Stop Calling Murderers "Monsters"
Adolescence, and the linguistic segregation of men who harm women.
Photo via Netflix
Warning: this post contains discussion of violence against women, including sexual violence.
I finally watched Adolescence, a fictional series about a 13 year old boy who is arrested for killing one of his female classmates. Of course, people have a lot of thoughts. Because there are already plenty of in-depth analyses out there, and because film criticism is a bit out of my wheelhouse, I’m not going to share my comprehensive thoughts on the show. Rather, I want to focus on a specific decision that the show creators made- the choice to humanize Jamie, the killer. The first time that the viewer sees Jamie is when the police break down his door to arrest him. He’s in his bed, and his fear makes him wet his pants. The earliest feeling we have for Jamie is empathy- he’s a kid, and he’s afraid. Throughout that episode, and the three that follow, the viewer is repeatedly reminded of both his humanity and his age. He cries in the police station, asks the psychologist to bring him hot chocolate (with marshmallows), and has a stuffed animal on his bed. Even after we see the tape of Jamie stabbing Katie, even when we know he is a murderer, the show never lets us forget that he is still a 13 year old boy.
On the surface, this decision may seem kind of counterintuitive. Why are we supposed to feel bad for a misogynistic teenager who kills his classmate? The point isn’t that we should be sympathetic to men (or in this case, boys) who enact violence against the women (girls) that they know. The point is that in most aspects Jamie is really a totally normal teenage boy. So often when men attack women, people (other men especially) leap to label these men “monsters” or “freaks”. They other the offenders, make them seem non-human. They are anomalies, a fluke in the system, not representative of men on the whole. And yet, the experiences of pretty much every woman indicate differently. I don’t know a woman in my life who hasn’t (at a minimum) been catcalled, harassed, followed, groped… the list goes on. So clearly this issue is far more pervasive than just a few bad apples in the barrel of otherwise perfect Honeycrisps.
No case has made this as abundantly obvious as the trial of Dominique Pelicot, who was convicted of drugging and raping his wife Gisèle, and the 50 other men who he invited into his home to rape her as well. Gisèle’s story clearly demonstrates that the men who commit these brutal crimes are not outliers- they are firefighters, nurses, plumbers, gardeners, and truck drivers. Put another way, they are Monsieur Tout Le Monde, “Mr. Everyman”, as the French media dubbed Gisèle’s abusers. There is often a resistance to acknowledging the degree to which normalization of sexual assault pervades our culture, because isolating perpetrators of crimes against women allows men to avoid doing the internal work of understanding how they too enable, if not directly participate in, rape culture. In the same way, many men fail to consider how they contribute to (or at the very least allow) the “manosphere” culture that leads to Jamie feeling justified in killing Katie. This small linguistic separation between the men who physically hurt women and the men who socially permit it is representative of the attitudes men often carry towards brutality against women. “I would never attack/kill/assault a woman, so none of this has anything to do with me”. The refusal to in any way connect themselves to physically dangerous men is also an evasion of the responsibility to dismantle the rampant misogyny that encourages male violence against the women in their lives.
While the show is careful not to demonize Jamie, they balance the elements that humanize him with also keeping his personality generic enough that he can act as a stand-in for most any teenage boy. While the perspective of Adolescence is far from one that caters to the male gaze, the non-specificity of Jamie’s character does remind me of a component of the essay in which Laura Mulvey coins the phrase. Mulvey discusses the male protagonist as a surrogate for the viewer- a figure through which they can envision themselves in the story. While this substitute is more so an idealized version of the spectator, he must still be nondescript enough that his identity does not interfere with the ability of those watching to put themselves in his place. Should the viewer learn too much about Jamie, they can use that specificity to justify to themselves that he is in some way significantly different from other young men. We know Jamie well enough to empathize with him, but not so well that we can draw obvious differences between him and ourselves (or the men in our lives).
Despite the somewhat transparent message of the show, confusion over the “purpose” of Adolescence was still widespread. Some believe that Jamie’s culpability is ambiguous, and that the series is about false convictions rather than the influence of misogynistic internet spaces on young men. At least part of this is because Jamie is depicted as both a murderer and still a child, and many people are notoriously bad at processing nuanced situations. Because we feel for him, we want to believe that he didn’t do it (even though we are shown proof in the first episode, and Jamie himself admits to it). This same clouding of judgement happens all the time in real life. It comes out that a man has hurt a woman, and the response is “He doesn’t seem like the type”, “I didn’t see it coming”, “But he was always nice to me!” If the transgressor doesn’t fit our narrowly constructed image of a dangerous man, it is almost inconceivable that he might harm someone. In our comprehension, he is either a villain or a man/boy but he cannot possibly be both. And thus, the people we have cemented as men/boys in our mind are not at risk of becoming aggressive, and nothing must be done to prevent potential violence. We have to be able to humanize perpetrators enough that we acknowledge how close the threat is, while not allowing it to prevent us from holding accountable those who need it. Othering, and at times even sensationalizing, assailants, rapists, and serial killers presents them as a naturally occurring and inevitable variant and allows us to circumvent recognition of necessary societal changes.
Thank you for this. I think what you wrote is so important. As a survivor of domestic abuse, I can say that I have never seen in the media or read anything that comes close to depicting what I survived. Abuse of women in our society is so normalized that most of the time we don’t even see it.
"Because we feel for him, we want to believe that he didn’t do it (even though we are shown proof in the first episode, and Jamie himself admits to it). This same clouding of judgement happens all the time in real life. It comes out that a man has hurt a woman, and the response is “He doesn’t seem like the type”... We have to be able to humanize perpetrators enough that we acknowledge how close the threat is, while not allowing it to prevent us from holding accountable those who need it."
This entire section resonates so much with me currently. I'm a survivor of domestic abuse, and Mt brother recently was arrested for repeating the cycle. It is so incredibly difficult to hold space for both sides of the coin, but necessary for justice. I had to tell my mom he was hitting his girlfriend, after her insisting that he would never do such a thing. Abuse is complicated and so full of grey areas. Thank you so much for writing this. I really, really needed to read this today <3