The following contains spoilers for American Horror Story (FX, 2011) and We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011), two things you really shouldn’t watch anyway because neither was very good, unless you are, like me, deeply committed to anything that stars Tammy Taylor or Tilda Swinton.
In the last month I happen to have watched one television show and one film that feature almost exactly the same plot line about motherhood and school shootings and it’s left me thinking about the context for these extreme representations of “good” mothers and “bad” sons.
Swinton and the three actors who play Kevin at various ages. The middle one was the scariest.
We Need to Talk about Kevin is based on the novel by Lionel Shriver and recounts the childhood of a boy who, from birth, is never quite right. He cries all the time, refuses toilet training out of spite, withholds affection, never says anything nice, and generally goes about life with a unsettling, demonic demeanor. Ostensibly we’re supposed to think he’s a “born sociopath” but the film never dwells on the cause of what’s wrong with Kevin. Instead, the story is told from the perspective of his mother Eva (Swinton), who struggles to parent a child she doesn’t like, and keep up appearances as a normal, loving mom to her husband (John C. Reilly), around whom Kevin always behaves normally. Eventually, Kevin kills his father, sister, and a bunch of students at his high school in a shooting scene that’s fairly generic, save for the use of a competition bow and arrow. He ends up in prison where his mother, whose life he spares, continues to visit him each week, even though his crime destroyed her family, community and professional life.
Constance and Tate from American Horror Story
In American Horror Story, Constance (Jessica Lange) tries to rebuild her relationship with Tate (Evan Peters). Stay with me, this is where things get a bit weird: Tate is a ghost, he died a decade earlier, shot by police after mounting a columbine-style execution of his own. Constance, like Eva, is far from the model mother; she often does the wrong thing but in the spirit of making do.
In each of these stories, the ambivalence of motherhood is taken to an absolute extreme. One way to contextualize this ambivalence is as a response to the fetishization of motherhood we see in mommy-blog culture. These women are given permission to articulate feelings other than adoration for their children. They offer a fantasy of just-getting-by that flies in the face of the motherhood–as good life ideal; an alternative to the tyranny of “you really should use cloth diapers” or “I taught my baby to sign at six months,” or “Oh…we don’t have a crib.” While what these sons do is seen as their mothers’ fault by many after the fact, the viewer knows that it wasn’t, and the focus is placed on the everyday practice of parenting a “demon baby,” from finding something he’s willing to eat for lunch to figuring out what to say when he puts your daughter’s guinea pig down the garbage disposal, or murders the neighbours. This is no Rosemary’s Baby; there’s no search for origins or coming-to-terms. Both mothers are radically unconcerned about why their children are the way they are because they are resolutely focused on getting by and making do.
Gabby reminded me about Freud’s description of caregiving as an impossible profession, too tied up in unachievable expectations and feelings of resentment on the part of the caregiver and the one who is cared for. As a fantasy of ambivalent mothering, watching Eva or Constance try to care for Kevin or Tate seems to be about a caring relationship in which this impossibility is emphasized, given room to breathe. Though there’s definitely a long legacy of representations of evil children in horror stories, the politics of these cases seems to defy the generic convention just a bit.
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