The Archetypology of Adolescence Part 1

One of the fun things about blogging is how often the real world throws up synchronicities related to something you just wrote about. This week’s synchronicity was not just related to blog posts but entire books. My latest work on Archetypology continues the last four years of writing that began with the Devouring Mother concept. One of the main archetypes I have returned to time and again during that period is the Orphan. Even the Devouring Mother is related to the Orphan because the Devouring Mother’s goal is to prevent her Child from growing up, i.e., entering the Orphan phase of life. The Orphan archetype was also at the centre of my most recent book, Archetypology Volume 1, where I analysed difficulties during the Orphan phase of life as being at the centre of the life stories of Martin Luther, the philosopher Nietzsche, and most of the patients that Freud and Jung treated in the early days of psychoanalysis.

So, it’s quite literally the case that I’ve spent much of the last four years thinking about the Orphan archetype, which maps directly to the time of life we call adolescence in the general culture. What a coincidence then that just as I released my latest book, which contains long sections on the Orphan, a new Netflix TV series called Adolescence should hit the news. Much of my analysis of the Orphan has centred on its appearance in literature and film, so the arrival of a new TV series couldn’t have been bettered timed. As I looked at it, however, I could see that this was no ordinary Orphan story. The 13-year-old boy at the centre of events has committed a murder. Given the age of the protagonist, I had assumed that the story would center around questions of guilt and responsibility. That’s true, but not in the way we might expect.

Adolescence is the growth phase between childhood and adulthood. The growth that occurs during this time is not just biological but also socio-cultural, psychological, and what would once upon a time have been called spiritual. In medieval times, adolescence was called the age of reason. It was the time when the higher reasoning faculties began to develop. As a result, it was also the time that individuals became morally and criminally liable for their actions. This appears to be a universal of human culture. All societies treat children as unable to be responsible. It is usually at puberty where that changes. Since 13 years is right on the borderline between childhood and adolescence, it sets up the obvious theme of exploring whether the boy in the story could be held both legally and morally responsible for the murder.

But Adolescence is completely uninterested in this question. That’s the first mysterious thing about it, but certainly not the last. In any case, the actual story itself has been overshadowed by the adulation it has received from the “elites” of the West, especially in the UK where the story takes place. No less a public figure than Keir Starmer decided its message was so important that it needed to be shown in every British school. Just this week, Starmer held some kind of summit to discuss the themes of the show.

This got me cynically thinking that the series was just another in the long line of ideological fantasy stories beloved by our modern aristocracy for pushing their social engineering goals; in other words, propaganda. That is certainly true. But as I started to analyse what was going on with Adolescence, it struck me that something far more interesting is at play. Even propaganda can have deeper meanings that its creators are not fully aware of. It’s going to take a few posts to unpack those meanings, so let’s get to work.

We can begin by asking what type of story Adolescence is. There are two obvious paradigms that we can compare it to. Since the plot revolves around a murder, Adolescence could be an examination of the motives and circumstances around the murder. That is a very common kind of theme in the history of storytelling, and it includes some of the greatest stories ever told. We’ll look at that option shortly.

The second option is the one suggested by the name of the story. The coming-of-age story as a genre began in modern times with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. But the concept is much older than that. In fact, stories where the hero comes of age have certainly been around in every culture since time immemorial. Since the Netflix series was given the name Adolescence, and since the protagonist is 13 years old, we could conclude that it is coming-of-age story.

As it happens, there was a film released just over ten years ago about a young man going through adolescence. I’m talking about Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which won no less than six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Linklater’s brilliant idea was to film over an entire decade. Every summer for eleven years, he got the actors together and shot part of the movie. As a result, the movie itself spans a period of eleven years in the life of a young boy, and the audience gets to watch the characters age in real time. The hero of the story begins the film in pre-pubescence, goes through puberty and ends up in adulthood. Boyhood touches on all the main themes of modern adolescence, including peer pressure, schoolyard bullying, the beginning of romantic and sexual relationships, dealing with your parents, etc. In fact, Boyhood should really have been called Adolescence since that’s what it is: an overview of the whole phase of life, filmed while the actor playing the hero of the story was actually going through it.

Boyhood, therefore, makes a perfect comparison with the new Netflix series which has given itself almost the same name, which features a young man as the nominal protagonist, and which raises a very similar set of themes. The huge difference, of course, is that the nominal protagonist in Adolescence has just committed murder. Since he is only 13 years old and therefore just at the beginning of adolescence, it’s pretty clear that he’s not going to have an adolescence at all. Why name a film Adolescence and then show us a hero who is not going to have one? Of course, the story of Adolescence is not really about the young man at all; not as an individual.

In Linklater’s movie, like any good story, we are encouraged to identify with the hero. In the case of men watching the movie, we identify with him by default since we all went through the same phase of life ourselves and we can relate to many of the scenes. But how are we going to identify with a young man who is a murderer? That would be a problem for the writers of Adolescence if they were following the format of the second kind of story that they could have told: an exploration of the motives and circumstances around a murder.

Think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The story revolves around the great warrior’s treachery in murdering an honest and noble king who has done him no wrong. But the murder of Duncan isn’t even shown at all. The entire story is about the lead-up to the murder and the consequences afterwards. The whole story is, in fact, about Macbeth’s motivations for the murder, which centres on his lust for power. But Macbeth is barely conscious of his own desires, and he wrestles with them throughout the story. Eventually, he has to be goaded into the deed by his wife.

Another of Shakespeare’s stories featuring the murder of a good and noble person is Othello. In this case, the entire story is the lead-up to the murder, which comes right at the end. Only after a long, sustained, and calculating deception by Iago, which is expertly designed to play to his master’s weaknesses, is Othello so overcome by emotion that he kills his wife. By the time of the murder, we know in great detail why Othello did it, which of his personal character failings were mainly responsible, and which evil bastard set the whole thing up (Iago). Thus, both Macbeth and Othello are explorations of the psychology of murders carried out by heroes overcome by emotions and motivations of which they are barely conscious.

Of more relevance to the subject of adolescence is the story of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo becomes a murderer unwillingly about halfway through the play. What is at stake this time is the question of honour, which, in 17th-century Italy, was a big deal for young men. Tybalt challenges Romeo to a duel, but Romeo has been secretly married to Juliet. From Romeo’s point of view, Tybalt is now a family relation. He declines the duel, but his friend, Mercutio, who doesn’t know that Romeo and Juliet have been married, will not allow the slight on his friend’s honour. When Tybalt kills Mercutio in the duel which follows, Romeo avenges his friend. Once again, the murders happen in a fit of passion.

This psychological exploration of murder was pursued in even greater depth in many of Dostoevsky’s great stories, including and especially Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Once again, Dostoevsky shows us the extended lead-up to the murder and ramifications which follow. These are intricate and detailed explorations of the moral and psychological issues at play. What especially interested Dostoevsky was the idea of cold, premeditated murder, done in a calculating fashion rather than in a frenzy of emotion. This fits with one of the main threads of Dostoevsky’s work, which is that reason and logic can be used as an excuse for killing people.

There’s one final story about murder that’s worth mentioning, and that is Camus’ The Stranger. Camus set out to overturn the accepted conventions by providing a story in which the reasons for the murder are unclear and where the protagonist doesn’t feel any guilt afterwards. The reason why that’s relevant to Adolescence is because the protagonist in that story, the 13-year-old boy, also shows no remorse. This fact is apparently what fans of the show have highlighted as one of its most poignant aspects.

But there is a crucial difference between Adolescence and the stories about murder we have just mentioned. Even in Camus’ story, the primary focus is on the inner state of the hero as he comes to grips with the murder he has committed. In tragedy, the hero is thrust into a situation where they lose control of themselves and events. They must learn to bear responsibility for what they have done and, in Dostoevsky at least, to seek redemption. Such stories invite us to go through a similar process, to imagine what we might have done in the same situation, and how we could reconcile such actions with our conscience. Tragedy, and great literature more generally, is inherently subjective in this fashion. It is concerned with the inward journey of the hero and it invites us to share that journey.

Adolescence is not a story that is concerned with the redemption of the murderer. The story goes out of its way to leave out the subjective perspective of the young boy. That’s why it’s correct to say that he is not really the hero of the story at all. The story is treats him as an object, not as a subject. We are not shown his inner state and invited to empathise with him. We are only allowed to infer things about him from external, objective evidence. The real “heroes” of the story are the people who view him in this fashion: his parents, the police, and the psychologist. These are all representatives of the audience, aka general public. The reason why Adolescence has the form of propaganda is because of these collectivist ideological assumptions. Like all socialist or fascist literature, it has zero concern with the individual.

There are four episodes in the series. The first episode begins with the police kicking down the door of the family home where the boy lives. It shows his arrest, strip search, fingerprinting and initial interrogation. The main emotional content of this part of the story is the shame and anguish felt by his parents, especially his father, who must accompany his son throughout the ordeal as his legal guardian. The climax of the episode comes as CCTV footage establishes that the son is the murderer. Again, the emphasis here is on the father’s realisation that his son is a killer. Thus, Adolescence begins, not as all other classic explorations of murder do, with a long build-up that establishes the motives and circumstances. At this point, we don’t know anything about why it happened. We just know that the young man did it. We are invited to process that fact not through his eyes but the eyes of his father. This is also how the series ends in episode four, which is yet again about the shame and guilt of the father, not the young man himself.

The second episode begins the process of trying to figure out why the young man did it. But, again, it doesn’t do that in a subjective sense by showing the young man himself. Rather, it’s about the police investigation of his school. We learn that he had been interested in a young girl who did not reciprocate his affections. The episode also shows that the killer’s friend was an accomplice who gave him the murder weapon, a knife. Once again, the episode ends by establishing the guilt of another young boy without any real exploration of his motives. Once again, we don’t see any of this through the eyes of the school kids but primarily through the police officers who are doing their job of investigating a murder. It’s an objective exploration of the subject, not a subjective one.

That leaves the third episode, and it is here where we might nominally expect to finally get some insight into the motivations of the killer since the episode consists of one long interview between him and a psychologist in the detention facility where he has been for seven months after the murder. But here again, we are not living this through the eyes of the young man but observing him through the eyes of the adult psychologist. Thus, the entire series of Adolescence completely avoids dealing with the murderer on his own terms. Everything we learn about him is through the perspective of other people. Adolescence is not a tragic murder story requiring the hero to take responsibility and seek redemption.

If we think about it, this fact is not in the least bit surprising. The point of tragedy is that the hero must take responsibility. In all of the classic stories about murder mentioned above, the murderer is an adult, or as good as one. Even Romeo is in his late teens. Yes, he is an impetuous youth, but he is old enough to know what he is doing and to take responsibility for his actions. What Adolescence purports to show us is a murderer who is only 13 years old. Since 13 is right on the age at which almost every culture assumes that legal and moral responsibility can be assigned to an individual, the core question of the story should have been whether this particular young man is capable of knowing what he has done and of taking responsibility for it in terms of his own conscience. But Adolescence completely avoids that question.

To say it again, the whole point of a tragic story is that the hero must bear responsibility. But that responsibility comes after the fact. Tragedy shows us heroes who are thrust into situations where they are not fully in control of themselves or of events but who then must come to terms with the guilt and remorse that follow from what they did as a result. Dostoevsky provides the ideal example here because the epic nature of his storytelling makes clear that coming to terms with murder takes years. In fact, arguably, you never come to terms with murder. It is just an open wound you carry for the rest of your life. At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has not found redemption. He has only begun the process of trying to find it. The entire story before that is about his attempts to avoid facing up to his actions and in his conscience. Dostoevsky explores all the ways that an individual can try to avoid taking moral responsibility for their actions. Even then, Raskolnikov relies on the assistance of Sonya, a fellow sinner.

In Adolescence, the young killer is not assisted by anybody. He is thrown into detention. The one person who could help him find the road to redemption is not a fellow sinner but a psychologist, a technocrat with a job and an agenda. She does her job well by tricking him into an accidental confession of the murder. The entire scene is about gamesmanship; only we are expected to empathise with the psychologist, since she is the good person in the story and the young boy is, by definition, the bad person. This kind of garbage would have Dostoevsky turning in his grave.

Apparently, others who watched the psychologist scene found it “chilling”. They did so because we’re expected to believe that the young boy is a cold, calculating killer who refuses to show remorse. But herein lies the absurdity of the scene. On the one hand, the psychologist treats the young boy as if he is a fully grown adult capable of taking responsibility for his actions. On the other hand, the actor they chose for the role doesn’t even look like he’s hit puberty yet.

Sometimes 13-year-old boys are already physically men. Sometimes, they’re still children. The difference is at what age they start puberty, and that’s different for different people. In this respect, I have some personal experience, as I didn’t begin puberty until 14 years of age. Since my birthday was right near the end of the cutoff date for the purposes of determining which year level in school I was assigned to, I was also about the youngest in my class. The combination of these two meant that I was a skinny, scrawny boy while most of the others in my year level were one, two, or even three years into puberty. As a young man in the first couple of years of high school, these issues make a big difference to your life on the playground.

In Adolescence, we already have the problem of a 13-year-old killer whose maturity should be the main focus of the story. They then chose to make that problem even worse choosing an actor to play the role who looks like he has not yet reached puberty. This leads into some genuine absurdities during the interview scene with the psychologist treating a 13-year-old as if he were a grown man. For example, she asks him, “Do you find women attractive?“ and “Do you think women find you attractive?” Do grown women find prepubescent boys attractive? Do prepubescent boys get upset when grown women do not find them attractive? The answer to both these questions is no. Yet the story hinges on the fact that this 13-year-old was so sexually frustrated that he committed murder.

This leads to the other main reason why the whole interrogation scene doesn’t work. There are several parts of the scene where the young boy is agitated and raises his voice a little. We’re expected to believe that he somehow scares the psychologist. But because he’s a skinny and seemingly prepubescent boy, he has no physical or psychological presence to speak of. His “threat” has all the credibility of a childhood tantrum. The only reason it works at all is because the story has already told us that he’s a murderer. In any other circumstance, we would see nothing more than a bratty young boy who’s got a lot of growing up to do.

In short, Adolescence has no interest whatsoever in investigating the motivations of the murderer. The entire story is not about him as a subject but as an object. He is the object of a police investigation. He is the object of the psychologist’s assessment. He is the object of his parents shame and guilt. Since the story is told primarily through these other characters, we as the audience are also asked to view him solely as an object. For these reasons, the story is an anti-tragedy. It fits well within the genre of modern propaganda, which couldn’t care less about the individual but is concerned only with “social issues”. No doubt, that’s why Keir Starmer and the rest of the Western elites have been falling over themselves to praise it.

If that’s all it was, if Adolescence was just another collectivist circle jerk, it wouldn’t be particularly interesting. All of the weird choices made by the storytellers could just be written off as the brain-dead fever dreams of our senile elites. Such ideological nonsense shows up so often in films these days that it’s become passe. What makes Adolescence worth talking about is that the weird choices made by the screenwriters actually reveal something very important. The final scene of the third episode really is chilling, just not for the reasons that the ideologues who made the show think.

The psychologist has successfully tricked the young boy into confessing to the murder. Having done her job, she informs him that they won’t see each other again. His final outburst is to ask whether she likes him. Because of all the ridiculous questions about his sexuality earlier in the interview, the young boy actually has the presence of mind to make it clear that he is not asking whether she finds him sexually attractive. He wants to know if she likes him as a person. She tells him that her role has been that of a professional and that whether she likes him is irrelevant. The young boy, who is now quite hysterical, is being physically removed from the room by one of the attendants while screaming the question again, “Don’t you even like me a bit?”

Apparently, what most viewers saw in this scene was a hostile and narcissistic young man who refuses to show remorse. What I saw was a young boy who had just been tricked and betrayed by an adult who really doesn’t have any interest in him as a person. That’s what the psychologist herself admits. Her job is done, and her involvement with the boy has ended. Thanks for playing, kid. Better luck next time.

Thus, the young boy has correctly concluded that this woman really couldn’t care less about him. That is the world in which the young man has found himself. The police, the attendants in the facility, and especially the psychologist have no interest in him as an individual. They have no interest in helping him on a pathway to redemption. They are just doing their jobs. The only reason they care about his failure to confess to the crime is because it makes their jobs harder. Now that the psychologist has tricked him into confessing, her involvement in the case is over.

This scene reminded me very much of a different kind of story. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Randle McMurphy plays the role of the troublesome patient who causes trouble for Nurse Ratched. That story is a satire, and because both Ratched and McMurphy are grown-up arseholes, we don’t really care much about who wins their little battle. In fact, we kind of hope they both take each other out.

But in Adolescence you have a young man trapped in a heartless institution who is not rebelling because he’s an arsehole but because he correctly realises that nobody gives a damn about him. Since he is physically indistinguishable from a child, that’s exactly what it looked like to me: a child being manipulated by a bunch of adults. It’s a horrifying scene, but not for the reasons that the people who made it think. In fact, the whole scene is made ten times worse by the fact that the people who made it did so with the sincere belief that they are the good guys. And that’s made ten times worse by the fact that the Prime Minister of Great Britain thinks it’s something worth showing to every teenager in the country. Here you go, kids. This is what the future holds for you. Do exactly what we say, or we’ll lobotomise you. Government by Nurse Ratched. Which is exactly how Great Britain and most other Western nations are run these days.

So, I wonder whether the reason why this final scene of the psychologist’s interview has struck a chord is because it inadvertently shows the truth. The story is cathartic because what it shows is the sacrifice of a young man to “the system”. That’s what it means for him to be an object and not a subject. The real protagonist are the adults who sacrifice him to the system: the police, his parents, and especially the psychologist. That is why their grief is actually quite genuine. And that is why it makes sense to choose a 13 year old prepubescent boy for the role. He is not a man at all. He is a child who cannot take responsibility. The responsibility is with the adults. The point of Adolescence is that it’s a collective guilt trip. Apparently, the entire nation of Britain feels the need for this guilt trip, and so they should, looking at the sorry state of that country.

Still, in order to really understand these issues, we first need to go back to basics and ask the question of what the period of life known as adolescence (aka the Orphan archetype) is really about and why it has become so problematic in the post-war West. We’ll do that in next week’s post.