MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 family horror film We Need to Talk about Kevin offers rich possibilities for study by examining it through the theoretical lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Doubling is a common horror film trope, but the doubling between mother and son in Ramsay’s film begs to be examined as an extended example of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Mirror Stage. Lacan theorized that some time between the ages of six to eighteen months, a child looking into a mirror could tell that the formerly fragmented reflection was his own, thus demonstrating that he was a separate entity from the image in the mirror, signaling the beginnings of the formation of his I or Ego. Lacan also states that after this formation of his Ego, the child will narcissistically desire to discover this ideal I in others, especially the mother. Taking a slightly different twist on Lacan’s Mirror Stage, we can interpret the film as Kevin’s journey towards selfhood. We follow him as he forges and refines his identity by gazing into the mirror of his mother’s face. By reading and reacting to her negativity, Kevin succeeds in fusing his being with hers, eventually erasing her own separate sense of self. Kevin’s extreme narcissism allows him to create what he considers to be the ideal I. By killing his father and sister, Kevin ensures that his mother will be forever an outcast. At film’s end, Eva’s only sense of self emanates from the basic maternal instincts that link her to her son. Reading We Need to Talk about Kevin through a Lacanian lens offers a fascinating way to explore this sinister mother-son relationship. The visual medium of film presents the connection between mother and son in a way that Lionel Shriver’s epistolary novel cannot.