Misunderstanding Adolescence

Like everybody else on Earth, I watched Adolescence recently and liked it very much. Brilliant television that sparks debate after watching. Unfortunately most of the online debate has little to do with what the filmmakers intended. The writers and the director are on record stating that their ultimate goal was for parents to question what their children are exposed to when they’re online and to be more communicative with them, rather than seeing mobile devices as a godsend to get the kids out of their hair. According to some studies, adolescents spend about 7 hours a day on their mobile devices and computers. That’s plenty of time to get influenced by the wrong crowd and develop weird thought processes that might lead to unspeakable acts such as the one committed by the 13 year old boy, Jamie, in this 4 episode Netflix series.

As the description of my blog states, I was a latchkey kid raised by television, so I know a thing or two about spending loads of time alone and not having the proper guidance during those formative years. It was TV that replaced whatever guidance was lacking from my parents and from the teachers at the school I went to, which back then still had corporal punishment on a weekly/monthly basis. Thankfully, nearly all my screen time was devoted to TV and console games and personal computers without multiplayer; I didn’t have access to the dark corners of the web until I was 14 years old. My “improper guidance” came from the likes of MacGyver, Magnum PI, The Dukes of Hazzard, Remington Steele, Arnold movies, Stallone movies – far from ideal role models but infinitely better than Reddit groups in which toxic worldviews fester.

Unusually for a modern TV series, Adolescence doesn’t suffer from intolerable writing aimed at casual viewers. If you leave it on in the background while you bake a cake you won’t have clue as to what is going on – just like it should be. Unfortunately by today’s low standard of viewership, this is more of a curse than a blessing.

After watching all 4 episodes I was ready to click on a clip of the show on Instagram – nearly all reels are from the third episode with the therapist which is a masterpiece that will be studied in psychology classes for years to come. It was when I looked at the comments that I realized that many viewers didn’t understand some key elements of the show, either because they didn’t pay the necessary attention or because years of TV series spoon-feeding the key takeaways have dumbed the audience down. What follows are examples of comments that were thumbed-up hundreds of times.

SPOILERS AHEAD

“I kept hoping Jamie was innocent until the last episode when he confessed” – To this I can only say rewatch the entire show because it is made immensely clear at the end of the first episode that Jamie is indeed guilty of the heinous crime. The show is about why the crime happened, not if. Talk about missing the point entirely. The confession which comes in the finale, over a year later in the story, is mostly about Jamie finally being ready to verbalize to his father that he is guilty. Obviously they both knew that he was because a year prior they had watched together the CCTV footage of the murder taking place.

“Jamie had bad parents” – The writers went out of their way in the final episode to show that Jamie was raised by good parents and that he had a caring sister whom Jamie himself describes as “clever.” There’s a reason the writers didn’t make Jamie an only child. They want the viewers to come to the conclusion that these good parents could have questioned what their son was doing all those hours alone in his bedroom, and that they could have intervened before it was too late.

“Jamie killed the girl because he had a bad temper like his dad” – The show makes it clear that Stephen Graham’s character has issues managing serious emotions, like when he gets rough with his daughter’s bullies after they vandalize his van and then follow the family around, but it takes a lot of serious provocation to get him there. The takeaway is that a temper alone does not lead to such murder, but it is a factor.

“The therapist was trying to get Jamie to confess” – A the end of the day Jamie is just a kid who by that point is paranoid every time he talks to an adult, thinking they want him to confess, as if the CCTV footage of the murder taking place wouldn’t be enough for any jury to convict him. But therapists are not detectives. The therapist’s job was simply to judge whether Jamie understood how serious the crime was, what the repercussions mean for the victim, what the repercussions mean for him, and importantly she was there to decide whether Jamie is showing remorse for his actions. As soon as she has those answers she gets the hell out of Dodge.

“Jamie was not being bullied” – Did you watch the episode that takes place at the school? The whole point of that episode is that bullying was what precipitated the murder. Didn't you see the sequence when the victim’s best friend savagely beats Jamie’s best friend? That’s the kind of company the victim kept. At that school bullying and revenge porn were commonplace. Did you miss the cops questioning if the kids even learn anything at that chaotic school? Since the victim is not there to express and defend her reasons, the third episode with the psychologist explains the victim’s motives: Jamie had tried to prey on her weakness when nude photos of her had been shared all over the school. But she didn’t just call him out on this predatory behaviour, she did so on social media in order to very publicly ridicule him, and loads of their school friends pressed “Like” on her comments. Ridiculing people on social media constitutes cyber-bullying even if one feels it is deserved. Of course Jamie’s immense overreaction to it is incomprehensible to us, but the writers wanted cyber-bullying to be part of the debate. Those who merely pointed this out in the Instagram comments were accused of promoting toxic masculinity, which leads me to think that in this particular case the lack of comprehension is more politically motivated than anything else.

To be clear, these were not isolated comments. Watching multiple reels of this show on Instagram and YouTube, I was surprised at how little modern audiences comprehend. Adolescence does not feature some cryptic David Lynch style storytelling. This is a straight-forward drama that unfolds after a murder has been committed, just like your typical police procedural or murder mystery would. Who knows, maybe the one single take per episode filming is too much for the distracted audience to keep up with.