We Need to Talk about Kevin

Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it's not as pretty

"Lucky for you, too! You need us! W h a t would you do without me, film a documentary on paint drying? W h a t are all those folks doing," he waved an arm at the camera, "but watching me? D o n ' t you think they'd have changed the channel by n o w if all I'd done is get an A in Geometry? Bloodsuckers! I do their dirty w o r k for them!"

"But people watch other things than killers, Kevin," Marlin prodded.

"Horseshit," said Kevin. " T h e y want to watch something happen, and I've made a study of it: Pretty m u c h the definition of something happening is it's bad. T h e way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there's m o r e and more of the audience and less and less to see. People w h o actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species."

"Okay, it's hke this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little j o b or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening.

You read the paper, or if you're into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even m o r e boring.

You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you'll get a p h o n e call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching. And you know, it's got so bad that I've started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half

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the time they're watching TV Or if you've got some romance in a movie? W h a t do they do but go to a movie. All these people, Marlin," he invited the interviewer in with a nod. " W h a t are they watching?"

After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, "You tell us, Kevin."

"People like me."

" W h y would I not know the context?" He took a single swallow from his glass. "I am the context." He put the glass on the counter, and left.

I'm certain of it: That moment, that hard swallow, is w h e n he decided.

But what most amazed me were his eyes. Ordinarily, they glazed with the glaucous film of unwashed apples—flat and unfocused, bored and belligerent, they shut me out. Sure, they glittered with

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occasional mischief, like the closed metal doors of a smelting furnace around which a little red rim would sometimes smolder, from which stray flames would lick. But as he stepped into the kitchen, the furnace doors swung wide to bare the jets.

"I got something in my eye. Kevin helped me wash it out."

Fair enough. But if I was so all-fired responsible, w h y did I still feel so helpless?

ssion to abandon. And there's an ownership to destruction, an intimacy; an appropriation. In this way, Kevin has clutched D e n n y Corbitt and Laura Woolford to his breast, inhaled their hearts and hobbies whole. Destruction may be motivated by nothing more complicated than acquisitiveness, a kind of h a m -

handed, misguided greed.

I watched Kevin despoil other people's pleasures for most of his life.

Sure, most children have a taste for spoliation. Tearing things apart is easier than making them; however exacting his preparations for Thursday, they couldn't have been nearly as demanding as it would have been to befriend those people instead. So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides

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the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am. Besides, for most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon.