Simon Sheridan – Page 2 – Simon Sheridan

Thoughts on the Australian (and Canadian) election

It’s rather a strange coincidence that both Canada and Australia had elections in the last week. It provides a nice excuse to talk about the numerous parallels between the two countries, which apparently led to almost identical election results, with unexpected wins to the left-leaning parties. (The victory to Labor in Australia was not unexpected, although the magnitude of it certainly was).

Canada and Australia appear to be in some kind of competition to see who can blow the most insane real estate bubble. Those bubbles are in turn fuelled by unsustainable immigration, and yet the elites of both countries have zero intention of reducing the intake, with the entire subject of immigration rendered verboten in the public discourse. Both countries have hollowed-out manufacturing sectors and a heavy reliance on commodity exports to fund a decreasing standard of living. In short, both countries are on a road to nowhere and just had an election where neither party offered anything except more of the same.

To understand the current situation that Australia and Canada find themselves in, we need to zoom out. Let’s zoom all the way out to the 16th century, and let’s talk about the country that would eventually give rise to both Canada and Australia: England. At the start of the 16th century, England was a backwater whose economy was predicated on the commodity export of wool, which it traded primarily with the Benelux countries, whose wealth came from turning that wool into clothing.

The ruling class of England wanted a piece of the action and set about a long-term plan to develop their own clothing industry. This is what is known in the business world as vertical integration. Since the English owned the raw materials, they could cut out the middleman by developing the ability to manufacture the final product. That’s exactly what they eventually did. Once their domestic clothing industry was up and running, the English cut exports of wool to the Benelux countries.

This was an early example of using protectionism and other trade and economic measures to grow domestic industry. Since the technological improvements that came with the manufacturing of clothing led directly to the industrial revolution, it’s hard to understate how important this was to the later success of Britain and its evolution into an imperial power. Britain’s initial imperial success came from being an exporting powerhouse predicated on the innovations that came with a vibrant domestic manufacturing industry that had been deliberately nurtured into existence.

Fast forward to the 19th century, and there was a big policy shift in Britain towards what some historians have called the “imperialism of free trade”. Britain threw off its protectionism and ran an imperial policy based on control of trade and financial markets. At the same time that Britain decided to pursue free trade, there were two primary rivals emerging: the USA and Germany. Both of the latter countries had learned from Britain’s example and were using protectionist measures to provide a safe haven in which domestic industry could grow. In some sense, Britain was the beneficiary of that since its consumers received cheaper goods. But the tradeoff was the loss of domestic industry.

If all this is sounding very familiar, well, yes, it’s the same pattern the US has gone through in recent decades. But there’s one more parallel which is directly relevant to our time. Once the deleterious effects of free trade on domestic industry became impossible to ignore, some elites in Britain started to realise that a reversion back to the old paradigm was needed. Thus, by the early 1930s, Britain was once again pursuing protectionist policies alongside its two rivals, Germany and the USA.

However, the key point to understand is that the protectionism was not carried out at the national level but within three primary trading blocs. There was the British Empire. There was the German-dominated trading zone of central Europe. And there was the American zone that included South America and also Japan, the Philippines, etc.

Although Australia and Canada were nominally independent nations at that time, the reality is that we were very much a part of the British Empire, and trade and foreign policy were set in London for the most part. Thus, despite its proximity to the USA, Canada’s main trading partner at the start of WW2 was still Britain.

Heading into the war, the GDP of each of the three trading blocs was almost identical. If we think about it purely in terms of economics, let’s pretend Britain and the US stayed out of the fight. Germany would have united continental Europe into a trading bloc that very closely resembles the current EU. Setting aside the moral and political issues, that might have been a somewhat stable equilibrium, but there was a wild card in the pack.

Russia had made significant advances in industrial production in the 1930s. By the end of the decade it was, at least in terms of raw industrial output, comparable to the other three trading blocs. Germany’s breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a game changer for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it opened the possibility that not only would Europe be unified but that it would also incorporate Russia. That would have easily been the largest trading bloc in the world.

In summary, by the start of WW2, there were four primary economic blocs: the British Empire, the German Empire, the USSR, and the USA. Britain and Germany went to war, followed shortly thereafter by the USSR. The USA got to stay out of the fray. That was its first big advantage. Its second big advantage was that the British Empire was not what it used to be. All that free trade and hollowing out of domestic industry had left the British with reduced capacity to compete with the Germans in war production. The Americans agreed to supply the British firstly via the Cash and Carry mechanism and then, when all British gold had been transferred to Washington, via the Lend Lease program.

The result was that the British Empire was bankrupt by the end of the war. The German Empire was also finished. That just left the USSR, which had also accumulated large debts to the USA via Lend Lease but which decided simply to default on those and gobble up land in Eastern Europe, thereby ushering in the Cold War.

The upshot of all this is that both the British and German economic blocs were merged with the US bloc after the war, with the USSR creating its own bloc in eastern Europe while also attempting to expand into Asia. Since Canada and Australia were both members of the British Empire, our allegiance was transferred to the US by default. It’s important to understand that, even though this period was nominally a “decolonising” and “anti-imperial” time, in actual fact the USA had inherited the mechanism of imperialism that Britain had created, which is to say, domination through control of trade, financial networks and military alliances. For Australia and Canada, the transfer of power from Britain to the US was so subtle that few even noticed, although the arrival of Coca-Cola billboards and Hollywood films should have provided a clue.

In the decades immediately after WW2, most nations in the now US-led western trading bloc were allowed to run relatively protectionist economic policies, and these facilitated domestic industrial production during the post-war boom. That was all thrown away, however, with the collapse of the USSR and the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s, with markets opened up and manufacturing exported to China.

The whole thing looks a hell of a lot like the same blunder that Britain made back in the 19th century with its “imperialism of free trade”. Manufacturing in every western nation has been hollowed out in exchange for a “services-based economy”. The US Empire now runs almost exclusively on control of financial networks rather than on the production of goods and services. For its part, China has pursued exactly the same strategy that Britain, Germany, and the US once followed of nurturing domestic manufacturing through protectionist measures.

From the point of view of Australia and Canada, we’ve been through all this before. In the 1890s, there were enormous asset bubbles caused by British free trade and monetary policy. In the 1980s, the same thing happened under a similar set of policies pursued by the US. Logic says that the same thing should be about to happen, and Australia and Canada are in their familiar position of being pawns in a game over which we have little real control.

And that brings us back to the recent elections. On the surface of it, it’s quite incredible that the general public of Canada and Australia should so eagerly vote for more of the same given how fast our standard of living has slipped in recent years. But the reality is that the governments in our countries are not in control of the levers that could actually change the economic situation. The big decisions are now made in Washington D.C and Beijing.

Despite these similarities, there are several interesting differences between the status of Canada and Australia. Firstly, Canada’s economy is now completely dominated by the US. About 3/4 of Canadian trade is with its southern neighbour. By contrast, Australia trades little with the US, and we are relatively diversified compared to Canada, with China, Japan, and South Korea being large trading partners.

A second big difference is that Canada is being weaponised by China in its trade fight against the US, not to mention being used as a trading post for fentanyl distribution. Canada is kind of like that character who wanders in between the hero and the villain in a movie shoot-out.

Australia certainly benefits from our geographic distance. But we’ve been given much the same role as Canada in the imperial arrangements. Our job is to supply commodities and raw materials. The result is a hollowed-out economy that is apparently now entirely predicated on immigration, for which we simply cannot produce the housing stock, leading to a truly insane housing bubble that, if it were to crash, would make the 1890s look like a picnic.

Against this background, I suppose the recent election results in both countries make some sense. Neither party was promising any change to the status quo because neither country is in a position to make such a change. Both Canada and Australia are pawns in the larger power game going on between the US and China. In that sense, voting for the fluffy-cuddly leftist parties is the best bet since they are the ones who promise to keep you “safe” and “protected”, which in this case is code for protected against the economic machinations of global powers.

In Bruges

Long-term readers would know that the archetypal relationship between Orphan and Elder has been a particular interest of mine in the last few years, especially as it relates to its manifestation in film and literature. Learning to identify archetypes in stories is valuable on the assumption of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye that the stories we tell ourselves (and the archetypes that we use) reveal patterns in the broader culture. If that’s true, then the question arises, what does the manifestation of the Orphan-Elder relationship in modern film and literature reveal about those archetypes in the broader culture?

The first thing to note about that is that the Orphan-Elder relationship almost never appears in stories that are realistic portrayals of modern life. Instead, its most common manifestation is in the science fiction and fantasy genres. That’s why we get Elders such as Obi-Wan, Yoda, Dumbledore, Morpheus, Gandalf, and the like.

A variation on this pattern is when the story nominally takes place in a realistic modern setting, but the Elder offering initiation to the Orphan is a foreigner. Thus, in Karate Kid you have the Japanese Elder, Mr Miyagi, paired up with American teenager, Daniel. The same idea was behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which gave us two Japanese Elders, Splinter and Shredder.

I would argue that the Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, is also an Orphan-Elder story with Cruise’s character receiving initiation from the samurai, Katsumoto. The same idea is behind the initiation of Jake in the movie Avatar. He is inducted into the foreign tribe of the Na’vi.

Although the use of foreign and fantasy elements in these stories reflects the absence of the Orphan-Elder relationship in the modern world, it’s also true that it is a realistic depiction of initiation, which requires a break from normality. That’s why armies have boot camps. These form a sudden and severe departure from everyday life.

It’s also why hazing rituals used to be given to apprentice tradesmen (before that became illegal). The point of initiation is that you are being inducted into a new world (the adult world) that is unlike that which you have known up until this point (childhood). Because modern society has no such initiation, it can only represent it as an aberration.

There is a third way in which modern storytellers can represent the Orphan-Elder relationship and that is in a criminal context. That’s what the Netflix show Adolescence does by having Jamie arrested at the beginning. As I noted in recent posts, his “initiation” is incredibly similar to that received by an adolescent boy in tribal and warrior societies. But in Jamie’s case, it is the justice system stealing him from his bed and carrying him away from his parents.

More broadly, though, organised crime works as a context to depict initiation because such organisations still operate in that fashion in the modern world. Thus, bikie gangs and other crime syndicates use hazing rituals and other formal methods to induct new members. The initiate usually must pass a proper test to prove that they are up to the job, which almost always amounts to committing some crime or other.

And this leads us into the subject of this week’s post because I happened to catch a film a few weeks ago featuring just such an initiation into a crime organisation. The movie is called In Bruges. I’d never heard of it before and had no idea what it was about, but I decided to give it a chance.

These days, most of the time I give an unknown film a chance, I find myself reaching for the off button by the 10 or 15 minute mark. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that not only was In Bruges worth watching, it’s actually one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a great piece of storytelling with a couple of surprise twists, likeable characters, excellent acting, and cool dialogue. What surprised me more, though, was that the first big twist in the movie sets up a classic Orphan-Elder relationship that begins in the criminal world and then turns into something far deeper. The movie is really about what Orphan initiation means in the modern West.

The story begins with two Irish hitmen arriving in Bruges after a job gone wrong in London. The younger man of the pair is Ray (Colin Farrell), who was supposed to knock off a priest but accidentally killed a young boy. The older gangster is Ken (Brendan Gleeson). The two have been sent to Bruges by their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and told to lay low until the furore around the death of the young boy has subsided. For the first half of the film, the story works as an odd-couple comedy with the two very different men getting on each other’s nerves now that they’re stuck in a quasi-domestic relationship in a Bruges hotel.

As the experienced gangster, Ken is unperturbed by the death of the boy. Presumably, he’s seen worse in his career. He’s delighted to take some time off work to be a tourist and see the sights of Bruges. Ray, on the other hand, can’t sit still, which is partly due to his guilt over the boy’s death and also because he’s a young man looking for fun, which he later finds in a romantic love interest, Chloe. With Chloe to take his mind off his guilty conscience, Ray also starts to enjoy himself, and both men look like they might have a pleasant stay in Bruges after all.

Then the brilliant twist near the midpoint of the film hits.

Now, maybe I missed the cues earlier in the movie, but the twist turns the story from an oddball comedy into a very unique kind of Orphan-Elder story. Harry, the big boss back in London, calls Ken and tells him the real reason he ordered him and Ray to go to Bruges. It’s not about laying low after all; Harry wants Ken to kill Ray so that there’s no loose ends over the death of the young boy.

What we learn at this point of the story is that the botched assassination was actually Ray’s first job. It was his induction into the crime syndicate, his test to prove his worth, a test he failed. This twist forces a re-evaluation of Ray’s character. We realise his scatter-brained behaviour earlier in the film was not just due to the stress of the situation but the fact that he’s not a career-criminal. His genuine remorse over the situation also reveals that fact. In fact, Ray is just a young fool who got in with the wrong crowd.

As the audience, we learn that. But, more importantly, Ken learns it too, and this sets up the brilliant second half of the film because now Ken has a moral conundrum as well. Presumably, an assassin like Ken does not get to know his victims before he kills them. But, after a couple of days in Bruges, he’s gotten to know Ray and also to like him. He knows as well as we do that Ray is in over his head. Crucially, because Ray has failed his gangster initiation, it’s not too late for him to be able to attain some kind of redemption. That’s true in the sense that he’s young enough to start again. It’s more importantly true in the sense that Ray has not yet learned how to kill without remorse. He still has a conscience.

The fact that Ray still has a conscience inadvertently awakens Ken’s conscience too, which has presumably been kept quiet during his long service to the syndicate. Ken is the Elder in the story. His job is to initiate Ray. But it turns out that Ray has something to teach Ken. The man who apparently had no problem watching a young boy get killed now has the job of killing another young man who, while not entirely innocent, is also not entirely guilty either.

Thus, what begins as an oddball comedy turns into a potential double-redemption arc, one that involves both the Orphan character of Ray and the Elder character of Ken. In theory, it’s too late for Ken to attain redemption. He’s already a career criminal. But Ray is just a dumb kid who should never have been given the job in the first place. Thus, Ken is presented with the chance of redeeming Ray, but in order to do so, he must betray his orders. He must choose between his conscience and his duty.

I won’t spoil any more of the story. Suffice to say that there are a couple more twists that keep the audience guessing right til the end. In Bruges turned out to be one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s also quite a coincidence that I saw it at the same time that I was working through my analysis of Adolescence, because the inversion that comes at the midpoint of the movie is very similar to the one I analysed in the tv series.

As I pointed out in recent posts, Adolescence is really about the father, Eddie, and the pain of the parent who must let go of their child. In Bruges gives us a similar perspective, only now it is about the pain of the Elder who must let go of the Orphan. Ken can let Ray go metaphorically (kill him) or literally. The latter option would be to let Ray out of the initiation into a life of crime and into something more like the “normal” initiation that we all receive in the modern West.

Because induction into a crime syndicate is one of the few areas of modern life that does fulfil the criteria for a formal initiation, In Bruges is able to contrast this formal initiation against the “normal” initiation in Western culture, which really looks like no initiation at all. If Ken lets Ray go, Ray will be without an Elder. This matches the broader absence of the Elder archetype in modern. But what In Bruges symbolically shows us is that this process is not easy for the Elder, just as Adolescence shows us that it is not easy for Parents to let go. It’s not easy because it makes the Elder redundant. But it’s also not easy because it entails leaving the Orphan to face the pain of the world alone.

As I alluded to in last week’s post, the ideal behind the lack of initiation in the modern West is at least partly contained in the stories of Wagner’s Parsifal and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In Bruges shares this ideal to a large extent. Like Parsifal and Alyosha, Ray is the pure fool whose naivete is what allows him to confront the world directly, including all of its most difficult aspects. To initiate the Orphan almost always amounts to killing the pure fool, or inner child. Thus, Harry’s order to Ken to kill Ray works perfectly as a piece of symbolism that Wagner and Dostoevsky would have understood. When the Elder initiates the Orphan, he kills the Child.

According to this way of looking at it, initiation is always a narrowing of the individual. Ray can be initiated into killing other people, but only by killing the part of himself that might object i.e. his conscience. It is because Ray has failed initiation that his conscience is still there to torture him over the death of the innocent boy. In Wagnerian or Dostoevskyan terms, it’s because the innocent in Ray is not dead that he can empathise with the innocence in the world and suffer with it. That is something that Harry can no longer do. Ken also couldn’t do at the start of the movie, but he learns by association with Ray.

Thus, In Bruges follows in the footsteps of Parsifal and The Brothers Karamazov in showing us the Elder whose role is precisely not to initiate the Orphan. It turns out that the hardest form of initiation is no initiation at all. If there’s no Elder giving us orders, then there’s nobody we can blame when things go wrong (except ourselves). The same goes for punishment. Ken and Harry can punish Ray for his blunder. But in doing so they only turn him into a kind of Pavlovian machine who does what he’s supposed to not from conscience but from fear.

By giving Ray a couple of days with nothing to do, Ken and Harry accidentally allow him to face his own conscience and thereby to open up an opportunity for redemption. Ken realises that because he’s spent time with the young man. Harry does not because he’s back home in Britain calculating the best way forward in a purely intellectual fashion. Even crime bosses need to be rational and logical. Thus, the second half of the movie also plays out as a kind of spiritual battle between the two Elders.

In Bruges ends up providing one of the rarest types of stories in the modern West: an Orphan-Elder story based in real life. The more I write about it, the more I come to think that it might actually be a modern classic. Since this post has ended up becoming a movie review, I suppose I should end it by giving the film a rating:

The Archetypology of Adolescence Part 5

I wasn’t going to write any more in this series, but a commentator (hat tip to Anonymoose) on last week’s post got me thinking more about the question of how stories change over time and what those changes can tell us about broader cultural shifts. Adolescence, as the title makes clear, belongs to the coming-of-age story genre, which is a universal of human culture. When we analyse that story, we find identical tropes that fit with the realities we must face when we go through adolescence. These include stepping out from the dominance of our parents and tackling the challenges of integrating into society.

It follows that one of the main themes of any coming-of-age story is the dangers posed by society which can lead the Orphan hero astray. There are always bad elements in any society, and the young, naïve adolescent can easily get in with the wrong crowd. This is often represented by a more general theme in the coming-of-age story, which is the idea that society itself is problematic. We see this idea expressed in one of its purest forms in the movie, The Matrix, where Neo has come of age in a society which is designed to keep him and the rest of humanity from the truth.

The Orphan, who is still little more than a Child, would have no chance of seeing through this illusion or fighting off the dangers of society by themselves. They need help. That help comes from the friends they make in the journey and especially from the Elder who becomes their guide. Thus, Neo has Morpheus to guide him in the right direction and the other members of the Nebuchadnezzar to provide support.

As we have already seen, Adolescence inverts this formula. Jamie has no Elders to guide him to the right path. The closest thing are the teachers at his school, who are shown as being scarcely able to manage their classes, let alone provide any kind of personalised guidance and counselling. This leaves Jamie open to malign influences from the internet. Moreover, Jamie’s friends are also going to lead him astray, as symbolised by the one who provides him with the murder weapon.

The absence of the Elder figure in Adolescence is no surprise. I’ve written at length on the absence of the Elder archetype in modern Western culture in blog posts over recent years and also my two most recent books. The absence of the Elder in story form mirrors its absence in the wider society. This makes sense since, as Northrop Frye correctly pointed out, stories reflect broader changes in the culture. If Elders have disappeared from the culture, one of our main sources to notice that change would be coming-of-age stories such as Adolescence. We might then ask when Elders started to disappear from our coming-of-age stories and why. Now, I haven’t had the time to fully investigate this, but my first guess is that, like so many developments that we take for granted nowadays, it began in the 19th century.

As it happens, we have a prime example of this in the story of Parsifal as it was adopted by Richard Wagner for his final opera. The reason why Parsifal makes such an ideal case study is because the original story was from the medieval period of Europe. The genre of the young knight going off on a great quest was perhaps the most popular coming-of-age story of that era. Therefore, we can compare the coming-of-age story from medieval times against the way in which Wagner adapted it for the 19th century. If we’re correct in saying that changes in stories reflect changes in cultures, then Wagner’s version of Parsifal should be able to tell us something important.

Let’s begin with the original Parsifal. Its author was the medieval knight and poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and it was written in the 13th century. The story begins with Parsifal’s father, Gahmuret, whose own father has just died. Gahmuret’s father was the king, and, in line with the inheritance rules of medieval Europe, he leaves his entire kingdom to his eldest son, Galoes. Galoes has magnanimously offered to give Gahmuret a segment of the kingdom to rule over, but the young man rejects the offer and leaves on the classic knight’s quest to find fortune and fame.

Here we see the close correspondences between fiction and reality that Northrop Frye was interested in. In the real world of medieval Europe, it really was the younger sons of the nobility who became knights. Because the eldest son received the entire inheritance, the younger brothers had very few prospects in life. Quite a lot of them turned to gambling, whoring, and crime. A less illegal option was to become a knight, not least because this increased the marriage chances of the young man. That’s why the classic knight story usually has the hero winning the heart of a virtuous maiden. In general, we might characterise the medieval knight story as a coming-of-age story for the men of the lesser nobility.

In von Eschenbach’s story, Gahmuret rejects the offer to settle down and travels first to Africa, where he beats the bad guys, marries a beautiful queen, and becomes king. But he gets bored with that and returns to Europe to marry Queen Herzeloyde. It doesn’t take long for his second marriage to also bore him, so he ups and leaves, travelling this time to Baghdad to fight on behalf of the ruler there. On this occasion, however, his luck runs out, and he is killed in battle.

The good queen Herzeloyde, meanwhile, is pregnant with Gahmuret’s child. Upon hearing of her husband’s death, she retires to the forest to raise her young son, Parsifal, away from the stories and temptations of chivalry that brought her husband undone. That tactic works well until Parsifal becomes a teenager (archetypal Orphan). Some knights come through his neck of the forest and tell him about the court of King Arthur. Entranced by the idea of knightly adventure, Parsifal runs off to join the king’s court. His mother is so heartbroken that her son is following in the footsteps of his father that she dies.

Note that this beginning to the story follows the template we identified in last week’s post. Parsifal is entering the Orphan phase of life and the death of his mother means that he is now a literal orphan too. The queen has attempted to shield her son from what she perceives as the bad influence of society. Her anguish at having to let go of Parsifal is the same as that felt by Eddie in Adolescence. In this respect, we can see a parallel in two stories that are separated by almost a millennia. It is the anguish of the Parent who must give their Child over to society, knowing all the dangers that lurk therein.

However, in the original story of Parsifal, the young man is not going to come to ruin, and one of the main reasons for that is that he immediately meets with the Elder who is going to induct him into the ways of knighthood. Almost the first thing that happens after Parsifal leaves his mother is that he comes under the tutelage of Gurnemanz, who will train him as a knight. In addition, he will make new friends who will help him on his journey, the most important of whom is Gawan. There follow a whole lot of other side quests in the usual medieval knight-story fashion, but the overall arc of the story is Parsifal’s coming-of-age as “Grail King”. The story finishes with Parsifal and his wife living happily ever after.

With this very brief outline, we can see that the original Parsifal matches Adolescence in showing us the grief felt by the Parent who must let go of their Child. One of the main differences in the stories lies in the absence of the Elder archetype in Adolescence and also the fact that Jamie’s friends are not a good influence on him but a malign one. As a result, Jamie is led astray by society, while Parsifal successfully navigates the Orphan phase of life and graduates to adulthood at the end of the story.

Now, if we fast forward to Wagner’s rewrite of Parsifal, which premiered in 1882, we can see that composer made some major changes to the story. Crucially, however, Wagner’s Parsifal is still a coming-of-age story. Therefore, we can compare it to the medieval one and hypothesise that the changes that Wagner made mirrored changes in the wider culture.

It’s worthwhile remembering here that Wagner was incredibly popular in his day, and so the cultural influence of his stories is comparable to those of the medieval myths he adapted. There was even a Wagner society here in Australia that performed some of Wagner’s works during his lifetime, and Wagner considered moving to the USA later in life since he was very popular there too.

Anyway, Wagner’s version of the story begins with Gurnemanz at the seat of the grail. We know that Gurnemanz is still playing his role as the Elder because we see him giving instruction to a group of squires. Thus, when Parsifal stumbles into the scene, we expect Gurnemanz to take him under his wing and turn him into a grail knight. That begins to happen, but then Wagner quite explicitly overthrows the standard plot arc of the coming-of-age story.

In the original version of the story, Parsifal’s mother did not want him to become a knight. To try and trick the older knights into rejecting her son and not giving him initiation, she had dressed him like a fool. That doesn’t work in the story because Parsifal wins a duel, thereby showing the knights what he is capable of. As a result, Gurnemanz becomes his Elder.

Wagner takes the fool trope from the original story and makes it central to his version. Parsifal is not just dressed like a fool. He is a fool. Nietzsche would later refer to him as a “country bumpkin”, and that is quite accurate. In Wagner’s story, the fact that Parsifal is a fool is what interests Gurnemanz because the knights of the grail are in dire straits, and it is prophesied that a “pure fool” will redeem them. Gurnemanz originally thinks Parsifal could be that fool. But when he puts Parsifal to the test, he is proven wrong. Parsifal is not a pure fool; he’s just a garden-variety village idiot and Gurnemanz angrily sends him away.

Within the first act of Parsifal, Wagner upends almost all the main tropes of the coming-of-age story. The Elder is supposed to recognise the potential of the young Orphan. That is what Gurnemanz does in the original Parsifal. It is what Morpheus does with Neo in The Matrix. It is what Obi-Wan does with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Wagner’s Gurnemanz, however, does not recognise Parsifal as being the pure fool and sends him away. Therefore, Parsifal receives no initiation at all.

At this point, we might expect Parsifal to get into big trouble in the same way that Jamie does in Adolescence. Without a wise Elder to guide the way, the foolish Orphan can easily be led astray. Wagner raises that exact possibility by having Parsifal wander straight into the lair of the bad guy, Klingsor. Imagine Luke Skywalker having to confront Darth Vader at the start of Star Wars or Neo having to confront Agent Smith at the start of The Matrix. Would we expect the untrained young man to defeat his more experienced opponent, or would we expect him to get gobbled up by the bad guy? Obviously, the latter is going to happen.

Yet, Wagner also inverts this trope too. Parsifal will see through the illusions of Klingsor and defeat him. Klingsor represents the dangerous element in society that can destroy the young Orphan. Much like the Matrix is an illusion set up to deceive Neo, Klingsor is the master of deception. In that respect, he’s directly analogous to Agent Smith. Yet, somehow, Parsifal, the village idiot, is able to see through it all.

There are more elements to the story, but those are the main themes that we need to understand how Wagner inverted the coming-of-age story with his version of Parsifal. In Wagner’s world, the Elder is no longer required because the Orphan’s foolishness is exactly what he needs to see through the illusions of society. In fact, Wagner is stating that the Elders of the grail are themselves trapped in illusion and need to be redeemed by the young man (this is actually what happens at the end of the opera).

We might be tempted to put all this down to the strange genius of Wagner. Many commentators have thrown up their hands and suggested that Wagner’s rewrite of Parsifal is not even a real story but must be understood allegorically. That is definitely not the case. Wagner quite systematically inverts the coming-of-age story.

If this was an isolated event, we might not say that it had any relevance to wider cultural trends. However, incredibly, at almost the exact same time that Wagner was working on the libretto for Parsifal, another great writer was constructing a work that presents us with an almost identical inversion of the coming-of-age story.

Wagner had been toying with the Parsifal story for decades but only set out to write the final version in 1876. At exactly the same time, the ideas for what would eventually become The Brothers Karamazov were taking shape in Dostoevsky’s mind. He began working on the novel itself late in 1877. Another really strange coincidence here is that Dostoevsky would die just months after Karamazov was released, while Wagner also passed away just six months after the premiere of Parsifal. Both stories would be the last and perhaps greatest works of two artistic giants of the 19th century.

There is one more strange and tragic parallel. Dostoevsky’s young son died in early 1878. His name was Alyosha, and that became the name of the hero in Karamazov. At almost the exact same time, Nietzsche sent Wagner a copy of his latest work, Human, All Too Human. That work made official the break between the two men. The break was incredibly painful for Wagner, who genuinely thought of Nietzsche as a member of his family (Wagner had actually considered making Nietzsche his son’s legal guardian in the event of Wagner’s death). It seems almost certain that Wagner had intuited this break in 1876 when he was writing Parsifal.

(In fact, I believe Wagner wrote Parsifal with Nietzsche in mind, but that’s an argument that will need an entire book to make, a book that I am currently in the process of writing, working title The Initiation of Nietzsche).

What this means is that both Dostoevsky and Wagner were in the process of grieving over the loss of a son in one case and an adopted son in the other, just as the archetypal Parent must grieve when their Child becomes an Orphan. It’s impossible to believe that these events didn’t have an influence on Parsifal and Karamazov.

More broadly, both Wagner and Dostoevsky were horrified by the rise of modern rationalism, which they each correctly saw as little more than a cloak for psychopathic politics. Nietzsche’s eventual solution was to embrace that development. If you’re going to be a psychopath, you might as well do it properly. Wagner’s solution was Parsifal, the pure fool. But Dostoevsky had hit on almost the exact same idea at the exact same time.

In Karamazov, the pure fool is the lead character, Alyosha. Just like Parsifal is sent away from the corrupt knights of the grail by Gurnemanz, so too Alyosha is sent away from the corrupt priests of the church by his Elder, Zosima. In both cases, the Orphan character explicitly does not receive initiation. The broader point is that their purity and innocence of character are what will allow them to confront the evils of the world. Any training that an Elder can give is only ever going to be a distraction from that.

Now, it’s not entirely true to say that Zosima and Gurnemanz provide no guidance at all. What they both do for their young charges is to show them suffering in the world. Gurnemanz does that by inviting Parsifal to witness a ceremony involving the perpetually wounded Amfortas and his dying father. Zosima does it by having Alyosha accompany him on his missions to assist the common folk who are facing distress. What Parsifal and Alyosha must do is face that suffering without losing the qualities of the pure fool. In fact, their foolishness leaves them open to understanding that suffering directly because they do not know how to construct the psychic and emotional barriers that normally protect us from the suffering of others.

One of the main themes that runs through the work of both Wagner and Dostoevsky is that the rationalism of modern society is a form of corruption. Initiation into that overly rational, left-brained world can therefore only corrupt the Orphan too. The solution is a direct confrontation with reality in all its potential ugliness.

Quite by accident, the writers of Adolescence show something very similar, since Jamie’s “initiation” is at the hands of the modern justice system, which is very rational and well-organised with its professionals who are all efficient at their jobs. Jamie’s cry at the end of episode 3, “Do you actually care about me?” is all the more chilling for the fact that Adolescence portrays the rational ones as the good guys in the story. What is completely lacking on the part of those professionals is empathy for the young man.

Of course, it is no easy task to empathise with a murderer. Dostoevsky explored that theme in detail in Crime and Punishment, where the only person who knows how to empathise with Raskolnikov is Sonya, who is very similar to the character of Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal; a redeemed sinner.

By contrast, in Adolescence, there is nobody around to care about Jamie because there is nobody who knows how to empathise with him. As Wagner and Dostoevsky knew, we live in a society where this kind of empathy is almost completely lacking. That’s what an over-reliance on rationality gets you. As G. K. Chesterton so beautifully put it, “Objectivity is just a fancy word for indifference.” Jamie is cast into a world where nobody cares. They’re just doing their job.

Apparently, with the success of the show, the writers of Adolescence are thinking of making a second series. I don’t expect for a second that it will happen, but there is a potential plot arc to the story that would allow it to explore the themes that Wagner and Dostoevsky covered more than a century ago. It would be a redemption arc for Jamie involving him coming to terms with the murder he has committed.

For that redemption to occur, Jamie would need would be the empathy of a fellow sinner. Following in the footsteps of Wagner’s Kundry and Dostoevsky’s Sonya, it could be a young woman who has come to terms with her own sin. Since both Sonya and Kundry are redeemed enchantresses, the obvious character in the modern world would be a beautiful young OnlyFans model who has seen the error of her ways. Perhaps she would see Jamie’s story in the news and start visiting him in jail.

A redemption arc for an online porn star and an Andrew Tate follower. That would be a coming-of-age story worthy of a Wagner or a Dostoevsky.

The Archetypology of Adolescence Part 4

The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye believed that you could tell a lot about a culture from the types of stories it told itself. If I’m correct in saying that Adolescence has accidentally created a new type of story, then we might expect that story to be relevant to larger cultural trends in the modern West. There is ample reason to think that’s the case because the transition between the Child and Orphan phases of life, which the drama of Adolescence focuses on, has undergone a fairly radical change in our culture in the last hundred or so years, albeit one that has antecedents in the centuries leading up to the 20th.

To understand those changes, let’s begin with the most fundamental of all relationships, that between Parent and Child.

The primacy of this relationship is a universal of human culture. However, what we find in Western culture, and this goes all the way back to late medieval times, is an unusual emphasis on the Child-Parent pairing. The nuclear family paradigm, where the household consists of only parents and children, has become more and more predominant since around the 16th century, reaching its apotheosis in the post-war years. Prior to that, extended families were the norm.

Thus, the expectation that Parents should play a dominant role in the lives of their Child goes back to the late medieval era. Like with most philosophical ideas, however, it received its “official” form well after it was already a mostly unconscious belief of the culture. The “new” educational theories that made the Parent primarily responsible for the upbringing of their Child arrived in 18th century. The almost universal prevalence of the nuclear family paradigm that has taken hold in the post-war years in the West is a culmination of this trend.

The upshot of all this is the role of the Parent has had an outsized importance in Western culture for a very long time. We might hypothesise that this is due to the deprecation of the role which, in most cultures, becomes predominant after the Child archetypal phase of life has come to an end and the individual transitions into the Orphan (i.e. adolescence). Speaking in general terms, and noting that there are all kinds of cultural variations on the pattern, what we see in every culture is that the Child-Parent relationship gives way to the Orphan-Elder one. This occurs around the time that the Child reaches puberty. At this time, the Parents are supposed to step back from their dominant role and hand over to the Elder. We can diagram this as follows:-

Obviously, we always remain the children of our parents, even if we become estranged from them. What the diagram is intending to convey is that the Orphan-Elder relationship becomes dominant after puberty. Parents must step back and allow their children to become independent. Children must leave the safety of the family unit and join the institutions of wider society. The representatives of those institutions are the archetypal Elders. It is their job to initiate the Orphan into the institution and provide training and guidance with the intention of making them fully-fledged members.

It is worth pointing out that there has traditionally been a sharp distinction between the sexes on how the Orphan separation from the Parents plays out. Women have arguably had the more definitive break because the most common pattern historically has been for them to marry shortly after puberty and be inducted into the family of their husband. In times before modern communication technology, this may have entailed a complete break with the Parents if the young woman needed to leave the town or village of her birth.

In any case, the woman is inducted into the family of her husband and we say that the Elder who initiates her is the matriarch of the husband’s family, either a mother-in-law or grandmother-in-law. Since women’s place was the home, the initiation included learning how to manage and contribute to the household, which, in most cultures, is an important place of economic production (the word economy comes from the Greek oikos, which means “house”).

Now, it’s important to realise that the break with the parents that the young woman goes through is very abrupt. There is time to mentally and emotionally prepare for it since marriages are usually arranged well in advance, but once the ceremony is over, the bride is no longer a part of her parent’s household. That phase of life is now over.

This sharp break with the Child phase of life also characterises the traditional initiation for young men. In hunter-gatherer tribes, the boy is carried off by the men of the tribe for an initiation that lasts many months. We see the same pattern in warrior-based societies. For example, in ancient Crete, the boy was “abducted” while sleeping and taken off for military training. The physical hardships, scarring, tattooing, and other practices carried out during initiation also serve the purpose of demarcating the new phase of life i.e. the Orphan.

The symbolism of being snatched from a mother’s arms or kidnapped from the parents’ household is clear. Childhood is over. The dominance of the Child-Parent relationship is over. The boy or girl is no longer just a member of their family; they are a member of the wider society.

Western culture never seems to have had intense practices such as those just mentioned, and this is no doubt due to the civilising influence of Greece and Rome channeled through the Catholic Church. In particular, Rome’s emphasis on the family seems to have passed down through the Dark Ages and into the feudal system. As a result, both feudal initiation and induction into the Church were marked by relatively tame ceremonial means.

The increased emphasis on the Child-Parent pairing began with the breakdown of the feudal system and the rise of capitalism. This led to a shift away from extended families and towards nuclear ones, especially in the towns and cities where proto-capitalism was hitting its stride. Capitalism’s emphasis on personal effort and work was matched by the Protestant belief in the single individual before God. This led to a focus on personal responsibility that was expected to be inculcated by Parents.

Nevertheless, during this time, the church still functioned as the main institution that provided both a sense of community and also a set of formal initiation rites that were given to individuals to mark the various stages of life, including the transition from Child to Orphan. Although the economic sphere was liberalising, the church provided a sense of continuity with the older traditions.

That lasted up until the 19th century, when the state pretty much went to war against the church in most Western nations. The church had its educational, administrative, legal, and welfare activities removed. Marriage and divorce became state matters. Education was now dictated by the state bureaucracy rather than the church. The welfare state took over from church charity. In general, the church and state were separated, always at the church’s expense.

Whatever else we want to say about that, it severely reduced the importance of arguably the last recognisable Elder role in Western culture: the priest/bishop/pope. What also disappeared were the rites of the church which marked the different phases of life. As church attendance fell off a cliff in the post-war years, we find ourselves without any ceremonial markers of the phases of life or Elders to perform them. The state is run as a technocratic institution according to bureaucratic rules and we are granted our “rights” based on such criteria.

In short, the experts have replaced the Elders. The state replaced all the functions of the church and swapped the priest for the technocrat. The “initiation” that we now receive is into the institutions of the state. But just like an expert bears no real resemblance to the archetype of the Elder, bureaucratic rules bear no resemblance to anything that has traditionally been called initiation. The closest thing we get to a form of initiation in modern Western society is the military. We might hypothesise that the reason so many men eagerly signed up to serve Napoleon or in the world wars was because the army offered a “real” initiation in a society where it had otherwise disappeared.

With that brief overview of the historical and cultural background, we can now return to the Netflix series Adolescence and better understand the way in which it portrays the “initiation” of the 13-year-old Jamie. Jamie is on the threshold between childhood and adolescence. He’s exactly the age at which, in tribal or warrior-based societies, he might be plucked from his bed and carried off for initiation. But that’s exactly how Adolescence begins! At the start of the first episode, Jamie and his family are asleep in bed when the police break down the door. Since the police are heavily armed, they even look like warriors come to haul the young boy off.

Of course, Adolescence is not presenting this as a normal initiation for a young man in modern Western culture. On the contrary, all of this is pathological. Jamie is going to receive the initiation of a criminal. The underlying belief of modern Western culture is that adolescence should proceed “naturally”, an idea that goes back to Rousseau and the Romantics. Jamie is going to be denied a “natural” adolescence.

Thus, Adolescence presents a strange combination of archetypal tropes alongside modern realism. Jamie is going to receive a kind of initiation, not at the hands of tribal Elders, but the technocrats who run the modern state apparatus. These technocrats include the teachers at the school that Jamie attends, the police, and, most importantly, the psychologist in episode 3. These are all professionals belonging to the class of experts who run the modern state which disintermediated the church about a hundred and fifty years ago. They are the modern equivalent of the Elder archetype, and it is therefore fitting that Eddie must yield his parental authority to them because his son has come of age.

In symbolic terms, Adolescence provides us with a classic Orphan initiation. This is actually very common in modern storytelling. Curiously, even though modern Western society has all but gotten rid of formal initiation practices, whenever we represent those practices in story form, everybody automatically understands them. When Luke Skywalker is initiated by Obi-Wan in Star Wars, it’s perfectly understandable that his parents and aunt and uncle are dead and that he can trust his Elder. When Neo takes the red pill in order to receive initiation from Morpheus, we don’t bat an eyelid at the fact that he is leaving his old world behind forever. Somewhere deep down in our unconscious mind, we understand that this is the way a “real” initiation must be done.

That is also what is happening to Jamie in Adolescence. By the end of episode 4, he has been away from his family for more than a year and there is no prospect of him returning. We might say that he is in the middle of his initiation. We see that most clearly in episode 3. The psychologist is going to teach Jamie a lesson of sorts by getting him to confess to his crime.

The use of the psychologist trope is perfectly consonant with the modern technocracy that arose in the last 150 years. But like most of the sciences, psychoanalysis was not originally an extension of state power. It began as a small, private group of enthusiasts in Vienna led, of course, by Freud. It is no coincidence that Freud and Jung had been trained in medicine. What they realised was that their patients had nothing physically wrong with them. That led to the search for psychological explanations.

I don’t know if it ever occurred to Freud and Jung how similar psychoanalytic practice was to the sacrament of confession that the Catholic Church had been conducting for millennia. Freud even stayed out of sight of the patient to encourage free expression, just as the confessional booth gives the confessor the feeling of anonymity. The Christian priest was a trusted Elder who could be relied upon to provide a listening ear and wise counsel. By the start of the 20th century, however, the elites of Europe could no longer take the priest seriously. But they could take a psychoanalyst seriously because he was a “scientist”. Freud and Jung inadvertently became Elders of the new religion of science.

Much like all the other sciences, psychoanalysis inevitably got sucked up into the vast technocratic apparatus that runs the modern state. Indeed, it seems that governments these days are almost as eager to pump money into “mental health” as they are into the health system more broadly. Psychology is now the domain of the expert, not the enthusiast. Thus, the psychologist in episode 3 of Adolescence does not represent herself as a private citizen offering a service, as did Freud and Jung, but as an employee of the state doing her job of greasing the wheels of justice. Her extraction of a confession from Jamie is done with that end in mind, and it is here that the contrast between the new and the old Elders of Western culture becomes most stark.

The Catholic priest has always been bound to keep the contents of the confessional booth a secret. Even if the confessor claims to have committed murder, the priest must not disclose this information to anybody else. This is called the Seal of Confession. Violating the seal is a serious offence usually resulting in excommunication. In this, we get a glimpse of the true nature of the Elder role, at least as it was intended to be practised in the Catholic tradition. It is primarily a personal relationship which places the conscience of the individual above the interests of the state. It’s no surprise that this should be the case. After all, the story of Jesus’ crucifixion is the story of personal sacrifice predominating over an unjust application of state power.

This contrast is why the final scene of episode 3 is genuinely dreadful. Jamie realises he’s been played by the psychologist. He asks her whether she actually likes him as a person. She answers by explaining that she is a professional. However imperfectly it might have been executed, what the Christian priest offered was the kind of care that Jamie is talking about. More broadly, that is what the Elder always offers the Orphan. Proper initiation is something more than a transaction or a bureaucratic rule. That is why the professional, the technocrat, and the expert can never be a true Elder.

Thus, modern Western culture no longer offers real initiation or real Elders. The family remains as the only institution that offers unconditional acceptance, at least in theory. In practice, one of the more important roles that the church used to play was as a kind of backup in the case of family breakdown, an institution that offered unconditional acceptance to those who could find it nowhere else. We got rid of that and now we have only the state. Although the state theoretically guarantees certain rights, those rights have a habit of disappearing when they are needed most. We saw that in the last few years.

And this is where Adolescence achieves a meta meaning that I believe the creators of the show did not intend. It is actually an accurate representation of the unconscious anxiety that accompanies the transition from Child to Orphan in modern Western culture. Eddie is going to lose his son. That’s what every Parent must do when their Child is an Orphan ready for initiation. But in the modern West, what that means is that he must hand Jamie over to the technocrats of the state – the teachers, the police, and the psychologist. However much the state tries to reassure us that it is full of compassion and will keep us “safe”, we know it’s not really true. The 20th century showed us what the state is capable of. A bureaucracy is just a machine. Eddie is the Parent who must sit back and watch his son disappear into that machine.

The Archetypology of Adolescence Part 3

In this post, we’ll finally get into the main reasons why the Netflix series Adolescence caught my attention and, I think, the real reason for its popularity. On the surface, the story is ludicrous. We’re expected to believe that a 13-year-old boy, who looks as if he hasn’t even hit puberty yet, is so sexually frustrated that he’s prepared to commit murder. To tell such a story, the writers would need to provide us with an intricate character study of the perpetrator, the victim, and the milieu in which they exist. Adolescence does none of that. Instead, it gives us the most generic of settings: everyday life in Britain. Its message appears to be that this is the kind of thing that could happen anytime. That is obviously not true. It’s a simple matter of statistics that murders like these are vanishingly rare among 13-year-olds and are almost always the result of severe psychosis in the perpetrator.

Some critics have taken these observations and concluded that Adolescence is nothing more than the usual anti-male propaganda that is so common these days. But that wouldn’t explain the popularity of the show, which really does seem to have struck a chord with audiences. Propaganda never garners enthusiasm from the general public, as numerous American film studios have found out to their detriment in the last decade. Adolescence must have something going for it to have generated what looks like genuine enthusiasm.

Adolescence looks like propaganda if we assume that the 13-year-old boy, Jamie, is the hero of the story. If that’s true, then the story is in line with propaganda’s usual tactic of presenting a ludicrous premise and expecting everybody to clap along with it. But everything changes once we realise that Jamie is not the hero of the story. Then we get a very different reading. In my initial analysis, I had realised that Jamie was not the hero, but I made the mistake of concluding that there wasn’t a hero at all. That’s not true. Adolescence does have a hero and the key to understanding its meaning opens up once we identify him. That’s the reading that I stumbled upon just a few days ago. I realised that the hero of the story is really Jamie’s father, Eddie.

The brilliant innovation that Adolescence makes is to approach the subject of adolescence not from the point of view of the young boy going through it but from the point of view of his father. That is why the show has resonated with so many people because, as far as I can tell, this story might never have been told before, at least not in the quasi-tragic way that Adolescence achieves. What is especially interesting is that neither the audience nor the makers of the show know what they have done. Everything about the story, the production style, the marketing, and the subsequent public discourse assumes that the young boy is the main character. The filmmakers seem to have accidentally created what might be a genuinely novel story type and it’s that which is resonating with audiences.

To understand this, we need to analyse Adolescence using the archetypology framework. We start with four archetypes that cover the natural human life span: the Child, Orphan, Adult, and Elder. We then analyse these according to three broad domains of identity: the biological, socio-cultural, and higher esoteric. We can map all this in table form as follows:-

	Child	Orphan	Adult	Elder
Higher Esoteric	Instinct	Ego	Will	Soul
Socio-cultural	Family	Apprentice	Parent/Journeyman	Grandparent/Teacher/Master
Biological	Childhood	Adolescence	Maturity	Senescence

A crucial concept to grasp is that there is a metamorphosis that transitions us between the archetypes. This metamorphosis is a process that lasts over a period of years and which resonates across all three domains of character. Since we are talking about the TV series named after the period of adolescence, we are concerned with the metamorphosis between the Child and Orphan archetypes. This is easy to understand at the biological level of being because everybody knows that puberty is a transformation that lasts a number of years. Puberty is the biological metamorphosis that signals the end of the Child archetype and the beginning of the Orphan.

There also metamorphoses at the socio-cultural and higher esoteric domains. If we begin with the latter, adolescence is the age at which the psychoanalysts claim that the birth of the ego occurs. Every culture recognises this change. It is the time when we are considered old enough to understand the world intellectually and morally, to tell the difference between truth and reality, right and wrong. Therefore, it is the time when a person can be held legally, morally, and spiritually responsible for their actions.

But we do not simply wake up one day with full consciousness of truth, beauty, and justice. It is a learning process we must go through. That is directly relevant to the story of Adolescence because we have a young man who has committed a murder and the assumption is that he is capable of taking responsibility for it. Jamie’s character arc of denying and then admitting guilt is a process that takes more than one year. It is the process of taking responsibility.

Related to these psychological developments is the socio-cultural metamorphosis that accompanies adolescence. It seems to be also a universal of human culture that children are left to the care of their parents during the first years of life. Because of this, we can say that the Child’s psychological and social development occurs almost entirely within the family unit. There are cultures where this is less true, e.g., hunter-gatherer tribes, but even then we can say that the Parent-Child relationship is the primary one from the Child’s point of view.

Because children are not seen to be personally responsible, it is their parents who hold responsibility for their physical, social, and psychological well-being. That changes at puberty, where the individual is expected to take up a role in broader society. Abstract ideas about legal and moral responsibility are given form by the fact that the individual is now a contributing member of the wider group. Their actions now have consequences.

Putting all this together, we say that the Child-Parent relationship dominates during the Child phase of life. The Child is not considered an independent and responsible person but is a ward of its parents. That is what changes during the metamorphosis into the Orphan phase of life with the biological metamorphosis of puberty, the psychological metamorphosis of the birth of the ego, and the socio-cultural metamorphosis of initiation into the institutions of society.

The name of the Orphan archetype represents the fact that adolescence is the time when the dominance of the Parent comes to an end. Of course, the Parent does not die in a literal sense, but in a symbolic sense they do. Furthermore, it seems to be a universal of human culture that adolescence deprecates the status of the Parent. We find this in the rites of passage that accompany the metamorphosis into adolescence and especially in stories that are told about that metamorphosis. It is this dynamic that is crucial to understand the Netflix show Adolescence because the real underlying drama in that show revolves around the Child-Parent dynamic between Jamie and Eddie. Jamie is now an adolescent, yet Eddie is still somewhat responsible for him. Eddie’s mission is to let go of that responsibility and Jamie’s mission is to take it.

To say it again, adolescence implies the deprecation of the Child-Parent relationship. In many cultures, this dynamic is made overt and the Parent’s role is expressly downgraded. To take two completely unrelated examples, in Australian Aboriginal culture, the young boy is literally taken from the arms of his mother and carried off by the men of the tribe for initiation. As a boy, he has spent most of his time with the women. But when he returns from initiation, that is no longer acceptable. His relationship with his parents has also now changed for good, and it is usually the maternal uncle who will become his mentor until he reaches adulthood.

This explicit change in the role of the Parent appears to be a common feature of tribal initiation. It is one a series of explicit role changes that include taboos and other overt regulation of behaviour. Freud speculated that these explicit changes to the Child-Parent relationships in tribal society were there as a protective measure against incest once the child has become sexually mature. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but the broader meaning is consonant with the Orphan archetype’s need for independence from the Parent.

To take another example of an overt deprecation of the Parent role, the Catholic rite that marks the onset of the Orphan phase of life is Confirmation. The initiate is “given away” by the godparents at this ceremony while personally re-affirming the baptism vows that the godparents had once done on their behalf. The symbolism is that the godparents’ active role is now over. Accordingly, the Orphan is now paired with an older member from the congregation who will become their mentor. We can see that this follows the same pattern as Aboriginal society i.e. deprecation of the Parent role in favour of a mentor (Elder).

The specific dynamic that occurs at the beginning of adolescence is that the Child-Parent relationship is reduced in importance. The Child becomes an Orphan and is paired up with mentors (Orphan-Elder relationship) whose role it is to initiate them into the institutions of society. In the modern West, the Elder role is filled by teachers, sports coaches, religious Elders, psychologists, counsellors, etc. At the same time that the Parent must step back from their dominance over the Child, the Elder steps forward to become the mentor for the Orphan.

Just as we find this dynamic everywhere in the anthropological literature, we find it in stories from around the world. The coming-of-age story is one of the most common and is a universal of human culture. It is the story about the transition into the Orphan archetype and it almost always features an Elder who takes the Orphan hero under their wing and provides initiation. Famous examples of Orphan initiation from the modern West include Luke Skywalker, whose Elders are Obi-Wan and Yoda. Neo’s Elder is Morpheus in The Matrix. Jake is initiated into the Na’vi tribe in Avatar. Paul receives initiation from the Reverend Mother in Dune.

Just as these stories always feature an Elder who will guide the Orphan through initiation, they also represent the deprecation of the Child-Parent relationship. This is most commonly done by representing the hero of the story as a literal orphan, whose parents are either dead or missing in action. There are countless examples of this. Luke Skywalker’s parents are dead in the first Star Wars movie. Harry Potter’s parents are dead. Hamlet’s father is dead. Batman’s parents are dead. Cinderella, Snow White, Oliver Twist, Spiderman, Superman, Jane Eyre – the list could go on and on.

The symbolic meaning of the dead-parent trope is to force the hero to undertake the Orphan’s mission of forging their own identity. The Orphan must leave the safety and security of the family home and step into the wider world. Since that is not an easy thing to do, there is always the temptation to avoid the difficulty. But if the parents die, the hero has no choice but to take up the challenge. More generally, the death of the parent symbolises the psychological and the socio-cultural reality of the Orphan phase of life. It’s the time when we must separate from our parents emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.

If the mission of the Orphan is to forge an identity separate from their parents, what happens when the parents are not literally dead? What if they are not only still around but also still want to control the Orphan as if it were still a Child? In the “happy path” stories, the hero’s parents are already dead, and the hero is free to forge their own identity with the help of the Elder. The second most common variation on the story is that the parents are still around, and they work to impede the Orphan’s mission by continuing to impose their parental will. In this latter case, the Parents become the bad guys by default because they are subverting the mission of the hero. We find this dynamic of the smothering Parent in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Dead Poets Society, Finding Nemo and many others.

The reason why the coming-of-age story is a universal of human culture is because we all must go through the transition from Child to Orphan. Since that transition requires the deprecation of the Parent role, the two main variations on the story are that the Parent is dead or the Parent is still around to cause trouble by refusing to step back from their dominant role in the life of their Child. This makes perfect sense according to the archetypal logic at play.

Because the hero of the coming-of-age story is the Orphan, the story is told from their point of view and the Parent’s attitude is only ever shown tangentially. We may get some insight into why the Parent does not want to let go, but this is never dealt with in depth because the hero of the story is the Orphan and we are concerned with their perspective. Therefore, the Orphan story tends to gloss over the genuine difficulties that Parents face in letting go of their children. These difficulties are not just due to selfishness or narcissism. It is a genuinely ambiguous question of when the Child is ready for independence.

Cultures where the Parent role is explicitly deprecated by initiation do not have such problems, because the Parent’s decision is made for them. But this does not happen in societies such as ours. Therefore, a long ambiguous period is created that both Parent and Orphan must navigate through.

This leads to an interesting insight that I had never thought about before. I can’t think of a single story which explores these issues from the Parents’ point of view. It seems that the difficulties faced by the Parent are only ever addressed as a secondary theme in the coming-of-age story. Thus, in the movie Finding Nemo, the B-story is about the father learning to allow Nemo his independence and struggling as he watches Nemo get himself into trouble as a result. The theme is also present at the end of Romeo and Juliet, where the parents of the star-crossed lovers must lament that their children’s struggle for independence has ended in death. But in these stories, the Parent is not the hero.

And this brings us all the way back to Adolescence because what I realised just a few days ago is that this is exactly what that story is really about. It is telling the story of adolescence not from the point of view of the Orphan but from the point of view of the Parents. The hero of the story is not the 13-year-old boy, Jamie, but his father, Eddie. Adolescence is specifically about the difficulty faced by the Parent who has to let go of their Child and allow them to become an Orphan. By incorporating the theme of murder, Adolescence amplifies the dynamic to Shakespearean proportions.

Because Adolescence is a modern story shot in the ultra-realistic style of a documentary, everybody interprets its meaning in a literal sense, and we therefore assume the story really is about the murder with Jamie as the central character. This reading is reinforced by the fact that the show is called “Adolescence” and that all of the public relations around the show have focused on the issue of murder. But once we understand that Eddie is the real hero of the story, our interpretation completely changes. What the Parent must do when their Child becomes an Orphan is to let them go, to allow them space and freedom. But that freedom comes with consequences. Are those consequences the responsibility of the Parent or the Orphan?

Adolescence amplifies that normal, everyday dynamic by making the consequences faced by Jamie and Eddie the most difficult imaginable. What has Jamie done with his newfound freedom? He’s killed somebody. If Jamie was the hero of the story, we would expect the focus to be on his process of taking responsibility or being brought down by the consequences of his actions, as is the case in Romeo and Juliet. But the real hero of Adolescence is Eddie. Thus, the main question explored is to what extent a father is responsible for the actions of his son. The fact that his son is only 13-years-old amplifies the problem because he is right on the borderline where we would start to assign guilt to him instead of his father.

Thus, I’m happy to admit that I got my initial analysis of Adolescence wrong. I was correct in saying that Jamie is not the hero, but incorrect in saying that there was no hero. Adolescence is a hero’s journey with Eddie as hero. We can therefore ask the question of the story, “What is the hero sacrificing, and what do they think they are getting in return?”

The sacrifice Eddie must make is his dominant role in the life of his son. That is the sacrifice that every Parent must make when their Child becomes an Orphan. What do Parents think they are getting in return for this sacrifice? Well, most Parents hope that they have raised their Child well and that their upbringing will allow the Child to flourish. Parents hope to sit back and watch that flourishing take place. That is the dream that is smashed when Eddie gets his door kicked down by police at the beginning of Adolescence (note, it’s also literally the beginning of adolescence for Jamie!). Eddie must confront the fact that his hopes for his son are gone (sacrificed).

Adolescence provides an extreme example of the same dynamic that every Parent must go through. To allow a child their independence is to allow them to do things that the Parent doesn’t approve of. They might form opinions that do not agree with the Parent’s. They might start listening to bad music or following Andrew Tate on Snapchat. The Parent can no longer demand that their child not explore such options. To do so is to become the Tyrannical Father or Devouring Mother, who subverts the mission of the archetypal Orphan.

Just as the death of the Parent in the Orphan Story is a symbol of the fact that the Orphan must forge their own identity in the world independent of the family, the criminality of Jamie in Adolescence is a symbol of the fact that when children grow up, they are potentially going to get into all kinds of trouble while taking on views and actions that their Parent will not approve of. When we examine that dynamic from the Parent’s point of view, we can see the difficulties that emerge. How must a Parent feel when their child takes on the exact opposite viewpoints on social issues? How does a Parent feel when their child behaves in a manner that they consider inappropriate? Anger, embarrassment, and shame are natural responses in such cases. This dynamic is turned up to 11 when the child becomes a murderer.

That is what provides the emotional and moral ground of Adolescence. It’s the anguish of the father who is both responsible and not responsible at the same time. It is fitting that Eddie must be present during the initial interrogation of Jamie since he is still considered the legal guardian. That also implies that he is still the moral guardian too, even though it is clear that Jamie’s actions were independent of his father. It is not clear who is responsible. Eddie must figure it out according to his own conscience. But he must also face the social repercussions for the actions of his son.

What Adolescence also captures is the fact that the sacrifice of the Child-Parent relationship is borne by the Parent. It is their sacrifice to make because the child very rarely sees their newfound independence as a problem. Orphans are not exactly known for being understanding of the opinion of their Parents. From the Orphan’s point of view, they are not sacrificing the Parent relationship but escaping from the domination of the Parent. From the Parent’s point of view, they really are losing their Child. Thus, the emotional resonance of Adolescence is exactly correct.

In summary, Adolescence is a hero’s journey about the Parent as hero in a story about the difficulties of letting their Child become an Orphan. I’m not the only one who missed that fact. Incredibly, it seems that even the writers of the show also don’t understand what they have made. I saw an interview with the writer and main actor, Stephen Graham. When asked why he thought the show was so popular, he said he didn’t know but speculated it had something to do with an exploration of the societal influence on young men.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both the writers of the show are middle-aged men who are married with children. I suspect they have unintentionally written about themselves. Quite by accident, they managed to write what might be a genuinely new kind of story. That would explain its popularity.