“Right
Here we go now
A sociology lecture
With a bit of psychology
A bit of neurology
A bit of fuckology
No fun!” – Sex Pistols
Adolescence. Ah, aye, Adolescence. Every middle class
Tomboy, Dickless and Harriette has had his and her word on the shock schlock
too-close-to-home Netflix hit of the year. It got rammed down our throats for
months as a must-see Expose Of Modern Homicidal (White) Male Youth when it
bombshell-dropped last March, a lesson and a warning, and the chattering
classes filled their sneering clucking tutting outrage-stuttering gobs with
condemnatory curses about young males and social media and misogyny and madness
and mayhem and murder.
You had to see the show, you had to gasp in jaded prurience, you had to clutch
your pearls, you had to get your fainting couch and smelling salts ready, you
had to brave the perils of a grave new world to understand what has gone wrong
with very young males and comprehend just how dangerous they are. They skulk
everywhere in modern life, in bedrooms, in parks, lurking, waiting, leering,
sneering, licking their lips and licking the knives they just can’t wait to
penetrate innocent unsuspecting female flesh with, in electric psychopathic expectation
of the gash-slashing to come.
Adolescence was a prophecy, a nightmare screamed underwater from every early
young male teen bedroom in the land, only spraying blood and dread and aberrant
psychology everywhere instead of furtive bathroom-wank semen. Nobody was safe
from these deranged insane shortarse killers, undeveloped brains full of
desperate plans of revenge and first-female-touch violation. The only way to
fight this psychotic social-media-fed friendly fire front was to keep the home
fires burning by having frank, don’t-kill-the-birds and bees conversations
with children who would probably rather be watching online cartoons or comedies
or fantasy or superhero films than being told they were condemned since birth
to be relics of 20th century masculinity, of outdated
post-industrial horror.
And, of course, it was all a pile of total…and
utter…shite.
Now that the rumour circus has left town (for a while at least – more on which
later), I just felt like punting my own tuppence into the public mass debate
over this four-hour debacle. Because I have rarely seen such a load of
propaganda-cum-exploitation-flick rubbish so breathlessly hyped to the rafters
as The Next Big Bad Thing. The last instance of this nonsense I can truly recall
was the ludicrous Video Nasties scare of the early 80s, when the Tories thought
all working class kids were going to storm the streets and go on crazed killing
sprees for watching flesheating cannibals and zombies and yetis and Nazi bikers
and monsters.
These repressed slimy middle class weirdos (who now write endless dry academic papers on horror films, finally having caught up with the fun aspect of them) were so scared of the impressionable proles taking up pitchforks and torches and machetes and flamethrowers that they banned a series of variable-quality gory horror films, stuff like Cannibal Holocaust and The Evil Dead and Driller Killer and Confessions of a Window Cleaner (wait, that wasn’t banned, I just wished that Robin Askwith rubbish had been disposed of, sorry). Madness was in the media air. Uncouth working class youth (middle class kids being far more sane and sensible and superior, of course, far less negatively impressionable) would become killers when they just viewed the wrong things in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Much like Adolescence, in some ways.
But that’s what frantic hyperbole does to you, doesn’t it? It gets you angry and energised, ready to stomp anybody who disagrees with The Received Truth And Wisdom on any person, film, country, subject, object, objection, whatever. It gets to the bizarre point where straight-faced comments like this one can be made from straight-laced, straitjacket-needing sweaty, creepy-looking Tory weirdos:
In the 80s, the Video Nasty witch-hunt hysteria had as its main bitchfinder general a crazy Christian freak called Mary Whitehouse. She hogged the (s)limelight, flogging her towering Jesus-based rage mourning, noon and nightmare, warning of eternal damnation for the kiddies if they watched the bad acting, wild animal inserts, and crap gory FX of rubbish cut horror fare like Zombie Creeping Flesh.
So I’m going to share a few thoughts about my own views on this mostly worthless Netflix halfpenny dreadful swill because, unfortunately, this shite is not over, by any means. All media in the UK converged to trumpet One Single Correct Narrative about what is, after all, a show made for profit for an American service you have to pay to use. Take my thoughts for what they are. People are still allowed, so far, to dissent from the soft-jackboot lockstep views being ever-more-blanket-cemented into place by the media and government and psychologists and various supposed sanity gatekeepers in a completely insane UK society. So I will say what the fuck I want. And…
“Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon” – Naked Lunch.
And what was all the naked idiot chattering (cl)ass jabberjawing about, both media and citizen? You may well have watched it, but if not, Adolescence concerns a random working class 13-year-old laddie named Jamie Miller, in a great performance by newcomer Owen Cooper. Jamie murders his classmate Katie, and the four episodes unravel to reveal the psychological, societal, and family-destroying aftermath of the murder. That Jamie has done it is never in question.
He is the modern incarnation of Damien Thorne, the skincrawler Devil Kid from the old Omen films. He’s Regan from The Exorcist, Gage from Pet Sematary, Malachai from Children of the Corn, all the kids from The Village of the Damned. Ah Hell, you get my meaning – insert your own pungent favourite evil, inexplicably murderous child character here.
What Adolescence is, at heart, after stripping away all the pseudo-scientific pop-psychology vague talk of social media and ‘the manosphere’ and such, is a modern manifestation of the 1970s horror trope started by The Exorcist, that of A Child Possessed. Adolescence is nothing but a cheesy exploitation potboiler masquerading as high-minded (psycho)social commentary and diagnostic art, a supposed X-ray of the tattered unholy holed soul of modern UK/Western youth.
The transition of a child from the growth-hormone-boiling chrysalis of youth to unsteady-footing young adulthood is scary for both child and parent, in that the sweet wee innocent becomes something new and potentially dark and brutal upon spreading their new slimy wings to the shady conspiratorial teenage sky. This has been a horror (and general) life trope since time immemorial, really. It’s just that it’s never been quite so blatantly, patently propagandised before, at least not that I can recall. That is interesting, hilarious, insidious, disgusting, disturbing...
...and boring as fuck.
So how does this new (anti) social experiment gogglebox fare stand up compare to past exploitation manifestations of adolescent murder and evil?
It doesn’t stand up. It falls down. Right on its smug, wannabe-diagnostic face.
Damien Thorn would have made Jamie’s brain explode, like he did with his cousin Mark in Omen II, and laughed as he did it. The English kid is a rank amateur in the ghoulish pasty-faced evil kid stakes, though the show, and the media, tries to make him into some inescapable omnipresent newbreed schizoid archetype. But the Devil didn’t make Jamie do it, that’s too 20th century in a post-Christian UK society, so the internet and (cue scary mood muzak!) ‘the manosphere’ are the culprits here. Why should The Dark One get all the credit when you can foist the same homicidal Pied Piper slaughter-blame onto Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to shoulder? It’s the 21st century, not the 12th! Hey Baggy, get with the beat!
Anyway, let’s take an analytical step back, in both time and subject matter. Remember when heavy metal was getting all the waking-assassin brickbats, due to real-life druggie metal burnout Ricky Kasso murdering Gary Lauwers? How I miss those weird, deluded, ludicrous, hilarious days! Still, Adolescence is the new murder metal mayhem myth, so let’s dive in! Here’s a bit of thrash trash as we start to dreamily, screamingly reminisce, to set the obscene scene:
Sighing expansively. So what have we here? Well, four one-hour episodes about the descent into knifeplay of an English 13-year-old boy and the decent families and friends he drags with him into murderous Hell. There is a strange aesthetic at play here. The episodes all start with real-life photos of the youngsters who appear in them, giving events a queasy, quasi-realistic tone. It’s set to a creepy, mournful, child-angel chorus soundtrack – which, if you’re in the mood for some fond child murder memories, you can buy online! Tap those toes, do-si-do, where the killing’s from no-one knows!
Maybe the real photos are the reason why the lunatic Starmer got confused, but I think his agenda was a bit more complicated than just mere confusion or a slip of the tongue. It’s like how some horror films say they are based on real-life events, but the base turns out to be really flimsy and easily flipped round for film drama purposes. I would imagine this purposeful blurring of fantasy and reality is meant to give the production more weight and heft as some sort of could-really-happen precautionary tale, but it didn’t work for me. Makes me wonder if mid-teens Owen Cooper will ever get a ride, now that he has entered world consciousness as a female-murderer. Then again, you get women writing to serial killers, so he’ll probably be alright.
CONTINUED IN PART TWO (OF THREE) HERE:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2025/05/adolescence-worst-exploitation-series-i_23.html
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