(This discusses disturbing themes, and can get viciously satiric and slightly disturbing)
13 MONTHS
is the fourth and
final part to this whole debacle. It’s the name of the episode, not how long
you feel you’ve been watching it for. Really, there isn’t too much to say about
this one, so I won’t say anything, except it worked well as a family drama. And
yes, I did say I was going to talk about them all…so sue me. I just got so sick
of having this whole thing rammed down my throat for so long I felt like
presenting an alternative point of view. Shrug.
It’s very obvious why this rubbish was so successful: like the also-worthless
Baby Reindeer (two ugly, creepy, damaged, unlikeable people antagonise each other for
six episodes – joy!), it has caught the modern zeitgeist. Both series were
net-based. The net still has a quasi-mystical scare factor element to some
people, seemingly, though the father Eddie in this would have been young enough
when the net came into widespread (ab)use that he would surely have known about
some of its dangers, as would his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco). Then again, at his age, in his 50s, the worst
you could watch as a child on a computer was a Spectrum 48K game or something,
so him not being hugely clued up on net radicalisation could be forgiven.
Unlike the fact this strange piece of propaganda exists. Its wildfire tearing
across all media and markets was completely inorganic, so it was clearly very
heavily promoted by both the media and the government. You couldn’t escape
mention of it for weeks. After I watched it, the next time I saw some kids
Jamie’s age from a local high school just walking along the street, I felt
weird, creeped out. And I didn’t like that. At all. What the hell is this divisive, boy-hating swill? It’s
a complete disgrace.
As for the filmmakers, they must be mightily arrogant cunts. Imagine thinking you have crafted such an amazing piece of work it should be shown in schools as some sort of peerless didactic learning aid, and taking it into Westminster to have them all ooh and coo over it. Twisted and sick as fuck. It’s just a cheesy, sleazy, stupid, ill-informed piece of exploitation shite, a better-acted episode of Casualty or The Bill with an attitude and delusions of grandeur. It’s actually quite bizarre to try and pretend that we still live in a monoculture like we did in the last century, with everybody in the UK basically watching the same thing, but they certainly tried to pull that propagandist trick on us with this self-important nonsense.
What Adolescence really is, is a societal placebo, a fake panacea that cures all kills. There are constant tragic news stories these days about youngsters murdering other youngsters, and knife crime. This production has acted as a lightning rod for parental and societal anxieties around the issues of youth murder and knives, and presented a fake ‘explanation’ for societal ills – just show this exploitation series in high schools and all will be well! It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so ludicrous and disgustingly pompous and misplaced. Still, plenty of political points to be scored pretending to care and be doing something about knife crime and the nameless faceless horde of young boys ready to massacre in every bedroom on the island, eh?
I mean, America constantly churns out vile violent swill about murders, both real and reel. Has making and watching all these pieces of violent shit ever made the problem get better or go away? Of course not. All it does is provide more cannon fodder for the violent material out there. But this is the sort of thing the government can jump on as a supposed cure for real-life problems, making it look as if they are doing something when blatantly and patently they are not.
Jack Thorne, the co-writer of this rubbish, testified in Westminster about this series, and internet madness. It was water cooler talk dressed up as ‘serious debate’, where politicians took turns tugging their forelocks and foreskins over the guy who co-wrote the series:
I didn’t watch it all. I’m not a masochist, and you’d have to be crazier than the Jamie character to do that. Might get violently radicalised and kick your monitor in after the arrogance, self-regard, pomposity and sheer blind ignorance on display. But at 14:45 he does make an interesting admission, theorising that negative online sites would have made a deep impact on him “when I was a kid.” So Jamie is based on an oddly dodgy retrospective interpretation of a 46-year-old putting himself in the mindset of a contemporary, self-loathing, school-bullied 13-year-old. Which is utterly ludicrous, of course. All so that the middle classes can dictate to the working classes, as usual.
Thorne was Jamie’s age just a few years before the the net came into real mainstream use, but those years are crucial. Older people who did not grow up with the net have literally completely different mentalities than those who did. It’s a generation chasm. We have pre-net psyches, and post-net psyches. Full Stop.
So for this eccentric, autistic, idiosyncratic man, to come into the public arena, and parliament, with his halfarsed series, based on what he thinks might have happened to him as a ‘neurodiverse’ young teen…I am shaking my head here. You have to ask yourself, who has killed more children: Keir Starmer, by arming and aiding Israel, or some fictional working class kid whose nonexistent ‘crime’ got jammed down our throats for weeks on end? Pretty obvious answer.
PUTTING THE CON IN CONCLUSIONS
You know, I was going to go deeper and further into this. But I realise even I can’t be bothered writing yet another opinion piece on this soggy sorry sordid shit sack, watched by people obsessed with crime viewing, and middle class moral paragons. But nah, that’s giving it way more credit than it deserves, really. So I’m going to wrap up by doing Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham a favour. There wasn’t enough blood and snotters in this for the average two-sec-attention-span viewer. One tiny bit of seeing a far-off vid on a phone of a 13-year-old stabbing a girl just wasn’t enough. So, as somebody who enjoyed horror films when I was young, I am going to give them some pointers, because they’re genuinely making a sequel to this braindead shite. I will help them make it far more interesting to watch. They won’t even have to give me a cut of the profits, or soundtrack sales, or anything. I am doing it to do my bit for community cohesion, and spitting on young males, because there’s just not enough of that these days.
So, say, let’s start in the interests of sexual equality. We all know women can be just as vicious and vile and violent as men. I feel that female violence is a trait of the fair sex’s that never, for some unknown reason, gets much discussed in the media. It’s very unfair. Why hide that horrific light under a bushel? Just ask Rose West, Myra Hindley, Margaret Thatcher, Mary Bell (if you want the child murderer angle again), Lucy Letby…or anybody cognisant of gay female couple domestic violence stats. So get a few elements of some maniac like this fucking murderous lunatic, who seems like she could have been radicalised by the net:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-64720003
Young, hot (if you like goth psychopaths who are dead behind the eyes, that is), crazy, pierced and tatted means we can get product placement in that will guarantee us some cash:
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/entertainment/tv-film/6719682/inverness-north-streetwear-netflix-adolescence/
We’re just brainstorming here. Maybe we could have Jamie getting out of the pokey after a few years, and using his evil, confused powers for good, killing evil women (or men) like the one above. Jack Thorne is the writer of some Harry Potter stuff. Maybe we could get JK Rowling out of hiding to give him the go-ahead to write some new Potter-type film where Jamie does spells that atone for his murderous male ways. Maybe we could have him as a teenage detective or something, like Thorne’s Enola Holmes film, where he wrote about Sherlock’s teenage sister. He seems to have a penchant for writing or adapting sometimes-self-styled troubled adolescent and teenage stuff, and science fiction. Think of the endless crossover possibilities! Franchises galore!
We can send Jamie to space, to Mars, to Victorian London, to wherever the fuck Harry Potter lives! Put Leatherface in it, Jason Voorhees, the Toxic Avenger, Freddy Krueger, even Warwick Davis’ shitey rapping Leprechaun!
All we have to do is make sure that, no matter what he does, he comes a cropper at the end of each film, because he’s male, and thus born worthless and extinct and inferior in a modern post-industrial, communications-obsessed world. Piece of piss. The tacky slime cinema purveyors Troma Films would put up a few bucks if Netflix won’t kick in. But adding extreme violence and recognisable horror franchise gore ogres into it is a savvy move for the violence-obsessed yanks. There’s a mint to be made!
Shit, I’ve inspired myself! Wonder if I can buy the rights to the Jamie character and send him into a whole new realm of possibilities. They won’t help cracking down on the net in the name of ‘the kids’ though. Doubt Keir Starmer would approve. Always a good thing annoying and disappointing psychopathic dictatorial shite like that. This is clearly a morally didactic, insufferably self-righteous horror series just waiting to be born. But I’ll leave the final word on net radicalisation to Scottish comedian Kevin Bridges. After all, his views on it are far more sensible and funnier than most, even if they don’t get twisted tongues wagging in Westminster. Which automatically makes them better. Guaranfuckingteed.
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