I watched the four hourlong episodes of the Netflix series “Adolescence” in one extended, horrifying gulp. The story follows an angel-faced 13-year-old British boy named Jamie who is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie, and lays out the effect on his family and peers. The show is fiction, though the creators say they were partly inspired by the shocking reality of violently misogynistic young men. “What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?” Stephen Graham, who is a writer of the series and also stars in it as Jamie’s bereft father, recalled thinking after one particular assault. “And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again.”
You know by the end of the first episode that Jamie is guilty; the police have video of Jamie stabbing Katie. So the central question becomes why did he do it, and the explanation rolls out over the next three episodes. His family is loving, if imperfect, like most families. Jamie’s father, a plumber, is disappointed in him for not being an athlete and doesn’t quite know how to relate to his sensitive, artistic son. Jamie is bullied in school and filled with self-loathing, and he turns to Andrew Tate and other purveyors of sexist online content to make himself feel big.
In the third episode, a pretty, young psychologist, Briony, draws out the “inciting incident” for the murder. Katie sent a photo of herself topless to a classmate, who then circulated it without her consent — something all too common in the real world. Jamie subsequently asks her out, thinking she might be amenable because “she might be weak,” since “everyone was calling her slag, you know, or flat or whatever.”
Katie turns him down, saying she’s not that desperate, and mocks him as an incel on Instagram. His entitlement and shame drive him to kill her. During the episode, Jamie mocks and menaces Briony, at one point standing over her, cursing at her and roaring in her face — it seems that every time she gets him to show his soft, vulnerable side, he turns on her, using undermining “negging” techniques that were often promoted in the online manosphere as far back as 20 years ago, before it was even called that, back when its levels of misogyny were quaint by today’s standards.
