Many hot-button themes form Adolescence, the devastating new show now streaming on Netflix, in which a 13-year-old British schoolboy is arrested for murdering his female classmate. Childhood. Boyhood. Parenthood. Policing, in and out of the house. And the overarching power of social media, which has taken over our lives.
Each is given equal weightage in this brilliantly-written, magnificently-performed, shot-in-a-single-take four-part limited series, which is set in a small British town, but could well be playing out anywhere in the world. Everything comes down to the central, burning question: What is it like navigating masculinity in today’s world? What is it like being a boy?
Being 13 has always been tricky: Age-old metrics tell us that that’s the point when you leave your childhood behind and step into the in-between place where everything — from sprouting hormones, bodily changes, to the rules of behaviour-and-engagement — begin feeling at once urgent and confusing.
But there are no manuals to tell you how to act. What is proper, what is not? Will you come across as a wuss if you do not ask a girl out, and if you muster the courage to do so, and she turns you down, what will you do with the shame and disappointment? If you’re lucky, you will learn how to deal with pimples and rejection; if not, the fear that you could end up doing something you will regret, is clear and present.
The real question that hits you like a hammer-blow, though, is asked by the accused, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), when he is some months into his custody. He asks a visiting psychologist: Do you like me? Before Jamie gets to it, he shows that he can be capable of uncontrolled, full-blown rage — that the loss of innocence has been an on-going process, leading to that moment when a boy can become a fatal instrument and take a life.
Do you like me? Likeability is our secret weapon. We all love to be liked. But when you are stepping into teenage, an unformed vessel just waiting to be filled, you are unsure. You are about to encounter the minefield of attraction, and attendant sexual impulses: How do you know if someone likes you? Will you be accepted? Or will you always be an “incel” as a bullying girl indicates on your Instagram timeline via a series of jeering emojis? How many “likes” will those emojis elicit from an ecosystem filled with other troubled adolescents, toughing it out in the playground and the lockers and the classroom, the way Jamie is?
Adolescence is a hard watch, and it doesn’t let us off the hook even once, maintaining breakpoint tension right through. We learn early on that the police have enough strong evidence for the arrest, and we see Jamie’s family move from befuddlement to resignation, as he moves through the system — the solicitor, the arresting officers, the other cogs-in-the-wheel at the police station stepping up as and when required.
The police procedural has its place, but the real purpose here is to show how an incident like this, if you can call a murder an incident, can impact everyone involved. In the heart-breaking final episode, Jamie’s father (Stephen Graham, also the show’s co-creator along with director Philip Barantini) and mother (Christine Tremarco) are left, sitting side by side on their bed, asking each other if they did enough. They thought he was safe in his room, but they had no idea of the seductive dangers of the social media he was ingesting.
The questions we are left with are urgent; the show wisely refrains from handing out glib answers. Would Jamie’s parents have known what to do even if they had been aware of the extent to which Jamie was being influenced by what he was ingesting? How would Jamie’s father, who had been raised by a father at a time when handing out a slap or two was considered the norm, be able to parse the shorthand that stands in for your standard teenage chatter? How much of generational trauma, passed down the line, becomes our parenting style without us even realising it?
And how do you prevent self-appointed social media gurus from tapping into the anxieties and insecurities of fragile young people? How do we detach toxicity from masculinity? I haven’t seen anything with the weight and importance of Adolescence in a long time: It should be made mandatory viewing.
shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com
