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frothingatthemaw · 4 months ago

Text

An analysis on Stevo Levy (SLC Punk! 1998)

[my partner (@cassetteplayersstuff) and i rambled about slc punk! for around two hours, and i wanted to construct it a bit more coherently, so here's that final product.]

Stevo flinching away so quickly after checking Bob’s pulse means he didn't even have time to see if there was a pulse because his body was so cold, that’s a terrifying feeling and having to carry that with you forever. It’s hard to think about the reality of what that could be like, especially with the one person who’d been your person since you were 14. That’s some deep grief, and everything else ending too in one fell swoop, losing everything. The loss is hard to imagine. As Stevo was already feeling the pit in his stomach of things closing off anyways, he could have never expected to find his best friend dead. Even more so after a night that seemed to go pretty well, despite telling himself he’s changed and he needs to move on.

This doesn’t even begin to explain the guilt he must’ve felt for yelling at him a little while prior, telling him to grow up and that SLC wasn’t Stevo’s home and it never was, but I also think this was a subtle way of saying that nothing mattered to Stevo anymore except for Bob because Bob had always been there. It had always been Bob. He could never see himself wanting to be there, and at the same time he could never see himself as being anywhere other than right next to Bob.

Even when Stevo was mentioning that maybe they were more different than he thought he still had all that love for Bob, they could get through every up and down and change the world threw at them together. Just them against everything in the end, that was definitely their order, the rules they abided by was being there by each other's side no matter what.

It was the end of all ends and nothing in the entire universe could’ve prepared Stevo for that. Nothing. And Bob even said he loved Stevo the day before he died and called him his brother.

Of course their friendship was close enough that even if he didn’t realize it, Stevo lashed out at Bob about that because it was safe to, it was a more personal anger instead of the whole being angry at everyone all the time thing. He had all those feelings welling up and all he could do with them was lash out. And to just know that he could do this, and know the next day there would be no hard feelings because that's how much they cared about each other, only to find that he couldn't just wake up and continue on with their lives like always. I don’t think Stevo felt safe with anyone else besides Bob. Sure he talked to people about punk things and such, but that wasn’t him, was it?

Stevo was angry to begin with because he cares. He didn’t want to lose Bob to Trish because Stevo was the one Bob loved first. He didn’t want to be left. He didn’t want to imagine Bob anywhere else than with him, by his side for the next thousand years. He was so fucking afraid too. He was scared for the ending to come. He was scared and he wanted Bob to be there to hold his hand.

And who else in the entire universe would Bob have taken to see his dad on his birthday with? No one else in the entire world would’ve been there with him other than Stevo. Bob apologizing to Stevo afterwards of the whole mess and then Stevo apologizing in return. That's love and trust. The trust with Bob's dad too was a lot, and especially when later after the party he’d been drugged, and he was crying and saying he isn't like his dad. Bob knowing after all these years his favorite person finally saw a side of his past he never let anyone see and was terrified this changed Stevo’s thoughts on who he was as a person, but obviously all Stevo saw was his best friend who needed a little more support than he thought before, but never saw Bob as genuinely crazy or less than because of that part of his life. They have the type of relationship where they had they could voice their feelings in the most ugly, terrible, raw way and wake up the next day knowing that they will still be there by the other’s side.

Stevo softened so much after seeing Bob's dad and I think a lot snapped into place, like Bob's love for Trish and such. Because it’s apparent Bob didn’t get that much and so the love he got from Stevo and Trish went miles long. Bob needed to pour himself into someone who loved him too. Honestly the whole ordeal made Stevo love Bob more, made him want to be in his life even more than before, if that were even possible. Bob's fear of Stevo’s thoughts on him changing is more proof that Stevo is a highly valued person in his life, and just a broken person at all. The feelings in that van afterwards were a lot to breathe through. The interaction of Stevo accusing Bob of being a poser for falling in love with Trish and then immediately following up saying he didn’t mean it proves that they know there’s never hard feelings between them, despite whatever bad shit could be said. And Bob knew this too, but Stevo just didn’t want his best friend to think he genuinely thought one bad thing about him. I think Stevo’s biggest fear was losing Bob and then it happened. That was the most feared thing that he wanted to push out of his mind because of the situation with Sean, but it happened anyway and it wrecked his world.

And when Mark pulled the gun on Bob. You can tell Stevo is scared out of his wits but he still yells at Mark to protect Bob in any way that he can make an effort to. He would’ve taken as many bullets as it took for him. Stevo would do anything for Bob, anything in the world. All Bob had to do was name it.

And, God, the excitement Stevo had after seeing Bob while he was in the hospital. The physical touch of play fighting with him. He adored him so entirely much. Stevo was safe with Bob and trusted him with his life just as much as he would’ve given it over to save Bob's. They were each other’s entire worlds and they evolved around one another.

It was like how Chris was talking about the cycle. Chaos and structure and it flip flops like that. That’s exactly Bob and Stevo as well.

At the end of the day, no matter if Stevo were a poser, or if Bob were a poser, love was the main contender of it all. Love was apparent and obvious in each individual thing that happened between them. Like yeah, they could’ve been a lot more different than they realized, but that was said, too, out of Stevo’s fear of the change and the possibility of losing Bob altogether. Stevo wanted to push until it happened or that the bubble burst, so it would happen already and he could get over the hurt as soon as he could. He couldn’t stand watching Bob slowly let go of things, and Stevo didn’t want to say he would’ve stayed through anything with Bob, but deep down, they both knew. It was engraved into their bones, an unspoken bound, a promise they both secretly kept and held one another to. Love was the baseline of it all, to love and to be loved, to love and to lose.

Maybe if Stevo could’ve voiced those fears sooner they could’ve been in a different place in their lives, still together but maybe less hurt, maybe a different hurt. All the what ifs of if they did things differently. They would have stayed together anyway, no matter their choices in life. That fear of losing Bob that Stevo pushed off indirectly leading to him losing Bob is tragic, something I’m sure he lays awake at night thinking about, if he had maybe had the guts to face his fears head on, then maybe his friend would still be right next to him to cheer him up, or maybe it was always going to happen.

It's a tragic thing for Stevo to me, because the more I deeply look at his character and his relationship with Bob, the more I think he could have BPD. Because of his feelings of fear with the losing but not wanting to face any of it, and the shame of admitting you so deeply care about this person. I think in the punk scene as well, Stevo had this warped vision on being able to voice your feelings and fears to someone you love. Especially with his parents, what a shitshow. His view on love, platonic or romantic or whatever else, was doomed from the beginning because he really did have no positive view on love and how it can succeed. Stevo didn’t have a reference point for that, and he sure as hell didn’t get taught it from anywhere. The lack of reference for what love can look like when it's good, it blinded him from the fact that he had good love right there with him and Bob, because admitting it meant admitting that it could also go away, and I don't think he could ever prepare for that. Separating himself from that idea in the end didn't help him prepare anyway like he cries out when he finds Bob there lifeless. Blocking himself out and not letting himself openly admit things didn’t prepare him any more for the loss of love than if he had accepted it sooner. No matter if he had negative views on it, his love was everything he had.

And I also headcanon Stevo as aromantic because of his whole fucked up view on love his entire life anyways. I think him being arospec explains a lot as well, and explains his “weirdly abnormal” love and attachment to Bob. I think him saying in the movie that he didn’t know if he was gay or asexual or whatever had to do with him being confused on his feelings about Bob because, yeah, surely that would throw him through a rabbit hole of confusion, huh? Especially around that time definitely.

I think the bottling of his emotions was also just not working as intended. He was wearing a poorly made mask and everyone could see the bits of him leaking out from behind it, and no one was better than Bob, of course. He had it in his head that he was keeping it cool, that he didn't care and showed that he didn’t care, and he was failing so hard in my eyes. It all just came out in a fiery anger until the end.

I believe that part of things was doomed from the very beginning. Things could’ve maybe been different, yes, but I think a dull ache of something would’ve never gone away. Maybe Stevo feeling guilty for thinking he’s trapping Bob to stay by his side while he’d rather do other things and be with better people, like Trish for example. I feel like so many things and possibilities went on in Stevo’s head and still do. It’s so much accumulated together that he doesn’t know what to do with it all, so it’s better to kind of say nothing, because he doesn’t know what the right thing is. He doesn’t want to fuck anything up more than it’s fucked up to begin with from the whole beginning.

I think he kind of grew bitter, too. His whole thing of Bob saying Stevo’s depressed and him denying it, then Trish saying Stevo had a big heart. And he says “I have a heart the size of a pea.” I feel like that sums a lot up. He was trying to not feel the pain of the end closing in, he wanted to detach himself from anything good that could’ve possibly come of anything at all. Even if he accepted the love he had in front of him, it was a bit too late by that point for saving. So he separated himself from any emotion at all, and especially whatever love he had. Because Stevo is nothing if not filled with love and the desire to do the right thing.

He was only fooling himself saying he didn't care and his heart was too small for love, and I'm sure he never really convinced himself either. He absolutely was hiding even from himself. He was so scared and confused that he just crumbled up into a ball that was a poorly made mask that even he believed to be pathetic and inevitably useless. He didn’t know what else to do, he didn’t want to turn to anyone because, fuck, people had enough of their own shit, didn’t they? What would it all matter if it wasn’t going to matter in the end anyways (under the belief the world was going to end and that the future was just a myth)?

Despite sewing himself shut, the finding of Bob's dead body ripped those seams open. It's like the floodgates opened and all hell broke loose. That was just the size of it, the crashing of the final acceptance that the love was there and now it was really gone, and he’d never get it back, and he would never be able to tell Bob that he loved him too. The separation didn’t help, it, in fact, made the whole situation worse. It’s really the whole thing of “if only I had known.”

I believe Trish saw Stevo more than Bob in this state, or at least she saw it first, and then Bob saw it, too. She cared because Bob cared and Bob didn’t really know that much about caring about someone else either, did he? And Stevo grew bitter because he was lost, so that’s why he got so angry. He was lost for words and lost for direction, and he was blaming himself for not coming to this conclusion sooner. He failed the system, he failed Bob, he failed himself. He was so broken by it that it turned him bitter and hateful and into a shell of a mask that could’ve been ripped off easily, but wasn’t possible for the circumstances.

People could see something was wrong, but all the people around him, besides Bob and I’d argue Trish, were too caught up in hating everything and everyone and betting on the world ending to care enough to make any attempts. Bob and Trish took him to that final party because they saw through it and knew he needed help, which Brandy was so perfect for.

I can see Trish talking Stevo up, because she sees him how Bob sees him obviously, and I think she does genuinely see Stevo as a good person. Trish talking up Stevo to Brandy and Brandy to Stevo, trying to make something magical happen in the wrong place and wrong time. Because, yeah, obviously Trish would say only the nicest things about Stevo and put lightly the fucked up situation.

But only hearing about the positives about a person, having a wonderful night that confirms these things, and then that same night watch as the ugly parts of his life comes out so quickly could be why she switched up so quickly, she had no warning, nothing told her his life was this bad. Saying someone is doing rough is just words, but seeing it with your own eyes changes things, and I don't think she was the kind of person to handle that at the time. Brandy seeing this messy part of Stevo ooze in the same night she met him, seeing the two sides of the coin that is Stevo, is definitely a lot to take in and consider when she wasn’t prepared for that. Coming from the family she does, it would make that she would’ve not ever seen anything like this, and not seen how messy and fucked up things can get, especially with her whole view on the punk scene and Stevo’s lifestyle choices up until that point. She kind of shattered his world in the same way she opened new doors. I view her more as that one person who changed his life and he was just another face in the crowd to her.

It felt like it was just a show of how even when he was doing better, he couldn't hide the things and fears he pushed off to be in the position to feel better. Bob was a representation of his biggest fears that night showing him that it's always going to sneak up and bite him in the ass if he just avoids it, even if the mask feels so normal that he believes himself that things are okay.

I also think it doesn’t make sense in the slightest that Stevo ended up marrying Brandy, I feel like that was a sole night to get his spirits up, despite how good she was for him in the grand scheme of things, in retrospect. He wasn’t ready for her at all, not in the way he needed to be with everything else going on and how damaged he’d become from the crash and burn. But so he lied to himself anyways, until he couldn’t anymore and was faced with the awful truth that he knew was going to ruin him anyway before he put the mask on.

It was like Brandy was only interested in Stevo when things were good in the bigger picture, but when things got a little messy, it was all lost. Even if one good thing happened for Stevo, that doesn’t erase the rest of the things that are fucking him up at every opportunity. Despite the paint on the rust, none of it was glamorous in the slightest. Deep down in Stevo, there was something rotting there and it was his unfaced fears. The tragedy of the calm before the storm, it’s like the thunderstorms as a warning for a hurricane coming in. It’s knowing this thing is coming and not knowing yet when, and it drives you nuts. Even though he wanted to just have it done with, to have it behind him, he also wanted to do anything he could to prevent it. He has the push and pull within himself too, some kind of haphazardness of indecisiveness. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Maybe years down the line he would eventually go back to SLC when he was ready and just so happened to see Brandy again, they could catch up and then something healthier that they are both ready for could bloom. Maybe when Stevo had done some major healing as well, but no chance they ever could’ve made it in the circumstances he was under the night of the party. The circumstances were more so of them both being young and lost and just grasping at anything good they could get, even if only for a night.

But I don't see Stevo ever looking back on that place. Maybe to possibly visit Bob’s grave, but nothing other than that. Because of his trauma attached to SLC, he’d want to leave it in the dust. This is just an if of if he even made it out of there. Because once he lost Bob, maybe he felt like that made SLC his home now, because that’s where Bob would forever be now.

#ender.txt #heart of mine #slc punk #slc punk 1998 #slc punk stevo #stevo levy #heroin bob #slc punk bob #slc punk trish #slc punk brandy #matthew lillard #character analysis

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