Political Noise and Quiet in We Need to Talk About Kevin and Night Moves
This is an unpublished prompt response I wrote for a class in the fall of 2024.
The sound design of films can impart their political messaging as much as dialogue and visuals. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011) uses noise to explore the dehumanization of its mother and son characters, Eva (Tilda Swinton) and Kevin (Ezra Miller). Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, 2013) on the other hand, uses sonic minimalism to interrogate activist methods and responsibility for actions.
We Need to Talk About Kevin features a sequence spanning multiple locations and times, connected sonically. It begins in prison as Eva leaves a visit with Kevin, another prisoner screaming. As she walks out, into the light of day, the film transitions to Eva giving birth. The prisoner’s screams become her screams. This is accompanied by the thumping of her — or perhaps Kevin’s — heartbeat and an eerie, echoic voiceover pulling her through the birth. Logically, we understand this voice to be a nurse, but its obscure origin and place in the diegesis give it an omniscient, foreboding presence.
Eva’s screams blend into Kevin’s as he cries in his father’s arms while she sits despondent in a hospital bed, the room barren and impersonal. The baby’s screams transfer to the whir of a power tool as Eva tries to scrape red paint off her new house, almost 18 years after Kevin’s birth and more around the time of the prison visit. The mechanic scream becomes baby Kevin’s screams once again as Eva tries to comfort him in their New York City apartment.
Unsuccessful, she takes him outside where his wails mix with the noise of traffic. He pierces the sounds of the city, not belonging in Eva’s domain where she is soon forced out of for Kevin’s sake. Eva stands in front of a construction crew, the pounding of a jackhammer downing out Kevin’s cries. She is relieved.
Several associations are made through this sequence. Firstly, Eva’s situation of motherhood is established as a prison through the linking of her with the prisoner and her hospital room with the prison.
In an interview with the film’s sound designer, Paul Davies, he describes the family’s later ranch house as alienating. He and the interviewer compare the house — a beacon of domesticity — to prison (87).
Eva and Kevin are also linked through this sequence. Her pain becomes his pain which becomes her’s once again — a piece of the film’s doubling that ties the character’s actions together and questions their cycle of strife.
Kevin’s cries are also associated with mechanical tools, like the scraper and the jackhammer. Eva uses the scraper to remove red paint, a color motif that reminds her of the inescapable nature of blood — both the violence of her son and their relationship, and the lineage they share.
Soon after, as Kevin’s cries blend with the jackhammer, so too is his humanity. To Eva, he is a nuisance to be quieted, a noise to get used to, a part of the societal machine that has taken over her life.
Night Moves relishes in quiet — most notably in the scene where the terroristic trio of Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), Dena (Dakota Fanning), and Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard) drive away as the bomb they set explodes. They enter the car in the dark, the only sound being their heavy breaths.
After a failed attempt, the car starts, its hum entering the sound mix. The characters and audience only hear the explosion, far off sonically, and cannot see it. The camera stays intently on the trio as Harmon laughs and they settle into a calm.
Dawn E. Hall writes that the “audiences hear their heavy breathing, the crunching of sticks and gravel, and the tension filled moment of the truck ignition choking—all in anticipation of seeing water burst through an exploded dam” (115). The quietness of the explosion subverts the promises of the film’s thriller genre.
It presents a key question of Night Moves, which is later presented by a character in criticism of the trio’s act: that they have centered theatrics over meaningful results in the environmental movement. The quietness of the explosion, in part, pushes back on this. There were no theatrics. Josh, Dena, and Harmon do not seem heroic or brave or even impassioned.
But the quietness does interrogate the morality of their deed. The sound design and camera situate the trio as physically distant from their crime and thus, emotionally distant from its repercussions which come to haunt Josh. The sonic minimalism of these scene asks the audience to consider the ramifications of actions that seem easy and clean.
Works Cited
Hall, Dawn E. “Expansion: Night Moves,” ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt, 2018.
“Paul Davies talks about Kevin… and Ratcatcher, Hunger, Love is the Devil, The American, Johnny Greenwood and Robert Bresson,” The New Soundtrack, 2012.