NETFLIX'S ADOLESCENCE: A DIGITALLY FACILITATED LORD OF THE FLIES

The fact that Netflix’s Adolescence has been screened in schools all over the UK is, I think lamentable, but it may just be the trigger that makes many more parents decide against the norm, that is state schools and even independent ones, too. Bear with me as I explain how Netflix might just have produced a series that could lead to parents removing their children from the current school system in Britain. Some of them may even find the Latin Mass by way of learning of Traditional Catholics who are determined to homeschool. 

 

The plot of Adolescence concerns Jamie, a thirteen-year-old boy who is arrested on suspicion of murdering Katie, a girl who was in his year. The police come in the early morning, take him from his bed, and bring him to a police station where he is confronted with CCTV footage of him stabbing Katie. Jamie vehemently denies this even in the face of damning evidence. He presents as an angry little boy who protests his innocence too much to Detective Bascombe who must unravel the events that led to this heinous crime. Bascombe and another copper go to Jamie’s school; a veritable zoo of frustrated teenagers, while teachers who seem mentally absent cope by turning on films. The police officers are nauseated and one moans, “Why do schools always have that same smell? It’s a mixture of vomit and cabbage.” 

 

In this atmosphere where little authority is exerted by adults, the youngsters form their own hierarchy. Amid this mess, Bascombe still has no leads, until his own son tells him that Jamie was the victim of cyber-bullying, that the girl he viciously knifed, had taunted him on Instagram as an “incel”, branding him as someone who was going to be involuntarily celibate indefinitely. It turns out that Jamie was especially galled by this because he had a crush on her and had made this known to her, only for her to mock him online for all his peers to see as someone who was not only going to be rejected by her but by every girl. She had an axe to grind.  Someone (but not Jamie) circulated semi-nude pictures of her which Jamie saw and the way she put him down may have been her way of reclaiming power. Adolescence is a digitally facilitated Lord of the Flies.

 

Later we learn that Jamie was spending a lot of time getting succor from the “manosphere”, and the series places the blame rather clumsily on online groups of embittered men. On a personal note, I find certain online movements that claim to support men to be incendiary and dangerous for young, hurt boys like Jamie. But whether we support these online spaces or not, the screening of Adolescence in schools is the biggest advertisement they will ever receive in the UK among the very young. Parents might just be taking their children out of school, not because they are Traditional Catholics but because they know in their gut that their child and his peers who have the same experience as Jamie may just seek out the “manosphere” to let their poison tree grow by way of seeing it get so much attention on a celebrated series.

 

Really, the series does an adequate job of presenting the modern school day as a dysfunctional daycare for those who are between childhood and adulthood. Anyone from the right to the left and everywhere in between is left wondering what if the current system does more harm than good. Commentators are saying Adolescence has good intentions in showing the “radicalization” that can happen online when unhappy “incels” fall prey to misogynistic groups; but just as sex ed can drive children to even greater levels of risky sex, can it not also be said that using such a show as Adolescence can also plant ideas, even violent ones, in impressionable young minds? Adolescence could run the risk of promoting the same propaganda and behaviour that it tries to warn against.  

 

Whether we like it or not that schools have put on Adolescence means it is now become part of the curricular; required viewing for pupils who are facing much of the same pressures as the characters. The world of Instagram means that bullying does not stop at the school gates, it follows the young person wherever they go. It is all so meta-theatrical; the series shows cinema being used in schools to fill the time, and that Adolescence is being used in schools to educate the young means that life and art are imitating each other a bit too closely. 

 

Personally, I have a history of being conflicted about home-schooling even though I had a horrible time at school when I was Jamie’s age. My reason for being in favor of the school system was that I believed I needed to get to know my peers and adapt to the ways of my fellow Millennials to get along in the world. But had I child now, even were I not a Traditional Catholic, I’d never put them into the same setting as the Jamie character. I’d consider it tantamount to institutionalized trauma. I augur that many will be joining our ranks of homeschooling. This summer they might just make the break. They may even acknowledge that  Traditional Catholics were well ahead of their time. 

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This article appears in the Summer 2025 edition of The Latin Mass magazine of England and Wales. You may read it in its entirety here. The painting was executed by John Singer Sargent.