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Adolescence Doesn’t Have the Answer
Less a mystery than a simmering social portrait, the Netflix series chases the question of why and finds little more than despair.
Each of Adolescence ’s four episodes, all directed by Phillip Barantini, are structured as one-shot takes, and so the first chapter unfolds as a meticulous accounting of what happens as the boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), is processed at the police station: fingerprinted, medically evaluated, and assigned a lawyer. Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling builds up to laughably wacky reveal that Harry Styles was an incel all along, and Todd Phillips’s Joker is often derided as a shallow incel-flavored Taxi Driver knockoff that transposes its anti-hero onto the superhero industrial complex. “What am I supposed to do?” Between the haplessness of the adults and the chaos barely contained by the institution, Thorne and Graham seem to lay down another thread of possible explanation: School conditions are so crowded and chaotic, to a point where Bascombe compares it to a “holding pen,” that you can’t help but see why a boy on the edge of actual violence might be overlooked.
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