On the surface, we see the two primary players of the film, We Need to Talk about Kevin, are Kevin, the son, and his mother, Eva Khatchadourian. Thrust into the waters of motherhood too soon, and forced to watch her husband take to parenting with easy, we see that from day one, Kevin is not an easy child. In several scenes he shows a calculated disdain for his mother, showing her that he controls his actions and emotions from a young age, which only furthers his mother’s irritation .
It seems the director wanted us to learn about the freedom or lack thereof that comes with being a mother, as well as a child. Throughout the film, we become increasingly aware that we not only need to talk about Kevin, but also his mother. In one specific scene, Kevin is already in school but is still wearing diapers and in the middle of changing his diaper, his mother flings him off the changing table and breaks his arm. Kevin lies about the incident in order to keep their tense relationship a secret, but what is more, Kevin’s mother does not confess. She also sees that Kevin begins to use the toilet immediately . While she sees something go right concerning parenting, she knows she has achieved it incorrectly, and we see that both the mother and the child are struggling.
At the end of the film, Kevin uses a bow and arrow, a gift he has mastered, to shoot both his father and sister. He then stages a mass shooting at his school. While this is likely the incident most individuals take with them, and perhaps even believe is at the epicenter of the film, I learned that women who do not want children or are ambivalent to having them do not always make the best mothers. Eva appeared to be a better mother to Kevin’s younger sister, perhaps because she had had more practice, or perhaps because her daughter was an “easier” child. In one scene, when Kevin is sick and specifically wants his mother around, she seems to want to be a mother once more. However, there are more indications that she longs for her old life, and that she is not experiencing an adjustment period, so much as resentment toward her first child for taking it from her.
Concerning psychology, then, we are forced to ask the age old question of nature versus nurture. Kevin, after all, remained emotionally ambivalent toward everybody around him almost from birth. He related more to his father, and was calmed by his presence as an infant, but when his mother was around would shriek and cry . This behavior continued, though in a more malevolent way, into young adulthood, eventually resulting in the loss of his younger sister’s eye. Obviously, nobody is born being bad by nature, and he shows no classic indication of identifiable disorders such as sociopathy that may have developed of their own accord. Indeed we must examine it from a point of his environment and ask again if we need to talk only about Kevin, or about Kevin and Eva, and if her nurturing had so profound an impact on the boy that it caused him to become a bad person.
In sum, the film, We Need to Talk about Kevin, is a dark film that, on the surface, would have anybody believing a boy had been born damaged. However, upon further analysis we see a woman may have been pushed into motherhood too soon. We may even see she never wanted to be a mother at all. Had she wanted to be a mother, or had Kevin been given up for adoption, his environment may have elicited better circumstances, allowing less psychological damage to be inflicted upon the boy based on nurturing.
References
Ramsay, L. (Director). (2011). We Need To Talk About Kevin [Motion Picture].
