“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?”
~Herman Melville, Moby Dick
In my off time, when I’m not working on political theology, I really enjoy literary fiction and film. And I mean that in the usual pedestrian sense; I just really like watching movies and reading books, usually totally thoughtlessly. But I also like to think a little about the things I watch and read from time to time, in part to cultivate virtuous practices of consumption. Since a few folks on twitter expressed interest in reading thoughts along those lines I thought I’d start stashing them here so they might be interesting or enjoyable to you, or hopefully add something to your own thoughts about some of the books/films we’ve seen in common. Another project at work here is to kind of demonstrate what Christian leftist engagement in culture might look like, since that isn’t something that one gets a very heady dose of in most American discourse.
Without further ado, I’ll be reviewing the 2011 film We Need to Talk About Kevin. Directed by Lynne Ramsay and based on a novel by the same title, Kevin stars Tilda Swinton as Eva, the mother of the eponymous Kevin, portrayed by Ezra Miller.
On the technicals: Kevin is well suited by Swinton, who haunts the screen in a perpetually aghast sort of numbness, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Miller was also an excellent choice for the titular Kevin, having already proved his enfant terrible chops in the equally painful 2008 thriller Afterschool, which meditates upon similar themes. The discerning viewer could view Kevin in pretty perfect continuity with Afterschool, which is, nauseatingly enough, the exact kind f hyperreality the two films swirl around at their cold, cold cores. Art upon art, symbol upon symbol, fake life preceding real life.
Kevin is the story of a frustrated upper class woman who prior to her pregnancy was a successful jet-setting travel writer. She’s unsure about having a baby and after the worst case of postpartum depression ever to occur in the history of mankind, she finds herself incapable of parenting her preternaturally difficult child. Everything Kevin does seems like a form of vengeance: he speaks late, almost defiantly, and he seems spitefully late to toilet train. Eva doesn’t cope well, and eventually flies into a rage, breaking Kevin’s arm — which he covers up, cunningly, to use for blackmail. As he matures into a teenager he seems to delight in exploiting every change in his body and capabilities to torment his mother, much like he did with speaking and toilet training — he masturbates aggressively (watch the scene and tell me the description isn’t apt) in plain view, and after training throughout his youth as an archer murders several students at his high school with a bow and arrow in the film’s climactic performance of evil.
That’s the chronological telling. Eva experiences it all in a series of jumbled flashbacks which are in their composition and success very hit-or-miss; the film can be, at times, almost overbearingly art house. There’s a motif with drippy red substances — red paint splashed on Eva’s car and house by vandals that lingers throughout the film, red jam on Kevin’s sandwich, smashed red tomatoes in an Italian village festival Eva fondly recalls — that will have you utterly exasperated. But the question it poses remains: can she wash her hands of this?
The real intelligence of Kevin is that you are told the point of the film before you see it: its thesis is actually its title. Its omissions are brilliantly selected. Why a bow and arrows, instead of a gun? Where are the psychiatrists, the therapists, the counselors any upper class family would surely have dragged such an antisocial kid to? Where are the shots of Kevin being bullied, getting on poorly in school, or even the mention of friends or a lack thereof? It’s all missing quite intentionally. If any of that had been in Kevin, then it would be a film about guns and gun control, or teens and psych meds, or bullies and bullying. But it stubbornly refuses any of the old go-tos when we talk about random acts of extraordinary evil like school shootings, and instead insists we talk about Kevin.
So what’s his manifesto, what’s his deal? I asked myself this when I was still looking at this like a school shooter movie in the genre of, say, Elephant. And Kevin does have something resembling a manifesto, but it informs the film, not the shooting:
“It’s like this: you wake up and watch TV, get in your car and listen to the radio you go to your little jobs or little school, but you don’t hear about that on the 6 o’clock news, why? ‘Cause nothing is really happening, and you go home and watch some more TV and maybe it’s a fun night and you go out and watch a movie. I mean it’s got so bad that half the people on TV, inside the TV, they’re watching TV. What are these people watching? People like me.”
Eva remembers this speech of Kevin’s through a TV screen; it’s unclear whether he gave some sort of interview where he said it or if that’s merely how she contextualizes it in her mind. But the point is that Kevin understands reality only as mediated through several layers of unreality, like the people on TV watching TV. What doesn’t make the news — going to work or going to school — is less real than what’s going on on television, that is, the activities of people like himself. Even in this instance, he can only understand himself as he relates to TV. Unless it’s captured in the circus of infotainment, it’s “nothing is really happening.” His frustration is that he exists in a kind of perpetually hazy unreality, and as he puts it: “there is no point. That’s the point.”
For Baudrillard, the endless circuit of unreality, in which a simulation of reality is repeated until the distinction between the real and the representation dissolves, is hyperreality. It’s a simulacrum, a situation in which the real is subsumed by self-reflective simulation. Theologian John Milbank helpfully explains a simulacrum as “a bad copy of a good thing.” These are the stages of descent into simulacrum:
“It is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.”
The image Kevin has of himself comes to him from media and is created by media; it’s not really referential to him, but it arrives more real than whatever else he could understand to be true of himself by nature of being packaged by the hyperreality of media. None of this absolves him of anything; this isn’t an indictment of media because media is just one venue through which reality is reproduced into a circuit of simulation. The fact is just that Kevin, and people like Kevin are consumed by imitation. Compare, for example, with the UCSB shooter who made a video of himself in the style of a movie hero, delivering a manifesto in the driver’s seat of a BMW while palms sway in the background. His manifesto? His life wasn’t what it should’ve been, too few parties and hot chicks, and thus the women who failed to deliver the cinematic masterpiece of a life he was entitled to must die — complete with villain-esque chuckles and poses.
For us, what does all this mean?
Baudrillard obviously doesn’t adhere to an Augustinian ontology of evil, but I think it’s rather helpful in this case. What does it mean, theologically, to become consumed by simulation? First, it means that one has turned away from the real, which is God, the being of beings. In the specific case of personhood, it means to negate the imago dei, or the soul’s vocation as the image of God, in order to turn toward the soul’s non-being, the ex nihilo (from nothingness) from which God saw fit to make it:
“Wherever the soul of man turns, unless toward God, it cleaves to sorrow, even though the things outside God and outside itself to which it cleaves may be things of beauty. For these lovely things would be nothing at all unless they were from Him…O God, creator of all things, but let it not cleave too close to love to them through the senses of the body. For they go their way and are no more, and they rend the soul with desires that can destroy it, for it longs to be one with the things it loves and to repose in them. But in them is n place of repose, because they do not abide. They pass, and who can follow them with any bodily sense? Or who can grasp them firm even while they are still here?”
The soul, in seeking to become one with that which it seeks outside of God, therefore seeks to become one with things that are inherently less than God, things which unlike the unchangeable Lord pass away into shadow. In that sense the soul, in seeking to make itself in the image of worldly things, unmakes itself. It tries to simulate what purely isn’t, what is doomed to corruption and eventual destruction. It seeks to reflect the nothingness from which it came rather than the being of God. This is the turn toward evil. Augustine explains:
“For God is unchangeable, and wholly proof against injuries. Therefore the vice which makes those who are called His enemies resist him, is an evil not to God, but to themselves. And to them it is an evil, solely because it corrupts the good of their nature…For to God no evils are hurtful; but only to natures mutable an corruptible, though, by the testimony of the vices themselves, originally good.”
When you’re sucked up into simulation, into the ever-reflecting reproduction of nothingness, you’re torn away from the imago dei and toward the gaping abysss of nothingness. But here Augustine delivers the punchline, and Kevin follows right along: to be seduced into consumption by the evil of the hyperreal is to have been corrupted, diminished, which means there was something there that was capable of losing something. That original kernel is good, and therefore can be redeemed.
At the very end of Kevin, we see Eva preparing a room for her son in the little house she’s moved into since being ostracized following his trial. We don’t know if Kevin will ever really get out, though we know his mother visits him in prison every two weeks despite his obvious disdain for her. The room she’s readied for him is a room fit for a boy, not a young man: painted blue, with books and toys he seemed to respond to as a child, with t-shirts carefully folded that an attentive viewer will recognize as ones he wore frequently in flashbacks.
It cuts through the frozen heart of the film, though it only lasts a minute. This gesture is real because it means something, because it is directly contrary to the presupposition of narratives about retribution and loss. Here at the end of all devastation and destruction, there is love. It’s tenacious. Maybe everything in the world, all the falsehood and misleading, works against it: but here it is. What is originally good in the soul can be redeemed even after it has been diminished by consumption in a false and corrupted simulation of itself.
Remarkable.