I watched the 4 hourlong episodes of the Netflix collection “Adolescence” in a single prolonged, horrifying gulp. The story follows an angel-faced 13-year-old British boy named Jamie who’s accused of murdering his classmate, Katie, and lays out the impact on his household and friends. The present is fiction, although the creators say they have been partly impressed by the surprising actuality of violently misogynistic younger males. “What’s taking place in society the place a boy stabs a lady to dying? What’s the inciting incident right here?” Stephen Graham, who’s a author of the collection and in addition stars in it as Jamie’s bereft father, recalled pondering after one specific assault. “After which it occurred once more, and it occurred once more, and it occurred once more.”
You realize by the top of the primary episode that Jamie is responsible; the police have video of Jamie stabbing Katie. So the central query turns into why did he do it, and the reason rolls out over the subsequent three episodes. His household is loving, if imperfect, like most households. Jamie’s father, a plumber, is disenchanted in him for not being an athlete and doesn’t fairly know tips on how to relate to his delicate, inventive son. Jamie is bullied at school and stuffed with self-loathing, and he turns to Andrew Tate and different purveyors of sexist on-line content material to make himself really feel large.
Within the third episode, a reasonably, younger psychologist, Briony, attracts out the “inciting incident” for the homicide. Katie despatched a photograph of herself topless to a classmate, who then circulated it with out her consent — one thing all too widespread in the true world. Jamie subsequently asks her out, pondering she is likely to be amenable as a result of “she is likely to be weak,” since “everybody was calling her slag, you understand, or flat or no matter.”
Katie turns him down, saying she’s not that determined, and mocks him as an incel on Instagram. His entitlement and disgrace drive him to kill her. Throughout the episode, Jamie mocks and menaces Briony, at one level standing over her, cursing at her and roaring in her face — it appears that evidently each time she will get him to point out his comfortable, susceptible aspect, he activates her, utilizing undermining “negging” strategies that have been typically promoted within the on-line manosphere way back to 20 years in the past, earlier than it was even referred to as that, again when its ranges of misogyny have been quaint by at present’s requirements.
