#i just watched intolerance

[thesapphocinephile]

**Elaborate in the comments or tags**

[good-to-drive]

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.

[justalittlebluetiefling]

Sometimes I try to write down thoughts about this campaign but I admittedly have not been paying enough attention to feel confident in my character analysis so I write an incoherent text post and then delete it because I don't know if I'm actually making the correct judgments.

[silvermoon424]

So fucking over the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!" excuse for censorship and fascism. It's not about the kids. It's never been about the kids. Conservatives just use them to make helicopter parents hysterical over the notion of their precious Jimmy seeing two men hold hands, which makes them vote conservative and support things like book bans. They don't see children as individual people, they view them as extensions of their parents who aren't allowed to think for themselves.

Whenever someone brings up the "BUT CHILDREN!!!" point I just want to tell them

[lovely-v]

Watching the presidential debate because I hate myself

[uncanny-tranny]

Look, politics are complex and nuanced, but if your view is simply that The Bad Guys should be dehumanized, I don't want you in my spaces. Quite literally, this line of thinking is reductive at best

[sukibenders]

Looking back at Girl Meets World, it will forever irritate me especially for how they handled/treated Angela. Oh this show really hated black women because how do you not only 1.) describe her, one of (correct me if I'm wrong) only few black and MAIN characters of the og show, as a "concept" 2.) have characters show obvious disgust at the small mention of her name 3.) depict her as a homewrecker for a new relationship that, really, shouldn't have ever happened 4.) have her old friends treat her like dirt and her old lover like she is the root of his problems, when there was nothing but positive love there 5.) reuse all the concepts from said previous love story just to elevate the new ship with a yte woman and 6.) compare her to Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest hurricanes that caused significant numbers of death, harm, misplacement, and trauma to people, largely of whom were black? Mind you, all these points I mentioned were toward the only main black character of the OG show before the spinoff, and the only, from what I can remember, black female character of the spinoff who didn't even stay long. Not even getting into the racist drama with some of the members on set, but you cannot look me in the eye and tell me that the way the show handled Angela, her story, and her relationship with the other characters + Shawn wasn't fucking disrespectful, you can't because I won't believe you.

[brightclaws5tudios]

Although nobody likely cares, I'll post some OC lore. Because I have COVID and will be confined to one small room for many days, and my neurodivergent ass can't handle that.

The character's name is Nairin Chauveron, and he's from a species called Shadows. These creatures have the ability to use magic and live for a very long time, and can also become Beast creatures. His, for example, is some weird giant white fox thing. However, Shadows are prone to a disease widely known as Corruption, which screws up their magic and can alter their forms.

They have crystals on their bodies, usually their chests, made of similar materials to their bones and horns. When a Shadow has Corruption, these crystals, or Cores, as they're known, fill up with dark magic when they usually contain regular life force. This makes the Shadow have a lot of negative effects, which I might explain later if prompted. (Although I most likely will not be prompted.)

Anyway, Nairin is pretty much the new king of the mountains, and I call him the bean man because he has paw feet with toe beans. He's also a slut. If you want to read the story I wrote featuring him, here's the link: https://www.wattpad.com/1318871197-mirror-dreams-not-this-dream-again-chapter-1

The story posts irregularly and it's mostly so I can get myself to do things. The first pic was drawn by me a while ago, the second is in a Picrew, the link is here: https://picrew.me/en/image_maker/1414503

I might post more about him later, and I had another, newer image somewhere, but seeing as I can't find it, that'll have to wait.

[fuck-comphet]

Hey mom, if you really wanted your house to be a safe space for me, you wouldn’t invite a known homophobe over while I’m here, and then call me sensitive when I tell you that I’m uncomfortable interacting with this person

[chrlotpony]

thinking of sunil nighttime cuddling w his "adopted" cobra child before sleep (my oc Milks Nevla).

sunil just has the TV on playing some show he doesn't even know about but he can't change the channel or turn it off bc the remote is out of his reach and he can't move cuz then he'll wake milks up. sunils usually more strict but it was a Friday night in the middle of the month, and milks wanted to watch TV w him despite near bedtime. eventually, sunil sleeps through the background noise

[dickbaggins]

youre the real one for that shelby 2 rant lmao

lmao sorry to unload all of that on your beautiful gifset, I just sometimes feel like I'm taking crazy pills with regards to her??? because she literally is the worst and sometimes I feel like no one sees it but me? I was praying she wasn't involved with onx but then I watched an Aleks stream very early on and there she was, pulling this 'I can hewp you with the budget Bob :) but pwease don't give me a role of authority, I'd hate that :(' routine and honestly my heart dropped because I knew it would be sdso/silas all over again but I was wrong, it's even worse and she's already pushing people out and ruining the whole of the pd

I wrote the longest most unhinged rant here but I deleted it all in the interest of appearing somewhat sane and not overly invested in gtarp (but one day I'm going to make my shelby 2 is an unstable bitch supercut for youtube and then you'll all see!!!)

[ittybittybumblebee]

Why is there so much good food in the world that i cant ever try because my stupid food intolerance like.

[bereft-of-frogs]

Ok I have finished the first season of interviewing that vampire (srs business edition). And I know that what AMC wants is for me to go subscribe to AMC+ to get the second season. But…I just ended up making me go watch What We Do In the Shadows (interviewing that vampire, comedy edition) 😆

[pegasusdrawnchariots]

My Shakespeare plays seen/read total has now officially been overtaken by my total adaptations watched of Cyrano de Bergerac alone

[navree]

it is shocking how little interest i have in watching hotd season 2, honestly, i'm infinitely more excited for the second season of my adventures with superman coming next week

[crushed-oranged-angered]

Reminder that just cause you start your post saying “I’m gonna be so careful not to offended anyone” doesn’t fucking mean anything actually

Fun fact: you can just say you don’t like something and not elaborate! You don’t actually owe the internet shit

And “Netflix should just make a separate show for the gays. They should just take all the gays and make their own show” do you hear yourself? Say that again

Some of you need to stop talking or acknowledge you’re uncomfortable with it, you are digging a hole and you sound homophobic