As per my Babygirl review, I've been ruminating on the concept of catharsis and whether it's something that is owed to the audience. With that film, I found its all-too-neat and tensionless storytelling frustrating, specifically because it seemed to be terrified to shame or unseat the audience with compelling conflict. More than ever, our tastes have become dictated by algorithms catered to our personal preferences with the intent of keeping us engaged and when we're not raging over pointless nothingness, we are being siloed away from our peers with beige specificity. Following suit are a new generation of storytellers who are being instructed to mould to the streaming model of media production and tick demographic boxes rather than tell stories that are full-bodied and messy.
Topicality, as a result, becomes a major selling point of a new TV show or movie and, as cynical as ever, it's not because someone had a humanistic approach to these issues, but rather, these companies seeing who can be the first to profit from the degrading attention spans and dwindling tethers to empathy that have been specifically cultivated by social media.
I've never been fully sold on the idea that simply broaching a question is interesting on its own and I'm definitely the last to argue that bringing awareness to an issue is the same as being incisive. We're fictionalising the world as a mode of art. We're not creating PSAs for scared parents who don't know what to do with the young men they're raising.
Whenever a TV show goes viral, despite my curiosity, I tend to avoid it at all costs. I'm only sometimes a snob who believes their opinions and gatekeeping is very correct but I often find that it's more that there are certain topics that are both very buzzy and excessively though deceptively dense, that which cannot be contained or finalised with a 4 episode mini-series. No one is (or at least no one should be) asking media produced by conglomerates to be praxis, but it is necessary to expect a deft hand when narrativizing culturally relevant issues or else we run the risk of allowing any commentary about any topic to be seen as 'good' simply because it's gesturing at something the audience has seen a new headline about.
I've found myself waiting for the buzz to die down before broaching, if only to allow myself to savour what is supposedly a must-see, history-making piece of art. Timelessness is not a virtue in every case but waiting until everybody has stopped having an opinion on something to see if it holds up to scrutiny even a week after its release is, generally, a good practice to stop me wasting my time for fear of not being in the loop. Gone are the days of the binge-watch for me. My aim is to cultivate my tastes and cater to them with intention, a practice that has prevented me from wasting hours on stuff that I don't like or even really remember (I'm looking at you, infamous true crime docuseries, whichever one you were).
In a myriad of ways, misogyny has never been more relevant or more profitable on either end of the spectrum. Between trad-wives, Andrew Tate and the manosphere, or TERFS and the absurd notion that banning trans youth from sports will protect young girls from harm, we've entered a uniquely distressing era of gender psychosis, only stoked and magnified by the ghouls running the various social media sites, funneling whichever moral panic you fancy directly into your brain every day all the time. Never has it seemed more dangerous to be staring at the pain rectangle, also known as your mobile phone, than right now.
This is the context under which Adolescence raptured its audience, who are unsurprisingly looking for any kind of answers to what seems like a runaway train that we are already too late in stopping. How have we lost control of our young men and what can be done to solve it? Unfortunately, this compelling set of 4 hours will not save the world, bring closure or even really satisfy your urge to see justice take place. In a lot of ways, it seeks to frustrate everyone who could be watching looking for answers as well as those are just looking for something quick and satisfying to breeze through. It's a show that refuses closure and simplicity, and it remains wooly if this was the correct approach for a topic this culturally relevant.
Adolescence centres on a 13 year old boy, Jamie, who is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie. Each episode takes the audience through the schism this seemingly out of nowhere violence has caused the community, but especially Jamie's family, who are focused on for most of it. By shooting every episode in one continuous take, the camera is allowed to float through the family home, the police station, the school, like a ghost, powerless to impact, slow down or change the course of events, forced to watch on as these adults reckon with their actions, and lack thereof, in preventing misogynistic violence to seep into and take hold of their youth.
To describe the series as at odds with easy answers feels like an undestatement at times. Adolescence is both disgusted at its violence and the authorities in charge of dealing with it. Particular attention is paid to the manipulative techniques of the police and the blasé attitude of the security at the facility where Jamie is sent to await his trial. It's a series that is very distressed by the endless ways that people charged with handling cases such as these are oblivious, unequipped and unfeeling. To put it bluntly, it's not a series that presumes the prison system is going to aid Jamie in becoming a person who understands the gravity of his actions, or that the police are going to be able to heal the families whose lives have been permanently affected by this violence.
When I watched Gus Van Sant's Elephant for the first time, I remember feeling like it was a film trying to interpret a tragedy as it was happening, fruitlessly grasping at easy answers but giving the audience none of the satisfcation of closure. This film was famously based the Columbine massacre, a performance of public violence that seemed to be venerated through conspiracy theories and rumours of the shooters being gay Nazis who were radicalised by violent video games. The film coalesces these theories and leaves it up to the audience to interpret the truth, asserting that it really doesn't matter why it happened but that it did and nothing was done in time to stop it. Adolescence operates from a similar perspective, that the criminal system asks for easy answers to complex layered questions and leaves victims, perpetrators and the public reeling with its inability to find the fault that it promises to find. With no one prepared to take responsibility, it's just a perpetual search quest. Truly, the banality of misogyny and a bruised ego cannot be it? There must be more. And yet.
What is insidious about misogyny, much like any other kind of naturalised oppression, is that to those people who benefit from it, most of it can't be articulated without seeming as though you are complaining about literally nothing.
Why should I have to stop using overly-friendly terms of endearment like 'love' or 'sweetheart' to women I'm not close with? How is that offensive? I'm literally just being nice.
The effortlessness of such misogyny, the everyday of it doesn't seem as though it's worth remarking on. And it's the inability to identify micro-aggressions without seeming crazy, pedantic or overly sensitive that prevents the average man from identifying latent misogyny in themselves. If your dad/brother/boss could be pushed to be more misogynistic, doesn't it steal away the image of the moustache-twirling mask-wearing sociopath looking to rape and murder you? Without the ability to other those who may harm us, we then have to look at the way that, structurally speaking, the call is coming from inside the house.
As someone currently working their way through Twin Peaks, it's interesting to compare the ways the two shows seem to take responsibility for the violence portrayed. Where Twin Peaks is adamant that everyone who knew about Laura Palmer's troubles and did nothing is complicit, Adolescence feels like a game of hot potato, where no one is ready or willing to be responsible for Katie's death - not Jamie, not the school, not the parents. The lack of ownership over what is a problem that feels ineffable, that presents itself everyday but which cannot ever be dealt with, is far more unnerving than what could have been a simple police procedural. Misogyny is deadly and looms over these characters like a shadow. Its lack of corporeality is understandably unsatisfying.
If the final episode can be summed up, it very much mimics the experience of watching your dad get very angry in public and being paralysed with unease because you don't know how to deal with it. And the worst part is neither does he! The whole show is explicitly in response to the moral panic around men and their mental health and their swinging emotions and the effect the actions taken through these emotions have on the world, but more specifically on women. However, many of the doomerist perspectives I've seen on the show feel entirely antithetical to those final 10 minutes. It is multitudinous, discouraging easy answers and knee-jerk responses, arguing very much that it takes a village to raise the next generation. So, when its audience falls into hysterics, saying that there is no hope, it feels as though people are not engaging with the show where it's at, and I do hold Netflix, the binging-and-watch-this-with-your-phone-in-your-hand platform, responsible.
Adolescence is not a perfect show but it is a thoughtful one that requires an audience willing to respond to it as a conversation starter and not much more. It's a series of bewilderment, where no one is really sure what is happening, especially not Jamie. And it's this bewilderment that renders these characters unable to be held accountable for their role in this violence. We are left with bloodless blood, a chalk outline in place of a body, and to some people, that's just not conclusive enough.
*
Further Reading:
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World (2023, directed by Radu Jude)
Presence (2024, directed by Steven Soderbergh)