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Feb. 20, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:34
2097 We Need to Talk About Kevin - The Freedomain Radio Review

A review of the movie and the book - sorry, I got the mother's name wrong, it should be Eva, not Celia.

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So, this is a review of the movie and the book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton, who I quite liked in Orlando many years ago, and written by Lionel Trilling?
Something like that. Anyway, so, this was an interesting and annoying movie, and an even more interesting and annoying film.
Book! And this is going to have some spoilers, so...
Sorry. But there it is.
So, the basic plotline is a boy is born unto a mother, and the mother does not bond with him.
She feels nothing when he is born.
He screams.
He cries.
He refuses to be potty trained.
He learns how to read and write in secret, as his mother feels to deny her the pleasure of teaching him, and he grows up to be A true hellion, like a truly nasty piece of work, and then commits a series of ever-increasing acts of crime and violence, culminating in a massacre, a school shooting with a bow and arrow.
Anyway, so this is, of course, about an evil spawn and so on.
So, things that are positive, things that are helpful, things that are useful, things that are true.
Well, they actually talk a little bit about parenting in this.
I shouldn't laugh because it's not a funny topic, but it's just so obvious.
What you're starting to see is the extremely vague notion that it could somehow be conceivably possible to That smoking might conceivably in some way have something to do with lung cancer.
I mean, not really.
But it's the faint tendrils of a possibility.
And that is...
I mean, I hate to say that's progress, but by God, I guess we'll have to call it progress.
Because the lack of the mother's bonding in the movie, you can see when she's holding her son, she's holding him at arm's length away from her, that she was a travel writer, so she'd go all over the world traveling and this and that, and she openly says to her son, you know, I hate you, I wish that... I was in Paris, and I don't like being a mom, and all this, that, and the other.
And so the fact that she sort of resists the birth, that the birth is painful, of course, that she feels nothing, no bonding when she sees her son, and so on, is important.
It's important. And then it's kind of tossed aside.
And then what happens is the mom is basically reacting to the bad behavior of the child for the rest of the story.
And that is...
I don't know.
It's just...
I mean, the research that I've done...
I'm not going to claim it's extensive or comprehensive or anything, but it seems in every single case I've looked into it.
People who end up as mass murderers don't just have kind of cold moms.
I mean, it's not that...
We're not that sensitive as psychological specimens.
They tend to be raped as babies and abused and have drug addict parents.
And I mean, just look at the biography of Charles Manson.
I mean, his mother was a prostitute who abandoned him.
He was in foster homes.
He was raped in these foster homes.
I mean, that's how you produce this kind of monster.
Not, well, my mom is intellectual and would rather be in Paris than his kind of coal.
I mean, that's This is not true.
And, you know, maybe I'll talk to the guy, but I just want to wonder, like, well, what kind of research did you do into mass murderers that you figured out that you would portray the genesis or the creation of a mass murderer?
In this kind of household, where he's got a loving and devoted father, obviously, well, I mean, the father character is completely ridiculous, is embarrassing.
It's, you know, I mean, the problem, of course, is that, I mean, this is the technical problem of the writing, is that If you have this nasty boy, and I mean the things, he like loosens the wheels on other kids' bikes so they have accidents.
He convinces one girl with eczema to scratch her skin off.
I mean, he does really horrible stuff.
Obviously, it's just completely sinister.
It's not just like punching kids.
It's like really sinister, nasty stuff.
And the problem is, of course, that the mother would see this and the mother would want to act.
But what they need to do is they need to create tension, right?
So the way the writer creates tension is he has a father who consistently defends his son's horrible actions by making excuses and so on.
And the book is written as a series of, quote, love letters to the dead.
Oops, that's another spoiler.
The dead husband. And, I mean, that's pretty obvious, right?
Because she's writing him letters rather than talking to him.
And all of that is...
Right. It's ridiculous.
I mean, the father simply could not be that blind.
And if he was that blind, then there's no possibility that the mother could love him as passionately as she claims to.
I mean, that's all just nonsense.
But you have to kind of do that in the same way that you have to have some reason why she didn't leave.
And you have to have some reason why they never took the kid to a psychologist or something like that, which would be, of course, the logical thing to do.
And more likely, the kid would be put on meds.
And so there's a lot of stuff that is just sort of artificially constructed.
And the negative behavior is shown by the mother.
Are portrayed as in reaction to the son, right?
And this is, of course, what parents feel.
I mean, parents genuinely feel this in general, right?
They feel that I was driven to my wit's end by the behavior of my child, and I did things that were wrong and that I regret, but I was really...
I was at my wit's end.
And so, at one point, she...
He breaks his arm, kind of accidentally, because he basically keeps shitting himself, and that's considered to be by the mom because he's angry at her and angry at the world and so on.
I mean, she says in the book, I genuinely believe that he screamed in his crib because he was full of rage at the world.
And where would that rage come from?
Well, of course, there's no answer.
There's no answer. So, as an infant...
He is full of rage at the world.
He's born with the rage.
This is the demon seed argument.
Now, why I say this is progress is because in the past you simply had, like Damien, you had the devil possessing children and the parents were helpless pawns.
Now, at least we're saying that there's some, you know, there's some faint whiff of parental responsibility in that she did not prepare for parenting.
So, here's what I'm talking about in terms of preparation.
Preparation for parenting. Hey, if you're going to be a parent, the first thing that you need to do is look at how you were parented and say, was that good?
Do I know how to parent?
Do I have any instinct about how to parent?
That's important.
I mean, that's the first thing that you should do.
The second thing, of course, that you should do is you should say, and what has changed inner knowledge about parenting in the 20 or 30 or, I guess if you're pushing it, 40 years since I was First, parent it.
Has anything changed?
We understand that.
We understand that.
If you want to lose weight, first thing you do is say, do I know how to eat in a healthy way?
The answer is probably no. And secondly, let's say that I was taught how to eat by my parents and taught what to eat by my parents.
Has anything changed in nutritional science?
In the last 20 or 30 or 40 years.
And that's basic.
That's parenting 101 or parenting to be 101.
Was I parented in a way that made me happy and successful and productive and secure?
Do I have a great relationship with my parents?
Do I respect them? Do I love them?
And that's great.
That means that you have a good base from which to start.
Second thing is, it's been perhaps a decade since I've been parented, or 20 years perhaps.
So then you say, okay, well, what has changed in our collective knowledge about parenting since I was a kid?
Every other thing gets upgraded.
Tablets, computers, cars, houses, airplanes, roads, everything you can imagine.
Washing machines, everything gets upgraded.
I mean, you have Swiffers now.
I don't even say this apparently.
You have Swiffers now. Everything gets upgraded.
And, of course, our knowledge.
Parenting gets upgraded. We all understand this with regards to marriage.
I mean, very few people say, I want exactly the marriage that my parents had 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 25 years ago.
Because roles have changed, options have changed, gender relations or sex relations have changed.
And so you look at what's new, what's changed in the interim.
We recognize this in particular.
I mean, there are tons of jobs around now that weren't around 30 years ago.
Web developer, you name it, right?
And so, when you're looking into a career, what do I have aptitude for?
And what isn't currently available that wasn't there before?
And it's much more important when it comes to parenting to look into these things.
How was I parented? If not well, then prepare to do differently, which is a difficult and challenging thing to do, but essential.
Essential. I mean, if you're moving to China, you might want to learn Mandarin.
And if you're moving to a foreign country, which you do not speak the language of, called Good Parenting, you might want to spend a year or two learning the language.
Through therapy, through self-knowledge, through parenting, to-be classes, whatever.
Learn the knowledge of the land in the future that you want to get to.
So in this book, the mother, Kevin's mother, Celia, she was parented by...
I can't remember her dad, if he was even there.
I don't think he was there. But he didn't have much impact on her.
But her mom was agoraphobic.
She was a shut-in. She was paranoid.
She was... And she had the business sense of a small bowl of clam chowder and that she would spend hours making greeting cards and sell them for 50 cents or a dollar.
And so her mother was crazy.
Her mother was disturbed.
Her mother had significant psychological pathologies.
And so she was a prime candidate to non-bonding, to postpartum depression, which is what she suffered from, Xelia.
And clearly she did not want to be who her mother was, and clearly she had not been raised in a positive and productive manner.
And she goes sailing into motherhood with no mention of the fact that she's going to have to do things vastly differently from how she was raised, that she wants to be an entirely different mother from the mother she had.
It's incomprehensible.
I mean, from the standpoint of philosophy and relative to every other thing that we do in our lives, it's incomprehensible.
It's only comprehensible if you look at the dead, inert weight of culture and the vanity of people who think that they can just start speaking an entirely opposite language, a different language, an entirely foreign language.
Learning how to parent well if you've been parented badly is not like learning French if you speak English.
It's like learning Klingon if you're Helen Keller.
It is a difficult, brain-wrenching, soul-wrenching, mind-expanding, personhood-deepening revolution.
And we have to have humility.
We have to have humility to recognize, if we had bad parenting, that the way we were parented is not how we want to parent, and it's not snap your fingers time and make it all different.
It's work. It takes work and humility and a commitment to the best in ourselves, in our family, with our partners, for our children.
And anything less is frankly disgraceful.
This is sort of my major beef with a lot of parents, is, you know, prepare for parenthood.
It's an awesome responsibility.
It's the most important responsibility that you will ever have in your life is parenthood.
You know, it's more important than the goddamn tablet you buy.
For people who say to me, and of course there are many who say to me, well, you see, Steph, my parents didn't know any better.
And they just were parenting the way they were parented.
And it's like, okay, no problem.
Did your father ever buy a car?
Yes, he did. And did your father, when he was buying this car, do any research?
Or did he just go out and buy the car that his father bought?
Or the model, or the manufacturer, or the kind.
Did you just go out and buy a Cadillac like his?
No, my father did all this research.
He read online, he bought the Lemon Guide, he talked to people, talked to his mechanic, and that's how he ended up buying the comparison shaft and so on.
Okay, so for buying a car, your father was very keen on doing research and finding out the optimum and best ways to do things and so on.
That was important.
So the car was very important.
How to be a good parent, how to parent, was not important.
And people, they told me, oh yeah, my dad had to go out and buy a computer and spend two days online trying to figure things out.
How important is that relative to spend two days reading a book or two on parenting before you have kids?
And the mother was unprepared for parenting.
Had lots of sentimental views about it.
Wasn't sure exactly why she wanted to be a parent.
Didn't enjoy her pregnancy.
Was just not prepared for parenting.
And these are the same people.
Who, when I was not prepared, you know, if I forgot about a test and I was not prepared for a test, well, I just got a fail.
I couldn't say, well, geez, you know, I completely forgot.
And that could happen. People do forget about tests.
You know, write down the wrong date or whatever.
It can't happen. Well, I just get an F. I mean, forgetfulness was no excuse.
Lack of preparation was no excuse for me when I was seven, eight, or nine years old.
Coming from the family I came from was no excuse for me.
I was judged by the standards of people who had peaceful, well-educated family environments with which to study.
No, no. So, you know, my home was violent and chaotic, but I was judged by the violence and chaos that I was involuntarily subjected to was no excuse.
Lack of preparation was no excuse.
I was judged by all the same standards as everyone else.
And a test is much less important than raising a child.
And this is the mind-bending hypocrisy, of course, of society, and I'm still staggered and occasionally angered by it.
But a lack of preparation was no excuse for me when I was seven or eight years old about a test, which is pretty unimportant.
Whereas, a lack of preparation in raising another human being from conception to adulthood is far infinitely more important than some stupid-ass spelling test.
Well, we are not to blame people for that lack of preparation, because you see, you see, we have to reserve our moral outrage.
We have to reserve our moral outrage.
For children of abusive homes whose chaotic lives have left them unable or involuntarily forgetful of a spelling test.
Anyway, this issue of responsibility, I find...
Essential. The issue of preparation, I find essential.
Parents who say, we didn't know any better, I think need to ask whether that was a standard that they accepted from their own children.
Did you accept from your own children when they'd say, well, I didn't know any better.
I was not prepared. I didn't study for my test.
Well, didn't you know there was a test coming?
Well, didn't you know you were going to have kids?
Didn't you think the test was important?
Didn't you think the best way of raising your children would be important?
Anyway, I mean, I think that's...
And this is not, you know, blanket condemnation time.
It's simply that honesty...
It's the basic, necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for every relationship.
If you're not honest, you're not having a relationship with anything other than lies, falsehoods, which is like claiming that an inflatable doll is your girlfriend.
You're not having a relationship with anything real.
If you're having a relationship with lies, it is not a relationship at all.
And so the honesty needs to be no excuses.
No excuses, to be clear, for parents or anyone really.
No excuses that you have denied to children.
Adults simply cannot claim a moral excuse that they have denied to a seven-year-old.
Because that's ridiculous.
That is to have infinitely higher moral standards for a seven-year-old than for a 30 or 40-year-old.
That is ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous.
So absurd that it takes an enormous amount of culture and religiosity to obscure that.
Anyway, so yeah, it's simply...
Look, parents have to recognize it's not an excuse.
It's not an excuse. So you have to start talking about other things other than making excuses because you can't have a relationship with ridiculous excuses.
You can't have a relationship with hypocrisy.
You cannot have relationships with lies.
And I really want people...
To have relationships.
I really want people to have love.
I really want people to have intimacy.
And you cannot have any of those things with defensive, hypocritical, ridiculous excuses.
Now, of course, the proof of the child's, quote, responsibility for his immorality comes in the form of Celia, who is the second child.
The second child who's born sometime after Kevin, the first child, the boy, to the same parents.
And, of course, to give the excuse that the parents have that they need, Celia is a sweet, wonderful, tender-hearted child who's almost too meek, who has not an unkind bone in her body, and so on. who has not an unkind bone in her body, and
So you see, the same parents produce one child who's amazingly sweet and shy and diffident, and another one who is a hellish monster spawn from the bowels of Satan.
So you see, it can't be the parents.
You see, it can't be the parents.
And that is inserted, you know, it's so important, and I say this as a guy who's written a whole bunch of novels and plays, it is so important not to sacrifice truth for pathos.
And, you know, Celia with a brother like that does not last very long.
And that is a very tragic and horrible story.
And it's put in there for pathos, right?
To make the child... To make the parents more sympathetic and to make the horror of this Kevin guy worse and so on.
And it's put in for pathos, but it is completely ridiculous.
Because what it's basically saying is that the child, Kevin, was born evil.
Right? As the mother says, he cried in his crib because he was enraged at the world.
And that is to say that his malevolence is genetic, because it's nothing to do with the parenting, because the parents produce together the complete opposite kind of child.
and which is to say that he's not evil because it's genetic.
So just to be clear, right?
So, to make this very, very clear.
Imagine some guy, some guy in a culture where wives are assigned to you.
You know, you don't get to choose your wives.
It's an arranged marriage or something.
And he decides to get married and...
The government agency of arranged marriages arranges a marriage with him to some woman who's just hell on wheels and his life is miserable and she just makes, you know, keys his car and threatens him with knives and so on, right?
And then that woman dies and then he is assigned another wife and he has an absolutely wonderful, great, healthy, loving marriage.
Well, then the responsibility is clear for the disasters of the first marriage, because he's able to have a wonderful second marriage, and therefore it cannot be him who is the issue.
It cannot be that his dysfunction contributed to the issue, and of course he can't be blamed for the wife that's assigned because he didn't choose her, right?
If he chose her, then obviously his dysfunction would be what caused him to choose her, but children are assigned, not chosen.
And if you were to write that story, then this would be an outright condemnation of the first wife.
And the condemnation would be amply shown by the fact that the same guy had a wonderfully happy marriage the second time.
And these self-same parents have a wonderfully happy and affectionate and sweet second child.
Despite the fact that she has this complete psycho monster for a brother.
So even with, you know, in your face, under the same roof, close proximate attachment to a complete sociopathic, narcissistic monster, she's still sweet and kind, you see?
He didn't warp her much at all, other than making her perhaps a little bit too diffident.
And this, of course, lets the parents off completely.
And the title of the book is also a clue.
We need to talk about Kevin, the son, not we need to talk about Celia or the dad.
We need to talk about parenting.
No, no, this is we need to talk about Kevin.
Psychotropic drugs are used as an excuse, you see.
But again, I mean, shockingly, this is what we call progress in the world today, where because, you know, he's going to commit this horrible crime, this kid, he ends up faking his way into getting prescribed Prozac so that he can use the Prozac rage defense.
But at least, at least the Prozac rage is mentioned, even if it's just used as a slimy excuse in the same way that he commits the crime before he's 16 so that he doesn't Have to be tried as an adult and so on.
And this is all part of the massive industry of manufacturing excuses for parents.
You know, the amount of cultural and narcissistic energy that is poured into the bottomless hole of the bad conscience of parents is truly astounding.
We liberate that energy.
I mean, we... We'd, you know, have jetpacks to Mars and cure cancer in about nine minutes, but instead we're pouring all of this intellectual and artistic energy into attempting to ease the fetid consciences of hypocritical parenting.
It's tragic.
It's horrible.
And, of course, it is the greatest secret.
So yeah, she breaks her kid's arm, but that's only after, as she says, she's been basically covered in shit for six years because he won't be toilet trained.
And this is the kind of mom that she is, right?
This is the kind of mom that she is.
That when her daughter Celia, when she's making her daughter French toast...
She is so careful to cook it evenly to make sure there aren't any runny bits.
Any runny bits on the French toast because her daughter Celia, you see, doesn't like runny bits on her French toast.
That is the amazing amount of conscientiousness that the mother shows and is capable of.
That level of attention to detail, that level of care and concern for her children's preferences, that level of sacrifice.
She constantly is making toys and gifts for her son, which he then, of course, in a very boring and predictable way, destroys.
That her son, that she shows this level of care and concern, that she sacrifices her career, her business, to stay home.
She does put her son in daycare after a while, but she stays home for a long time, and she tries to teach him how to read, and she tries to teach him how to do numbers, and she makes all these little wonderful toys and makes up all these games for him and so on, right? That is...
By any stretch of the imagination, incredibly committed and concerned motherhood and caring motherhood.
I mean, good heavens.
Good heavens.
Jeffrey Dahmer's mother moved out.
What?
And left him alone when his father divorced.
their parents divorced, she just kind of moved out with his sister and just left him in the house alone when he was in his mid-teens, I think.
All of this is designed to show That the helpless love of a mother can make no purchase against the innate evil of a bad child.
And this kind of moral determinism, which like all determinism, erases morality. - Is, to my knowledge, unsupported by a single shred of empirical or scientific evidence.
There is scientific evidence that certain boys possess a gene for aggression, extra aggression, but that gene is only activated when in situations of abuse.
So yes, some people who are abused do not become abusers, but then George Burns smoked cigars and cigarettes and lived to be 100.
So what? You don't know ahead of time that you're going to make it to 100, or whether you're going to die at 35 from lung cancer.
You don't know whether your kids have these genes, and therefore the abuse is the catalyst, but it is not the root cause.
And...
It is really astounding...
And it is relative to the sort of demon women that were portrayed.
Of course, it's different portraying adults as demonic as opposed to portraying babies as fundamentally demonic, which is what this book does.
But there is no explanation.
There is no trauma that he suffers other than a mom who was kind of cold, but still very attentive.
So she didn't feel that attached.
She didn't feel nothing. But she was extremely attentive and concerned and involved in a way that, at least according to any killer that I've ever read about, and I've read about quite a few by now, because, of course, this root of evil is an important topic for anyone interested in philosophy to study.
But it is the massive excuse...
That is provided to the parents, which is to say that your children do not result from your parenting, that your children are innate in who they are.
And, I mean, there's a lot of research being done on this, and, you know, again, if people have contradictory information to this, please, please let me know.
I'm always eager to falsify any approach that I'm taking, because I really want to align with the facts as much as possible.
But to call somebody evil where their personality is innate is like calling somebody stupid for being mentally retarded.
It's unfair. Or calling somebody lazy who's in a wheelchair because they don't take walks.
That's... Incredibly cruel.
It's incredibly cruel and unkind to call people evil if they're innately that way.
And it's not evil then, because there's no choice.
So, it's fascinating in that the book does acknowledge that parenting is somewhere on the periphery that may be somehow involved.
But of course, what we generally feel is incredible frustration at this attentive and caring and concerned mother who's constantly rebuffed by her satanic child...
And, of course, the ridiculous one-note father.
He's not bad. He's not bad.
What about this? That's just a terrible character.
A terrible character. Not even a character.
Just a foil. And the kind, wonderful, and attentive daughter.
This is all designed to say, as has been said from the beginning of time, that it's not the parents.
It's not, in this case, even the fault of a demon.
But the demon is just biology.
And... It's amazing how much we will sacrifice to rescue the conscience of parents.
Morality, integrity, facts, reason, evidence, truth.
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