One of the first scenes in Adolescence has a SWAT team breaking into Jamie Miller’s (Owen Cooper, Wuthering Heights) home to arrest him on suspicion of murdering his classmate Katie (Emilia Holliday). who was found with seven stab wounds before she was pronounced dead. While the paramedics couldn’t do anything about Katie bleeding, SWAT could do something about Jamie’s soiled PJs. Despite the severity of the crime, Jamie’s father, Eddie (Stephen Graham, who produced and co-wrote the series with Jack Thorne) was permitted to enter his son’s bedroom to help him change.
The uncomfortable question is: Why was the 13 year old afraid? Was he afraid because he did know why there was a gun in his face, or was he afraid because he didn’t? You might relish in the cowardice of a murderer being caught, or you may sympathize with the confused fear of an innocent boy, but there is an overlap between sympathy for fear and relishing in it: understanding.
With this understanding comes another uncomfortable question: who has to understand? Emphasis on both “who” and “has” — the former for the question of identity, and the latter for the question of obligation. Who has to? Not just the reaction to being caught, but the action itself. Child psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty, The Crown) says that very word many times when interviewing Jamie in a youth detention facility. Afterwards, she says, “I want to understand you.” Attempting to dismiss this want, Jamie repetitively reiterates “To understand my understanding of my understanding of my understanding of my understanding.” Briony cuts off this repetitive rambling with a simple “yes.”
Throughout this third episode, Jamie shows he has no interest in understanding why he feels the way he does. When he proclaims that he’s ugly, he expects Briony to reassure him that he isn’t, and is annoyed when she asks why she feels that way. This annoyance turns to frustration, and frustration to rage. Trying to call back on their previous camaraderie, he tries to downplay that rage, mocking her for being afraid of a 13 year old boy. Far from being humble, this self-deprecation is a cover, an excuse. He’s writing off his fury by saying boys will be boys, and saying boys will be boys means you’re incurious about why boys are the way they are, and if you’re incurious, that means you’ll never understand.
It’s not difficult to parse Briony’s own understanding of the situation. She’s more or less the protagonist of the third episode, but this is the only episode she appears in. Adolescence, if nothing else, feels unconventional in this approach. For instance: you might expect the crime-drama to end with all the characters coming together for the big trial at the end of the show, and not with Eddie’s 50th birthday. Each episode is unique, almost jarringly distinct, yet miraculously cohesive.
That its four episodes are each shot in their own, single take is essential to the Adolescence’s portrayal of both time and the individuals inhabiting the frame. The camera will flow from one narrative thread to another, then another, and then back to the first, often leaving both the viewer and characters waiting tensely to see how they might resolve. Following Jamie’s arrest, Eddie waits at the station with his wife, Manda (Christine Tremarco, Swallow) and their daughter, Lisa, played by Amelie Pease, as they reconcile with the arrest. They talk about the damage done to their house, but, ultimately, Jamie wasn’t the only one at the end of a gun. It was a horrific experience, made all the worse by the fact that they don’t know why Jamie is there. When Eddie seeks answers from a policewoman at the station, the camera follows her as she responds like a movie theater usher on her way to clean a theater, informing the patron that someone will be with them shortly.
The structures of Adolescence manage people like cattle, with great efficiency and no care. When DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters, Top Boy) and DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay, Game of Thrones) investigate Jamie’s school for clues, most of the teachers are malicious, bitter twits. “What are we, social workers?” asks one when the prospect of grief counselors is brought up. This same teacher callously dismisses parental concerns about the safety of the school. The murder of their student didn’t even happen on school grounds, so why is it his problem? Most of the teachers only care about disruption of the structures, not the children that inhabit them. When one little turd in Jamie’s history smugly shouts “Awww, he did it!” said little turd is talking about the murder of Katie like his sibling was caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and his teacher only scolds him because he interrupted class. He’s there to get the kids through the day. No more, and less if he can manage it.
It’s not just the extraordinary blocking that makes the single take nature of each episode relevant to the narrative. It’s also the passage of time. If each episode (ranging from 45 minutes to an hour) is in real time, each minute densely packed with lives that are unalterably scarred by the events, what might the passage of time between the episodes themselves bring? What might a month bring? Six months? Seven? A year?
There is one life in Adolescence that may, at best, get five minutes of screentime. This life is Jade’s (played by Fatima Bojang), Katie’s best friend. What Adolescence does with Jade’s limited screen time may have similar issues to the characterization of Anna Paquin’s Peggy in The Irishman. After all, being an effective commentary on women being silenced might still rub one the wrong way if the woman in question is still being silent, and it’s for this reason that this review will end on Jade. She has four scenes in one episode, the first three showing us she’s only noticed insofar as she serves or disrupts these structures. In the first, the police want to know what she can tell them. In the second, she starts a big scene when she attacks one of Jamie’s friends, accusing him of killing Katie. (Police can hold a gun in Lisa’s face, but don’t let a Black girl be angry at an accomplice to her friend’s murder). In the third, a guidance counselor talks to her about why she’s in trouble, insisting there are people there to help her. Jade knows this is technically true in some ways and false in any way that matters, because the therapist will only try to pacify her, not understand her, and she fearfully storms out.
At the end of this second episode, a father and son reconcile. It is the last time we’ll see either of them in this entire series. It’s a nice moment, and you’ll probably be glad it happened, as you’re meant to be, since Adolescence is very much interested in how fathers can do a better job with their sons. As this happy duo drives to a Chinese place for exquisite chips and barbecue sauce, the camera briefly dwells on Jade for the last time. Her loneliness is scarring, because she had a friend, had someone she cared about, and who cared about her. Now they’re gone. Not just gone, but taken. Not just taken, but taken horribly. Taken violently. Taken in an evil way. So Jade walks home. She walks home with no one to speak to, no one to listen to, and no one to understand.
