Moral panic, here is your tape.
[This post contains spoilers of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why.]
In an article published May 1 by the New York Times, suicidologists and psychiatrists claimed that the series glamorizes suicide and mental illness and could even lead to a rash of copycat suicides, a very real phenomenon. On the same day, Vox pondered the “social responsibility of art.” Vulture astutely argued that 13 Reasons Why back-burnered its message about suicide to make for a more thrilling mystery. The Cut, doing what every outlet should have done, spoke to actual teens about what they think of the show and they responded with ambivalence, as well as a stated confidence about the sort of content (which, in 13 Reasons Why’s case, includes two rapes and a graphic suicide) they can or cannot handle. (My teen sources told me that they didn’t watch the show because they knew it would be triggering and they disapproved of the series’ handling of depression—an illness that, in the course of 13 episodes, is never really discussed.)
All adults who wrote these articles still don’t know what to make of this show. I don’t either. It’s not Degrassi; Degrassi, while dealing with equally dark subjects, is more careful and sensitive to the message it’s projecting. It’s not Skins, either, though the characters do say “fuck” and get drunk at parties, which we all agree is very edgy. 13 Reasons Why gives the impression that it’s trying be a little bit of both and, unfortunately, it fails on both levels. It is a less thoughtful Degrassi and a less interesting Skins—it’s a messy show that’s riddled with very upsetting, jarring moments like the lead character Hannah splitting open her wrists with a razor blade she stole from her parents’ store and bleeding to death in her bathtub. What’s worse, it doesn’t provide any tools for the young audience to fully comprehend what has happened.
“We worked very hard not to be gratuitous,” series creator Brian Yorkey said in a featurette about the series. “But we did want it to be painful to watch because we wanted it to be very clear that there is nothing, in any way, worthwhile about suicide.”
It’s a given that Yorkey—in adapting a beloved YA novel by Jay Asher—wanted 13 Reasons Why to be a sensitive depiction of teen life, but unsurprisingly, a lot of nuance can be lost when a suicide narrative collides with a revenge fantasy for the sake of exciting storytelling.
In the story, Hannah (a beautiful dead girl who is present even in her death) devotes each tape she leaves behind to a person whose wrongs have led her to end her life. While this could be read as a plea to viewers to be more sensitive to their classmates and understand how even the smallest cruel action can turn into something more damaging, it instead comes off as cruel and manipulative on Hannah’s part: She airs her grievances, but gives her offenders no chance to make amends. The show’s other main protagonist, Clay—the Romeo to Hannah’s Juliet—finds himself in a state of emotional agony after receiving the tapes because he’s so convinced that he’s done something that’s led his high school crush to end her life. (Again, depression is hardly mentioned at all throughout the series.)
One thing that is intriguing in regards to the series are the liberties Yorkey and his writers took in straying from the source material. In Asher’s book, Hannah dies of a pill overdose instead of slitting her wrists. Clay mostly experiences the tapes alone, learning—through Hannah’s narrative—the harm which boys his age can unwittingly cause their female classmates. While the show entangles Clay in a conspiracy that involves death threats, physical assaults, and what almost promises to turn into a school shooting plot for Season 2 (which Netflix just green-lit), the book is more about Clay learning that everything he thought he knew about Hannah were his own projections and, really, he didn’t know her very much at all.
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