We Need to Talk About Eva

We Need to Talk About Eva: Adapting Emotion from Page to Screen, and the Significance of Silence. Lynne Ramsey’s 2011 film We Need to Talk About Kevin (hereafter Kevin) is an adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s award winning Shriver won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005 for We Need to Talk About Kevin. 2003 novel of the same name. Both texts depict Eva Khatchadourian’s experience of her son, Kevin, from conception through to his eventual incarceration for mass murder. Much of the available critique focuses on feminist perspectives of Eva’s role as mother (Gambaudo, 2011; Jeremiah, 2010; Muller, 2008; Robbins, 2009; Thornham, 2013; et al.), and though significant, this paper examines the ways in which Eva’s emotions are communicated and represented in both texts, with a particular interest in how her written narrative translates to silence on screen. Predictably, adaptations from novel to film invite a certain amount of ‘fidelity criticism’ (McFarlane, 1996; Hutcheon, 2006; et al.), grounded in “normative and source-oriented approaches” (Hermans, 1985:9). Expectations of “equivalences of sensibilities or form” (Schmidgall, 1977:6) deem that the adaptation must be recognisable as relative to the “original” (Hutcheon, 2006:7) or “source” text (31). Linda Hutcheon offers an efficient description of adaptation as follows: An acknowledged transposition of a recogni[s]able other work or works A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work (2006:8) Essentially, Hutcheon’s model allows that adaptations are not carbon copies of adapted texts, and therefore can and do exercise artistic licence provided the source text is acknowledged. Prior knowledge of the source text contributes to the “horizon of expectation” (Hutcheon, 2006:121), which shapes the way an adaptation is received. Conversely, it is not imperative that the source text is ‘known’ for an adaptation to be considered successful; an adaptation “is its own palimpsestic thing” (9), carrying traces of the source text but existing independently of it. In the novel, Eva’s narrative is coloured with hindsight and partiality, and as such should be regarded as somewhat unreliable. At the same time, Eva qualifies as a ‘reluctant narrator’, which Mark Leon Higdon describes as a person “who has seen, experienced or caused something so traumatic that [s]he must approach the telling of it through indirections, masks and substitutions” (1991: 174). This reluctance is evident in Eva’s own admission “I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story”(32), a fear she is forced to confront as a result of Kevin’s murderous actions “[…] he has imprisoned me in my life every bit as much as he has imprisoned himself in his” (172). Despite her disinclination, Eva’s verbose, retrospective letters constitute a confessional discourse, driven by her need to vocalise traumatic experience, as Vanessa Guignery explains: Compulsive verbosity in confessional writings can indeed work as a smokescreen to confuse or hide an issue: one may sidestep a trauma that cannot be addressed by submerging it in an endless flow of words. (2009:4) Shriver’s Eva constructs this garrulous narrative ‘smokescreen’, to conceal the fact that Kevin also killed her husband, Franklin and daughter, Celia. This is effectively what the novel is ‘about’ in terms of narrative pay-off, with the ‘talk about Kevin’ providing the context for Eva’s loss. In order to transpose this context from page to screen, the narrative undergoes a translation and dramatization process whereby the emotion of Eva’s trauma must be made visual, yet as Hutcheon affirms the epistolary novel can prove particularly challenging largely due to interiority (2006:40). As film critic Pauline Kael points out: “Movies are good for action; they’re not good at reflective thought” (quoted in Peary and Shatzkin, 1977:3) the implication being that interiority does not translate well on screen. Nevertheless, Ramsey’s adaptation of Shriver’s introspective, epistolary novel effectively captures Eva’s innermost feelings by depicting silent solipsism, represented by dialogue-free shots of Eva’s face and facial expressions, and punctuated by contrasting non-diegetic sound and music. According to Hutcheon “[f]ilm sound can be used to connect inner and outer states in a less explicit way than do camera associations” (2006:41). For example, the sounds of the garden sprinklers accompany ‘bad things’ in Eva’s memory, long before the discovery of Franklin and Celia’s bodies (towards the end of the film) reveals the significance of what this sound represents. Furthermore, the way music penetrates the action is equally significant. Eva’s demeanour on screen demurs the upbeat sentiment of ‘Mother’s Last Words to Her Son’: “The song’s lyrics ‘You always have been your mother’s joy’ ironically hint at [Kevin’s] behaviour and skills bringing people anything but Italics in the original. joy” (Gregoriou, Forthcoming Dr.Christiana Gregoriou’s paper ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin Some More’ was first presented at the Heidelberg PALA conference in 2013, and is to be included in a forthcoming on the crime fiction migration effect. Access for reference provided with Dr Gregoriou’s consent.). This contrast brings into relief Eva’s unsettling sense of maternal duty. As Eva never voices this discontent (other than briefly alluding to visiting day when forced to remind her boss of her afternoon off) her narrative develops with the assistance of extra-diegetic sound. As Eva’s emotions remain unspoken, these extra-diegetic sounds underscore the memories and emotions that give way to flashbacks. The flashbacks deliver the dialogic exposition necessitated by the novel’s loquacious letter-chapters, without Eva ever having to utter a word. Eva’s epistolary narrative is loaded with what Monika Bednarek calls “emotion talk and emotional talk” (2009:395), which “records [Eva’s] essentially negative emotional responses” (ibid) and shows “how language use both reflects and construes emotion schemata” (396). To offer a distinction: [E]motion talk makes use of expressions that directly and explicitly name a particular emotional response (e.g. fear), whereas emotional talk uses expressions that can be more indirectly related to some kind of emotional experience, which need not be clearly identifiable Italics in the original.. (Bednarek, 2009:396) The following extract illustrates both devices in a construction of Eva’s contempt, with emotion talk in bold and emotional talk in italics: [O]nly on my back did I contemplate what retarded advice that was. Pain, good Original italics removed for the purpose of illustrating emotional talk in italics.? I was overcome with contempt. In fact, I never told you this before, but the emotion on which I fastened in order to push beyond a critical threshold was loathing Original italics removed for the purpose of illustrating emotional talk in italics.. I despised being spread out like some farm exhibit with strangers gawking between my canted knees. I detested Dr. Rhinestein’s pointed, ratlike little face and her brisk, censorious manner. `I hated myself for ever having agreed to this humiliating theatre. (75) Eva’s contemptuous interior monologue accounts for her experience during her labour with Kevin, and powerfully denotes negative affective meaning. This emotion(al) talk consequently provides valuable cues for the adaptation of character in the transposition from ‘telling’ in the novel format to ‘showing’ on screen (Hutcheon, 2006:38). The identification of emotion(al) talk provides the schema by which Eva’s interiority can be transcoded without “the infinite resources of the English language” (McGrath cited in Hutcheon, 2009:70), and subsequently, relative paralinguistic devices pertaining to her dissatisfaction (such as facial expressions and body language (Bednarek, 2009:398)) are employed on screen to silently convey Eva’s contempt. In addition to the emergent emotional schemata of Eva’s narrative, Monica Latham asserts that: The long and prolix letters in which [Eva] keeps turning over her guilt are actually built on various devices of silence (euphemism, camouflage, verbal short-cuts, oblique symbols, and raw, curt exchanges) to be found at the core of her abounding self-examination. (2009: 130) These ‘devices of silence’ translate directly as silence on screen, most obviously the fact that Eva chooses to euphemise Kevin’s killing spree as “that Thursday” (7). Hutcheon claims that “Absences and silences […] almost invariably get made into presences in performance media […] thereby losing their power and meaning” (2006:71), however this is not the case in Kevin. Eva’s minimal interaction with other characters in the film dictates that Thursday becomes a conspicuous absence; by limiting Eva’s reference to Thursday to just one indirect reference during the ‘anniversary’ visit to Kevin at the end of the film, Ramsey’s adaptation acknowledges Eva’s loss of the person that she “most wanted to talk to” (24). Eva’s pervading silence on the subject has the effect of a metaphorical ‘elephant in the room’, drawing a parallel with Eva’s own analogy for marital separation (358). Without the utility of Eva’s one way “respondence” (328) with Franklin, essentially without Franklin to talk to, Eva is rendered fittingly silent. Eva’s silence can also be interpreted as shame, as she herself claims that she is “exhausted with shame” (4). In her paper ‘Shame, the Silent Emotion’ (1999) Gill Hinshelwood states that: “Of the four crisis emotions of grief, fear, anger and shame/contempt […] shame is considered to be the most difficult to express” (1999:1). She goes on to say that “[t]o feel shame is to withdraw, to have no voice” (ibid). It is therefore plausible that Eva’s silence is represented as ‘exhausted shame’, with numerous scenes of her silently lying down both in bed, and on the sofa, preceding directorial cuts to flashbacks which detail the source of her shame: Kevin’s actions. Interestingly, Hinshelwood equates shame with contempt, and given the above discussion in relation to Eva’s labour, it appears that, for Eva, the distinction between these emotions is especially hazy. The common denominator in Eva’s experience of both emotions is Kevin. Kevin irrevocably altered Eva’s life long before his murderous rampage. One of the film’s first scenes shows Eva at ‘La Tomatina’ (pre-Kevin) “immersed literally in exotic, ecstatic freedom” (Gregoriou, Forthcoming See 3.), and though silent, she is smiling and carefree. At this point silence is positively coded for Eva in that, despite being surrounded by the sounds of the crowd, Eva is completely autonomous. Kevin corrupts Eva’s silence by incessantly crying as an infant, driving Eva to drown out the sound by standing close to a pneumatic drill in the street. This moment of reprieve for Eva foregrounds silence and its influence upon her happiness, yet when Kevin eventually stops crying, Eva finds his silence menacing. While `I was hardly complaining, Kevin’s silence had an oppressive quality. First off, it was truly silence – total, closed-mouth, cleansed of the coos and soft cries that most children emit […] Second, it was inert. (111) Paradoxically Eva comes to associate Kevin’s ‘oppressive’ silence as a watchful presence: Previous to motherhood I had imagined having a small child at elbow as something like owning a bright companionable dog, but [Kevin] exerted a much denser presence than any pet. Every moment, I was hugely aware that he was there. Though his new phlegmatism made it easier to copy edit at home, I felt watched and grew restive. (112) This ‘presence in silence’ permeates Eva and Kevin’s discourse both literally and metaphorically, and it ultimately controls her. Eva’s anxiety at Kevin’s silence is borne out when she returns to her newly decorated study to find that Kevin has defaced the walls with her ink and his squirt gun. Eva also becomes indebted to Kevin’s on-going silence after he lies to his father about how he broke his arm ( Eva threw him at the changing table after he purposely soiled himself), and as a result Kevin uses the unspoken truth as leverage against Eva, silently stroking his scar to get his own way. Kevin’s ‘silent presence’ continues to dictate Eva’s life even after his incarceration for Thursday; on screen Eva prepares a duplicate bedroom for Kevin, and is seen ironing his clothes and making his bed. Eva’s actions are a silent acknowledgement that Kevin, despite his actions, will continue to be a part of her life. Talking about Kevin is Eva’s way of processing her emotions, and whilst Ramsey’s filmic adaptation does not transcribe Eva’s entire account, it instead sensitively interprets her emotions though the significance of silence. Contrary to fidelity criticism’s belief that adaptations lose something of the original through the process of adaptation, this paper shows that a conscientious adaptation can instead be both intuitive and revealing. This critique, guided by the process of adaptation, uncovers the emotional narrative framework that pervades We Need to Talk About Kevin in both its forms. The silence at the forefront of the film text intuits the inherent silence (and its significance) in the novel. Arguably the most significant instance of silence between Eva and Kevin comes at the end of the film; in the novel Eva embraces Kevin after finally asking the unavoidable ‘why’, and believing she hears him apologise she utters “I’m sorry, too, Kevin. I’m sorry, too” (398). In the film, this exchange omits dialogue during the embrace, thus removing accountability and along with it the questions of fault and responsibility that underpin both texts. The unspoken words in this final scene are conveyed by the silence; Eva loves her son. Bibliography: Bednarek, M. (2009). ‘Emotion Talk and Emotional Talk: Cognitive and Discursive Perspectives’, in H. Pishwa (ed.). Language and Social Cognition: Expression of the Social Mind. New York: Mouton de Gruyter Gambaudo, S. (2011). ‘ We Need to Talk About Eva: The Demise of the Phallic Mother’, Janus Head. 12;1, 155-68. Gregoriou, C. (Forthcoming). ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin Some More’ [email transmission by consent of the author]. Hermans, T. 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Available at http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/sequence2/archive/sequence-2-1/ [Accessed 4th May 2014] [Type text][Type text][Type text] 1