In this essay, I
will be focusing on the affective presence or absence of the mother in Lynn
Ramsey’s We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) (referred to as Kevin), and Erick Zonca’s Julia
(2008), where Swinton plays Eva in the former, and Julia in the latter. Initially,
it is crucial for the term ‘affect to be defined as this term is notorious for
pervading definition. The term affect came to prominence in A Thousand Plateaus, the work of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guttari, two French philosophers. Written in 1980, it
referred to affect as flows and forces, also described as intangible energies,
with the translator, Brian Massumi, in the foreword, describing it as “an
ability to affect and be affected” (1988: xvi), which implies affect is
something exchanged between two people.
Silvan Tomkins,
a psychologist and personality theorist, developed affect theory a decade later
by categorising affects into six, and later nine, nameable emotion pairs
ranging from enjoyment-joy to anger-rage. According to Tomkins, affects “are
aroused easily by factors over which the individual has little control” (Tomkins
1995: 54), implying that affects are
similar to emotions, but beyond our jurisdiction. Affect can be described as a state of mind relating to an emotion,
or the aura created by a situation.
The ‘affective
absence’ can be the absence where generic convention has led to our expectation
of its presence, so that leads the ‘affect presence’ to become where the conventional
maternal ideal has been fulfilled. The psychoanalysts, philosophers and
theorists I will use in the essay to explore the affect absence/presence of the
maternal figure are Judith Butler, E. Ann Kaplan, Sigmund Freud and Jacques
Lacan. These individuals work has been selected because of their focus on the
development of the mother, the development of the child, and the relationship
between the two.
Judith Butler is
an American philosopher and gender theorist, whose work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity strove to
trouble the idea of what we perceive as the origin of gender. I intend to
extend Butler’s theory to trouble the idea of the maternal, and show how it
exists only within the dominant discourse of motherhood – by which I mean
child-rearing books, women’s magazines and television shows and popular
Hollywood films.
Kaplan is an
English professor in New York, who wrote a book called Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular culture and
Melodrama, in which she came to two definitions of the ‘maternal
melodrama’: the complicit and the resistant. The complicit maternal melodrama
“represents the mother as a paternal function, and addresses a male spectator”
usually featuring an “intense mother-son relationship” (1992: 69). The
resistant maternal melodrama is “from the mother position and about its
pleasures and oppressions” (1992: 69). These two ideas will be explored in
relation to the films later in the essay.
Widely
considered the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud investigated the realms
of the unconscious development of the mind based on case studies in the late 19th
to early 20th century. This essay will look at the Oedipus complex,
a stage of childhood development in which a male child directs his “first
sexual impulse towards [his] mother and [his] first hatred and [his] first
murderous wish against our father” (1899: 364). This theory is particularly
relevant in regards to Kevin’s (Ezra Miller) behaviour towards his mother in Kevin.
Finally, this
essay will explore some of the theory of childhood development from Jacques
Lacan, a French psychoanalyst from the mid 20th century. Lacan’s
work will be used to explore how the child relates to the mother in relation to
their ‘want’, ‘need’, and ‘demand’ stage from his work Ecrits and The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis.
As an actress,
Tilda Swinton has been described as the “supremely poised ice queen of the
cinema” (Lee 2009: 1). Swinton’s acting technique embodies flat affect, often
portraying characters as measured on the surface, whilst hiding the chaos
beneath. The Independent describes
her on screen personality as “elusive” (Romney 2008: 1), while the Guardian describes her as “cool” and
“intelligent” (Cochrane 2011: 1). By asking Swinton to perform the maternal
figure in Kevin and Julia, both Ramsey and Zonca are making
a statement about the idea of the ‘mother’, as Swinton troubles the constructed
nature of the maternal figure, to be explored and discussed further.
Although in Julia, Swinton is not the biological
mother, she is the predominant female adult in the film who cares for the
character Tom (Aiden Gould). I have chosen this film because of the contrast in
affective presence of Swinton as a maternal figure between Eva and Julia. This
essay will explore the question of maternal affect or its absence in Kevin and Julia, through which I will uncover and dissect Swinton’s
performance as a maternal figure within these texts.
In 21st
century Hollywood cinema, the ‘mother’ is typically a warm, reliable,
responsible woman, who cares for her children selflessly. The stereotype
related to the American mother in both Kevin
and Julia is long hair, minimal
make-up and modest clothing, as shown by the other mothers in the anti-natal
class of Kevin and Elena’s (Kate del
Castillo) appearance in Julia, as the
biological mother of Tom. These stereotypes align the association between
motherhood and femininity, subverted by Swinton’s appearance, dress and
behaviour in both films. Tilda Swinton has short, cropped hair and is famed for
her androgynous style, challenging the idea of what it is to be feminine. In
Judith Butler’s work on gender as a performance, she writes that gender is a
set of acts, created through repetitive performance, “Gender is a kind of
imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation
that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of
the imitation itself” (1993: 310). If we are to extend this theory to
motherhood, it could be argued that the ‘maternal figure’ has been created
through imitation, and is not in fact the original, but the effect of
motherhood.
The pressure on
mothers to fulfil this role often leads to dissociation with the child, as
shown by Eva in Kevin. Vivienne
Welburn, in her work on postnatal depression, protested, “If we do the job
adequately, it is taken for granted that it is ‘natural’ to us, if we do it
badly we will be castigated by just about everyone in sight” (1980: 23). The
idea that motherhood is natural to all women is troubled in both films, as
Swinton’s characters take on alternative relationships with the boy’s they are
the mother figure to. In Kevin
especially Eva is blamed for Kevin’s actions as a result of her parenting
skills, not just by the women in her town breaking her eggs in the supermarket
or physically assaulting her in the street, but by herself by making an
omelette with the eggs and taking the piece of shell out from between her teeth
as she eats it.
Kevin begins with Eva living an idyllic lifestyle as a
globetrotting travel writer, but her carefree attitude leads to pregnancy and
the result is a child whose brief moments of humanity excuse him from complete
evil. Effectively, Eva is shown to sacrifice her independence and her place in
the public sphere in order to fulfil the stereotypical association of
motherhood with the domestic/private sphere. By the end of the film, Kevin’s
(Ezra Miller) actions leave her with no family, no job and no friends. Ramsey
has taken the book written by Lionel Shriver and stripped it of its epistolary
form; instead of a vocal narrator, the audience is shown the story with
temporal disjunctions from Eva’s shell-shocked point of view, that make us
question the trustworthy nature of the protagonist. The films subversion of
realism uses diegetic sounds that do not fit with the images on the screen,
such as the garden sprinkler sound that is repeated throughout but not shown
until the end, giving the film a disoriented feeling.
The first scene
of Julia shows Julia as a promiscuous
barfly, the result of which leads to her losing her job, and being pressured by
her sponsor to attend AA meetings, where she meets Elena, a desperate mother
whose child is under his paternal grandfather’s care. Elena convinces Julia to
kidnap her son with a financial incentive. When Julia realises Elena has no
money, she takes Tom anyway, blackmailing the grandfather for $2 million, however
her plans are ruined when she has to drive through the border wall into Mexico,
and, ironically, Mexican drug dealers kidnap Tom from her. The film ends in a
whirlwind of unbelievable violence and guns, where Julia has a moral turnaround
in her exchange of the money for the child.
The third person
perspective of Julia allows the
audience to observe the choices the character makes, whilst conforming to the
idea of the resistant maternal melodrama – it explores the trials of motherhood
from a fresh perspective, as Julia has only just been put in charge of Tom. The
affective presence of Julia as she learns to become a mother is evident in her
encouraging words of “Good boy Tom”, when Tom is drying himself in the
bathroom, much to both characters surprise. Julia is a character who displays
no ‘nurture’ desire in the beginning of the film, stating, “I don’t know the
first thing about kids”. When forced into a maternal role, however, maternal
characteristics are triggered, repositioning the figure of the mother in
traditional discourse. In comparison, Kevin
subverts and troubles the genre of the maternal melodrama because the
non-linear narrative from Eva’s disorientated hindsight does not conform to
Kaplan’s definition when placed alongside the idea that Kevin was never
provided with an idealized mother. By mixing the complicit and the resistant
maternal melodrama, Kevin subverts
the idea of what the maternal is by questioning the audience’s expectations of
motherhood.
So how does
Swinton’s affective presence or absence as the ‘maternal figure’ in these films
subvert the conventions of the maternal melodrama, which have depended upon
emotional excess, and legibility of the maternal figure? In Julia, Swinton’s affective presence as
the maternal figure subverts the conventions of the maternal melodrama due to
the direction in which the character Julia’s emotional excess is directed.
Julia is presented as being untrustworthy, shown through her inability to keep
her job due to repeated lateness. Her boss snorts in disbelief at her poor
excuse of “family problems”, as the character is not the typical ‘mother’
figure in her appearance (tight dresses, over-the-top jewellery, too much
make-up, heels) or behaviour (poor time-keeping, alcoholism).
However, throughout
Tom’s kidnapping, Julia and Tom become so close that Eva calls herself his
mother when questioned by a stranger.
In Kevin, Swinton’s affective absence
subverts the conventions of the maternal melodrama through the flat affect of
the character Eva, Kevin’s birth is an example of disturbing the genre. In his
work on the melodramatic imagination, Peter Brooks, a professor of literature
at Yale University, characterizes melodrama as an “indulgence of strong
emotionalism” with “extreme states of being” (1976: 4). This is the complete
opposite to the post-birth shot of Eva, who sits in a white, clinical room with
bare walls and no colour, upright and expressionless as her husband Franklin
(John C. Reilly) holds a bundle of blankets and coo’s into them. Kevin’s crying
dominates the room, merging into the sound of a sander against concrete, a
metaphor for overwhelming the eardrums and the psyche. Alongside this, we see
no breast-feeding between Kevin and Eva, another example of how their
relationship is unnatural from the offset, a denial of the most intimate
affections between mother and child. Swinton’s pale skin almost blends into the
sheets of the bed, adding to the lack her lack of presence and the
unnaturalness of the situation, the blandness of the room making us aware of
the absence of colour.
The colour red
in Kevin occurs repeatedly, and is
undoubtedly a metaphor for the horrors to come, however it could also be
deduced that the colour red replaces the affective absence Swinton creates with
her use of flat affect in her portrayal of Eva. She uses a red pen when trying
to teach Kevin maths, which he purposely flouts by counting to fifty and
demanding a stop to the lessons. Kevin turns a piece of bread with unnaturally
bright red jam on it upside down on the coffee table, to which Eva glares at
him, but does not chastise. Perhaps the most vivid of all is the red paint
thrown at Eva’s windows. She cleans it off with the most teeth-clenching methods
– razor blades on glass, an electric sander on concrete, scratchy paper on her
windshield. The shots of Swinton washing the red paint from her hands are
reminiscent of a historically famous woman, who was so affectively absent, she
claimed she would “dash the brains” of her new born child: Lady Macbeth. Eva’s
guilt in her failings to raise Kevin by society’s norms, not conforming to
social scripts and regulations is evident in her eventual affective absence in
her interactions with him.
Eva’s guilt is
pungent throughout the film, her anxieties made clear as she sees her
reflection in her sons actions, made visual through Ramsey’s clever editing of
Swinton plunging her face into a sink, and Miller pulling his out. The water
signifies purification as Eva tries to wash away the past, but the cuts keep
taking us back in time. Kaplan wrote about Nancy Chodorow in her work Motherhood and Representation, a
feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst, who theorized “the boy gets his
masculine identity through precisely negating his earlier “feminine”
identification with the mother” (1992: 33). In Kevin’s similar appearance to
Eva’s, it could show the male child’s refusal to negate his identification with
his mother.
Red wine is used
by Ramsey to symbolise a desire to escape, often shown when Eva has experienced
a particularly difficult situation with Kevin. Zonca also uses alcohol as a
symbol for escapism, showing Julia often out of control, and then almost
stupefied by her hangovers the next day. The character Julia is shown as being
ruled by her pleasure principle for immediate gratification, and uses alcohol
to forget about her problems. Julia admits to her friend Nick that she’s tired
of her life, “I smile and I eat shit from guys, and what do I have? I don’t
have anybody, I get drunk, and I’m getting old”.
Alcohol permits
an escape from both characters’ lives, however also facilitates their isolation
from motherhood, even if only as a temporary escape. Eva covered the walls of
her study with maps of countries she had presumably been to, or wished to see,
and when asked what they were for by Kevin, she said it was to show an aspect
of her personality. When she leaves the room, Kevin takes a water pistol and
paint, and shoots the room, ruining the maps and leaving his own mark. Upon
return, Eva takes his gun and stamps on it until it breaks. In the next scene,
she is shown sitting on the sofa with her feet on the coffee table, shoes
covered in red paint, sipping a glass of red wine. The symbolic significance of
this scene is overwhelming and has many different connotations, Film4 writer Catherine Bray describing
the maps as Eva’s “lost freedom” (2011: 1), but I will explore the phallic
ideology behind it. Kevin uses his water pistol, which could represent the
penis, to splatter paint, which could be ejaculating and therefore a
humiliation technique used on Eva, or urine to leave his scent, in order to
mark the room and attempt to regain power over his mother. In this scene, Kevin
is attempting to take back control by punishing Eva’s dreams of escape through
the paint on the maps, ruining them. The red wine, as alcohol, signifies her
need to escape the situation, making her affectively absent as a mother.
Religiously, red wine symbolises strength and life, being the blood of Christ,
and perhaps Eva seeks strength in order to deal with her daemon child.
Eva does not
begin Kevin’s life as an affectively absent mother. In the first interaction
scene with Kevin as a toddler (Rocky Duer), Swinton portrays an affectively
present mother, one who tries to engage with her son by asking him “Can you say
ball? B-b-b ball?” before rolling the ball towards him. By sounding out the
plosives of a simple word, the character Eva is trying to pass on her knowledge
to her child and help him to learn, whilst physically stimulating him with a
toy. Kevin refuses to respond to Eva, staring blankly at her with a furrowed
brow and allowing the ball to roll in between his legs without rolling it back.
Kevin only rolls the ball back once when Eva has lost her patience, but then
doesn’t respond again.
Kaplan used
Freud to explain how and why children learn to speak, “children learn to use
language as the means for replacing the loss of the mother” (1992: 29). Freud
interprets the learning of talking as a moment when the child becomes
autonomous from the mother, so this could be used to explain why Kevin refuses
to talk, because he doesn’t want to let go of Eva. Kevin’s affective absence
shows how the relationship needs both the mother and the child to participate
in order for it to function. Kevin takes no enjoyment from playing with the
toys, and does not seem to engage in activities like other children. Therefore
he does not fulfil the role of the child that is essential in a mother/child
dichotomy. Eva’s calm façade breaks in moments of frustration, for example when
she says to him “Mommy was happy before little Kevin came along. Now Mommy
wakes up every morning, and wishes she was in France”. When Kevin is
incarcerated, Eva still seems to be playing the maternal role, she irons his
clothes and folds them, and places them in a room he has never slept in.
The character
Julia contrasts with Eva in that she does not attempt to nurture Tom, but does
care for him. Julia adapts to her role as a maternal figure in Tom’s life after
she kidnaps him, but in a forceful, brusque way. When they first arrive at the
motel, she shoves him in the shower, makes him dry himself, and covers him in a
blanket whilst he sleeps. This challenges the ideas of Stern and Stern, who
wrote a book called “The Birth of the
Mother: How the Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever”. This book is a
self-help manual on how to be a mother, and what to expect from motherhood. In
this book, they write, “you will draw on maternal instincts, developing
intuitive ways of holding, touching, and making sounds that build the
relationship between you and your baby” (1998: 13). Julia and Eva trouble this
idea in regards to how the mother/child relationship is developed. Eva seems to
lack the ‘maternal instincts’, whilst Julia develops a maternal relationship
with Tom despite her lack of biological connection, and both Eva and Julia
display affective absence as a mother throughout. From this we can conclude
that Swinton defies the idea of the ‘maternal figure’ by presenting it as an
effect of motherhood, rather than the original.
There is a battle between affective absence and presence within the character Eva when Kevin is born. She holds up the baby, who is wailing incessantly, and attempts to arrange her face in maternal ecstasy, but instead freezes in a grimace. Eva shows signs of post-natal depression after the birth. The baby cries for an unnatural amount of time, causing concern from passers by in the street. Eva stands with the buggy next to some road works so that the drilling will drown out the noise of the baby. When Franklin returns home from work, she is lying on the sofa with the curtains closed and a pained expression on her usually crease-free face. Post-natal depression symptoms include tiredness, irritability and indifference to the baby. In an interview in Welburn’s book, where sufferers of post-natal depression are interview about their illness, ‘Ann’ states “Nothing I did seemed to please the baby… I felt helpless… Every single thing that I did, he bawled his head off at, he never smiled, was never happy” (1980: 33). This is echoed in Swinton’s portrayal of a mother who feels she is unable to cope with her own child.
Eva’s pleads
with Franklin to leave Kevin settled, when he returns from work. When he picks
up the baby, the audience anticipate ear-piercing cries, but the expectations
fall short as the child mews in comfort at the touch of his father. Franklins
ability to interact with Kevin successfully question Eva’s capabilities,
leading to further disconnect from both Franklin out of jealousy and Kevin out
of anger. The mother’s life is taken over by the baby, as her appearance
changes in order to provide for him, shown by her swollen breasts spilling out
of her vest top.
The baby also
takes over Eva’s life with his needs, wants and desires. In Lacan’s work on
psychoanalysis, he theorizes about a child’s development in regards to their
mother, often described as the ‘Other’ due to difference in sex. He writes,
“Mans desire is the desire of the Other” (1973: 235), which can be interpreted
as desire for recognition from the ‘Other’ – in this case Swinton –
alternatively it could be desire for what the Other desires, what the Other
lacks – in this case Franklin. In the first case, when a child receives care
from the Other, this indicates the Other cares for them and understands them.
However as Eva is unable to care for Kevin, the rift between them grows and a
lack of understanding stunts their relationship growth. Eva is conflicted in
her dislike of Kevin for altering her life, and her desire for him to be
societies ideal child. In his earlier work, Ecrits,
Lacan writes that desire is essentially a demand for recognition (1966: 431),
and that the dependence on the Other for recognition is what structures the
drives of the child. (1966: 343). Kevin as a child could be seen as playing up
in order to hold Eva’s attention, which is understandable when taking her flat
affect into account, and when he doesn’t receive this, his desperation for
recognition leads him to act out.
In Julia, it can be interpreted that Julia
desires recognition through her promiscuity – a desire for attention and
intimacy from men – highlighting her loneliness. She has no ‘Other’ to demand
attention from, which could be why she became an alcoholic. This is curbed when
she puts herself in charge of Tom, she has responsibility, and her drinking
reduces. Neither Eva nor Julia were warned about the effects caring for a child
has on you as a person. Against their will, there is a transgression in the
character of the female protagonist’s– in early scenes, Eva dances in the rain
with Franklin, lies in tomato juice in a crowded festival, enjoys sexual
intercourse, yet when Kevin is born, Eva loses the capacity to enjoy anything
at all.
To conclude, by
comparing and contrasting the affective presence/absence of the mother in Kevin and Julia, I have argued that the ‘maternal’ can only exist within
discourse. Swinton has challenged the idea of ‘motherhood’ in these two films
through her affective absence. The flat affect makes the ‘maternal figure’ the
effect of motherhood rather than the origin, as seen through extending Judith
Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Swinton disturbs the conventions of
femininity by her androgynous appearance in Kevin,
and her over-feminine appearance in Julia,
with clothes that accentuate her cleavage. Through this, she also challenges
the idea of the mother, as she is supposed to be the ultimate woman – a
provider of life. The idea of the ‘maternal’ has been shown to be a set of acts
which comes into being through repetitive performance, or in the case of these two
films, does not come into being if not performed at all. Instead there is an
absence of maternity. In Julia, this
is shown through the scene when she buys him food and gives him water, where
she performs maternal tasks, even though she isn’t Tom’s mother, or even a
mother at all. These tasks do not appear natural to her, so one can only assume
she performs them because she has seen someone else do this. Likewise in Kevin, Eva consults a doctor because she
has a lack of confidence with what her own parenting skills, and suggests Kevin
has autism so as to free her from blame. Ultimately, both films epitomise the
sense that neither presence/absence can dictate a woman’s maternal nature, in
that conforming to society’s expectations of motherhood will not guarantee a
successful mother/child relationship.
Through her use
of flat affect in Kevin, Swinton
manages to disconnect with the expected warmth and love that a woman is stereotypically
expected to express towards their new born. This could be used to explore
post-natal depression. Swinton’s performance in Julia contrasts mightily with this, being one of Swinton’s most
extroverted roles. As a woman who shows no desire to be a mother, having the
idea of her having ‘family troubles’ scoffed at by her boss, Julia takes on the
maternal role reticently.
Bibliography
Bray, Catherine
(2011). ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ in Film4.
Published online: http://www.film4.com/reviews/2011/we-need-to-talk-about-kevin
Accessed: 11.01.2015
Brooks, Peter
(1976) The Melodramatic Imagination:
Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. Yale University
Press: New Haven
Butler, Judith
(1993). ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Routledge: New York
Cochrane, Kira
(2011) ‘Tilda Swinton: I didn’t speak for five years’ in the guardian. Published Online:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/11/tilda-swinton-we-need-kevin
Accessed: 11.01.2015
Deleuze, Gilles
and Guttari, Félix. (1988) A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. The Athlone
Press: London
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(1899) The Interpretation of Dreams.
(1953 ed. Translated by James Stachey) George Allen & Unwin Ltd: London
Kaplan, E. Ann
(1992) Motherhood and Representation: The
mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. Routledge: London
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(1973). The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-analysis. (2004 ed.) Karnac Books: London
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(1966). Ecrits: The Complete Edition in
English (2006 ed.) W.W Norton: London
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(2009). ‘Review: Julia’ in Film Comment.
Published online: http://www.filmcomment.com/article/review-julia-erick-zonca
Accessed: 30.12.2014
Romney, Jonathan
(2008). ‘Tilda Swinton: I am not interested in acting skills” in The Independent. Published online:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/tilda-swinton-im-not-interested-in-acting-skills-1038275.html
Accessed 20.12.2014
Stern, Daniel N.
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Manchester University Press: Manchester
Filmography
We Need To Talk
About Kevin (2011)
Director: Lynn
Ramsey
Producer:
Christopher Figg, Jennifer Fox
Starring: Tilda
Swinton, Ezra Miller
Julia (2008)
Director: Erick
Zonka
Producer: Jeremy
Burdek, Bertrand Faivre
Starring: Tilda
Swinton, Saul Rubinek
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