Social realism has long been the received form of an official, ‘quality’ British cinema. From documentarians John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings to dramatists Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold, from the character-driven Tony Richardson and Mike Leigh out to the poetic edges of Terence Davies and Bill Douglas, the very breadth of directors potentially captured by the term points not only to the genre’s unstable scope but also its discursive effectivity in unifying a canon of Serious British Cinema or television drama.[i] The term typically designates a style of film that deploys ‘documentary’-like camerawork (though this feature is rather nebulous: documentary is hardly identifiable with a singular shooting style); features naturalistic, often non-professional, acting; shoots on-location; and focusses on ‘gritty’, working class subject matter: poverty, unemployment, (de)industrialised townscapes and the attendant ‘social problems’ of drug-abuse, homelessness and incarceration. In an era of the resurgent far-right, anti-immigrant race-rioting and reignited super-egos of masculinist misogyny, this description suggests that social realism is well-placed to narratively represent and explore the ‘social problems’ of British fascism today. The hit Netflix mini-series Adolescence (2025) attempts such an exploration. However, contra recent post-critical reappraisals of social realism, I want to suggest here that the series is symptomatic of the formal limitation of much social realist drama in mediating emergent political attachments. That is, Adolescence exemplifies social realist blockages in ideologically figuring the political and material contradictions underlying the pro-filmic world ‘transparently’ captured.

Adolescence follows the aftermath of a murder; Jamie, a teenager boy, has killed his female classmate in a seemingly non-sensical outburst. Through four episodes, each told in a single elongated sequence shot, we encounter the confusion of the police, prison therapists and parents as they fail to understand how and why a young boy could develop, on the dark space of the internet, a misogynistic hatred strong enough to kill. The series has its roots in a breadth of social realist forms. It unifies both social problem films, films charged with moralistic force which take contemporary social discourses for their source material, and ‘angry young men’ dramas, a slate of ‘50s and ‘60s literary adaptations that typically focused on the reactionary ennui of isolated working-class men. As such, the series deploys a (hyper-)realist form, achieved via the one take format and its overwhelming emphasis on the naturalist acting and dialogue, to render a transparent national allegory where the state of the nation is conceptualised through the singular social issue of the angry young men of today. Its mode of address, taking the paternal perspective of middle-class state apparatchiks, also delineates its ideal spectator. The sympathetic police, educators, psychologists and petit-bourgeois home-owning parents are the central voice of and target of the text. 

The series is structured through two opposing discursive threads: on the one hand, the misogynistic, fascistic impulses that energise the murder and, on the other hand, concerned adults’ attempts to understand these impulses. The function of the single take format is to align the spectator with the latter discourse. Each episode is thus primarily rendered through the perspective of different adult figures as they interrogate Jamie or their own lacking perspective. The narrative quickly establishes and is propelled forward by an epistemological gap between the adults and Jamie. The adults lack the cultural, technological and political means to understand Jamie’s violence. They struggle to grasp the seemingly indecipherable group codes of incels and the manosphere that enrapture his hatred. In the third episode, the psychologist approaches an understanding. With Jamie, she discusses a variety of key terms (incels, pornography, power and objectification) that unveil Jamie’s warped perspective of his relationships to women. Yet this internality only acts as confirmation of the fatal act committed. The epistemological path taken is to project, like the psychologist’s assessment, Jamie’s psyche towards the act, the phenomenal surface onto the violence, rather than to move back and outwards towards the historical conditions that overdetermine this psychology. If social realism typically relies upon its claim to transmit the real, in which mise-en-scène is conceived as a neutral vehicle for the world, in Adolescence this is a psychologised reality in which the single take format, functionalist music cues and the primacy of the script all heighten a claim to character authenticity above all else. As Jamie’s psychologist puts it: “what you think is more important to me than what is true”. 

By allowing the camera to remain entirely within the linear post-event narrative (staying with the adult faces of confusion and fear) the single takes duplicate the epistemic gap which Adolescence takes as its narrative substance; the ‘oner’ format systematically excludes the determining conditions of Jamie’s violence to a nefarious, amorphous outside. If vision and truth typically correspond in the realist narrative, their troubled correspondence here in CCTV footage of the murder, which reveals an unstable surface of truth, or the outburst of some opaque underbelly, merely confirms the narrative conviction that we, the adults-in-the-room, do not understand.[ii] If this epistemic gap is the problem, the series’ solution is to resolve it through its very doubling. Adolescence’s realism can only depict this epistemic gap such that its recognition is the solution — ‘we do not know that we do not know’ turns to ‘thank God we know that we do not know’. Jamie comes to represent a discourse which is principally identified with the internet and remains near-consistently off-screen in ostensibly unrepresentable space. Hence, according to Adolescence’s realist and narrative logics, it remains unknowable. As such, the material and discursive well of Jamie’s hatred is rendered into a formless fear, outside of politics proper, in which it is possible to project a range of evils and subject positions (Keir Starmer himself opined in response to the series that “this could really happen anywhere and almost happen to any child”).[iii]

There is something curiously reassuring in this insistence upon an epistemic gap. The catharsis achieved through the repeated deployment of minor ambient or downbeat pop music at the end of each episode, in all its disempowering shock, reassures. We find the problem troubling, and this strength of feeling soothes us with the moral righteousness of being troubled. The effect of the pathos in repeated tearful breakdowns is that one feels assured in one’s own powerlessness. As with the kitchen sink drama, such ‘moral realism’ is sustained by Adolesence’s claims to authenticity.[iv] Yet, the single take format which produces such authenticity also threatens it by foregrounding a spectacular and flashy dramatic stylisation. If the kitchen sink drama contained a similar tension between moral and aesthetic stakes in its opposition of authenticity to poetic realist, stylised moments of spectacle, Adolescence seems internally divided between the former’s moralism and a kind of technical realism; the authenticity of the characters captured against the technological mastery of the producers. The former secures its claims to troubling moral affect. The latter secures its status as a “cinematic art form”[v] possessing “visually impressive”[vi] dynamism which itself aestheticizes the authentic world depicted rendering it comfortably distant as prestige, nationally-significant dramatic object. As Andrew Higson puts it of the kitchen sink drama, “visually fascinated, we can at the same time rest assured that our gaze is morally sanctioned”.[vii]

Indeed, a pathos-laden re-assurance and morally sanctioned gaze explains the rhetorical force of the British Labour’s Party’s marshalling of the series, represented in Starmer’s X post above. The series became, in the weeks following its release, a site of serious discussion in which the principal object of discourse seemed to be the very necessity of serious discussion. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch was criticised on BBC Breakfast for failing to watch the series (a segment in which host Naga Munchetty symptomatically declared that Adolescence was a documentary with a real-life impact “in terms of what people are talking about”).[viii]For Badenoch to watch the series would thus entail a political commitment to serious discussion; an assurance that Badenoch, like the rest of us, was responsibly devoted to being troubled. These exchanges demonstrate that the possibilities of realist intervention are typically predicated on rhetorical deployment of its epistemological claim: “to know these alien conditions will be to experience indignation and pity, and to be stirred thereby to political action”.[ix] Yet, any claims to Adolescence’s conjunctural effectivity — perhaps in it forcing a ’gritty’ encounter with the ugly truth of young men today — must be tempered by the very epistemic poverty that it resigns itself to. 

The indignation and pity Adolescence conjures then comes at the expense of a systematic exclusion of those discourses (the nefarious unrepresentable outside) that would empower its epistemological claim. The series avoids what we might call a cognitive map of the determining conditions for Jamie’s actions. Indeed, the major reactionary gender politics of our era, the attempt at a hardened re-naturalisation of gender by anti-trans groups — not to mention the compounding history of immiseration, austerity and fascist resurgence in Britain — is entirely absent from the show’s non-partisan conception of violent masculinities. To build such a map, to approach the political and economic conditions of possibility for proto-fascist young men, would undermine the very mode of address and formal structure Adolescence deploys. Absenting political, economic and cultural determinants in favour of the unknowable outside and sequence continuity is the very condition which enables its moralist plea to the nation, itself conceived as the undifferentiated unity of certain age and class-status audience. 

The epistemic gap, posed and redoubled in Adolescence, is really a formal resolution of, and narrative compensation for, an even more deeply entrenched aesthetic gap. If Adolescence merely announces our lack of understanding of the problem, this reflects its social realist origins. Social realism has historically been content with announcing the quarterly social problem in all its plain sparsity as a simple confirmation of the truth of its visual authenticity. It tells us to be assured in the morality of its gaze that arrives to announce the problem as if to solve it (worry not, we the adults-in-the-room can now handle this). Social realism clings to the social, reaches in the darkness to find the light, only to show us the surface as if it were the structure. But what if the problem lay in the gaps between images? What if, in our rush to understand, to make legible, through concrete images, to attach the problem to a narrative event, we missed how this violence spills out everywhere and into all our social interactions, in front of and behind the image? What if we cannot even recognise the problem if we cannot un-recognise ourselves, to look beyond this realism, this grit, this English somewhere-but-not-here, to find the abstraction of the structural forces that continually reproduce the crisis? 

These familiar oppositions — surface/structure, concrete/abstract, inside/outside —might seem old hat. Yet it is those ‘social realists’ (I am thinking, in particular, of Alan Clarke and Terence Davies) who have managed to traverse these oppositions, to move from the concrete to abstraction and back again, who have managed to overcome the epistemic-aesthetic poverty of English realism. In short, it is those who have pushed at the very limits of social realism itself, within and against it, that most clearly traced their respective historical moments. Clarke, in a series of realist films and teleplays tracing the violent and fascistic impulses of contemporaneous youth — most notably Scum (1979), Made in Britain (1982) and The Firm (1989) — offers a key counterpart to the worst of the realist tradition. His austere, detached approach, often a stark opposition of shot/reverse-shot necessitated by the tight TV-production turnaround from shooting to broadcast, pushes us to question the abstraction beyond the frame before a moment of clarity that points to the fact that it’s all already there. In Made in Britain, the young neo-Nazi Trevor and his social workers become, through these reverse shots, mirror images of one another; the abstract reproduction of fascism is evident in the concrete imagistic opposition of the carceral, education and under-employment system with the fascist youth. Such disinterested, oppositional images emphasise the roles of broader structures of the British state and economy rather than the lone, pathologized psychology of character achieved in Adolescence’s smooth flow. And if Clarke’s characteristic sequence shots were a reference for Adolescence, the former’s placement alongside or within tensely decoupaged sequences — a method of opposing the false freedom of fascist libido to its underlying contradictions — bear no resemblance to the latter’s forced method of dramatic heightening. Clarke’s is at least a fighting realism, one that might offer a different path to aesthetically registering the problems of fascism and violent misogyny and their grip on young men in Britain today 

Refrences