proximoception | (no subject)

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We Need to Talk About Kevin is shattering for members of the parent subspecies. Not sure how it is for others. Or what to call the others - "children" seems patronizing.

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It felt like it was made for parents.

I'd have more patience if the numbers on abused kids and homeless kids were different, or if the stories coming out of situations like Columbine were different. Swinton feels responsible, and vilified. Where there's psychopathy IRL, meaningful responsibility is debatable - psychopathy seems to be a brain problem, not a nurture problem, not along the subtle lines the story tells (you weren't a blissful enough mother, omg). Where there isn't psychopathy, the dominant provoking IRL experience seems to have been peer relationships, not parental ones, and often the perpetrators seem to have been mentally ill. With mental illness being separable from the state of not being loved enough. Finally, parents whose children kill people in sprees tend to receive support and sympathy, as seen in Columbine, as seen in the recent article about Adam Lanza's father, as seen in the nearly universal support and sympathy for the woman who wrote the internet essay "I am Adam Lanza's mother," who was likely abusing her child. These parents receive sympathy because other parents are so afraid of being that parent, because the horror-fantasy is that strong.

Overall, ego-needs of parents effectively obscure the health and safety needs of children, to the point of routine physical endangerment of children. Non-parents are denied standing to comment because they're not parents. Here on the outside, one's left watching what happens to actual children, which is less "...Kevin" than Rachel Aviv's "Netherland."

I think we're to understand that the community picked up that he'd aimed the crime at her, from his killing the rest of the family then lying down to be arrested essentially at her feet. The scene with the wheelchair kid also showed, convincingly because you felt worse for her, that she felt much worse when people were nice. All it was really taking from Columbine was absurd extremity - to say this shit is stronger than all other shit. No, people who do those things don't tend to say or think it's about their parent; a real Kevin is probably impossible. You can argue there's irresponsibility to taking those licenses. I'd suggest the various "art film art film" klaxons going off at the beginning minimize these dangers by boring off most of the uninformable.

She wasn't "unblissful," but an abuser. This was not subtle to parents, though I did wonder if some of it might be to nons, since they weren't going the usual glowering or cackling demon with belt and cigar route. "She didn't hold him" is not a cliche, it is extremely fucked up (watch a parent watching those scenes sometime). As was most of what ensued. She was clearly abused, and he was abused by her right there in front of us.

You know my position on abnormal psych: genes affect things in the sense that certain personality-infuencing configurations provide more protection than others to trauma flooding. This is crucial for treatment, trivial for diagnosing the problem, which is that flooding. Which comes from those who should have been giving care. And who sometimes thought they were.

What I noticed was how much was done to show how conflicted she was. She tried, and failed, and blamed herself. She kept doing it. There was confusion, there was pain. But I do not recollect scenes where she was deliberately, intentionally cruel to him, and experienced relief or pleasure at his suffering. What, perhaps, you mean by "glowering or cackling demon." Except that's the crux of how hard it is to *actually* depict abuse, because IRL this behavior is ubiquitous, and ubiquitously minimized and rationalized.

We don't see a moment where he's in pain and she's satisfied, or where she deliberately humiliates him, because if that was depicted, we would lose sympathy for her. Instead, we see her fantastic loyalty. Her grappling to appreciate the extent of her responsibility.

I'll re-emphasize: the abuse that will cause sequelae is so much more likely to be deliberate cruelty and deliberate aggression. What she did was destructive, but it's not going to cause psychosis the way that experiences of intention-to-harm are going to cause psychosis. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23327756). What she did would hurt, but it's not going to cause premature mortality the way that intention-to-harm emotional abuse, sexual abuse, refusal to provide medical attention, etc. will. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19840693)

The true iron law upheld by the film is that the parent must attract the sympathy, and the child is the monster. Over and over I am asked to sympathize with the parent's fear of creating a monster. What I do not see is a pause, or any retreat from the brink of identifying the monster as the child.

Trauma-flooding, sure, but what causes the flooding? I will hold with perception of intention to harm. Over coldness, conflictedness, discomfort, what overloads your thalamus is a trusted person's pleasure at your pain, and when you're young your brain is going to be open to that damage, kind of forced open. But who do we witness engage in the behaviors? Kevin. Only Kevin. Of course Kevin; that's the genre. The movie knows what the real damaging behaviors are, and it knows they'll really kill audience sympathy, and so it knows who to give them to - the child.

She tries to play that game with the ball with him? And he's mad, and she'd discomfited, because she's doing it wrong as usual, and is keenly aware. If they'd had the guts to have her mock him for incoordination, to laugh at him, you'd have something. Because his experience of that could be intentional harm, and it's a behavior which would seem normal that most people could condone. And then he could cry at the confusion and pain of being humiliated, and she could respond with anger, and there we have an average traumatizing day.

Edited 2014-04-30 02:49 (UTC)

Not really a point to my defending it twice, given the resoluteness and personal element to your opposition. But I will in case anyone else is reading this, as it's a movie that gets something very important very right.

After admitting you're surely right that someone subjected to those particular neglects and abuses would likely not become psychotic - though of course Kevin didn't either. But no, an actual Kevin presumably wouldn't have committed a school massacre. Alcoholism, more likely. Maybe violence against women. The movie killings are a lucid fellow-travelling of the psycho crimes: by not letting me understand I'm loved you're putting me in a world where I'm robbed of a childhood and family, hence a pointless one, and I'm showing you what it looks like. An art massacre, not a real life one. Maybe the real Kevins write books like this, or film them.

The bow thing is part of the attempt to pull it into art space, and incidentally clear of the strong crosswinds of the equally important hence potentially immensely distracting gun issue.

She didn't know what she didn't know because someone fucked her up. So bad that she didn't know how to hold a baby or not lash out at a defenseless child. These are hard things to not learn fast - I think the movie plays with expectations of nons a bit, the sorts of "how would I know what to do if someone suddenly threw a baby at me" thoughts you have before the kid shows up. In the event you just know or, better, you find out. A parent's reaction is mingled recognition of the phenomenon of being in over your head and hatred for the inexcusable. A mentally healthy parent could never "oops" in these particular ways, but the fact that someone else could chills you about what your own gaps in self-knowledge might be.

Not having it be underlinedly clear just how off she is a risky ambiguity but probably a necessary one to get this message into a story form. The point of everyone attacking her is that they're right - the movie's trying to get you into her own shoes for that Oedipus reversal. Again, there's no clearing it from crimes against reality. But it had reasons for distorting what it did.

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