We Need to Talk about Kevin is a 2011 film adapted from Leonel Shriver’s 2003 novel of the same name. The film stars John C. Riley, Ezra Miller and my perennial fashion favorite, Tilda Swinton. In the movie/book, Kevin (Ezra Miller) is a troubled teen who murders his father and sister with a high-tech crossbow and goes on a killing spree at his high school. When we finally leave Kevin, he is turning eighteen, evidently nervous as he awaits his transfer to an adult prison to serve out the rest of his term.

His mother, Eva (Tilda Swinton), formerly a successful travel writer, is left reeling in the aftermath. It emerges that she had never bonded with him in the first place (perhaps her maternal instinct was trying to tell her her something? Or perhaps it was her biological rejection that left him traumatized?). The story traces the early signs of Kevin’s sociopathy through a series of letters from Eva to her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly), culminating in the massacre of innocents. For the record, I haven’t seen the film yet—I’m just summarizing other commentaries I’ve read.

Oh yeah, and the family’s last name is Katchadourian. Translation: they’re Armenian.

Needless to say, some of you are having a hard time swallowing this particular depiction of Armenians, one of the few that we have on record after Cher and the Kardashians. It’s an inglorious and not altogether accurate way of marking our entry into American pop culture. Other stereotypes of our people run the gamut from Glendale thugs to Tehran-style rhinoplasty to “Huh? Is that like Albanian?”

To add insult to injury, no actual Armenian actors were cast in the production (that’s right, suck it Atom Egoyan). To be sure, Miller is dark and moody enough to pull off that young Keanu Reeves playing an Armenian playing a Smith Western look (translation: I’d beat). On that note, doesn’t guitarist Max Kakacek look kinda like a young John C. Reilly? But my beloved Swinton leaves me dry. Apparently, the producers’ idea of Byzantine stateliness is an applique of black hair dye over stony Saxon phenotypes. But wait, I’m confused—that’s her married name, does that mean her hubby’s the Armenian one? I mean, an Armo unironically named ‘Franklin’ with the face of a medieval Austro-Hungarian peasant? Me thinks not.

And then there’s the issue of intentionality. We Armenians accept that Medicare fraud is practically the national pastime, but the cold-blooded slaughter of children, and worse, family members in way that is distinctly nihilistic (Nietzsche) and nineties (Columbine)? Now that’s unthinkable. In the absence of God, we still have our collective memory.

I don’t know what Shriver’s experience with Armenians is: whether he chose this surname because it meant something to him empirically or because it provided a sufficiently ambiguous alternative to ‘Johnson’ or ‘Smith.’ (There is a reason that Heller’s Yossarian is ‘Assyrian’ and not, say Ashkenazi.) In other words, was this choice purely incidental or part of a larger personal commentary on a small and relatively obscure ethnic group that was then unthinkingly translated onto the big screen? But then again, there is nothing inadvertent or accidental about the Hollywood marketing machine: it takes everthing into account, and so this name made sense from some overwhelming perspective, if only because it gave the design team the go-ahead to transform Anglo ice princess Swinton into a swarthy shrew.

If you want my opinion, I suspect this has little to do with Armenians themselves, and more with the catch-all notion of the Other. Something tells me that Arabs wouldn’t have gone over so well. Armenians, on the other hand, are like Muslims, but with the benefit of Christianity on their side. (Good luck explaining to your audience that there is such a thing as Christian Arabs.) Meanwhile, Kevin is literally an “other” in his family’s midst. His motives are no more clear than those of an essentially mysterious and potentially hostile foreign race.

Strange then, that the Katchadourians are portrayed in such squeaky-clean, all-American terms—there is no hummus in this house—that their ethnic identity seems unnatural. That is to say, there are no stereotypes here, except for those that expressly don’t apply to Armenians. The new-agey professions, the minimal decors, even Eva’s coldness as a contrast to the prevailing image of the Mediterranean mother as traditional, old-fashioned, involved to the point of stifling the child. All of these things are not only distinctly non-Armenian, but distinctly non-specific, more a simulacrum of Hollywood perversity than anything else. What actual family functions like this—as a pastiche of empty cultural signifiers? This mixing of metaphors is perhaps above all else a testament to Shriver’s dubious literary ability, but I haven’t read the book, so I can’t really comment.

It is this avoidance of specificity that is the greatest affront to our Armenian-ness, not the conspicuous lack of Armenian actors or the fact that the Armenian protagonist is also a murderous sociopath. We ourselves are the first diagnose our particular cultural inadequacies: our baroque emotional registers, our intense family dynamics, our cheap sentimentality, our poor taste, our meddling, our covetousness, our hedonism, our criminality. We make light of them the best we know how. The flipside of this is the reason Armenians are such a bright and artistic, if unrealized, nation. We are perceptive to psychological nuance so the spotty pattern-matching throws us off. There is even an unintentional grain of truth here. Armenian youths, especially those from former Soviet Republics, are frequently what you’d call ‘disturbed.’ I’m pretty sure if you ran a census, Armenians, like Jews, would show elevated rates of mental illness relative to everyone else. You might say it comes with the territory.  

Look, I’m not here to cry racism, mostly because, if nothing else, Armenians deserve an honest kick in the ass every once in a while. But the idea that a young Armenian man, imbued with the ethical urgency of his past, could exist outside of his family and outside of his history in a dystopian, post-Columbine landscape of Big-Gulps, gas stations and existential alienation, i.e. be an American, doesn’t seem rational, at least not yet. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.