Over the last couple nights my wife and I watched all 4 hours of the excellent Adolescence on Netflix.
Excellent show. Excellent acting.
(Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers).
"Devastating" doesn't cut it. Hard sometimes for a teenage boy to see, perhaps, but the desires and anxieties he confronts are normal. And yet, somehow, through a combination of well-intentioned-but-clueless adults, a culture that fails to hit the right notes, and unfettered access to certain ideological rabbit holes, Jamie at some point finds and secretly commits to (what I suppose you might call) a terrible “masculine way forward”.
In true pickup-artist style, he “moves” on an older girl at her moment of “weakness”, judging her ripe for exploitation. Presumably winning (“claiming?”) an older girl serves as a prop for his low self esteem? When she rejects and publicly mocks him (accurately, although cruelly) online in coded language beyond adult understanding, he deals with the humiliation by following her and stabbing her to death with a hastily-borrowed kitchen knife.
The series raises many questions and does not allow space for trite answers. Dad has struggles with emotions, but that doesn’t really define him. Nor is he absent. Nor is he disrespectful or unloving to Jamie’s mother and sister. Jamie can talk through his feelings OK, but there is a disconnect between his online emotional reality and normal life. He is fractured and ultimately alienated from what I think could be termed “key masculine drives” and they control him in a hidden way and have found some kind of twisted satisfaction online. At no point in the series does he seem able to integrate the parts of himself. It’s not clear he ever will be able to.
Something I noticed in every episode was a certain ubiquitous male refusal to defer to appropriate female authority. Students are appallingly sweary and dismissive to teachers, but it’s worse towards the women teachers. And then, of course, Jamie’s own Andrew Tate-esque "pivot-to-negging" and angry outbursts when the inquiries of the court-appointed psychologist start to threaten his deeply guarded “male secrets”. The exact nature and extent of which we can only begin to guess.. entitlement..control… God knows.
By the end of the final episode Dad is left marooned in a strange absurdity (and we along with him): To one side immature lads graffiti his van and mock him, while others invite him into a bizarre secret alliance. To the other side, his (to him) “monster” son still reaches out for him as “dad”. Jamie is able to discern that he has failed his father’s expectations somehow (“Dad…I’m sorry”), but does he really understand, even seven months later, how, or why, what he did was wrong? I don’t think so.
Dad and wife Manda refer back to stories of school-disco childhood innocence to ground themselves, which is lovely and delights their daughter (despite herself). But I suppose their teenage world of getting a “frenchie” for being “good at holding hands” would not be intelligible for the (porn-addled?) young men who were not present in that scene.
The father, a good dad in so many ways (although not perfect) fundamentally lacks the resources to engage with a morally complex (“compromised?”) masculinity; he averts his eyes when his son misses a goal in football and the other dads laugh at him. He impulsively recoils from Jamie at one point. He has always struggled to connect to and feel his own anger in a straightforward way, so instead it forces it’s way out and controls him in occasional outbursts (we hear about some of these, and we see a little bit of it too).
Is all of this an internalised over-compensation for his own father’s violent bullying of him? I think so.
This, I think, is presented as the root-of-shame and blind spot that was ruthlessly exploited by…. something… to steal his son away. But this is a penny that has only just begun to drop for him as the series ends. A few weeks before the start of his son’s trial for murder.
We are left weeping with Dad as he tucks his baby boy’s teddy bear into the now-vacant bed. Next to the computer he should never have allowed in his son’s bedroom. With it’s unfiltered internet and social media connection that the UK government should not allow for children either.
Out of his depth. Devastated. Only beginning to grasp how it went wrong.
Starting a journey that we as a society urgently need to start walking properly as well.