Note: This review contains spoilers. if you haven’t watched ‘Adolescence’, I strongly recommend you do.
Very few cultural offerings hit you with a hammer blow like ‘Adolescence’.
As a piece of television drama, it is meticulously constructed. The cast is obviously well chosen and of a high pedigree. Stephen Graham is held to be one of the finest screen actors of his generation with a rare ‘everyman’ quality and a history of being involved in socially aware dramas. Ashley Waters has morphed from being former gang member to hip hop artist to star of the much lauded ‘Top Boy’. His performance as DI Luke Bascombe is measured, intelligent, vulnerable and also totally confused. More clear eyed and insightful characters are to be found in his partner, played by Faye Elaine Marsay, and a clinical psychologist, played by Erin Doherty.
The rest of the work is peppered with well-known faces from British television dramas providing a distinct ballast of familiarity in what feels like a hostile environment. It could be said that the standout performance is that of the lead character, played by Owen Jones. Found using the tried and test Ken Loach method of auditioning non–actors, the subtlety and nuance in which he presents a troubled boy on the verge of adulthood manages to be both heart breaking and chilling.
Technically it is hugely impressive piece of work. Each episode is one continuous unedited shot. This is a style form of filmmaking that has evolved over the last quarter of a century. The first large scale production of this kind was ‘Russian Ark’. Released in 2002, it is a historical drama that travels through the Hermitage Palace in St. Petersburg. The form was enabled by the invention of lightweight, digital video cameras that could be used by Steadicam operators for longer periods of time. In 2015‘Viktoria’, a Berlin based heist film, utilised the same strategy. The 2021 film Boiling Point, also starring Stephen Graham, pushed the form more toward the socially aware territory of ‘Adolescence’ as it commented on the pressures and toxicity that can be encountered in the upper echelons of the hospitality business.
However, the true power of this limited series is not to be found its technical virtuosity nor its deft casting. It is the subject explored that lands like a punch in the gut. We are taken through a brutal arrest of a thirteen-year-old boy by armed police in an English suburban home, to him being charged with the vicious murder of a female classmate, to father and son being left in a police interview room to watch the CCTV footage of the boy repeatedly stabbing a thirteen-year-old girl. And that’s just the first episode.
In ascertaining the motive for such a horrendous crime, we are led into the deeply disturbing and perplexing world of toxic masculinity and cyber bullying. In a world where the telecommunication devices we carry our pockets can enable us to talk with large groups of people all over the world and access practically any information or media, a digital Pandora’s box has been opened. On one hand we have the myriad advantages of being more connected and having access to more resources than ever before, on the other we have our children able to access extremely harmful material and be targeted by bad actors. And once the box has been opened, no amount of firewalls will provide protection.
In that incredibly delicate and volatile period of life when we transition from children to adults, our young people can find themselves in a sinister new terra incognita. Part of the process of individuation, for some of us, is to reject our former role models and go looking for new ones. Some of those that young men find online have a chilling and distorted agenda. The most obvious of these, of course, is Andrew Tate. This emotionally blunted narcissist offers young men a ‘strategy’ for eliciting sex from girls and women by manipulation and duplicity. It is based on the deeply misogynistic and distorted views that women will only be attracted to a certain demographic of men so those left behind have no other choice but to cheat. The carrot is sex, but the stick is to be labelled an incel. This is the term for involuntary celibate. An online group of usually heterosexual white men who cannot secure a romantic partner, which can result in misogynist rhetoric, hate speech and in extreme cases violence against women. In recent psychological research the discovery of a hitherto unknown limbic brain response is being considered. We know fight, flight and freeze but there seems to be another – flock. It involves making alliances with others, due a perceived threat, that under normal circumstances would not be considered. This could be the most pernicious and damaging of all lower brain responses as makes the individual vulnerable to the manipulation of nefarious agents. If you look at certain recent – and not so recent – political events through this lens, you may begin to notice a pattern.
The facility to communicate with anybody, at any time, via several platforms is without doubt one of the triumphs of the internet and communication networks in the current epoch. The opportunities for communication and the dissemination of information have improved and enriched our lives immeasurably. But there are unforeseen outcomes and novel environments created by the ability to address someone by such an abstracted, sometimes unsolicited and, in most cases unregulated, means. The potential for abuse – whether through a misunderstanding of the context or plain maliciousness – is obvious. Over the past two decades we have seen Instagram be used as a tool to look at pictures of kittens, promote businesses, buy and sell illegal drugs and invoke several suicides.
‘Adolescence’ posits an extreme reaction to an act of cyber bullying fuelled by the influences discussed earlier. There are two scenes that, in my estimation, have particular significance. When the two investigating officers visit the school with the intention of establishing a motive for such an appalling crime, they enter an institution that is failing in its duty. The pupils treat them with suspicion and resistance openly. They flounder in the attempt to gain a meaningful line of communication with any of the associates of both victim and perpetrator. It is only when the son of one the officers, who is a pupil at the school, intervenes they are shown where they have been going wrong. He insists on having a private conversation with his father. In an empty classroom a sobering revelation is made. The Instagram conversation between victim and perpetrator, which the officers mistook for a potentially friendly chat, is shown to be a codified form of cyberbullying using the vocabulary and syntax of emoji. Will Self stated recently that the model and structure of how we access information has changed so much it as if our younger generations are working on a different operating system. The more mature among us are informed by those rectangular objects where you have to turn pages. This demographic is in possession of what he refers to as a Guttenberg mind. The digital natives who walk amongst have a Google mind.
The other scene of note is a psychological assessment made in the facility where the boy is held pretrial. In the interview a psychologist endeavours to gain the confidence of the boy in order to provide an assessment for the judicial system. It is a fraught and sensitive process in which she displays, courage, intelligence and compassion. It is not in the involuntary admission of culpability that the most relevant exposition is made. We already know he is guilty from the video. It is in the admission of that in the events that led to the crime, the boy made advances on the girl after she herself was the victim of online shaming. Topless photos of her had been shared and she was the recipient of fifteen minutes of infamy for that particular day. It was in this moment of weakness that he made his advance and was subsequently rejected. Normal modes of teenage courtship had been replaced with predatory behaviour with disastrous consequences.
M.C.