Manliness

Illustration/Uday Mohite

The Netflix show Adolesence is a timely and powerful work, responding to a time of tremendous masculine disaffection expressed through online abuse, intimate partner violence, a mental health crisis and rising suicide rates.

The show begins laconically, then explodes with a violent police entry. Each episode is a propulsive single shot in observational documentary style, jettisoning you into the story's reality. We feel every emotion with visceral force - fear, panic, the helplessness of parents before a dispassionate system, how everyday sweetness flips to unsettled rage in a moment. Our experience mirrors the hormonal churn of adolescence - emotions go from ten to hundred in a second, keeping us in their grip. The passionate desire to make us look at the problem drives the show as much as its technical virtuosity and this sincerity makes the style feel urgent and muscular, not macho.

The third episode, which has been the universal favourite, left me a little restless. Despite stunning performances, there was a sense of a schema, a diagnostic understanding of the workings of masculinity plotted onto a character, even as the young man bristles at the therapist's search for a stock script of family abuse. But the final episode, my personal favourite, engulfed me with its masterful, devastating humane-ness. It left me weeping, my heart split open with an empathy not only for the characters, but for the world, for myself, for where we find ourselves today. That is how art fulfills its essential nature - helping our hearts open to receive the world and enter it afresh, without pre-packaged responses.

Adolesence re-inaugurates a discussion on masculinity. But it would be a shame if our praise for its accomplishment anointed it as the last word on the issue. Rather, it is a potent invitation to think about these issues more deeply, through varied perspectives.

How should we respond then to this masculinity - so lonely, disconnected, panicked, lashing out, sitting prey for the Andrew Tates of the manosphere, their imagination of other people's freedoms as stealing men's power and life as a zero-sum game where manliness is defined as domination and bullying?

One of the limitations of the prevailing discussion on masculinities is that it often looks at masculinity in isolation, without the cultural tangle of caste, race, market forces or success-driven education and social life of which it is a part. Because "toxic masculinity" is seen in isolation it allows elite men to position themselves as progressive by discussing it as a problem in "other" men. This distances them from examining how they fulfill a manly culture in their own genteel ways vis-à-vis others. It also creates a reasonable impatience in women who feel that they are yet again being asked to service the well-being of men when society has barely begun to attend to women's realities.

Can we be liberated from these stalemates without, for instance, breaking the manly structure of social media debates, in which debates have victors, not new ideas? Cycles of mutual deligitimisation increasingly shape our overall culture, in art, in politics, even dating. It creates either wildly violent narratives like Chhava or inert political correctness.

Adolesence indicates that we need to find new forms that respond to contemporary reality. The cynical mindset that is considered edgy needs to be infused with a greater emotional purpose, an unabashedly humane eye that helps us walk towards each other in these divided and lonely times.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com