Review

Culture

Film & TV

Masculinity

19 March 2025

4 min read

Adolescence reflects our darkest corners, here's how we can respond

Each one-take episode is an exercise in empathy.

Lauren Westwood

Lauren writes on faith, community, and anything else that compels her to open the Notes app.

A father walks with his son away from the camera, his hand on his son's shoulder.

Netflix.

‘Is it really that bad out there for our children?’

This was the text my mum sent our family group chat following episode four of Adolescence, the astonishing new drama from Netflix. Anyone familiar with previous work from Stephen Graham will know to expect grit and challenge, but Adolescence is different.

Adolescence paints a stark picture of a world gone wrong. We observe this in the Miller family who, within a few minutes, stand and watch as their lives are upended when their teenage son and brother is arrested on suspicion of murder.

Technically, it is remarkable. The script is stunning. The cast are incredible. The direction is impeccable. The camera perceives the action in one continuous take, and the viewer receives this without a single edit. We watch each second of the hour-long episodes with precise focus, curiosity, tension and compassion. As the camera is moved, so are we. We become immersed in the spiralling realities of the detective, of the disbelieving father, of the psychologist, of the scrawny boy who wets his bed when armed police raid his bedroom. We pass person to person and take on their emotional load, even for a moment. These are not simply tug-on-the-heartstrings moments, watching Adolescence is an exercise in empathy.

These one-take episodes flawlessly capture extended scenes of flawed humanity. Minute by minute, we learn more about Jamie Miller, played by Owen Cooper, the thirteen-year-old boy at the centre of it all. His parents are loving. He gets on with his sister. He is polite to the nurse at the police station. Jamie appears like a typical young boy. A worn teddy-bear sits atop his star-adorned bedding that matches the wallpaper. His friends are impish, awkward and they are the usual levels of unkempt. He seems just like any other kid.

These small acts bring light to dark places, and demonstrate how the viewer might live right in a world where much feels wrong.

As the plot unfolds, we see how darkness, and Jamie’s anger, lurks behind a digital life. Mostly hidden in emoji codes and Instagram comments, it is only in episode three when a stream of explicit misogyny pours from Jamie’s mouth. It emerges that his development has been intercepted by exposure to toxic masculinity, incel ideology and the incessant rage of ‘the manosphere.’ We witness the unravelling of lives that are disconnected despite sharing the same roof. Just as the uninitiated are confused by terms like ‘red-pilled’, Jamie’s parents are stunned at why their child would commit such a crime.

Adolescence is a sobering watch because it holds up a mirror to a bleak picture of society. In the same week that Netflix released the series, a teenage boy was sentenced to life imprisonment for the fatal stabbing of a fifteen-year-old girl in the London borough that neighbours my secondary school.

But it is also a rallying cry for social response. The ultimate aim isn’t for the audience to be depressed into stagnancy, but to consider afresh the responsibility we have for each other, particularly for the generations coming behind us, and to take action in our communities. When my mum asked about the reality for ‘our children’, she was supporting this concept of collective responsibility and care for the next generation.

As Adolescence reflects our darkest corners, so does it present those among us who are trying to connect and show up in love for struggling young people. We see this in the detective who goes to the chip-shop with his son in an attempt to build their relationship, and also in the psychologist who carries around a container of mini-marshmallows for Jamie’s hot chocolate. These small acts bring light to dark places, and demonstrate how the viewer might live right in a world where much feels wrong.

The glimpses of positive intergenerational connection in Adolescence should serve as a compelling reminder to churches, a remaining shared space where generations collide. We learn so much from each other that we simply cannot gain from siloed, disconnected living. At its best, the Church provides a space that allows people to break out of their usual circles and habits, to be loved and to love, to be challenged and corrected, to develop a connection to God and to his creation.

To consider again the question, ‘Is it really that bad out there for our children?’

Quite possibly. But in the reflecting of light, however dim it may seem, we are presented with the possibility of something better. As generational barriers come down, we can move beyond empathy and into action.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.