For once we happened to watch a much-discussed current show only a week after it debuted (instead of months later or years later). This is the Netflix show Adolescence (Wikipedia link).
It’s four hour-long episodes, about a 13-year-old boy in an English village who is accused of killing, with a knife, a girl classmate. Each episode is shot in one continuous take, and the episodes are sequential but not continuous.
The first is about the arrest in the boy’s home; the second is about the reactions at the boy’s school; the third is an interview between the boy and a counselor; the fourth is about the family’s reaction as, 13 months later, the boy pleads guilty. It’s not a mystery story; it’s clear by the end of the first episode that the boy is guilty — we see CCTV footage of him stabbing the girl. It’s about why the boy did it.
Technically, the show is brilliant in its execution, in the one-shot takes, and in the acting. There have been dozens or hundreds of posts on Facebook, and surely elsewhere, from people analyzing the show, finding hidden meanings perhaps.
Thematically, it corresponds with Jonathan Haidt’s THE ANXIOUS GENERATION, which I reviewed a bit skeptically here. The show suggests that boys, as much as girls, are affected by online chatter about their looks and who likes them and who doesn’t. (There’s a passage in episode three in which the boy asks the counselor, “am I ugly?” over and over; which he pronounces “oogly”.) The show invokes ideas of “incels”, that “80 percent of girls like 20 percent of the boys”, so that many boys get left out (at least they think so) and it shows how emojis on phones convey meanings that adults don’t understand.
So there is something fundamentally true here, and I’m thinking it might be about adolescence and the capacity of our modern civilization, via social media, to disturb the natural progression of growth. Short-circuit the natural growth of adolescence, through easy access on social media. I’m now more sympathetic to Haidt’s premise.
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Stepping outward and back, we’re in the adolescence of our species. We’ve lived, childlike, for millions or hundreds of thousands of years, of understanding ourselves and our myths as the centrality of existence, as children do about their parents and community. And have only recently realized, in the past couple centuries, the bigger picture: our place in an ancient, infinite universe. This realization has scared many people, and they fight back: by denying the bigger picture (evolution, et al), retreating to their tribal stories and values. And sometimes striking back, like the boy in Adolescence, at something that threatens their identity in that bigger picture. The current administration is doing that current striking back.
