I have four nieces and nephews, two boys and two girls. I try to be a good bridge between their mom and the world of pop culture, games, and the internet. This sometimes means calling them out when they’re using inappropriate slang they think my sister and I don’t know; it sometimes means reassuring my sister that some joke or trend isn’t the moral panic the local news or her Facebook friends make it out to be.
But I often worry about my youngest nephew, who’s feeling his way through cusp-of-puberty questions about manhood and gender. The last time I saw him, over the winter holidays, his speech was peppered with references to Elon Musk, AI, and cryptocurrency that I have no idea how he knows about. He plays a lot of video games, and he watches a lot of YouTube; while my sister carefully controls the former, a single mom with four kids doesn’t have the time or, really, the ability to monitor his YouTube habits closely enough. I’ll sometimes peek over his shoulder when I visit, trying to get a sense of who he’s watching, but beyond hideous hours of Mr Beast, I have no idea where he’s getting some of the stuff it’s so obvious he’s parroting from somewhere.
All of this gave me a particular interest in Netflix’s Adolescence, a four-episode series that came out in March. The show opens with police busting into the home of the Millers to arrest 13-year-old Jamie on suspicion of murdering his classmate Katie. The show’s claim to fame is shooting each episode in one continuous shot; in the first episode, this means that after the adrenaline of the police’s violent entry wears off, we follow Jamie on the entire ride to the police station and the process of getting booked in, the formality by turns calming and unnerving.
Each episode’s refusal to look away has a unique effect on the drama. I found the most moving episode to be the second, where the inspector prosecuting the case, Luke Bascombe, goes to Jamie and Katie’s school looking for information. Without the ability to cut to the most important moments–Luke interviewing Katie and Jamie’s friends, a conversation with his own son–we see the chaos and tension of the school halls and get a sense of the environment that shaped Jamie and Katie’s relationship, where everyday interactions are laden with violence and double meanings.
I’ve seen the most attention paid to the third episode, where a psychologist interviews Jamie while he’s being kept in a psychiatric facility. Jamie speaks in manosphere talking points, bragging about sexual interactions with women and criticizing Katie for being flat-chested. It’s Adolescence’s most heavy-handed episode, clearly wanting to warn parents about the world of Andrew Tate and his ilk. Young actor Owen Cooper does an incredible job as Jamie here, jumping dramatically from being a confused kid trying to find his place in the world to a threatening, sexist… well, man. The psychologist asks Jamie questions about what he thinks masculinity is, how men should act, and about the men in his own life. I’ll be honest that I found some of this a bit too simplistic, nudging the show into Lifetime movie territory, but at the same time, things manage to not become too reductive. Through how Jamie embraces and backs away from internet talking points, through how he wavers between pain over how his classmates teased him for being an “incel” and embracing the label to push the psychologist away and justify his actions, we see someone whose worldview isn’t fully formed yet. Jamie is less some villain and more someone standing at the crossroads of different ways to be, absorbing all the messages around him, trying identities on to test how the world around him reacts, with dire consequences. But the show also doesn’t let him off the hook for this, emphasizing the seriousness of the messages kids are receiving without forgetting that they’re still just kids.
The final episode shows the effect all this has had on Jamie’s family, and raises questions about his parents’ culpability that are hugely moving while still stumbling a little too eagerly into on-the-nose territory. Adolescence is rarely a subtle show, but this is balanced out by its filming technique, which never lets it overly foreground its most obvious pieces. It made me think a lot about my own nephew, who, when I’ve pointed out that some of the things he says are hurtful, has earnestly backtracked in a way that gives me hope. It can be too easy to default to “well, they’re a good kid” as an excuse not to have hard conversations about the things kids are seeing and saying, and Adolescence felt like a good reminder that I should do more than assume my nephew will just grow out of it. I'd be curious to hear what actual parents think of it; it's a worthwhile watch, if often a difficult one.
