War on the Quiet Boys

Netflix's "Adolescence" as a political instrument

Because of the kinds of people I follow online, most of the reviews I’ve read of the Netflix internet sensation “Adolescence” have been pretty negative. Despite the quality of any individual reviews, I think that’s a little unfair. Both things are true: that it’s a well-made show with important ideas, but also that it has been instrumentalised for cynical political reasons. That’s a shame. Before launching into how it was co-opted and why, I think it’s worth dwelling on the show’s virtues – to help us understand what’s been lost in the fatal transition from drama to propaganda.

“Adolescence” may be a bad document on which to base policy decisions, but it’s a great one about the perils of parenthood. The radioactive core of the show is the relationship between a father and his child, rather than any of the hoary and embarrassing rubbish about incels, the manosphere or weaponised emojis. What happens when a child proves unequal to the burden of love and hope that is invested in them by you as their parent; when they instead do something unforgivable, what does that say about them and about you. These eternal themes are the stuff that great drama is made of.

A great drama isn’t enough for the makers of the show, who regrettably also feel it needs to Say Something Important About Our Society. Our murderer, Jamie, is a weedy young man from a stable and loving lower-middle class background, who is regarded as bright by his teachers and has no history of interpersonal violence or poor behaviour in school. (The show adds in some qualifiers on these points, but I think minor ones). In order for the show to make sense as a societal warning, it’s essential to believe that hundreds if not thousands of Jamies across the west are one Youtube video away from murdering a girl. If that isn’t true then the core lesson of the show has no general applicability.

But to the limited extent that such crimes ever even happen, the perpetrator is usually Jamie’s total opposite. Stephen Graham (the show’s lead actor and creator) has cited a number of stabbings as the inspiration for the show. This murder in London has been picked up online as being the main one; it’s likely that it was chosen by a critical internet hivemind because the killer was black and therefore provides the maximum contrast with Jamie. But the case is still a good example of the kind of kid who usually commits this sort of murder – the deprived background, the premeditation, the history of violence and explicit signs he was willing to harm women. I think it’s notable that in none of the cases alluded to by Graham is there any evidence that the manosphere was a factor or acted as a catalyst. Yet that is ultimately the show’s thesis.

Detail from one of the cases that inspired the show

So why did the entire public square instantaneously leap into action to operationalise the message of a piece of fiction that has no wider lesson? Protecting women and girls from a violence is wonderful goal and not a partisan one. But terms like Incel, manosphere, redpill do have a partisan political meaning. They are understood by governments across the west to be part of a nest of fringe beliefs that have been mainstreamed in recent years. They are linked in the minds of people who make laws to things like Brexit in the UK, Trump in the US, housing and asylum protests in Ireland.

In this thinking – which is often encouraged by the people involved - the kind of person who likes Andrew Tate is probably also the kind of person who might vote for Nigel Farage. Attacks on the migration and asylum systems are frequently framed in masculinist terms of unvetted military age migrants coming into the country. In Ireland the discussion of Adolescence bled seamlessly into repudiation of Conor McGregor for his remarks about asylum and immigration. The bro- MMA- Podcast complex was understood as a key factor in getting Trump elected and one that is crucially outside mainstream control. This parallel mainstream has proved a massive irritant in relation to all of the things that used to be the domain of consensus expertise in former years, from vaccines to foreign policy. It has helped to inflame a whole sector of the electorate and to make them unmanageable from the point of view of those experts.

So the figures and forums to whom negative attention will be turned in light of the show are not just troublesome because of the retrograde sexual attitudes they might have, or the threat they pose to women and girls. They are troublesome because they are aligned to the upward surge in exactly the kind of political activity that is most disruptive of the status quo. The post-Adolescence discussions being held in parliaments and on TV are best understood as an intensification of the ones around dis- and misinformation. The utility of this discussion for governments and activists everywhere is not that this will help get phones out of schools, but that it will give a second wind to these attempts to reign in inconvenient political speech on the internet.

Some groups are more in need of this kind of control than others. This is the heart of the matter; the idea of Adolescence as a call to action has been embraced because it presents a chance to interfere with and oversee the inner lives of the demographic that Progressives are worried about the most - quiet, smart young white men. Many of the worst parts of the show relate to this stuff. During Jamie’s trial his father meets a young man of this type in a DIY centre – skinny, socially awkward, good with facts - whose eyes bulge with lascivious delight about having pictures of the dead girl and who seems (from my reading) to suggest there is an underground wave of virgin nerds ready to support Jamie. It’s one scene where the show moves from the believable into a kind of Penny Dreadful lib fanfic.

The recent Trump election solidified the sense that a generation of such men - as they really exist, not as hateful stereotypes - are being thoroughly lost to progressivism. This loss is compounded by the feeling these boys are noy just beyond the reach of understanding of activists and commentators, but of the culture itself. There is plenty of polling to support this. Post-election, this prompted a lot of soul-searching, which I wrote about previously, about how to get these people back on side – the “we need a left-wing Joe Rogan” meme.

Why are quiet young men such a problem? They are not members of an acknowledged victim class, so for a system that is based around sentimentality and valorisation of inadequacy there is no leverage with them. You can’t sell them the dream that they are downtrodden and will be the recipient of sympathy and state goodies if they just play along. Far worse, they seem morally repelled by the idea that they might even be sold this dream.

Their quietness and reserve is a problem because it means they don’t bring their views out into the open where they can be harangued and scolded for them – where the whole of culture can act like their hysterical romantic partner and emotionally blackmail them into compliance. The bookishness is a problem because it means they are smart enough to develop views that might be convincing to themselves and others; and because their thoughts stray down all kinds of unsavoury and unproductive paths out of simple intellectual curiosity. Most ominously for mainstream progressives, through online anonymity they are creating a parallel culture that is proving successful and attractive for others like them. This private world must be obliterated if progressives are to get the culture back under control. Providing the cover to think and talk about that is part of the political utility of this show.

Plenty of people commenting on Adolescence note that it’s prompted a “discussion”, a “public conversation” on important issues like phones in schools, or the general unhealthiness of young people losing their time in the magic mirror of the internet – and yeah, sure, it has. But most of the time has been taken up by a partisan political panic attack on the part of journalists, activists and people who are a little of both. These people are not talking to young men, but to themselves, about a mutual enemy who has slipped their bonds and needs to be brought back on to the reservation.

This is in keeping with the show itself – whatever it’s qualities it often strays into sentimental melodrama and has an insistent tone of fretful hysteria, which in this writer’s opinion is far more likely to appeal to women’s tastes than men’s. Stephen Graham’s telling of what inspired the show, and its best qualities, are a reflection of the fact that it is really about the fears of a parent – not any thoughts of the theoretical perpetrators. So my point here is – if you think there needs to be a conversation about men and boys it has to start with their own understanding of their inner lives, values and experiences and work outwards. But this show is fundamentally not like that and therefore by definition cannot be a way of performing outreach to them.

I think we need to linger on the insanity of what happened here. The transformations of masculinity and the alienation of young men from progressive ideals are a massive problem for mainstream culture. But the persistent problem with these Bad Guys is that they refuse to be quite as bad as that culture would like. Having failed to find a sufficient supply of the kind of villain we want, we wrote a fantasy of him on the back of a napkin, and then handed that to the Judge to be entered as evidence. The underlying show might be good in and of itself, and the show might be great, but by positioning an unrepresentative fictional anecdote as something to be transposed into government policy, they make it into trash. If you think discussion is about protecting women and girls I have a bridge to sell you.