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The Unusual Grey Space of 13 Reasons Why: Boundary-Pushing Storytelling vs. Irresponsible Media

Everyone and their mom (actually, especially their mom) currently has an opinion on 13 Reasons Why, the new Netflix original series about a teenage girl’s suicide. Before her death, Hannah leaves behind a series of audio tapes that detail why she killed herself and who was to blame. It’s an inherently dark premise, and it just gets darker as you learn more and dig further into Hannah’s mind and experiences.

I binge watched this show in two days. I hit it hard. I was immediately impressed with it (and its soundtrack, but I won’t go into that here). I couldn’t look away from the dark story, and by the end, my immediate impression was that this show was impactful, meaningful, shocking, and important. The takeaway message for me was “We can do better. We’re not doing enough.” It felt like such a strong statement, and I was on board. Then came the opinion pieces from all over the globe.

There are two arguments going on here:

a) 13 Reasons Why is an intensely realistic portrayal of what teenagers are currently facing in American high schools. It portrays how mental health resources can be scarce or ill-equipped. How social media has changed everything for teens in the face of public shaming. How politics and money can take precedent over justice. Even how young females in crisis are often dismissed as being “over-dramatic.” The show is brave in not shying away from the brutal reality of teen suicide. It teaches teens that their actions have consequences and affect others in ways they may not realize. Teenage viewers, especially, have claimed the depiction of high school culture is devastatingly accurate.

b) 13 Reasons Why romanticizes and glamorizes suicide. It has serious potential of triggering copycats or inspiring the use of suicide as revenge. It’s irresponsible to depict horrific scenes such as Hannah’s suicide and Jessica’s rape in such detail, given that the show is marketed to teens and young adults.

As a person, I generally have opinions that swing harshly one way, but on this, I can see both sides. 13 Reasons Why is a very rare piece of work that straddles the line between boundary-pushing storytelling and irresponsible media. And it just so happens that I care deeply about both of these issues. I am deeply against censorship - I think art and media should be able to say whatever they want through any visuals, language, or method they want. But, as we’ve come to uncover in the last several decades of storytelling, media has direct correlation to how our culture develops and sees itself, and more so every day. From violent video games to dark films to a toxic social media feed, they all have real-life consequences. The way we portray marginalized groups has real-life consequences. We have to be cognizant of that. We don't have a choice.

So where does brutally realistic art turn into irresponsible media that has real potential of damaging our culture? It isn’t black and white. There is no fine line. There are dozens of nuances and considerations to look at here. So we should. We need to.

Media, especially television, is just going to get more complicated around these issues from here on out. The medium is becoming increasingly uncensored, thanks initially to HBO, and now Netflix, which has taken unprecedented reigns on artistic freedom. It’s led to the creation of some magnificent art, available for viewing at any time from any place. But with 13 Reasons Why, we’re beginning to see the dangers and concerns that can arise from such blatant artistic freedom in television, especially television that is thematically on par with R-rated movies and that children and teens can now access completely on their own.

The complications around Hannah’s death scene could easily be its own essay. Before I finished the series, I came across a headline that read, “Is Hannah Baker’s death scene the most disturbing depiction of suicide?” I figured the writer was probably hyperbolizing, but then I watched the scene. It’s irrefutably disturbing. You cannot describe the scene without using that word, and it’s very possible it is the most disturbing depiction of suicide on film. I flinched, covered my eyes, and cried for Hannah and her family. But is “disturbing” automatically cause for outrage? Or is “disturbing” an effective motivator to frighten young people out of choosing suicide themselves, as executive producer, Selena Gomez, claims it does? I’m not sure it’s either.

This is where artistic storytelling vs. real-life consequences really comes to a head. Because if we’re looking at this as a 13-hour movie, a fictional story, a purely narrative experience, there is also the issue of viewer investment and payoff. I realize that sounds a bit fucked up because we’re talking about a young girl’s death, but she is fictional, and more importantly, this series wouldn’t be structurally sound without a death scene, at the very least. While wading through the episodes, I thought about how much of a disservice it would be to the show, the viewers, and the character of Hannah Baker if her suicide was glossed over. We spent 13 hours learning about Hannah and why she was going to kill herself. We knew she was going to kill herself. When you look at the story in a vacuum (which most of us do as we binge-watch it in our bedrooms, entrenched in the story itself, not yet the ramifications of the story), it requires that end payoff, climax, grounding moment, whatever you want to call it.

The converse opinion is that this scene is unnecessarily graphic, triggering, and drawn-out. This article by an LCSW claims that Hannah’s death scene is literally “a tutorial on how to complete the act of ending your life.”

When one side claims something can take lives, and the other side claims it can save lives, it’s a pretty good indicator that we have no idea where we stand as a people on freely-accessible graphic material. And I don’t think it has anything to do with seemingly irreconcilable differences of our country like political party. I think it’s just comes down to the fact that technology, art, media, and our children themselves, are all growing faster than they have in any other generation. And until we figure it out, children and young adults are going to continue to feel confused when they see these kinds of graphic material. And they will be seeing more.

Every day, television is turning more and more into an art form, rather than a frivolous, mind-numbing, time-waster like our parents drilled into us. And artistic television comes with much more responsibility than mindless television. The same way you theoretically can put whatever you want in an art gallery, doesn’t mean you should. TV is taking on new formats we aren’t used to, like 13-hour movies you can watch in one sitting, and it’s asking more out of us in the process. I strongly believe the answer to these quandaries of responsibility, triggering material, and cultural acceptability lies in media literacy. Alongside English, math, science, and art, children and teens need to start being taught how to interpret what they’re seeing on their screens every day. They need to understand what’s real, what’s fake, what’s fictional, how it affects them, how it doesn’t affect them, what they can learn from what they’re seeing, and how to better choose what they want to see, rather than the current mentality that they need to see everything.

I am innately compelled to fight for artistic integrity, but I also care deeply about mental health, and the fact that so many licensed therapists and mental health professionals have spoken out against the show does speak volumes. As licensed therapist and YouTuber, Kati Morton, points out in her generally negative review, I agree that Netflix should have taken its many liberties to slip mental health resources into the storyline of 13 Reasons Why. It may have forced the writers to stray from the original text, but it could have saved face for the show and helped to paint it as a show that does indeed advocate for awareness and education of mental health issues as we trust that they originally aimed to do.

The reality is perhaps Selena Gomez & Team got exactly what they wanted with 13 Reasons Why: enough shock value to spark endless conversation, free advertising, and revenue from Netflix. But in this climate of polarization, we need to start acknowledging when something is grey, when we’re not sure how to proceed, when something has us divided on a topic as serious as teen suicide. The fact that so many of us can’t handle even thinking about the suicide of Hannah Baker, a fictional girl, could indicate deeper cultural issues surrounding shame and fear. But in a world where mental health concerns are becoming increasingly more prevalent, especially in adolescents, precautions also need to be prioritized. We can work on both. I hope the outcry to 13 Reasons Why doesn’t lead to widespread censorship, but I also hope with each of these debates, we get closer to a culture that creates and values responsible media, art, and all of its intersections.

[withintherealm]

Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” Fucked  Me Up in the Most Devastatingly Unexpected Way (And I’ve Been Fucked Up A Lot)

I’ve been an epic Black Mirror fan since the first fucked-up episode involving a prime minister fucking a pig. I was astounded by the bluntness and willingness to just go there, no holds barred. I was so instantaneously hooked. There was no tearing me away. I’m not sure how anyone could start a Black Mirror episode and not finish it. I was hooked by the blatant imagination of the series, the analysis of the most primal human conditions told through stories that both critiqued our fucked up world and lovingly empathized with it. But no episode has done that better yet than Episode 4 of Season 3 newly-released by Netflix, “San Junipero.”

I didn’t expect it in the least, and that’s why it’s brilliant. “San Junipero” took longer than most episodes to start to make sense. I noted that as a trend in Netflix’s new season: the episodes were much less cold open and more of a slow burn that expects you to wrap your mind around the concept as you go. More than halfway through the hour-long episode, I was actually disliking it, disheartened by the fact that the episode is actually the least technologically realistic of any of the episodes thus far. It broke apart my perception that the series only told stories that could theoretically occur given our current and progressing technologies, and that disappointed me. Someone could probably argue with me that uploading your dead soul to a virtual heaven is within the realm of possibility, but, sorry, I don’t buy it. But that doesn’t mean the idea is not a goldmine of a thought experiment, delving into what the fuck would actually happen in this situation, blanketed warmly within an emotionally-investing, classically-told love story.

I guess I’m in love with this episode because I’m obsessed with death and what happens after we die. I’ve never really admitted that in plain speech because it makes it sound like I wear a floor-dusting trench coat and have Marilyn Manson lyrics tattooed on my back, but it’s true. More frequently than I probably should, I dig into those scary corners of my thoughts that look to (hopefully) 70 years from now, when I’m on the brink of leaving the earth, hoping that what comes next is tolerable. I’m not religious. I don’t want to accept the divisive and overly-simplified concept of heaven and hell. But what the hell else is there? This episode of Black Mirror has an answer.

San Junipero is a beautiful virtual city that people can choose to spend eternity in when they die. It also transports them to a different time period. But the impressiveness in the writing emerges in all of the subtlety and thought put into the city and its effects. It wasn’t lazily created as a perfect-vacation-paradise construct of heaven. It probably was to begin with by the characters and then the writers took the realistic ramifications into their own hands. “The Quagmire,” for example, is a club where residents go “to feel something,” indicating that San Junipero definitely leaves something to be desired, something missing, which I think we can all agree is an attribute we consider when thinking about any kind of construction of an afterlife. And then there’s Kelly’s backstory with San Junipero, which isn’t revealed until the last moments of the episode. Her daughter died at 39, before the technology had even given her the option of choosing San Junipero, and her husband died after, when the technology did give him the option. And he couldn’t choose it because his daughter couldn’t. This generational perspective is a humanistic touch that rounds out the narrative and forces us to consider what technology might force us to do and worse, who to leave behind.

On a different page, I think music fanatics get more out of this episode than others. My favorite moment of the entire episode was literally right after the episode ended, (which is poetic, unprecedented, and wonderful in itself). Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” leads into the ending credits, and it was like I was hearing the song for the first time. My jaw dropped. It was like this song had to have inspired the entire story, or it was the most wondrous accident. Visuals of Kelly’s dead soul being sucked into a computer-generated afterlife laced with lyrics like, “We’ll make heaven a place on earth / I reach for you and you bring me home / In this world we’re just beginning to understand the miracle of living / Maybe I wasn’t brave before but I’m not afraid anymore / They say in heaven love comes first.” The bright, synth-y pop brings on an undeniably familiar sardonic mood, but this moment overall is not the least familiar - it’s a miraculous gem. The episode ends with a Game of Thrones Hall of Faces-esque visual of tiny blue lights being distributed by a robot, representing all the dead souls currently jamming in 80s dance halls, or the equivalent of some other decade. It’s absolute, devastating poetry. A romantic, 21st century fantasy of death.

[withintherealm]

Within the Realm

Writing was my first creative love. I’ve dabbled in every art form in my quarter-century of life. My parents put me in dance for their own amusement, I assume, after I learned to walk. I started piano lessons at the age of 8 and dropped off by 13. I played percussion in my high school band. I sang in the choir. When I was 15, I began my intense and complete love affair with visual art. I tried out some theatre. I now play guitar. But when I was only 10, my love for creative writing was all-consuming. It was my identity. It was my dream to author a book and see it in Barnes & Noble one day. A strange dream for a 10-year-old, yes, but it was absolutely genuine. I wrote strange, incoherent stories on my 80s-era computer, and reveled in the idea that I was 10 and already had my dream cemented and my life figured out.

That identity stuck all through high school. Even though on the outside I was the weird art kid always who always had paint on her face, and I had odd roles in the school musicals, and I could usually be found hitting a large drum at football games, at the end of the day, I was writing. It was my own thing that I could do on my own and I didn’t have to prove a damn thing to anyone by it. Those Word documents on my Windows PC were mine. Those embarrassing LiveJournal accounts were mine. Those late nights typing nonsense were mine. It was my therapy. But one day I just stopped. Life happened. College started. I got tired.

And I got smarter, I guess. I started reading more mature books, I studied art history, I read in-depth articles in the way that is standard by our modern world. And suddenly my writing didn’t measure up. And I figured it was better to not write than to write something inferior.

I no longer think that. I think it’s better to write something than to not write at all. I’ve gained a lot of confidence in the last bit of my life, and I give so many fewer fucks. I’m starting to write again. Earlier in my life, I loved fiction, but in my adult life, I almost solely read nonfiction. Memoirs, essay collections, biographies, etc. I’m fascinated by what’s real. Critiquing art is something I was trained to do through college, and I guess I’m now pretty mediocre at it. Critiquing music, honestly, interests me more. I used to find it really scary, and it is. Baring your opinions without inhibition, like the drunk girl at a party giving an impassioned speech on why she just can’t get into Radiohead and all the guys ganging up on her because she’s wrong. (That’s me, by the way.) It’s hard. People will defend the honor of what they love to the death. But, like I said, so many less fucks given now. I’m currently reading “The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic” by Jessica Hopper, which intrigues me because it’s the exact material I’ve wanted to write for years. Jessica is a bit older than me, so her perspective is different, and I see there’s a space to be filled by female millennial music lovers and their personal experiences with loving music. I love hearing people’s experiences with music. What was the first record they bought, the first show they went to, how did it all converge into the musical identity they now assume? I grew up in a strange place in music. A place that is rarely discussed in-depth. And my feminist eye sees it in a much different way, and it’s telling me to tell the story.

I keep thinking about Hannah Horvath at the beginning of Girls, when she says she’s the voice of her generation while she’s high. (That part about being high is really important.) I think what Hannah was getting at was what this generation needs is every voice. We’re being taught by the public education system that we’re special snowflakes and our voices matter, but then we grew up on the Internet, where it’s all relative and how could our stories possible matter in an infinite, gaping abyss? I don’t buy the idea that the Internet is too saturated with voices. The Internet is too saturated with morons in comments sections, but real, genuine stories by real voices from our generation will always be within the realm of necessity and at the end of the day we’re all still just looking for someone who’s gone through what we’ve gone through.