Right at the end of the messy Season 3 of 13 Reasons Why (Streaming on Netflix), a character quotes Tolstoy’s War and Peace to say (without attribution of course), “Let the dead bury the dead.” And even though we are supposed to make do with that statement, this season like the other two before it, leaves you with a chaotic pastiche of graphic rapes, emotional abuse, trauma triggers and general futility.
Sure, the series brings home the epidemic of insensitive schooling systems where bullying, slut shaming, sexual abuse, rape culture, entitlement over female and occasionally male bodies go unaddressed.
As also the toxic celebration of aggressive jocks, and the cycle of misogyny in families. And the lack of support for young girls cornered by shame and pain but in the end, the series fails to serve either victims or survivors because it doesn’t really make it clear just what young girls are supposed take away from a story like this.
Not to mention, convoluted messaging even though the makers offer crisis counselling tools before each episode. Season 3 also discusses homophobia, the trauma immigrant families face, the terrifying reality of teen abortions, of opioid abuse but in the end, the question remains if the series offers any positive answers to the women whose trauma and violation fuels most of its narrative.
Season 3 is particularly dense because it offers dangerous apologia on behalf of rapists, potential school shooters and complicit men. With the one size fits all explanation that “hurt people hurt people, ” so why not try and see why they hurt people. Most disturbing is the inability of the series to understand the complexity of the issues it addresses. Like the many reasons mass shootings take place in the US and why they are mostly helmed by white men.
Though filmed at a time when racial tensions are at a boiling point in the US and white boys and men with guns are blowing up people in clubs, in school corridors, in super markets and churches, the series seems overly keen to promote the idea that dangerous men can be psychologically disarmed.
So in Season 2, we had that hugely irresponsible scene where Clay (Dylan Minnette), the saint and the saviour of the series, confronts Tyler (Devin Druid), an armed shooter and succeeds in helping him to get away before the police can get to him.
In a chat with the audience post the series, one of the makers conveyed that most young shooters have a history of abuse and damage preceding their tipping point and things could turn out better if , “we all just took care of each other.” Point taken but he makes no mention of the right wing propaganda, the misogyny and the hate for minorities and immigrants that most white mass murderers are influenced by. And he fleetingly mentions the easy access to guns as a major contribution to gun violence in the US.
The series remains blissfully unaware of the fact that sometimes people hurt people just because they can. Yet, white male privilege in the series be it embodied by the main antagonist Bryce (Justin Prentice) or by the habitually cruel Monty (Timothy Granaderos) is contextualised to show us how they have felt unheard and unloved in their families.
Justin (Brandon Flynn ),another messed up young jock who plays a part in the death of Hannah Baker in Series 1 and is meekly complicit in the rape of his girlfriend, is also depicted as a victim who has been scarred by abuse. Notice this also. Marcus (Steven Silver), the black guy in the primary group of bullies is quickly disposed off after his video with a stripper is leaked. He meekly gets bombed with paint, gets blackmailed and leaves the school and we don’t ever see his back story as to why he became an insensitive groper.
The most horrific thing Season 3 attempts is to try and humanise Bryce, a poor little white rich boy who in his own words has raped half a dozen girls . Yet, say the makers in a discussion post the series that if we see people as monsters, we let them become more powerful than they are. So he is shown as an adorable little boy who shares his lunch with a poor class mate and becomes his life long friend. The same friend whose girl friend he rapes eventually after pushing him out of the way.
But hey, his parents were always absent and he was afraid that his mother preferred her white carpets to him. But eventually, he grew up to lord over the big mansion where he then went on to rape another unwilling girl in a hot tub and pushed her already bruised self-image over the edge, contributing to her suicide. But wait. He wants to change for the better. With yoga and wall painting sessions with his mother. A passionate encounter or two with the daughter of a househelp. By trying to make amends and help those he has hurt. So what if that flicker of self-awareness comes after he has lost most of his friends, his father has turned his back on him, and in his new school, he himself faces the kind of bullying he had once put numerous people through.So what if he is enabling drug use among friends occasionally, vandalising homes and then getting triggered at the sight of his former girl-friend hugging a rival and then breaking his knee out of jealousy during a game.
As we watch Bryce being humanised with tears and loneliness and remorse, we are reminded of the US media’s by now notorious and familiar summation of white crime as a mental health issue.
Lest we think the series is veering towards genteel racism, we have a black narrator in this season who faces no discomfort in easing herself into everyone’s secrets.
And just why aren’t we done yet with the hunter vs hunted narratives full of predators and victims and gratuitous violence that have become commonplace on so many streaming platforms? How long will we continue to see the brightly lit, naked window metaphor (seen most recently in Ashwin Saravanan’s film Game Over and also in the psychological horror fest, You) with the oblivious woman framed inside like an object of desire? Being watched, preyed upon? The fact of her psychological and physical vulnerability emphasised again and again?
And her story twisted and usurped by others? In 13 Reasons Why, take Hannah’s arc in Season 1 and 2. She remains a victim without meaningful closure whose only gesture of defiance is her legacy of 13 tapes naming and shaming the abusers of her trust in life, love and friendship. And the excessively elucidative, graphic nature of her suicide scene had to be edited out eventually in Season 1 because it was was irresponsible and severely trauma inducing.
The women in the story, when not being violated, serve primarily as triggers for revenge. Clay almost loses his mind trying to find ways to avenge Hannah’s death and feels personally violated when he finds out that both she and Ani (Grace Saif), the new girl he is beginning to fall for, had sexual relationships with men he doesn’t approve of.
In Season 3, Jessica (Alisha Boe) and her team of gender activists do make a few placards and shout slogans about dismantling patriarchy and strip on a sports field but the gesture has a theatrical quality rather than a meaningful impact.
There is one hugely moving scene where male and female survivors stand up in public to own their pain. And another where the psychological trauma of rape is articulated poignantly by Jessica when she tells a contrite Bryce, that no matter how hard she tries to put the past behind her, all she can remember is her inability to breathe when he was violating her.
But how does she reclaim her body and sexuality? By falling back into a passionate relationship with Justin, the same boy who still has a drug abuse problem and who was complicit in her rape. When called out for her hypocrisy by a gender activist, she says tamely, “It is complicated.”
There is a scene in Season 2 where Jessica hasn’t yet fallen back into love with Justin, but is struggling still with her feelings. We see her with Hannah’s mother who has not just lost her daughter to suicide but her husband to an extra-marital affair. Both women have no reason to wistfully long for the men who have grievously hurt them but they do because you see, that is how love is. Without filters.
This series shows us again and again that women are drawn to men who can potentially destroy them. So Bryce’s girlfriend in Season 2, keeps proclaiming her love for him privately and in public till it becomes impossible to ignore that he is a serial rapist. Ani, the new girl in school and the narrator of Season 3, considers Jessica as her friend but has no issues establishing a physical relationship with the latter’s rapist because she couldn’t resist a lonely, desperate for redemption Bryce. Because women often function as rehabilitation centres for damaged boys who cannot help themselves.
There is no end to the empathy offered to sociopaths in Season 3 and even an infatuated boy who almost gets his bones broken by Monty, not only forgives him but agrees to have a relationship with him.
After the unexpected deaths of each of the two antagonists who have devastated countless lives, this point is floated, “he was a human being and didn’t deserve to die.”
One of the makers said in the post Season 3 chat that their attempt was not to condone the evil these characters unleashed but to explore what they could have become. This idea that violent men can be rehabilitated without stern legal and psychological intervention with only empathy is dangerous.
There are multiple examples of women failing to notice warning signs and losing their lives when they keep circling back to the very men who have damaged them. A few therapy sessions that Bryce undergoes and his lenient sentence could have been enough to change years of sociopathic behaviour?
Also notice, how even the allies of the women, in the series begin to mirror the bullies at some point . Clay cannot accept the fact that Hannah and Ani chose other men over him or that his idealised version of these two girls is not who they really are. Zach Dempsey (Ross Butler), the voice of sanity despite a few failings, ends up being his worst version in one pivotal scene. Violent and irredeemably cruel.
Alex (Miles Dominic Heizer) who was so traumatised by Hannah’s death that he shot himself in the head, begins to pump steroids in Season 3 to look like the jocks he so hated because the girl he loves has chosen one of them. And for a brief period, he even befriends Bryce again, even though he had raped two of his best friends.
We are even subjected to his graphic trysts with a sex worker who tries to counsel him into accepting himself. In the end, his inability to control his anger in a key scene, establishes that for all the talk about empathy the show ladles out, it really is just about shock value. About leaving situations open ended so another season can be milked out of the story.
Watching Uyare ( Rise), a 2019 Malayalam film directed by Manu Ashokan , brought home the intrinsic problem with 13 Reasons Why.
While excruciatingly detailing crimes against women, it shows us not one female character who has the fiery self-determination that Parvathy Thiruvothu’s Pallavi Raveendran displays in the film. When being gaslighted by her attacker’s father who wants her to forgive his son, she quietly sits down before him, takes off her head scarf and lets the horror of her acid scarred face sink in. He gets up and leaves without a word. Or take her encounter with her attacker in a plane that shows that she owes him no empathy. None.
The scenes firmly establish that there are certain scars that need to be accounted for. That scene where Pallavi visits the Sheroes Hangout and sees an acid attack victim applying lipstick is both poignant and empowering.
There is not one moment in the three seasons of 13 Reasons Why where you connect this deeply with a woman’s inviolable power no matter what has been taken away from her.
Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.