Adolescence

Wild show that tackles some very important themes about youth culture. Impressive cinematography, obviously, but the performances are also insane, could you imagine hearing the director yell “cut!” and having to film the whole episode from start again.  This show did remind me of something I personally was witness to in VGS (or high school). Not exactly the same but that anxious feeling came back when watching this and I learned that I haven’t thought about that night in years, so here’s a storytime I suppose: When I was 15 - 16, a friend of mine got stabbed in the neck outside of a party. More a revue party that was organised together with our school. The guy who did it took off and we were unsure of what had happened, at first. My friend who had been stabbed didn’t even react at first, no scream, nor did he collapse. It was like he didn’t realize what had happened. He just walked back toward us, eerily calm, until he stepped into the light. That’s when we saw it: blood and wayyy too much of it pouring from his neck.  We rushed to him. I shoved my jacket against the wound while my other friend called an ambulance. But before it could arrive, a taxi pulled up. The driver took one look at us and yelled for us put him in the cab and we loaded him into the backseat, and one of my friends jumped in with them, leaving us standing there on the curb, covered in his blood on our hands, shirt, jacket, everything. The police showed up about five minutes later, questioning everyone still there. Miraculously, my friend survived. He lost a terrifying amount of blood, but that taxi driver got him to the hospital just in time. If we’d waited for the ambulance, he probably would’ve died.   The Aftermath  The worst part came later - back at school. Our school was pretty mixed: kids from western Oslo (the wealthier side) and eastern Oslo (traditionally poorer, with more immigrant families). The guy who stabbed my friend was unfortunately Somali, if he had been white this probably wouldn’t have gotten this out of hand, and almost overnight, the vibe shifted. What used to be a chill, easygoing place turned tense and ugly. Racist slurs got thrown around. Fights broke out constantly. It was a shitshow for months.  I got interrogated by the police, sure, but that wasn’t the end of it. Friends of the guy who did it started threatening me and at its worst the police visited our school every day to make sure something wouldn’t kick off. The school I’d known before was gone. That one night didn’t just change my friend’s life. It changed everything. My point is that violent acts like this can and, usually do, disrupt the social harmony to a point of complete collapse and can domino into larger societal issues as you see in this show and with my school. And, it’s obviously an issue but also somewhat fascinating how quickly it can snowball.