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good-to-drive · 3 months ago

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Abuse, Silence, And Why Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I recently finished watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix, and, aside from being the most brutally honest portrayal of domestic abuse I have ever seen, I discovered a beautifully written examination of narrative as power and silence as abuse and how this manifests in our larger culture.

Without going into too much detail, the show is filmed in two distinct styles that are interleaved throughout each episode to tell a cohesive story. Allison and Kevin’s relationship as seen by the rest of the world is told through a multi-cam, laugh-track sitcom that depicts a very typical “goofy husband, shrewish wife” mainstream comedy. Allison’s life through her own eyes is told through a single-cam drama/thriller about Allison planning to murder Kevin to escape his abuse.

It’s an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, but more than that, every episode explores the difference between truth, fact, and reality, and how none of these things are quite as much or as little as story. But while the process of transforming the chaotic and plotless reality of life into a story is as involuntary and essential as breathing, misogyny and the degradation of women is just as ubiquitous in our society, and a story that exists at the expense of another person’s lived reality is a refutation of their humanity.

It's also just a great show for anyone who likes to engage with history (or reality TV or true crime or “real life stories” in general), because while we have to tell ourselves stories about her own lives, we have to tell ourselves stories about other people as well. Eternal silence is narrative death, and the perpetual silence of an unspoken narrative is often the last death we can visit on someone whose story we’d rather ignore.

I also pulled up some books – Lolita and Disgrace – that dealt with similar themes, but from the perspective of the abuser. And what strikes me the most is that, across three beautifully written stories about narrative and silence within a culture that normalizes abuse, Allison, who began her story within a state of narrative death, was the only point-of-view character who had any chance of surviving.

One of the main themes of Kevin is that a compelling story is often a story that reinforces what we already believe or like to believe, and while the story may be factual and true it often also exists at the expense of someone's lived reality. The exact same series of events can be a silly joke or a harrowing tale of abuse depending on the lens through which we view it, but historically we've only been willing to see the multicam, laugh track, sitcom perspective on unbalanced relationships.

The alchemical process of turning a series of disjoint facts and experiences into a narrative creates something new and compelling, and erases much of what previously existed. In this way, it’s entirely irreversible. We spin our experiences into a very thin thread, a story we can tell ourselves that elicits something within us, something we need in order to live with the complex, uncertain, and unsatisfying reality of life. In think in many ways the thing we elicit in ourselves is truth. But truth is both more and less than fact, often more a reflection of our own beliefs and desires than the events of our lives. And in telling that truth we may never stray from the facts, but we almost by definition cannot give voice to another person’s reality.

There's a scene in season 2 of Kevin when Allison is hit by a door – a la the classic excuse – because of Kevin’s carelessness. And while he absolutely did not hit her, the way it's written is such an incredible allegory for how Kevin has curated their story and curated their friends' and family’s perceptions of their story such that even if she tells everyone the exact, unvarnished truth of what's happening to her and begs for help, they will only be capable of seeing the laugh-track, sitcom, “Kevin is a harmless goofball and his wife is a total shrew” perspective on the events of their lives.

As so often happens with abuse, their friends and family saw Allison being hurt because of Kevin. But the alchemy of creating a narrative around Kevin and Allison is irreversible, and the series of events they witness can only be spun together to a joke, an accident, a silly, childish mistake. Allison’s reality, Allison’s pain and fear, is completely elided. Like a lost sound in the middle of a sentence, her experience goes silent, and their larger understanding of her relationship never has to change. And you feel so acutely how Allison lives her entire life in that silence.

Storytelling is human, it’s essential, there’s no other way to engage with our own lives. And it’s not lying. It’s never lying to tell the truth. But it doesn’t reflect every reality, either, because another person’s reality can’t be reflected within our own narrative, because that’s what it means to be another person. To spin two different threads.

And because narrative is the essential process by which we understand our reality, denying someone their own narrative, or denying that this narrative be heard, is inherently abusive. To allow someone a voice is to give them humanity, and to suppress it is to strip that humanity away.

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, follows the story of a professor, David, who rapes a student and then fails to protect his daughter, Lucy, from being raped by intruders in their home. He destroys his daughter’s life – not through failing to protect her, but through twisting her rape into a story about why the rape of his student wasn’t wrong. The main theme of the book is generally considered to be exploitation, but Coetzee doesn’t deal with the exploitation of the rape. That’s too direct, too immediate, too easy for the reader to understand as misogynistic and wrong. Rather, Coetzee delves into “the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs” (Ruden).

The rape is how we understand David as a fundamentally exploitative person, a person who denies others their humanity by converting them into a vessel for his own desires, who erases their voice in order to speak through them and give himself the things he needs. And that’s how we recognize that the way he absorbs and claims the stories of his daughter and his student is another kind of violation of their humanity. Another way of turning women into vessels for men’s pain and fear and need.

What’s fascinating is that David's student finds her voice – files a complaint against him – and is eventually able to continue with her life. The woman he raped is less damaged by him than his own daughter, because she was the woman he couldn’t permanently silence.

In Lolita, another brilliant novel about abuse, dehumanization, and storytelling, Humbert turns to the reader at the end and says, “Imagine us, reader, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.”

It’s not that Humbert knew he was fictional, but that he knew everyone was fictional. Believed the entire world only truly existed in his own mind, because anything beyond that was irrelevant to his needs. He coped with the collapse of his ability to dehumanize Dolores (who he called Lolita) by demanding that his voice be resurrected. Demanding immortality. Demanding his narrative exist in another person’s world, and thereby be given the existence and humanity that Allison and Dolores and Lucy and David’s student were denied.

Pushing his needs, finally, onto the reader, because we are the only person he has left, and a person like him can only exist through the use of another. In that way, Humbert was powerless. In that way, Kevin and David were powerless, too.

In Disgrace, David’s dream is to write an opera, and at the end of the book he realizes he’ll never finish his magnum opus. He’ll never be able to terminate the process of converting himself, his world, into a story. But he does learn to decenter himself in that narrative. And it’s when he loses all fear of death, and any conception of the self, that he gains the ability to give dogs – who he generally equates to women – a voice within his opera, his life’s work.

It’s in death that we discover our true unimportance as human beings, that we learn to let go of vanity and our conception of the self entirely. And David had degraded women so thoroughly in order to justify how he used them to meet his own emotional needs that it was only in losing all value for his own life that he could gain the ability to see them as equal voices. To actually put those voices into his own life story. It's at the cost of himself that he allows other people to truly exist, in the death of the self that he finally allows the world to exist outside of himself. It’s almost a positive character arc. Almost.

When Kevin finally loses the ability to abuse Allison, he, like many abusers, loses all desire to live. His world was built on a structure of superiority and inferiority, on beings and vessels, on the inherent value of men and the inherent meaninglessness of women’s lives. The system on which he based his entire reality has been destroyed by Allison’s declaration of the self. And, if he was a being because she was a vessel, then in losing the ability to treat her as a vessel, to fully and completely dehumanize her, he has lost his own humanity.

It may be perfectly summed up here: “Become major. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (Coetzee).

If you’re not to be a main character, if there indeed is no split between major and minor characters, between people and the paper dolls that populate their story, between living beings and the vessels into which they pour their need – what is life for?

Nothing. At least, not for people whose narrative must exist at the expense of another.

And that’s why I say that only a narrator like Allison could survive this kind of story. Despite beginning her story trapped in eternal silence, her reality fully elided no matter how immediate and obvious it became, Allison was the only point-of-view character of any of these three stories who didn’t establish her power through the degradation of another. Who didn’t conceptualize the world via being and vessels. Whose narrative didn’t exist, by necessity, at the expense of another person’s humanity. Whose thread could exist in a larger tapestry without destroying her sense of self.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not generally a likable character. She’s misogynistic, cruel, selfish, jealous, desperate, afraid, and in pain. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, she’s not at her best, and she’s often pushed to do things that are ugly and disturbing because she’s simply been pushed too far.

But, for me, the power in her character is in how her last scene never felt like a final scene. Her story didn’t have to be killed, her conception of the self didn’t have to be killed, in order to reveal the brutal reality of stories twisting and intertwining without any inherently superior truth or narrative among them. Allison’s story was one of declaring herself. And that’s why it didn’t feel like it ended at the end. Instead, this felt like a beginning.

#this is probably the most egregious 'post that no one asked for' that I've ever written #but man this show HIT me y'all #and then I went back and reread parts of disgrace and that hit me too #it also made me reconsider my online presence and how I myself engage with narrative in the very small little world I'm a part of #I caught some shit a while ago and made a conscious decision to never comment on the narrative around mental health #and to be clear I was just talking about a general narrative in society at large I wasn't bringing up anything specific or attacking people #more how larger social narratives filter into and sometimes come to define individual stories #but it was upsetting to people and I figured instead I can just try to express a compassionate perspective on the mentally ill myself #but now I wonder if I've gone too far #idk without naming any names I'm getting unblocked by people who should definitely still find my mindset intolerable to their worldview #and I don't blame them because we all have reasons for the things we believe and we're all just doing our best #but it's a canary in the coal mine #it makes me think I've become so focused on not ruffling feathers that I'm tacitly approving some disturbing beliefs #and I think I could have happily ignored that if I hadn't just watched this show #posts that no one asked for #kevin can fuck himself #kevin can f*** himself #op #longer rambles

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sunnyashe · 6 days ago

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A prequel to this: we might get there. maybe. just setup for now

next scene under cut!

Rumble and Frenzy both stiffened instantly. Scrap.

Rumble side-eyed his twin, watching shock dawn to horror on Frenzy’s faceplate.

Jazz.

“Seems the terrible two are taking the party outside!” Jazz was still standing directly behind them, his grin practically audible. Fragger fed off Cassetticon fear. “‘s there a reason you didn’t pay for that engex?”

“Nope,” Rumble responded immediately, turning to face Jazz. The word dragged out, ending with a lilt, as if he was unsure.

Simultaneously, Frenzy launched into a ramble on the spot. “We have special instruction, clearance, from the Prime! He wants energon samples from across the undercity for…”

Rumble picked up the thread as Frenzy trailed off. “Because he wants to try out the local culture! The Op’s so bored of the fancy shmancy energon they keep serve’n him in that palace, so he asked us to bring him some of these commoner…delicacies!”

Jazz exaggeratedly brought a digit to his helm, miming a comm exchange. "Wow! I thought you might've been stealing for yourselves, but if you're stealing for the Prime, it must be fine!” After a beat, he sighed theatrically “OP says he didn’t order any engex, you sure you didn’t get the wrong guy?”

Frenzy was still rooted to the spot, facing the street. :Turn around, dumbaft!: Rumble crackled through to him with comms, :Face that slag-head helm first! It’s too late to run.:

:Idiot, it’s called deniability!:

:What, like you talking to him didn’t give up the jig?:

:I was telling the concrete!:

:It’s too late, flickerbrain, grow some self-respect!:

:What, like how you respect Autobots?:

In one swift movement, Rumble dropped all of the stolen engex he was holding. He hopped in front of Frenzy, snarling, with a fisted servo extended to crack his brother’s stupid visor.

A warm, scarred servo yanked Rumble up by his backplate. Frenzy, who had unsheathed a vibroblade from who-knows-where in retribution, was also bodily hoisted up into the unforgiving air of Kaon’s industrial sector. Jazz’s rictus took on an amused tinge, “Woah there, mechs. It’s my job to keep violence off the streets, you know? You’re makin’ it real easy.”

Rumble wiggled in his grasp, limbs flailing ineffectually, “Then be glad about it, turbofox wannabe!”

Frenzy twisted his helm to attempt to bite Jazz’s servo “Yeah, you’re so great at your job! Now let us go!”

Jazz tilted his head, as if considering. As soon as he moved to speak, Frenzy plowed over whatever he was about to say with an interrogation he had little diplomatic power to execute. “Why the frag are you even here? Low-end neutral bar in the sticks? Does your job require engex overcharge or some slag?”

Rumble fought with renewed vigor, as if Jazz was diverting processing power away from his grip to consider his answer the question. “Yeah! Too scared of fighting a little crime without bein’ drunk?”

“As a matter of fact,” Jazz said blithely, ignoring them, “I was considering letting you miscreants off with a warning and a promise that you’ll give that poor bartender a sparkfelt apology.”

Rumble glared at the underside of Jazz’s helm distrustfully, sending Frenzy a databurst comm, :Liar.:

:No slag.:

Jazz continued on, unruffled, pretending not to be hacking their private comms, “But, y’know…there’s no harm in a little catch-up. I haven’t seen you two since the war!”

“As if it’s over,” Rumble growled. Bitterly.

Jazz’s smile widened, and Rumble realized he kind of fucked up. “Anyway, how’s Sounders doing?”

Frenzy scoffed, crossing his arms while dangling a meter in the air, “Who the frag is Sounders?”

Jazz laughed a little, softly. He lowered Rumble to the ground. The Cassetticon ripped himself out of Jazz’s hold as soon as his pedes hit the cobbled, gritty floor, arm raised defensively. Maybe he was making good on that obvious falsehood from before? It wasn’t like him, at all, there was probably another trick–

Frenzy was still suspended midair. With his now free left servo, Jazz materialized two pairs of miniature stasis cuffs, lightly spinning them between two digits with obscene expertise.

“So, my mechs. Where is Soundwave?”

#transformers #soundwave tf #rumble tf #frenzy tf #jazz tf #RiRFiB (for now)#comic #transformers fic #fanfiction #i don't think i can tag this as jazzwave but the intention is there #yeah rumble definitely calls jazz a furry here #because i draw his sensor horns as ears: my mind is gigantic and everyone should do that #lore background: basically megs defects to work with the autobots and soundwave goes through an earthspark-esque divorce arc #lotta people get jettisoned back to cybertron and are told to rebuild #the more outwardly destructive decepticons get imprisoned #but since the autobots need mechpower to fix the cities and imprisoned decepticons are Not in the business of Working Under Duress #they're mostly banished to backwater areas but allowed a modicum of freedom and are encouraged to find jobs to do #it sucks but dudes like soundwave who dipped the fuck out of the active warzone once megatron frsauce betrayed him are pretty well hidden #jazz is just picking up the strays who have been under the radar for the decade since the end of the war #making sure another revolution doesn't disturb the peace #we'll see how that goes (me too i have no idea where this is going)

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