Adolesence

The problems the Netflix series canvas predate the internet

As controllers of robots perpetrate long-distance violence, light-weight, rapid fire, semi-automatic guns designed for military conflict are brought into American schools to settle petty, personal scores in fits of youthful rage – warzone equipment has become a violent ‘personal accessory’.

—The Cambridge World History of Violence: Volume 4, 1800 to the Present

The Netflix “limited” series, Adolescence, is an incredible piece of television, but I feel like I have watched a different show to the one all the rave reviews are raving about. Nearly all the focus in them is on the way in which a particular sort of internet culture has corrupted an otherwise innocent and “normal” teenage boy—and therefore an otherwise normal and innocent surrounding society—somehow driving him to commit a heinous crime. To my way of thinking, though, what the show actually presents is a world of male violence that existed long before misogyny was digitised.

For instance, I thought this review of the show in the New Yorker was great, but when author Dorren St Felix writes that “Adolescence lives in the paranoid world that Andrew Tate made,” I was surprised. Tate, and those like him, may well be part of the problem, but this is in no way a world that they created.

Which is to say, such reviews are focussing on the wrong thing, panicking culturally about internet culture without addressing the culture of which the internet itself is a part.

I don’t want to play down the role of that online culture, and the internet may well a force multiplier, which is a fundamental problem in itself. But to me it feels more like a symptom than a cause.

Look at the way the program begins. A highly militarised group of police, decked out in body armour and assault weaponry, show up in force at a suburban house and burst in to make an unannounced arrest. Whatever arguments you can make about the efficacy of such an approach—this show of overwhelming force—it is a perfect illustration of the legitimised state violence that governs our world. Such an action might be shocking to most of us, but it is normalised and clearly presented as something against which we have no recourse. The police telling the homeowners, the boy’s parents, that they might be due some compensation for “the mess”, if they lodge the right request, underlines not just the violence of what has just happened but the disparity of power inherent in the whole process in which the violence is embedded.

The officers at the police station who handle the formal arrest process and set in train the whole legal machinery in which the family is now inextricably enmeshed may well behave decently, even with some compassion, but it is clear that all that decency could disappear in a heartbeat if any resistance was shown. Or if objections were voiced in the wrong way.

The entire procedure and its attendant decency are underpinned by the threat of violence we have already seen unleashed at the boy’s house.

But this is normal, right? Reasonable. Just the way things are.

Many reviews have concentrated on the episode set in Jamie’s school, and it is worthy of attention, not least because it is the one that most acutely highlights the role of social media. But the most chilling episode to me is Episode 3, the one involving the forensic psychologist, Briony Ariston, who comes to speak with Jamie Miller, the boy at the centre of the drama, played brilliantly by Owen Cooper.

From the opening seconds of the episode, we are again inside a system of legitimated violence. The place is a mental-health facility for boys charged with crimes, and it is freighted with uniformed staff and walls of surveillance screens. Briony is there to make an “independent pre-sentence offense report,” which “the judge will read in order to get an understanding of you and your understanding of the charges.” It is her fifth visit and that alone speaks to the level of control being applied. We are also told that she is only one a number of psychologists to assess Jamie, which again underlines the regimented and pathologised nature of Jamie’s situation and to the way in which our society is geared up to do deal with young offenders like Jamie.

As Briony checks in with the head guard, we hear screams from other cells. An alarm goes off, and staff rush through the corridors to deal with an incident, past Briony on her way to see Jamie. She is also shown footage of a fight Jamie has been involved in, and we see him beating the shit out of another young inmate, establishing beyond doubt his propensity for violence. It is the sort of physical violence you only learn by doing.

Where did Jamie learn this?

What follows is an intense series of interactions between Jamie and Briony in which he veers from sweetly manipulative to openly violent, yelling at her, physically threatening her, smashing away a cup of hot chocolate she has brought him. During their exchange, she quizzes him not just about his views on masculinity, but also about his relationship with his father (played by the world’s greatest actor, Stephen Graham).

Jamie tells the story of his father destroying a shed in their back yard one day when he was angry about something, though Jamie is defensive of him and rationalises the whole incident as an aberration. It may well have been, but it is clear that he understands the violence his father is capable of. And it should be clear that his father wasn’t groomed to this sort of violence by Andrew Tate videos.

The whole episode is harrowing, and Briony is left completely devasted as Jamie is finally led away. To what extent the episode is an accurate representation of how such exchanges would happen in real life, I don’t know, but as presented, you can’t help but feel that it was part of system that perpetuates, even encourages, the very violence it is set up to diagnose and document.

This institutionalised violence—because that’s what it is—has little to do with any online culture and is instead embedded deeply in the sort of societies we have established, even when we are attempting to bring some nuance and humanity to issues of crime and punishment.

For me, though, the most telling part of the episode is not the exchanges between Briony and Jamie but two brief encounters between Briony and the head guard. From the moment she arrives, this man is a leering, not-quite-threatening presence. His exchanges with Briony are drenched in British class consciousness, his own obvious feelings of inferiority in regard to her professional status, his desperation to impress her, and a thinly veiled sexual attraction.

I say not-quite-threatening in the sense that, paradoxically, the institutional conditions in which they meet constrain any temptation he might have to take things further. Nonetheless, he makes his presence felt and Briony is clearly uncomfortable with every moment they spend together. During their final encounter, when she is standing at a video screen observing Jamie now that he has been left alone, the guard stands right at her shoulder, trying to impress her with the fact that he has read a book about body language.

“What are you seeing?” he asks, almost whispering, accentuating their physical closeness. “I mean, what was it you're looking for, is it body language stuff?”

She doesn’t answer, so he continues.

“Just, I'm reading a book on that at the moment.”

He shifts position, moving even closer. She jumps when he speaks, he is so close.

“My sister gave it to me. See, people hide,” he says. “You know, I don't need to tell you this, but they hide so much.”

He is completely plaintive. Almost whispering in her ear. Almost crying you can’t help but think.

“Maybe they tell the truth, but their bodies, faces,” he says.

She shuts him down, trying to continue her job of observing. So, he changes tack. Becomes more personal. He tells her he couldn’t do what she does and she responds in kind. And then it is banter from him about swapping jobs, vacation times, pay grades. Ingratiating.

She tells him she likes her job most of the time.

“Well, I hate mine,” he says.

She leaves, and he hugs the door jamb to his office, watching her all the way down the corridor.

The whole encounter is as creepy as fuck, and I think it says as much about the underlying themes of the show as any other segment. In fact, the entire series appears to me to be less about the specifics of online culture and its corrupting possibilities than about the way in which women are forced, as a matter of course, to manage men’s anger, not to mention their ever-present sexual overtures.

The exchanges between Briony and the guard are all that writ large—or writ small, and all the more powerful for that—but they are also present in the ways in which Jamie’s mother and sister are forced to navigate Jamie’s father’s moods. They are all suffering because of Jamie’s crime, but somehow it is the father’s feelings that are paramount and that have to be catered to.

As I say, it is an incredible show, but we are kidding ourselves if we try and dump all the blame for the sort of violence it examines onto “internet culture”. Absolutely kidding ourselves.