#kevin can fuck himself this show

[pizzaboat]

The insanity of Unagi is that Phoebe lived on the street and definitely stabbed people

So Ross, being like, "Ha, you definitely wouldn't win a fight!" Is both crazy arrogant and stupid

Also kinda messed up, considering not only was he trying to make Rachel feel unsafe, but also Phoebe, who's got all sorts of issues from when she actually was unsafe. Living on the streets

[homoquartz]

what's so cool about "kevin can fuck himself" is the way it forces you to reframe what are otherwise painted as harmless sitcom antics. it makes you really think about it.

for example, the sarcastic asides typical of a sitcom are actually cruel and abusive when rooted in reality. while you're watching the scene, set up in saturated colors and a laugh track, you have to force yourself not to slip into the banter.

it's a depiction of how abusers manipulate perceptions and get everyone else to go along with it. how it's normalized as "harmless" and laughed away.

it's a really good show.

[biggest-bara-tiddies]

I feel like one of the themes the writers of Kevin Can F Himself are going for is that sitcom-style presentation softens clear abuse to the point that it becomes hard to notice. Like as long as there is a laugh track, most people would struggle to clock Kevin as being abusive. But honestly I could tell from the first episode just by how he treated the coffee table in the living room. Allison got that coffee table on major discount from pottery barn and she is proud of it. Getting a table that nice for cheap is an achievement and it's clearly the nicest thing she owns, but none of this matters to Kevin, in fact, the very reason of her valuing the table is openly mocked by Kevin. He goes on to put drinks without coasters on it, puts his feet up on it, and stands on it eventually breaking it only crudely fixing it with duct tape to restore it's basic function as a coffee table and to lower it to his level. Kevin treats it with such disdain and abandon it's honestly instantly clear that nothing Allison values matters to him and that it's essentially open season on everything that makes Allison herself and not just Mrs. McRoberts or Mrs. Worcester Wild Dude. I love that you can analyze something as mundane as a coffee table in this show and see it as a microcosm of Allison and Kevin's marriage and a representation of Kevin's abusive treatment of Allison

[novelconcepts]

A thing I find really important about the way Kevin Can Fuck Himself goes about its job: Allison is kind of a mess. She’s self-centered, she doesn’t put other people’s needs first, she makes reckless choices that endanger herself and others. And the show says: yes. Right. She’s flawed as fuck. And she still does not deserve any of what’s happening to her. It could be argued that she is, in fact, this flawed as a direct product of her trauma. Her self-absorption, unlike Kevin’s, is actually self-preservation. It puts Patty in danger. It tunes out Diane’s pain. It capitalizes on Sam’s relationship problems. And still, the show says: yes. Right. She’s going about this in fumbling, worrying ways. And she still does not deserve any of what’s happening to her.

Know how we know this? How we really know this, outside of our own objectivity, our own awareness of the abuse she’s enduring even to the soundtrack of laughter?

Because Tammy is the one to find her. Because Tammy is the one holding the cards at the end of the game. Tammy, who does not like Allison. Who sees so clearly the complicated, messy, dangerous person Allison can be. The mistakes she is prone to making in the name of desperation. How imperfect she is at every level. And Tammy, who is the character most explicitly set to call Allison on all of her shit, to drag her before a court of law, to lean on that hot-button of whether or not she’s a “good person” until it breaks—lets her go. Folds the cards up, puts them in her pocket, and leaves.

Because Tammy, like the show, like the thesis statement of abuse is never earned, never deserved, never warranted, understands. This is a world that so often sanitizes women after it’s too late to save them. A world that insists she should have done more to get out. A world that insists you should be kind and moral and perfect, or maybe you got what was coming to you. This is a world that sees fighting back as an equally heinous crime. As punishable, if not more so, than the actions of the instigator.

But this show doesn’t want to play that game. This show doesn’t want to fuck with it at all. Allison doesn’t have to be perfect and moral and above reproach. Allison has blood on her hands, and a DUI neatly ignored, and knowingly has an affair with her married boss. Allison hurts her friends sometimes, and she makes awful decisions out of desperation, and she doesn’t always pay attention to other people’s plotlines. And the show says: yes. Right. She’s making choices you probably should not agree with.

And she still does not deserve any of what is happening to her.

[officialempressofhell]

Tammy getting so angry at Neil comparing him to their father is resonating with me. She is every woman who is realizing that her male relatives are the same danger to women as the strangers who have been harassing her all her life

[azatas]

really really can’t recommend kevin can f**k himself enough, especially if you grew up watching sitcoms. it’s such a well done deconstruction/criticism of the genre and the way they blend the sitcom with the drama and the reality of what being married to a guy like kevin would be is so unique and bold and i think they nailed it

[biblicalhorror]

Thinking about how Pete used to be a priest and Kevin's (unnamed) mom was a nun. The fact that Pete was clearly stripped of his title. And we don't hear anything about Kevin's mother beyond the fact that she's dead. Thinking about how Diane says that she thinks of Pete as her "creepy uncle" and hates him. Thinking about how Kevin being born was likely a huge scandal for Pete and his mother and led to him being kicked out of the church. Thinking about how Pete doesn't seem to have any remorse at all for the potential abuse of power that occurred which led to Kevin's conception. Thinking about how Pete was the one most likely to make jokes objectifying women with Kevin. Thinking about how Kevin was likely raised believing he was some sort of miracle or chosen one, destined for great things solely because acknowledgment of the shame surrounding the circumstances of his birth would require Pete admitting fault. Thinking about how normalized it must have been in his childhood to see women being talked down to, objectified, sexualized and made into nothing more than plot devices to powerful men. Thinking about the sense of entitlement he must have had baked into him, and the deep fear hiding underneath all of it that one day everyone is going to realize he's his father's biggest skeleton in the closet. Thinking about this show having one of the most nuanced and complex portrayals of the cycle of abuse and patriarchal violence that I've ever seen!!!

[sazwritesstuff]

so i've been watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself and i know a lot of people have mentioned/talked about how light, saturation, camera angle, Alison's roots growing out, her arm in a sling/not a sling, etc changes in Kevin's POV vs reality but one thing i've noticed that i've not seen anyone talk about is how Alison's voice/accent changes

Alison's accent becomes thicker, as does Paddy's, and exaggerated when we're in the sitcom world and i just think it's an interesting little detail and also plays on how sitcoms so often exaggerate how characters talk like some of the lines that they say in the sitcom world you would never catch yourself actually saying in day-to-day life

the change in how Alison speaks really helps to emphasize how fake that would is because it sounds unnatural and forced just like a lot of sitcoms where it is a caricature of reality and it just shows how Kevin distorts the reality that we see and hear when we are pulled into his world

[thelovers-thedreamers-and-me]

accessibility win for Kevin Can Fuck Himself- if you have the subtitles on, you get to see extra profanity that you don't get to see uncensored in the show itself. complete reversal of censoring subtitles for spoken cussing. well done, everyone!

[comphetkoncass]

i love when popular misogynistic tropes get scrutinized to show the woman’s realistic perspective. i love when writers examine many women’s instinct to fawn rather than flee or fight.

[lovely-v]

This was an iconic progression in television history okay

[brutusinthewoods]

breaking bad for lesbians

[deceitfulmermaid]

neil is actually soooo fascinating to me i could put him in a jar with a stick and a leaf. like 1. you overhear your best friends wife plotting to murder him with your sister 2. you assault said wife 3. your sister almost kills you protecting said wife 4. once you recover from this you tell your “best friend” about the murder plot and not ONLY does he not believe you but he laughs at your haircut and doesn’t ask you ANYTHING about why you were gone/what happened to your hair/the HUGE SCAR ON YOUR HEAD which conveniently does not exist in Sitcom World bc that would require kevin to think about anyone else for two seconds

AND YOU STILL HANG OUT WITH THIS GUY. like wow talk about cycles of abuse. neil treats the people around him terribly, can’t be with diane in front of other people, can’t be kind to patty or to allison, can’t sympathize with anyone but himself, puts himself at the mercy of kevin to keep himself in good graces with an abuser, completely ignores what are very clear signs that diane’s husband is abusive.

but!!!! he recognizes his father in himself. he eventually kicks kevin to the curb. he accepts (eventually) that patty has kicked him out.

i love the ambiguity of neil’s ending. he COULD figure it out! there’s hope for neil! yeah he fuckin sucks but there are glimmers of decency in him and there’s the acceptance of who he really is that kevin lacked. he COULD quit drinking, maybe get some therapy. self help idk whatever works for him. maybe once he stops drinking he takes skating more seriously, finds other hobbies that get him around kinder people.

OR he could get sucked into the orbit of another charismatic abuser. WHO KNOWS!

all we the viewer know is that it’s NO WOMANS JOB TO FIX NEIL. neil has to fix neil!

[calliecopper]

I've been watching "Kevin Can Fuck Himself" with my dad the past few days, and during s1e1 I immediately went "lesbians" as soon as I saw Allison and Patty, but my dad was like "nah no way", well we just watched the season 1 finale and my dad looked at me and was like "lesbians??"

[alexjcrowley]

I am on episode 2 of season 2 of Kevin Can Fuck Himself and there is something I have to say because it's breaking my heart. And it's about Allison. Look, I know- we all know- she's far from perfect: she is messy, impulsive, she can be manipulative, controlling, she often lies, puts others in danger in order to save herself without thinking twice; you could say she emotionally blackmails Patty into looking into Tammy's notebook, the first thing she does after hitting Neil with a boiler is making sure she can pretend she was making tea with that rather being like "Oh shit I may have killed my friend's brother". I know about all of this, we all know.

But I still can't in my heart root against her or understand people root against her because in this show there's not one fucking person who actually tries to help her escape her abusive marriage. It doesn't matter if they see Allison's and Kevin's marriage from the outside, or if they're present during acts of abuse or if they hear Allison scream in their face she needs to get out, they don't care about her.

Patty is the first important character to know about the abuse first-hand and because Allison explains it to her that she is being abused, that Kevin is trapping her, stripping her of possessions, of ways to leave him, of her life. And Patty does help Allison, a lot, because they're sort of trapped together in the same mess, but there hasn't been a moment yet in which Patty goes "Yeah we are going to help you leave your husband". You would think, in a perfect worldn after Patty actually takes into consideration the abuse she has seen Allison go through she would be like "Okay, my first priority may be sorting my own shit with Oxy, but after that we're getting you out of that house." No. If Allison didn't push to get out, in ways that may be questionable and exploitative of others, for sure, Patty wouldn't be the one to say "let's get you out of there".

Allison speaks to Sam. What does Sam says? That Kevin's an idiot. He doesn't want to get Allison out of town because he recognises that leaving the city, putting physical distance between her and her husband, may be the only way for her to escape abuse. He wants to live some sort of love dream, that seemed to me as much - if not more- about leaving his wife's overbearing family as it was about being with Allison. And when she doesn't want to run away with him, he is not interested in helping with her situation anymore. He refuses to give her a job, which strips her away for the little economic autonomy she could have had, and it's not like he says something like "but I'll look out if there are other places that are hiring...". And yes, I do understand that she often acted unfairly towards him, that she always had the emotional upper hand on their relationship, dictating its terms every time. But that doesn't cancel out the constant and apparently inescapable abuse she is submitted to in her daily life. She still needs help for that.

What about when she confronts Neil? Neil who knows what's going on. Neil who has often taken part in that abuse, who has fawned the flame at every given opportunity and knows what kind of guy Kevin really is? He berates her for always whining. But yeah, what can you expect from the guy who was going to kill her.

And Diane seems to function as this idea of what Allison may become if she doesn't do anything a put her marriage, she is the wife who is more or less totally submitted to her husband and doesn't even rebel anymore, doesn't even think she has a right to rebel. So of course someone who has grown so accostumed to abuse to believe it is the norm is not going to help Allison get out of her abusive relationship.

And really everybody until the point I have watched (ep2 s2)- every random side characters who has witnessed Allison's abusive relationship, has heard about it from her or has had a hint that there was something off about that relationship: the police officer who stopped Allison and Patty, Nick, the PI- didn't give a single fuck about it. None of them thought "maybe I should help her, maybe I should do something." Not even a little thing, not even, fuck, spare her from one of Kevin's insults just once.

When Allison says she tried to kill herself (which is understandable, given her situation, given that death might be the only way out), Patty tells her "You're playing the victim." No shit, she is the victim. Yeah, even if she acts shitty towards people, even if she often acts selfishly (in self-preservation, may I add, since nobody else seems interested in preserving her otherwise), she is still the fucking victim. And nobody wants to recognise it and, even when they do, nobody wants do anything about it.

Everybody would be more than fine if she kept bearing the abuse in silence.

"Well, if she didn't act so shitty all of the time and if she settled for a less questionable solution than killing her husband, maybe people would sympathize more with her and want to help her-" It doesn't fucking matter. It's not a victim's duty to look palatable or innocent enough so that they may deserve help. Her husband's compromised most of jobs, forced her to move in with him, and he's more than ready to call the cops on her when she tugs on her leash just enough for him to get a sense she may be sipping away and there are people debating that if she only were nicer about her life being taken away from her own hands maybe someone would feel like doing something.

It breaks my fucking heart that the abuse she suffers from her husband is the core of the show, going by the title alone, and nobody does a thing to help her. Nobody. Nobody gives a fuck if she lives or die or she isn't seen anymore or if Kevin buries her in the backyard or he keeps her chained at home or nobody hears from her anymore. And I know- as Sam said in one of the first episodes, I believe, and as it was explained in Ted Lasso- that a victim may still be held accountable for the relationships they pulled out from; that it doesn't matter the reason, if you disappear in your friends's life all of a sudden you're going to hurt them, so let's say Allison alienated all of her former friends, because they all thought she was a bitch and it was 100% a conscious choice of her to abandon them.

There are still so many people in the show that overlook what she is going through. It reminds me of that scene from "Why Women Kill", when April goes on her "I Hate People Who Look The Other Way" monologue, about her mother being abused, and everybody in the family knowing it, and nobody doing anything.

I feel that's what everybody does in this show. They look the other way. They don't care. Only if Allison shouts and goes crazy and tries to kill herself or her husband they deign her of a minimum of attention, and even after that Allison being in very real danger is always the least important matter. Everybody in that show has their own interest to look after, but that's not an excuse. There, I said it, that's not an excuse. That's not enough.

Fuck do I know that you can't take care of everything, that you can't solve every world issues, but if in front of you you see someone who needs help, who is begging for help, you can see them and you turn in a blind then what. What are we doing as people. Everybody saw Allison being abused, everybody knows and fucking nobody does anything. Helping eachothers out is all that we were put on earth to do. And none of them, none of them decides to mind his own business because they don't know how to help, they believe they could make things worse- they just don't want to. They don't want to help and they don't care. I don't know who would be sad if Allison died by Kevin's hands, what I do know is that none of them would certainly be sad enough to move a finger for her.

You think Allison is self-serving? Show me a selfless character in this show. The closest we get to this seems to be Patty- who I like, she's probably my favourite character, and she does a lot for Allison, but if Allison didn't one day decided Kevin deserved his life to be taken away more than hers she would not have done a thing.

Allison's not perfect, I very much know. She often acts in bad ways, she takes bad decisions. But I don't think any of the other characters have a right to judge what she does while they were busy looking the other way.

[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.