This series is a hit and has had some rave reviews, so to mention its good aspects is almost superfluous, but I will a bit: it presents a very current, relevant storyline, approaches a difficult subject head-on, a child murderer, the incel, the manosphere, misogyny, chauvinism; it uses some interesting realist filming techniques, and has some good and even great acting. OK, on to the bad stuff:
Like with so much
British media of this kind, our offering hits you with a moral sledgehammer
that too self-consciously sees itself as ‘finger on the pulse’, but you can’t
help feeling it is already dated. It fails pretty miserably at capturing the
working class and working class emotions, except in a very caricatured way,
instead for the difficult moments it resorts too obviously to petit bourgeois kinds
of behaviour for its characters, for instance the main subject, the boy
murderer, seems too middle class, something like a cuckoo child in his family, he
is quite erudite, unlike his father, a plumber, a small small businessman with
tattoos and a van. At the same time, every other child in the series that gets
any significant screen time seems to be stamped from the same mould, with the
same blank expression, unsmiling, humourless, - practically inhuman. Except by
some miracle, the son of the cop. He is dealt with far too obviously in such a
way that flags to us that we are supposed to see this man, his father, as even
more of a hero than he already is, for he is such a good Dad too. Earlier he
had been so nice and honourable to the suspected murderer (with a kitchen
knife) on his arrest that it was like an advert for the police.
Then the school
scenes. What a strange place, on the one hand full of liberal caring teachers
and staff, with a few token nasty ones added , and the children are all
uncaring, and show totally no sadness about the death of one of their own, in
fact they were mostly excited about it. This seemed the most unrealistic
passage in the series. It must be difficult to capture this kind of school, for
sure, probably because it would have working class kids in it, and this series
seems unable to address them, it is for it foreign territory, so we just get a
harsh caricature, like a Hogarth painting where everyone is emotionally kitsch.
The part that was
probably the most successful after the first episode was the psychologist who
visited the boy murderer in an institution. The interview had a Tarantino-esque
quality to it. It was gripping, edge of your seat stuff. But the last and final
episode I found difficult to follow either because the sound quality was poor
and did not pick up the conversations very well but also maybe because the Liverpudlian
accents, with all that emotion and stress, were quite strong, especially for
the two women, it made me ask myself were they using this accent to signify
crudeness? Neatly for us, we knew the
father was going to display his anger problems, which he did on tap. I could
not recall what a ‘Nonce’ was initially, I had to look it up. It seemed as I
was watching a slightly offset thing to spray on the father’s van, I was not
sure why. Perhaps it was that the sexual side of all this had not been, until
this word appeared, raised to any great level, except in the indirect sense of
sexism. But this sexism was quite sexless, until finally at the end what you
are led to suppose is the possibility that the father, when he was refused his
oats by the mother, got into a big, barely suppressed, strop and everything
condensed his anger from there. Surely this was not blaming the wife, the
woman?
One of the most
glaring omissions, which we must assume was fully intended, was the complete
absence of any perspective from the parents of the girl who was murdered, or
indeed of the girl herself up to the fateful moment. You briefly saw her
pushing the boy in a black and white CCTV video, and then him attacking her.
Her schoolfriend had a memorable small part, but in which she just seemed angry
rather than sad. Maybe this was the problem, the emotions on display throughout
were telegraphed and without subtlety, they were either blank and bland or
heart wrenchingly crazed. Only the main cop, a man, his son, and the father of
the boy murderer were given a wider range of emotional responses. I suppose
this was intended to be kind to them and sort of absolve them, because they
were trying hard to make sense of things in a difficult modern world, full of
weird emojis, of all things. But that they were all male sits a bit strange in
a series that has been received as bravely tackling misogyny.
For this series, the
misogynism seemed to be mainly understood as being perpetrated by social media
as the bad guy, or bad gal to be more exact. The female stabbing victim had
been bullying the boy (OK, not impossible, but come on…) as an incel, we are
informed. Surely this was not suggesting she, sort of, deserved it, or that she
was a part of the explanation for what happened? Was the series doing its own
sly version of victim blaming, having a go back at the MeToo argument in the
guise of criticism?
But the tension the
father caused and which was revealed to us in the final episode clearly went
against this interpretation in the end, his pent up anger was a violence that
did not need to go much further to have its horrific effects on his family, which
had obviously grown accustomed to it and developed coping techniques. But this
just left us in an eclectic mess of moral possibilities, reflecting, I suppose,
a too enthusiastic desire to be on point.
There are some glaring
things that have been left out: there was no transgender concerns on display in
this series, peculiar because one of the most high-profile murders by young
people recently was of a transgender person. So, it seems as though the whole issue
has been forced into a mould that excludes this. The critical language that followed
in response to the series used the modern buzzwords like toxic masculinity and
incel but avoided toxic gendering, which was at least suggested as a factor in the
programme. The problem of capitalism and democracy was also avoided, - if on
the broad scale capitalism can be expansionist and imperialist, why should the individual
be any different?
Today news is not so financially
free as it once was, even if it is more widespread and potentially available, if
young people today mainly get their news from online sources, on their smartphones,
the majority will go to free versions, not the so-called reliable stuff behind
the paywalls. But here in the wild west
lie all the exploitative sensationalist dangers, and the extreme right-wing
version of reality. The free market, unhindered, leads to fascism. We got a bleak
taste of this from the depiction of the school, with the kids staring at their
phone screens as they walked home, but these were mainly, if I recall correctly,
female students, as if they were the ones mainly affected.
