OK, I know I'm not supposed to do this but:
The nightmarish son in the film that?s exciting Cannes is a toxic caricature women are too ready to believe in
We need to talk about We Need to Talk About Kevin. The film of Lionel Shriver?s novel about a high-school massacre has excited Cannes, and is spoken of as a Palme d?Or winner. My gender should, I suppose, rejoice: here is a woman novelist, a runaway bestseller voted Britain?s favourite winner of the Orange Prize, made by a woman director into a film starring the superb Tilda Swinton: a regiment of brilliant women storm the literary and cinema world. Why, then, the frisson of unease? It?s only a movie, and less graphically violent than many.
The novel, narrated by the mother of the killer, relates her disgust at the child right from his birth. It is well written, a sophisticated page-turner. School shootings do happen in the US, and such things must be addressed by creative artists to help us all to think about them. Moreover, motherhood is universal and not always easy, and Ms Swinton ? after prudently praising her own ? breezily says that this hymn of hate to a growing child is ?not that far from the everyday experience of being a parent ... a bloody business, having a family?.
The Times critic also found the film?s depictions of maternal frustration to be merely ?exaggerations of the ordinary hell of parenting, only a few steps away from ourselves?. The director Lynne Ramsay, herself contemplating a family, says: ?Sometimes a child is born and you just don?t know who he is.? (Well, duh ... who didn?t work that out? Is it not half the fun of being a parent this greeting of a fascinating stranger?) Clearly, it all strikes a nerve. So in the interests of fairness I read the book straight through over the weekend, and now I see why. Women are oddly prone to identification with novel heroines, however awful. I have long been mystified by the cult of Bridget Jones: the original book was terrific, a clever and horribly perceptive satire on a modern kind of overgrown girliness. It is quite clear why this self-obsessed airhead can?t keep a boyfriend or commit to her job. Yet tens of thousands of women cried: ?I am Bridget!?
Men do not do this. Reading The Diary of a Nobody, they do not bounce delightedly, saying: ?It?s my story! Mr Pooter, the pompous suburban clerk, c?est moi!? They do not instantly identify with Mr Bean or Hannibal Lecter. They just laugh or shudder and move on. But when Kevin came out, most female comments online and by critics expressed identification with the narrator, Eva, mother of the killer. One typically wrote that she too ?agonised over the impact of having a child, felt invaded by pregnancy . . .?
Eva?s character is well realised and quintessentially modern: a successful travel-book writer, she is arrogantly bohemian, snobbish about decor and food, vain and touchy. She nurses a sense of entitlement and ? despite an American upbringing and considerable wealth ? a conviction of victimhood because of her Armenian roots.
She is a mass of unreflective liberalism: against capital punishment, pro abortion. She hesitates about getting pregnant, wondering what the point is, now that children no longer ?till the soil and take you in when you?re incontinent?. She insists on the child taking her name rather than her longsuffering husband?s, sneering:
?I should get varicose veins, for a Plaskett?? During amniocentesis she despises him for being prepared to accept the ?martyrdom? of a Down?s syndrome child, and jeers repeatedly at his ?Norman Rockwell? ideas of family life.
Eva despises most things about her compatriots: she is pitiless about the dull, the fat, the ordinary, the untravelled. Bullied children are dismissed as ?wallowing in their tiny suffering?. She seems to have no friends and despises the neighbours.
The baby repels her from the start, and here the novel departs from realism into cartoonish, almost psychotic, exaggeration: beady-eyed and angry, Kevin has no redeeming features whatsoever, even in babyhood. Eva extends postnatal depression to lifelong resentment: even her child?s failure to potty train early is a plot against her. But note this: she hated boys even before pregnancy, wanting a girl. She says that any woman who does not avert her eyes and quicken her step when passing a group of lads is ?zoologically? unwise because ?boys are dangerous?. Kevin?s dull-eyed sadistic malice, displayed from baby years, is only what she expected. When his sister is born, naturally the girl-child is graceful, gentle and loving. And gets maimed by Kevin.
So the loudest echo from the book is not just about modern women?s fear of giving up independence and a life of narcissistic self-satisfaction. It is about the horribleness of boys: all boys. This is what bothers me. Feminist writers in the 1970s started on this tack: I recall being shocked by the hateful way The Guardian?s Jill Tweedie (?most crime is committed by men?) wrote about her own teenage sons. Jenni Murray, a feminist but happy mother of sons, remembers a friend who commiserated with her at the birth, saying ?poor you, having to raise one of the enemy?.
That explicit, daft feminism may be in decline, but its legacy is how boys are demonised ? often by mothers, and immensely in the education system. They are stereotyped as exhausting, messy, sexually rampant vandals, uncouth in the classroom, idle in the home, mini-Clarksons behind the wheel.
Unlike Shriver?s Kevin they are quite approved of while they remain sweet toddlers ? but the moment they become ?louts? we are told to shrink from them in disgust, until by some miracle they emerge as polite young men. In this legend, little girls grow shiny hair and adorable smiles, do their coursework and shop with Mummy. Boys grow huge feet and growly voices, leave things to the last minute and wear ridiculous clothes. Boys! Ugh! Nasty!
I hardly caricature. And I hate it. It?s a lie. Boys have energies and interests and sensitivities and (sometimes) inarticulacies that can make them hard for women to empathise with. But they have virtues, greatnesses and generosities too. They deserve respect and humour and understanding, scope and structure. It is a prissy, toxic feminism that tries to make them grow like us: and this resurgent, woman-born legend of Kevin the Irredeemable does not lift my heart.