Category: Archetypology

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 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.

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.

I did say that in the next post in this series we would be looking at the broader meanings around the phase of life called adolescence (aka the Orphan archetype in archetypology). However, it occurred to me that I wasn’t clear enough in the last post about the reason why the Netflix TV series Adolescence represents an inversion of the literary tradition of Western culture. That literary tradition also has strong connections to the Christian theology. Thus, it’s not a surprise to find that both the literary tradition and the theological tradition came under attack in the 19th century as the state set out to disintermediate the church. That process was completed during the two world wars. As part of it, the state finally achieved independence from the church in the creation of propaganda.

While entertainment and literature were still part of the private sector/market, the propaganda of the state was largely confined to overtly political matters. But the line between propaganda and the “arts” has become well and truly blurred in recent decades with ideology and propaganda increasingly being inserted into nominally free market works. The TV series Adolescence belongs to a relatively new trend that’s been picking up steam in the last decade for nominally artistic works to be nothing more than vehicles for ideology. The result is “literature” and “art” that no longer resembles the Western canon. In fact, it is the inversion of that canon. In order to understand this, we first need to be clear about what the Western literary tradition is.

The seminal text on understanding the underlying structure of stories, and therefore the basis of literature, is still Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Campbell gave the structure of stories the name of the hero’s journey. Every story can be thought of as a cycle where the hero returns to the same state in which they started. Campbell was inspired by the work of Carl Jung, and so he used the Jungian categories of consciousness and unconsciousness to describe that state change. A story begins with the hero living in their normal, everyday life where they are fully conscious of what is going on. They must then go on a journey that requires them to leave a world they understand and step into one they don’t; hence, a journey into the unconscious.

This is a perfectly valid way to look at it, but there’s a higher-level concept that better captures the meaning of the hero’s journey. Stories are about sacrifice. The reason why we care about the hero is because they are laying something on the line, something that is important to them. Our empathy with the hero rests on this fact.

However, neither the hero nor the audience can know the true meaning of the sacrifice in advance. Thus, the hero’s journey is also a journey of understanding. Every story involves the hero agreeing to a sacrifice they do not fully understand and then learning what it means as they live through the consequences.

We can diagram this as follows:-

It follows from these considerations that the first and most important question to ask about any story is, “What is the hero sacrificing, and what do they think they are getting in return?” For example, in the movie The Matrix, the character of Neo must leave the matrix. Clearly, it’s not going to be an easy journey to leave the only world he has ever known and step into one he is barely aware of. The sacrifice in this case is potentially his own sanity and maybe even his life. He is willing to make that sacrifice in order to learn the truth about reality. But he can’t fully understand what that means until he has actually taken the journey. Again, that is why we say that the hero can only be partly conscious of the nature of the sacrifice they are making. Full consciousness only comes at the end of the story.

It’s important to understand that this dynamic is not just about fiction; it is very much a part of what it is to be human. Our lives are full of stories, which is another way to say that our lives are full of sacrifices. Let’s say you have a job you are more or less happy with, and then you get offered another job. Maybe the other job seems more interesting. Maybe it pays more. But there’s still an element of risk involved in accepting the other job, because you can’t really know whether you’ll like it till you try. Furthermore, the only way to find out is to sacrifice your existing job.

Thus, the acceptance of a new job is a hero’s journey. You are the hero of the story and if we ask the question of you, “What are you sacrificing, and what do you think you are getting in return?”, the answer will be that you are sacrificing your existing job, and you are hoping to get a more interesting or better-paying job. The story of your transition into the new job begins with the sacrifice of your existing job and ends when the ramifications of the change are fully worked out and you understand them, i.e., when you fully understand the nature of the sacrifice you made.

What often happens in such cases is that you learn there were things about your old job that you really liked but you weren’t fully conscious of. To quote a Phil Collins lyric, “You don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it.” Put into our terminology, you don’t know what you’ve got until you sacrifice it. This is why the hero’s journey has a lot in common with the grieving process where you have to come to terms with the sacrifice and the fact that it’s gone forever.

In summary, to understand the meaning of any story, we must know what the sacrifice is and why the hero is making it. This is true of an everyday story like getting a new job. It is also true of the greatest stories ever told.

Probably still the most important story in Western culture is the story of Jesus. In this case, the answer to our question, “What is the hero sacrificing, and what do they think they are getting in return?”, has millennia of theological argument behind it. Jesus sacrifices himself, and what he gets in return is the redemption of humanity. We already know the answer, but let’s walk through an analysis of the crucifixion part of the story because it contains some crucial facts that have shaped the tradition of Western literature and theology.

Even if we take a purely secular reading and forget that Jesus is supposed to be the son of God, the crucifixion story still makes clear that Jesus is sacrificing himself. Jesus had gone round making many enemies among the Jewish religious authorities of the time. He had also developed a close relationship with his disciples. If we assume Jesus was a good read of character, it is perfectly possible that he intuited that Judas would betray him to his enemies and that Peter would renounce him afterwards. Even though he knew these things, Jesus did nothing to stop events from proceeding. In that way, he made a decision to sacrifice himself and that forms of the basis of the crucifixion story.

Note also that this is a perfect hero’s journey pattern. Jesus may know what’s going to happen, but we as the readers do not. From our point of view, he is stepping into the unknown. What happens after his arrest is uncertain (even though Jesus has already said he’s going to die).

As most people would know, what actually happens is that the Jewish religious authorities hand Jesus over to Pontius Pilate and demand that he be executed. The crucifixion story, therefore, sets up a dichotomy between the personal sacrifice that Jesus makes and the fact that he is subsequently offered up as a sacrifice by the Jewish authorities.

Here we must note a crucial point about how justice works. The convicted criminal is themselves a sacrifice in the name of the law. In most societies throughout history, the “law” is religious law. Therefore, the criminal is a sacrifice to the gods. But even in a secular reading, the punishment meted out to the criminal is “holy” to the extent that it extinguishes the crime and returns everything to equilibrium. We can see that this process is identical to the hero’s journey and that is why stories involving a crime (or a moral transgression) appear in almost all great literature.

In the case of Jesus, the crime he had committed under Jewish religious law was to proclaim himself the son of God. The priests insist that he be punished (sacrificed) to restore the holy order. That is fair enough. However, the story takes a dramatic twist when the priests hand Jesus over to the Romans to try and have him found guilty under Roman law. They do this because they want Jesus executed, and Roman law forbids execution except by Roman authorities. That is why Jesus is hauled in front of Pontius Pilate with the mob screeching for him to be crucified.

The problem is that Jesus has not committed any offense under Roman law. That’s what Pilate tells the mob. After a few attempts to avoid a wrongful conviction, Pilate literally washes his hands of the affair and sends Jesus off to be crucified.

What that means is the punishment (sacrifice) of Jesus was invalid within the terms of both Jewish and Roman traditions. Jesus was sentenced to Roman punishment even though he had committed no crime in Roman law. Moreover, we can see that both the Jewish priests and the mob were not really concerned with justice but with vengeance. Therefore, they tarnished their own beliefs and their god with a murder.

All of this serves to amplify the dichotomy that the crucifixion story sets up between personal and collective sacrifice. The crucifixion story, perhaps more than any other story at that time or since, makes crystal clear the difference between the personal sacrifice of the hero (Jesus) and the invalid sacrifice to abstract notions of the sacred committed by both the Roman and the Jewish authorities.

This theme of personal sacrifice rightly became a core component of Christian theology and then Western culture more generally. Jesus’ conscious sacrifice of his own life is a symbol that all our lives are sacrifices. Since we all make sacrifices anyway, the only question is whether we do it, like Jesus does, in full consciousness of what we are doing. The crucifixion story is about consciously becoming your own sacrifice and taking full responsibility for it. That’s why it is arguably the ultimate hero’s journey.

The juxtaposition of Jesus against both the mob and the Jewish and Roman authorities also reinforces this meaning. The Jewish priests and the mob do not want to take the responsibility of trying Jesus under Jewish law. They try to fob him off on Pilate. Pilate doesn’t want to take the responsibility either, and he washes his hands of the case. The result is that nobody takes responsibility. The whole thing is a sham. The broader question raised by the crucifixion story is whether any mob or any system of authority can ever really take responsibility or whether in fact such systems are always about avoiding responsibility. If that’s true, then the sacrifice of the individual is always invalid.

In any case, there is only person in the crucifixion story who really takes responsibility, and that is Jesus. The dichotomy is between the lone individual who sacrifices themselves in full consciousness of what they are doing and the baying mob and the authorities who sacrifice other human beings for base motives of which they themselves are not even conscious.

It is sometimes said that all of Western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato. We might make the same claim for Western literature as being footnotes to the crucifixion story. All of the great stories in the Western canon follow the pattern of foregrounding the individual and the sacrifice that they make over and above the societal and collective perspectives. In other words, they’re all hero’s journeys. For that reason, we can begin to understand any classic story in the Western canon by asking the question, “What is the hero sacrificing, and what do they think they are getting in return?”

In relation to stories involving murder (of which Adolescence is theoretically an example), the murder victim is usually the sacrifice. For example, Macbeth is going to sacrifice the life of Duncan. What does he get in return? Well, he gets to become king. Unlike Jesus, however, Macbeth is not fully conscious of what he is doing, and that’s how it is with any hero’s journey where the hero is not God. Thus, the story of Macbeth is largely the story of the competing drives and desires swirling around in Macbeth’s mind, including his revulsion at the idea of murder. Macbeth is only partially conscious of the sacrifice he is making at the start of the story, and it is not until the end that the full horror of what he has done becomes clear to him.

The same applies to the story of Othello, although there is an interesting twist here because Othello is actually the sacrifice and Iago is the protagonist (Shakespeare pulls the same trick in Julius Caesar, where Caesar is the sacrifice and Brutus the hero). In Iago’s case, the sacrifice of Othello is not even made to attain some ulterior goal but simply out of pure resentment at the fact that Othello had overlooked him for promotion. Iago does not challenge his master directly but manipulates others to do his dirty work for him. Eventually, it all spirals out of control, and the final sacrifice includes Desdemona, as well as Iago and his wife.

To take just one more example, the sacrifice that motivates Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is the murder of the pawnbroker by Raskolnikov. What distinguishes this story is the sophistication of rational argumentation that Raskolnikov employs. As an ex-uni student, he takes a highly intellectual approach to the justification for murder. (Modern uni students still do. See the recent murder of the health insurance CEO in the USA as an example). Dostoevsky’s point is that you can rationalise a murder all you like, but facing its consequences is a completely different matter.

But the Raskolnikov example is valuable for a second reason, because he begins the story by playing the role of the authorities in the story of Jesus. That is, for him, the sacrifice is a purely intellectual exercise in weighing up abstract arguments. The priests in the crucifixion story also had abstract, rational grounds for wanting Jesus punished, i.e., the fact that he had blasphemed. However, they had no grounds for having him killed. Their reason and logic may have been sound, but they had to deceive themselves about their true motives in order to push for crucifixion. That’s how it is for Raskolnikov, too. He has all kinds of ingenious arguments for why he should kill the pawnbroker, but none that actually justify the murder.

This raises another common thread in all the stories we have looked at: the victim is never fully innocent. Therefore, an argument can always be made that they did somehow deserve what they got.

In Othello, Desdemona has kept her marriage to the general secret from her father. This betrayal of familial confidence is what allows Iago to stir up trouble in the first place and sets in train the events which lead to Desdemona’s death. In Macbeth, Duncan seems like a wise and noble king. Yet, he is clearly a bad judge of character who has not seen the unchecked ambition that lies in Macbeth’s heart. Duncan’s lack of judgement and lax security measures bring about his downfall. Meanwhile, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s victim is a pawnbroker, a person who profits from the misfortune of others. They are a sinner by default.

Even in the Bible, Jesus is at fault because he really has broken the religious laws of his people. What’s more, he is at fault in a larger sense since he is a god who has manifested in human form. This goes against the entire theological beliefs of the ancients, who saw material manifestation as inherently corrupt. The whole point of being a god was that you didn’t sully yourself in such a way.

Once again, the difference is that Jesus was acting in full consciousness and therefore he fully intends what he does. That’s why we can say that Christianity really did have the effect of redeeming human life in the eyes of the ancients. But that redemption could only come at the end of the story, hence we say, again, that the crucifixion follows the hero’s journey pattern, since the full meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice only becomes clear at the end.

With this rapid overview, we can see some of the main themes that have formed the literary and theological tradition of Western culture, which actually begins before the story of Christ, since we can find some of the same ideas in Greek tragedy. The focus has always been on the hero’s journey, which means the sacrifice made by an individual who must then live through the consequences. The Western tradition has always foregrounded this individual perspective, and this is certainly the main reason why Western culture has always had a far more individualistic disposition compared to other cultures.

The broader point of this tradition is that society can only ever view a murder or a moral transgression from the objective point of view. When the justice system sacrifices the criminal to its abstract notions of the sacred, it must always do so objectively. The law can uphold abstract principles only. More generally, society can only ever sacrifice to such abstractions, whether those be religious and theological (God) or ideological (justice). Society can never take the subjective view in the way that the hero’s journey does. Therefore, full responsibility can only ever attain in the individual.

That is the theological and literary tradition of Western society. All through the medieval period and up until the 19th century, there was a finely tuned balance in Western society with the church as the custodian of the subjective, hero’s journey perspective and the kings of Europe as the custodians of the societal, collective perspective. While the kings were officially servants to the theological tradition, we can say that they implicitly upheld the individualist tenets of the culture.

But all that began to change in the 19th century as the power of the state grew. The state duly used that power to disintermediate the church altogether, and the collectivist mentality took over the culture. That collectivist mentality took different forms, socialism and fascism being the two most notable, but ultimately what was pushed to the side was the traditional foregrounding of individual responsibility as exemplified by the hero’s journey.

And that brings us back to the Netflix series Adolescence, which takes a collectivist approach to what has traditionally been a core subject of theology and literature i.e. murder and moral transgression. After our discussion above, it should not be a surprise to find that Adolescence does this by foregoing the hero’s journey pattern altogether. It is not a story that takes the individual perspective.

If Adolescence was a hero’s journey, it would feature the 13-year-old boy, Jamie, as the protagonist. The story would revolve around the question, “What is the hero sacrificing, and what do they think they are getting in return?” In the same way that Macbeth, Iago, and Raskolnikov have motives for their murders, we would want to know Jamie’s motives. What does he think he’s getting out of it? Is he just out for revenge like Iago? Is he, like Raskolnikov, the over-intellectual incel loner who lashes out through unconscious resentment and shame? Those would be the foundational elements of the story. But any hero’s journey is concerned not just with these facts but also with the way the hero deals with the sacrifice they have made. It is concerned with the consequences to the hero as an individual endowed with a conscience who is capable of redemption. That is what the Western literary tradition would be concerned with.

But the storywriters of Adolescence are not concerned with that at all. To say it again, Adolescence is not a hero’s journey. It is not concerned with Jamie as a subject but with Jamie as the object in a legal proceeding. It is not a question of what Jamie is sacrificing because Jamie is the sacrifice. He is the sacrifice in the same way that Jesus is the sacrifice from the point of view of the authorities in the crucifixion story. Thus, when we say that Adolescence is not a hero’s journey, we can be even more specific and say that it is a story told from the point of view of the collective. That is why it is alternately filtered through the lens of Jamie’s parents, his friends, the police, and the psychologist. The story is concerned with Jamie as object from these various perspectives.

Just as in the crucifixion story, the priests and the mob want to sacrifice Jesus in the name of their abstract notions of the sacred; that is also the sole concern of the storywriters of Adolescence, who manage to insert seemingly all the latest ideological fads into the story. These are the abstract notions of the sacred according to the ideology of modern liberalism. In that ideology, it is the technocrats, the high priests of liberalism, who must find solutions to the various social ills that are preventing the creation of utopia. Jamie is nothing more than the carrier of those social ills, and his sacrifice is meant to appease the liberal gods.

Thus, Adolescence inverts the paradigm of Western theology and literature. It does so by inverting the hero’s journey pattern. It is like telling the story of Jesus’ crucifixion from the point of view of the mob or Pontius Pilate. The only thing that they care about is that Jesus admit his guilt and receive his punishment. And that is really the only thing that the main characters in Adolescence care about. Jamie’s refusal to admit guilt is not a question of personal conscience and a journey towards redemption, such as it would be in a Dostoevsky story; it is a trivial annoyance standing in the way of “justice” being served, such as it is when Pilate gets annoyed that Jesus won’t confess.

That is why we could say that Adolescence belongs more broadly to the age of the Antichrist (both in the Jungian sense and in the sense of being an inversion of the crucifixion story). It’s also why the high priests of liberalism, whether they be in the universities, the public service, or the government itself, are so concerned with problematising the Western canon and “decolonialising” the curriculum in schools. Young men like Jamie might accidentally read Shakespeare or the King James Bible. Hence, Keir Starmer sees it as his number one priority to jam Adolescence down their throats instead.

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.