13 Reasons Why aired its second season under the premise of instigating conversation on mental health, violence within the school system, and the life saving value of recognizing the beauty of the individuals around you before it's too late. In reality, 13 Reasons Why aired another season culminating in a scene so beyond the boundaries of allowable or understandable that it borders on dangerous. This post is half rant, half my heart, and I apologize in advance for the sections in which fear or anger outweighs my ability to be compassionate. Also there might be spoilers, but I think they're worth it.
Season One:
I first read the book 13 Reasons Why the summer after losing a dear friend (and a piece of my heart), and the book itself was shockingly healing. The book negates the extremes of the show and teaches that sometimes just being in high school is enough to feel overwhelming and devastating. The book walks through Hannah Baker's honestly average teen experience, and through that average experience allows Hannah to become a connector for all teenagers experiencing anything that feels so heavy they think they can't continue. The message is a useful and essential one: you don't have to be experiencing the most extreme version of pain for you pain to be valid, crippling, or enough. Anything that feels so intense that the darkness feels unending is enough. Your pain is enough, because the fact that someone else might have it "worse" does absolutely nothing to negate the fact that you have value and your pain is worth hearing and voicing. The book also left behind the message that suicide is the ending to a conversation -- no matter how people may react to a person's absence, death means that person will no longer be there to experience it. Death ends healing, reconciliation, belief, hope, and the glimmer of a possibility that somehow, someway things might not be this bad for always. In the book, Hannah isn't a hero. She's just a human being that makes a choice, and the reader is given the honor of deciding whether or not that choice was correct. I was left wishing she had stayed.
FAST FORWARD TO THE SHOW. This show, targeted at teenagers, leaves behind the message that if your problem seems too overwhelming, death is a valid, attainable, and acceptable answer. The viewer watches Hannah get everything she ever wanted in life: her parents are sorry, the teenagers that made her life miserable get what's coming to them, and the boy she wants to like her spends every day regretting that he didn't tell her. Because we're watching a TV show, the viewer forgets that in real life this information is negated. Hannah doesn't know any of this, because Hannah is dead. 13 Reasons Why doesn't offer a conversation on mental health, it offers one out without any sort of alternative and without any depiction of what it might look like to deal with depression and suicidality in a healthy, communal way. The TV show amps up Hannah's experience to the extreme, removing the average teen's ability to relate and reinforcing the unspoken rule that "others have it worse, so we're not sure why you're complaining". Hannah's suicide has little to no negative consequences on people that didn't "have it coming". We don't see the emptiness of grief or the permanence of death. We see a young girl on a mission whose ghost ensures its completion. High school can be one of the most isolating experiences without any sort of external influence - giving the world a "hero" who uses suicide to manipulate and punish those she feels has wronged her sets an example for young humans who may have felt that Hannah was the first person who understood them. This doesn't even TOUCH on the trauma of the graphic scene that takes the audience step by brutal step through Hannah's suicide, providing a real time, no holds barred seat to Hannah cutting her wrists and being found by her parents.
Season Two: The Reason Behind This Post
When the rumors hit that season two involved a school shooting, I honestly thought (and hoped) they were joking. What I didn't expect was for the school shooting to revolve around a character who was seeking retaliation for being brutally sodomized using a broken broom handle by three jocks in the locker room while his head was held down in the toilet. Again, in true 13RW fashion, this scene in shown in real time, graphic detail with absolutely no boundaries between the trauma and the viewer. And I'll be brutally honest -- if I had known this was the character backstory and his motivation for walking into a cafeteria and wanting revenge, I might have held the door open for him.
It should NEVER become "normal" to turn on the news and see another story involving a kid killing other kids. But the reason I think 13 Reasons Why is so dangerous is because they've given the potential school shooter perhaps the only story that makes the audience wonder if this level of violence might just be acceptable. They haven't initiated a healthy discussion or discussed mental health, they've given the shooter a worthy cause. And they've done so in a way that traumatizes the audience alongside the characters. I have nothing but admiration in my heart for those who seek to start difficult conversations, but I honestly believe that this scene went so far beyond the limits of appropriate that it did nothing but harm. The production/direction team for the show argued that this level of crime against another human being needed to be shown in graphic detail because this level of horror should be experienced. I agree. It should. But showing it is unnecessary. Also, I would argue that this level of cruelty might not be happening everyday. This level of cruelty is rare. Rare enough that it might be considered extreme.
I don't know how to end this post, other than saying if you disagree or want to talk, PLEASE get in contact with me. If you're struggling, please talk to someone. Anyone. A friend, a counselor, the stranger on the bus. Know that you're seen and you're loved and your life has value, despite how horrible current circumstances may seem. Know that life is designed for change, and no situation is stagnant. Know that every morning you wake up and get out of bed is a sign of incredible strength, and if some mornings consist of you just opening your eyes and laying there breathing, that strength is just as apparent. Know that death isn't an answer, it's a door slamming. Know that there's hope, that there are people who can hope for you when you can't, and that the world will get better. And know that you are a beautiful, complex human bean, and you get to decide what breaks you.
-Bethany Elyse-
