Review: FILL THE VOID (Rama Burshtein, 2012)

Israeli filmmaker Rama Burshtein sets her debut feature film in a close-knit community of Orthodox Jews in Tel Aviv, though the community is so very closed to outsiders, I wasn't sure for some time which country or city they were in. One gets the feeling they could be anywhere in the world, and for them, nothing would change; they are their own little world, passing through the modern world, interacting with it only when they must - to call an ambulance, for example - but otherwise not thinking of it at all as relative to themselves. If others look at them curiously as they pass through the streets, they do not seem to notice the staring, and if pounding music forces its way in through their windows, they close out the sound without comment. The bubble of their world remains intact.

And I could not help but be, in some measure, attracted to such a community - even if the thought of living among such a group also rather terrifies me: such a closed, tight community has very little room for individual, personal sorrows, joys, or secrets. For personal concerns are not merely personal; they are communal. What concerns the individual concerns the larger community: the wealthy are expected to give freely and generously on Purim to those in need because, one gets the sense, that the wealth, though centered on one family for most of the year, really belongs to the whole community. And the rabbi - aware and concerned for everyone - will give attention not only marriages and deaths but also, with equal seriousness, to the elderly woman who feels helpless because she does not know which oven to buy.

We - most of us, at least - are  not used to such a picture of community, much less the experience of such; for us, individuality - the pursuit of our own dreams, our life, liberty, and happiness - is paramount. Certainly, we have ties to friends, spouses, partners, families, but we like to think we have power of individual choice over the circumstances, perhaps even of the familial relations, we find ourselves in. In stark, arresting contrast, the film offers a picture of a group where the community is paramount, where a common theology, and common, unique language, and common religious practices make the community and community concerns more important than the individual - though - and here's where the story resides - the film follows the struggle of an individual within that community, how she must weigh her own desires and feelings - her individuality - in the balance of the communal.

And so, while film offers us a sense of the community, the film isn't concerned with an examination or critique of the whole group and its culture and practices; it's simply the context - albeit a vital context - for the particular story we are following, the story of girl, Shira, 18 years old and thus now at a marriageable age.

As the film opens, we see her - with her mother and directed via phone by the matchmaker - shyly and eagerly looking around the market for the man who might potentially be her husband.  Shira's face throughout the film is a delight to watch; she is silent often, but emotions so vibrantly and delicately animate her eyes, her mouth that one feels the dynamic narrative of feeling - confusion, desire, happiness, love, grief - beneath the surface. The others of her community - her father, mother, sister, brother-in-law, the rabbi, her aunt - are older, and we sense they have learned to control much of that facial display of personal emotion; they are more difficult to read - though nonetheless, often all the more, fascinating to study - and their inscrutability stands as an essential contrast to the youth and naivete of Shira. Her face as she sees this potential husband is beautiful, demurely muted but nonetheless alive, illuminated with shy curiousity, eagerness, trepidation, and happiness, and when she later greets her sister, who has come to visit, that face lights up to its fullest and joyous speech pours out. With her sister, she might fully express her youthful eagerness and happiness at the thought of an upcoming marriage.

Grief, however, strikes her and her family, and she is placed in a position in which her youthfulness and naivete must, more quickly than she is ready, give way to adult decisions, adult expressions, adult emotions.

There is no room in the situation for her to be merely blythely young and happy; instead of looking forward to marrying a young husband and growing older by degrees with him, she must grow older all at once, the weight of family cares for this particular community of people suddenly resting on her unready shoulders. The family - and the community as a whole - places certain hopes and expectations on her, often expectations that are conflicting. Her family loves her and wants her to be happy, and yet they have in mind the happiness of the entire community as well. Her mother and father say, "We don't want to push you, Shira," and they don't, not verbally, and yet Shira can well read their hopes for her - and as a daughter who loves her parents and her community those suppressed familial hopes do, indeed, push her.

Like an Austen novel - and this film has been to compared to Austen - the plot, set in a very small community and most often within that, in the domestic sphere, centers around whom Shira will marry and how the community respond to her choice. It's a simple plot, then. The execution of the plot, however, is far from simple, and the emotional and situational complexity, as Shira tries to understand herself and her desires, as she tries to navigate among those she loves, as she tries to do the right thing for the good of all, all the while being urged to act of her own volition and choice, drew me further and further into the lives of this group until for me, like them, the outside world was of very little concern; it barely existed.

Burshstein's film will, for me, without doubt be one of my favorite films of 2013, and in addition to the emotional and situational complexity, the cinematography is stunningly beautiful, lighting and framing the characters in such a way that I was not only immersed in the world but bowled over by sheer beauty. The cast, too, one and all, give performances that don't feel like performances - subtly nuanced and deft, one and all.

And last, it is rare that we have the opportunity to see such a closed, religious community, one in which the camera presents them to us so simply: through Burshtein's extraordinarily skillful, delicately shaded storytelling, we absorb their traditions and practices without any outside commentary and judgment, even explanation.

From a feminist perspective, I could possibly complain about the stifling expectations of a community where women's roles are purely, solely domestic; I could protest that Shira and the other young women around her should not have to believe that marriage is the beginning of life; I could grumble at the fact that the men are the leaders and teachers of the community - speaking, singing, and ruling - while the women sit and observe, separate. But I cannot and will not do this.

The community is what it is; we are presented with it in order to participate in its joys and sorrows - not to stand outside and judge - and such is the craft of the film, we do. Its heartbreaks and joys and hopes became mine.

"Lonely as this finger": Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love

(Note: My essay on Kiarostami's earlier, companion film, Certified Copy, may be found here: http://ajournaloffilm.blogspot.com/2012/02/place-spacious-and-strange-abbas.html )

**SPOILERS**

I recently dipped back into Russian literature - after too a long hiatus - with Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, a gripping read that caught at my heart as much as it stimulated my mind, in the way that only the emotionally vehement and intellectually rigorous Russian writers seem to be able to do. The novel has clear philosophical and political themes, but the book centers on human relationships - between parents and children, between friends, between lovers, between gentry and peasantry - and on the way those relationships constantly shift and communication fails, especially under the strain of a generation gap, a gender gap, a class gap. In one scene, a husband and wife comfort one another in the sudden, careless departure of their son, a son whom they love so dearly but do not really understand and do not really commune with on any level:

 "'He has gone, left us!' [the father] faltered. 'Gone, because he found it dull here with us. I'm a lonely man now, lonely as this finger,' he repeated again and again, and each time he thrust out his hand with his forefinger pointing away from the rest. Then [his wife] came to his side and pressing her grey head to his grey head, she said: 'It can't be helped, Vasya. A son is an independent person. He's like a falcon that comes when he will and flies off when he lists; but you and I are like the funguses growing in hollow tree: here we sit side by side, not budging an inch.'"

"Lonely as this finger," connected but always separate from the hand. And even on a deathbed later on, parents and son are separate; they do not understand one another no matter how much blood joins them, no matter how much one may yearn for the other.

The relationships in this masterful book, speak so truly and poignantly about the human problem of communication: we long for a connection, we long to understand and be understood, we long for something real with one another - but we are always aware of something we are missing, a connection not quite made, a communication not quite fully received, even in the healthiest of relationships.

And even at the meta-level in my reading experience with this book, this moving story, I was aware, as I always am with Russian literature, that it is a translation. In an odd word choice that puzzles me, in a strange interchange between characters where I don't understand a motivation, I am aware, however much I become invested in the lives and characters of the novel, that I am missing something. With my inevitable limitations as an English speaker, as an American - as someone who does not know Russian, who is not Russian - I miss something. Always. In reading a translated book, I am ever aware of this - and I mourn what I cannot have - but my interaction with a translated book only brings to the fore something that is always true, in every communication I send, in every communication I receive: that we are working with signs and symbols, and we do not always fully understand what the sign signifies and what the symbol represents - and that, at an even more basic level, the sign will never be the thing it signifies. If I have only the sign, I do not have the signified. Literary critics, the deconstructionists in particular perhaps, have articulated this problem – the best they can, that is, with the limitations of words. Communication will always break down, will always be imperfect.  And yet, at a practical level, we cannot remain in a state in which we point out the limitations of every sign and symbol; however limited, we strive to communicate with one another, to understand one another, and we hope to make contact; we hope for communion, for intimacy, and for love.

Abbas Kiraostami's most recent film, Like Someone in Love, a companion piece to his 2010 film, Certified Copy, understands our problem and understands our desire: it understands our strivings for connection in the midst of a world where we always strain to see, to hear, to understand.

Running as a stream over, under, and through the film, noises that are a mere background to the main story constantly distract us and deflect our attention – they burden our strain to listen and to understand: music, conversations, traffic sounds. Even inside what should be the quiet of a car or inside the walls of an apartment, the exterior noises intrude in every moment. And our vision, too, as much our aural sense, is constantly obstructed and distracted: we see our characters through a curtain or from a distance and behind objects; we see them as a likeness in a photo, in a hazy reflection, or through a window that is reflecting something or someone else.  Layers of other sights and sounds come between us and our object, and we are aware of the constant decisions we must make in each moment - what do I listen to? what do I look at? what is most important? how do I interpret this thing I see and hear only so imperfectly?

The opening scene of the film beautifully encapsulates the struggle throughout the film to discern, perceive, and understand. The scene is a humming restaurant, or a bar, rather - a pleasant place, where the conversation seems friendly and lively, where the music falls pleasantly on the ear, where groups of people sit or stand in animated groups - talking, laughing, leaning in and out, making gestures. And through it all, the sound of one woman's voice rises, slightly louder than the rest and arrests - or barely arrests - our attention, gradually drawing our curiosity. The camera stays still for a long time, letting us take in the whole scene - a wide frame - without giving us hints of whom we should look at or listen to. Whose voice is it? Is it someone with those standing in that group in the background on the right? What about in that group of three in the middle, sitting at the table? Or perhaps the red-headed woman in the foreground to the right? We strain to match the sound of the voice to one person's lips. We think, for a moment, we've succeeded, and then, stop and doubt the match. 

But the camera eventually shifts and gives us some direction, and we see the speaker is a woman on a phone who has been out of sight, just behind the camera's gaze. And so we do begin to focus on her, to try to listen, but her words are out-of-context; we hear the words - or read them, rather, since the film is in Japanese, translated for us, we hope with some accuracy, into English words that appear on the screen - and we understand the words individually and in groups, but the clues as to who she is and whom she's speaking to build only gradually - and we doubt our guesses about this overheard slice of a conversation. 

The scene continues in this vein, and we finally understand whom we are to focus on, but she is often out of sight still, and the camera focuses on the person she is speaking to or on another group who isn't even aware of her: it focuses on the group of three at the table; or on the red-headed woman, who seems to be a friend, maybe a colleague; or on an older man, who seems to know her well.  And still the bar sounds and activity constantly intrude - we follow people going in and out, listen to and see the door open and close, sense the constant conversations - and with all of these distractions, we continue to try to understand who the woman is, who the red-headed woman is, who the man is and what they all are to each other. The man, we guess, is a boss - and owner of the bar? - but he seems to treat her in an almost familial fashion - a father? But, then, that doesn't quite fit; they don't act like father and daughter - the relationship isn't somehow familiar enough. The red-headed woman seems to be a friend, clearly listening in on the phone conversation, even speaking into the phone herself to the caller, but the two women are not together at the same table; the red-headed woman seems to be with someone else, someone who is mostly just out of our range of vision. There's something familial about the relationship between the women, too, but something there doesn't quite fit that label either.

Who the women are and who the boss man is becomes clear as the film goes on - we learn the main woman's name, Akiko -  but the guesses we make about what their words mean in full, about who they are, and what they are, and how they are related to each other represent the bigger thread of guesses and imperfect assumptions and interpretations running throughout the film. We make guesses about the characters of the film; they make guesses about one another. By the end, who the characters actually are is clear, but what they mean to each other and how we might define, once and for all, their relationships eludes both them and us.

But the desire for a meaningful relationship, for intimacy - for a true connection and defined roles - is no less urgent, perhaps all the more urgent, as interpretations go awry and as modes of communication fail: as phone messages go unanswered or a phone is left to ring, or a phone is disconnected; as a pounding on a door is ignored; as a specific car horn is subsumed among the other traffic noises; as a line of print is inadvertently left out of a book; as a request to move a car is ignored; as a whisper is too quiet, a gesture too obscure.  Throughout the failures in communication and interpretation, we see the urgent desire for relationship and for closeness in key moments and through key characters - through Akiko’s boyfriend's tracking of her, and through his decision to marry her so that, as he says, she will be forced to be with him, so that she will have to answer his questions, so that she will not lie to him anymore; we see it through an old widowed professor's invitation to a call-girl - our Akiko, as it turns out - where we soon realize he does not want the false intimacy of purchased sex but something nearer to companionship, a shared meal, a conversation over a glass of wine, something like the intimacy he shared with his deceased wife perhaps.

And while those moments and characters are certainly most central to the film, they are highlighted most beautifully, for me, through another scene representing the longing for relationship and the simultaneous failure of communication - through some smaller moments relative to our main character, Akiko, and to her grandmother. As Akiko rides, via taxi, through the city at night for her meeting with the professor, she listens to her phone messages, ear buds dangling from her ears; the camera remains on her face - luminous and beautiful but impassive.

There are seven messages, most from her grandmother, who has arrived in Tokyo and who wants to meet with Akiko. The series of messages take us through the grandmother's day: in the first message, she is riding on the train, nearing Tokyo, looking forward to seeing Akiko; in the next message, she has arrived, and she tells Akiko where she is and that she will wait for her - she hopes for  a lunch with her granddaughter; in the next, it is lunch time, and she has resigned herself to lunch without Akiko; in the next, she describes finding a picture of a woman that looked like Akiko in the phone booth - she says she knows it couldn't be Akiko, but she calls anyway - perhaps, somehow, she will make contact this way - but only an ill-pleased man answers; in the final message, she has returned to the train station - it is nearing the train's departure time, and she will wait for Akiko under a statue at the station. The longing for her granddaughter runs throughout each message - though we understand the grandmother has long lost touch with the real Akiko - we become more gripped with each message, waiting with each to hear where the grandmother is, if she's given up, and wondering if there is still time for Akiko to get to the station.

Akiko's impassivity - a constant throughout the messages - breaks as she listens to her grandmother's final words, and she asks the driver if the train station is nearby. What will she do? We so long for her to run to her patiently waiting grandmother and to embrace her.

As the taxi moves past the station, we rejoice at a first glimpse of the statue and then, straining, we finally spot an aged figure standing underneath it. But as we move past, other cars obstruct our vision, people walk in front of us, and the car carrying Akiko doesn't stop; the woman we believe to be Grandmother is out of sight. Once more around, Akiko asks, and we strain, again, with Akiko, to see that small, waiting figure, craning our necks, almost, to see around the obstructions. We see her, but she is soon lost to sight once again, and the car, carrying Akiko and the chance for a connection, moves on. The gentle tension and longing of the scene paired as it is with those things blocking the connection is so beautifully realized, suffused with tenderness, but it also relentlessly backs away from a fulfillment for that tenderness, backs away from a possible connection.

What would have happened if Akiko and her grandmother had met? Was that woman beneath the statue really Akiko's grandmother? Akiko clearly believed her to be, and perhaps that emotional reality is what mattered most as the taxi passed the station. For Akiko, the woman was her grandmother, not just like her, and she decided to reject the connection with her.

Likenesses and surrogates run through the film - Akiko is mistaken for a granddaughter, the professor is mistaken for Akiko's grandfather, and these mistakes are not corrected.  And Akiko tells a story about when she believed, as a young girl, that a famous painting was a portrait of herself - and she still half believes it is though she knows it isn't she. She lifts her hair into a bun, imitating the woman of the portrait and showing just how similar she is to the painted woman.

Likenesses, surrogates, translations - they are not the originals, but perhaps the translation is all we have.  Even the most astute translator of words and of people - the professor, who is both a translator and sociologist, with his house full of well-thumbed books and a mind full of research - cannot find a way to communicate with perfect precision with those around him. His ability to perceive, like anyone's, is flawed and his ability to communicate is flawed. His manuscript suffers an imperfect printing; he cannot express what he really wants from Akiko; he falls asleep when he should be paying attention; he repeats only a portion of a conversation when he is asked for the whole; he backs out of his driveway, blind, nearly hitting a woman and her children; he wants to protect Akiko but wanders from window to window when she is threatened, unable to get a clear view and unsure of how to act.

But for all his flawed communications and failed connections and even with Akiko's own failed connection with her grandmother, the professor and Akiko find in one another, something like a familial relationship that feels true. He says, at one point, almost playfully but also seriously, he will act as grandfather to her, and later, when she needs a grandfather, she calls him. We are aware of a kind of emotional reality between them, however tenuous and shifting the relationship.

And the film's final scene offers another kind of emotional reality as it brings about a sort of violent end to the film’s train of constantly obstructed communications – obstructed communications between film and viewer, between film character and film character. A stone is thrown - it's sudden, elemental, violent; it is a barbaric communication, but it forms, for us, almost a relief: a concrete something that transmits one, clear, specific thing, emotional frustration and anger; there is no questioning its message.  The stone shatters a glass window – glass like the glassy surfaces we see throughout the film - glass that hides something by a reflective surface and simultaneously allows a view to something; glass that has kept out noise and let noise seep in; glass that has reflected people and distorted people.

The glass that has half blocked and half allowed sounds and sights shatters almost joyously, if terrifyingly, removing, if only for a moment, the questions about what a symbol means and the questions about what one person is to another.  “Talk to me,” this moment screams; "I need to know you hear me, not through a phone, not through an intercom, not through a car window, not through a glass darkly, but directly." 

Because the moment is so sudden and violent, we understand it cannot maintain itself and it will not bring about trusting intimacy. But we do understand it in itself ; we understand the rage and the desire that brought it about. And it does feel like a relief, as thwarted as we have been throughout the film, so distracted by other things, voices, sounds, sights, that we have yearned for focus and one specific moment of clarity, for a specific moment of truthful contact.

And with that we leave the film’s world. And whether we leave hopeful or in despair will perhaps depend on our own hope for true contact in a world of signs and symbols, likenesses and translations.

For my part, I am hopeful. My reading of Turgenev will always only be an imperfect one; my reading of anything and anyone will always only be imperfect. But even with a translation, I find those moments of emotional contact. My heart weeps with Turgenev’s parents, bereft and separated for their son – and my emotion is real, however, flawed is my perception of the relationship and of the language. And my heart rejoices in the moments of something like familial connection between the professor and Akiko – they are like a granddaughter and grandfather – and for me, it is enough.

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.