K-SCORE: 45
Creator: Brian Yorkey
Based on: Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Starring: Dylan Minnette, Katherine Langford, Christian Navarro, Alisha Boe, Brandon Flynn, Justin Prentice, Miles Heizer, Ross Butler, Derek Luke, Kate Walsh, Devin Druid, Michele Selene, Brian d’Arcy James
Spoiler Level: Major
We seem to like high school stories as a society. There are a lot out there. High school students have adult brains and bodies, but they only recently got them, and they don’t know how to handle them very well. They tend not to treat each other very well and they tend not to know how to temper their strong emotions and stay level-headed because they have very bad senses of perspective. High school feels like the whole world. A lot of comedy and a lot of drama can be plucked from that. There’s a Family Guy clip that I love that makes fun of One Tree Hill, where they change the intro song to sing, “High School is a serious thing. These problems matter,” only sarcastically. And a lot of adults remember the mistakes they made in high school and they think about them a lot, so these four years in the development of a person get blown out of proportion. 13 Reasons Why is the epitome of that. It’s taking the problems one faces in high school and it’s shoving extremely potent real problems in alongside the completely trivial bullshit and claiming there’s a very important connection. As a piece of entertainment, 13 Reasons Why is barely worth evaluating because the creators of the show don’t care whether you like it or not, just whether or not you were paying attention to their message. With regard to that message, I applaud the courage of the show to talk about some of these things at all, I’m frightened at the amount it fails to address and the perspectives it refuses to give, left in disbelief with regard to the reality it portrays, and infuriated by what I believe will be the byproduct of this show and stories like it taking this mainstream yet unhealthy and unrealistic stance on issues like teenage sexuality, rape, assault, bullying, and suicide.
In a normal review, this paragraph would be what I focus on. As a form of entertainment to make those watching intrigued, excited, and amused, 13 Reasons Why is pretty bad. It’s entirely too long. It has no levity, no sense of humor, and a consistently dreary tone, which makes it impossible to gauge the relative power of more or less dramatic moments. It has too many jock characters, and hates them all. There’s a Hispanic, gay, mechanic/oracle character that offers next to nothing to the story as he’s not connected to the events and not needed to further the premise. The show is split 50/50 with flashbacks to the high school in the time subject Hannah Baker was still alive and the present with her friend Clay and others listening to the tapes where she explains why she killed herself. What happens in the past has less drama than it should because the outcome, her suicide, is a foregone conclusion. What happens in the present is largely irrelevant. It’s little more than characters coming to terms with their greatly varying degrees of wickedness and guilt, usually by taking long silent walks in their neighborhoods. There’s also the story of the lawsuit, where the parents of Hannah are suing the school for creating an environment that led to their daughter killing herself. The outcome of this lawsuit is left off entirely at the end, and thus it too becomes irrelevant. It’s just a device to say, “the truth comes out,” which could have been done by having the mechanic/oracle or Clay emailing Hannah’s pre-suicide recordings to the whole town. The show is manipulative and contrived beyond belief, twisting the details of its circumstances to send its narrative to exactly the place it wants to regardless of the plausibility of those circumstances. At one point, a school administrator and a police officer perform an illegal search and seizure on an entire classroom and find drugs on Clay, who is being framed, and the severity of both of those problems is never addressed, to the point where it’s extremely bizarre and irresponsible. It’s decently well written and acted in the sense that the individual scenes aren’t broken or stilted and the characters are mostly consistent. But it’s not enjoyable at all, with a dreadful pace, with no dramatic stakes, and with no conflicts that keep pressing the story forward. But again, the creators could care less.
They have a message and that message is about bullying, slut-shaming (as its been branded), and failure to prevent suicide through inaction. In the show, Hannah Baker leaves 13 tapes for 13 different characters (though sort of only 11) where she describes how and why their relationships went so poorly, all of which contributed to her tremendous sadness and eventually her suicide. The tapes for Justin, Jessica, Alex, Clay, Courtney, Marcus, Tyler, Zach, Ryan and Bryce have to do with sexual encounters that left Hannah embarrassed. That’s a ridiculously huge percentage. Until the actual incidents of rape, these moments are so petty and convoluted that I was laughing at the show for the way they handled them. To conflate a poem that briefly and vaguely alludes to masturbation with suicide - absurd. And then the show makes the richest white male in the school an actual, shove you down, pull off your underwear and rape you rapist. But the message seems pretty clear from the start. Women are victims. The young men in the high school just can’t get enough of any little incident that shows their female classmates in a sexual light and they pounce like predators onto the prey of women who have no ability to handle their own sexuality. Men, because of who they are by nature, need to have their sexual drives caged, their gazes averted, and probably their dicks cut off just to be safe. Women, because of who they are, need to be constantly protected, given safe places to explore their own sexuality at their own speed, and not engage in anything that makes them uncomfortable. Both are equally ridiculous. No one is comfortable having sexual experiences for the first time. The idea that one group is evil and one is fragile is not only false, it’s dangerous to propagate, and that is very much the agenda of 13 Reasons Why. If you think I’m exaggerating, just watch the 30 minutes segment after the final episode entitled “Beyond the Reasons” where the creators and actors will tell you exactly what their agenda was in case you couldn’t figure it out from the fiction itself. That things is ten times worse than the show. That thing would get a K-SCORE of 1. There’s little worse from an artist or artists than feeling the need to explain exactly what a piece means; it represents having no faith in a group of viewers to think for themselves, and it’s representative of how our educators actually treat our youths. Now, if you think that I’m being an asshole who is condoning rape, go fuck yourself. Even when I was in high school, if a friend of mine was raped, I’d report the rapist to police, I’d figure out how to get my friend help, and if that didn’t work, I’d soak a rag in ether, place it over the rapists mouth, put them in the trunk of my car, rent an off-site storage facility, and disintegrate the rapist in acid, not bothering to shoot them or slice their throat before plunging them into the chemical that would slowly disintegrate their flesh. Then I’d take my chances with the police, feeling confident because they were useless before. But that experience has never happened to me. I’ve never known a rapist. I’ve never known a girl who was raped. I’ve known people who had better and worse sexual experiences, people who had to aggressively rebuff people who wanted them, people who were hurt on both sides of the experience of rejections, and we can do things to improve all of that. I did know a girl who lied about being pressured to take her top off at a high school party and got two innocent kids from my high school expelled, and even in the unreality where they were guilty, they weren’t rapists - they were horny teenagers, pressuring a girl to show her tits. To fail to accept that these incidents don’t come on a sliding scale of human experiences is just outrageous. And the most frustrating thing about this concept is that the reason I’m told that these millions of women that are supposedly getting raped aren’t coming forward through the healthy channels is because of all the victim shaming. Who are all these people that are overtly pro-rapist and anti girl who gets raped? Find me these men that are actually uttering the phrase, “she was asking for it,” which I hear in every story and have never heard in reality. Find me these slut-shamers that are actually making girls feel ashamed of their promiscuity. You can claim I have a skewed perspective if you want, but everyone can only see the world through their eyes, and I see the constant press of a narrative that isn’t reflective of what I witness in reality. Furthermore, aggressive, drama-heavy fiction that pushes this message has the detrimental side-effect of making both young men and young women ashamed of who they are naturally, afraid of experiences that are already uncomfortable, and embarrassed and confused for wanting things their hormones make them want. Pay close attention to our fiction. I’ve been throwing around a new theory for a couple years now. There are two types of sexual relationships in stories now: female-initiated and rape.
Yet even if you accept the rightness of the message of the constant raping going on in our high schools and the constant bullying that is centered around female sexuality, 13 Reasons Why is monstrously unfair in its omission of the essence of suicide, especially the suicide of a young girl. There are no reasons for Hannah Baker to have killed herself, and the show is blaming 13 living people and giving 13 or more reasons that she felt she had to do it. No amount of bully and not even the rape justify that action. I’m to believe that she became so miserable and so hopeless that she felt no future where she was happy was plausible, but obviously that’s not the case, not in this fictional suicide nor in other ones. Such, hopefully rare, cases are almost entirely about PARENTS recognizing a dangerous level of emotional damage in their child and imparting the perspective that, as I mentioned earlier, teenagers are so bad at. High school is not a tenth as serious as we make it out to be. If there are two people besides Hannah herself that are most to blame for her killing herself, it’s her mom and dad for not knowing enough about their daughter to know that she was far from okay. They don’t have tapes dedicated to their actions and inaction; they didn’t even know she made tapes. And I can’t even blame them entirely either. It’s cruel. They cared about their daughter. They just had one who hit a bad streak in school, was emotionally unstable, and very secretive. Sometimes a tragedy is just a tragedy and the best reason to describe why it happens is: for no good reason whatsoever. 13 Reasons Why is uncomfortable with that idea, of the universe being as naturally chaotic as it is, and so it’s pointing fingers and blaming everyone for their imperfections. “We all have to be better,” says Clay at the end. I notice he doesn’t qualify what level of quality would be acceptable to him. If he’d said, “We should all strive to be better,” than I would have agreed with him. But there’s a really big difference there. The worst part of this show by far (and if there’s only one take away from my whole essay here about it, please let it be this), is that I believe it makes teenage suicide more likely, not less likely. Despite the placards with suicide prevention hotlines and resources for people struggling, the essence of the premise takes the act of suicide out of the hands of the person holding the lethal weapon. It wants it to be akin to societal homicide. And for those teenagers that are actually so depressed that they want to kill themselves and believe that the whole world is either overtly against them or doesn’t care about them, they can use this show as support for their ideas that taking their own life casts appropriate fingers of blame on all those other people who failed them. Have you met teenagers? Feeling like the whole world is against them is pretty common. Furthermore, a part of such people will know that they won’t be around to see just how guilty all these victimizers around them really are, so then the suicide looks like a vidicating option, righteous and freeing. There’s a damn good reasons our society propagates the message that suicide is a selfish act. People don’t want to die and be remembered as being selfish cowards. If you take that away, and turn it into something courageous that can draw attention to the pain you were in and throw it on others, then suicide could become a tool for the desperate and the miserable. Do not, do not do that.
There was one thing about 13 Reasons Why that I liked, even though I wish it showed fifty times more wisdom in its approach of its difficult subject matter. That was the way it showed the repercussions of teenagers being closed off individuals, unable to come forward to each other and to adults about how they’re feeling. The characters aren’t so villainous (with the exception of Bryce) that they’re incapable of loving and supporting one another; they just don’t talk about things honestly. If Clay had told Hannah that he loved her, Hannah would have reciprocated those feelings, and vice versa if she had told him, and then they would have gotten to experience that honest young love time that is, for many, the very best part of being in high school, which is otherwise a pathetic, tone-deaf, self-obsessed, boring, oppressive, freedom-hating institution. Ah… all joy and making out and going to see stupid movies together and bitching about classwork and sneaking into each other’s rooms… If only they’d been open about their feelings. But they weren’t because they were cowards. Kids, don’t be a bunch of fucking cowards.