THE CYNICAL CRITIC

I woke up way too early today, considering I already slept very late last night. I went to bed wishing that by morning my heart wouldn't be pounding as hard as after I finished watching this movie. Much to my dismay, it still is.





It's not really a horror movie because I didn't scream nor did I do anything gay at any point while watching it. It's weird but I find it really frightening.


You know that kind of fear that makes you sweat beads as big as gum balls. The kind of fear that gets your heart pounding so heavily you feel like throwing up. That feeling right after you wake up from a very bad dream but then you realized that you're still in the same dream. Yeah, I got that kind of fear from this movie. But why? I'm just weird, that's why. Really now, I think it's basically because I see a lot of myself in Kevin...and it scares me.

Like him, I've been torturing my mother all my life. Well, just mostly if I must say. My whole life just seem to be about jeering her to the limits. Why? I don't know. I just do it. I think she sees me as the black sheep of the family because she just can't seem to find a way to fix me. I sometimes think that she must really hate me and just says she loves me for the sake of being a mother to me. She always assume that her motherly love can magically transform everything. Well, except me.


Then, does she begin to think that it's her fault, somehow?
Does she ever wish she have never given birth to me in the first place?
Am I like Kevin- detached, unemotional, uncaring, psychotic?
Does our actions spring from nowhere, or are they somehow prefigured?
Are we born evil, or did our mother made us this way?


The mere thought of finding the answers to these questions gets my heart racing. From where? Is it from fear? Or is it from excitement? I used to think I knew, now I'm not so sure.

This movie is like a car-crash: terrible to watch but you look to see how awful it can be. Although most people might see this film as just another "bad seed" story, it's actually a quite damning statement about parenting and those crucial stages when a mother needs to bond with her baby as it develops its social behavior. Kevin may seem like a "a demon child who torments his poor mother from infancy through adolescence", but the film questions her blame, as she never made an effort to bond with her child. She never picked him up; she never rocked him; she strolled him near a construction worker actively drilling the ground just to drown his cries. I'm not sure that I blame the child for growing to resent her. Then, when she does try to connect - too little, too late - she only gets frustrated by his resistance, furthering the degradation of their relationship. Granted, the child may have been wired to be evil but, perhaps, had his mother given him the motherly attention he needed at that critical development stage, he would have turned out less so.- CYNICALCRITIC