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Notes -
"Adolescence" isn't like that.
After watching it, I can give my thoughts, and it really isn't.
First let's look at what "incel" means in the world of the show (which may not reflect reality). "Incel" is portrayed as a zoomer concept that all the kids know about and the boring old adults don't get it. The kids know about it because all kids know about it, and boring old adults don't because it's a kid thing and it's just not part of their generation. It's also shown to be a generic insult, kind of like how calling someone a fag may have been used 10 years ago. Calling someone an incel doesn't make them an incel, just like calling someone a fag doesn't make him a homosexual. And in fact the protagonist explicitly rejects the label. His friends are also not suggested to be incels, though they are pushed together as common victims of bullying. One is bullied for being poor and the other is bullied for being dumb.
In the show there is no idea that there's a looming incel threat that is coming for your kids and schools. The attack is portrayed as being motivated by bullying and a personal grudge against the victim, not by ideology or misogyny. Of course being called ugly and an incel was a big part of this bullying, but no more than any other kind of relentless torment that kids put each other through.
Now let's analyze the episodes individually.
Episode 1 mostly lacks social commentary, but if anything, is anti-police by showcasing quality police brutality and abuse. The show starts off with the detectives nonchalantly executing a hardcore no-knock raid with dozens of heavily armed officers in order to pick up a kid. Even though the kid is an accused murderer, they have no reason to believe he will resist or that the family will impede the investigation. Then there's the interrogation, where the police don't have enough evidence, so they gaslight in order to fish for a confession. Fortunately the kid has a lawyer and is able to avoid most of the traps. It's true that being anti-police is somewhat blue-coded but I don't otherwise see anything too major happening in this episode.
Episode 2 is more of a commentary on school and society. The administration is shown as uncaring and incompetent. Bullying runs rampant. The detective's son is even bullied every day nobody things anything of it. The drama and storytelling is nice, because we see in the beginning that the victim's best friend is hiding something, and we find out gradually that it's because the victim was doing the bullying too. Of course murder isn't justified in this situation, but it establishes the main character as a sort of antihero that we can almost relate to. Which is the perfect time because when the detective breaks the friend he says that's the last thing he needs to close the case and throw our antihero in prison.
Episode 3 is a battle of wits between the two characters. The killer wrongly assumes that the psychologist is in cahoots with the police and fishing for a confession, but rightly understands that she is not on his side. The psychologist alternates between trying to build a rapport and asserting her authority, while the killer remains on the defensive. At the end we find out that the killer gained a liking for his nemesis, in sort of a messed up Stockholm syndrome kind of way. It is shown that the killer's mind is melted by being exposed to too much oversexualized content on Instagram. This sounds correct as whenever I make the mistake of opening FB, I get reels by creators who also do OF.
Episode 4 is hard to analyze, but it's hard to argue that there's any sort of partisan propaganda wrapped up in it.
Overall, the show is overhyped but also interesting enough, and really isn't pushing some sort of woke angle. 50% of murders are committed by a certain kind of person, yet true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected, not because of a woke bias in reporting.
Yeah, I've been looking for an opportunity to jump into this, with my perspective on the show from here in the States, where it's been popular but not explosively dominating the pop-culture discourse like it seems to be across the pond. I didn't watch the whole show, but my fiancée did and I caught significant chunks of it. I thought it was a very well-made psychological thriller/crime drama. The actors were very good -- the child actor playing the son in particular, but the supporting cast were quite good too, the father in particular stands out in my memory as having some solid scenes. I'm a bit of a sucker for the one-shot long-take gimmick but I thought it was done really well and with purpose, it ratchets up the tension and makes things feel more real (perhaps a factor in why everyone seems to be taking it so damn seriously). It's not made explicit whether he actually committed the murder until, iirc, the third episode and you can really feel the confusion of the characters as they believe or don't believe the story, his parents being in denial until the end, etc. The show overall kind of feels like a plot you might see in an episode of Law and Order: SVU but given a higher production value and done in a sort of elevated indie-artsy style. It's genuinely very well done.
So, I definitely understand why the show was a hit. What I do not understand is why it has become this absurd social flashpoint. Yes, the show includes some cringey dialogue about the young killer being radicalized by "the manosphere", but the point of the show (or at least, this is how it seemed to my American eyes) is the drama, the social commentary is just there to make things topical -- like when CSI would do an episode about killers organizing in chat rooms in the 2000s -- and is very much secondary to just being an interesting piece of fiction in and of itself. I did not get the sense that it was pushing any kind of significant message at all, really. There's an element of "this could be your kid next" but only in the way that you're supposed to think "ooohh, Michael Myers could come to YOUR town!" when you watch Halloween.
What I'm getting at is this. The interesting question, in my mind, is not "why does the show exist in the form it does" or "why is it popular"; it is a somewhat-soapy crime drama involving children and families and a salacious murder, and has some elements tying in to topical hot-button issues. In short, it's top-tier mom-bait -- think again of the venerable Law and Order: SVU -- that's been elevated to wider success on the back of good execution (direction, cinematography, and acting). This kind of stuff has been successful for decades, and Adolescence is an unusually well-crafted example of the type, but nothing more -- so the interesting question, to me, is "why did the British government and mass media latch onto this so insanely hard?" They're talking about it like it's some kind of exposé and not, you know, a completely fictional TV show. Because -- to reiterate -- the show by itself does not come off as a preachy after-school special type of thing, or even especially woke. It's the same sort of salacious, loosely-based-on-the-headlines drama that people have been making for decades. When I first saw that people in the UK government wanted to show it in schools I sincerely thought it was a joke -- but now it seems like they're really going to do it. Is it just a sort of dark bread and circuses thing, "let's gin up some furor about this fictional story so we can avoid dealing with our many real problems"? If so, it looks like it's working, as both woke and anti-woke commentators are taking the whole thing incredibly seriously. Pardon my French, but, what the fuck is going on in England?
I haven't watched the show or plan to, but your description of the phenomenon surrounding it reminds me a bit of the Netflix show Jessica Jones from about a decade back. Not nearly as big a deal in terms of being talked about for ideological messaging as Adolescence, but I ran into more than a few mentions by people about it as some great demonstration of "rape culture." When I watched the show, it was a decent superhero dramedy that was so extremely far removed from anything approaching social reality that the notion that it was some meaningful social commentary to anyone who's not actively trying to twist it that way seemed utterly absurd.
Which, I think, points to why the people talking about these shows this way are doing so: they're actively trying to twist it that way. The mainstream ideology that these people follow posits that fictional works always and inevitably have political and ideological meaning, which is why the followers so often decrt media that has the wrong messaging and also try to create media that has the right messaging. This show Adolescence seems to have enough features that allow them to see the correct patterns that properly flatter them and their messaging, and it's apparently well made to boot, so they latch on to it.
The funniest possible thing to happen now would be the writer(s) of the show being proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be unremorseful sexual predators.
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