congrats, you have feelings. now what?

adolescence, horror and the weight of wanting control

so i’ve been thinking about male rage. which, i know is like the most exhausting topic in the world because it’s everywhere. it’s in the way people talk, the way they move, the way they love (badly) but then i watched adolescence and it was like oh. we’re actually saying it now. we’re actually showing it for what it is, no soft edges, no excuses, just the raw, ugly truth.

first of all, the way this show is shot? unreal. one continuous take. no cuts, no escape. like even if you wanted to look away, you physically couldn’t. and jamie. oh my god. he’s not just angry but he’s unraveling. he’s this perfect storm of insecurity and desperation and fury and you can see it in everything he does. the way his body holds tension, the way he stares a second too long but he’s not a villain and he’s definitely not a hero

he’s just drowning and he’s dragging everything down with him.

and then there’s the parents. the tension between them isn’t just background noise, it’s the breeding ground for everything jamie is. his dad is detached and cold but still somehow looming over everything. his mom is trying to keep things together but unraveling in her own way. it’s like watching a house slowly rot from the inside and nobody wants to admit it’s happening. then there’s that scene with the psychiatrist where jamie is sitting there, arms crossed doing that thing where he acts like he’s above it all, like none of this is getting to him. but you can see it, right? the exhaustion. the need to be understood, fighting against the fear of actually being known. it’s brutal.

the audience reactions? hilarious. people either get it and feel sick about it or they don’t and call him ‘just another toxic male character.’ which okay, sure, but do you think people like him don’t exist? do you think this kind of rage just lives in fiction? because that’s cute. that’s really cute. especially when you look at the way the internet operates. the way these incel communities wrap their claws around young, lost minds feeding them narratives that fester and mutate until they become something truly dangerous.

the chokehold is real and it’s shaping the way an entire generation of boys sees themselves and the world around them. but no, let’s just pretend it’s fiction. let’s pretend it’s not happening in real time.

i read cursed bunny a while back and somehow, it crept back into my mind while watching adolescence. the two couldn’t be more different yet they both carry that same unsettling weight like something rotting beneath a polished surface, waiting to break through. there’s this story called ‘the head’ about a man haunted by the severed head of a woman he wronged. and it just. won’t. leave. him. alone. it decays, it festers, it follows him everywhere, a physical manifestation of guilt and violence and of something he thought he could bury and forget.

but you can’t just walk away from the things you destroy. you can’t pretend they don’t exist. isn’t that exactly what adolescence is saying? that rage isn’t just about the moment it erupts, it’s about the aftermath. the damage. the things that linger long after the outburst is over.

because that’s the thing. male rage, female rage or whatever. we talk about them like they’re separate creatures but at the core? they’re the same. it’s just different flavors of hunger. different ways of screaming without making a sound. adolescence shows it in a boy who is burning alive from the inside. cursed bunny shows it in a man who is haunted by the consequences of his violence. either way, it destroys you.

so yeah. i’ve been thinking about that….

and now you are too. sorry:)