Adolescence, Netflix’ four-part single-take, real-time series about a schoolboy knifing, is the streamer’s most popular series of all time in Britain and in many other parts of the world, has been hailed by critics as a television breakthrough, and has been endorsed by Britain’s Prime Minister Kier Starmer who not only watched it at home with his kids but wants it viewed in all British schools.
The last British series to have this kind of a social impact was last year’s Mr. Bates vs The Post Office, which at that time Kier Starmer also championed, though it was pointed out that his prosecutorial office was in part responsible for the perpetuation of the scandal.
There are multiple subjects which the series embraces, including a generation reared on the internet that is media savvy and relationship ignorant, the deterioration of the public school system, and the class system as evidenced in episode three’s confrontation of its working-class adolescent who marks the privileged or “posh” status of a police psychologist.
But its main focus, and the lens through which all of these subjects are refracted, as is made painfully obvious in episode four, is male violence, passed on through generations and perpetrated against women.
There are some excellent scenes and fine points made by the series on that score, including the psychologist’s confrontation of the boy Jamie as converting his fear of women and inability to communicate with them into rage, and the explosion of his father Eddie (Stephen Graham, the show’s co-creator) who in the series’ ultimate moment, after beating a young neighborhood hooligan, explains that his father beat him and he was proud to have not carried on that tradition in never touching his son. To which his wife says that, in light of the tragedy and of his own continuing spurious angry eruptions, that effort was “not enough,” giving the lie to a confession that has become a cultural and media trope, rationalizing and sanctioning psychological violence.
The problem is that all of this is filtered itself through a class lens, with the villain and source of violence in the society being not just “masculinity” in the abstract but male working-class men and the boys they raise.
Societal institutions are fair-minded in the extreme but unable to cope with this lashing out by the “other” in their midst. Episode one, after the initial breaking into the house by the police, is seen through the eyes of the detective inspector, detailing the laborious ways the police are scrupulously observant of the laws favoring suspects, but leaving open the question of what the boy’s treatment would be like if he were not white.
Episode two, though describing a breakdown in civility in the school system, does not place the blame on the years of austerity by first the Conservative and now Starmer’s Labour government. Rather, the problem is those unruly students, “the kids,” who in the words of one teacher “have no feelings.” Episode three, which locates or rather traps the audience in the interrogation room for almost the entire duration, through Jamie’s criticism of the psychologist acknowledges the class differences but ultimately comes down on the side of his naked and scary brutality.
Episode four, one of whose Aha! moments, because of the need to stretch out time for a family trip to the hardware store, actually involves the Australian band Ah-ha. This episode also is the meanest in its presentation of the “working class” problem: Its men, of course in the elitist neoliberal view, are mainly violent creatures, while the assigned role of its mostly passive and victimized women is to socialize this violence. This characterization leaves out the ability of both working-class men and women to work together to channel this energy against the elites and for their rights, with women historically often in the forefront of British struggles for equality.
There is a long history in Western societies of “othering” adolescents, and of the terrors their untrained or unindoctrinated minds can conjure, taking in comic books, rock ‘n’ roll and horror films, all forms which equally have rebellious anti-capitalist aspects.
Equally the series, and this is not remarked upon, also participates in racial coding. When JD Vance recently visited Britain he evoked, as part of his far-right, anti-immigration agenda the specter of Muslim gangs knifing the populace. As everyone in Hollywood and in American politics will tell you, if you want to raise that specter in the “liberal” climate, the way to do it and get away with it is to present the problem but through the eyes of a white protagonist. The dog whistle then still pierces the ears of those attuned to it but there is plausible deniability on the part of the creators, with this show also being based on an actual incident involving white teens.
A word about the style, so pronounced in the series. The long take, that is, the refusal to cut a scene up into its component parts, is an old and revered trope in the cinema, however it is usually attributed to those on the left beginning with Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise, about the French Revolution, The Crime of Monsieur Lange about the devastation wrecked by an owner on his workers, and Rules of the Game, a minute examination of the ultimately deadly “foibles” of the aristocratic class In Hollywood. There’s also Orson Welles’ astute presentation of the interpersonal violence and alienation of the right-wing publisher William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane, Robert Altman’s devastating critique of Hollywood in The Player, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s validation of an unlikely community of sex workers in Boogie Nights. This series, on the other hand, though it purports to be in the tradition of both the long take and the British “Angry Young Men” social cinema of the late ’50s and early ’60s is, in its elitist gaze concealed though the trope of hyperrealism, actually anti-working class and anti-left. That is, the refusal to cut here, instead of opening up a world, closes it off and does not provide a context for its attack on a specific class, thus posing its aggressive behavior as ultimately beyond explanation.
No doubt Kier Starmer, the anti-working-class head of what he still chooses to call the “Labour” Party, who purged it of its radical Jeremy Corbin-led elements, when watching at home with his kids was eager to warn them that working-class anger was something they should condemn. He was probably much more comfortable with a work that only features that anger lashing out at women instead of combining across racial and gender lines to unionize and erupt at figures (like himself!) whose austerity creates the conditions for that anger. The Starmers of the world then sit back, “tsk-tsk,” wave their hands Dr. Frankenstein-like as they watch what are, in their eyes, these “deteriorating creatures” running amuck.
Adolescence: Not a TV vérité masterpiece but simply “posh” pretentiousness.
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