What "Kevin Can F*ck Himself" Reveals about Power, Abuse and Relationships
(Warning: Incredible amount of spoilers ahead. I’m doing my best not to explain the plot, but I’m definitely using parts of it to make a point)
AMC’s, “Kevin can Fuck Himself,” is, in my opinion, a brilliant piece of art critiquing many of the tropes of the long beloved sitcom style of show. The show is set in two distinct POVs; the familiar bright, jovial multi-camera perspective set to look like it’s performed in front of a studio audience, and a much darker, more jaded and realistic perspective most commonly through the eyes of Kevin’s wife, Allison. While it seems as if the show's central point is on the dehumanization and degradation of female characters on historically “wholesome,” cable television, there is an immense amount of detail placed into every scene that speaks to much more common, everyday dynamics within couples, relationships, families and communities that are both painful and beautiful to watch.
Substance Abuse and Perception
Nearly every character within this show has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and at several points that practice is exposed as a path that can lead to far more destructive habits very quickly. The abuse of alcohol heightens or even directly causes many of the problems present within this story. We see this in small ways, when Allison tries to pressure her freshly sober aunt into drinking with her, and in tragic ways, with the accidental death of a character who struggled with alcoholism throughout the entire show.
What’s so tragic about the substance abuse within this show is that their behavior is so normalized by everyone around them that it would be nearly impossible to get any one of these characters to see their behavior as abnormal or even harmful. As a viewer, it feels alarming to watch a person choose to continue to numb themselves as the problems in their life mount to ever more terrifying heights, but through the perspective of these people’s lived experience, that is the way to deal with it.
Conditional Violence
This show is rife with violence that is incredibly hard to watch at times, but even as the viewer, this violence is commonly justified within the context of the story. Sometimes, this is just through the perspective of the characters, when Patty attacks a stranger on behalf of Allison, or when Allison’s motivations regarding her husband genuinely seem to be the only viable option to her. Other times, the importance of this violence is so tangible it’s felt by everyone experiencing it, even the viewer. This is the other time Patty attacked someone for Allison, or the time Neil attacked someone to defend his best friend. Within the context of substance abuse, poverty, and a myriad of different abusive relationships at play, the characters consistently become desperate enough to act out in the most destructive ways, commonly harming the people closest to them.
Unfortunately, most of this violence does feel justified as it’s playing out. Within the abusive web Kevin wraps everyone in his life around, the violent reactions of the people he’s using as playthings seem natural, given that it’s the harmful dynamics present that are pushing them to act out in more and more extreme ways. Even more unfortunately, this behavior doesn’t exist in a vacuum with Kevin as the sole object of these consequences. Throughout the show, and much more commonly throughout reality, abuse doesn’t just dissolve trust and respect within the relationship that is affected, but can motivate a person into falling deeper into disrepair, harming every other aspect of their lives as well.
The Cyclical Nature of Abuse
Allison’s character is the best example of how abuse can change people. Allison is a victim of her husband's emotional, financial and (implied) physical abuse, but that does not mean she is a “good” person. She is deeply resentful of others as a projection of her own insecurities in life, and this dynamic does not only exist within her psyche. She rekindles a high school affair she had seemingly out of frustration and boredom (several decades wasn’t enough time to reflect on why that was wrong), and it seems to fuel her ego that she’s sleeping with a man who’s married to a woman who encapsulates everything she wishes she could be. While she does experience a redemption arc throughout the series, what we see first is her adopting Kevin’s habits of manipulating people to use them for opportunistic schemes to destroy her own husband. It’s legitimately painful to watch that at the same time as Patty and Allison are building a trusting and intimate relationship (seemingly a first for both of them), Allison is struggling with using the communication tactics she’s internalized from her life with Kevin to manipulate Patty to act in accordance with her desires. At one point, she even learns to manipulate Kevin for exactly this passion, as she realizes it’s easier to let him do the dirty work by tricking him into believing it’s in his best interest.
This is exactly how abuse perseveres throughout lifetimes. Victims have to recognize themselves as such in order for the actions taken against them to be seen as unjust. If this doesn’t happen, and instead a person internalizes the abuse they face as normal or justified, they are far more likely to repeat those patterns of abuse in their lives. Simply, people can’t do better until they know better, and until they do, they’re gonna do what they know. This extends far past romantic relationships, and in truth, the best example of this dynamic is something far more biological; our relationship with our parents. I’d wager to bet that the Venn Diagram of people who have been spanked as a child and who believe spanking is a justified punishment is a near perfect circle (not accounting for the detractors who grew past the perspective they grew up with). This isn’t because they’ve been knocked with sense, it’s because the normalization of violence when you’re young (especially when it’s routinely used against you), is very likely to result in you believing your urge to hit your children is justified, because of the experiences you were conditioned to accept when you were their age.
This is where I will lose a lot of people, because abuse isn’t a problem that we readily discuss and prescribe others with, like depression, unemployment, or even the common cold. Abuse and abusers occupy a completely separate part of our brain, roped off for the most evil among us with little to no redeeming qualities. But in creating dissonance between abuse and our life, we effectively put on a pair of rose colored glasses to continue feeling comfortable without having to make many changes or challenge our current perceptions. Refusing to understand abuse as a learned mechanism to establish and maintain power within your role in other people’s lives, and instead thinking of it as some intangible social ill made up of evil people plotting on the demise of their loved ones, isn’t going to help anyone root out the abusive tendencies present in their life and work to build healthy alternatives.
This brings us to the third dynamic present in “Kevin Can Fuck Himself,” that holds an immense amount of truth for our lives;
The Sticky Mess Between “Good and Bad”
Just like real people, the distinction of “good,” and “bad,” is incredibly unclear throughout this show, and characters bob and weave between that binary as the show progresses. For example, my favorite character, Patty, learns to advocate for herself and begin living based on her own desires throughout the course of the series and helps Allison escape an abusive relationship, but it’s also true that she got several of her salon clients addicted to oxycontin as their drug dealer. Even this act is incredibly blurry on the moral scale within the context of the show, as we see Patty’s genuine interest in helping her community manage the pain they cannot find assistance with through the proper channels. Her brother, Neil, exemplifies the inherent complexity of the moral “value,” of human beings because initially we see him as a stupid, violent henchman riding on Kevin’s coattails, but it becomes clear that he is a man struggling with an alcohol addiction and PTSD while having no intimate and supportive connections in his life. While this added context doesn’t excuse Neil’s violent behavior, it colors him more as a person struggling with several different facets of his life (that we see him begin to work through), instead of a perpetually broken, “bad” person.
(if you want to watch the show skip this next paragraph i can’t help but talk about this part)
Kevin also exemplifies the tendency of humans to grow into their own growth, but it serves as a cautionary tale. During the finale, when he finally faces the consequences that have been accumulating nearly his entire life, he loses himself in his own destructive patterns. We see him drink to excess while falling apart, before he literally burns himself to death, an especially poetic ending for a man with a pension for arson. In this way, Kevin’s own demons killed him.
We never remain stagnant in this life, we either sink deeper into the patterns we have become accustomed to, or we put in the work to shift them.
We see how abusive mechanisms slowly creep into our lives and make a home among our behavior as Allison settles into Kevin’s deeply manipulative nature to trick him into covering her tracks. Ultimately, she chooses to leave, but it would be easy to picture how Allison would develop as a person that shares more and more in common with Kevin the longer that she is subject to his manipulation. “Good,” and “bad,” are tricky distinctions to force humans inside of, but throughout the course of the show, we see how stepping out of learned responses and into vulnerability releases people from the grip of abusive dynamics.
The Power of Relationships
The most uplifting aspect of this show by far is how it explores the redemptive power of relationships. Each person afflicted by Kevin’s behavior finds solace in other people; Allison and Patty in each other, Neil in Diane, and Pete in Lorraine. The only person who doesn’t experience this throughout the series is Kevin himself, because he never gets to the place where he’s able to take accountability for his actions and grow past his destructive behavior. This is the light that exists within this incredibly dark story; other people are both the problem and the solution. Allison and Patty breaking past the dynamics that had been cemented in their lives and expressing themselves honestly to each other created a domino effect that liberated their entire community from those abusive power dynamics.
In real life, this transformation doesn’t occur over the course of 2 seasons, neatly wrapped up with the “villains,” death and the hint of a new relationship budding from the ashes, but that doesn’t mean this knowledge doesn’t ring true offscreen. While other people are most commonly the cause of our greatest pain, they are also the pathway to our largest spouts of growth. We are far more alike than we are different, and we hold the tools necessary to heal each other. It is a lifelong process, but we are not alone in our pursuit, and there are always more people for us to meet if we feel as if we have nowhere to grow.