What 13 Reasons Why is Really about - Madness in media

[Music] 13 Reasons Why is the greatest television series of all t- oh sorry I’m getting ahead of myself. 13 Reasons Why is a 2017 television series based on the 2007 novel of the same name. The TV version sparked a great deal of controversy and I will attempt to address some of its criticisms, all the while explaining why those same criticisms are the exact reasons I have nothing but love and admiration for this show. I've already covered 13 Reasons Why a couple of times, in a live speech and on my blog, in “13 Reasons Mental Health Advocates Need to Watch 13 Reasons Why”. Though I will readily admit that I put this video earlier on my schedule to try to coast off the release of season 2, the reason I keep coming back to this show is because there’s still so much more to say about it. I'm not even going to address the second season because I know before I watch it that either it says the same thing as the first one, and any commentary would be redundant, or it says something different and merits a separate video. In this video, all my thoughts on the show will be about season 1. Another reason I keep coming back to this story is because I keep seeing angry rants from so-called “mental health advocates” calling for petitions and boycotts against a new season they obviously haven't seen considering these rants started flooding in before it was released. Sometimes I wonder if these zealots ever saw one episode, because most of the arguments I’ve seen are straw man nonsense. If you honestly believe the main message of 13 Reasons Why is to “glorify suicide” then your criticism has nothing to do with the actual story being told, and the only thing you're really criticizing is your own bias. I’m gonna tell you what 13 Reasons Why is really about. The story begins with our title character Hannah Baker, a bisexual poet. You thought I was gonna say “high school student” didn't you? At this point she has been driven to suicide and already completed the act, but not before recording and distributing audio tapes about the thirteen (13) people in her life who contributed to her downward spiral. By beginning the story here, with Hannah's journey shown entirely in flashbacks, and Clay’s journey just beginning, the writer has laid out a thesis statement on the first page of the first episode: Hannah was killed. The basic premise of this story rests upon and reinforces the notion that suicide is caused by violence, cruelty, oppression, and apathy. The message is laid out from the very beginning and every moment that comes after is an argument to support that message. 13 Reasons Why is a persuasive essay, and it does a spectacular job of arguing its point. I don’t think you can really make a case that it’s not compelling, only that some counter argument has convinced you not to change your opinions in light of what you’ve seen. I mean come on, if nothing else you gotta give props to the editor, because this is one of those razor sharp movies where not a single frame is wasted. Except it's not a movie. It’s an expansive epic and they kept that *** up for 12 hours! But that doesn't matter, does it? Hardly anyone is criticizing 13 Reasons Why for its plot, its characters, pacing, realism, or really any aspect of it. The backlash against this show has nothing to do with what’s in the show. What makes 13 Reasons Why so controversial is what was left out. Hannah: “This was not a spur of the moment decision.” There are 13 reasons why this girl killed herself, and not a single one of them is a chemical imbalance. Her first attempt at dating prompts a wave of slutshaming, her only friend in a new town breaks up with her, the guy who broke them up paints a target on her back, a man rapes a woman right in front of her, then rapes her, and when she sees a counselor about it, he gaslights her. No one inside the story ever suggests that Hannah Baker was mentally ill and would have been fine if she just got on the right medication. The only time we ever see a psychiatric drug is a brief exchange in the second episode, and those were for Clay, not Hannah. Don’t misunderstand, I recognize that lots of people get great benefits from lots of different drugs, and I absolutely support their right to take those drugs. The context in this scene though, Clay’s incompetent mother thinks grief over a friend’s death is the time to bring in pills as your first offer? The writer almost seems to be mocking the suggestion. Tony: "The police in my neighborhood are a little different from yours.” I don’t think it was an accident that our two (2) most featured characters are both kind of generic white, cis, able-bodied people with just enough hipsterism to be entertaining. Clay may be Autistic and Hannah may be bisexual but the script never uses those words. Because that’s not the point. This isn’t about *** people being the only ones who get bullied, or neurodivergent people being the only ones who struggle with grief. You may take the cynical position that cinema is an industry of manufactured defaults and that we got white leads for the same reason every other show has white leads. I think that’s a fair conclusion; I don’t fault anyone for reaching it; but considering how much diversity there is in the prominently featured supporting cast, I don’t think that’s what happened. Allow me to offer an alternative: Hannah Baker had to be a white, cis, able-bodied, and trauma-notwithstanding neurotypical girl who doesn’t care for labels. She was carefully crafted this way to maximize the number of people who would be willing to believe her story, and minimize the number of people who are able to brush it off as something that only happens to “other people”. She’s not a victim of gentrification; she wasn’t bullied for being ***; and she didn’t kill herself because of a tragic disability nor because of a “mental illness” telling her to. She had things happen to her that could and do happen to anyone. And how about Clay Jensen? He’s a socially awkward straight white male who has to come to grips with the fact that although he’s never the “alpha” in a social group, as a straight white male he does still experience many unfair advantages; and before he realized that, his privileged position of ignorance caused more problems for someone he cared about. He starts off not understanding why his name is on the list. Clay: “Why the hell am I on this!?" and by the end he realizes that he made a lot of mistakes. Clay: "I just left her there! She needed me and I walked away!" Obviously not everyone who watches this show is a straight white male with a slight victim complex, but we can all take the opportunity to think back to a time when we should have done things differently. Who is the protagonist of this story? Clearly it must be Hannah, right? The title is a reference to her actions, which serve as the premise of the story, as well as the hook, the structure of the narrative arc and division of episodes, the center point that connects all the other characters, and the big event that sets the rest of the plot in motion. All of those things are true about Hannah, but they aren't necessarily what makes someone the hero of the story. In fact it's much more common in modern narrative styles to have an unsuspecting or unwilling hero who some catalyst thrusts into the action: see Frodo from Lord of the Rings, Neo from the Matrix, the version of Iron Man that kicked off the Avengers franchise, or Luke Anakin Rey Jyn and Han frickin’ Solo from you know what they’re from, back to Hannah. We see her journey but in cut-away snippets like an unraveling mystery. We see a world with her in it but we never really see the world through her eyes. We are mere observers trying to piece things together. We see her the way Clay sees her. That’s what the story is really about. Unless you're writing something experimental, you want your protagonist to be someone who the audience can relate to. Someone who they can see a piece of themselves in. We never really get that from Hannah. They tried to make her believable of course, but she isn't quite humanized because she has more a important function to serve. She is the catalyst. And who does she catalyze? You. The viewer. This was never meant to be about warning suicidal people not to kill themselves, because in all likelihood you are not Hannah Baker. You are Clay. ♫ ...and I never shed a tear, another sign of my condition. ♫ You may find this story discomforting, even frightening, for the same reasons Clay is frightened. Deep down you know you have made mistakes in your life, big and small as everyone has, but taking ownership of those mistakes is painful. It forces you to question your own moral character, forces you to grapple with your identity as a good person. And that’s super uncomfortable so instead you try your damnedest to find reasons why it wasn't your fault, it wasn't your responsibility, it should have been handled by a professional. But that professional's job title only exists because the world needed someone to clean up after your mistakes. The idea that you are responsible for the well-being of other people in your life is frightening because it would mean that every time you blew someone off to pass them on to a professional, you did something wrong. Really wrong. The kind of thing that only bad people do. I believe the purpose of art is to bring comfort to the afflicted, and affliction to the comfortable. 13 Reasons Why, both the novel and the show, are here to bring truth. A truth that we already know deep down but would never face directly unless a work of art shows it to us. If the truth makes you uncomfortable, then this work of art has done its job. ♫ ...the reason for the run and hide had totaled my existence ♫ Though Hannah serves as our narrator, she does not begin her journey as a robot that delivers exposition. So she does not say “I am thinking about suicide.” but as she racks up trauma after trauma, it becomes all she can think about. And yes, I am going to show that scene, because this commentary, like the story, would be incomplete and lack impact without it. I'm going to warn you before I do, I'm going to say the word “blood” enunciated very clearly and then countdown from 3. I think that’s reasonable. Moving on. ♫ ...shouted for someone to open the lock, I just gotta get through the door ♫ Hannah does reach out. She tries to be social and gets punished for it. She tries to ask for help, and gets dismissed. She explores every avenue she can think of, and tries as hard as SHE is capable of trying. But nothing works, and by process of elimination, suicide becomes the only option that SHE has available to her. ♫ Gotta knock a little harder ♫ So she does it. In the book, Hannah kills herself with pills. It works in that medium, but the TV writers knew they needed something more graphic. And so we are shown a pool of blood. As promised here's your countdown: 3, 2, 1, here it is. No music, no narration, no fanfare at all. Just a girl in a bathtub, dying, all alone. And you, the viewer, alone with your thoughts. The actor who plays Hannah, Katherine Langford, she said in an interview that it was written into the script the shot should stay "longer than is comfortable.” Are you uncomfortable? You should be. I’m uncomfortable. I had to look at this shot many times in order to edit this video, and it never stopped making me uncomfortable. Every time you send someone to a locked treatment center, every time you call a trans woman "sir", and every time you hear a desperate soul calling out for help but ignore them because you think someone else will probably do the job for you, I want you to remember this image. This is not glorious. This is a human being at the lowest she will ever be. A mother in disbelief, snapping at her frozen husband, each panicking in their own way, desperately trying to fix a problem that is beyond the point of fixing. There is nothing romantic about this scene. Not the way it's shot, acted, or written. It’s the inevitable tragedy caused by a cruel world that refuses to stop being cruel. For the first time in any fictional story I can think of that ever addressed the topic of suicide, this is art imitating life. Call this show what you will- melodramatic, vulgar, inconsiderate, irresponsible, it doesn’t matter. Whatever the word choice, it’s an excuse not to make a change to your own behavior. The story shows the world as it is now. If nothing changes, there will be many more Hannah Bakers in real life, and no I’m not talking about “copycats” who had already decided to kill themselves but then got the idea to leave audiotapes instead of paper notes. I’m talking about people being bullied, assaulted, gaslit, abandoned and neglected. Those are the causes of suicide. It IS that simple. If you want people in this world to stop coming to the conclusion that death is preferable to life, then life has to get better. And it doesn’t get better until we make it better. Oh boy that got emotional. But hey, when you're dealing with source material like this you gotta follow through. Hello dear viewers, thanks for joining me, and since you watched the whole thing I’m guessing you probably liked it, so how about you hit that “like” button? and the subscribe button, and leave a comment with what show, movie, or other piece of media I should cover next. Or just to have a conversation. I do respond to questions. I'm especially interested in feedback on the format. My channel is in desperate need of a series that isn't just a rip- [cough] homage to somethingsomeone else created. So let me know how I'm doing, and hopefully there will be many more to come. Bye!