I was dreading it but knew I had to do it. I was very aware that I was going to find it very difficult, emotionally draining, deeply unsettling. I knew it would be very good and I knew I wouldn’t regret it, but dread remained the overwhelming sensation. I got over it. I’ve watched Adolescence. A week later I feel I can write about it, but the programme itself I am not over.
It was wonderful and comfortably the most important piece of art I have witnessed in a long time. It is hard to grasp how good this is – the writing, the acting, the technical execution, the way it addressed the subject. There was one brief exchange of dialogue in four hours which felt slightly forced. Otherwise, if there is any improvement possible, I don’t know what it was.
And yet having now read goodness knows how many responses I feel back in despair again. I wonder if our era is capable of discussing important issues properly. I wonder if we are capable of discussing important issues at all. Because a number of the takes I’ve seen make me wonder if we’ve watched the same programme.
Some quick context which I think is important. I was dreading this for a specific reason. My son is adopted and can have some ‘behaviour quirks’ (revolving around temper). He is 12. The protagonist in Adolescence is 13. I found it almost impossible to watch without seeing us in it. Jamie was in no sense a carbon copy of my son, and yet from the moment we see him, Jamie was my son.
Perhaps how you see this programme is about where your empathy lies. We only see Katie’s side of the pain that results from his awful actions through one proxy. We never meet the bereaved family at all. I have talked to different people about this programme (if my experience is anything to go by, once you’ve watched this you need to talk to someone, anyone…) and they seem to break down at different points.
One person I spoke to found episode four hardest (the impact on Jamie’s family, the guilt and pain and mess). Another was upset by the school episode (the ‘god, what chance do they have’-ness of it). I was broken totally by Jamie being dragged from the interview room in episode three, desperate for someone to tell him he is not a monster, that is is loved, that he is worth something, that he’s valued.
That means that for me this was a programme about how, somehow, we have created children with such a desperately low sense of self esteem, riddled with self-hatred and fear and confusion. It was a programme about how on earth we created a situation where that self-hatred is directed towards violence. It is about what we did to our children.
Best I can tell, this is just one more opportunity for everyone to get back to the same culture war battles they were entrenched in before, because everything is really about us, all the time.
What it is not is ‘an answer’. This is art, created by artists. If you’ve read anything whatsoever about the approach of the creators then you will know that this is not meant to answer the question ‘why?’. This is art; it goes to great lengths not to answer the question ‘why?’. That is our job.
I am unconvinced we’re doing a good job of it. Best I can tell, this is just one more opportunity for everyone to get back to the same culture war battles they were entrenched in before, because everything is really about us, all the time. I’ve seen it claimed that it was ‘about’ how social media is making children bad. Or it’s ‘about’ the problem of the manosphere corrupting men. Or it’s ‘about’ the lack of male role models.
Or it’s ‘abou’t worldwide misogyny. Or bad schooling. Or overreacting to not having a girlfriend. Or bad parenting. Particularly reassuring is that Kemi Badenoch says it’s wrong in blaming social media, even though she hasn’t watched it. Yet none of these are the worst take – that is won by a country mile by this piece which suggests the solution to the problems raised in this programme is for young men to all join the SNP.
(I know you think I’m making that up. I wish I was. The idea that the SNP is a “real rebellion” is nuts. The idea that a young, working class, non-university-educated white man would find a welcome in the SNP is surely satire. The idea that joining the SNP would reduce the level of isolation and bullying he faces is, eh, novel…)
If you actually watched and thought about the programme then you’d know it wasn’t ‘social media’ that appeared to be a key driver but rather what is effectively ‘group chat’. It was online bullying by peers that seems to have started some of this, not ‘the manosphere’.
Jamie has bursts of misogynistic behaviour but unless I’m badly misreading the script here, they are performative and rehearsed. At other points when he is speaking personally Jamie appears to be much more sensitive and understanding about women. This isn’t a boy who appears to have been steeped in hatred – or at least not at first.
And saying this is ‘toxic masculinity’ is equally narrow. If we’re throwing insults around, it was the needless and cruel weaponisation of post-Me Too feminist terminology which seems to have been a tipping point. Jamie was lonely, not an ideological ‘incel’. He didn’t seem to have done anything much to merit the bullying (at that point).
Just an overreaction to not having a girlfriend? Christ, did no-one hear the crushingly awful low self esteem he expressed, the pain, the loneliness, the deep psychological scars. Perhaps he could ‘just get over it’; perhaps someone with a severe eating disorder could ‘just have their dinner and shut up’.
The school appeared to be a third of the way into Lord of the Flies. Not reading it, recreating it. I don’t know about you but while I find it a big stretch to say ‘it was the school’s fault’, certainly there was no chance that the school was going to help. It seemed barely capable of scrabbling to a basic awareness that there was any problem. Pastoral care?
Of course the problem is violence. The problem was violence when it was the boy stabbing the girl to death in episode one – and when it was the girl carrying out a serious assault on a male classmate in episode two. Blaming the parents is an even greater stretch, yet if there is a line that will haunt me until the end of my days it’s the mum saying “I think it’s OK to believe we should have done better”.
(Please, if anyone has cracked parenting, please phone me. I need advice. Like, all the time. I suspect I’m doing everything wrong and will only know when it is too late.)
The only simple answer I have that explains any of this is that adults have created an environment for children which is killing them and it is not each other the children need protected from but us
The best art poses complex questions; the worst politics offers easy answers. So perhaps it is fitting that a great piece of art has produced such dreadful politics. But where we can leave the art behind (can we hell – I couldn’t even write this for a week), the reality it shows is hunting us down and tearing at us.
If your conclusion to all of this was simple then I suggest you watch it again. The only simple answer I have that explains any of this is that adults have created an environment for children which is killing them and it is not each other the children need protected from but us. We monetised childhood and made them grow up too fast so we could take their money from them.
We made them feel bad because that fuels the economic addiction on which our society is based. We made parents work too hard for too little reward so that, exhausted, we get home, sit the kids in front of a screen and shop online instead. We didn’t only allow a spiralling mental health crisis, we fuelled it and then we balked at any attempt to do anything, because we are cowards.
(To this day the Scottish Government is working night and day to make sure that it hives off responsibility to anyone else it can shrug off its responsibilities too – it is for local authorities each alone to decide whether social media should be banned in schools. What cowards, what god-awful cowards.)
We ran public services so badly, allowed wealth inequality to grow so precipitously, managed public finances so carelessly that we can’t afford child psychological service fit for the disaster we’ve created. We can’t even provide the infrastructure of clubs and societies and facilities that keep kids safe and engaged. We built the kids a prison of low self-esteem and exploitation and despair and loneliness and then we threw away the key.
But given half a chance we will take all of the above, get back on our own social media platforms and get right back on with the same knuckle-dragging culture wars this programme tried to dissect. I don’t think anything struck me so much since watching this programme than the survey which showed a majority of children (67 per cent) want social media banned.
They want protected from us too. That’s our world. The children want to be protected from us.
We need a sophisticated all-society change and instead we’re offering kids the chance to join the SNP. We saw Jamie broken and got straight back on to repeating the bullying online. As adults. Same story – he was just a bad’un, misogyny, manosphere, toxic blah blah blah. It wasn’t us with our decades and decades of life. It was the 13 year old.
Feel better now?
I started crying when the police were pointing a gun at tiny little Jamie in his bed (was that really necessary?) and, when he is made to get up, he has wet himself. I fell apart at the end of episode three. For about 24 hours afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about it, on the verge of tears every time. I’m finding writing this hard.
I will now probably spend the rest of my life trying to untangle this in my head; or at least I will if we don’t do something. I can see only pain, mess and complexity. I can only tell you that Jamie wasn’t predestined to become what he did, and it isn’t too late for him even now (though it is over for Katie). I know that prison isn’t going to do anything but make this all worse. I know this is our fault.
The day after we finished Adolescence I grabbed my son on the way to school and hugged him for too long. He was bemused but humoured me. Those wet trousers, that pickle sandwich, that poor girl walking home alone having lost her only friend, Jamie shouting ‘tell me you like me’, mum and dad hugging on the bed. That teddy bear.
You know it is great art when it makes you want to be a better person. If only it made us want to be a better society.