Okay, right up front: SPOILERS herein.
These first paragraphs are safe. Then you’re on your own. If you haven’t watched Netflix’s mega-popular four-episode crime drama, and you don’t want to know what happens, stop reading when I say, “STOP.”
I am not recommending that you watch the series, by the way. It is intensely disturbing and will probably haunt you. I am not saying not to watch it, either. It is very well-made and the acting and camerawork are first-rate. Each episode was shot in real-time as one take, so you’re basically watching four expertly filmed plays. The plot: a thirteen-year-old boy is charged with murdering a classmate. Four episodes show the impact on the suspect, his family, his school, and the police officers and psychiatrist who investigate the case.
STOP! SPOILERS.
In an early morning raid, police break down the door of the Millers, a lower-middle class suburban family transplanted from Liverpool. Machine guns at ready, they make for the upstairs bedroom of 13-year old Jamie and tell him he’s being arrested on suspicion of murder. Jamie selects his father to be his “appropriate adult” who accompanies him as he is processed, charged and questioned. The first episode ends with the presentation of CCTV footage of Jamie stabbing the victim seven times.
In the second episode, detectives visit Jamie’s school and question his classmates. One boy tries to run away, because he apparently knows too much. One girl, the best friend of the deceased, becomes violent. Jamie’s dad carries flowers to the memorial of the victim.
In episode three, a young psychiatrist questions Jamie. They banter, they seem to like each other. Jamie becomes angry more than once, but it’s clear that this young doctor wants to help… until she doesn’t. When Jamie, still maintaining his innocence, describes his feelings as he confronted Katie with a knife in his hand, his psychiatrist turns cold. She clearly realizes that there is no “out,” for this patient. He’s a murderer and he doesn’t feel remorse. As he’s dragged from the room, Jamie demands of her, “Do you like me? Tell me you like me!”
The fourth episode is set on Dad Miller’s fiftieth birthday. Jamie calls from the “Education Center” where he’s been in residence for 13 months without trial. Amidst wishing Dad a happy birthday, he announces he’s changing his plea to guilty. (Forbes, in a review, called this a “confession.” It is not, strictly. He never says the words, “I killed Katie.”) The rest of the episode shows the devastation, doubt and regret of his family, especially his parents.
Creator / Star Stephen Graham calls Adolescence a “Whydunnit.” That is, you know early on that young Jamie Miller is guilty of murdering his classmate, Katie. Guilty as hell. Except…
The reveal that Jamie is guilty is actually kind of murky, and I missed it. Maybe bad eyesight is to blame. After denying that he killed Katie, Jamie is shown–along with his father–CCTV footage of an encounter between himself and the victim. Their body language says that they’re angry as they stand in confrontation in a parking lot. Katie shoves Jamie and he falls to the ground. Then he regains his feet and we see his arm move up and down several times. Jamie’s father asks, “What have you done?” and he can’t even look at or touch his son.
Reviews have depicted the CCTV footage as clearly showing Jamie stabbing Katie seven times. I saw nothing clear about it, even after watching it twice. The footage is shown in-scene on a laptop, with a tightening shot allowing the laptop monitor to occupy a little less than a third of the overall picture. Certainly the elder Miller’s response tell us he’s seen something incriminating; but I, as a viewer, was left with doubt because I simply did not see clearly what was happening. So I watched the next two episodes with that doubt in my mind.
What turned me to the realization that Jamie was guilty was the reaction of his psychiatrist at the end of her interview with him. Her face said to me, more clearly than the laptop image, that she had seen the eyes of a killer. In the moment, however, I didn’t like her very much. I felt as though she had let her personal feelings overcome her to the detriment of her patient. And it’s significant, for me, that I continued to think of Jamie as a patient, not a murderer.
Graham says, in a making-of short, that his goal in creating the series was to “Start a conversation” amongst parents about the influences of culture and social media on their children. I would say he accomplished that, but with caveats I’ll explore below.
He also stresses that he wants his audience to believe, “This could happen to me.” I take that to mean that any parent could discover that their child has been radicalized by social media into someone who rejects the parents’ values and is capable of doing great harm. I’m partially sold on that. As a parent and grandparent, I do see social media and our culture taking my offsprings’ opinions in directions I did not expect. Graham says he set out to make it clear that the parents were not at fault, even though, expectedly, they blame themselves. They were just normal parents. I think it’s worth talking about. I’m not sure I believe that social media is capable of training murderers all by itself.
One of the disturbing “It could happen to me” aspects of the show, for me, is the depiction of citizens’ interactions with law enforcement and our legal system. Doors being knocked down in morning raids is a frightening image. It should be. It’s literally an invasion of sacred space by strangers with guns who actually will kill if they feel they’re in danger themselves. The practice of “swatting,” placing a fake emergency call to direct a SWAT team to the home of a political or social adversary, has been growing in popularity. Adolescence does a good job of portraying the horror of it, but also, to an extent, serves to normalize it. The question of why a dozen men with machine guns and a military style strike are needed to apprehend a 13-year-old boy is never asked or answered.
Similarly, no comment is made on Jamie’s sitting in detention for 13 months without trial. We seem to accept that, innocent or guilty, a person who is suspected of a crime is going to lose a big chunk of his life, possibly his home and his job as well, and that’s just the process. And that could theoretically happen to any of us. And the fact that Forbes took Jamie’s plea-change as a “confession,” when indeed something like 95% of convictions in the U.S. are made based on plea-bargains where witnesses were intimated into not trying to defend themselves in court, says to me that a lot of us have more faith than we should in our criminal “justice” system.
Jamie is presented in such a way as to tug at the heartstrings of parents. He’s small, unimposing, a nice-looking kid. He’s so frightened by the raid on his home that he pisses himself. He’s an artist who doesn’t like sports. Even after he rages at his psychiatrist and tries to physically intimidate her, he wants to know, “Do you like me?” It’s heartbreaking. I think every parent has suffered with a child who just wants to be liked and wonders why he’s not. Graham, who says he decided to do the show because of the rise in teen boys stabbing girls in his native England, has been accused of race-swapping Jamie. The high-profile stabbings were committed by people of color, and Graham made his protagonist white to garner sympathy with the majority of viewers, is the claim. Graham denies this.
One of the takeaways reviewers are identifying from Adolescence is the danger of online Incel culture. Ironically, Graham, when he started work, says he was not aware of this phenomenon. It became central to the story he told. Incels, for the uninitiated, are people who are involuntarily celibate. Although the self-descriptive term was invented by a woman, it is now primarily associated with men who blame society and particularly the attitudes of “women” (not sure which women) for their unwanted virginal status. There is much bandying about by the students at Jamie’s school of the claim that 80 per cent of women are attracted to only 20 per cent of men. Jamie is accused by Katie of being an incel. My unsophisticated reaction to all this was, “These kids know too damned much for their own good!”
In the end, a lot of people are taking away from Jamie’s story the message it seems his parents took away: Jamie spent too much time on the computer and got infected by incel culture. That made him into a killer.
But here’s my problem with that: Jamie is a non-entity. (Owen Cooper, let’s be clear, plays him brilliantly.) There are broad swaths of characterization there, sure. He’s an artist. He’s not a jock. Popular girls at school don’t like him and are cruel to him. But who is he? I think we’re meant to believe that he’s the geek-boy next door, but there’s just not enough there. His displayed rage suggests deep-seated anger issues, and I don’t think those are just installed by online bad actors like so much malware. He says he likes girls, but does he? Aside from his father, whose relationship with him we only see under the worst of circumstances, we do not see Jamie having a positive relationship with anyone. He has friends with whom we never see him interact. Honestly, we got to know Katie as a person much more than we did Jamie. On balance, I was not convinced that this broken kid was broken by an Internet phenomenon. I never got the “why” in the “whydunnit.”
What I did wind up with, and perhaps this was also Graham’s intent, was a lot of questions about how we as a society deal with violent crime and mental illness. In this case, Jamie is a broken person… now what? He goes to prison, or an “education center,” for the rest of his life. We assume he’s too dangerous to be out among the general population. That’s reasonable. Should he be punished? How? Punishment implies either revenge or education. I don’t know how you teach the lesson, “Don’t kill” to someone who can make up his mind to kill and feel he was justified. I’m not sure revenge helps anyone. A dark part of me thinks that Jamie’s life is over, and perhaps he’s better off dead. Certainly his family is already mourning him as though he were dead. Can he be “cured?” That would depend, I would think, on what’s wrong with him. And we just don’t know. If he was just propagandized into doing evil, can he be “un-propagandized?” And would any of this happen in our current prison system, where offenders, violent and non-violent, are sent to live in a perverse society where the strong and the savage rule by force? We have a tendency to off-handedly say that criminals should go to jail. But we really don’t have much idea–or interest–in what happens to them once they get there. For a lot of us, it’s just part of our revenge fantasy that reassures us that bad people get punished.
Adolescence raised questions. Ultimately, though, it does not do its job of answering “why,” other than the old canard, “Society is to blame.”