If Kill All Normies maps the ecosystem, Adolescence renders its phenomenology
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V: The Captive & The Fugitive, Modern Library, 2003. p. 262.
In the poignant scene of a police vehicle, an ordinary father’s smile at the sound of his son’s voice is a moment of pure emotion. A few minutes later, 13-year-old Jamie Miller, will be arrested under suspicion of murder and his father—Eddie Miller, played with sombre physicality by co-creator Stephen Graham—is distraught. Adrift in disbelief, Eddie offers the hollow comfort of an embrace, but the moment is already slipping away, carried by a momentum that cannot be undone. Meanwhile, Jamie’s terror is palpable: he wets himself. Thus begins Adolescence, the emotionally intense, morally wrenching British mini-series created by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini. Adolescence is not content to portray a social tragedy; it immerses us in its suffocating rhythm. A father follows behind in his car as his son is driven away in a police van. We sit in the quiet. We sit in the rupture. The boy is already lost to something that has no name but haunts every frame: a collapse that is emotional, generational, and digital.
Watching Adolescence is to be placed inside the machinery of justice, grief, denial, and doubt. But it is also, crucially, to be placed in the wake of a world where subjectivity has been reconfigured by the ambient terror of social media, masculinity’s implosion, and the failure of language between generations.
Jamie’s (played by breakout actor Owen Cooper) story becomes the core of Adolescence, a four-episode mini-series about the tragic loss of innocence of adolescence. The series scrutinises how systems respond to fragile lives under unimaginable pressure and tackles the pressing issues of social media’s threat and society’s masculinity trap.
Set in a northern English school and its surrounding streets, Adolescence distils the raw materials of contemporary Britain—knife crime, incel rage, online subcultures, toxic masculinity, broken homes—under relentless light. The camera never blinks. The audience cannot look away. The result is immediacy, urgency, and an overwhelming sense of presence. In this way, Adolescence does not merely recall social realism; it evolves into spiritual violence.
Kill All Normies
This visceral portrait of contemporary Britain, laid bare in Adolescence, finds a chilling echo in the theoretical landscape mapped by Angela Nagle in Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Read alongside Angela Nagle‘s polemic against the aestheticisation of cruelty and ironic detachment that metastasised online into the alt-right; Adolescence can be understood as the emotional and ethical consequence of a culture warped by digital estrangement. Where Nagle maps how the performative logic of meme culture and identity warfare distorted political life, Adolescence gives us the interior wreckage: the boy, the father, the silence. One is theory. The other is the ache.
In the subterranean recesses of the internet, beneath the polished veneer of mainstream media and social respectability, roils a cultural conflict that has reshaped public discourse in the 21st century. Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies is an urgent, incisive, and occasionally uneven attempt to anatomise that transformation. First published in 2017, the book arrived in the wake of Trump’s election, the Brexit referendum, and the crescendo of internet-fueled culture wars. It functions both as a diagnosis and a warning: the nihilistic playgrounds of anonymous forums have erupted into real-world consequences, catching progressives, liberals, and institutional conservatives alike off guard.
Nagle offers a history of internet subcultures and a polemical inquiry into the dynamics of cultural revolt. Her premise is simple: the so-called “alt-right”—a nebulous constellation of white nationalists, ironic shitposters, men’s rights activists, and digital provocateurs—emerged not despite progressive online culture but as a grotesque mirror image of it. This is a story of the ouroboros, of extremities feeding into each other, of political identity metastasised through memes, harassment campaigns, and the collapse of irony into belief.
Her central thesis—that the alt-right’s rise was shaped as much by aesthetics, irony, and online culture as by ideology—reconfigures how we understand political radicalisation. It was not the old dogmas of race or class that won the youth, but memes, sarcasm, transgression, and the promise of subcultural belonging. In her view, transgression migrated from the left to the right. Where the post-1968 counterculture had once used rebellion to critique power, the digital far-right weaponised transgression itself—emptied of content, untethered from consequence.
In Adolescence, the cost of this transgression is not political but emotional. The characters—an ensemble orbiting the traumatic arrest of 13-year-old Jamie Miller—are caught between the drive for expression and the mechanisms of surveillance. Their rebellion is neither ideological nor earnest; it is performative, ironic, and often tragic. Here, Nagle’s critique of irony-as-politics finds its fictional afterimage: the teenager who disassociates through meme-speak, longs for connection but speaks only in cultural references, and wields identity as shield and blade. The show is not about the internet so much as one inflected by it, in its very grammar. The absence of visible screens is deceptive; TikTok loops, ambient virality, and algorithmic anxieties haunt every gesture. If Kill All Normies maps the ecosystem, Adolescence renders its phenomenology.
The Incel, the Child, and the Crisis of Recognition
At the heart of Adolescence is Jamie. Jamie is not a killer archetype. He is a liminal figure: volatile, vulnerable, unknowable. Episode three, set entirely in a therapy room, is a study of discomfort. Jamie vacillates between posturing and pleading. He mocks his psychologist, Briony Ariston, acted by Erin Doherty with disarming precision, then quietly admits he believes himself ugly. He doesn’t ask for comfort but asks why she doesn’t offer it. “Aren’t you supposed to say I’m not ugly?”
This exchange contains, in miniature, the epistemic wound of our time: the collapse of affective authority. Who affirms us? Who reflects us to ourselves? As Nagle writes, online culture is replete with identity performance, virtue exhibition, and ritualised cruelty. It offers exposure, not recognition. Validation, not understanding. This collapse is at the heart of Jamie’s story in Adolescence, a powerful exploration that will leave the audience intellectually stimulated.
Jamie embodies this collapse. He is the boy born into irony, unable to feel sincerity without shame. Jamie is a product of cultural incoherence. He is wounded.
Her central thesis—that the alt-right’s rise was shaped as much by aesthetics, irony, and online culture as by ideology—reconfigures how we understand political radicalisation. It was not the old dogmas of race or class that won the youth, but memes, sarcasm, transgression, and the promise of subcultural belonging. In her view, transgression migrated from the left to the right. Where the post-1968 counterculture had once used rebellion to critique power, the digital far-right weaponised transgression itself—emptied of content, untethered from consequence.
In Adolescence, the cost of this transgression is not political but emotional. The characters—an ensemble orbiting the traumatic arrest of 13-year-old Jamie Miller—are caught between the drive for expression and the mechanisms of surveillance. Their rebellion is neither ideological nor earnest; it is performative, ironic, and often tragic. Here, Nagle’s critique of irony-as-politics finds its fictional afterimage: the teenager who disassociates through meme-speak, longs for connection but speaks only in cultural references, and wields identity as shield and blade. The show is not about the internet so much as one inflected by it, in its very grammar. The absence of visible screens is deceptive; TikTok loops, ambient virality, and algorithmic anxieties haunt every gesture. If Kill All Normies maps the ecosystem, Adolescence renders its phenomenology.
From Meme to Memory: The Question of History
One of the implicit themes in Kill All Normies is the erasure of historical memory. In its speed and ephemerality, the internet produces a kind of amnesia. Memes replace arguments. Historical analogies are flattened. Fascism becomes an aesthetic, not a political force. Nagle laments how digital culture’s endless churn undermines the capacity for sustained political analysis or historical grounding.
In Adolescence, this amnesia becomes lived. The characters are unable to locate themselves within historical or generational narratives. Their actions feel causeless, their pain without precedent. This is not just a loss of history but a loss of lineage, of language, of the very structures that once mediated suffering. This is beautifully captured in the scene during the visit to Jamie’s school. Luke Mascombe, the detective played by Ashley Walters, is explained by his son the emoticons and the language of Instagram.
Austerity of Form, Abundance of Feeling
Adolescence doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It comes from the haunted interior of Generation X—the parents of Generation Z—who now find themselves unable to read their children’s emotional landscapes. Adolescence fetishises panic itself. The internet is not shown through screens or notifications; it is ambient, atmospheric, and corrupted in the air. It distorts not only the children but also their parents’ very language.
Adolescence resists the temptation of the spectacle. There are no courtroom scenes, explanatory arcs, or villainising of Jamie. Instead, the series returns to the ethics of social realism, but it’s a realism reconfigured by the digital condition. It’s intimate and unsentimental, akin to ‘Cathy Come Home’ (1966) or ‘Kes’ (1969), but with a twist. The danger here is not just poverty or class but the disintegration of perception. The threat is not in doorways but in the quiet, messages, and ambient data.
We are asked: what does it mean to see? To be seen? What does it mean to witness a boy’s collapse without interpreting it as pathology?
Nagle warns us against a culture that reads too quickly and reacts decisively. Online, the urge is to know, to brand, to exile. But Adolescence refuses that economy. It asks us to look and keep looking without resolution.
The formal constraint of Adolescence is central to its philosophical weight. Each episode unfolds in one continuous shot—not as a gimmick but as ethics. Jack Thorne described it as “forcing partiality.” We do not get the whole truth. We are denied omniscience. Instead, we inhabit time—time as a burden, time as a witness. There are no flashbacks to Katie’s death, no narrative conveniences, just partial views, flawed perspectives, and aching ambiguity.
That decision resonates with what Nagle critiques in Kill All Normies: a culture addicted to totalising, real-time judgment—where digital communities pass verdicts in seconds, based on fragments. Online, the desire for absolute knowledge collides with the reality of partial information. Every post is evidence. Every silence is suspicious. But Adolescents resist the cut and resist the algorithm. It does not scroll. It dwells. It asks us to sit with what we do not know.
This formalism is not ornamental. It is metaphysical. It positions the viewer not as a passive consumer but as an implicated witness. It restores duration in a world of fragments. In this, Adolescence is a rebuke to the twitch-reflex culture Nagle anatomises—a culture of hot takes, call-outs, and self-curation. The show, by contrast, exposes the limits of what we can know of each other.
The Hollowing of Masculinity
Masculinity’s implosion haunts both Adolescence and Kill All Normies. Nagle critiques how online masculinities have been reshaped through grievance and ironic cruelty. She is clear: the alt-right did not emerge from doctrinal fascism but from alienated boys who aestheticised rebellion and nihilism. They found community in hate but, more profoundly, in the aesthetics of anti-normativity.
In Adolescence, we see the emotional ground zero of this crisis. Eddie’s father is a man of presence but not language. He is not cruel. He is simply lost. He offers proximity, not intimacy. Love, but no comprehension. His breakdown on his son’s bed—curled, whispering apologies—is not about failure to discipline but failure to connect. He is a father out of time, raising a child shaped not by moral values but by code—a child whose pain arrived not in rebellion but virally.
This is what makes Adolescence devastating. It shows us that masculinity is not only toxic when violent—it is also tragic when mute. The failure is not ideological but intersubjective. It was a missed encounter. A silence that calcifies.
What Kill All Normies and Adolescence ultimately share is a deep lament for the loss of intersubjective reality. One charts the mutation of public discourse into ironic cruelty, while the other stages its consequences in private grief. Both mourn the loss of sincerity, the breakdown of generational transmission, and the corruption of youth not by malice but by unmoored systems.
In the final scene, Eddie lies curled on his son’s bed, weeping and whispering for forgiveness. It is his 50th birthday, and the family has feigned celebration. The truth, though, rises through the silence. It reveals. It holds grief in the frame and refuses to flinch.
In this light, Adolescence is not a crime story. It is a philosophical tragedy. A boy misread. A father is unprepared. A society that replaced presence with performance. It is what happens when recognition disappears—when we no longer know how to see each other as humans. This is not Lear. The sin isn’t hubris. It’s helplessness. A world where pain arrives silently and virally.
Together, Nagle and Adolescence mark the edges of a culture adrift. One gives us the historical architecture of collapse, and the other gives us its sound. And if there is any hope, it lies not in critique or policy but in our capacity to dwell in the partial, the unfinished, the real—to look again and keep looking, even when we don’t understand.
Even when the boy is already gone.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.
