Behind the screen, teenage boys are drowning in incel culture, but the children don’t bother — it’s just the water they swim in. Set in England, Netflix’s Adolescence follows 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) after he stabs his female classmate, Katie, to death. Seven times in the chest. The four-part series isn’t a whodunnit. It’s a why-did-he-do-it? Even Adolescence doesn’t have an answer.
Jamie excelled in school. Jamie had close friends. Jamie played video games. Jamie isn’t a “monster,” because Jamie could be any boy you know. So, what does Jamie do when life gets hard? He opens Instagram. He notices the emojis the popular girls comment under his posts: dynamite, red pill and blue pill, beans, the 100. For the eighth graders, emojis like that are as good as stamping “incel” on the boy’s forehead. Instead of asking for help, Jamie resorts to the manosphere, Andrew Tate, and any other way for him to have control. Online, Jamie learns that the easiest way to have control is by tricking, dominating, and controlling women. Soon enough, Jamie doesn’t see his mother or his sister as equals, and mocks the female psychologist assigned to his case.
In a chilling one-shot take, the series unfolds at the police station and lingers on the terror and vulnerability in Jamie’s face. The boy enlists his father as his trusted adult, and both are seated while they watch CCTV footage of Jamie stabbing Katie in a parking lot seven times in her chest. The ambiguity of the case is gone, and there is only mystery that remains: why? The script unfolds as Jamie’s father, Eddie, is forced to look in the mirror, and confront the example he has set for his son. When Jamie needed help, Eddie looked the other way to avoid confronting his failures. His son was bullied, humiliated, and mocked for not being “manly” enough, and in the age of incels, the only communities that welcomed him were the toxic podcasts and Instagram comment sections.
Despite providing context for Jamie’s action, the show leaves a few questions unanswered. To what extent can we attribute this to incel culture? To the “manosphere”? To a deep-rooted misogynistic culture? The fear and anxiety on the screen reflect the position of adults, stuck on the outside as they try to wrap their head around the mind of young boys like Jamie.
Police officers Luke Bascombe and Misha Frank tackle the habitat of young children as if it’s a warzone, searching his school for signs of a murder weapon. The officers are clueless of the inner workings of the young teenagers until a social outcast, Bascombe’s son, approaches them with information that revealed the cyberbullying and emasculation of the adolescents. After realizing the extent to which young boys measure themselves on how they are perceived by women, Bascome interrogates Jamie, asking him if he has a girlfriend or how he would like his women to look. Because the shot was done in a single take, the uneasiness Jamie feels as he struggles to answer the officer’s questions jumps out of the screen into the stomachs of viewers.
Hot chocolate or a hot temper? In episode three, viewers witness both from Owen Cooper as he fluctuates from aggression and entitlement to the pleading of a 13-year-old boy. Therapist Briony tests Jamie’s relationship with his father, friends, other women, and himself, and pins the boy like a butterfly to a card. Cooper demonstrates an exceptional performance that lets the viewer see the radicalised misogynist Jamie could become, or perhaps already is.
Critics complain about the lack of presence of the victim and the spotlight being on Jamie, when really the purpose of justice is to avenge the dead; however, I disagree. With haunting clarity, the show keeps the victim present enough to question how many women and girls must die for a man to feel worthy in society. Adolescence questions who demands these fatalities, and what we’re teaching boys as they are left to navigate a world growing up in the manosphere, with a concept of masculinity that insists they survive it alone.