The innocence of Adolescence The boomers don't understand the zoomers

“Do you know where your children are?” used to be the most chilling thing you could say to a parent. Now, of course, parents know exactly where their children are: at home, probably in their bedrooms. As playing out has declined for pre-teens, so has going out for teenagers. The hours that previous generations spent being antisocial in parks or youth clubs are now spent, in many cases, on screens: delving down YouTube rabbit holes or sucked into the vortex of TikTok’s “For You” page.

And knowing where your children are is little reassurance when the media they’re consuming represents something you’re certain is horrific, but don’t quite understand. I think that fear explains the avid response to Netflix drama Adolescence, which across four episodes, each filmed in real time and (audaciously) as one shot, tries to unpick the nightmare of a teenage boy (Jamie, played by Owen Cooper) who stabs a teenage girl to death. The motivation for the attack is initially obscure, but the investigation rapidly fixes on Jamie’s involvement in the online subculture known as the “manosphere”.

In the final episode, which focuses on Jamie’s shattered family, his parents struggle with their own culpability — the degree to which they should have known the path their son was on, and stopped him. His mum (Christine Tremarco) frets about all the time Jamie spent on his computer, unmonitored; his dad (Stephen Graham) remembers how he too has been pushed “incel stuff” while looking for workout content. The series ends with Jamie’s dad in his son’s disarmingly childish bedroom, sobbing: “I’m sorry son, I should’ve done better.”

The series deliberately resists offering backstory that might make Jamie more explicable. There’s no domineering father, no neglectful mother; nothing that might reassure the viewer that this could never be their family. Only a gentle-seeming boy who did well at school and caused no trouble before this one devastating act. Graham, who co-created the series as well as starring in it, says the series is a reaction to the spate of real-life, child-on-child knife crime: the intention was to “hold that mirror up to society and say, ‘Just have a look at this, because it is happening. It has happened.’”

He also says he knew nothing about the manosphere before he started work on this project, and you can tell. The world Jamie is drawn into is never shown on screen. Instead, it is represented through the efforts of baffled adults to understand an impenetrable language of emojis and posting (in one scene, a detective’s son painfully talks him through the meaning of “red pill”). Adolescence is unsettlingly realistic about, say, the simmering anarchy of a school full of teenagers, but when it comes to online, this is a boomer version of zoomer life. It can look at the symbols, but has no way of deciphering them beyond the inevitable cry: “Take away their phones!”

Confronted by something as shattering as children who kill, the only act that feels possible is witness. Adolescence shares a lot stylistically with Gus Van Sant’s 1999 film Elephant, which was his response to the Columbine massacre — the high school shooting in which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 and injured 23 (Klebold and Harris also killed themselves, and one of the survivors recently died of her injuries, bringing their toll to 14). Like Adolescence, Elephant uses a real-time structure and long, watchful camerawork; rather than being filmed in one take, it has a looping structure that brings together the last minutes before the atrocity from the perspectives of several kids.

Elephant’s title was intended as a reference to the impossibility of comprehension. Van Sant told an interviewer he was thinking of the parable of the five blind men encountering an elephant: “One thinks it’s a rope because he has the tail, one thinks it’s a tree because he can feel the legs, one thinks it’s a wall because he can feel the side of it, and nobody actually has the big picture. You can’t really get to the answer, because there isn’t one.” The enormity of the event resists understanding.

A year before Elephant, Michael Moore had satirised attempts to find a simple, singular cause for the shooting in his documentary Bowling for Columbine, which was particularly scathing about media efforts to blame Klebold and Harris’s acts on the boys’ consumption of violent media.  Bowling for Columbine has aged badly for several reasons, not least its elevation of Marilyn Manson (the rock star who was erroneously blamed for inspiring Columbine) to the status of moral authority. Moore was correct that scapegoating movies and videogames was inane, but he also deliberately overlooked the degree to which Klebold and Harris were immersed in the aesthetics of bloodshed.

From the earliest stages of their plan, Klebold and Harris had seen their actions in cinematic terms. One of the missed warning signs of their plot was a senior-year film project they collaborated on called Hitmen for Hire, in which they played hitmen picking off fellow students. They left behind a cache of tapes (nicknamed the Basement Tapes) detailing their plans, and intended for release; these were later destroyed by law enforcement for fear that their circulation would inspire copycats.

And Columbine itself was planned for the cameras. Although the death toll was shocking (especially at the time, when a school shooting was a new phenomenon in America), Klebold and Harris intended it to be much, much higher. They had planted bombs in strategic locations with timers set to ensure maximum fatalities, and maximum publicity. These failed to go off, but journalist Dave Cullen (who has covered Columbine in more detail than probably anyone) describes what was supposed to happen:

“The cafeteria bombs would kill nearly 600 people instantly; what they called the ‘fun’ part would be shooting up hundreds of survivors; and the massive car bombs set in the parking lot outside were to be the coup de grâce. Those timers were set to explode 45 minutes after the initial blast, wiping out countless more survivors and first responders, live on national TV. The Columbine killers’ performance was staged as the most apocalyptic made-for-TV horror film in American history.”

Klebold and Harris had learned their sense of drama from the films they watched and the games they played. That doesn’t mean that media turned them into killers. (A folie a deux between psychopathic Harris and depressive Klebold probably did that, and Harris specifically may have been dangerous under any conditions. “If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done,” writes Cullen.) But media profoundly shaped the kind of killers they became.

The failure of Klebold and Harris’s bombs meant they did not achieve the total infamy they hoped for. But they achieved enough to have become cultural figureheads of a sort, to a certain sort of person. They wrote the script for the gun massacres that have since become regular occurrences in the US. At Cullen’s estimate, 54 shootings with 300 fatalities (and many more injured) have been directly inspired by Columbine since 1999.

In September last year, a British teenager tried to join their number: 19-year-old Nicolas Prosper executed his mother Juliana Falcon, brother Kyle and sister Giselle with a shotgun, then headed to a primary school where he intended to accomplish the “massacre of the century”. He was specifically obsessed with Columbine, making him one of thousands of “Columbiners”, as the Klebold-Harris fandom is known. To them, Columbine was an act of nihilistic heroism, and Klebold and Harris are idols to be emulated. With sad inevitability, there has even been at least one shooting in which Elephant was cited as an inspiration.

Few people have pushed back against Adolescence’s implicit thesis that tiny incels turn into killers. Those who did have not come from the Left like Moore (the Left allowed its free speech muscle to waste away during the 2010s, when it assumed that the right side of history had won and all that was left to do was gloat at the losers) but rather from the manosphere itself. Andrew Tate fans in particular seem to have been exercised by Adolescence, with some calling it a “character assassination” of their hero.

Unfortunately for the Tate fans claiming “moral panic”, it is only weeks since the conviction of Kyle Clifford for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, and the murder of her mother Carol and her sister Louise. At the trial, the prosecution revealed that Clifford had spent the night before watching Tate videos; the crown argued that Tate’s self-declared misogyny was a direct encouragement for Clifford’s abhorrent violence.

It is no longer particularly controversial to draw a line from what is watched and read, to what is done. That is partly because the escalation of user-generated content means that those with an interest in violence are no longer limited to material that might come under the definition of “art”. Van Sant had a reason for staging the high school massacre of Elephant, and his reason was to look at the nature of violence and the lives it scars. The Columbiners who make fan illustrations of Klebold and Harris are simply showing their admiration for Klebold and Harris.

Adolescence, notably, doesn’t explicitly show the stabbing that instigates the story. The emotional impact of the assault comes from watching someone else watching it: Jamie’s father is shown grainy CCTV footage of his son attacking the victim. Perhaps a judgement was made here that, in a drama leaning so heavily on the risks of media contagion, it would be hypocritical to offer anything that might gratify those attracted to violence.

For all Adolescence’s will to refuse pat answers, though, I suspect there is still a certain truth about violence that it is not willing to acknowledge. Children who kill do not have a single “type”, as the FBI school shooter threat assessment conducted after Columbine found. There is no checklist you can turn to that tells you who will or will not become a murderer. But there are commonalties among those who do: a history of psychological issues, tensions in the home, an obsession with death.

It was true in 1999 that it took more than a first-person shooter to make a massacre, and it’s still true if you substitute “incel TikToks” for Doom. A child like Jamie who appears to shift from “nice” to “vicious” with no outward signs is rare to the point of being mythical. Despite Adolescence’s meticulous verisimilitude, Jamie is a kind of monster: the ultimate distillation of those parental fears about what might become of your child, lost in the wilds of social media.

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