We just finished. Wow. What a disturbing (and incredibly well made) film.
But of a hot take here, but I think this show really missed the mark. I think the show doesn’t drive home hard enough the toxicity of incel culture and instead distracts us with the idea that… maybe teen girls shouldn’t be so mean?
I know that’s not what the show’s creators meant for people to take away from it, but in trying to be just a little too clever and too subtle about the effects of incel culture, it leaves too much room for such an alternative reading.
Where I think the show went off the rails was in episode 2 (when, rather than have the victim’s friend add important context about the lead-up to the crime from her perspective, they instead went with “ohhhh… the victim girl was mean to him!”), and where I think it missed the opportunity to hop back on the right track was episode 3. Because I do think the subtext of episode 3 is that the victim was only “bullying” the little incel twit insomuch as he tried to pull some incel pickup artistry on her after she had just been the victim of misogynistic bullying herself. While that might seem like good writing, being subtle, I think it’s terrible messaging. This is not the sort of thing to be subtle about. There should have been a very clear message about how the likes of Andrew Tate are poisoning the minds of young men and boys, and no possible room to think that actually it’s just boys being mean to girls being mean to boys being mean to girls ad nauseum.
No. It’s boys being brainwashed and becoming misogynistic little twits. And then, when one of the targets of their misogyny dares to clap back, one little twit escalates to full on murder. That’s the story, and they should have made that abundantly clear, not just implied.
Subtly is overrated, and this show’s writers were a hair too clever for their own good.
Couldn’t disagree more. I don’t want a sermon and life is messy. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the series as much if it had been more nakedly black and white. It’s already pretty black and white IMHO and removing the retaliatory bullying as a motive for the murder would have dumbed down the story too much. The potential negative ramifications of ubiquitous online social interactions are part of the story beyond just the toxic incel subculture.
Well, I guess it’s a hard disagree, then. Because I do think a story about a misogynistic little twit murdering a classmate for rejecting his attempts at pick-up-artistry and daring to call him out for what he is (a red-pilled little twit) is black and white. There are no shades of gray. There are no two sides.
Good art doesn’t have to be subtle, and Adolescence didn’t have to be either. All they had to do was re-work the scene with the victim’s best friend in the classroom (episode 2) to make clear the victim’s perspective and thus have the victim “speak” and let that stand as the final word on who bullied who. Instead, they gave us several unnecessary minutes of completely irrelevant banter, and only implicitly (in episode 3) challenged the idea that this attack was motivated by the victim’s bullying.
Yeah, teens are horrible to each other. And the popular teens tease the less popular ones mercilessly. And murder is still wrong, and far more horrible than the teasing.
That makes the show realistic.
Good art also doesn’t have to be realistic. I dare say most (all?) art isn’t.
I think episode 3 does the job clarifying that just fine and I like the framing that lays out that the public shaming of said twit, however justified the angry victim felt in the moment, was the unfortunate trigger for an unstable boy to snap. We’ll have to agree to disagree 
.
Count me in the camp that would have disliked your version as much as I thought this version was amazing.
I realize that was a superficial response. To go a bit more - cartoons can be great art but usually great art is not cartoons. The biggest gut punch for me in this show is the view as a parent, and the realism of the situation allows for that. More so though the story is not a simple plot of evil villain. ALL the characters, even many brief background characters, have or have had issues either stated or implied. Dealing with them isn’t perfect for any of them. Hearing what they are in others is missing for many of the characters. Many of them had experienced rejections or bullying, and some have or had self loathing. Those things are common parts of adolescence and beyond. The how each of them deal or dealt with that is a large part of the story. Different characters dealt with it differently. The risk that very dysfunctional on line communities present as a model and amplifier of turning this self hate our children may have outwards is a large part of the story, but not the only part.
If he had no trigger of self loathing it would have made no sense.
Another part is how the parents, not just Jamie’s, could have connected better with where their kids actually were and are. They mean to do well. But he is having a world on line they are clueless about, an experience of being bullied they are ignorant of. The cop loves his kid but had no real connections with him. His realizing that and trying to remedy it was important.
Just my experience and opinions though!
Think of it like this…
Adolescence is yet another depiction of male on female violence in which the motivations and experiences of the male perpetrator are centered and given long, thoughtful analysis, while the experiences of the female victim are all but ignored. We only see her through flat security camera footage as she is being brutally murdered. As far as her experiences and motivations, the only explicit textual descriptions we get of her is as a cyber bully, which invites the audience to infer that in a way she brought this attack on herself. Even as the show’s creators introduce a ready-made mouthpiece for the victim in the form of her best friend, who is twice subjected to on-screen questioning (once by the police, and then again by a member of the school staff) we get no real exploration of the victim’s interior life and real motivations. We are left to, at best, infer that maybe she wasn’t just some unprovoked bully in episode 3, but I fear that subtextual narrative may be lost on the viewers who most need to receive it.
Regardless, the point stands: this show centers the perpetrator’s narrative over the victim’s and invites us to see him as a complex and fully developed—albeit repulsive—human being, while relegating the victim to utter passivity and near-irrelevance except maybe as a plot device. The only hint of agency we get for her in the actual text (as opposed to subtext) of the show is that she was a bully picking on a less popular kid.
I think showing this film to children would be especially problematic because I think children are least likely of all to suss out and understand the weakly implied critique (in episode 3) of the perpetrator’s preferred narrative (that he was the victim of bullying and his crime was a reaction to the same), and most likely to walk away thinking the actual victim was at least partially to blame for her own death. Which, ironically, is precisely what her friend feared: the writers clearly recognized the danger of privileging the perpetrator’s narrative, and yet they completely wasted the opportunity to present us with a more forceful counter-narrative that would make it clear that it was the victim herself who suffered the most from bullying, including by the perpetrator, and that the perpetrator’s murder was just the all too predictable climax of the unchecked misogynistic abuse he and his male schoolmates directed at her and other girls.
I also think, given what the lead detective had to say about showing films in classrooms as a substitute for actual learning, it’s especially ironic they would think of showing this to children as part of their school curriculum. But that, frankly, is the least of my concerns about this show.
You don’t think it matters that she befriended a girl who was picked on and bullied? I thought her friend’s breakdown was very moving, and said sometime important about the victim. Whereas the boy never felt fully motivated to me.
It sure was moving. But it also did nothing to advance a sorely needed counter-narrative. With more responsible writing, it could have succeeded at both: being moving and acting as a counter-balance to the perpetrator-centered approach to storytelling.
Maybe that’s what the next season will try to address. There’s lots of story left to tell.
I don’t think there’s any plans to make a second season.
So, I guess where I differ on this point is that I don’t think it was weakly implied. I think it was very strongly laid out. You’ll note that the writers had the friend AND the one cop speak to the issue of the victim’s story being left out in episode 2. Then they follow it up with episode 3 where in the perpetrator himself lays out exactly how he in fact took advantage of public bullying and shame to try and manipulate the victim before that blew up in his face. I think they knew exactly what they were doing in how they wanted the narrative of the crime and blame to unravel itself. I don’t think they made any missteps at all.
Now as to the critique that kids in particular may not pick up on this as readily as adults - honestly, I dunno. I’m pretty sure I would have at that age, but maybe I’m just fooling myself. But I think the writers did a pretty effective job of demolishing most/any of the residual sympathy that may have still been clinging to the murderer from the first episode. He’s physically small, confused, frightened and fragile, sure. But also clearly off his nut - impulsive, explosively angry, violent and clumsily manipulative. His motives come off as not as genuinely righteous anger at being wronged (as much as he keeps trying to insist on it) but as the insane rage of a would-be abuser thwarted.
I’m not sure this show was made with a teen audience in mind (I rather suspect it was aimed more at parents) and I can’t speak to what they might take away from it. But to me the narrative is pretty crystal clear. It may indeed be interesting if they go back and explore this from the victim’s POV in the next season. I think that could be pretty compelling TV, but I haven’t seen any mention that that is what they’re thinking of exploring.
It’s not a done deal last I read, but apparently there are ongoing negotiations going on over the idea. Success is a big motivator.
I can imagine the writers using the success to tell a completely different story rather than a rehash of the first - reading interviews with the writers/producers, it was a very specific story they wanted to tell rather than start a TV smash.
I don’t know about a second season, but I would be curious to know what the legal outcome would have been after Jamie pleads guilty.
Any UKers here to tell me what sentence he would likely have gotten, considering his age, the fact that he plead guilty, etc? Would the defence have tried to make a case that he was bullied?
He wasn’t an incel, though. He rejected that ideology. The bullying bothered him because he considered them losers. And I think it was important to show that too. Incels aren’t the only ones who are a danger to women or feel entitled to women’s bodies. The issue is much much bigger and more complex than good team/bad team.
I found this guidance from the Sentencing Council (covers England and Wales):
Detention during His Majesty’s Pleasure is a mandatory life sentence and will be imposed when a child or young person is convicted or pleads guilty to murder. Schedule 21 of the Sentencing Code states that the starting point for determining the minimum sentence where the offender is under 18 years of age is 12 years as opposed to 15 years for those over the age of 18.
So it looks like 12 years minimum, in all likelihood in a Youth Detention Centre rather than an adult prison. And it looks like, with murder, pleading guilty doesn’t prevent a ‘life’ sentence. Which isn’t actually life in the vast majority of murder sentences.
thanks. Interesting. So that means that in the show Jamie would possibly be out of prison by the time he is 35? I would like to think that he could get psychological help during his time there and with a bit of luck might be able to rebuild his life…