Could have done better?

Adolescence (2025)
Miniseries (4 episodes)

https://kinocheck.com/show/s23/adolescence

This miniseries has everyone buzzing. It is likely regarded as the most surreal creation to grace screens since 16-year-old Linda Blair portrayed Regan MacNeil in the 1973 film, The Exorcist. This is Netflix's latest blockbuster offering. The subject matter is undeniably dark, involving a 13-year-old student murdering a fellow female student as a result of cyberbullying. 

The miniseries features the filming of each episode in a single shot. While it may feel sluggish at times, this approach enhances the story's immersion as the case unfolds.

The essence of the story begins with a police raid to apprehend a teenager suspected of murdering another teenager. From that moment, it evolves into a police procedural drama as the legal system processes the accused. It showcases the overwhelming emotions experienced by everyone involved: the police officers, the supportive staff, the lawyer, the social worker, and the psychologists. For most of them, it is their first encounter with a young person embroiled in such a heinous crime. This situation is a devastating blow to the accused's parents and sister, who struggle to comprehend the idea that their beloved son could commit such an act.

As the series progresses, we learn more about the family dynamics and the atmosphere within the school. Much has changed since our own school days. Children now possess a private portal to the outside world, a realm filled with malevolence and deceit that threatens to ruin their futures. No matter how much strict discipline and guidance are instilled in them, they lead lives of their own. Cyberspace offers a secluded environment where anything goes. The thin line separating decency from insanity becomes increasingly blurred. What was once considered taboo has now gone mainstream. Children are vulnerable; they possess the illusion of agency and believe they can make their own choices. They misuse privacy for all the wrong reasons, constructing an impenetrable barrier around themselves. The adults' words of wisdom can sound harsh, digging them deeper into the abyss. With alien neologisms like incel (involuntary celibacy) culture, the manosphere featuring harmful gender ideologies, and themes such as the '80-20 rule', schoolchildren are lost in their quagmire of finding a place in their universe.

When the proverbial excrement hits the fan, everyone will be in for a shock. They will ask, "How did our innocent little child transform into such a monster?" Parents will start to question where they went wrong. Could they have done better? These parents faced greater hardships from their own upbringing and external pressures, yet they turned out fine. Why can't their offspring, with all the modern conveniences at their disposal, manage to be resilient and not easily triggered? No one seems to understand.

The crossroad?

The Graduate
1963 novella by Charles Webb
1967 film directed by Mike Nichols

In the past, existential crises typically arose after a certain age of maturity. Following a prescribed path, an adolescent would transition into adulthood. One must work diligently, persevere, and slog through challenges to realise his true potential. As the Peter Principle states, "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties," they may attain the highest position for which they are ill-suited, leading to subsequent brooding. Only then do they begin to question the meaning of it all. What is the purpose of existence? What is one good for? What is their contribution to humanity, and what will be their legacy? 

In the days when seeking knowledge was laborious, one had to be content with passive diffusion. Learning intimate biological know-how was peer-driven. Rightly or wrongly, that remained a go-to source for quick references. In the spring of youth, the doe-eyed youngster absorbs everything piecemeal. There was no time to contemplate abstract concepts such as mortality and the purpose of life. 

The first contemplation may arise at the birth of the firstborn. Awed by the little one's possession of the grandmother's eyes and the dimples from his wife’s side, he may be intrigued by the greater forces of nature; however, the buck stops there. He is too busy making hay while the sun shines, as long as his body permits. 

The children will become increasingly independent from their parents. Similarly, the other half will carve out time for essential reflection. Fears of helplessness, redundancy, and loneliness may begin to seep in. A personal crisis of existence will ensue. This unfolds after years of lessons taught by the unyielding School of Hard Knocks in Life. 

Fast forward to the modern era. Instant access to a wealth of information at one's fingertips creates a false sense of security, leading one to believe they know everything. Matters that should be contemplated in mid-life suddenly swirl in the mind far too early, long before one has even entered young adulthood. 

"What is the purpose of it all?" he asks. "What sort of legacy will he leave behind?" He develops a guilt complex from enjoying the good life that his parents worked hard for. He wishes to give it all up for the poor and live on little more than air and sunshine. He scorns the capitalist system world. 

The end result is considerable confusion regarding what is expected of the youngsters. They believe their elders are too detached from the currents of contemporary life. Unfortunately, they lack role models to emulate. Consequently, they fumble in the dark, grasping at straws and occasionally making misguided choices that lead directly to disaster. This may be a consequence of information overload and the absence of a clear path for the young to follow.

This story challenged the status quo upon its release in the 1960s. A high-achieving recent university graduate from an upper-middle-class family with a clear path laid out before him harbours doubts about his future. He does not wish to follow in his father's career footsteps. During his graduation party, his father's business partner's wife embarks on an affair with him. Matters become increasingly complicated when he is introduced to and falls for the partner's daughter. 

The classic book and film became literary powerhouses in their own right. The film later emerged as the 17th greatest American film of all time and is esteemed as one of the most significant and influential films ever made.

 There was also a sequel to the book, Home School, set ten years after 'The Graduate', which did not perform particularly well. The film likely succeeded because it was the 1960s—a time of anti-establishment sentiment, hippie culture, and empowerment. This ideal representation of a generation is not limited to the 1960s. The feeling of not wanting to toil away in a seemingly meaningless job under the 'Man' is still experienced by the current generation. The notion of answering to the boss without any personal space is repugnant. Perhaps it is the leftist idea at play here—that individuals should spend equal time working for sustenance as they do for leisure, recreation, and family. Karl Marx believed that the working class should work no longer than necessary. Gone are the days when one was defined by one's profession.

P.S. Thanks, MEV, for the recommendation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Just a biological act or something divine?

Y tu mamá también (And your mother too, Mexican Spanish, 2001)

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Interestingly, sex has always assigned the duty of maturing someone and smacking people with the profound answer of the reason for existence. Tinseltown impresses us that sex is the panacea to all our worldly problems. Of course, we all know that sex may also create problems of its own.

There was a time when sex was accorded a special status in society. Because of its mysterious nature, which was ill-understood by primitive men, sanctioning permission to indulge in this biological activity was complicated. Many requirements and rituals had to be fulfilled to obtain access.

As the societal restrictions became increasingly questioned with no logical explanation in sight, the biological act came to be treated as such, a biological process, not needing frills and pomp. Humans were merely continuing the spread of their seeds for the continuity of species.

Slowly sex lost its respected status in society. No more did ritual-sanctioning coital-related activities make any sense. Sex became a plaything and acquired many new roles - break-up sex, revenge sex, coming-of-age sex, casual one-night-stand sex and more; all deviated from its intended purpose, i.e. sowing the oats. Oats were sowed alright, but wildly.

But then, in modern society, sexuality becomes more complicated. Their premise is that love does not necessarily blossom between genders but within genders too. Gender is fluid, and a person picks and chooses the gender he feels at that moment; a male in the morning and a female in the evening, perhaps?

This story is about two precious sex-crazed 17 years-old boys who had left their girlfriends at the airport. The girls are off on a family European summer vacation. The boys, minors legally, are already smoking, drinking and sexually active. They are hoping for a sex-filled summer sexcapade. They meet a cousin's bored wife at a party. They try to flirt with her, offering to take her to a secret beach hideout. The bored wife discovers that her husband had a fling. Heartbroken, she decides to join the boys on their road trip.

The boys obviously want to bed the sexually mature lady. After many ups and downs, quarrelling and soul searching, the summer turned out to be a season none of them could forget, especially the boys.


"Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea." is a dialogue in the movie. Well, it is not so straightforward. If one has put his mind to surfing, he has to manoeuvre his body and posture in such a way that he stays afloat and not swept away by a massive wave and goes under. In strict terms, he is not merely giving himself away to the sea but skilfully using the buoyancy of the water and propulsive forces of the waves to his benefit. Similarly, man cannot simply surrender to his primal instincts but plan his life with his intellect.

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The tumultuous years...

Lady Bird (2017)

This coming of age movie is made by a debutante director. Bringing up children may not be so gratifying after all. After the initial awe of the wonder of the Universe to create a body within a body, reality soon hits you. You do not mind all the sleepless nights and backbreaking chores to keep the little one breathing. All the lethargy somehow vanishes at the sight of the little one carving a slight smile at us. Devious devils soon reveal their dormant selves quick enough.

As they hit puberty, they metamorphose. Blame it on growing pains, changing hormones, undeveloped pre-frontal cortex or dopamine cravings, they view the hands that feed them as aggressors. They feel that the parents suffer from a siege mentality. Their obsessions with thrift and stickling to time are utterly too stifling. Growing up sheltered, the chicklings perceived the whole wide world as gentle as their domestic guardians. The peer pressure to conform to the herd further accentuates the tensions in the household.

The parents, on the other hand, only want to pave a smooth passage for their offspring. Not wanting to repeat the silly mistakes they had done, so as not to miss the similar opportunities that had come their way, they try their level best to impart the wisdom that they acquired along the pebble-filled path of life. Sadly, all these would fall on deaf ears as it had happened during the elders' generation and the one before them.

Is it not the spring of youth, the new found freedom and immaturity that blinds us from all from the potentially blistering fire in front of us? Maybe experience would teach us. We have to have our fingers burnt to feel the pain.

This simple real-to-life depiction of a mother and her teenage daughter during the tumultuous years of high school to college period. The mother is a psychiatric nurse who has to work double shifts and count every penny to make ends meet. The father had been recently retrenched. The daughter seems oblivious to all these but is content to keep up with the Joneses. She yearns to get the best memories of her youthful years and wants to do something with her life. She does not want the melancholy of the household to bog down her ambitions. Through all that, they seek a middle ground.

 https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Running commentary of life?

Looks like a new form of parenting has crept into our society. The little one, usually a toddler would be given sort of of a running commentary of all the things that go around him.

Bring him to a checkout counter, while the mother is busy unloading the trolley of food stuff, the father would be busy narrating what is being done and how the transaction is recorded, calculated and so forth.

At the obstetrician's office, whilst having the good doctor examine the yet-to-be-born addition to family, father does his duty again. He explains to the confused toddler of the various anatomical parts of his offspring as seen on the ultrasound screen much to the annoyance of the attending obstetrician. The doctor who is still living suspended in the good old time where children were seen and not heard,  seriously wonders whether the child really understands what in heaven's name is going on, but the father's duty has to go on! He is waiting for the son to ask the father, "Who put little Tommy in?" just like he heard his mother read to him the nursery rhymes "Ding Dong Bell".
In his own mind, the obstetrician shudders what the father would say to son when he is literally caught with his pants down during his nocturnal orchestrated manoeuvres in the dark?
I thought children were to explore things themselves, learn the hard knocks lessons of life through self discovery and research rather than being spoon fed information that they sponge up as they pompously slide through life mollycoddled and sugarcoated....

Don't blame me, it is my brain!

Blame my Brain (the amazing teenage brain revealed)
Nicola Morgan 2005

Had the honour of meeting the author of this book in KL recently when this Scottish lady was conducting a workshop for writers of teenage stories. Her passion to write ignited at the age of 9 but had to wait for 27 years to publish her first book. She has written books in many genres, fiction and non -fiction, mainly for teenage readers.It is an amazement how those cuddly lovable cuties metamorphose into a volatile piercing thorns, something in the line of gremlins when exposed to water. In the case of tweens, it is adolescence! They may be the next most difficult thing to analyse after the female brain!
In this 200 odd page book, the author offers an reasonable explanation for this transformation. It can basically be blamed on nature, 3 main punching bags - genes, evolution, neuro-chemicals.
The author's target group seem to be teenagers and those in constant contact with teenagers with the hope of giving a reasonable explanation to their sometimes bizarre behaviour, probably to knock sense into the youngsters and to avoid adults from breathing down their necks.

Compared to other animals including primates, human spend a much more time in adolescence as they need to learn much more to seep into adulthood. Even though we tend to think that the brain stops growing quite early in life, it continue growing to much later and the dendrites and synapses undergo pruning and remodelling during this crucial age. The frontal cortex connexion to other areas of the brain is not fully developed explaining the sometimes rash decisions. The melatonin secretion which is related to sleep, is abundant at a time when a lot of work need to be done, hence the apparently sleepy-head teenagers. Dopamine which is sometimes associated with satiety sensation in certain part of the brain is increased with alcohol. When it consumed by the brain which is not fully developed, the chances of addiction and mishaps seem higher.

Risk taking brings up us in the evolution ladder and helps us improve our technology. The risk takers survives the cold winters!
Evolution is often called an easy animal which can explain many of our behaviors. A cat is a cat in spite of years of births and rebirths with limited skills of purring and scratching their fur. Man, on the other hand, have evolved from a wheel rolling population to one who sends nuclear powered vessels to other planets. A long adolescence is needed to prepare these children to adulthood to continue the good work done by their ancestors. Nature has shown that breeding with closely connected siblings or offspring is unhealthy, hence it tries to prevent breeding within families by creating intolerance between parents, children and amongst siblings for this very reason.
It goes on to educate on other teenage problems like eating disorders, self harm and depression.
What I find quite intriguing is that we blame our behaviours to everything but ourselves. Affluence, luxurious living, living in absence of poverty may pamper us till we all turn pompous, fat and spoilt to the core.
What we all, as mankind, need is an occasional calamity to shake us and put us all in other. We can all then see how fast we all mature, literally overnight! (this is not the author's recommendation,of course!)
Good advice from the author for the teenagers on the need to stay focused. As the brain connexions are being pruned and being complete, they need to constantly practice, prepare and stay out of trouble because their future starts here.