We Need to Talk About Kevin

The process of spectator’s engagement with the character is one of the most multidimensional studies in film theory. In his study on the character engagement, Murray Smith states that: ‘Characters are salient elements of narrative structure, but we should never lose sight of the fact that characters are, nevertheless, parts of larger structures’. (Smith, 1995, 74) By using the example of We Need to Talk About Kevin, an adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s (2003) famous homonymous novel, this essay will closely study the phenomenon of perverse allegiance through the prism of the ‘structure of sympathy’ theory, and discuss, to what extent perverse allegiance can be regarded as an aspect of character engagement and ‘identification’.

The movie starts with the scene which shows a woman waking up at a house which is coated red stains from exterior. The woman, named Eva, has flashbacks to her past. Via these flashbacks we learn about her son, Kevin, and their arguable relationships. Despite the name of it, “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, there are not profound talks about him that we
witness during the movie. In this writing, I am going to try to fill this deficiency and talk about Kevin’s abnormality and potential reasons of it from the perspective of developmental psychopathology.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a disturbing but powerful story told from the perspective of Eva, a widowed mother whose 15-year-old son Kevin commits a fictional mass murder at his high school in Nyack, New York. The 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver was praised by critics, as was its 2011 film adaptation of the same name, written and directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring the talented Tilda Swinton as Kevin's mother. Much has been said about the novel and the film related to motherhood, gender, masculinity, school violence, and many other topics; however, one conspicuous aspect of We Need to Talk About Kevin that critics have left largely un-talked about, in both film and novel, is the defining role that Robin Hood plays for the young psychopath in these texts. In this presentation, I demonstrate that Ramsay's adaptation emphasizes Robin Hood far more than Shriver's novel does; Ramsay retains all of the Robin Hood material present in the novel, but she embellishes it, drawing upon iconographic elements of the Robin Hood tradition familiar to modern audiences to achieve a cinematic effect of essentially portraying a bad Robin Hood. We Need to Talk About Kevin certainly comments on the contemporary problem of massive school shootings as well as the ongoing issue of mass shootings in general. For the purposes of this conference, however, I am only concerned with the extent to which this story is a Robin Hood story; and if it is, what is achieved in depicting Robin Hood as a homicidal American teenager? In the novel, the narrative begins subsequent to Kevin's homicidal spree. In epistolary form, Eva (Kevin's mother) writes to her deceased husband, whom Kevin had also murdered on the day of the school shooting; Eva tells her account of the events leading up to her son's bloody actions, which includes a long personal history of contention between her and Kevin as she attempted to raise him. Even at his birth, Kevin shows aversion to his mother, and the two of them butt heads

This study focuses on Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's epistolary novel We Need to Talk About Kevin and argues that the film should be seen as an example of feminist horror that subverts and challenges cultural mother myths. It considers the impact of feminist psychoanalytic approaches to horror before exploring the emerging genre of feminist horror films and the revised theoretical approaches to horror that the genre demands. The analysis of We Need to Talk About Kevin centres on the film's feminist representation of motherhood. The film's internal landscape and intimate exploration of Eva's fractured, unreliable memories has wider resonance and acknowledges the simple feminist truth that patriarchy would rather sweep under the carpet: mothers do not always bond with their children.

Recent investigations into ethical experiences of fictional narratives have discussed the ‘positions’ that readers adopt in relation to the author, narrator and characters . This article applies Text World Theory as a means of accounting for the ethical experience of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. Qualitative analysis of a sample of 150 online reader responses on the reading-based social network Goodreads reveals a range of ethical responses to the novel positioned between two interpretative ‘camps’ and the nature/nurture debate they reflect with regards to the character, Kevin. Drawing from this dataset, I explore how stylistic features of Shriver’s epistolary novel could be seen to influence readers’ ethical positioning in relation to the multiple perspectives presented at different levels of its narrative structure. As a result of the analysis, I propose that an account of ethical experience using Text World Theory may benefit from the concept of ‘construal’ in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. By modeling readers’ variable attention to multiple minds, including their own, a cognitive grammatical model of construal may support an understanding of ethical interpretation as an interpersonal experience within particular reading contexts.