‘Adolescence’ Is About Fathers

The following story contains spoilers for all four episodes of Netflix’s Adolescence.

IT’S EPISODE TWO of Adolescence, the four-part British miniseries that exploded on Netflix last week, and DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) is at a school investigating the death of teen Katie Leonard. Throughout the half hour of police interviews, pupils have been alternately emotional and evasive, and Bascombe is still in the dark about what could have caused the shocking crime. That is, until Bascombe’s 15-year-old son Adam (Amari Bacchus) pulls him aside and explains that Katie’s murder might be connected to the online culture and language of incels and “the manosphere,” expressed via cryptic emoji codes in Instagram comments. When Adam breaks down the basic symbols – red pill, blue pill – his father asks: “Have you been watching The Matrix?”

This miscommunication is one of the only funny moments in the series, and also a clear illustration of the intergenerational ignorance around online expressions of misogyny related to figures like Andrew Tate. Throughout the series, co-written by Jack Thorne and lead actor Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini (who shot each episode in a single unbroken take), millennials and Generation Xers try to level with the digital and psychological spaces that immerse impressionable minds.

In custody for Katie’s murder is her 13-year-old classmate, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), suspected of stabbing her to death. Adam reveals to his dad that the case could be related to a digital culture of misogyny that the older generation is out of touch with. In Adolescence, the speed and saturation of the internet has, apparently, created a critical division between the teens and their offline parents–in this case, especially, between fathers and sons.

When Adam shows his dad the hidden messages in Jamie and Katie’s comments, it’s a breakthrough for the case but a troubling discovery for a father who hadn’t clocked the barriers between his and his son’s worlds.

Adolescence is most affecting when it shows us fathers reckoning, in real time, with the reduced role they have in influencing—or understanding—their children’s behavior. The show was created and directed by three men in their 40s and 50s, and it is, at its heart, a story about middle-aged men realizing that the most hurtful and influential messages about masculinity have found a vast, invisible (to them, at least) new channel.

The Instagram comments show that Jamie had been publicly bullied by Katie, who accused him of being a red-pilled incel—an accusation deployed almost as a slur. But, as we learn in episode 3—a long, intense interview between Jamie and psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty)—the 13 year-old actually has internalized the binary, simplistic messaging of online misogyny, on two fronts. On one, it has contextualized his (typical) adolescent insecurities: He’s convinced he’s too ugly for girls to like him, and subscribes to the “rule” that the majority of girls will unfairly only go for guys “better” than him. On the flip side: He mentions the unspoken rules for sharing explicit images of female schoolmates without their consent, and that he thought Katie would go out with him after she’d suffered humiliations of her own, when she was “weak” and therefore open to his advances.

Adolescence does not paint Jamie as a born sociopath, an extremist of the incel agenda, or even an exception among his peers. In a less sophisticated series, Jamie might have been driven to corners of the internet and groomed to lash out violently in response to a campaign of bullying. What actually happened to Jamie is frighteningly typical: Men on the internet conditioned his understanding of the world, and this was reinforced by his peers. Jamie felt humiliated and rejected because he did not feel appropriately masculine, inspiring a fury he ultimately directed at Katie, instead of at the distorted “parenting” he’d received online. He enforced its power even if he didn’t ever benefit from it.

Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), Jamie’s parents, are not present for their son’s interview with the psychologist, and we never really witness them accessing his interiority. The closest we get to this happens at the end of episode 1, where Eddie sits in on Jamie’s police interview. He begins apparently convinced of his son’s innocence, but you can sense things start to shift when the police open the interview with screenshots of aggressive comments Jamie’s left on an older Instagram model’s post. The police ramp up the receipts, and by the time Eddie and Jamie are shown unambiguous CCTV footage of Jamie stabbing Katie, disbelief and horror has clouded Eddie’s face. He twists away from his son, cowering.

By episode 4, Jamie’s parents weep in their bedroom trying to figure out where everything went wrong. “He was in his room, wasn’t he? We thought he was safe,” says Eddie. To a working-class English father, the idea that he failed his son because he had no idea of the danger his child was courting is crushing. But when Manda continues, saying, “He never left his room. He’d come home, slam the door, straight up the stairs on the computer. See the lights on at 1 o’clock in the morning,” Eddie is immediately defensive. “We couldn’t do nothing about that,” he stresses, as if trying to convince himself.