How does a little boy become a 'bad guy'?

Netflix's 'Adolescence' asks why a 13-year-old committed murder, and it gives no easy answers. It's Andrew Tate, sports culture, toxic masculinity, parenting, capitalism, and so much else.

Owen Cooper as Jamie in Adolescence. Photo: Netflix

There is a scene toward the end of Netflix’s crime drama Adolescence that absolutely rocked me. Two parents sit in their bedroom, leaning against each other. They are heaving and bereft. There’s a wash of mascara across the mom’s cheek. The dad’s polo shirt is stained with her tears.

Manda and Eddie—SPOILER ALERT—are coming to terms with the fact that their 13-year-old son Jamie murdered a fellow classmate—Katie, a girl who romantically rejected him. Their son, so young he still sleeps with a stuffed animal, stabbed Katie to death after she called him an incel on Instagram. These parents are wracked with questions. What happened to their son? How did he get this way?

This scene hit me less as the parent of a little boy than as a person horrified daily by the procession of powerful men responsible for horrific, unlawful, violent, and even deadly acts. I felt that scene politically, culturally, and existentially. It reflected how I often feel when regarding Trump, Musk, Vance, and their ilk. How did they get this way? How did their followers get that way? Can we stop the spread of this vision of manhood?

I know so many of us right now feel like these on-screen parents who, along with their son, have lost any sense of normalcy.

This TV moment comes at the end of Adolescence, a remarkable four-episode British miniseries, which is getting a tremendous amount of buzz in part because each episode is a single continuous shot. There are no cuts, no splices. It’s a mind-boggling feat and the acting is nuts. When I finished the show, I declared out loud, “Everyone gets an Oscar.” Even more impressive to me, though, is that this show successfully indicts a vast swath of potential influences in this boy’s violence, and while not ever letting him off the hook, either.

Jamie isn’t the biggest nerd in school, but he certainly isn’t a jock or cool, and he doesn’t measure up to any macho ideal. Manda and Eddie reminisce about their little son who once loved to draw, who was so good at it, and then suddenly stopped—right around when his dad put him in football, in hopes it would “toughen him up,” but he instead found himself humiliated on the field. Eventually, he ended up spending most of his hours on the computer in his room—doing what, his parents aren’t exactly sure.

As these parents sit in their bedroom—while their adolescent son sits in a prison cell—they cycle through questions of blame and causation. Was it us as parents? Was it me as a dad? Was I messed up by my dad? Was it the manosphere? Incel culture? Was it the socialization of boyhood? Was it sports culture? Is this simply who he is? Did we make a monster? My efficient summary doesn’t do it justice, because it isn’t pat or cliche. We linger with the nuances of these questions and their impact on Manda and Eddie.

Across the show, other questions are implied: Was it misogyny, toxic masculinity? The messed-up culture at his school? Checked out teachers? Terrible, constant, and widespread bullying by boys? By girls?

All of the above, it seems. All these various forces act on or with each other. There are no easy answers, just an interconnected set of causes and consequences. Just a terrible morass of pain and shame.

This week, I watched a clip of Tim Walz on Gavin Newsom’s podcast (I know). This exchange captured my attention:

NEWSOM: We’re losing them. We’re losing them to these guys online. We’re losing them to people that I’m bringing on this podcast as well. That’s why I brought—

WALZ: These are bad guys though. These are bad guys.

NEWSOM: But they exist and we could deny they exist. They exist, not only they exist, they persist. And they’re actually influencing young kids every single day.

WALZ: How do we put some of those guys back under a rock?

NEWSOM: I think we have to first understand what their motivations are. I think we have to understand what they’re actually doing.

WALZ: You don’t think it’s racism and misogyny?

NEWSOM: I think there’s a lot of that, but I don’t think it’s exclusively that. When you talk to a guy like Steve Bannon, he talks about working folks and he talks about how we hollowed out the industrial core of this country.

WALZ: But he denies the election!

Ah, these conflicted ideas about what made young men vote for Trump. Is it the influence of “guys online” (e.g. Andrew Tate)? Are those “guys online” inherently bad? Are their followers inherently bad or were they turned bad? Is it racism? Misogyny? Or, as Newsom implies, is it that bad actors have used working-class concerns to sell racism and misogyny? Do these boys and men have valid concerns? Or are their concerns more accurately labeled racist and misogynist?

Of course, this conversation is reminiscent not only of the questioning in Adolescence but also the post-election surge in debate around men’s disillusionment and how to reach them, for the good of us all.

What is so gutting and realistic about Adolescence is how intractable the problem feels. Jamie killed Katie after she mocked him online for being unfuckable, but we soon learn that there was a backstory to her mockery.

She had been slut-shamed after a boy non-consensually shared a topless photo of her with the rest of the boys in school. After she was designated a “slag,” Jamie saw an opportunity. Maybe now that she was devalued by the whole school, she would be willing to go out with him. Instead, she rejected him and then mocked him, perhaps seeing her own opportunity for social redemption.

It’s a big tangled web of patriarchy, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. Adolescence shows how many of us—all of us—are tangled in that web. Eddie was beaten by his father growing up and he chose to break the cycle and intentionally parent Jamie differently; and yet, though he is not interpersonally violent in the home, Eddie’s own temper and rage has a real presence and impact for his family. We watch as a sudden shift in his mood sets his wife and daughter on edge.

The show doesn’t blame Eddie, but it does draw a line of connection between Jamie’s murderous violence and the more prosaic and accepted form of anger that Eddie exhibits at home. It’s just one line of many.

And it’s not just explicit misogyny and toxic masculinity, which the show makes clear are aided by other related social dysfunctions—from schools that feel carceral to the extractive demands of capitalism preventing parents from parenting in the way they want. What makes the show so watchable is that a finger is pointed at “bad guys” like Andrew Tate, and in countless other directions, too. The roulette wheel of causation is spun again and again. We’re all implicated—in the problem and the solutions, plural.

And good luck to us.