The Portal

On the Netflix series "Adolescence"

An essay on the mini-series Adolescence — and plenty of spoilers follow.

A cowering cherub at the end of several assault rifles, his pyjama bottoms soiled, young Jamie seems an absurd target for an armed raid. The police must have it wrong.

So opens Adolescence. It’s early morning in an English village, and the Millers’ front door has just been breached by battering ram. Into the house pours a stream of tactical cops, arousing the fear and incredulity of its occupants, as they make their way up the home’s stairs to the 13-year-old’s bedroom and charge him with the murder of a 14-year-old girl and schoolmate.

Nothing will be the same again.

If there’s any ambiguity about Jamie’s guilt, it’s dispelled in the first episode, and when we see him again in episode three after the passage of seven months, his presentation is radically different. Held in a youth detention centre awaiting trial, Jamie is visited by a forensic psychologist. Largely vanished now is his air of sweet fragility and guilelessness, replaced with a kind of impish malevolence. Volatile and vindictive, Jamie resembles a leprechaun in thrall to his own storms of insecurity and hatred.

We watch his emotional convulsions – watch him flicker between a desire to be loved or validated or, failing these, feared. The latter is the most easily accomplished.

“Transformation” isn’t the right word, because Jamie’s already a killer when we first see him, but the malevolence he displays here is shocking nonetheless. And so it is for the psychologist, who betrays none of her fear and disgust when sat before Jamie, but certainly does when she’s alone.

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Dismissed as “anti-white propaganda” by Elon Musk and celebrated for its cultural significance by UK prime minister Kier Starmer, Adolescence is now one of the world’s most streamed series.

Only four episodes long, it’s distinguished by fine acting and the fact that each episode is shot in one continuous take. This is unusual, to say the least: filming in this way is logistically unforgiving and asks much more of the actors, who must deliver significantly greater chunks of lines.

The makers of Adolescence forfeited the benefits of editing, then – the dramatic possibilities of cutting between time and place – but achieved a profound intimacy in allowing each episode to unfold in real time.

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Adolescence’s camera is fixed to very real places – a family home, a police station, a high school and a juvenile remand centre – but each of them are haunted by virtual ones.

Behind his bedroom door, upon the screen of his smartphone, Jamie’s immaturity and insecurity metastasises. What might have begun as a young teen’s garden-variety self-consciousness has transformed into a murderous misogyny.

His parents are clueless about his transformation from anxious dweeb to killer. They’re unaware that his faith has shifted from them to online gurus, that he’s become a boy who places his humiliations in the hands of men such as Andrew Tate, from where they graduate into rationalisations for murder.

In his bedroom, the catastrophically impressionable mind of Jamie Miller transforms ordinary pubescent confusions into murderous contempt.

Such is the “manosphere”. Entrepreneurs of retrograde masculinity, men such as Tate promise to cure boys (and men) of their self-pity, sexlessness and perceived enfeeblement, and transform them, for a fee, into virile titans of status. The grift hinges upon the exploitation of insecurity, as so many grifts do, while invoking grand themes about the dissolution of male potency and decline of Western civilisation.

But Adolescence trembles with something much larger – a melancholy atomisation. The obliviousness of Jamie’s parents seems forgivable to me, or at the very least familiar. Their son’s introversion and reluctance to confide in them doesn’t seem categorically different from their own adolescence. Boys will be boys, and teens will be teens, and the loss of communication doesn’t seem unusual. What is unusual, or generationally significant, is their son’s captivity to his phone’s screen and the portal to violent and arcane politics.

“This is why the wisdom of putting smartphones in the hands of children is so central to the debate around the manosphere,” writes English journalist and columnist James Bloodworth, whose book about the phenomenon will be published in June. “We tend to explain radicalisation by searching for pre-existing vulnerabilities. This is often the most appropriate approach: radicalisation can feed on inner turmoil and insecurity. Yet such feelings are not always organic: the market can play its own role in their generation. Wealth in a capitalist economy is accumulated through the creation of needs as much as their satisfaction. And smartphones are the vehicle through which masculinity entrepreneurs are able to circumvent other forms of socialisation (parents, teachers, approved role models) in order to cultivate their pied piper–like appeal.”

There’s also the basic fact that the Miller family is of modest means, that the father works hard and unglamorously, and that to pay his family’s bills there’s only so much energy left to forge tender bonds with his withdrawn son.

None of this is to be admired, merely acknowledged, and it’s certainly familiar to me. Years ago, I wrote about my own high-school years: “I saw negligent fathers preside sullenly over a small kingdom of beer and football, rungs on the ladder to adulthood. These avatars of manhood sat fat, idle and indifferent on their suede thrones, covering their apathy with the witless tenets of laissez-faire parenting – boys will be boys.”

The warm attention of parents to their children, and the mutual faith that they might develop together, seems like everything to me, but I’m also painfully aware of very basic things that conspire against it.

Then there’s the atomisation of Jamie’s school, to which episode two is devoted, and the sense that it’s an institution given not to teaching but basic behavioural management.

There are indifferent teachers and exhausted ones; there are hordes of children glued to their phones at recess. As the camera snakes throughout it, we see classrooms dedicated to videos and I thought of something a university lecturer recently told me: that he’s now yielded to his students’ pronounced hostility to reading, and their diseased attention spans, and now relies upon podcasts in a way that makes him feel ashamed.

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Less remarked upon by critics is the response of Jamie’s parents. For a little while in Adolescence, the audience might share the certitude of Jamie’s father about his son’s innocence. The police have got something wrong here – there’s been some terrible crossing of wires. So it’s painful to watch the slow presentation of evidence in the interview room, and his reluctant, spasmodic surrender to the fact that his boy might be a killer.

Each episode modestly jumps forward in time, and by the final one we see Jamie’s family a little over a year from his arrest. They’ve evidently decided to support their boy, though we’re not privy to their discussions about it, and we’re left with the heavy incongruity of them taking a call from their son in detention while driving home from a hardware store. The incongruity is that the conversation is as loving and banal as you’d expect to hear between parents and their homesick child who’s away on summer camp.

Between episodes, the family have decided not to disavow their child despite his obscene crime. We can only assume that a sense of parental protectiveness has survived their repulsion, and that they understand that no social justice nor resurrection of the murdered girl will occur should they withhold it.

But we do watch them agonise over cause and effect; we watch them weep and howl over their presumed creation of a killer. If they can’t understand how they might have helped make one, they can’t quite exonerate themselves either, and so they embrace each other while suspended painfully between their own sense of innocence and guilt. They’ll never understand, but nor will they ever forgive themselves.

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Almost 10 years ago, I published a book about the murder of a teen girl by a teen boy. Her name was Rebecca Ryle, and she was 19 when she was strangled upon the oval of the primary school that lay across the road from her house.

James Duggan was the name of the boy who killed her, and he was 19 too, and they’d never met before that night. It was 2004 when her body was found, and it was eight years later when I first met Rebecca’s parents at the same house across from the school. They live there still. To leave feels like an abandonment.

If Adolescence is concerned with its killer’s motivation, the murder of Rebecca was at least formally baffling. Before police, Duggan was an inarticulate and reluctant subject. He was similarly vacant before several psychologists. One could locate biographical facts – an unsettled family, distant parents, a recurring need to establish social status through violence – but both his trial and my own investigation failed to meaningfully draw any straight lines between one thing and another.

But that wasn’t what the book was about, not mostly. It was about Rebecca’s parents and their collision with a life-altering obscenity, and I still think of the word that her father, Fran, used when talking to his two younger sons about their relation to women.

Tenderness.

A war veteran and labourer, Fran is not your typical woke saviour. But the murder of his child would not make distant his relationship with his other children, nor cauterise his heart from the lessons he wanted to teach them. Towards the end of the book, I wrote:

Fran once told me that he’d been impressed by Robert Hughes’ Australian history The Fatal Shore. He remembers the Pebble Men. “Hughes is talking about these guys that were on one of the hardest penal colonies, not sure if it was Norfolk Island or not, but they were called Pebble Men. You couldn’t break them. They were so abused from poverty-stricken childhoods in England. They’d been flogged, beaten, eventually sent to Australia for whatever crime. Flogged again, brutalised, starved. They got to such a state that you could just flog these guys to death. They could bleed to death, but they wouldn’t crack. Wouldn’t cry. 100 lashes? So what. Pebble Men. You feel like there’s not many people who can hurt you now, you’ve done all you can. Without being stonehearted or bitter, nothing could break me like that has done. I’m not going to be that flinty hearted myself, but dig deep. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone.”

The simplistic interpretation here is that Fran is a Pebble Man. He isn’t. He hasn’t traded his tenderness, curiosity or willingness to be vulnerable by actively loving his family. He’s tough, but it’s not the bleak, granite toughness of someone who has abandoned the risks and pleasures of love. Fran can take inspiration from the Pebble Men – can be semi-confident in his capacity for suffering – but his great strength is found in his refusal to shut his heart from others, or new experiences.

And it was something he was determined to teach his two sons.