We Need to Talk about Feminism
by Alexis Kinloch
It was a movie-at-home night, and my housemates and I chose to rent We Need To Talk About Kevin. The film adaptation by Lynne Ramsay of the book of the same name explores issues around the choice of motherhood, maternal ambivalence, and the struggles and strangeness of raising a human who is completely separate from you yet completely connected to you.
I live in a shared flat with H. and D., a woman and man who are married. I had recently read Doris Lessing’s Fifth Child on H.’s recommendation, and attended a memorial symposium for Rozsika Parker, a pioneer in the field of psychology on maternal ambivalence. Plus, I had just found out my sister is pregnant. Conversations about issues of motherhood, isolation, depression and desperation were common between H. and I, and we were excited to see how Ramsay handled the central character’s difficult internal struggle with such issues in film format.
The movie unfolded, confusingly at first, with quick flashes back and forth in time, eventually resolving into a narrative focusing on Eva Khatchadourian (played by Tilda Swinton), who is grappling with raising a young son, who she feels is taunting and playing tricks on her for his own enjoyment. Each time Franklin, Eva’s hapless and oblivious husband, dismissed her concerns as paranoia or treated her as if she was being unfair to the child, H. and I would murmur how abasing and frustrating such lack of support from one’s partner would feel.
D. piped up with a loud and long sigh. Then, exasperated, he let us know, “You don’t have to always analyze everything through a feminist viewpoint!”
I was instantly angry. But why? What was the problem with that? Why did it bother me so much? I am, indeed, a feminist. I do a lot of talking and sometimes shouting about it. He knew my politics well, and from time to time was vocal about being fed up with hearing about it.
I bit back. “You're conflating a feminist viewpoint with a woman’s viewpoint. That’s not fair." But is it? Does the sensation of solidarity with another woman’s struggle, or the voicing of a perceived unfairness automatically necessitate an “ism”? Does my identification with the film’s themes automatically qualify me as a feminist because I am a woman? Why did I feel so painted into a corner?
A long discussion unfolded, which was never resolved and probably never will be. In order to try to understand what I was feeling, I turned to reviews of the film and found that several critics called it a feminist film. A review in The Guardian called it “a brilliantly nihilist, feminist parable”. The Vine said it is “a particularly feminist horror film”. The Daily Mail suggested its subject matter made it “a hard-line feminist parable”. Slant Magazine accused Ramsay of using the film to “state her stale feminist agenda”.
So what was to become of We Need to Talk About Kevin, if its creator and empathetic viewers are to be discussed (and at times pigeonholed and dismissed) in these terms? I was not surprised that the Best Director category at the 2012 Academy Awards was populated solely with whitemen: Woody Allen, Michel Hazanavicius, Terrence Malick, Alexander Payne, and Martin Scorsese. Each of these films featured a white male protagonist. Ramsay’s film, though highly
praised, was nowhere to be found.
I was brought back to my initial feelings of frustration. Does a movie automatically become a feminist film because it is told from the point of view of a woman? Does it mean that you have to be a feminist to understand a film from a woman’s viewpoint? Does the repetition of the modifier “woman”, as in “woman artist” or the “woman’s artwork”, not perpetuate the idea of women being exceptional and thus secondary in culture to men?
Being called a feminist has always made me feel proud. But being labelled as a feminist for my interest in and identification with a film by a woman and about a woman still makes me frustrated. I long for a time when our stories are regarded as neither threatening nor unusual. I long for a time when we are heard without defensiveness, and our experiences are not dismissed. I suppose I long for a time when we are equal and our artwork can be appreciated and discussed on a variety of levels (formal, technical, conceptual), instead of simply “feminist”.
Alexis Kinloch, loafer and dilettante, currently studies the visual culture of science at University College London.