S05E18 Adolescence

Do we ever grow up in the end?

Hey all.

I’m making a start with this one right now mainly because the experience of having seen the four episodes that make up the series Adolescence is fresh. However, I will be taking my time developing what I want to say, since the series really deserves it.

Before I get into the series, I did want to mention the obvious…. I’m on summer break. I’ve usually hung an episode explaining this, but this time around I simply gave you episode 17 a couple of weeks ago in which I talk about making plans in “this modern world”. I spent a month working on a video graphic novel version of Episode 5: Sunglasses, which I encourage you to go have a look at, it’s a precursor to other similar work I’ve got planned for the future. And summer just kind of dumped itself upon me here in sunny Spain, we’ve been in summer mode temperature-wise since more or less mid-May, even though summer only officially began a couple of days ago.

So, as usually happens during the summer, I just don’t open the laptop that often, I’ve got vegie garden to attend to, sitting on the patio in the evening, trying to stay cool through the midday heat, short trips here and there, though this year those are being watched carefully, gas prices and an unstable world you know. This may be the only episode I get up and running before September, it may be one of two or three, just not planning anything concrete.

That said, Adolescence. That’s one of those words that I can never seem to remember how to spell correctly. Too many letters, I’d spell it a-d-o-l-e-s-e-n-s and leave it at that. But that’s just not how things work, is it? And having that desire to just spell things the way I want to, well that’s a nod to the subtitle, do we ever grow up in the end?

My mother considered herself a perfect speller. It’s hard to really know if that were true, she was certainly a very careful speller, since she told anyone who might be interested that she was perfect at it, she’d certainly not want to be caught out in a spelling error. Anyway, she considered correct spelling to be an important aspect of our education. Could be because she grew up in a time when going to school meant those long walks in freezing temperatures with snow up to your knees and a hot potato in your pocket, no notebooks or pencils, my mother actually used a hand slate board and chalk, she had to learn what was taught, there was no real way to study once class was out.

As I was struggling with spelling, which I did, I struggled with spelling all the way up to becoming an English teacher myself and rely on Google and spellcheck to keep my spelling in line even as I type this up, my mother’s only remedy for poor spelling was copying words. I had to copy all the new spelling words five times each, sitting in the recovered restaurant booth my father had installed in the kitchen, every evening until the Friday spelling test. I then had to copy any of the words I got wrong on that test a number of times more, don’t remember, let’s say 25 each? That was how I “learned” to spell. Nothing wrong with spelling a word wrong on the test, you simply have to copy it a couple of dozen times more and maybe you’ll remember it.

My mother did try to use some memory tricks. I remember learning the spelling of “comfortable”. She had me pick that word apart into come for (a) table and drop the (a) I might have said. That worked quite well and has stuck with me for over 50 years.

That idea of copying being a useful remedy was not lost on me. Right around 7th grade spelling was merged into the English class and now called “vocabulary”. It was taught along with grammar and literature and the like. In one of those junior high schools I attended, the English teacher, always thought of her as Mrs Steltch, needed us to learn 40 prepositions in order to be able to record some kind of progress through testing. Week one we had to write, from memory, 20 prepositions. If we got all 20 perfect, we did not have to take any more quizzes. However, if you got just one wrong, you’d have to take the quiz again the next week, but this time you had to know 25 prepositions. Each week 5 more were added to the quiz. That’s good teaching technique, threaten them into learning….

That first week I got 19 out of 20. The preposition I got wrong was a spelling error, I wrote “until” with two “l”. When I got that quiz back on Monday and saw that I’d have to repeat the quiz I was crushed. I had written, with ease, 20 prepositions, but spelling had gotten me again. That evening, I copied the word “until” some 100 times onto a sheet of paper and on Tuesday I turned this over to Mrs Stelch, asking her to please relieve me of having to take the quiz again on Friday. She recognized the effort, that’s true, but she made me take the test anyway. Rules are rules.

What I’m getting at here, I think, is that while we are working our way to adolescence (look mom! I spelled it right on the first try!), while we are actually navigating actual adolescence, some of the workarounds and star signs stick with us, perhaps for life. I kind of got the feeling that the series, Adolescence, was trying to get that idea through to us. While we may think of adolescence as a brief period of time in human development, revolving around the onset of puberty and including a brief period before and a brief period after, or at least to the point of having a 25-year-old brain that actually functions, we may actually never grow out of that adolescence.

What I want to say about the series is a lot, and last night as I lay in bed going about structuring my essay in my head as is my wont, I began to realize that it simply would not fit into one essay at all. So, just to get a jump, I’ll simply spend this essay outlining what I saw as the overall plot of the story and how it presents its theme. Here goes.

The first episode begins with the first character, a police detective, getting ready to execute a SWAT-type arrest in a quiet residential area in some middle-class town in the UK. Kind of shocking to see the actual arrest, kind of exaggerated, you’d think they were arresting El Chapo with all the guns and body armor and helmets and the battering ramming of the front door. and the shouted orders that had to be obeyed. Turns out the person being arrested is a 13-year-old boy, who actually wets his pants as he’s ordered out of his bed and taken into custody. Just the kind of exaggerated reaction you might expect from an adolescent, the police, not the kid, the kid just doesn’t look like he’s reached even that brief period before hitting puberty, he’s pissed himself out of fear.

The second episode really immerses us in the world of adolescence, that same policeman, with his partner, are being guided about a middle school where the classmates of the arrested boy are needing to be told that if they had information about the crime the boy is being held for, they might just contact the police. Again, we’re treated with exaggeration, the school is a mess, mainly because there is a lot of adolescent attitude around, the kids seem to rule, the adults only ever get attention when they yell louder than the kids. This episode highlights just how much of a gulch there is between those labeled as adolescents and those labeling them as such. Two youths, especially, give us the contrast, the policeman’s son, who attends the school and pulls his father aside, tries to help his father understand basic linguistic traits of that younger generation, and a best friend of a victim who is totally destroyed because she believes that no one besides the victim ever saw her as who she is, leaving a school counselor crying and begging for that best friend to come back and sit with her.

You’ve seen the series, right? If not, please stop here, I’m not going to hold back on spoilers, this series of episodes is for those who have seen the series and may even have thought about going back and seeing it again. If you haven’t seen it, do so, it’s super quality drama. If you have seen it, go see it again, you’ll appreciate it even more.

So, what I hadn’t mentioned is that the 13-year-old boy has been arrested for the brutal stabbing murder of girl who goes to that same middle school. We don’t know if he’s done so for a while, he says he hasn’t, his dad believes him, but if the police were able to get a SWAT team together after having convinced a judge to issue the warrant for his arrest (if that’s how things are done in the UK, where this series takes place), they must have some compelling evidence. Okay. They do. In that first episode a CCTV video is produced that clearly shows the boy stabbing the girl in a parking lot. OK. The boy continues to insist that what is on the tape is not what happened. OK. That’s not very mature behavior, is it? What, does the kid think that by repeating the lie over and over everyone will simply begin to believe him? Isn’t that how things work? Worked for Goebbels. Worked for Conway. Kelly Anne, not George.

That second episode ends with a moment that kept me expecting. The boy’s dad, who in the first episode is absolutely destroyed, who has done the “tell me the truth boy and I’ll never ask you again” trick with his son, who then sees on video that his son has lied to him, that dad who is a simple man, not yet 50 years of age, a hard-working man who has been able to proved a middle-classed life for his wife, his older daughter and this son, who is being asked to somehow understand what is going on in the police station, what has just happened in his boring home, that man has driven to the car park where his son brutally stabbed a young classmate to death to leave flowers among the other flowers there just outside the police tape. He has no lines in this episode, except those new lines that have developed around his eyes, on his forehead, on either side of his downturned lips. What’s to become of dad?

Episode three brings us back to the boy. Totally back to the boy. Almost only the boy, though we are helped along by a mental health evaluator, maybe a psychiatrist, maybe a psychologist. What matters in this third offering is the boy, though, and somehow the boy’s father, though it’s not really about the father, but rather the idea of the father figure. Or the masculine model the boy may have been emulating before the crime. Now some time has passed, perhaps a few months, and it’s gently presented to us that the kid is not being held in some juvenile correction unit awaiting trial. This looks more like some type of rehabilitation center. The shouts we hear are of truly distressed youth, and the boy actually protests that he should not be interned here, what may or may not be a kind of psychiatric holding for troubled youth.

The drama that plays out between the doctor, a young, though very focused woman and the boy, still 13 years old, is one of a slow tango of mutual manipulation. The doctor wants to hear what the boy considers masculine, manly man, post adolescent male behavior. The boy simply doesn’t know, though he makes a number of educated and spot-on guesses. The boy flips between that pitiful kid who pissed himself in fear when his bedroom was suddenly filled with black-armored police officers pointing weapons of war at his face, and a strange, Dahmer / Bundy / Lector kind of character able to threaten, scare, upset the professional facade of the doctor. It becomes clear that the motivation that has been asked for in the first two episodes by the police, the motive that would help bring about formal accusation, is being explained to us as a combination of adolescent poor judgement and a certain fragmentation of personality. We can probably be somewhat relieved, this kid will probably not end up in jail. Though the crime was horrible, well, it’s complicated and you may end up wishing for the plot twist at the end that justifies your kind of believing his insistence that he hadn’t really done it and someone else did. This “diagnosis” kind of softens the blow of knowing the kid did it, having it confirmed by the boy himself in this episode, I guess.

But what about the dad? We’ve seen him suffer in the interrogation room in episode one. We’ve seen him mourn both the victim and probably his own son at the very end of episode two. He’s asked about several times in episode three but does not physically appear. Not to worry, the final episode circles back to dad, and in the most poignant way.

I won’t go too much in depth about the character of the dad. Generally speaking, as I’ve mentioned, this is a man who is following the script, married to his school sweetheart, has a kid, has another kid, works really hard, I think he’s a plumber, earns enough to keep up the nice house mortgage, the daughter, the son, the well-dressed wife. Episode four lets us see this family that we’ve only been presented to in a moment of high-tension stress, a moment of chaos and fear, a front door busted down, orders shouted, machine guns in faces, dark-clad soldiers of the law invading, abducting, destroying the peace of their regular-old middle-class life.

Now we see that life recomposed some months later. The boy will be going to trial soon. Seems like he’s doing better. It’s dad’s birthday, and the boy has sent a beautiful card with a drawing of his dad. Mom’s making a good English breakfast, dad’s feeling chipper, daughter brings bad news, someone has painted graffiti on the side of dad’s work van. The word nonse painted with spray-paint. Had to look it up. Means pedophile it seems. No relation to reality, the dad has never been suspected of being such, the boy is a murderer, but you know, adolescents, they don’t care, it was a quick word to spray on the side of the work van. Misspelled as well.

Dad tries to keep his control, really tries, he’s the kind of guy who, when he loses that control is capable of tearing down a garden shed. The boy told us that in episode three. Dad looks for a solution, repeats some coping words some psychologist has offered the family, deal with the problem at hand, make something good of a bad situation. Something we tell our adolescent companions in this life all the time. Don’t just go ballistic because something untoward has happened. Untoward things happen to everyone all the time. Stiff upper lip, get over it and get on with it, right? That’s how things are done in the adult world.

Yet, dad does lose it. Dad does have a fit and behaves like a teenager. Kind of justified, he was dealing with a teenager. Dad suddenly feels like a confused teen himself, why shouldn’t he shout childish threats and throw a bike and grab a boy by his shirtfront and shout-spit into his face, why shouldn’t he dump a can of paint over the graffiti on his work van?

And yet, the family has that calming moment. It’s actually the daughter, still in that official period that we like to call adolescence, who breaks it down for her parents. A simple explanation that dad has tried to make clear to mom who isn’t convinced until daughter repeats it. A family that loves one another, who hadn’t done as bad in raising their kids as they doubt with the affirmation that they, the parents, had made both the boy and the girl, look at what they had made. In an almost adolescent, no, not almost, an adolescent way keeping the focus on me, me, me, overlooking that there is a him and a her who have been actively participating.

Okay, I’ve said it, but will repeat myself. There’s more to this commentary, not sure just how much more, I want to talk about the characters, I want to talk about the theme and I want to talk about the production itself, which is what bumped my own rating of the show up to a nice, clean, perfect 10, no going back, I gave it a 10, that puts it up there with the only other 10 on my list, the movie Boyhood. Funny, right, how somehow those two shared a perfect theme for perfect drama?

More over the next weeks of summer!

Cheers.