The online incel community has taken a break from blaming women for their ongoing failures in life to issue a collective tantrum over Netflix’s new drama Adolescence, which dares—dares, mind you—to portray incel culture as the toxic, rage-filled echo chamber it so demonstrably is.
Honestly, I would call Adolescence a very surface-level view of incel culture. It’s fairly accurate, but you’d need a much longer series to truly get the culture across. Contrapoints’ video on incels is a really good breakdown of the mindset.
I’d watch Stephen Graham make tea, it was a well acted interesting show. But how they are finding enough to be angry at I dont even know, bar the obvious with the kid and the throwaway mention of algorithmic recommendations in the closing minutes of the show.
Yeah this was my main problem with it was it was just very surface-level. Like I’m glad it’s being brought to the table for discussion for mainstream audiences, but it felt a bit glossed over like something I’d heard from an NPR story on video games; “did you know about this thing called incel culture? it’s all the rage with the youths.”
I don’t know what the solution is or how I want to see it conveyed, but I recall Polytechnique doing a better job at instilling horror in me from incel culture than Adolescence, albeit it was more subtle, and that was from 2009.
I think the part of the narrative, and the one-shot approach I think supports this, was to highlight how ignorant the people were to this thing that clearly has much more to it.