In a past life I was a teaching assistant in a prep school, and the experience turned me into an advocate for military conscription. The boys were great till roughly age 11; docile, easily taught. After that they became pugilistic and sex-obsessed, and covered in spots. I was trying to persuade them to read Lord of the Flies, while they were getting on with living it.
Adolescence, a TV drama that follows the arrest of a 13-year-old boy for murder, holds no surprises for teachers. It stands out in an era of over-produced dross for its elegant simplicity: a single camera, one take, it dips in and out of the justice process in real-time, as if eavesdropping on an everyday tragedy. This is the kind of relevant drama the BBC insists only it can make, yet it’s Netflix that’s gone and done it.
Each episode is set in an institution – cop shop, school, detention centre – that seems to function solely to keep a lid on violence, its energies so distracted that it has no time for its official job. A friend texted: “that’s the best representation of a high school I’ve ever seen on TV.” Why? “Because they’re always watching videos.”
The students are kept in class to keep them off the streets – one of them bolts through an open window – and the adults seem to know less about life than the kids do. The police cannot fathom why the boy, called Jamie, stabbed to death a nice girl who apparently liked him, till a gormless teen translates her Instagram messages. She was mocking him with emojis; Jamie had asserted his manhood. “That Andrew Tate shite,” moans a copper, as if Tate – a fascistic online influencer – corrupting serpent in the garden of childhood.
Pundits have leapt on the show as an indictment of the contemporary “manopshere” (one columnist was given the unfortunate headline “if you know a 13-year-old boy, talk to him about what being a man is”, which sounds like a pervert’s charter) but this is a very old plot.
Lord of the Flies, Blackboard Jungle, Scum – all these dramas dealt with the problem of young male anger, and the writers of Adolescence, Jack Throne and Stephen Graham, imply it is innate and cyclical. Jamie’s dad once “tore down the shed” in fury; his father beat him. The script reads like a meditation on the Christian concept of Original Sin, a misunderstood idea.
Modern folk like to believe that individuals are born as blank-sheets of paper and corrupted by outside forces – by poverty, racism etc – so Original Sin has been dismissed as an unhealthy hangover from the age when kids were written off as wicked, and frequently caned. This gets matters upside down. Original Sin says we are born to be good, but are surrounded by temptations we find hard to resist due to a mix of nature and nurture. I remember, around the age of 13, watching a friend cheerfully tear the legs of a spider. I was too desperate to be liked to stop him.
Acknowledging the potential for violence in all boys is the first step towards managing it, through discipline and moral education, yet our society not only denies the essential character of human beings, it is oddly punitive towards those who point it out. Strict head teachers are called “elitist”. Psychiatrists who tell men to “man-up” are labelled “toxic”. Meanwhile, over-energetic boys are stuck on medication and a handful of particularly confused cases are turned into girls. The doctrine of perpetual kindness, never label and never judge, turns out to be cruel in effect. It doesn’t teach us the truth about sin. Worse, it leaves us lumbered with it.
What will happen to Jamie? Do you imagine the community will ever forgive him? Or, if he comes to terms with what he’s done, he’ll ever forgive himself? In a Godless world, it is easy to die defined by the worst thing you ever did.
In the Christian view, Jamie must be punished – obviously – yet God, the judge who loves, accompanies him from the crime to the cell, never abandoning him, willing him to repent.
Christianity, far from being guilt-obsessed, operates almost an industry of guilt-relief, as whitening as Daz or restorative as penicillin, offering prayers and sacraments to help you face yourself and free yourself, to start all over again. Progress can take a lifetime. That’s why growing up is actually a wonderful thing. Many have praised a superbly acted scene between Jamie and his psychiatrist, in which he alternates between a terrified boy who complains about the pickle in his sandwich and a man who throws his chair and screams: “What did you think about me?!” That’s the heart of it. Teenagers imagine the world is looking at them and laughing.
Well, recently our world has started doing just that. Social media is a narcissist’s mirror, a stage for validation and ridicule, and a playground where the bullying goes unpoliced.
What a relief to grow out of such rubbish! The 21st century, being shallow and materialist, links ageing to pain and obsolescence, to be deferred with botox or escaped via Esther Rantzen’s death pod.
But, in fact, it is a privilege to mature, to develop patience and empathy, to be able to appreciate the nuance of great art, like Adolescence, without looking out the window, wondering when the bell will ring.
