Author’s note: Mild spoilers ahead.
Social media isn’t just generating anxiety among the populace, it’s rewiring many people’s brains – especially those who are younger and have never known anything else. From the insecure and often narcissistic quest for likes to the damage inflicted by cyberbullying, social media continues the paradigm of the internet as the digital wild west. There seem to be no rules or accountability.
From the get-go, the hit Netflix series Adolescence plunges us headlong into chaos. British police crash through the door of a suburban family home to arrest 13-year old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) on suspicion of murder for the death of classmate Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). He is dragged into custody, his family in tow, and he repeatedly denies to his father (Stephen Graham) and the authorities that he has done anything wrong, but when confronted with CCTV evidence of his homicidal act, everything changes. The family is shattered, and greater waves crash into the community. That’s just the first episode.
Beyond breaking UK viewer records on Netflix, the four-part Adolescence series is doing something that a lot of other similar shows don’t: it’s inspiring serious conversations about a real world crisis. This isn’t a modern soap opera or sci-fi epic, but it’s a tale that was inspired by a series of knife attacks in the UK by teenage boys. (The third episode of this series in particular is quite disturbing.)
Each episode is filmed in one continuous take. This isn’t done as a gimmick – the consistently moving camera starts on one character or set of characters, then switches track to follow others. It emphasizes the tumult in the home, at the police station, at school, and beyond. The first episode focuses on Jamie’s arrest and detention. The second episode follows the detectives as they go to school to question teachers and students (they seem as baffled as the parents). The third episode finds an incarcerated Jamie in a therapy session that gets incredibly volatile. And the final episode shows how the family is coping with their son’s incarceration, impending trial, and the increasing vitriol towards them from people in the community.
There’s no final resolution to the storyline, but that’s not the point. Each episode is set up to show us how different people are coping with the senseless murder of this girl by a boy influenced by the misogynistic manosphere and its gaslighting manipulation tactics. The show does not rely on any flashbacks, so other than knowing the victim’s name and seeing her face in a photo, we only know what we hear from other people, and we also learn that she has faced some problems, as well.
What makes this story so compelling is the fact that it raises a lot of questions, and even while some answers are provided in terms of the case, many more disturbing questions linger. It is a warning call for older parents to start learning more about what their kids are doing online, how they communicate with emojis, and how their addiction to their screens has warped their worldview. This is different from the old school cliché of parents just not getting their kids’ pop culture references; they don’t understand the world they are growing up in.
The adults here seem impotent to combat the problem. During the second episode, one of the detectives talks to a teacher while rowdy students have been corralled outside during an unexpected fire drill. The frazzled educator considers the school akin to a holding pen, with many of the unruly kids hard to contain. Even the main detective (Ashley Walters) has to get covert advice from his teenage son because his child is embarrassed by his lack of understanding of social media. It is important to understand that social media is not just a forum for kids to keep up with their favorite celebrities, watch videos, and absorb small news bites; it is an active culture where they toss barbs at one another and vie for dominance just as older generations did in person – except those scenes play out in front of a wider virtual audience.
Adolescence avoids painting black-and-white portrayals or serving up pat conclusions. It’s clear, regardless of the ultimate outcome of his case, that Jamie is a disturbed young individual whose immersion in online incel culture and buying into such ridiculous theories as the 80/20 rule – meaning 80% of women allegedly only like 20% of all men – eventually find him channeling irrational rage towards a female therapist three times his age who is completely shocked, understandably, by his behavior. Jamie’s parents struggle painfully with what has transpired, wondering what they did wrong and why they couldn’t see the warning signs.
After watching the show, one might become more sensitive to the increasing number of media stories about unruly teens – flash mobs of uncontrollable kids in public spaces, NYC teens stealing subway kids and joyriding on trains, and small groups of young people assaulting people of any age for ‘fun.’ There was a recent trend where young people were inexplicably throwing their phones at singers on stage, and sometimes hitting them. This nihilism at any level often stems from the desire to become famous on forums like TikTok, and these kids don’t really understand the consequences of what they’re doing.
Kids are presented with a strange unreality these days. They watch celebrities lob insults at each other and try to lure more attention to their various publicity stunts, without ever really knowing what the true lives of the people they admire are really like. They also live in a world of first-person shooter video games and blockbuster movies that usually trumpet violence as the solution to problems. At one point in episode three, Jamie’s therapist asks him, “Do you understand what death is?” It’s not clear he does.
Like the Zendaya-led series Euphoria on HBO, it’s easy to watch Adolescence and think that the next generation of kids is doomed. That’s far from the truth, but by shining a harsh light on the underbelly of their secret digital lives, it shows that just because a kid isn’t out running around late at night does not mean that he or she isn’t inflicting damage on the world. Not all the kids are turning into bad apples, but it’s easy to get radicalized without even knowing it… or one’s parents sensing it. While viewers can feel empathy here for different characters, Jamie becomes a troubling fixture because at his age one has to wonder – is it possible to fix someone so young who is already so broken?
Adolescence has deservedly reaped accolades and inspired a lot of debate about the topics that it’s presenting. Its ultimate message is not one of preachiness or simply condemning the digital media that is creating so much disturbance. It is asking parents and communities to take a closer look at what their children are doing online. It might also have them consider how their behavior, and that of their role models, affects their offspring. Jamie’s father wants to be a good dad, but he occasionally displays aggressive outbursts of anger that are explosive, even if they’re not directed at his family.
Frederick Douglass once said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Australia recently enacted a ban on all social media for people under the age of 16. It will be interesting to see what legal challenges are presented to counteract that, but one wonders if in America there should be more accountability for what is happening with young people online before it leads to more destructive and emotionally damaging outcomes.
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