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I must admit, as an English Lit guy, it irritates me quite a bit that all of the commenters on this forum feel comfortable judging an artistic work by reading a basic synopsis and reviews from people they dislike (if anyone actually watched the show I'm happy to be corrected but it doesn't seem that way from how people are talking). I haven't seen the series either and I can't say that it's good, but there's a reason why we have the saying about the book and it's cover and all that. It's lazy and can hardly be called analysis at all.
This is the culture war thread after all. If there wasn't a culture war angle to this, it wouldn't even be here as a post - it is relevant because UK media and government figures are obsessing over the show, insisting it is vital to understanding young men and should be shown in schools, etc.
I saw someone make a comparison to the film La Haine. That film provoked plenty of discussion in its native France, was shown in a government meeting (IIRC), much like Adolescence. La Haine is now widely regarded as a classic film, but I don't think this reputation would have any bearing on a talk of whether it was relevant for the French government, or whether it had any lasting impact on policy and so forth.
That's well and good if that's what you want to talk about, but the OP has 2 sentences which relate to the series being discussed by MP's. The rest is their own analysis of the plot, its supposed real life references, and some non sequiturs about knife bans and asian hate, which as far as I can tell have nothing to do with the show, they're all just getting lumped in as things that people that OP dislikes are promoting.
If the culture war angle relies on what the message of the show is and not just who is talking about it, then I would simply repeat my comment that I find it irritating that people will decide what the message of a show is based on a review from someone they dislike. It is simply lazy.
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The primary focus I see here is the propaganda angle, we don't need to watch the show to know little white boys aren't The Problem. Also this criticism would sting more if woke media wasn't always so fucking generic. If safety and inclusivity and ad-friendliness didn't dull creator's creativity even before they get around to making the story advance the same insipid globohomo agenda every fucking thing else is advancing.
Also that attitude privileges positive criticism over negative criticism. Nobody gives a shit if you gush about a show before watching it, in fact that is a significant part of most media's promotional strategies. And you can spin up all kinds of lies about a movie you haven't seen if it codes right wing. Therefore it is the duty of every good, right thinking person who doesn't want globohomo corpo-friendly slop jammed down their throats to loudly and repeatedly badmouth anything that even looks like it. This is the world progressives apparently wanted, it would be unkind not to give it to them.
You do need to watch the show to know if the show is saying little white boys are the problem. Anything else is laziness disguised as politics.
Is any show that depicts a young white male murderer implying that young white men are The Problem? I want an actual answer to that, because it seems like you're saying yes to that if you feel this comfortable shitting all over something you have the barest passing familiarity with. If no, then I don't understand your reasoning.
My attitude privileges nothing, it is simply the fact of the matter that people will spend hours and paragraphs shitting all over something they have no idea about. The reverse is usually not true. When it is, I also find that distasteful.
Your attitude of treating every artistic and cultural object as a missile to jam down the throat of the other political side without any of your own analysis is both lazy and sounds incredibly tiresome and unrewarding. I prefer analyzing things on their own merits. What you describe is certainly not the world I want, nor is it the one I find myself in.
Then you simply aren't paying attention. It is not the world I want to live in, it is the world I fought hard and impotently against, and I remain adamant in my belief that the only way out is consequences. One side of the debate - whether you accept it or not - spent the past 15 years shoring up their vise like grip on the zeitgeist to the point they now control not only coverage, but to a large extent distribution of all non-independent (in the classic sense, not the neoliberal sense) media. They block media they don't like politically from being seen or purchased. They flood the news with negative reviews before a right wing product even launches, because they gatekeep the authorised critic pool. When people complain they declare them nazis or incels or gamers. When people watch it and write their own reviews for metacritic or opencritic or Google, they call it review bombing. When people then stop watching they double down on blaming the audience. Or they blame 'fatigue', which is a mod on blaming the audience. Funny how dumb nerds like me talked about star wars and comics all day every day from 1985 to 2015 and then suddenly got fatigued huh?
And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage. That's why review bombing exists as a concept, why every now and then we get think pieces about how you can't trust user scores, and why we have the 'don't yuk someone's yum' meme. That wasn't the case before marketing executives realised they could game user impressions that hard. Positive reviews should be treated as dishonest by default these days, as they are part of the machine and thousands of people's livelihoods sometimes rely on the product scoring a high enough percent on review sites to count as success.
And so the answer to your question is no of course not. It's a Venn diagram of overlapping concerns, like adjacency too globohomo, where and by whom it was produced and the marketing campaign used to push it. And while white boys is one of the two main ones in this instance, the other necessary element is the chattering class thinking it's very important and we need to put it in schools. I doubt we'll see anything that important and iconoclastic (because that would be a necessary component, you don't need to show school kids shit they have jammed down their throats all the time) from a traditional media source ever again. Setting aside there being nothing new under the sun, there are too many competing and conflicting interests involved for nuanced arguments to take hold and far too many ways for people to pass the buck.
There is of course an experiment we can do here that will settle whether adolescence thinks little white boys are The Problem or not. You could watch it, and you will immediately be able to rub my face in how wrong I am. I would genuinely appreciate it if that was the case, because I have met Stephen Graham and he is really smart and friendly and just all round awesome, but I have kicked at that football way too many times to trust Lucy now.
I'm not sure who you think you're talking to. I am not a faceless representative of the political side that you so clearly despise. I am an individual who has provided my personal view on how media should be commented upon.
You are conflating a ton of things. There are some things people will call review bombing, will flood with negative reviews, etc. There are also people (like you) who will do all of the same negative behaviours and think they're justified for some reason? Sure, those things happen (I also think review bombing is a term that points to a distinct phenomenon, albeit with a negative connotation) and are sometimes bad. How much water do you think the 'I'm going to blame the general audience for my show being unpopular' argument really holds with the public? Is this a thing you think all "globohomo woke" people believe, or is it something you saw a few people say on twitter and now you're repeating in your deluge of spite?
"And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage". Umm...yes, privileging positive coverage privileges positive coverage. I said that I didn't boost positive coverage. And I also don't think it's common to do so with coverage from people who don't know what they're talking about. Anyone who posted a video to social media where they gushed for 5 minutes about a movie that they announced throughout the video that they had no knowledge of would be roundly mocked in most circles. "Think pieces" Again, why are you letting what a couple random people online write about dictate your entire artistic life? If you asked the general public, what do you think trust in user scores would show?
Your 2nd last paragraph is a bunch of motivated excuses for laziness in not attempting to appreciate the artistic work as a cultural object. From everything you have said, I would have to reply that the world you describe does seem to be the world you want to live in, since you seemingly make no attempt to do anything other than perpetuate it. You'll never know when something "important and iconoclastic" really does come along because you'll never have given anything a chance.
This whole time my point has been that you should not proudly proclaim a positive or negative opinion on art that you have basically no knowledge of. I have no interest in watching the show myself because my point is not that it definitely does not say what you think it says, my point is that you simply don't know if that's the case. Neither do I, and neither does anyone else on the forum apparently. I'm not inclined to do someone else's homework if they want to take the leap of making proclamations about a show they haven't seen.
Lmao ok, well given the way you talk to me I don't give a shit what you think. You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave. You demand empathy from me even as you insult and misrepresent me, you dismiss everything I say as not even worthy of consideration, and yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect, you are simply uninterested. But I am intellectually lazy for my lack of interest you say, based on three posts, the first of which was clearly playing on the irony of just desserts, and the second one you seem to be ignoring because it's too nuanced to sneer at. But I know I'm right, so I have nothing to prove. The only reason I engaged you is because I like talking about this.
It doesn't matter if you think I'm lazy, I know I am simply avoiding demoralisation and adding a straw to the camel's back that is mainstream media, and that's good enough for me. I am perfectly content to let others who feel compelled to discover the actually important and iconoclastic stuff - remember how I said that to you and asked you to watch the show and tell me it was good so I could go watch it? Word of mouth is my method of discovery, it's actually worked well for most of human history.
No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage.
Yeah, it works even from people who don't know what they are talking about and from random strangers the audience doesn't even know. That concept is a core part of advertising. And I don't just mean in the age of tik tok (although even more so now) it has been known for decades. And almost any kind of advertising can work for any product, but different types can work better than others. For gadget advertising you want a spokesperson to provide the product with authority. For appliance advertising you want an extra who looks like a classy but normal person to imply the user will gain prestige from owning the appliance. For car advertising you want sexy people to imply the car will make you sexier and get sexy people to hang out with you.
And media advertising comes in two prongs - you want famous people attached promoting it and you want regular people gushing about it. It used to be that you just wanted regular people talking about it, good or bad, the point was to ensure it is part of the national conversation. But after the 2011 writer's strike that changed and advertisers were given a lot more power during production as producers needed the additional funding provided by sponsorships and product placement. People were only really tolerating product placement in reality shows though, so they had to pivot, but they learned they could get similar gains through hype. That was when the astroturfing began in earnest. Now it's all about promoting positive engagement and chilling negative engagement. But since you won't believe me, ask an advertising executive. They'll dress it up in convoluted obfuscating language, but they are usually happy to talk about it.
If you don't give a shit what I think, I recommend stopping the engagement. This will be my last comment given this fact. I do find it a bit hypocritical to complain about the "way you talk to me" when you like to throw in some "LMAO"s and "Bud"s and openly don't care about what I say, yet accuse me of condescension as I clearly state my opinions, but alas.
"You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave." You think that's how I behave, because you seem to have flattened everything in the world of cultural and artistic appreciation that you either have no interest in understanding or cannot understand into the bucket of 'globohomo woke' and the cultural left. Case in point, my argument, which you have repeatedly misunderstood, as below.
"yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect". Yes....if you read my last paragraph, i stated that this was the case and that that wasn't my point. It is very tiresome to have your argument misunderstood over and over again despite stating it in plain terms.
Yes, I do in fact believe your practice of consuming artistic and cultural objects is intellectually lazy. Writing some text about why you think this is not laziness doesn't change that fact.
Am I supposed to take your comment regarding "irony of just desserts" as saying that your first comment wasn't serious? Or was it? If the former, then it seems a mistake to engage on this forum in that way. If not, I don't see why this should be some new understanding for me if you still support what you said there in earnest. That's not irony. I think calling it the irony of just desserts when the the behaviour in question is really just trusting negative reviews from people who don't know what they're talking about to spite people you dislike is dressing up the behaviour a little bit to make it more presentable and sound more sophisticated than it really is.
So you say word of mouth is your method of discovery. That would be fine, except for the fact that your word of mouth supply chain seems to also consist of people who don't consume or know much about the things that they positively or negatively recommend. So you're not getting much value there if the posts in this forum were sufficient evidence to stay away from this show. I stand by the fact that if there were something important and iconoclastic in this or other shows, you would be extremely unlikely to come across it given your artistic consumption habits.
"No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage." So I said essentially a synonym of what I said that I did, with about the same meaning, and you have chosen to not believe me. Fair enough. Again, the only reason you seem to think that my attitude privileges positive coverage is that you think other faceless people do this and that I'm one of them. That's what happens when you treat individuals (and artistic objects) as if they're all in a bucket that you despise.
I will disagree that this concept is a core part of advertising. I stand by what I said, if someone admits ignorance of the thing they're reviewing, they will be roundly mocked. Reviews rely on the perception the reviewer knows what they're talking about. These people may in some cases be paid to say those things, but the outward message is that they have consumed the thing and are recommending the thing. Advertising from the company that makes a product itself or makes money off of it can be heavily discounted, and indeed I think most consumers understand this and are not deceived that the sexy person in a Lexus commercial has some intimate knowledge about cars and prefers a Lexus. This does require some intelligence and intuition on the part of a consumer to separate what the company wants your perception to be of the product and the reality of the product given marketing expenditures, but that's why there is a vast information ecosystem you can use to make this determination, and independent reviewers exist. Refusing to do this legwork and instead throwing out the baby with the bathwater is what I would call lazy.
I didn't speak down to you until you started doing so to me. That's what I do when people speak down to me. And you are still conflating refusing to stop talking about media I haven't watched with refusing to watch media I don't agree with politically. Ideally I would prefer the motte not acknowledge that kind of show at all, but since it was brought up, talking about it is the point of the forum. By your standards the only way to have a conversation is after giving the media the views they need, but hate watching pays just the same as watching in earnest.
That was what I meant about the irony in my first comment - you assumed I was seriously insisting we should all be loud dicks about anything we suspect we won't like, but I was exaggerating for comedic effect. I was actually the first person on the motte to vociferously argue for watching everything - even propaganda if you are in the right state of mind, although I have been reconsidering that lately. But you don't have to watch it in ways that profit the lazy and unscrupulous. Stereotypes only have significant value in impersonal interactions - for seeing the shape of the world, the pattern. When you are directly interacting with someone stereotypes can point you in the right direction, but individual elements of the pattern can and do behave erratically.
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For my part, given the topics involved and the kinds of people insisting it's Very Important, I'm pretty much willing to let my assumptions ride. I'm not turning off my pattern recognition ability because you think it's unfair.
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For most of us, the precise contents of a work of fiction tend to be secondary to the effects of those using a work of fiction as a basis for policy changes.
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I often read or otherwise experience works that I know I won't get along with! I have much to say about e.g. Glass Onion's excellent lighting and camerawork, even if describing its plot would take me another 800 angry words. Last year I've read Babel just so I could critique it fairly. (And I hardly ever see it reciprocated, there aren't many leftists queuing up to read, I don't know, Camp of Saints.)
And then the Charybdis to your sentiment's Scylla is that I'm getting asked by wife and friends why the hell am I doing it to myself, why read something only to rant about it. Can't please everyone.
And then there's often a conclusion from lefty social media users that if someone reads/watches an Important work, but doesn't take the intended moral lessons from it, that it's a failure of Media Literacy on part of the reader. And this one makes me even more disinclined to bother. If the conclusions are supposed to be preordained, if it's all just a morality play, can we assume that I've taken all the lessons and skip the 'experiencing' part?
(Just to be perfectly clear, because this kind of sarcastic hypothetical often transfers badly across writing - yes, what I'm proposing here is a horrible way to engage with art, but reducing works to one-dimensional anvilicious Messages welcomes it.)
In that case I commend you for practicing a forgotten art. I also read Babel last year (not knowing much about it going into it). I actually quite liked the historicity and worldbuilding of the book, it was pretty different from what I normally read in that sense and a good change of pace, but ran into a headache with the sections that were maybe to the most unsubtle degree I've come across in modern fiction so overtly didactic and earnest about the reader getting the point. Like, we get what you're trying to say, you don't have to try so hard. Still glad that I read it.
I agree that there's no way to please everyone, but there's also no reason to attempt to. Read what you want and comment however you like on it. If someone thinks you missed The Point or are wasting your time but you found it a valuable reading experience, they can get bent. If it wasn't, then you can reevaluate whether you want to continue those reading habits. It just irks me when people will dismiss something so completely out of hand because the wrong people like it. It's one manifestation of the brainrot you see everywhere these days where people don't want to bother taking the time to form their own critical opinion of something, so they'll regurgitate what some content creator said about X or Y or judge it on the most surface level of details.
Though on that note, I also agree with you that works which are striving to be summed up into one didactic surface level message invite bad takes. Still, I don't see how (from the summary that was given) this show would qualify necessarily. The original comment even qualified by saying that even IF young white men are radicalized in a way that the series shows, then that's reasonable. "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." So you don't have a problem with the possible reality of the content, you have a problem with the perceived message that this is promoting about young white men I guess?. But without watching the show, we have no idea what the message of the show might be, what conclusions it might draw about how much race/social media/drug use/gender dynamics/parent responsibility or anything else play into the narrative.
And here we see the problem with the disparate cultures. My reading of the op, ideologically aligned as I am, is that it is fine to make tv shows about paths to radicalisation and youth crime, but ALL of the media that does this suggests the problem is little white boys and that doesn't reflect reality at all. That there is nothing brave or courageous about telling a story about the path to radicalisation and knife crime when you refuse to confront the ethnic reality of who actually falls onto that path and who actually commits most of the knife crime. And this is taking place in a media environment where being white and male is already setting you up for antagonist status, so it is no wonder the (ideologically aligned) media is lauding it and will do so regardless of its quality. That is not "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." it's "you are still crying wolf".
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The overt, propaganda use of a text can be significantly distinct from its artistic merits (eg: Triumph of the Will, which is both noisome NSDAP propaganda and beautifully shot)
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