has been some horrific event.  But the film shifts so swiftly and so fluidly between that present and the past—several different pasts, in fact—that we are often unsure at first whether we are seeing the present or a past and we are unsure at first of the particular past.  But this fluidity of time, this lack of any chronology--as the red blinking 12:00 in Eva’s bedroom indicates--represents Eva’s mindset: for her, the past is her present; it informs her present, overshadows her present; she sees it and feels it in everything. 
Likewise, the central horrific event of Eva’s life informs and overshadows everything that came previous to it so that every point in time is in some way the same.  Every moment in filtered through the red-colored lens of Eva’s horror.  Time is round, we might say, not linear. 

Given the film’s context then – Eva’s mind and emotions,   
which have no ordered time frame –-it is a film that demands second and third viewings, for a first viewing is incredibly disorienting; our senses are bombarded with images and sounds that feel powerful – almost unbearable in their power - but which we do not quite understand, and the sense of time is conflated and compacted to such a degree that, in the natural reaching for a linear path, we are easily lost, perhaps even frustrated.  We are not used, I think, to feeling a story, to tracking a character’s journey via such tangentially connected, emotive, and personally significant sounds and images; we perhaps long for more dialogue or even some exposition to give us a foothold.  But giving in to the film’s sensory journey via Eva’s emotions and state of mind offers a cinematic experience quite unlike any other– Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life imagistic journey, as it is linked to the mind of the main character might possibly be one unique parallel – and it is such an uncomfortable, unsettling journey that perhaps we are all the more resistant.  But if we are willing to give in to this journey and if, further, we are willing to take the journey twice or thrice, the path through the film is clear.  Impressionistic and associative as Eva’s story is –with her dreams, her present, her memory—all whirled together, it is nonetheless a journey.  Eva’s story does have an arc and a distinct resolution.

In spite of the fact of this arc, it is best, I think, to approach the film, as it itself is constructed: via its key moments in which we most clearly see time and space conflating for Eva.  We could, certainly, track the chronology of the events of the film, but if we are to approach the film as one about a state of mind, as a psychological and emotional journey, then actual chronology isn’t as important – it is perhaps even distracting.  We want to understand, finally, Eva herself, not the actual events as we might a news story, but her perception of them and her feelings about them. 

Any number of scenes beautifully and wrenchingly illustrate Eva’s state of mind: in one scene, set initially in the film’s present, Eva walks down a prison corridor after a visit to her son, Kevin, and she passes two guards holding a prisoner down to the ground – the struggling, helpless man looks up at her, in a voice that is somehow both screaming and pleading, “I didn’t do anything!”

The camera’s gaze immediately shifts to a hazy scene, 
 where someone – we don’t know who - is screaming, “Nooo!” -- and louder and longer, “Noooooo!”  We realize, slowly, through the haze and the fractured images and confused sound, we are in a hospital, at a birth; a nurse or a doctor says, “You must stop resisting, Eva,” and we see Eva’s face in the round hospital mirror, wrenched, topsy-turvy, upside down – clench-mouthed. 
And Eva screams on, her experience and herself a mirror of the prisoner on the ground, restrained by guards.  Eva’s mind conflates what she sees in the present – the prisoner – with her past, with her own struggle – in this case, the moment in the past in which motherhood had been thrust upon her.  Kevin’s birth she associates with forcible imprisonment and with her own screaming and ineffectual protest against it. 

In another scene, again, set initially in the present, Eva drives through a neighborhood at night; it is Halloween, and children are dressed up in their finest ghoulish attire.  Eva startles when she notices them;
 

they seem to stare in the car windows at her, seeming to taunt her, mock her.  When she arrives home, closing the door on the Halloween night, the children glare in at the windows
   
and almost immediately begin knocking at her door, threatening and demanding, “Trick or treat! Candy! Candy!”  And Eva frantically searches her bare cupboards for a pacifying offering for these children, but she has nothing, nothing to satisfy them, and so she hurriedly turns off her light, a poor attempt to indicate she is not at home, and shrinks into a corner,

while the pounding on the door grows louder, louder.  Eva covers her ears, and the scene shifts: her house door becomes a refrigerator door of the past and the pounding becomes the smack of a toddler’s bowl of food being thrown at that time distant refrigerator.
   
Pound, pound, smack, smack, “Candy! Candy!”  The children are monsters.  Her toddler, her child is a voracious monster, demanding food and then hurling it from him in a vicious attack upon her being and senses. 

The Halloween scene is perhaps one of the most obvious indicators of Eva’s state of mind – an indicator of her feelings about her son and of the violent pressures closing in upon her psyche, an indicator of her relationship with and feelings about him.  There is nothing fun or sweet for her about the children dressing up for Halloween and going trick-or-treating; it is only a horror in light of what her own child grew up to do and, also, most particularly, in the light of her own ambivalence about motherhood, an ambivalence that was with her from her first-born, Kevin’s, very conception, a moment imagined as maliciously dividing cancer cells:  

Ultimately, though, I think we must say, this is not a sideshow story about one unique woman and her mutant, monstrous killer of a son; it is not a story we can dismiss so easily as merely camp, or freakish, or ghoulish, something wholly other, something apart from the ordinary.  No, it is a great deal more piercing and uncomfortable than that.  The film isn’t interested in giving us Kevin’s psychology; it isn’t interested in helping us understand why Kevin went on to so wantonly murder his classmates.  We never see Kevin’s journey.  We never see into his mind.  We are never alone with him to do so.  We see him, only, through the lens of Eva’s own perspective.  As such, the film is interested in showing us the cognitive dissonance a woman – dare I say, any woman - might experience when her body, her life, her mind – her self – are disrupted by the birth of her first child, when her identity is no longer her own but instantly and inextricably linked to another human being’s.  For the rest of her life.  Motherhood.  Eva is no longer Eva, the lover,

the career woman and "Legendary Adventurer"; 
she is a mother, “Mummers.”  Eva becomes a name absolutely tied to motherhood, and the universal overtones of Eva - “Eve” - cannot be missed, as Eve means “living” or “mother of the living.”  

We might ask, then, if this is such a big sort of story, reflective in some way, of the experience of all or many women who become mothers, why make it such a gruesome story?  Why make the first-born child of this mother such a horrific person, so, apparently, evil?  Ramsay, I believe, like Flannery O’Connor, uses the horrific to force our attention; she shocks us, casting her story of motherhood in an unthinkable context to reveal something to us that we might normally pass by or take for granted.  “Sure, I have a mother” or “Yes, I am a mother” and “Yes, yes, I know all about that.”  But perhaps we don’t.  What are the stories of mothers around us, what are our common myths?  Mothers in movies, for example, are often one extreme being or the other, the angelic nurturer, for example, in Malick’s Tree of Life or the brutal religious fanatic in Carrie. Eva is neither one of these kinds of mothers.  She is certainly at odds with the other mothers around her – she doesn’t fit the type, as we see so vividly, in a scene in a locker room: Eva, sitting slumped in sloppy, loose clothing that hides her pregnancy, is contrasted to the happily chatting women around her, their skin glowing, their bulging bellies, bare and triumphant.
   
Eva isn’t one of them, clearly. She is isolated even as she is surrounded and suffocated.  And as she walks later, alone, her expressionless face is like a horrible wince of pain as she is enveloped by a wave of children, skipping, pink little girl ballerinas.
    
Eva in the midst of the bulging bellies, Eva in the midst of darling pink tutus – these are just two more images of Eva, showing us so vividly her state of mind, her sense of herself in its disjointed state, her mind disconnected and resisting her physical state, her pregnancy, herself as mother.  Unlike the women around her, her pregnancy is something she cannot embrace as something she has chosen for herself – it is, rather, an alien imposition upon her very being.

Disjointed as her sense of her self is, however, Eva isn’t a monster: she isn’t Carrie’s mother, and she doesn’t fit the monstrous woman myth.  She will not acknowledge her pregnancy, she screams and resists through her childbirth, and she sits in an emotional blank in the hospital bed as her husband fauns so smilingly over his first-born son,
   
 but at home with Kevin, she tries. Kevin’s screams cannot be drowned out by even a jackhammer, 

and her body is not her own—she lies exhausted, with outlandish, engorged breasts when Kevin finally sleeps
   
—but alien as this motherhood is to her, she tries. 

Lifting baby Kevin up in one scene, she smiles at him desperately, her smile almost ferocious in its effort;
   

in another scene, she sits on the floor to play ball with the toddler Kevin, plastering on her smile at intervals again in her effort to engage the glowering boy by sheer force of action.

But Eva’s efforts at motherhood with her first-born are just that – efforts that are--and clearly feel—unnatural to her.  Motherhood is still a thing that has been thrust upon her and that drowns her; her smiles are really a drowning woman’s desperation to stay afloat, not the indication of a truly happy, natural swimmer. 

Throughout the film we see those threads of the self that Eva would like to be, the self she sees herself as – a self that is disconnected from the domesticity of motherhood and, specifically, from Kevin.  Some early images of the film (though still bathed in red, and thus bathed in Eva’s present mind’s consciousness of Kevin) are of Eva alone, her pre-Kevin self, exulting in the tomato festival of Spain, limbs splayed and lolling in utter freedom and lips joyously parted. 
Peppered throughout the film, too, are images of Eva and Franklin in their early days of falling in love; here, again, Eva is joyous, full, exultant.
   

Eva’s conception of herself, we see , through these images of freedom and through the paired images of Eva’s various moments of resistance against the bonds of motherhood, is as a free agent.  Her love for her husband, Franklin, is something she chose, something her emotional and sexual self gravitated towards organically and freely – her relationship with Franklin is mutual and mutually fulfilling; her career, too, as it is so linked to world travel, is something she chose naturally, chose passionately, as we see in her exultation in Spain, as we see in the room in her home that she tenderly covers with world maps – her designated room, her room, so satisfyingly for herself alone. 
 

The advent of Kevin impinges on Eva’s notion of her deepest self, and Kevin’s assault with ink upon her map room is not primarily an indication of Kevin’s evil: it is an indication of Eva’s perception of Kevin’s assault upon her own being – it is personal. 
     
Kevin intrudes into her emotional and sexual bond with Franklin (often literally interrupting); he disrupts her ability to travel anywhere she likes at any time, as we hear in a remembered argument with Franklin in which he protests her desire to leave for Ecuador; Kevin, as we have seen, invades her very physical self – her belly, her breasts, her body’s need for sleep.  And while Kevin goes on to do a truly horrific deed, we must acknowledge the fact that Kevin the baby—and even his later self, as a toddler, as a 6 or 7 year old, as a teenager – is not actually, based on the facts we can glean, a monster.  The factual things we can confirm that Kevin is, the things we see him do are not, in themselves, monstrous.  Apart from the actual murder, there is no real, factually demonstrable thing that Kevin does that is horrific, that makes him a literal demon seed.  As a baby he cries. A lot.  Many babies do.  As a toddler he is non-responsive, or he hurls food.  He has potty training issues.  Lots of young children do those things or have that issue.  (Show me a normal child who hasn’t. Let me introduce you to mine.)  As a teenager, he teases his little sister, demands she get him soda, and vacuums her hair.  (Is there such a thing as a big brother who doesn’t torment his little sister?)  Certainly, there are suggestions of Kevin’s propensity towards violence.  Eva believes he has killed his little sister’s guinea pig; she believes he has poured Dran-o in his little sister’s eye; and he keeps computer viruses, inexplicably, on disks in his room. But the computer virus might be a thing any disgruntled teenager (or adult, in fact) might keep, and the horrific things Eva believes Kevin does are suggestions Eva herself makes – these things are confirmed by no one else.  We don’t know they are true; we never actually see him do any of those things.  We are following her character, so we do believe her –or we want to –but the evidence of the film demonstrates Eva’s limited perspective as a narrator.  Can she, in fact, interpret Kevin for us, when from the moment of his birth, we see she has refused him, resisted him as hers?  Can we, in fact, rely on her interpretation of her memory of the events of the past (a double remove – an interpretation of a memory) when her memory and her interpretation are all filtered through the murders Kevin commits?  All filtered through her own desire to disassociate herself from him? All filtered through the idea that his very being is an assault upon hers?

The bare fact of the freely associating images of the film—showing us that the present, for Eva, is all connected to and associated with her past and her memory—pushes us towards the fact that Eva’s memory is just that – her memory. It is not neutral.  It is hers. And notably, for example, we do not see the murders, but we see Eva imagining Kevin posturing with his bow and arrow, just having committed the murders.
     

It is the one key scene, however, of Eva’s mind, the one linked to the very opening images – of the dim evening with the white billowing curtain and the sound of the sprinkler—that finally reveals, just how far Eva might be misremembering or misinterpreting any number of the events of her life, especially those related to Kevin.  The film returns us, at various points and often, to the sound of the sprinkler, to the image of the curtains.  We hear the sprinkler, for example, when Eva discovers that Kevin has splattered ink all over her lovingly decorated map room. We hear the sprinkler when the camera focuses in on Kevin’s little sister’s guinea pig.  That sound filters Eva's memories of the times Kevin had assaulted her - or when she feels he had assaulted her.

The significance of the evening with the curtains and the sprinkler isn’t fully revealed until late in the film.  We return to that evening, just after Eva has learned of the multiple murders at the school that Kevin has committed, and Eva is returning home, to her dark house.  She is alone – only her footsteps echo.  As she calls, “Franklin?” “Celia?” Eva sees the open sliding door and the billowing white curtain.  And we finally move—the sound of the sprinkler growing louder and louder, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch -–through the curtains (Kevin’s target only just visible through the sheer white),  
   
and out onto the lawn, where Eva discovers the final horror: her husband and her daughter lying wet in the grass, dead, shot through with Kevin’s arrows.  And the sprinkler shoots up and water rains down on them, an unrelenting, impassive.  But with this sound and image, we understand the deep disconnect of Eva’s mind-–the separation between an actual event and a memory of an event.  The sprinklers we see on the lawn are the oscillating, not the pulsating, kind.
   
They should make no sound at all, barring, perhaps, a very faint hissing of water.  But the scene is not silent.  The sound of a kind of sprinkler that is not, in fact, actually in the scene, confusingly permeates it. Image is disconnected from sound; image and sound are out of joint.  And this sign, among many others, is an indication of several key things: of Eva’s unreliable memory of her past; of the permeation and impact that this event has had upon her – her memory of the sound of it, filling other moments of her past; and, I think most notably, of the disconnect at the heart of Eva’s very being.
  

The film, I believe, is about a woman coming to terms with her new identity as a mother.  It uses a horrifying vehicle to do so – a bloody, some might call, tasteless and soulless vehicle – but the violent disruption at the core of Eva’s mind and being is so severe, it can only be simultaneously resolved within Eva and demonstrated to us, through these bloody, extreme means.  From Kevin’s conception and through her pregnancy, Eva rejects motherhood, and outwardly as much as she wants to show otherwise, she rejects Kevin as her son, from his birth onward.  The film is full of her fierce attempt to maintain her identity as a free agent and disassociate herself as far as possible from the emotional, physical, and mental consuming thing that is motherhood.  Eva’s very name indicates “mother of the life,” but she rarely refers to herself as “I” or “me” when we see her interacting with Kevin; she refers to her identity as a mother in the third person: “What Mummer did is very, very wrong, and she’s so, so sorry,” she says to Kevin – a forcible removal of motherhood from herself as an “I.”  But motherhood is consuming, and Kevin, both by his mere presence and by his personality, will not allow her continue distancing herself.  It is a bloody, horrific act by her son that finally strips her of everything that she identified as her own, as her self – her husband, her job, her chosen daughter.  She is left nearly penniless, destitute of comfort and friends, bathed in the blood Kevin shed, and identified by everyone, not as Eva Khatchadourian, but as Kevin’s mother.  She, for the world around her, and now for herself, is nothing else but his mother.  It is very, very bleak indeed.

The film It’s a Wonderful Life is a film I love in large part because it is about one man’s struggle with who he believes he is – a traveler, an adventurer, a builder – and who he actually is.  His life, as it comes, isn’t the life he wanted.  It isn’t the life he planned.  He was meant, he believes, for big things, for glorious things, not for a small, domesticated life in a “crummy little town.”  The joy of the film, of course, comes as he realizes the treasure that is his actual life, not his imagined life, the treasure that is the real George Bailey, not the George Bailey he thought he should be.  And the end of the film, as he is surrounded by warmth, laughter, happy tears, and friends, he shows us his heartfelt, and finally full, acknowledgement of that treasure.  The George Bailey that he longed to be is still out there somewhere, and that fact holds for me that sharp poignance that keeps the film from sentimentality.  But George, in the end, stops fighting himself, he stops fighting the forever falling off knob on his house’s stair railing and instead, kisses it.  It is his, it is himself, he will embrace it.

Eva’s bleak journey does not end with such joy.  She is not surrounded, like George is, by her loving friends, by a supportive town.  She has nothing.  Nothing but herself and her son.  And there lies the real resolution.  In the end of the film, Eva finishes cleaning the red paint that an angry world had splattered on her house in the beginning, a revenge given to her as much as it is given to Kevin.  She finishes cleaning and begins to make the shabby house which she’s been merely inhabiting, a place to live.  A home for herself and for Kevin, her son.  She paints the interior walls, and she carefully irons and folds Kevin’s shirts
   
– the maddening, tight shirts we’ve seen him wear and that have made her and us uncomfortable throughout the film.  She makes a bed for him, taking infinite care over the edges, tucking them smooth, and she places Robin Hood on the bookshelf, a book representing his violent action, her possible complicity in it, and the bond she and he share, a moment of connection between a sick boy and his mother.

Then, in the very last scene – a scene in which there are no interruptions of memories, of images or sounds from the past, no wildly associative and disjointed moments – Eva visits Kevin, and she is fully present – fully in the present.  In previous visits, Kevin and Eva have been at odds;
   
they have been clearly in a battle against one another – they either spar with one another – Kevin always taunting her – or they are silent.  More, we know, in a refusal to speak than in a lack of things to say.  

But this final visit, this final scene, is different.  Eva looks at Kevin, as if for the first time, for in her face is an open vulnerability
   
– wounded and wary, yes, but it is not the guarded shield, the mask we’ve seen on her in every other moment with Kevin.  She looks him full in the face; they have a real conversation, and Eva says very simply, “I want you to tell me why.”  And Kevin, during this conversation, for the first time, looks unsure, himself emotionally vulnerable, his head shorn of its shock of black hair
    
swallows, and says, “I thought I knew once.”  The two sit, in the wake of that answer, and look at one another.  This ending is not about that answer - it is about Eva and Kevin looking at one another, about Eva truly looking at Kevin.

Kevin, here, so vulnerable, even afraid, is, for the first time, real.  He is not the nightmarish demon-seed.  Not, I believe, because he is changed or because he is a different person, but because Eva has changed.  Eva is finally looking at him, without that resistant barrier, which she struggled to put for so long between them, in her desperate effort to maintain the identity she wanted without him.

And then, the guard calls time, and in what is the most moving moment of the film, Eva, without waiting for Kevin to make a move, deliberately clasps him to herself. 
 
It is a volitional, honest action – not the false action that was the plastered smile she gave Kevin as a baby – but an action that is both her decision and her emotional present.  It is an action that demonstrates to us her decision and her emotional ability to finally embrace Kevin as her own, embracing him for whoever he is and for whatever that embrace will continue to mean to her and to her life.

In this scene, she rejects the solitary identity she’d been struggling to assert and accepts, literally embraces, the connection between them.  And in that moment Kevin becomes, for the first time, a complex being – or at least, a being with the potential for complexity.  He isn’t a “thing” that has invaded Eva’s life anymore; he is her son.  We feel it. Her embrace of him as her son, of herself as mother, doesn’t diminish the horror of his actions– she knows, fully, that horror because she has bathed in it, but facing it straight on, as her own, is a release, a catharsis she needs.  Her life can never be a “wonderful life,” but she owns, fully, a kind of peace. She is at one with herself again.  And in the final moments, Eva walks down the corridor towards whiteness.  The red is gone.
  

Like Flannery O’Connor’s stories, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is an assault.  But it is in pursuit of an emotional truth and in pursuit of a journey through a mother's cognitive dissonance, through a war within herself.  The film is about that violent wrench in her notion of herself, of her identity, the disconnect between her perception of who she is or was as opposed to the new identity that has engulfed her. The film sets out to shock with blood and violence because it sees Eva’s mental and emotional journey as bloody and as violent as real blood, real violence.
  

I understand why so many of my students are angered by O’Connor’s stories, and I understand the anger a given viewer might have at this story, too.  That it dares to transgress our notions of decency acts like a kind of violence upon us, but ultimately, for me, the portrait it offers us of a woman struggling against motherhood and of a woman’s, final embrace of that motherhood as a part of herself, is as revelatory, as honest, and as human as the work of the most truly visionary of our artists. 

"And the sons of God shouted for joy": Terrence Malick's Tree of Life

 

Jessica Chastain, who plays the mother in Terrence Malick’s Palme d'Or winning Tree of Life, called the film, a “visual poem” recently on the Guardian’s podcast.   And that’s about right, for the film follows no classic narrative structure; it’s more stream of consciousness meditation than story.  And I guess it’s the poetic, non-linear quality of the film that has left many audience members baffled and even a little angry, and has prompted articles like this one in The New York Times:  “Walking in and Walking Right Back Out of ‘The Tree of Life’”.  In the screening I attended, the two young men sitting behind us, after 30 minutes of shuffling in their seats and only half-suppressing sigh and groans, stumped out of the theater with a “This is stupid.”  Not the film “starring Brad Pitt” I’m guessing they were probably expecting.

 

I suppose I was able to go into the film a little more prepared than those two young men, having watched Malick’s other films, Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World, and fortunately knowing, then, something more about Malick’s sensibilities.  I’d also heard that the film “challenges” and “tests” its audiences, and it did help to be ready for that kind of experience.  And while I confess that the 17-minute section near the beginning of the film--in which Malick imagines the beginning of the universe--and we see not characters but explosions, amoeba, and dinosaurs--did test me a little and while the entire film challenged my ability to understand what Malick wanted to say at each moment, I never wanted to leave; on the contrary, Malick, I think by the sheer weight the beauty on the screen, held me pinned to my seat, often in a kind of rapture. 

In a few transcendent moments in my life, I have been moved unexpectedly to tears by a beautiful painting or sunset or by a strain of sweet music.  This film has that power.  Throughout, I was carried along by waves of sensation; I was frequently in the clutch of threatening tears without really knowing why.  In a classic film or story, you sense the climax coming; you know, usually, when to reach into your pocket or purse for a tissue to sniffle into.  Here, I could not predict that moment, those moments.  And I could not understand the why’s of the emotion that did overtake me.  Was it just the startling impact of the cascading images of beauty?  Was the film tapping into some deep longings or memories or questions buried in my subconscious?  Probably, yes, to all of that.  Still, pinpointing the reasons would be impossible and, I think, not, ultimately, what I want.  While the film asks deeply profound and existential questions and so ought to be examined on the intellectual level, it is also a film that exists, like music, like dancing, like a painting, equally, if not more so, at the emotional level. 

I read a piece a long while ago in The New Yorker featuring the genius pianist and then teenage prodigy, Evgeny Kissin, and the interviewer/writer reflected on the way that Kissin seemed to use words awkwardly, almost with embarrassment during the interview – he could not express himself well.  But when he sat down to play, he was utterly free, eloquent, powerful and graceful; his hands, the keyboard, were the components of his language.  Perhaps, since that article, Kissin has become more adept in giving interviews, but I rather like the idea that his primary language, his heart language, if you will, can voiced only through the piano.  Terrence Malick is a notoriously shy filmmaker; he will not give interviews, and he did not appear at Cannes to receive his award.  Perhaps he feels, and I do feel, that his films speak for themselves and they bear his unmistakable personal stamp, his voice.  The Tree of Life is no exception; it is fully eloquent, but experiencing it is like being immersed in another form of communication, one that reaches not just the intellect but the emotions. 

But all this discussion has been very subjective, hasn’t it?  What is the film about, anyway?  How about some concrete detail?  Yes, hmmm.  Because this film touches on such an emotional level, the concrete is difficult.  I could tell you about Michelangelo’s Pietà if you've not seen it; before I went to Rome, I myself saw pictures of it, and it was described to me by an art historian – I could grasp what she said about the color, form, and detail of work – but until I saw it myself in St. Peter’s Basilica, I had no comprehension at all of its beauty, heartbreak, and power.  This film is like that.  You need to experience it to know it.  And while all films communicate via imagery and so cannot ever be really translated to words, or to my particular words here, Malick’s films, and this one, too, demonstrate fully just how complex and untranslatable the language of film is. 

In spite of the inadequacy of words, however, I want to try to respond somehow, in the best way I can, in words, to some of the details of The Tree of Life.  Filmmaker Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and soon, Looper) on the /Filmcast recently said that it’s difficult to talk about the film “without sounding pretentious and awful,” and I fear I’ve already stepped into the pretentious and awful category, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I plow on.  It’s the sort of film that makes you want to say something back to it.  

I did worry, before I saw the film, that it itself would be too grand, too over-reaching, too ambitious to succeed.  What filmmaker can make a film about the beginning of the world, of life and not seem pretentious?  Stanley Kubrick attempted it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and most film critics seem to think he succeeded, but well, he’s Kubrick, and do we really need another film like that?  Malick has proved that we do, I think, and if The Tree of Life equals 2001 in its ambition, it surpasses it in beauty and warmth.  The Tree of Life is about life, the universe and everything, and it does have a very long sequence without human characters, but, unlike 2001, it is firmly grounded in one particular family, one particular person, and because we feel a strong connection throughout to this person, Jack, played by Sean Penn but also played, more particularly and powerfully, by the young first-time actor, Hunter McCracken, the vastness of the universal, indeed, the universe, takes on poignant significance.  I cared about the beginnings of the universe, as Malick has imagined it, because I cared about Jack; Malick beautifully connects to two, the abstract and the particular.

But on to some of the particulars.  The film jumps easily through time and space, but its “present,” if I might call it such, is with Sean Penn, the older Jack, a clearly financially successful man in his late 40’s who appears to be either haunted or emotionally dead or both, and he moves through the space of his cold glass-and-steel city world as if submerged, isolated from the world and the others around him.  Nothing is explicit, but the older Jack is in crisis.   It is clearly an existential crisis, related to the problem of suffering in the world, specifically the suffering of his own family, in the face of the death, some years previous, of his younger brother, a death which came in the brother’s very young adulthood.  This grief opens the film and colors and interprets in some sense all that we see after it.  We see the news of the death broken to Jack’s mother and then to his father.   We see the unbearable weight of grief on both of them and the hollow non-answers of the platitudes those around them offer, relative to the death.

Also framing the film, as a sort of pairing to the grief and death, are two themes: one, appearing on the screen, as a quotation from the book of Job, part of God’s answer to Job’s suffering at the end of that book—“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (38:4, 7)--and the other, in a voiceover from Jack’s mother—“There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.”   The film, thus, at its heart, shows suffering and brokenness, and then asks why and explores how we might live in a suffering world, a world that is at once breath-taking in its beauty and horrifying in the ugliness both without and within.   For Malick does not just turn the lens outward and make Jack ask, "why has this thing been done to me?"  We also see Jack in falls from grace, boyish in character though they are, and he must also ask, "why do I inflict pain on others?"  How may we be healed from both?  Is healing possible?

It is through the lens of the older Jack’s memory, that we return with him to his life as a young boy, a boy looking and moving towards manhood, and to his life with his two younger brothers and with his father and his mother.  It is this section of the film, with Jack and his family, that the film is most particular and for me, most poignantly powerful.  The most linearity occurs in these sections though the film is always impressionistic in its storytelling.  This impressionistic character of the lives depicted beautifully captures what memory is like, especially memories of childhood, fleeting but vivid and intense fragments that shape so powerfully one’s sense of personal identity and worldview.  The specific memories as they are so seamlessly cut together pursue both the question of suffering and the question of how to live, following grace or following nature. 

We see Jack observing the way his mother—grace—moves through the world and the way his father—nature— moves through it, the mother (played by the sublime Jessica Chastain) embracing beauty, tenderness, kindness love, herself a part of the graceful natural beauty of the world; 

the father (played by Brad Pitt) doggedly following the path of material success, clearly loving—or longing to love—his boys, but giving them rules, laws, and discipline more than spontaneous affection.  He is a deeply flawed man, flaws that Jack sees and hates.

And so Jack has these two models before him, but he soon finds that living is not so simple as following the beautiful model his mother offers; his own self and desires intrude, and in a few deftly sketched scenes, we see Jack falling from that grace, willfully and almost gleefully inflicting pain on his brother or throwing rocks through a window, breaking the glass simply for destruction’s sake.  His guilt after these things weighs on him, and in a voiceover, an echo of Romans 7 where Paul outlines his internal struggle between righteousness and evil, Jack says, “What I want to do, I can't do. I do what I hate.”  Jack, then, participates in and creates pain,  in opposition to what he knows, fully, is right.  He is thus culpable in some way in regards to the suffering of the world, and in a key moment in the film, he recognizes aloud—an exemplary moment in which I think we understand that the older Jack is interpreting the life of his younger self—that he is more like his father, as troubled as that relationship with him is, than his mother. Trouble within.

The trouble without takes not just the form of his brother’s death, of his father’s harshness, but also the form of the world's scars: the neighbor boy whose head bears a patch of baldness, a burn from a vicious house fire; the man who limps with handicap across the street as the boys stare; the haggard prisoners, at a stop in the town; the man with epilepsy, in a fit on a lawn.  Malick, through the beauty and light of the film, still peppers the world with these figures of suffering or brokenness, and like the vividness of a childhood memory, they cannot be shaken.

What answer does Malick give to the questions of the film?  To Jack's crisis?  Does the grown-up Jack find redemption?  Malick, does give an answer, though not, I think, a definitive answer, and in spite of the biblical (and also Roman Catholic) references, I do not believe that the film is specifically tied to the redemption Christianity offers.  The clearest moment of redemption comes when, in a kind of pulling of the pieces of his memories of his family together at the end of the film, the older Jack imagines a reunion on a beach with his family--his father, mother, dead brother, younger brother--a demonstration, perhaps, of the belief that death does not end the possibility of healing, of forgiveness, of redemption, of new life.  And while this scene verges for me on the sentimental, it does not overshadow, ultimately, the beauty and impressionistic subtlety of the rest of the film.  I think Malick’s answer to suffering, guilt, and brokenness relates to new life, to creation, to grace covering over and transforming nature.  The long sequence in the film of the beginnings of the world says that new life underpins even this suffering present life, and that powerful beginning continues on through the births and even the deaths of Jack’s particular family.  Among the many breath-taking images or sequences from this film that will stay with me is one in particular – Jack’s birth.  His boyish form begins in the sea, under the water, and he swims or moves upward until we see his mother in the hospital, surrounded and bathed in white – a baby, Jack, is born.  The wonder and love and joy of that moment is transcendent.  In it, the beginning is contained, and “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” 

I cannot tell to whom to recommend this film.  One’s response to it will be purely personal; you will love it, or it will not work for you, and I can’t predict which it will be.  It may glue you to your seat, or you may itch to leave.  Even if, however, you cannot embrace its themes and loose narrative, it, surely, is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen; and I can recommend it fully to anyone on the strength of just that.  It’s a theater experience quite unlike any other.

Never Let Me Go - a film by Mark Romanek

**SPOILERS**

A thin young woman lies on an operating table in a stark room, lit with bright cool lights. A respirator hangs from her mouth, and the doctors busy themselves around her open abdomen. The beeping of the monitor connected to the woman is the only sound. The beeping begins to go fast, and then faster, faster, but the doctors continue on, unhurried, never glancing at the face of the woman on the table - there is not the usual half-panic, hurry, and concern one might expect in an operating room with such hectic beeping. The beeping rises and rises until the individual tones merge into one line of sound. Still, the doctors and nurses move deliberately, efficiently, unhurriedly. A red organ is carefully lifted from the body; the ventilator is taken from the unresponsive lips. The doctors and nurses leave, no backward glances, and the woman  is left on the table, alone, her body gouged and open, helpless, pathetic, undignified.

This scene, this image of the woman, of the lonely body on the table is at the center of Never Let Me Go, a film about the inevitability of death, the loneliness of death, the starkness of death, the frailty of the dying and the dead, and the selfishness and lack of compassion of the living. Heavy stuff indeed. But somehow, this film is simply beautiful, one of the most beautiful films, in fact, that I’ve seen this past year. And in spite of the heavy weight of the subject matter, in the quiet center of the film, there is no reaching for grand philosophical statements about life and death. There is only an unassuming poignance and resonance.

The film’s story centers on three young people who grow up without parents, cloistered behind the walls of a school called Hailsham, growing up to serve a purpose from which there seems to be no escape. Their marrow of their lives, when they reach adulthood, is to be given in service of others - and they have no choice in the matter. They were born for the purpose.

In a traditional Hollywood film, we might expect our young heroes, beautiful as they are and centered in the story as they are, to find escape, to fight their way to the freedom to live as they wish. But this film is not a traditional film. Where we expect a rise to some kind catharsis, even if that catharsis is a raging, fiery one of death, we get only a quietness. It’s a film of anti-catharsis in a way, if there can be such a thing.

It’s a film the undermines our expectations for what a conventional film should do at so many turns - but instead of giving us shocking twists away from convention, we instead get simple, gentle turns in other directions, turns that, if we have been paying attention, we could have seen coming, but perhaps we might see clearly only in retrospect.

From early on in the film, our three young people, as children, are caught in a kind of love triangle, and while our sympathies are with the sweet, thoughtful girl called Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and the boy she’s interested in, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) (and there is a beautifully built series of moments, depicting the shy childhood romance between Kathy and Tommy), we watch with Kathy, as her friend Ruth (Keira Knightley), woos and wins Tommy.  It is a puzzlement - Kathy and Tommy seemed made for each other.  But our expectations are thwarted.  And they are thwarted again when we take, in the film, a leap in time: the children have grown, Tommy and Ruth are still together, Kathy still watches, quietly, from the outside.

We are thwarted still further when a break between Ruth and Tommy yet later does not result in Tommy and Kathy finding one another - the film simply goes on in its quiet way, the characters moving through life, giving in to it, letting it carry them.  And even later in the film, after our three have gone separate ways, when they find a way, by chance, to meet with each other, meeting on a beautiful, isolated beach, Ruth, in a gesture of guilt and admission of jealousy and unrightful previous possession, does not reclaim Tommy, but gives him up, gives him to Kathy.  But the scene does not offer the catharsis we might expect; it is instead a strange anticlimax, falling well after where the normal climax would come, an anticlimax that intentionally undercuts all our expectations for what a romance in film is “supposed to be” - instead of giving us a love affair, it brings us only the offer of a love affair - but an offer that we know, and the characters know, is an offer that comes too late.

We do not get the rushing together of the lovers into each other’s arms after years of painful separation as we might get in a conventional film; we get only years of calm acceptance and then quietness in the face of Ruth’s confession.  Kathy’s response is silence, and then a “it’s too late, Ruth.”  And it is.  Tommy and Kathy have a few moments of tenderness together, but we know Tommy has no time.  We’ve just seen him, before Ruth’s confession, on the beach in the midst of an excited exploration of an abandoned boat, clutching his side - and we know the inevitable is not far off.  A love affair, if there will be one, will be only as quiet and staid as is the reception of Ruth's statement.

So the catharisis that could possibly have come earlier in the story cannot come now at this point in the film.  And the film is intentional in that.  Instead of catharsis, we have, instead, two people, who have quietly loved each other, but long ago gave each other up, two people who have a few small moments together at, essentially, their deathbeds.  And this, I think, is exactly what the film is about.  Death in life.  And the ways that we simply carry on, carry on with the life we have, without fighting, until death.

There is a slim hope of a possible deferral of their deaths, but it is a hope we know that is born of fragile wishes and ignorance - and, Kathy, at least, is careful in her hope - careful in hope throughout the whole film.  She hopes, but she tempers her hope always - they know that they will die, and very soon.  Kathy has no real illusions, and so, because we are primarily following her, neither do we - nor should we, if we are wise - as viewers.

In the scene in which this hope for Tommy and Kathy will be answered, once and for all, a scene which we might normally view with suspense, there is only an uneasiness and dread - poignance - but still, deep unease.  And I believe the film gives us all the subtle hints we need up until this point of hope to know that this scene - where Tommy hopes to prove a reason for a deferral - will not bring any real suspension of or hiatus from the march towards death.

We see our first hint towards that stark truth when we see the Madame, the sort of superintendent of Hailsham, at the school for the very first time when Ruth, Kathy, and Tommy are still children.  The Madame arrives in a car and walks up the steps through the curious children - walking with a look of distance, distaste, possibly, on her face - and we see one action in which she lifts her bag up so that she will not touch the children.  And then we know just how what she - and by extension the outside world - considers these children to be, inhuman, Other.  We have the hint there that there is no real hope for any sympathy, for true deferral for these children.

There is another hint towards this truth in a moment in a cafe when Tommy, Ruth, and Kathy have their first contact with the outside world, a moment when the idea of and hope for a deferral for lovers is first broached.  A deferral for lovers.  Surely, there will be that . . . ?  Our three are with another couple who is in love and desperate, desperate for some hope.  We see the painful expectation on the faces of other couple, their belief in a rumor about a deferral, as they eagerly ask our Hailsham three for confirmation of the rumor.  But then the crushing fact comes that the Hailsham children have never heard of such a thing.  In that scene, in that moment, the rumors about deferrals, all the stories of hope, are crushed, if not explicitly, then implicitly.  If there is not a deferral for lovers, for  the sake of this sacred thing called love, who will be spared?  And this cold knowledge adds to the dread, the knowledge we have as viewers that these characters we are following will die in exactly the way that all the others have died.  Simply because we are following their story makes no difference - they are our characters, but the fact that we love them doesn’t matter.  They will die exactly as planned.

And so in the scene in which Tommy and Kathy, together, hope for life, we have been given all the hints we need, to know, at least subconsciously, that hope is useless.  We have seen enough, felt enough, to know that this is not a story that will have a happy ending, not a story that will demonstrate the triumph of the human spirit, the fighting against the machine, the fighting face of the odds.  No, the scene only confirms what we have known, surely, all along, death will come as has been planned, at the time it has been planned, and the characters will accept it in the same way that we've seen them accept everything, submitting to what they have been made for.

It is a film that builds its tragedy slowly, and without histrionics and wild gestures and, beautifully, without convention.  It simply gains in heaviness by simple additions of weighted, small moments.

But the idea of life in death, of the inevitability of life in death is not the only idea in the film.  The film is also about the actions of the soon-to-be-dead living towards the dying, towards the dead.  We see that action with the doctors who have removed the organ from the young woman and left her coldly on the table, but we also see it in our main characters.  As Ruth is languishing, sick and ill, in the hospital, Kathy comes to see her, to tell her that she and Tommy will try to apply for a deferral of their fate.

We see in that scene the stark contrast between a woman who is in the very grasp of death, who has no hope, no love left, and a woman who has a few more years before death comes to claim her, a woman who has a very small something to hope for - and the second woman, the one with the hope, leaves the other to her loneliness, without, that we can see, regret.  And in spite of the love we have built up for Kathy, we see in her a coldness towards Ruth’s plight that comes from her own concern with herself, from her own slim hope that she might be able to extend her life - for just a little while.  She does not fight against her ultimate fate, but the extension, oh, the extension, she will reach for that if it's there, over the dying, helpless form of her friend.

And there in that scene, in that capsule - the one woman dying, the other woman still alive and wrapped in her own hopes - the horrible truth is that our characters are just the same as those who have destined them to their fate,  for our characters can be as cruel in their small hope to live just a few years more as those who take life from them.

So this film is indeed, about death, about the inevitability of death, about our fragile lives - but it also about the horror of the ways in which we scramble over one another in order to beg Death for a moment more of life.

This is a film that will resonate for a long time to come - because of its loveliness, its devastation.  It's a film of understatement and interiority - and so utterly, cooly beautiful in the execution of those two things.  The film is so much about what is not said, so much about undercurrent.  It’s constructed in such a way that it undercuts what we might expect, but it undercuts those expectations in very quiet ways, so quietly and beautifully, in fact, that we don’t even realize perhaps, until long after we’ve left our cinema seats, what it has done.