Sunday, March 30, 2025

Adolescence - As poetry and criticism professionalized, difficulty was fetishized

'Adolescence' creator Jack Thorne opens up about what message he wanted to convey

“We’re not making a point about race with this,” he said on The News Agents podcast. “We are making a point about masculinity. We’re trying to get inside a problem. We’re not saying this is one thing or another. We’re saying this is about boys.”

According to Deadline, the series shed light on online radicalization of young boys instead of a specific case.

“The big question was why is violence from young men or boys towards young women or girls going up? Why is this happening?” Jack previously told the outlet. 

“Looking into it and trying to pose that question as fulsomely as possible, without providing easy answers, was the aim that Stephen [Graham] and I set out on years ago," he continued.

“I hope what we’ve done is shine a light on an area which has been talked about but not looked at."

"This is an issue that everyone has been aware of, but discovering it through Jamie is something we’ve been set on capturing. That people are excited to watch and understand Jamie, and try to understand the issue through Jamie, is rewarding," Jack concluded.



——-

Jamie is bullied in school and filled with self-loathing, and he turns to Andrew Tate and other purveyors of sexist online content to make himself feel big.

In the third episode, a pretty, young psychologist, Briony, draws out the “inciting incident” for the murder. Katie sent a photo of herself topless to a classmate, who then circulated it without her consent — something all too common in the real world. Jamie subsequently asks her out, thinking she might be amenable because “she might be weak,” since “everyone was calling her slag, you know, or flat or whatever.”

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 “I don’t like to write but I want to write. Getting up and trudging into that office is just what I do. It’s the daily activity that gives structure and meaning to life. I don’t enjoy it, but I care about it.” 

~ How to have a passionate life 

In one of his novels, “1Q84,” Murakami described that kind of troublesome curiosity: “I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what.’ And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to.”


A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible

Haruki Murakami was a mediocre student. Like a lot of people who go on to high achievement later in life, the future novelist had trouble paying attention to what the teachers told him to pay attention to, and could only study what he was interested in. But he made it to college, and a few credits before graduating he opened a small jazz club in Tokyo. After a ton of hard work, he was able to pay the bills, hire a staff and keep the place open.

In 1978, Murakami was at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Japan watching a baseball game and drinking a beer. The leadoff batter for his team, the Yakult Swallows, laced the ball down the left field line. As the batter pulled into second base, a thought crossed through Murakami’s head: “You know what? I could try writing a novel.”

He started writing after closing time at his jazz club and eventually sent a manuscript off to a literary magazine — so blasé about it that he didn’t even make a copy for himself in case the magazine lost what he had sent in. It won a prize and was published the next summer. He decided to sell the bar, which was his only reliable source of income, and pursue writing. “I’m the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do,” he wrote in his 2008 memoir.



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