We Need To Talk About Kevin: A Character Analysis About Kevin

Kevin, played by Ezra Miller, did not possess the moral components found in the average human being. Even while being playful Kevin was morally grotesque. In several scenes where he was playing with his sister, Kevin's playfulness crossed the boundaries from harmless sibling squabble to something more ominous, but why did Kevin behave this way? The film leads one to infer, Kevin's moral dysfunction resulted from a biological defect which rendered Kevin rather unresponsive to human emotion, including his own mother. As an infant Kevin cried incessantly despite his mother's care, thus Eva, Kevin's mother, began to sense, that there was something wrong with Kevin. After observing Kevin, with very little difficulty, one could deduce he had an eerie ominous character that was not a product of socialization, because Kevin had loving parents.

Although Kevin had loving parents, they rarely disciplined him. As a preschooler, Kevin was rude and commanded his parents at will, and seldom did his parents ever scold him on comments such as " I don't give a rat's ass". Kevin's impudence greatly affected his mother to the point where Kevin understood that his mother was inured, " Just because your use to something does it mean you like it. Your use to me ". Eva was clearly frustrated and defeated by her problem child; she openly admitted she was happy before Kevin was born. Kevin threw food on the refrigerator door as a toddler. He slammed bread layered with jelly on a glass table as a preschooler, and in shameless defiance stared at his mother afterward. Being in diapers pass the age of six, on one occasion Kevin defecated after his mother finished changing the diaper in hopes witnessing his mother endure the frustration of changing the diaper again. Frustrated, Eva tossed Kevin which resulted in him breaking his arm. After coming home from the hospital, Kevin began using the the toilet normally.

While touching the scar on his forearm, Kevin's adolescent wisdom deemed his mother's action as commendable. Kevin admitted to his mother the incident gave him a taste of his own medicine in saying, " You know how they potty train cats? They stick their noses in their own shit. The don't like it, so they use the box". Does this indicate as a child Kevin wanted to be disciplined, and that his misconduct was an indicator of contrition, and he was relying on his parents to discipline him so he could stop being bad so he could feel better about himself ? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Kevin's impudence traces back to his years as a toddler. However, being a toddler does not exempt disciplinary action. The impression from the film is, there is something fundamentally wrong with Kevin, and no measure of discipline would have changed the outcome. Kevin behaved as he did because his moral machinery was essentially defective. He was born a sociopath. Kevin's contemptuous behavior in his childhood could reasonably be attributed to immaturity although he was rather perceptive.

In his adolescents, Kevin's acute perception shaped a worldview enabling him to understand his place in society as a sociopath. This is a worldview that described humans as being fascinated by evil in a pointless repetitive life in which people watch the news because they want see to bloodshed. They want to see individuals like Kevin commit horrific acts, and not to " get an A geometry", Kevin:

It's like this: you wake and watch TV, get in your car and listen to the radio you go to your little jobs or little school, but you don't hear about that on the 6 o'clock news, why? 'Cause nothing is really happening, and you go home and watch some more TV and maybe it's a fun night and you go out and watch a movie. I mean it's got so bad that half the people on TV, inside the TV, they're watching TV. What are these people watching, people like me?

The point Kevin makes is that people live monotonously. The routine of life is inane to such an extent, that people need to witness tragedy in order to feel that life has significance. Kevin's social commentary is insightful, but not axiomatic, because empathy may drive people to witness tragedy because they could imagine themselves in a tragic situation that they may not want for somebody else, not necessarily because life is pointless. Indeed, people have an interest in tragedy, either a serial killer who has murdered over twenty people, or a fatal car accident, but people also have an interest seeing others prosper. After all, people love happy endings.

However, according to Kevin's worldview," there is no point", and "nothing is really happening." Since people are watching individuals like him, what is his role in the scheme of people's pointless lives? Is Kevin bothered by people's vacuous monotonous lives so much that he had to commit an abominable act to make a point about how meaningless people's lives are? Did Kevin commit the act to make a point about human nature? Perhaps Kevin's logic was the guarantor of a worldview that was so infallible that the natural outcome was to commit such an act. Maybe Kevin felt his own life was pointless, and through this act he earned the recognition that he deserved for his work thus attributing meaning to his life, or maybe Kevin he did it simply because he could. Whatever the reason may be, when Kevin's mother asked him why he committed the act, his response was, " I used to think I knew. Now I'm not so sure."