10.04.2025

Striking a nerve

Jim Moody reviews Philip Barantini (director) Adolescence Netflix, limited season (four episodes)

It is early morning in a quiet locality somewhere in the Doncaster area, when suddenly the police batter in a family’s front door and haul a 13-year-old boy out of his bed and into custody. From there on in it is downhill all the way for dad, mum and his older sister - but especially for the boy, who is accused of murder. A nightmare scenario that in Adolescence is the beginning of a material tragedy for two families, a neighbourhood, a school’s pupils and teachers, and the population of a town.

Adolescence uses excellent means to achieve an impressive impact. As an example of the techniques, each of the four episodes is shot in one take (ie, using a single Steadicam, without cutaways); what we see emerges as raw and human - a powerful drama. It may be a truism that fiction can often engage more than factual forms, such as documentaries, and the emotion is certainly in evidence here. Adolescence is television at its best, dealing with difficult social issues and exposing to the glare of public attention situations which relate to ordinary life. This limited series (or ‘season’, as US programme-makers would have it) serves up via an excellent script, tight directing and filming, and admirable acting a work that is believable and empathetic.

Role of state

It is not the fault of the series that it is now being added to bourgeois politicians’ armoury in enhancing the role of the state. Unfortunately, co-writer Jack Thorne (of This is England fame) has publicly approved the notions of a smartphone ban in schools and imposing a ‘digital age of consent’, as exists in Australia. He floated these ideas to Sir Keir Starmer at a recent Downing Street meeting that included the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Children’s Society.

While almost all UK schools already prohibit mobiles in some settings, the idea of a digital age of consent is a new and far-reaching proposal that would greatly restrict civil liberties for the young. It may even be impracticable, in that illegality is no barrier to those determined enough. But scenarios in which young people were publicly policed as to their digital viewing might well result in criminalisation of swathes of children in the manner of other existing proscriptions, such as illegal drug use. This is not something that anyone seeing themselves as a democrat should countenance.

In the first episode of Adolescence, young Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is arrested for murder after ‘the thugs’ (police slang for Territorial Support Groups) batter down the Miller family’s front door and point guns at everyone. Jamie’s dad, Eddie (Stephen Graham), is still in shock at the police station. An outwardly sturdy man, he is puzzled and upset during police physical examinations and interrogations. The interplay between parent and child only grows more fraught for both as police processing proceeds.

Jamie is initially bemused, unable properly to articulate his own defence or even to explain anything to his father. But he follows the duty solicitor’s advice, giving ‘no comment’ answers when he should. Building the case against him, DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and fellow interrogator DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) present him with evidence from his mobile and street camera stills. But the clincher comes when they play a street camera video showing him stabbing fellow pupil Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday) multiple times. Eddie is devastated, what with Jamie having just previously sworn to him that he was innocent.

Day three following the murder sees Bascombe and Frank visiting Katie’s and Jamie’s school: a semi-chaotic ‘holding pen’, according to Bascombe. Their enquiries are stymied, as no murder weapon is found. Then Bascombe’s son, Adam (Amari Bacchus), a pupil two years above Jamie, enlightens his father as to the meaning of the Instagram emojis sent by Katie to Jamie. They were not flattering, and the message Jamie received was: ‘You’ll be a virgin forever’ (ie, using ‘incel’-ism against him). Adam goes on to quote the incel motivational/recruiting phrase that “80% of women are attracted to 20% of men” and highlights the red emoji that Jamie used as a ‘call to action to the manosphere’. The scales fall from Bascombe’s eyes, while Adam says he had to speak up because it was “embarrassing watching you blunder about”. Soon after, Jamie’s friend, Ryan (Kaine Davis), is arrested for conspiracy to murder for giving him his knife and Jamie is formally charged.

Here the truism is that incel ideation often has effects in specific situations such as schools, where some kids like to lord it over others, often leading to bullying. This is especially so where social media and those falling foul of it can be markedly affected negatively. But school culture, if we can call it such, is a reflection of wider society. Matters that exist beyond the school do not cease their effect once inside. As expressed in this fictitious school, there is no evidence of a countervailing culture of condemnation of the foulness created by reactionary ideas about women and associated sexual predation.

One teacher mentions that she has heard some boys talking about Andrew Tate, but she clearly has no appreciation of what foul ideas this person propagates. This expresses in microcosm a weakness in the body politic, or politics as carried on throughout bourgeois Britain - a weakness resulting from the absence of left and particularly revolutionary ideas. Battling reaction and the upsurge in its revolting ideas faces humanity with a new barbarism that communists and the rest of the left must fight - and build the means to do so.

In perhaps the most moving episode, seven months later Jamie is still being held on remand, though in an inappropriate setting that he rejects: it seems to be a youth mental health facility. Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), a psychologist who has the task of assessing him prior to trial, appears as a welcome visitor. She has established a good rapport and teases out truths, but the biggest problem remains: Jamie maintains strongly that he did not kill Katie, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Eddie is still his hero, his preference for only male friends confusing Jamie about the very idea of having female friends himself. Briony’s visit is punctuated by tempestuous outbursts; scrabbling for justification, Jamie says Katie was a “bullying bitch”. Although he claims to have been put off by what he found on the internet about incel ideology and rejecting it, he still thinks the 80/20 idea is valid. Then, when Briony announces that the visit is her last, Jamie goes apeshit and is escorted out.

This deals effectively, if obliquely, with the pressures, on young people especially, caused by long periods in custody. While in cases of murder, rape or arson there is no presumption of bail in the English criminal courts, it is not ruled out. Here, Jamie exhibits negative behaviour from incarceration that bring tears, including from Briony, who nearly gives way completely after Jamie has gone. These are harbingers of what Jamie shall face and likely fail to deal with following conviction and sentence to years of confinement. And there are therefore questions that are exposed for those with eyes to see at this point: how can we not oppose imprisonment as the broad-brush approach - even to what are found to be serious criminal actions in the bourgeois courts? Is it punishment fitting the crime or rather societal revenge against those who transgress?

In the final episode, by the way, 13 months following Katie’s murder, Jamie’s family is not faring well. On Eddie’s birthday louts spray-paint his van. Spending a morning roughing up a spray painter and hearing from Jamie that he is pleading guilty completely bend him out of shape.

A crucial lie for bourgeois regimes is that propensity for criminality and carrying out criminal acts are individuals’ flaws. How that serious flaw, if flaw it be, developed in an individual is seen as secondary. Parental failure or lack of discipline is pub talk. Physical removal of aberration - anathematisation - are considered society’s best solution. At one time those members of society considered sufficiently culpable were put to death. But permanently excising by death or whole-life imprisonment solves nothing and are corrosive remedies. Executions doom a social system to death, while lengthy imprisonment is long drawn-out mental torture.

Certainly, in the UK there is a dearth of worthwhile activity for prisoners and little to no preparation in any real or useful sense for life beyond prison. The old saw spread by Alexander Paterson - commissioner of prisons 1922-46 - still holds, while prisons exist: those sentenced to imprisonment “come to prison as a punishment, not for punishment”.¹ In other words, a prisoner should have all the rights that someone not imprisoned has, apart from the fact of her or his removal of the right to live where they want: this is the sole punishment. Beyond that as yet unachieved reform, however, abolition of incarceration has to be our eventual goal.

Stripped of legalese and bourgeois liberal reformist cant, bourgeois criminal law to this day is, of course, based on naked revenge. But then that is the incel idea, too: revenge on women for preventing 80% of men from having freely available sex. It is as (if not more) reactionary as medieval ideas about women.

Denial of rights

Returning to issues raised around Adolescence, and reactionary commentaries and politicians’ eagerness to bring in further state bans and prohibitions, the Online Safety Act 2023 now places a duty on social media companies to protect children (legally defined as everyone under 18) and “puts a range of new duties on social media companies and search services, making them more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms”. Specifically, “Children must be prevented from accessing Primary Priority Content [which includes] pornography … bullying … abusive or hateful content … content which depicts or encourages serious violence or injury …”²

As is usual with state interventions, this act introduces blanket controls over vast areas of internet content, reducing the ability of the left - and especially the revolutionary left - to promote and recruit in the battle of ideas. Legal interpretation of the act - inevitably expensive in terms of the costs in the courts, where such matters end up - fall most heavily on those least able to bear them, let alone other criminal consequences. The overall effect on societal interchange and communication is deleterious out of all proportion to the vaunted benefits, even were they to accrue.

Adolescence is currently available on Netflix: www.netflix.com. The series is to be made available free for use in secondary schools via the Into Film+ streaming service.

See ‘Why prisons?’ in A Paterson Paterson on prisons Manhattan 1951, p23 (original emphasis).↩︎
www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer.↩︎