Stephen Graham (left) and Owen Cooper in Adolescence Courtesy of Netflix Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Was there a more terrifying horror story this TV season than Adolescence? Fortified with a raft of Emmy-nominated performances and a one-take directorial design that leaves the viewer agape with admiration, the Netflix limited series takes aim firmly at that central audience for home viewing: parents. And it goes for the jugular, with its portrait of fathers and mothers clueless about what technology is doing to their kids, how sad and despairing and angry and radicalized and monstrous their kids are becoming as a result. Owen Cooper's Jamie would never have used the knife, the show heavily implies, were it not for being extensively cyberbullied and swimming in the toxic stream of online manosphere rhetoric. Related Stories Movies Netflix Sets 'Nouvelle Vague' Awards Season Release Dates -- Theatrical and Streaming -- and Categories (Exclusive) TV Emmy Anomalies: Their Shows Were Snubbed, But They Weren't Even the most tech-savvy parents - and Lord knows I'm not one - are susceptible to this kind of terror. Huge numbers of parents of children ages 10 and up grew up in a world without mobile phones and social media. Our brains are pre-Twitter; they predate TikTok. And so we look at our children - who are the closest creatures to ourselves we have - and worry, like Jamie's parents, that they're actually entirely alien to us: the eternal basis of moral panic, but here infused with new technological force. Or maybe a different kind of technological force. After all, technophobia in the movies goes back at least as far as Fritz Lang and Metropolis; and anxiety about kids and their crazy-slash-dangerous new machines - from jalopies to hi-fis - has been a staple of generation gap culture for well over a century. But all those stories about kids, for all their concerns, leaned into a sense of wonder, or joy, that seems glaringly absent these days. For those of us of a certain (parental) age, if there's one pop culture work that stands out as a testament to the dangers of technology in the hands of kids, it's the one in which Matthew Broderick sets out to play a video game and almost sets off a global thermonuclear war. WarGames is framed as a cautionary tale, but it isn't, really; at heart, it's about the possibility - the joy - of a kid with a keyboard who has worlds unimagined at his fingertips. It's true, among the iconic images of the movie are those simulations of missiles arcing over an intercontinental map. But the image that stays with you is the one of Broderick, with Ally Sheedy leaning over him, transported, rapt, by the possibility of what sits in front of them. Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick at a computer in the Cold War classic WarGames. MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection The highest-grossing film of the previous year - in fact, the highest-grossing film for the next decade - revolved entirely around a kid wanting a phone. That's admittedly a slightly unusual way of describing E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, but technology - as Spielberg frames it through Elliott's eyes - is a kind of ramshackle magic that offers the promise of love and transcendence. Presumably it's science, not magic, that makes those bicycles fly - maybe - but who can tell the difference? Drew Barrymore kisses E.T. in the 1980s touchstone. Universal/courtesy Everett collection For those who skew slightly younger, that touchstone unquestionably is The Matrix. (Notably, when one of the kids in Adolescence uses the term "red-pilled," and his father identifies it as coming from The Matrix, his son has no idea what he's talking about.) Because while Neo and his crew actually end up in a dystopian computer-vampire hellscape when they take the red pill - the term for a sense of brutal truth also adopted by the manosphere Adolescence comes to critique - that's not really what it is. As anyone who thrills to the movie knows, especially and perhaps primarily if you watch it when you're young, taking the red pill means you get to do awesome superhero bullet-time stuff in what the screen persists in making look like "the real world," even if, by the movie's logic, it's the ostensibly computer-generated illusion. I acutely remember overhearing a conversation between two roughly 10-year-old boys after seeing The Matrix Reloaded in the theater. BOY 1 That was awesome! BOY 2 That was amazing! BOY 1 Just one thing. What's a matrix? BOY 2 I don't know. WarGames and The Matrix, each in its own quite different way, follow the classic dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Computers and phones are doorways to Narnia: They allow for the possibilities of fantastic adventure - "fantastic" in both senses of the term. But in a world so t