This has all been a reminder of the truth that when a piece of media catches fire in the public consciousness and becomes ubiquitous, the underlying driver of that is always something other than the thing itself. Thats the weirdness of a “hit”. In the case of adolescence, so many people seem unaware of the basic facts of what the show even says or is about. It’s as textbook a case of a moral panic as has ever happened anywhere.
I think something is being missed here. Most people who watch Adolescence do not assume people like Jamie are likely to become killers. They realise this is fiction, doing what fiction does. The reason Adolescene pulls such deep emotional levers is that it keys into a more generalised fear of the effect of smartphones on kids.
The show does not exist in isolation. It comes a year after Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation and after a year of campaigning by groups like Smartphone Free Childhood. The book/movement has had almost constant media coverage. Adolescence rides on the crest of this wave.
Perhaps we should question whether the show's pulling such deep levers is proof of it hitting some kind of truth, not the literal one of 'Is the story realistic?' but something more profound.
Adolescence is fiction. When fiction works, it's proof that some truth has been found. Rather than saying it's all ridiculous, we should ask ourselves what.
"When fiction works, it's proof that some truth has been found."
I take it that by 'works' you mean popular with the viewing audience by virtue of speaking to some profund and general inner anxiety.
I am reminded that long, long ago the fictional work 'Vita et Passione Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis' composed by the saintly Thomas of Monmouth, was very popular indeed.
The audience, and the authorities, were convinced that 'some truth had been found': in this case that Jews were prone to the kidnapping and ritual murder of Christian children. This particular truth was a major factor in the spread of violent antisemitism across Europe throughout the Middle Ages. This blood libel survives into our own times.
Is it possible that the 'some truth' which is revealed by fiction is as likely as not to be an ingrained bigotry, and that its consequences may be less than beneficent?
Believe me, some women find it just as difficult to negotiate these new social norms focused on empathy and harm prevention :-)
I don't have a Netflix subscription (I'll never consider it while they're funding Harry & Meghan) but from the reviews I've read, it sounds as if this drama is shining a spotlight on the mouse in the corner while ignoring the elephant rampaging round the room.
I understand how in "Adolescence" the baleful influence of the "Andrew Tate shite" can appear to "progressives" to be the main point of the drama. But to me, what made the show so compelling was its exploration of the theme of male humiliation - which, as Tom Wolfe pointed out in his novels, is the most powerful spur to bad behavior on the part of any man or boy. Jamie killed his classmate because the girl humiliated him, publicly, with her coded online posts implying that he could never win a woman. What he may have read or heard about women in the "manosphere" seems extraneous to this.
The closest analogue to "Adolescence" is "Carmen" - nice boy from a good family n Navarre is humiliated by the Gypsy siren, so he stabs her to death. Same story.
Maybe Carmen should be shown in schools rather than Adolescence? At least it has some great tunes and we know it’s fictional and we all know Jose is not a role model to follow. Although I suppose the Torreador is the Andrew Tate of the time …
Or have ‘Delilah’ by Tom Jones sung at assembly, to warn of the dangers of taunting a man beyond - oops, I mean the dangers of the internet or something
"This is why actuaries could not write compelling dramas - the plots would be predictable and depressing, and make the audiences feel bad about themselves."
It was hard to pick out the very best insight among so many in this piece, but I chose the sentence above, probably because I used to work with actuaries.
Weirdly I was also advised to become an actuary in the distant past, I suppose it was the go-to advice for anybody who did well at maths in 80s and 90s. Luckily for me, I found computers more interesting.
I worked for an insurance company in the late 80s and early 90s. I was in tax accounting and regulatory compliance, but our section was lumped under the Vice President - Actuarial, so I sat with the actuaries and their programmers. Some of them were quite mad.
I couldn't say, but I thought it was an unusual hobby for a math guy in a suit. There was one who rebuilt Corvettes in the parking lot of his apartment complex, too.
I worked in computing (programming/systems analysis) for a brief unhappy time in my mid-twenties, in Bristol (England). I hated everything about it. But we also had a strange female boss (mid-thirties) who seemed to keep making very arbitrary decisions and messing up how the various 'teams' -- or just people -- worked together in her department. So you would suddenly be taken off one project with this person, and put on another. It all got so mad no one knew in the end what they were supposed to be doing. Then one day she left. Just went. This is someone who, back then, was getting decent money for running a large IT department. So the company got into her desk and stuff and -- behold -- she had loads of charts plotted out in mad detail. It was all stuff like X should not work with Y because Scorpio/Capricorn. Much more mad twaddle about -- I don't know what you call it -- Earth religion/New Age? Just bonkers stuff, anyway. And she'd been sorting out the past months on what she saw in the stars and 'getting her own readings done', etc.
Very good article. I had just had a conversation about this program with a young lad(24 years old) who is a graduate engineer before I read it. I mentioned the program and questioned what was going on and how ridiculous, indeed dangerous, it was for for the establishment to use it to (again) target white men and boys. He thought it was a great series and white boys are violent. I said I’d like to the stats on that and pointed out that most knife crime is black on black and if course the industrial rape of white girls is by Muslim Pakistani men not white boys and the program is based in a black boy murdering a black girl. They would never make a program about that. Far easier to go for the soft easy target: white men and boys.
My favourite fact about Andrew Tate is that his dad was an African-American International Chess Master. The actuary in me also notes that the more significant fact is that Andrew's parents divorced when he was 5, and he was raised by his mum.
See Tate's twitter post of late about the joys in pubs in the 1990s. It was all rosy tinted but I think true too- inflation and immigration and the nanny state killed the common joys of life.
You can maybe add dating apps to the list of suspects. People don't go out so much these days to meet the opposite sex (or the same sex for a certain demographic)
Excellent. When will dysfunctional liberals own up to they way their progressive values have wrecked the family and the country and to what that actually leads to, crime in areas they don't want to think about - young black kids stabbing each other for whom black lives don't matter, and their own kids depressed and ticked off, which can only possibly be explained by the manosphere, rubbish as quite a lot of it is. A nasty case of dishonest blame shifting.
Following what happened in Southport, Adolescence is disgraceful propaganda. That it’s been so watched, only indicates how desperate people are to see a white British boy as a main character - for once. But in casting they have not chosen any sort of British boy but one with a general olde world charm. A wholesome look that would not look out of place on a tin of toffee. An idealised version of “us” for those who foolishly hark back to pre immigration Britian. That he looks nothing like those who are most likely to resort to knives in post immigration Britain (and by an order of magnitude) is exactly the point. And that it feels risky to say this is the point too. And then there is side swipe that he must be working class, because while racism is really, really bad, classism is definitely good. This is just the cultural left clearing up misapprehensions and debunking lies. It is afterall a universalist/blank slate world where we are all interchangeable (at least if white) and where everyone is equally likely to commit knife crime, unless they are women. And if this is not enough to make one heave, the universalism cuts one way only, where the good and saintly characters are our overlooked immigrant saviours.
And I'll grant they are thorough - or I'm paranoid. Most of the filming for A was done in Kirkby and South Elmsall which are white enclaves just 15 miles north of Rotherham!!!!
“…….Jack Thorne, the show’s writer, has even called for teenagers to be banned from social media to ‘stop [the] pollution’ of misogyny online, while the government is clearly using the series to promote its Online Safety Act…..”.
Yet neither Jack the Rat nor Starmer’s egregious government are interested in the intrinsically racist plague of misogyny - of which 99% - has been perpetrated by a section of society that is being given immunity from criticism.
Beyond brilliant Ed, cuts right through to the heart of the matter. This is why I subscribe to you. You are one of the best British writers of our time. Long may you continue
Sadly the people who will make decisions about policy in these areas don't go into such depth, or even ask basic questions about the premise.
I liked 'To Kill a Mockingbird', but I remember Fever Pitch more vividly. Especially the chapter on Gus Caesar. Years later I read that Gus had actually become a millionaire, as a financial trader in Hong Kong.
'Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch appeared when I was in the third year of secondary school . . .'
I was thirty-two when it came out, and read it. I have to accept I am officially old. Did kind of like Hornby, and the mad stuff about biting the heads off chocolate white mice before the footie game and he can write and even the 'suicide book' worked. High Fidelity was the best, though Magnus Mills' 'The Forensic Record Society' was equally 'autistic', and fun, and got across some of all that seventies growing up with prog rock and then the punk thing at 16, then the best years ever for music, then the mid to late eighties destroyed it until nowadays it's just utter pap.
It does make you wonder how much classic fiction was propaganda designed to create discussion around a fake problem instead of looking at the real one.
I am beginning to see various cultural products about the McCarthyism as deliberate attempts to hide that Hollywood and the State Department were full of fanatical Stalinsts; the BBC seems to regularly feature Mosley in dramas despite him being a pretty peripheral figure; I suspect quite a lot of things written about mental asylums were the effort of activists with the bizarre RD Laing tinged belief that mental illness didn't really exist and the most dangerous patient could safely released.
"The Crucible is another one I could have mentioned, but being a parable it slightly differs from those mentioned."
I was in The Crucible (played the Reverend Mr Hale) at school. Have you read Robert Warshow's masterly critique of the play (published in the American Jewish magazine Commentary in its pre-Podhoretz days of troubled liberalism)? He points out, inter alia, that the Salem Trials bore a much closer resemblance to the show trials that had just taken place in Prague than to any trial that had recently concluded in the United States; and he also made the point that the allegory failed since (at least as far as the modern secular audience is concerned) there is no such thing as witchcraft, whereas there were Communists. The metaphor, in other words, implies that those accused of being members of the Communist party were innocent by definition!
In any case, infringements of civil liberties were actually worse during WWI, the First Red Scare in the aftermath, and WWII, than the post-WWII Red Scare.
In fact, the House of Un-American Activities Committee was actually founded on 1938 and was originally obsessed by Axis "Fifth Columns".
The actuary joke (surely there is only one): Q--What's the difference between an American actuary and a Sicilian acturay? A--The American actuary can tell you how many people will die in a given year. The Sicilian actuary can tell you their names.
Thanks for the shout out
This has all been a reminder of the truth that when a piece of media catches fire in the public consciousness and becomes ubiquitous, the underlying driver of that is always something other than the thing itself. Thats the weirdness of a “hit”. In the case of adolescence, so many people seem unaware of the basic facts of what the show even says or is about. It’s as textbook a case of a moral panic as has ever happened anywhere.
See also: The Handmaid’s Tale, which was fortuitous enough to first air six months into Trump's (first) presidency
One of the Kardashian girls dressed up as sexy handmaid for Halloween and provoked uproar
I'd forgotten that! actually very funny, to be fair
Up-phwoarr more like 💪🏻
Do you think Angela's Ashes and the constant films about the laundries had a similar effect in Ireland
surely
I think something is being missed here. Most people who watch Adolescence do not assume people like Jamie are likely to become killers. They realise this is fiction, doing what fiction does. The reason Adolescene pulls such deep emotional levers is that it keys into a more generalised fear of the effect of smartphones on kids.
The show does not exist in isolation. It comes a year after Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation and after a year of campaigning by groups like Smartphone Free Childhood. The book/movement has had almost constant media coverage. Adolescence rides on the crest of this wave.
Perhaps we should question whether the show's pulling such deep levers is proof of it hitting some kind of truth, not the literal one of 'Is the story realistic?' but something more profound.
Adolescence is fiction. When fiction works, it's proof that some truth has been found. Rather than saying it's all ridiculous, we should ask ourselves what.
"When fiction works, it's proof that some truth has been found."
I take it that by 'works' you mean popular with the viewing audience by virtue of speaking to some profund and general inner anxiety.
I am reminded that long, long ago the fictional work 'Vita et Passione Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis' composed by the saintly Thomas of Monmouth, was very popular indeed.
The audience, and the authorities, were convinced that 'some truth had been found': in this case that Jews were prone to the kidnapping and ritual murder of Christian children. This particular truth was a major factor in the spread of violent antisemitism across Europe throughout the Middle Ages. This blood libel survives into our own times.
Is it possible that the 'some truth' which is revealed by fiction is as likely as not to be an ingrained bigotry, and that its consequences may be less than beneficent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Miracles_of_St_William_of_Norwich
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781802702804-008/pdf
Believe me, some women find it just as difficult to negotiate these new social norms focused on empathy and harm prevention :-)
I don't have a Netflix subscription (I'll never consider it while they're funding Harry & Meghan) but from the reviews I've read, it sounds as if this drama is shining a spotlight on the mouse in the corner while ignoring the elephant rampaging round the room.
Many such cases - Louise has written about that subject very well
(I should really watch the Meghan show, I just can't bring myself to)
I understand how in "Adolescence" the baleful influence of the "Andrew Tate shite" can appear to "progressives" to be the main point of the drama. But to me, what made the show so compelling was its exploration of the theme of male humiliation - which, as Tom Wolfe pointed out in his novels, is the most powerful spur to bad behavior on the part of any man or boy. Jamie killed his classmate because the girl humiliated him, publicly, with her coded online posts implying that he could never win a woman. What he may have read or heard about women in the "manosphere" seems extraneous to this.
The closest analogue to "Adolescence" is "Carmen" - nice boy from a good family n Navarre is humiliated by the Gypsy siren, so he stabs her to death. Same story.
Maybe Carmen should be shown in schools rather than Adolescence? At least it has some great tunes and we know it’s fictional and we all know Jose is not a role model to follow. Although I suppose the Torreador is the Andrew Tate of the time …
Too much smoking for these days :-).
She works in a cigarette factory, a total no go!
Or have ‘Delilah’ by Tom Jones sung at assembly, to warn of the dangers of taunting a man beyond - oops, I mean the dangers of the internet or something
"This is why actuaries could not write compelling dramas - the plots would be predictable and depressing, and make the audiences feel bad about themselves."
It was hard to pick out the very best insight among so many in this piece, but I chose the sentence above, probably because I used to work with actuaries.
Thank you!
Weirdly I was also advised to become an actuary in the distant past, I suppose it was the go-to advice for anybody who did well at maths in 80s and 90s. Luckily for me, I found computers more interesting.
I worked for an insurance company in the late 80s and early 90s. I was in tax accounting and regulatory compliance, but our section was lumped under the Vice President - Actuarial, so I sat with the actuaries and their programmers. Some of them were quite mad.
mad as in Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind sort of mad?
Weird little quirks, like being a Deadhead or into astrology.
Aren't Deadheads supposed to have the higher average intelligence for music fans? (I'm not one)
I couldn't say, but I thought it was an unusual hobby for a math guy in a suit. There was one who rebuilt Corvettes in the parking lot of his apartment complex, too.
I worked in computing (programming/systems analysis) for a brief unhappy time in my mid-twenties, in Bristol (England). I hated everything about it. But we also had a strange female boss (mid-thirties) who seemed to keep making very arbitrary decisions and messing up how the various 'teams' -- or just people -- worked together in her department. So you would suddenly be taken off one project with this person, and put on another. It all got so mad no one knew in the end what they were supposed to be doing. Then one day she left. Just went. This is someone who, back then, was getting decent money for running a large IT department. So the company got into her desk and stuff and -- behold -- she had loads of charts plotted out in mad detail. It was all stuff like X should not work with Y because Scorpio/Capricorn. Much more mad twaddle about -- I don't know what you call it -- Earth religion/New Age? Just bonkers stuff, anyway. And she'd been sorting out the past months on what she saw in the stars and 'getting her own readings done', etc.
What happened to her after that?
Very good article. I had just had a conversation about this program with a young lad(24 years old) who is a graduate engineer before I read it. I mentioned the program and questioned what was going on and how ridiculous, indeed dangerous, it was for for the establishment to use it to (again) target white men and boys. He thought it was a great series and white boys are violent. I said I’d like to the stats on that and pointed out that most knife crime is black on black and if course the industrial rape of white girls is by Muslim Pakistani men not white boys and the program is based in a black boy murdering a black girl. They would never make a program about that. Far easier to go for the soft easy target: white men and boys.
My favourite fact about Andrew Tate is that his dad was an African-American International Chess Master. The actuary in me also notes that the more significant fact is that Andrew's parents divorced when he was 5, and he was raised by his mum.
obviously a clever guy, and a deeply bad one.
See Tate's twitter post of late about the joys in pubs in the 1990s. It was all rosy tinted but I think true too- inflation and immigration and the nanny state killed the common joys of life.
You can maybe add dating apps to the list of suspects. People don't go out so much these days to meet the opposite sex (or the same sex for a certain demographic)
Excellent. When will dysfunctional liberals own up to they way their progressive values have wrecked the family and the country and to what that actually leads to, crime in areas they don't want to think about - young black kids stabbing each other for whom black lives don't matter, and their own kids depressed and ticked off, which can only possibly be explained by the manosphere, rubbish as quite a lot of it is. A nasty case of dishonest blame shifting.
Following what happened in Southport, Adolescence is disgraceful propaganda. That it’s been so watched, only indicates how desperate people are to see a white British boy as a main character - for once. But in casting they have not chosen any sort of British boy but one with a general olde world charm. A wholesome look that would not look out of place on a tin of toffee. An idealised version of “us” for those who foolishly hark back to pre immigration Britian. That he looks nothing like those who are most likely to resort to knives in post immigration Britain (and by an order of magnitude) is exactly the point. And that it feels risky to say this is the point too. And then there is side swipe that he must be working class, because while racism is really, really bad, classism is definitely good. This is just the cultural left clearing up misapprehensions and debunking lies. It is afterall a universalist/blank slate world where we are all interchangeable (at least if white) and where everyone is equally likely to commit knife crime, unless they are women. And if this is not enough to make one heave, the universalism cuts one way only, where the good and saintly characters are our overlooked immigrant saviours.
And I'll grant they are thorough - or I'm paranoid. Most of the filming for A was done in Kirkby and South Elmsall which are white enclaves just 15 miles north of Rotherham!!!!
“…….Jack Thorne, the show’s writer, has even called for teenagers to be banned from social media to ‘stop [the] pollution’ of misogyny online, while the government is clearly using the series to promote its Online Safety Act…..”.
Yet neither Jack the Rat nor Starmer’s egregious government are interested in the intrinsically racist plague of misogyny - of which 99% - has been perpetrated by a section of society that is being given immunity from criticism.
Beyond brilliant Ed, cuts right through to the heart of the matter. This is why I subscribe to you. You are one of the best British writers of our time. Long may you continue
Thank you very much Joseph
Great essay!
Sadly the people who will make decisions about policy in these areas don't go into such depth, or even ask basic questions about the premise.
I liked 'To Kill a Mockingbird', but I remember Fever Pitch more vividly. Especially the chapter on Gus Caesar. Years later I read that Gus had actually become a millionaire, as a financial trader in Hong Kong.
'Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch appeared when I was in the third year of secondary school . . .'
I was thirty-two when it came out, and read it. I have to accept I am officially old. Did kind of like Hornby, and the mad stuff about biting the heads off chocolate white mice before the footie game and he can write and even the 'suicide book' worked. High Fidelity was the best, though Magnus Mills' 'The Forensic Record Society' was equally 'autistic', and fun, and got across some of all that seventies growing up with prog rock and then the punk thing at 16, then the best years ever for music, then the mid to late eighties destroyed it until nowadays it's just utter pap.
High Fidelity was also great. About a Boy was good although a rare instance where the film was better.
I've recently reread Juliet, Naked - there's an Ed West character there, based on you?
no way. he's called Ed West?
Yes, tiny side character, one of Duncan's nerdy internet friends. I noticed the name when I reread it.
It does make you wonder how much classic fiction was propaganda designed to create discussion around a fake problem instead of looking at the real one.
I am beginning to see various cultural products about the McCarthyism as deliberate attempts to hide that Hollywood and the State Department were full of fanatical Stalinsts; the BBC seems to regularly feature Mosley in dramas despite him being a pretty peripheral figure; I suspect quite a lot of things written about mental asylums were the effort of activists with the bizarre RD Laing tinged belief that mental illness didn't really exist and the most dangerous patient could safely released.
many psychiatrists in the mid-20th century seemed to believe some absolutely loopy things.
The Crucible is another one I could have mentioned, but being a parable it slightly differs from those mentioned.
"The Crucible is another one I could have mentioned, but being a parable it slightly differs from those mentioned."
I was in The Crucible (played the Reverend Mr Hale) at school. Have you read Robert Warshow's masterly critique of the play (published in the American Jewish magazine Commentary in its pre-Podhoretz days of troubled liberalism)? He points out, inter alia, that the Salem Trials bore a much closer resemblance to the show trials that had just taken place in Prague than to any trial that had recently concluded in the United States; and he also made the point that the allegory failed since (at least as far as the modern secular audience is concerned) there is no such thing as witchcraft, whereas there were Communists. The metaphor, in other words, implies that those accused of being members of the Communist party were innocent by definition!
https://www.commentary.org/articles/robert-warshow/the-liberal-conscience-in-the-cruciblearthur-miller-and-his-audience/
In any case, infringements of civil liberties were actually worse during WWI, the First Red Scare in the aftermath, and WWII, than the post-WWII Red Scare.
In fact, the House of Un-American Activities Committee was actually founded on 1938 and was originally obsessed by Axis "Fifth Columns".
Very disappointed reading fever pitch didn’t make you and arsenal fan Ed
no, but I live only a mile away or so, so my son is.
Ahh. Good. Just like this place, the more of us sharing in the despair, the more bearable it is
Hopefully the impact of Tariffs - on Britain and worldwide - will take people's minds off Safety Online and similar tosh.
The actuary joke (surely there is only one): Q--What's the difference between an American actuary and a Sicilian acturay? A--The American actuary can tell you how many people will die in a given year. The Sicilian actuary can tell you their names.
ha ha
We used to say, "An accountant is an actuary without the big personality."