What Makes a Kid Want to Kill Somebody?
A scene from Sunday night’s Desperate Housewives. A do-gooder neighbor reminds an alcoholic single mom that kids need their mommies home, not out looking for men in bars.
Yeah, there are spoilers.
I suppose it’s the stuff of forensics and other fields, and even though I rarely have a murderer telling me his problems, I do hear a kid say, on occasion, “I want to kill someone.” Even, so and so. “I want to kill so and so.”
This is never a good moment, hearing this, because you have to decide who to call, and among the calls is the one that warns the potential victim. That’s the law. There are very few situations in which a mental health professional has to break confidentiality, but this is one of them.
So last night, about 8:00 pm, we’re eating dinner. I watch as FD reads the paper, watch the fork hit the mouth, and in another corner, a kid, biologically related, the other eater, is staring at a computer screen, trying to find the error in his code, hundreds and hundreds of lines of program code. He’s feeling a little homicidal himself.
I don’t feel much like sitting, and as luck would have it, Desperate Housewives is about to begin. I like the show, mainly because I like some of the actors, and I like that the women, the wives, are forced to make quick decisions that will affect just about everything important in family life. And I like that when the story ends, somebody’s trying to do something nice for somebody else.
There’s always at least one really creepy, dangerous person on the show, which helps me raise my anxiety threshold. I’m reading a slasher novel, too, just to do that.
Anyway, the cringe, the tension in Desperate Housewives is generally well-done, not gratuitous, and the plot can keep my interest. Like last week a teenager (we like him) is working a counter, pouring a latte in the corner coffee shop, talking to a customer old enough to be his father. Actually, the guy really is his father, but the boy doesn’t know this. His mother has made sure to hide this information, has run away, assumed a new identity. She knows bio-dad is a dangerous man.
So bio-dad is befriending the kid in the coffee shop and has confided the story line of a novel he’s supposedly writing. Now he asks his innocent son, “So what should I have him (the spurned father in the novel) do for revenge, now that he’s caught up with them?”
The kid thinks. The pause is pregnant.
“To get to the mother,” he suggest, “I’d have him get to the kid, get to her through the son.”
“That‘s what I’m thinking,” his father replies.
Cringe stuff. Anyway, this week we get a new plot, a completely new set of characters, one that is going to tie up many of the unsolved, ongoing mysteries on the show. “Epiphany” takes us through the life of a little boy, Eddie, whose father has left him at the age of four to his mother, a verbally abusive woman who is addicted to alcohol.
No matter what Eddie does, no matter what he thinks or says, she’s contemptuous and ridiculing. Having Eddie has ruined her life. She laughs at him, smirks at him, belittles him. It’s so well-done, so real, what you see, even if it is television, is actually a fine enactment of what happens in emotionally abusive, verbally abusive homes. We don’t call these homes toxic for nothing.
Eddie searches for nurturing people, and on Wisteria Lane there’s no shortage of these. But he makes the mistake of taking the relationships too seriously, thinking older women might really like him, or might like him for their daughters. And when he risks intimacy, when he tells a female, any female, about his feelings for her, she inevitably laughs, too. Like his mom.
Nobody takes him seriously. He just needs someone to love him. You think this is trite? I wish it were.
And wouldn’t you know? He’s had some very serious anger problems for a long, long, time. He’s a good kid, just can’t manage his anger very well. And yeah, he’s the killer in the neighborhood. One of them.
All I can say is, I liked it. And if I were on the jury, I’d go with the insanity defense. For some reason, my guess is, they’ll never pick me.
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Here’s the summary from the ABC website, but if you have time, watch the whole show:
We meet Eddie’s mom Barbara, a mean, slovenly drunk. She raids his room, looking for a bottle of Scotch, but instead finds his scrapbook with the clippings about the Fairview murders.We flashback to when Eddie was just four, and his father left his mother — after loudly proclaiming that he’d never wanted any of this, including Eddie. Mary Alice tries to befriend her, but Barbara isn’t interested. Mary Alice stops by one day to give Eddie a teddy bear and finds him home alone while his mom is out drinking. She lectures Barbara about not putting her needs ahead of her son, but the lesson clearly doesn’t take.
Gaby first meets Eddie when she moves to Wisteria Lane and finds a lonely Eddie inside her empty house — he’d been sneaking in to play there since the previous owners moved out. He ends up coming over every day because Barbara has a new boyfriend. When he surprises Carlos and Gaby in the tub, Carlos orders Gaby to “cut him loose” and start making friends with other women, not nine-year-old boys. Gaby wants to go talk to Barbara, but Carlos advises her, “We don’t want to be known as the nosy neighbors.” After Gaby tells him they can’t be friends anymore, Eddie grabs a BB gun and shoots a bird.
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