Lynne Ramsay – Bitch Flicks

Death of the (Male) Author: Feminist Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s ‘Morvern Callar’

How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy and authority.

The poster for Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 film, Morvern Callar

This post by Sarah Smyth appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

What would you do if you found your boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor after committing suicide? Panic? Cry? Call the authorities? This is not the case in British director Lynne Ramsay’s delicious 2002 film, Morvern Callar. The film opens with the titular character, Morvern (Samantha Morton) lying on the floor by her dead boyfriend as the lights on the Christmas tree flash in the background. The scene is silent and utterly absurd. Morvern sits quietly, perhaps contemplating what has happened, although the film never quite reveals what she’s thinking. She then touches and caresses the body in a way which is both sensual and erotic. The scene is visceral and private; it’s almost tender. Yet, underneath it’s silent and passive exterior, there’s a subtle kind of violence, a violence in not doing anything through Morvern’s refusal to act in a “moral,” “normal,” and “citizenly” way. This violence quietly yet insidiously perforates the scene. Morvern eventually gets up and looks at the computer where, on the screen, bears the instructions “read me.” This is her boyfriend’s last command but one to which Morvern gainfully obeys. From here on out, Morvern resolutely and, I argue, violently stakes out her place and takes control over her own trajectory by, ironically, reinterpreting the very instructions which her boyfriend left on the computer.

The violence in the opening scene is of Morvern not acting following her boyfriend’s death

Morvern Callar is based on Alan Warner’s 1995 novel of the same name. It centres on Morvern, a young supermarket assistant, who lives in a cold and bleak Scotland. Her boyfriend commits suicide on Christmas day, leaving behind presents for Morvern including a cassette player, mix tape, and a manuscript of his novel with instructions for Morvern to get it published. The instructions read, “I wrote this for you. I love you,” and Morvern takes this quite literally. She deletes his name from the title page and inserts hers instead. After sending the manuscript to a publisher, she then escapes on a hedonistic holiday to Spain with her best friend and colleague, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), where they spend their time clubbing, taking drugs and having sex. When she’s there, a couple of publishers seek Morvern out and offer her a lucrative book deal, which Morvern gladly accepts. When she returns to Scotland, she plans to use the advance from her deal to leave home and, perhaps, start a better life. She extends this offer to Lanna who declines, and the film ends on an ambiguous but hopeful note as Morvern sits at the station waiting to begin her new life.

Morvern Callar is not obviously nor overtly a violent film. The opening scene – quiet, muted, subtle – informs the tone and even the theme of the rest of the film. Yet, Morvern’s act of deleting her boyfriend’s name – James Gillespie in the film, unnamed in the book – from his manuscript is a violently feminist act. Since the beginning of literature itself, male authors have continually appropriated the voice, narratives and identities of women Perhaps with the flexibility creative licence, this in itself shouldn’t be problematic. After all, women have also appropriated the voice, narratives and identities of men in their work. Rather, the problem arises with the profusion by which this occurs, the privileging of the male-authored narrative within the canon, and the consideration of these narratives as universal rather than explicitly gendered. Morvern’s act, then, is a protest against this and reclamation, perhaps even reparation, for the years of oppression enacted on female voices within literature.

The realisation of this reparation is significant. Morvern gets paid an extraordinarily large sum, £100,000 (about $270,000 today) to be exact, from the publishers for her book deal. Given her background and socio-economic status, this sum is doubly significant. In fact, its life changing, enabling her to reclaim an authority and autonomy over her life not (literally) afforded to her before. When Morvern asks Lanna to go with her on this new adventure, she tells her not to worry about money; Morvern can take care of it. This offer positions Morvern in a traditional heteronormative male role as she proposes a promise of financial security to the woman. Of course, this involves a level of female dependence of male power, here economic, inducing a loss of female independence and freedom so crucial to the subject of modern feminism. Lanna declines, perhaps for this reason or perhaps because she’s too tied to home. But ultimately, this is journey for Morvern to take, for Morvern to reclaim, and the film leaves us hopeful that it will be successful.

Lanna chooses not to leave with Morvern despite the tempting financial offer…

In order for Morvern to follow through effectively on this violent act, however, this violence must be literalized on her boyfriend’s body. If she informed the authorities of his death, Morvern would also risk sacrificing his financial and intellectual property. She, therefore, leaves his body on the kitchen floor for a while before eventually cutting it up in the bath and burying it in the forest. The film makes no attempt to suggest any moral quandary on that part of Morvern. As Williams says, “Morvern never reports the death, and deals with the body herself. She mourns Him but shows no remorse, no guilt for -as it were- dancing on His grave. If she gets away with it, it’s partly because she doesn’t lie: Morvern is guileless as well as guiltless.” The scene in which Morvern cuts up the body is, in fact, blackly comic as the blood splatters on Morvern’s body accompanied by the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Sticking with You.” Although we get no point-of-view shot – the body is, in fact, never seen – we are privy to Morvern’s subjectivity and interiority through the music which Morvern is listening to on her cassette player. Our sympathies, then, are directed towards Morvern, not her boyfriend. This violence, then, is both an extension and a literalization of the violence enacted on the (male) authorial authority, and, crucially, I argue, an explicit feminist statement.

Morvern’s authorial violence is literalized on the boyfriend’s body in a darkly comical way

The violence enacted on the authorial authority within the film is also mirrored outside of the film. The novel is written by a man but is narrated by a woman. The film is adapted and directed by a woman, reclaiming the female narrative voice through this female vision. As Shelley Cobb argues in Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, Ramsay inverts the gendered appropriation by excluding Warner’s narrative voice, reflecting Morvern’s usurpation of the ideal figure of the male author. If as Linda Ruth Williams claims, Morvern “purloin[s] a man’s cultural capital,” Ramsay also purloins the symbolic, cultural and economic capital of (male) authorship. This purloining of capital and the subsequent signature of Ramsay’s (female) authorial authority within the film is most obviously found in the changes Ramsay makes when adapting the novel for the screen. How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy and authority.

In this way, then, I disagree with Lucy Bolton who argues that Morvern’s journey is about establishing the lasting communion with her dead lover. In Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women, Bolton claims that Morvern lodges the memory of her boyfriend in her mind, using her body as a cradle to preserve the memory of touching him. This reading crucially neglects the violence Morvern enacts on her boyfriend both on his body and his authorial identity. Morvern deletes his name and buries his body; it’s a separation rather than a preservation. Morvern Callar, then, is about violence, a reclamation and reparation through violence, which enables women to radically remove themselves from oppressive male structures, and, instead, construct their own narratives, their own voices and their own journeys through this very destruction.

Pleading for the Female Gaze Through Its Absence in ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’

The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

This guest post by Emma Houxbois appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

“You guys know about vampires?” author Junot Diaz once asked an audience of college students. “You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?'”

This is the starting point of Blue is the Warmest Color, which contends, and grapples with, the fact that depictions of female pleasure by female artists do not exist in art. This condition, this lack of understanding and representation, is what dogs its protagonist, Adele, as she struggles and ultimately fails to achieve a sense of comfort with her queerness. Female pleasure abounds in the film from the explicit sex between Adele and Emma, whose romance the film charts the rise and fall of, to eating, and the particular pleasure of observing and being observed. Adele is sometimes the subject, as she pursues Emma or when they take in an art exhibit, her gaze on the nude female figures constructed by men the focus of the scene, and sometimes she is the object as she poses for Emma’s paintings, the first representational work of her lover’s career.

The English title of the film, the same as the graphic novel it was adapted from, implies an inversion of the normal way of seeing. We’re used to seeing blue as cool, cold, and distant, but the film challenges us to see it as a vibrant and passionate colour the way that it challenges us to reconceptualize the power and passion of queer love. The French title, La Vie D’Adele: Chapitres I & II are heavy with film and literary allusions. To The Story of Adele H, the loose account of how Victor Hugo’s daughter pursued an unrequited love across continents and La Vie de Marianne, a novel left unfinished, suggesting both tragedy and an unfinished quality, which both come into fruition. Adele remains restless and unfulfilled throughout the film as Truffaut’s depiction of Adele Hugo is, but the irony of the reference is that Blue’s Adele is an inversion. Instead of warping the world around her to believe that an unrequited love is genuine, Adele is dogged by the invisible weight of heteronormativity that propels her to hide her relationship and live in a private shame. The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

The problem with the male gaze and trying to uplift or separate a female equivalent from it is that male gaze as a term and concept has shrunk in its application to a narrow didactic interpretation that borders on being universally pejorative. To wit, the simple unexamined usage of the term was thought to be all that was needed to condemn Blue is the Warmest Color by its skeptics, but the use of “male gaze” as a cudgel that immediately translates into prurience and exploitation does more harm than good to the conception of a female gaze not least because it immediately valorizes the alternative, as elaborated on by Edward Snow in his essay “Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems”:

“Nothing could better serve the paternal superego than to reduce masculine vision completely to the terms of power, violence, and control, to make disappear whatever in the male gaze remains outside the patriarchal, and pronounce outlawed, guilty, damaging, and illicitly possessive every male view of women. It is precisely on such grounds that the father’s law institutes and maintains itself in vision. A feminism not attuned to internal difference risks becoming the instrument rather than the abrogator of the law.

[…]

Under the aegis of demystifying and excoriating male vision, the critic systematically deprives images of women of their subjective or undecidable aspects- to say nothing of their power -and at the same time eliminates from the onlooking “male” ego whatever elements of identification with, sympathy for, or vulnerability to the feminine such images bespeak.”

Simply put, the male gaze is not a monolith, and despite the way that the term is used in criticism and conversation, no one actually views film from the position that the male gaze is monolithic or purely informed by patriarchal values. To actually adopt that stance would require the conflation of Kenneth Anger with Quentin Tarantino, among other laughable absurdities. Male-directed film has always found ways to appeal to women on terms other than internalized misogyny, and of course the male vision in film has been frequently mitigated, influenced, or redirected by the work of women in other roles. Tarantino, for instance, is famous for his collaboration with the late editor Sally Menke, whom he sought out specifically for a feminine influence, which is hardly a rare event. Much recent buzz was generated by another female editor, Margaret Sixel, who worked on Mad Max: Fury Road with longtime collaborator George Miller (she edited Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City for him). Her contribution has been argued as being integral to the strong female reception to the movie, which, again, runs the risk of valorizing women’s work as being inherently superior.

The problem with strictly gendering the gaze is that it can improperly frame collaborations and essentialize the vision of female filmmakers. Mad Max: Fury Road, as a film, is more than the sum of a male director and a female editor, especially for a narrative so committed to dissecting toxic masculinity from within. So too ought Sally Menke’s work with Tarantino be seen more than just a mitigation, but a cornerstone of Tarantino’s desire to achieve more that what the limitations of his masculinity allow for, especially as the roles of women in his films evolved from non existent in Reservoir Dogs to the complete focus in Deathproof. Perhaps the most intriguing recent example of how a female collaborator transformed the work of a male director was in Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her own novel Gone Girl for David Fincher, inverting the uncomfortable and frequently malicious male gaze that engenders his work, transferring the web of fear that his female protagonists like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander or Alien 3’s Ripley live in to the male protagonist and through him, the male audience. It’s a synthesis that cannot be easily essentialized into a single gendered gaze.

This is compounded by the fact that male nor female are fixed categories, nor are their desires. How are we, for instance, intended to properly frame the work of Lana Wachowski as a trans woman? How trans women engage with gender in our own lives and through our art cannot and should not be subsumed into a lens defined by the cisgender female experience. Which is only the beginning of how ruinous categorizations of gender in the gaze are on queer film and filmmakers. In comic book criticism especially, lenses of queer male masculinity are frequently co-opted and assimilated into constructions of the female gaze, which has the twin repercussions of narrowing queer male desire to a pinprick of feminized male figures and completely alienating queer female desire. If there are to be productive critical frameworks that utilize “male” and “female” gazes, they must be understood as needing a prism held up to them in order to properly understand the full spectrum of what informs a particular vision. There needs to be an understanding of intersectionality intrinsic to their uses.

On that note, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, the stars of Blue is the Warmest Color, are the only actors to have been awarded Cannes’ Palme D’Or alongside their director, Abdellatif Kechiche. It was done by a jury made up of Steven Spielberg, Bollywood actress Vidya Balan, Christoph Waltz, We Need To Talk About Kevin screenwriter Lynne Ramsay, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu (whose Beyond the Hills and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days have tackled themes including queer femininity and access to abortion), Japanese writer-director Naomi Kawase, Nicole Kidman, and Ang Lee. Nicole Kidman, it must be recalled, co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s erotically charged Eyes Wide Shut with then husband Tom Cruise. Ang Lee’s career as a director has been built almost entirely out of critically lauded portrayals of queerness and eroticism including The Ice Storm; Lust, Caution; Brokeback Mountain; and Taking Woodstock. The crowning of Kechiche, Exarchopoulos, and Seydoux by this jury, Lee and Kidman in particular, ought to have carried with it all the mythic importance of Quentin Tarantino, as head jurist, awarding Chan-Wook Park the Palme D’Or for Oldboy a decade earlier. Instead it’s treated as a footnote. Presumably because in this instance, that jury was more attuned to the nuances of the male gaze than the American critical establishment that presaged its arrival on US soil with cries of exploitation and misogyny.

The Cannes jury made it clear that they wanted to define the film as a collaboration, and I would extend that further to define it as a conversation. At its heart, Blue is the Warmest Color is a film about performances of identity and how the stresses of assimilation can erode and destroy fundamental parts of our being. One of the primary ways that we can perceive Kechiche’s self awareness that his masculinity limits his ability to conceive of and portray female queerness accurately is the insertion of a viewpoint character for him, an Arab actor Adele originally meets at a party thrown for Emma’s artist friends. He asks naive, well meaning questions about their relationship that queer women the world over hear, but understanding that he’s probed far enough or perhaps too far into her life and identity as an interloper, he opens up to her. He tells her about how he’s an actor and he’s just been to the United States, describing New York City in the same way that we dreamily describe Paris. “They love it when we say Allahu Akbar,” he says with a smile, telling her about how there’s always a hunger for Arab terrorists in Hollywood. Kechiche is, himself, Tunisian, and this is his exegesis.

He’s approaching the queer experience from the perspective of the immigrant experience. This is the Adam’s Rib that he proffers up towards the goal of uncovering female pleasure in art. This is the part of himself that he bares in order to justify the depth with which he probes Adele and Emma’s relationship. The clearest way that we see his Arab identity in the film is in the act of cooking and eating, which easily transcends the specific cultural context he takes it from thanks to the intimacy and care with which it’s handled. Cooking is framed as emotional labor, seen most keenly as Adele frets over making Spaghetti Bolognese for Emma’s friends, fretting over it as she serves it. Eating is, except for Adele’s junk food stash, a communal act, the consumption of the emotional labour of cooking as much as the food itself. This merges with queerness as Adele tries oysters, possibly the most yonic food imaginable, at dinner with Emma’s family. Her hesitance and discomfiture with eating oysters despite the welcoming attitude of Emma’s family mirrors the overwhelming tension she’s experiencing in her performance of queer femininity, and the difficulty she’s experiencing in how accepting Emma’s family is of it.

The broader sense of how Kechiche attempts to conceive of queerness through the best available lens at his disposal is how he constructs France’s queer community as a diaspora. He portrays Adele’s budding queerness and her experience of the queer nightlife in much the same way as the child of immigrants might feel overwhelmed and illegitimate by their first exposure to their parents’ native culture. There are certainly parallels between Adele’s entry into the queer community while still in high school and A Prophet’s Malik’s early uncomfortable interactions with the Arab prisoners after having been forcibly assimilated into the ranks of the Corsicans.

Where they differ is that Malik is able to thrive within the group by shedding attachments to the structures that will never accept him while Adele folds under the pressure of maintaining both a queer identity and the public performance of a straight one, immolating her relationship with Emma and leaving her isolated. Similarly, the Arab character returns to the film as Adele visits Emma’s latest show after their reconciliation. He tells her that he’s left acting, that he got tired of that one narrow performance of identity that the film industry allowed him. He’s never been happier. Adele remains unable to shed that attachment to the normative world and leaves feeling more upset and isolated than ever before.

The pressure of assimilation asserted by heteronormativity and white supremacy are distinct yet similarly functioning forces, which is one of the main achievements of the film. While it is by definition an uneasy attempt at capturing the queer female condition, Blue is the Warmest Color succeeds magnificently by providing a context and a shared struggle with which to build solidarity between marginalized groups in contemporary France. In the scene immediately following Adele’s break up with Emma, we see her leading her children in a celebration of African culture, with Adele wearing a cheaply thrown together pastiche of African fashion, adopting a clearly false and ill fitting identity. It’s a stark metaphor for how poorly Adele assimilates into heteronormativity.

Kechiche’s attempts to conceptualize of others’ struggles by finding commonality is by no means uncommon or uncelebrated in contemporary film. Jim Sheridan found common ground with 50 Cent when making Get Rich or Die Tryin’ by taking him to where he was born in Dublin and exploring their differing experiences of 1980s New York City. In an oddly similar way, Steve McQueen launched his feature film career by exploring the Northern Irish experience of otherness in his account of Bobby Sands’ imprisonment in Hunger.

In regard to the female gaze, Blue is the Warmest Color isn’t an exemplar, but a cautionary tale in how conflating the gendered gaze with the gender of the director can obscure and severely harm incredibly brave and vital filmmaking. Especially in the case of a film that strives to achieve a sense of understanding between distinct groups that suffer similar forms of oppression.

Emma Houxbois is a fiercely queer trans woman whose natural habitat is the Pacific Northwest. She is currently the Comics Editor for The Rainbow Hub and co-host of Fantheon, a weekly comics podcast.

‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’s Abject Mother

The film relocates the fears surrounding motherhood away from the patriarchal fears of abjection to the female and feminist fears of fulfillment.

Written by Sarah Smyth as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

Western society and culture fears mothers. Through her grotesque leaky body and the ambiguous division of the mother/child during pregnancy, patriarchy marks the mother as strange and mysterious. She is nature, opposed to the “proper” masculine position of culture. So prevalent a fear within Western society, the mother is the ultimate embodiment of abjection. In this piece, I will use the theory of abjection in order to examine Lynne Ramsay’s exquisite 2011 film, We Need to Talk about Kevin. In doing so, I hope to locate the film within a post-feminist framework, demonstrating the ways in which the representation of abjection plays into our notions of maternal and female achievement. Ultimately, I argue that the film relocates the fears surrounding motherhood away from the patriarchal fears of abjection to the female and feminist fears of fulfillment.

The poster for "We Need to Talk about Kevin" — The poster for “We Need to Talk about Kevin”

The theory of abjection is most powerfully put forward by Julia Kristeva in her book, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Here, she discusses the abject as the grotesque, the repulsive, as that which we want to expel and dispose of. Particular examples of this include bodily waste such as excretions, secretions, vomit and menstruation, rotting food, and corpses. The significance of these abject moments and the reason we fear them so much is, as Kristeva says, not due to their lack of cleanliness or health “but what disturbs identity, system, order”: “What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”. It is, then, the uneasy position between boundaries that causes or repulsion and rejection of the abject: death and life, clean and unclean, healthy and diseased.

Film academic, Barbara Creed, developed Kristeva’s theory of the abject to suggest the ways in which the maternal body, as particularly represented in horror films, embodies abjection. So obviously and relentlessly fleshy and visceral, the maternal body is linked to the “natural” world of birth, decay and death. Menstruating, lactating and gestating, the maternal body embodies this very ambiguous abject space. The boundaries of her body become blurred, setting her apart from the patriarchal world which continually attempts to remain “clean and proper”. For Creed, many classic horror and science fiction films including Alien, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and Carrie play on this idea of the monstrous abject maternal function. In all of these films, the pregnant woman, or the potential pregnant woman as represented through menstruation, provides the horror of the film through the very abjection of their female body.

Website, Ain't it Cool's poster for "We Need to Talk about Kevin" plays on the original poster for "Rosemary's Baby" suggesting the links between the two films — Website, Ain’t it Cool’s poster for “We Need to Talk about Kevin” plays on the original poster for “Rosemary’s Baby” suggesting the links between the two films

Although We Need to Talk about Kevin is not explicitly a horror film, it uses many of the tropes of the genre to create feelings of unease and fear around motherhood. Adapted from Lionel Shriver’s successful novel, the film focuses on Eva (Tilda Swinton), a travel writer, and her relationship with her (sociopathic? disturbed? evil?) son, Kevin (Ezra Miller). The film is told in a series of flashbacks as we learn that Kevin is somehow involved in a terrible criminal atrocity. As we discover what Kevin has done, the film also reveals the relationship between mother and son, posing the continually fascinating question: does familial and social upbringing wholly inform a person’s moral and ethical values or are some people just born evil?

As the film unpicks this question, it deconstructs traditional conceptualisations of the abject and identifications of the monstrous. For Eva, great pleasure is taken in the abject. During one of the first scenes in the film, Eva travels to La Tomatina festival in Spain. Through the shots of Eva wading through the semi-naked bodies and the vivid red tomatoes, the film emphasises Eva’s pleasure or even jouissance (a kind of excessive, orgasmic pleasure) in the visceral, bloodlike, grotesque experience. The film makes clear that Kevin disconnects Eva from these experiences she so craves. She’s not able to travel, and eventually winds up at a menial job in a travel agency. In one particularly painful moment, she finishes decorating her own room, her special room, with rare maps, which Kevin then destroys with paint. But not only is Eva unable to travel, write or occupy a room of her own, crucial activities for the active, challenging, and independent woman as Virginia Woolf so passionately advocated. She is also particularly separated from the physical and emotional experiences of pregnancy. The film gestures towards her pregnancy through an extreme close-up shot of cells splitting. Later, after childbirth, Eva sits quietly and almost mournfully in a cold, clinical hospital as Franklin (John C. Reilly), her husband, coos over the baby. The film presents her pregnancy through a scientific and technological lens, far removed from the abject experiences of pregnancy put forward from the previously mentioned films.

The wide angle of this shot suggests the physical and emotional distance Eva experiences towards her pregnancy and her child

Most radically, however, in a reversal of gender, Kevin primarily embodies abjection within the film. He throws, smears and expels food, leaving it to rot and become covered in ants. He refuses to become toilet trained but shows an extraordinary level of control over his bowels as he defecates just after being changed, frustrating his mother greatly. When he’s older, Eva catches him masturbating but rather than feeling embarrassed or chastised, he menacingly holds eye contact with her until she hastily shuts the door and walks away. What’s interesting about these moments is the manipulation of the traditional abject mother-child relationship. As Creed points out, the mother not only embodies the abject body. She must also police the abject body; it is the mother’s job to map and uphold the “clean and proper” body of the child before he/she enters the paternal and patriarchal world of language and culture. In We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva refuses or is unable to exert this maternal authority in order to keep Kevin’s body “clean”. She doesn’t clear up the food Kevin throws. She cannot potty train or exert any kind of control over Kevin’s bowel movements. She is unable to extend any influence over Kevin’s masturbatory habits. As Sue Thornham claims, “Kevin denies [Eva] control, refusing her transformation of the unknown into an exercise of mapping, of motherhood into a teaching relationship. Instead, his behaviour insists on the messiness of the body, on the fleshy, the organic, the abject – and insists that Eva recognize this, together with her own rage and fear at her entrapment”.

Kevin's not at all concerned that his mother's caught him masturbating... — Kevin’s not at all concerned that his mother’s caught him masturbating…

The film’s deconstruction and blurring of the abject roles examines and challenges the post-feminist ideas and ideals of motherhood. In Unruly Girls; Unrepentant Mothers, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes that post-feminism purports to celebrate intensive mothering as the liberated woman’s enlightened choice when, in fact, it both replaces subservience to a husband with subservience to the child, and naturalizes motherhood as an essential part of womanhood. By refusing to embody her traditional position as the abject mother, Eva and, indeed the film, challenge the idea that every woman must become a mother, that every woman will find fulfillment in being a mother, and that every mother must take up her position as the abject figure in this patriarchal society.

In all, We Need to Talk about Kevin is not a misogynist depiction of the feared maternal figure. Rather, it is a feminist revelation of the fears mothers have themselves; that they may not love their child, that they may not fulfill the so-called ultimate expression of womanhood and femininity, and that they may, in fact, release the monstrous potential of themselves and their child through the very abjection of their maternal function.

Sarah Smyth is a staff writer at Bitch Flicks who recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’

Official movie poster for We Need to Talk About Kevin

This is a guest post by Amanda Lyons and is cross-posted with permission from her blog Mrs Meow Says.

You know how I said in my review of Into the Wild that it was one of the most recent books I’ve read that disturbed me? We Need to Talk About Kevin is the most recent book I’ve read that disturbed me.

The reason for this (apart from the obvious fact that it’s about a child psychopath that you know is going to do something very, very bad, thus every event, every word is soaked in a weighty, dull dread) is that if you are a woman who is ambivalent about having children, Kevin represents your absolute worst nightmare, the zero sum of all your fears of what could happen once you’ve heaved a child from your bloody body.

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly in We Need to Talk About Kevin

It’s a fascinating and minutely detailed account from Eva Katchadourian of her mothering of Kevin. It’s also an examination of her own soul and an attempt to parse what she may and may not be responsible for during the long build up to the ultimate flowering of Kevin’s violence.

Eva is a very cerebral person, and accordingly Kevin is a very cerebral book, following Eva’s long monologue (confession?) to her absent husband as she makes a hard and painful analysis of what has happened. In a wider sense, it is also an examination of the cultural notion of a mother’s guilt for the actions of her children—Eva is punished by her community for the crimes of her son and ends up living almost as a fugitive from her old life. She is wracked by guilt and horror, analysing events and their lead-up with painful clarity.

But it is soon very clear that though Eva is aware very early on that something is “wrong” with Kevin, she is isolated both by Kevin’s insidious nature and her very role as a mother—and is utterly powerless to do anything about it. Her All-American, trad values-craving husband Franklin coerces her into moving away from her beloved New York to an extravagantly ugly house in the suburbs for the sake of their “family.” Every time she tries to raise her concerns about Kevin, he is disbelieving, and disapproving—he is easily manipulated by his savvy child; because he is not Kevin’s primary caregiver, he only sees what Kevin wants him to see. On top of this, he is a devotee at the shrine of the inviolable nuclear family and refuses to acknowledge anything that could endanger this dream. Instead, he equates Eva’s misgivings with what he perceives as her untrustworthy wanderlust which he fears will take her away from him.

Tilda Swinton glaring

And this is what was so terrifying to me about Kevin—its worst-case scenario of motherhood. The woman enslaved, powerless, first by the very presence of the baby growing inside her and then trapped in the four walls of the home, slave to a psychopathic child who is the ultimate tyrant. Disbelieved by her partner, having to cope alone, cut off from the socially accepted positive experience of motherhood. Forced to nurture a child that has nothing but hate and contempt for you.

And yet, in a lot of ways Eva and Kevin are very alike. This is why Kevin knows it’s easier to get around Dad, but not around Mum—because she understands him in a way Dad never can. Kevin embodies the darker elements of Eva that she herself is unaware of until she starts her minute analysis in the aftermath of his arrest. This feeds her sense of guilt—but also her understanding of him, and her eventual coming to terms with his nature.

Shriver has obviously done her homework. Her construction of Kevin’s childhood reminded me very much of undiagnosed schizophrenic Nancy Spungen’s in her mother’s memoir And I Don’t Want to Live This Life. And when I read this NY Times article about child psychopaths, I thought right away of Kevin and how much the behaviour of the children in it echoed his. It also made me think of Lionel Dahmer’s memoir and how he searched for the answer to Jeffrey’s crimes in his parenting, the dark twists in his own personality and the ways in which he and his son were alike.

Tilda Swinton looking uneasy

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a dark and disturbing, dread-filled book. It consumed my thoughts while I was reading it and terrorised my brain. There are imperfections that mar its surface, the main one being some narrative trickery that I won’t reveal as it’s something of a spoiler. But I will say that I thought it was a bit gimmicky and a slight betrayal of the reader.

This aside, though, it’s an amazing book: painful, scary, intelligent, and unforgettable.

So when I heard there was a film coming out, I thought, “Crikey! Good luck!”

This is because, as with The Hunger Games, We Need to Talk About Kevin is narrated as an internal monologue. Recreating the same effect in a film is very difficult, if not impossible, to do. But the distinctive voice of Eva Katchadourian is essential to the story, is the story.

However, there was one very positive factor—the film was directed by Lynne Ramsay, who is absolutely fantastic. Her films are always creative, individual, and beautifully made.

Tilda Swinton and tomato soup

But hearing about the casting of Tilda Swinton gave me some pause. Don’t get me wrong—I love me some SWINTON. She is astonishingly awesome. I also really liked her interview with W Magazine about the film, in which she said:

It’s every pregnant woman’s nightmare to give birth to the devil. And every mother worries that she won’t connect to her children. When I had my children, my manager asked me what project I wanted to work on next. I said, “Something Greek, perhaps Medea.” Nobody quite understood what I meant, what I was feeling…

You have twins, who are now 13. Did you worry about becoming a mother?

When I first saw the twins, I really liked them. And, at the same time, there was a ghost over my shoulder saying, What if I hadn’t liked them? Kevin spoke to that feeling. It is that nightmare scenario: What if you don’t feel that connection to your children? There’s no preparation for having children. In Kevin, the woman I play is in mourning for her past life, and yet she looks at this dark, nihilistic kid and knows exactly where he comes from. He isn’t foreign to her; she sees herself. And that is, quite literally, revolting to her.

Predictably the gossip rags were like, “WTF! Bitch be crazy!” but I thought she nailed the hammer on the head (or whatever that saying is). She understood the book perfectly, and it was obvious that Eva Katchadourian was in safe hands.

And of course, she is fantastic in the film. She is such a great actress, so lacking in vanity and unafraid to plunge into whatever is needed for a role. It’s just, that … well, Eva is of Armenian descent. And this is quite important in the books. She’s olivey and dark, and Swinton is a long cool glass of milk.

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly and balloons in We Need to Talk About Kevin

Obviously these things can be rectified by certain techniques, and duly Swinton’s hair was dyed, and I’m pretty sure they made her wear dark contacts, an attention to detail which I appreciate.

This might have been okay, if I didn’t feel so uneasy about the casting of the other central characters as well. John C. Reilly, I love you, so please forgive me for this, but I imagined Franklin as handsome (I think he’s actually described as such in the book)—albeit in a ruddy, slightly chunky sort of way, but handsome nonetheless. Not only did Reilly not at all correspond with how I thought Franklin should look, but I just completely could not buy he and Swinton as a couple, no matter how hard I tried. He didn’t do a bad job, but I just did not believe it. And there wasn’t a lot of chemistry between them to help the situation out, either.

And then we arrive at the titular Kevin himself. With Kevin, I had the opposite problem: he is described as being quite good-looking in the books. But movie-Kevin goes beyond this; he looks like an underwear model. Ladies and gentlemen I present to you, Ezra Miller:

Ezra Miller, star of We Need to Talk About Kevin

Once again, though, I must praise their attention to detail. Kevin clearly has zits in some of the shots, and he is wearing the too-small clothes that Shriver describes in the books. But he is just so ridiculously gorgeous that I couldn’t help snorting in the theatre at the sight of him. It’s also impossible to believe that he sprung from the loins of John C. Reilly and Tilda Swinton. So some suspension of disbelief issues there.

These issues aside, however, Ramsay makes a solid effort of adapting this story for film. She doesn’t try to oversimplify the story, nor does she bang you over the head with detailed explanation, which I really appreciated. The attention to detail that I’ve mentioned several times earlier shows respect for and a real dedication to the source material. Her technique is as exquisite as her previous films, and I love that the movie isn’t overly shiny looking like so many American movies—she doesn’t try to gloss over the ugly bits.

However, it’s impossible to overcome the central problem—the way the story is told in the book just can’t be replicated in a film. But I also found that having read the book, there was just no tension in the story and the characters didn’t quite gel enough for me to get pulled into their story anyway. It’s a well-made film, but I’ll have to declare the winner unequivocally: BOOK.

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Amanda Lyons is a writer from Middle Earth (AKA New Zealand). By day she writes on finance, by night whatever takes her fancy at http://mrsmeowssays.blogspot.co.nz/.