Note: This is a post about a show about a boy who pretty brutally murdered a girl and the investigation and fall out from the murder. The show is not graphic in its depiction of violence (the inciting incident is only shown very briefly, as the characters watch a small lap top that captured the crime on a CCTV recording, and it is grainy and not even the focus of the scene), but the show is all about that violence and how various people react to it. It is not really a show that I think needs any kind of spoiler tags because it is not a mystery and probably something to be fairly informed about before deciding to watch it. I am not going to try to censor myself when talking about it, so reading this may spoil some narrative elements if that kind of thing is important to you.
I can already tell that I am going to be writing a lot about this show, and breaking down specific elements it brings up for me, and in regards to patriarchal misogyny in much greater detail, but I figured I would start with one “my reaction post” about it first, and then see where that goes.
Firstly, I knew I was going to have to watch this show and talk about it in these blogs as soon as I heard about it, because it seems so invested in this conversation, especially about not figuring out how to talk to young men about patriarchal misogyny. Secondly, I have been seeing some other folks “hot takes” about the show, generated without watching it, and I knew I wasn’t going to be that guy who talked about what I think the show was saying or why it made the choices it did without actually seeing it form myself. I have some craft and form reactions to it that I will probably touch on in this post, and then a whole lot of content reactions that I may bring up, but will probably deep dive into in future posts. I think the show is an important enough conversation starter about these topics that I will probably watch some of the episodes multiple times to try to give more detailed analysis. But for now first reactions:
I was told to be prepared for the show to be intense. I may have over-prepared myself, and perhaps been a little more prepared than most to take in this kind of media to begin with, but it didn’t really hit me hard until the 4th episode. There are topics and portrayals of those topics that are intense in each episode and if I had still processing traumatic experience with things like: being arrested for a really serious crime that I had definitely committed, having a classmate or close friend violently murdered by someone I knew, or working closely as a psychologist with someone I knew to be an unrepentant murderer, the first 3 episodes might have been a lot more intense for me. Instead, the only episode that really hit me hard emotionally was the 4th episode, which is set about a year after the incident and focuses on the parents of the murderer processing what happened. I have daddy issues that I will probably have to talk about in a future blog at some point, but know that movies/shows that intensely deal with parents, especially fathers, either failing their children, or making choices that hurt themselves to protect their child just absolutely destroy me, and make me ugly cry. I may have never rage-cried as hard at anything in my life as watching Billy Elliot’s father break a picket line to pay for his son’s dance lessons.
One of the reasons why I think people are having intense emotional reactions to the show though is because it is filmed in these long, long, long single take shots with a camera that will pan around the characters and move through the set in what must have been absolutely grueling scenes to direct, film and act through. There is almost no outside narration in the show, but the camera does a good job of giving you a view inside as many as 3 or 4 different characters’ heads at a time by being focused on their faces as they are reacting to the immediate story beat. At times I found the cinematic approach exhausting to watch, and I don’t think I would generally say I think filming that way is a good idea, but I think it did work for this show, and for this topic. Although, I did sometimes find myself focusing on that camera work instead of the plot because it is impossible to film that way and not have some scenes play out much longer than needed because you have to follow characters walking down flights of stairs and through halls for much longer than you are used to seeing as an audience member. Relatedly, and to help pass some of the time in those scrolling shots, the ambient sounds and noises, on top of the thematic music that would be playing definitely toys with your emotions as well and probably compounds some viewers’ anxieties and emotional reactions to the show.
One “hot take” that I see coming out of rightwing reactions to the show is anger that the show is trying to demonize an angry, hurt white boy as some kind of zealot in the army of men’s right groups, incels and patriarchal misogynists, and that the show’s purpose is to make white straight men out to be “the enemy.” Now most of the people repeating this take are going to dismiss everything I have to say, because I am openly talking about resisting and challenging patriarchal misogyny in this blog, but I think if they actually watched the show, they would probably realize that the show is really tame on the theme of large scale social or political theories driving this kind of violence. I don’t think any character in the show even uses the word misogyny to talk about the crime that has been committed, even though it is a crime driven by a young male character’s anger at women. Almost every character in the show is incredibly sympathetic to the murder, even the arresting cops, and if the character was not a sweet and innocent looking white boy, I don’t think audiences would have found any of that sympathy believable. I think what these very flimsy and shallow analyses miss the most is that the show itself is very much less about the boy or the social factors that might have influenced him, than it is about being parents/adults and trying to understand how things like this happen and maybe be more proactive identifying signs that lead up to it. Honestly, some of the trolling takes I have seen about the show almost just seem mad that there is a default assumption by all the adult characters in the show (and most of the kids) that a boy murdering a girl (who might have been bullying the boy by calling him an incel) is morally bad. Otherwise, the show is far more politically neutral and sympathetic towards the character who commits the murder than many people who have experience with this kind of violence happening in their lives might be comfortable watching. The girl and her family’s grief and pain is never even shown on screen. One of her friends gets a brief amount of time in front of the camera, struggling to process her pain and sense of loss, but that is really it. This show is about the boy, his family, and helping the audience see all of them as real, complex people, perhaps to the show’s detriment.
In future posts about this show, I want to talk about: episode 3 where the boy/murderer converses with the psychologist, who maybe the first person to get him to start processing what he had done, even while exposing herself to what can only be called abuse from someone who is still trying to convince himself and the world that he did nothing wrong…specifically because what he did was not really wrong; episode 2 and whether social media really is something entirely new in how it enables kids to create unsupervised social worlds for themselves; Episode 1, and how handling violence like this through the criminal justice system is so problematic as far as really understanding what is going on or figuring out how to change it; and then, of course, I think I have to talk about being a parent of a child that will have to deal with being socially identified as a boy (unless/until she/they doesn’t/don’t identify as a boy and then we, the parents will do everything we can to support her/them be correctly socially identified) and how that relates to my own experiences and fears around growing a boy surrounded by the violence of enforced masculinity and patriarchal misogyny. In other words, I will be coming back to this show, but future posts will not only focus more specifically on particular topics, they will also fold in a lot more personal experience around those topics and issues.
Until next time, be kind when you can, to yourself, and all those who will use your kindness to build a better world for us all…including you.
Benjamin C. Roy Corry Garrett