Things go wrong too quickly for Paul (Harry Treadaway) and Bea (Rose Leslie) in Honeymoon (2014)
Ah, Honeymoon. This film has so much potential, truly, but this tale of a Honeymooning couple who run afoul of something in the woods outside Bea's childhood family retreat just cannot rise above the questions it leaves hanging, or the gore and shock tactics that render women's bodies horrifying and disgusting. I'm disappointed to see that this viewpoint, entirely told through the eyes of the male protagonist, Paul, is written and directed by a woman. Heavy sigh. This film is her first, and though it has some issues, I hope it is not her last.
The film suggests that one can never know one's spouse, especially if after finding her walking around in the woods in the middle of the night, he awakens to find her unable to brew coffee or make french toast adequately. The HORROR! Paul is suspicious and proceeds to test Bea at every turn, especially after going back to where he found her in the woods and finding her torn nightgown. The biggest problem with this film is that there is no building of tension or slow burn. Change happens very quickly, and the film has virtually no suspense.
Paul investigates Bea's sexy nightgown
While Treadaway is really quite delightful as Victor Frankenstein on Showtime's Penny Dreadful, and Rose Leslie is also great on Game of Thrones, there really is no chemistry between these actors in this film. They seem to be sniping at each other very soon into the honeymoon, and the film goes to some length to maintain Bea's "mystery" by never getting into her head. She's constantly scrutinized by her new husband, and the audience is supposed to be discovering the horror right along with Paul. Yet, I found him so unappealing and unlikeable (his decision to go and catch fish in the early morning hours utterly idiotic), that I just wanted him to die...like right away. Instead, the camera follows him around as he (and we) piece things together.
"You Know Nothing, Paul!"
The world gets weirder as the story evolves. The one clear thing is that "something bad" happened to Bea in the woods, and its affecting her body, especially her lady parts. She has some nasty, scabby "mosquito" bites on her inner thighs, she starts spontaneously bleeding, self-mutilates herself at one point, and then there's a truly gross-out scare that sends everything into hyper-drive. After that moment, Bea becomes completely and utterly abject, and one wonders just how things are going to all shake out. Unsurprisingly, at this point in the film, Paul loses all interest in her--she's beyond saving. Thankfully, she is kind enough to help him "hide," even after he's treated her so shoddily.
I can hint at references the film makes--to body snatching, the Evil Dead, possession narratives, alien abduction, The Wicker Man--but what you end up with is mere speculation. The film never really reveals what happens in the woods, and the spectator is left hanging, attempting to fill in the many plot holes that the film leaves gaping open. Honeymoon never reaches for cleverness or provides any explanations, which leaves one saying "Okay, then." The film has so much potential, but it just squanders it. I think even merely changing things by providing Bea's point-of-view would have made the film far more compelling. Instead, we're stuck with Paul.
If you want to see a film that explores the abject, female body, but has a more fleshed out female protagonist, I would recommend the fore-mentioned Animosity (2013), or the smart and twisty Dutch horror thriller Left Bank (2008).
I have to admit, I am mesmerized by Swiss artist H.R. Giger's imagery. His bio-mechanical creatures are equal parts primitive, almost dinosaur-like, and cyborg futuristic. With penis-like heads, weird orifices, and dual layers of razor-sharp teeth nestled in wet, gooey, gaping maws, the Alien xenomorph introduced into visual culture in Ridley Scott's visionary Alien (1979) lives on, and on. The creature's combination of delicacy and danger troubles any understanding of inside and outside, epitomizing what French theorist Julia Kristeva and cultural theorist Barbara Creed term "the abject." While Creed invested a great deal of theoretical energy describing the Alien landscape, and its inhabitants, as examples of the "monstrous-feminine," I don't think Giger's world is so easily defined. He constructs bodies and creatures that are both penetrated and penetrating, creating Escher-like fantasies that mess with your eyes. ***Be prepared, these images may be NSFW!
Perhaps one can chalk all this stuff up to weird, twisted bondage imagery, but I don't think his images are that simply explained. Sure, one can see body parts that are undeniably female, but where do they begin and end? This image above recalls Egyptian imagery, mixed with perhaps some werewolf stuff, and there are breasts, balls, metal connecting wires and skeletal tubes.
Is his stuff just weird tentacle porn dressed up as art?
Yes, there are plenty of phallic shapes and tubes penetrating bodies, but the scale of these landscapes are utterly wacko. When I watch Alien, and see these Lilliputian "explorers" climbing into crazy, drippy holes and walking down dark, wet corridors, they are tiny compared to these vast spaces. If you look at the above image, I can just picture some little people in space suits crawling all over this thing, clinging to all those sinuous lines. Yet those lines also look like train tracks, part of some vast circulatory transit system.
For Giger, female bodies and sexual imagery are not easily traceable to common notions of "reproduction," as the Alien facehuggers and chestbursters both prove. He tends to illustrate what one might call "baby machines" that are like a twisted mash-up of Donald Cammell's Demon Seed with The Matrix.
Giger certainly has a thing for icky looking infant figures. They kind of look like him.
What I really want to do is go to one of these Giger Bars in Switzerland, and actually sit in one of these creature chairs, like a whacked-out Alien space jockey that swills Martinis.
This bar puts all other bars to shame. Now I just have to find a conference in Switzerland to get me there.
When I first saw Lynne Ramsay's harrowing We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) last spring, a mere 15 minutes into the movie I turned to my friend and said "that would be my kid...if I had one." Ramsay's lyrical study of maternal ambivalence, based on Lionel Shriver's award winning novel, is a marvelous "evil kid" monster tale. Tilda Swinton's portrayal of the embattled Eva, mother of the malevolent, sociopath Kevin (played by several extraordinary young actors, including the mesmerizing Ezra Miller) is equal parts sympathetic and unlikeably passive. The novel lessens the female protagonist's helplessness and passivity by structuring the tale in an epistolary format, as Eva writes to her husband, Franklin, in a strong and self-reflective voice.
Eva and the three Kevins
While the film's representation of Eva is riveting, the story falls into that special trap that society holds for filmic representations of troubled female subjectivity: the ordering of events renders Eva's view unreliable, and her subjective "visions" call into question her version of all of the film's calamitous events. Is Kevin actually evil, or did he become that way because Eva's not a proper mother? While the novel raises these issues as Eva battles constantly with guilt and self-blame, there's never any doubt that she is right, and Kevin's "bad to the bone." The film strategically places doubt throughout in order to leave the final decision in the mind and experience of the viewer. This strategy in some ways makes the film more fun to discuss, but it also creates a more forceful indictment of Eva as epitomizing an improper or abnormal mother and woman.
The fact that the film was not wildly successful at the U.S. box office, and did not garner the substantial awards that it deserved (Oscar and otherwise), suggests that the pervasive American cultural obsession with self-sacrificing, perfectionist mothering rendered Eva the true "monster" of the film. Upon showing the film to one of my classes, I was surprised at how few of my students held any sympathy for Eva at all. Sure, many of them are much closer in age (and life experience) to the older Kevin, and are actively in the process of accepting/demonizing/forgiving their parents for present disagreements and past sins. Yet some of them were quick to tell me that Kevin's behavior is not beyond the realm of how "normal" or "average" kids might behave at various stages in their lives. Really? And Yikes! I'll stick to my fervent motto, "No kids, only kittens." With seven billion people on the planet, I figure I'm doing everyone a favor on this one.
A HORROR TALE IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE
The film begins with some very abject imagery as Eva is wafted through the crowd covered in tomato splatteringswhile attending a festival in Spain. She's a travel author, and this moment, riding high amongst a sea of revelers, is represented as simultaneously orgasmic and unsettling. One of my students pointed out that she's emulating Christ here, and believe me, that's no accident. Eva's punishes herself and is punished for all of her son's sins, and Ramsay illustrates this punishment through countless scenes where wet crimson fills the frame.
In Kevin's early moments, Eva's home and car are splashed with red paint, and Eva spends the entire film meticulously scrubbing, scraping, and removing the scarlet hue.
Still, Eva's never able to fully expunge the guilt she feels toward her son's violent acts, and allows others to abuse her at every turn. Beyond the aforementioned property splatter, she's violently slapped after exiting a job interview, harassed and menaced by a variety of Halloween revelers, has all of her eggs broken (symbolic!!) as she hides from a woman at the supermarket, and tolerates malicious sexual slurs from a co-worker that only escalate when she gently rejects his interest in dancing with her. Her continual utterance of "it's my fault" or "I deserve it" in the face of these slights feels inevitable within a narrative that constantly absolves her husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly) of any responsibility.
He's the loving Dad upon whom Kevin bestows his rare smiles. He is also the patriarch who disbelieves Eva's concerns and suspicions toward Kevin at every turn. Franklin's fate ultimately lets him off the hook (as fathers so often are left), for he never has to face what kind of monster his son actually is. And what of Kevin?
Kevin's birth scene is shot through a refracted reflection off of one of the birthing room's cold metal surfaces, and the nurse intones "Eva, stop resisting" as she screams in agony. No Hollywood smiles or tears of joy here. Eva suffers from severe postpartum depression, as so many women do, and the film explicitly shows the struggles and strains of early parenting--ones only Eva appears to experience.
None of these early experiences are beyond the realm of ordinary. Some babies sleep like blessed little lambs, while others emit ear shattering shrieks and refuse to sleep or settle. Kevin's clearly in the latter camp. So it's only when Kevin is old enough to be played by a bevy of dour, sullen, sinister actors that one starts to actually think that Kevin might not be your average "problem child."
Kevin, from a very early age, looks at Eva with a frothing combination of loathing and contempt, and the scene where she benignly tries to play ball with him is one of my favorites. Of course, Franklin's absence from these early scenes makes Kevin's behavior toward Eva all the more fraught. As a comment about "wishing she was in France" indicates, Eva's ambivalent about parenting and misses her life before she became defined as a mother.
Like some unstoppable malevolent force, Kevin controls Eva at every turn, stripping her of any life outside of him. Whenever she takes a tentative step toward happiness, or even tries to make a connection with him, he makes sure she knows that those attempts are pointless. He'll spray paint all over her lovely "room of one's own," just as he will boldly shit in his pants, glaring at her, as soon as she changes his diaper. He defiantly resists potty training to well into his 6th or 7th year, and only "learns" after Eva hurls him across the room and inadvertently breaks his arm. Now one might think--Child Abuse!--and in other films, I might wholeheartedly agree. As a testament to Ramsay's filmmaking skills, Eva's violent reaction seems not only justified, but a relief. She finally does what we all wish, but we also know in our hearts is absolutely wrong. Now in The Omen, Gregory Peck's violence toward his son seems like the only possible move. Well, times have changed!
Unfortunately, Kevin's not dead
Things take a turn for the hopeful when Kevin comes down with a cold and actually allows Eva to care for him. They have a momentary bonding moment that seems to offer the possibility of Kevin's transformation through the power of a mother's love. I believe that this scene is just a smokescreen meant to undermine Eva (and the spectator's) belief that Kevin is a bad seed. The connection Kevin makes with her also hinges on her reading him The Adventures of Robin Hood, which certainly comes back to bite her in the ass.
Some of my students were surprised and shocked that Eva decides to have another child, and the film discursively suggests that this new arrival (who turns out to be a girl) is unwanted by both father and son. Celia (Ashley Gurasimovich) is a warm, friendly, and sweet kid, which proves in many ways to Eva that her eggs are not actually "broken," and that Kevin is just bad "luck of the draw" or a losing ticket in the genetic lottery.
Kevin the teenager, as embodied by Ezra Miller, is simply fascinating and horrifying. He plays games with his little sister where he ties her up and gags her, he clearly puts her guinea pig in the garbage disposal, he somehow gets her to pour drain cleaner in her eye, and then sadistically eats some crazy eyeball-like fruit at the dinner table with obvious gusto.
The day that Franklin decides to gift him with a bow and arrow for Christmas is the proverbial "writing on the wall" for the rest of the family, and Kevin's school mates as well. Every year brings an ever more violent and powerful bow and arrow gift! The film implies that our thirst for violent entertainment, and our turning killers into "celebrities" spurs Kevin to make his violent moves....but really. C'mon. One only has to recall that all of this mess started when Eva read Kevin Robin Hood.
Events finally crystallize from their hazy first representations, as the spectator sees, with Eva, what Kevin has wrought. On returning home in shock and horror from the high school, Eva finds her home empty, only the sounds of her suburban sprinkler marring the dead quiet that surrounds her. When she re-emerges from the backyard, covered in blood and stumbling through the french doors, one thinks that she cannot survive any more horrors. Yet she does, seemingly waiting for Kevin's release from prison, interested in taking up the mantle of motherhood once more. Maybe this time she'll get it right.
We Need to Talk about Kevin, like George Ratliff's Joshua (2007), is a fierce cautionary tale, situated in a world in which one must love one's children at any cost. In this same world, Mothers still shoulder the majority of blame for their kid's actions, even if it's uncertain how much "nature" or "nurture" is involved. Eva cannot win either way.
"No Kids, Only Kittens." And honestly, do we need to talk about kittens?
