Adolescence and Male Rage — A Review by Zarak Rais

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ale rage is not too shy to introduce itself. It mutates to touch the life of every woman you know, and in this version, a young teenage girl’s introduction to it ends in her murder. The murderer is her male classmate, all of thirteen years old. But Adolescence is deliberately steered away from the shock and horror of a brutal murder. Our attention is called to the sobering systemic and personal failures that made a young boy physically, emotionally, and psychologically ready to murder a girl.

On the surface, nothing seems amiss. The boy – Jamie Miller played by Owen Cooper – is slight and skinny, terrified as the police barge into his home in a morning raid. He wets his pants as he gets arrested and charged for murder. His family is in shock, repeatedly claiming his innocence. They have a basis for it, as other facets of their life show them as a well-knit unit, caring and concerned for each other.  You almost think the police have made a heavy-handed mistake, until the CCTV footage shows irrefutable proof of a vicious stabbing.

The other characters are left reeling, as are we. Rage-induced violence from men is not new. But it is particularly bleak when a child’s vision of masculinity is predicated upon violence and disdain towards women. Why such anger, we may ask?

The show mentions incel culture, the manosphere, and the damaging effect media personalities selling an empathy-starved version of masculinity have on the psyche of young men. Not only do they normalise verbal and physical abuse against women and debase them, they exploit male insecurities as well. Men today find themselves in a position where women require less from them than at any other point in history. Women can study, work, earn, and manage an independent life so the traditional role of a family provider (and the female gratitude expected for it) does not hold as much sway. As for the role of a protector - women can reasonably rely upon the secular structures of law and state, perhaps even to escape a situation of domestic abuse inflicted by these very “protectors”.

So between the crumbling of traditional roles and the mocking of empathy, the resulting identity crisis drives men deeper into the arms of misogyny. But the systemic failure that allows these “manosphere influencers” to rack up billions of views across social media goes deeper than that.

We severely underestimate the vast generational gaps that social media has facilitated. The memes, emojis, and shorthand trending today will become outdated in the blink of an eye. It's a challenge to have common cultural touchstones with people just a couple of years younger than us. Meanwhile the parental generation is still stuck in the pre-internet change-comes-once-a-decade mindset that is actively hurting the kids. They have no adults they can trust to have a mature, sensitive, workable solution to their problems, who will not belittle their struggles.

The school counsellor, the teachers, the parents in Adolescence all fail their charges through ineptitude and cluelessness. The police officer Bascombe’s investigation hits a wall until his embarrassed son explains the shorthand and emojis on instagram are clues to the bullying Jamie went through at school. His relationship with his son is nearly identical to the Millers’ relationship with their son in its total lack of real communication. The first hit to Jamie’s self-esteem did not come from social media – it came from his father. Social media only exacerbated that feeling in an already volatile adolescence. And he could not open up to his father about being bullied for fear of being shamed by him. In the aftermath, the Millers’ discuss Jamie staying up till late in his room, but clearly never discussed with him the online content he was consuming.

Only one adult who asks the right questions and engages Jamie on his views regarding women is the child psychologist Briony, who breaks past his friendliness and properness to the simmering rage beneath. This rage did not build in a vacuum. His adolescent insecurities were exploited, he was shamed for his looks and called an incel. Having fed on a steady online diet telling him of female inferiority and weakness next to his masculine greatness, his response to the insult is violence and murder. This escalation is not unexpected given the discourse we have normalised.

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Erin Doherty as the child psychologist Briony Ariston during a charged session with Jamie – a still from Adolescence on Netflix.

Social media is here to stay, and kids will be exposed to harmful content on it. Children will not open up to parents on sensitive issues if the parents have not won their trust and respect in other, less sensitive matters. In this digital age, we lead increasingly isolated lives. Being rigid and lashing out if kids express their individuality or deviate from the path set out for them will only result in kids freezing their parents out from their truest thoughts, their deepest concerns. Kids will simply not feel safe with them. They will turn towards the blackhole of social media and seek answers and validation from people who are just as likely to scam them as help them. South Asian parents fail abjectly in this matter. Snatching their kid’s phone, shouting at them, or beating them will do nothing except drive the wedge deeper because it only takes away from the kids the coping mechanisms they have found for themselves and builds resentment in them. Parents also have to stop projecting their own childhood onto their children. The coming generations will have no notion of a life before the internet - they are being born in it. It's a radically different childhood than any before it. And having reactionary “everything bad now” responses to any novel developments in their kids’ lives is unhelpful. It's a very sensitive and challenging task, perhaps more so than any previous generation of parents had to face. But they have to rise to the moment. The onus of parenting will always lie with the parent – they made the choice to be parents. The failure of not doing so is already before us.