We Need to Talk About Kevin - Review

I suppose the obvious supposition is that it's a polemic against modern consumerist America and the reason these white, middle class kids with everything go on these shooting sprees. Our knee jerk reaction is to blame the parents and the mother in particular for after all, isn't she the perpetrator of original sin that we've been paying for ever since. Hence the narrator is Eva or Eve, the woman who gives birth to a monster, who tips Pandora's box all over the nation.

Elephant by Gus Van Sant tries to explore the Columbine massacre through film and he comes to much the same conclusion: that there's a void, a nothingness and a meaningless. They (the public) need someone to blame and try to pin the blame on Hitler, the parents, the teachers but never the fact that there is no one to blame but the children themselves. Kevin seems to be saying the same thing:

"Cause otherwise? You type on your computer and go home and the refrigerator comes on and another computer spits out your paycheck and you sleep and you enter more shit on your computer...Might as well be dead." p326

There was something disquieting about his need for nappies until the age of five, his reluctance to come out of the womb and his own mother's reluctance to give birth to him. This was later exemplified through his constrictive undersized clothing. It wasn't until by her own admission, she didn't want him ripped out of her that she put in any effort and couldn't believe the pain. She was so used to being on morphine within her saccharine sanitised society; that she had never actually experienced pain before.

She is what some sardonically call a poverty tourist and wanted to experience pain and poverty but behind a shield. Her passport and her identity was always her get out clause, she always knew she could go home and there would be someone waiting for her when she did. She went on about her 'roots', the massacre of the Armenians but it wasn't until Kevin massacred those close to her that she again felt anything except antipathy.

On a more superficial level she was a Liberal and he, a Republican. Yet she was the one who wanted to punish while he, Mr Plastic was so sucked into Pax Americana that he lost his own life as his son burst his misconceptions with an arrow.

The two children were so different as though he had somehow sucked all the health, courage and personality out of the mother and then nullified it with his own inert expressionlessness. In a world so packed with stuff that he could have anything he wished he liked nothing and had no taste for anything except it seemed: his mother.

Eva goes back to the seventies feminism where women were just getting used to having a say over their own bodies. They had the pill and abortion rights and didn't see why they should be held hostage or their personal lives ransomed for children whereas Franklin (a reference to Roosevelt) was more Reagan or 'traditional'. He cannot believe that if he puts on a good enough show, it won't work. As though if he lets off enough fireworks on the fourth of July there won't be maggots in the apple pie.

In a senseless consumerist driven society with no spiritual centre or governmental norms the only thing to look forward to was becoming yet anther cog in the wheel, of doing what was expected of you. Of getting a mortgage, having children and playing Frisbee with them in 'down time'. Whose populace was fed on bloodshed in order to make them feel anything at all, a feeding frenzy of questions from those removed by the television camera. He picks off the American Ideal one by one with an arrow like Robin Hood yet lacks any real altruism. In fact he seems to lack any real feelings at all.

Except he seems to yearn for his mother's approval and affection and during her diatribes he is taking notes. She tries to pull off the facade that she's a liberal well travelled hippie but she's a millionaire just as enamored with her personal possessions as all those she deigns to despise. She has no compassion for the weak, lonely or disaffected. She is deeply superficial. Her first descriptions of people are through their looks, they are dismissed as fat or physically unattractive and she often describes the way she looks. She hates the large modern house her husband buys when it echoes modern middle class American society. The lack of privacy, the pretentious attention to detail and the lack of any real substance or feeling.

At the end, Kevin had a photo of his mother on his wall in prison and admitted that she was his intended audience. She had often railed about school yard rampages while her plastic husband stuck up for the disaffected children. She seemed to be feeding her son tips on how to go about it, in order to get rid of her apathy. It was her who hated the society that bore her and her son who attempted to mow it down. And it was to her he turned when he was ill, frightened and needy. So in a sense, the book seems to be saying that it's the soft, liberal approach that brings this kind of tragedy into fruition yet since the 'traditional' Republican approach is plainly inappropriate we need to redesign the fabric of society itself. So the book throws a daunting question back at the reader...