21/04/2025
Late ADOLESCENCE opinion. I've had to watch Adolescence in two parts because we ran out of our Netflix subscription after two episodes, and I've only just watched the second two. But I got summat to say - and I'm gonna darn well say it here - basically cos I am not on Twitter no more and I love being late to a party.
I have read a lot of discourse on LinkedIn, Facebook about the show, and after watching the fourth episode, I am dumbfounded by how little of it delves into the toxicity of Stephen Graham's character. Everyone was speaking about social media/Andrew T*te/Incels etc, but what I think we are witnessing throughout the final episode is how two family members - the wife and daughter - are trying to manage an angry and childlike man. Two women who are terrified of saying the wrong thing, desperate to make him happy, and after he abused a kid and threw paint over his own van, sit there in silence for what feels like eternity, as neither of them hardly dare breathe. The final episode hums with a low-key fear and tension from the father, whilst at the same time portraying him as a victim.
For me, the show switches from what Jamie has done - to some real closure of why he might have done it. Because surely a family where the angry (or at least festering) father is having to be babied and managed by the women would have an impact on how a son views women. The way Jamie talks to the psychologist in the third episode in some way echoes his father's behaviour and the idea that if a woman doesn't make things better for him, or flatter him, they are in some way useless or deserve aggression.
I feel like I've seen a different show - because soooooo much discussion was about social media. But, at the end of the day, we aren't really shown much of what Jamie has been looking at on his computer, what we are shown is what he has been looking at day in and day out - his father.
Perhaps, it's no wonder there's so much violence and aggression towards women if we live by some sort of mad metric that if a man doesn't hit or r**e his family, then maybe he's doing an alright job. (I'm not saying that all aggressors in families are male, but in Jamie's family - it seems it was.) I don't understand how we can watch two women who are nervous as f**k about putting a single word out of their gobholes, and then start talking about how social media is to blame. Yes, I am sure social media is damaging for young brains, in so many ways, but it feels like a bit of a scapegoat here. Perhaps, it's just easier to talk about that than look at the root of where things are really going wrong.
