The breathtakingly awesome Netflix drama has rightly landed onto the platform of our collective attention. Its many glowing reviews are making sure it stays in our collective conscious. The reviews are repetitive in highlighting a whole range of notable scenes, immense acting talent and the social issues it raises.
Notable media commentators and including MP’s have added their voices of praise alongside concern. Even the odious Prime Minister Keir Starmer has once again nauseatingly ceased the moment to try and convince us that by watching it he is a man of the people, really? But amidst all this adulation something, one thing is not being mentioned, not being recognised, not being addressed. Humiliation.
The main character, the 15-year-old murderer ‘Jamie Miller’, I have met many hundreds of times. More precisely, I have met many hundreds like him and interviewed them in the secure estate just like it unfolded in the third episode. Like the forensic clinician in the drama my task has been, not so much to consider the symptoms but, to discover and consider the cause.
Violent and murderous acts are always an expression of something that cannot be said. Violent communication is nearly always the failure of words needing to resort to action. For Jamie and the hundreds of other young boys and older men like him, there exists within them experiences too awful to tell. For those who have witnessed these awful things occurring, such witnesses often become bystanders who are also unable to tell. All of this clearly repeated in the failure of this drama’s adoring witnesses to also not name the unbearable, the unthinkable.
The drama never uses the word humiliation, but in both words and visual action humiliation reveals its unique devastating ability. Father is not able to look at his son on the football field when sons’ ability makes him ‘less than’ in his fathers diverted eyes. The inability to look is repeated again in a moment of son’s desperation. This time it’s not only fathers’ eyes that are turned away but his whole body. There are indeed occasions in life when ‘not to be looked at’, when ‘not to be seen,’ when ‘to be turned away from’, when ‘not to be held’, when ‘to be rejected’ takes even the most resilient into the raw painful experience of humiliation.
When the raw painful experiences of humiliation cannot be spoken of then most surely, they repeat, replicated in a way that converts the pain into triumph. This is what Jamie Miller did and exactly at the moment when a new humiliation wounded him afresh.
But Jamie is not the only male experiencing the wound of humiliation and in so doing needing to pass it on. Father too it seems knows all about humiliation. Scene by painfully uncomfortable scene we see and hear how humiliation reduces this father until in foetal position he lays crushed on his son’s bed. Just prior to that scene we are invited to know about his humiliation with references to the past, his encounter with professionals, with his neighbour and even the wider public. Again, none of this is spoken of, it’s just enacted. Its internal impact on him only visible in his taught hands clutching the steering wheel of his work van. It is a profound suffocating even violent silence in that van which is the triumph seeking repetition. His victim(s) this time, his wife and daughter. It is the kind of silence by which those on the receiving end of it die a thousand deaths. So yes, it too, he too, is murderous.
Throughout, we were invited to witness the unravelling of this family in several dramatic moments. Truth is, real life, for most is not a continuous dramatic experience. The causal factors of life’s dramas tend to occur moment by moment, subtle, almost invisible, almost silent, often unconscious. But nonetheless they are happening.
As more and more of the family dynamics unfold, father is revealed to be a male who has perfected the ability to humiliate down to a fine art. Importantly, we also gain the impression that Jamie was not like his father and was more readily identified with his mother. Jamie, it seems is a gentle, shy boy, who is not assertive and has been bullied.
Many clues were given as to suggest that Jamie was more identified with his mother. In her he found a way to make sense of himself as different from his father. But to survive in a male dominated such an identification for a young male is not considered safe. To survive, the need becomes to relinquish identity with his mother and become as his father. What followed was Jamie doing just that. How many young males, we must ask, are required to do exactly this?
This excellent drama does reference misogyny but does so by placing it outside of those present. It’s placed in the external influence of incels, social media and not in its actual source, which is in fact for Jamie, much, much closer to home. It is this unhelpful projection that seduces us. Politicians, reviewers and viewers it would seem also cannot bear to acknowledge the deadly role humiliation is playing in the whole sad state of things. Far easier to get distracted by incels misogyny, because we are not like that. That’s okay then.
The effort to survive humiliation is seldom not a one-off event. Once residing in the psyche, humiliation will reappear and readily manifest again and again when its original conditions come into play. To be free of humiliation without a fully conscious recognition of its cause and impact is virtually impossible. Humiliation is a lifelong repetitive trauma for many, even though the original experience is long past. When humiliation occurs in our primitive years of development we tend then to be at the mercy of primitive forms of coping. The very nature of Jamies primitive coping did not wait long to manifest.
The final scenes of this drama indicate that the tragic consequences of humiliation have not finished for this family. Even when Jamies father is in the grip of experiencing humiliation for himself, all it seems he can do is seek to absolve himself and gets an unhelpful absolution from the women in his life. How often must that have happened? Lots I guess. The collusion by his mother with his father would not have been lost on Jamie. It rendered him alone and isolated in his humiliation. What use is a witness if they do not change the situation? do not make a difference? It’s not unusual for someone caught up in this parental dynamic to develop a rage against the non-protecting parent. No wonder, he becomes overwhelmed with frustration and rage at the forensic psychologist as he slowly realises that she too is not going to change his situation. She too then is made to experience his humiliation by the visceral delivery of his phlegm right into her face. Hardly anyone can escape humiliations deadly repetition.
We can all be invited into being witness to humiliation. Supermarkets, high streets, bar rooms, places of worship, schoolyards, garden centres, sitting rooms, kitchens, cars and work vans are all arenas where the shadow of humiliation is cast. In watching this drama, we were all placed in the position of bystander and, if the media reviews are anything to go by, all failed to name what we were witnessing. We called it all sorts of things, but we did not call it humiliation. The reason for this is perhaps revealed in this little-known fact; Humiliation in affect is clinically responsible for inducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder equivalent to or, even more so, than the experience of child sexual abuse. In short, humiliation is an experience of the horrific and we don’t want to know.
If ‘Adolescence’ is really to be a success, may it put the issue of humiliation firmly on the agenda and more firmly into our conscious minds. Maybe then we won’t need to repeat it as often as we do and can be courageous in our knowing.
Br. Stephen Morris fcc
