13 Reasons (Editorial)

"13 Reasons Why" is a Netflix original series that follows the life-after-death of high school junior Hannah Baker whom creates 13 separate audio recordings on 7 cassette tapes that she leaves behind before committing suicide. The series, based on the same-titled book written by Jay Asher, touches on a lot of super heavy points ranging from the trials and tribulations of being a teenager in high school all the way to the aforementioned teen suicide with a lot of heavy points in between. This article will have a lot of spoilers, so if you have not yet seen the show but want to, then I'd urge you not to read after this paragraph. Try and get through the pettiness of the first couple episodes, and watch the entire series. I think it's an important show to watch/book to read for all ages due to one overarching theme of mental health that the show does its best to drive home. The article will also touch on many of the other important themes, as well as address characters and plot points that sufficed or not to tie the show together.

Where to begin?

Like Clay Jensen, the lead male character played by Dylan Minnette, who slowly, methodically, and painfully listened to all 7 tapes over the "slow" period of about a week, I watched the show over the course of about the same time frame. And then it took me another week to write all of this. The first episode, or "Tape 1, side A," left me not so curious about much. Most of the major characters were introduced one way or another, and I had already learned, albeit accidentally through FB posts/convos that at least one rape takes place during the show, and after the first episode I correctly suspected who the rapist was. But I'll get to that in another tape...
Hannah Baker is portrayed as an equal parts shy and equal parts confident high school sophomore that maintains purity in every sense. As the story is written, the audience is meant to take what Hannah says in her tapes as truth; however, right from the get-go she incorrectly blames Justin, her new love interest, for spreading a racy picture of her to a bunch of students through text. What she doesn't know is that the person who pressed the send button on Justin's phone, where the pictures were archived, ended up being the true antagonist of the show and the worst piece of shit in the world. As a brief aside: For me, this only makes Justin a little less of a shit. I hated his character at the beginning, and, although he had his moments where we thought he might turn into a decent human being, I hated him at the end, too.

Through the first 4 episodes/2 tapes I went from liking and understanding Hannah from a "Well, shit, looks like I'm experiencing high school as fast as it is experiencing me," kind of way to then disliking her entire character because of her reasons for putting certain people on the tape. No one should be able to watch this series or read Asher's book without meticulously keeping the perspective that this girl has already committed suicide during the time that Clay is listening to the tapes. After all, she  introduces a few tapes with that just in case anyone forgot, for one, and for another, it's hard to watch without thinking "Really? She's citing these reasons for her suicide while, in the process, mentally and emotionally ruining lives, too?!" For me, it was a challenge to listen to Hannah's tapes while keeping in perspective that this person can't be helped. These tapes are not a cry for help, because she's already dead. These tapes are revenge tapes. And as Asher himself proclaims in an interview with Barnes & Nobel--a series the book-store franchise calls "Meet the Writer" that he did in 2009: Hannah is not exonerated. (Citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w6N9qaZ5cc)

After the first 4 episodes, the show really begins to take form. The character development and writing is superb, and upon doing some of my own research, I noticed that there were 6 different directors and 10 different main writers during the course of the show's production. The director/writer pairings for episodes 5 through 12 were perfect. And since I know now that the writer of the first 2 episodes is the same writer as the 13th episode, I'm thinking that the problem is the writer for those episodes. Alex Standall, played by Miles Heizer, is overall my favorite character, while my least favorite character goes to, you guessed it, Courtney Crimsen--which has nothing to do with the actress. Michele Ang played the part well, the character was just the worst kind of on-the-fence-between-right-and-wrong-self-centered character I've seen since Cardinal Wolsey from the King Henry VIII based historical series "The Tudors." Clay Jensen didn't deserve to be on the tapes at all, not even to tell him he shouldn't be there, which is basically the only reason he's there. Clay is on Tape 6, Side A--or Episode 11--and after listening to the majority of his tape, he blames himself to the point of tears, because he doesn't stay in the room she tells him to leave after a make-out session. 'Cause, ya know, that's exactly how I would reward the person I love: Put them on a tape detailing the reasons for my pre-meditated suicide, only to tell them that they shouldn't have left the room I told them adamantly and aggressively to leave. Perfect. Clay is also just a teenager trying to figure life out. Hannah is likely his first love interest, and all he's trying to do is make sure that she doesn't hate him after making out with him--a rather common insecure musing of a teenager.

Mental health, or the lack thereof, is the main overarching theme of the series. Mental illness, defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as: Real disturbances of thought, experiences, and emotion serious enough to cause functional impairment in people, making it more difficult for them to sustain interpersonal relationships and carry on their jobs that sometimes lead to self-destructive behavior and even suicide (citation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-illness/), is an issue with a lot of grey areas. Psychologists and psychiatrists respectively have a lot of trouble correctly diagnosing whether someone has mental illness A or mental illness B, so to speak. Some mental illnesses are more easily diagnosed than others, etc. As stated in the most recent citation: "There is ongoing debate concerning the way that mental illnesses should be classified. There are two aspects to this: which conditions get classified as mental illnesses rather than normal conditions, and, among those conditions we agree are mental illnesses, how they are grouped together into different kinds." Despite the debate, there are a couple statistics that hold true. According to NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) 1 in every 4 people will have a mental illness at some point in their lives while 1 in 25 have a mental illness already. Those are really startling numbers.

More startling to me than the 4%-of-all-people figure for mental illness--roughly 280,000,000 people--is how people converse about the topic of mental illness as though all or most aspects of mental illness--i.e. how one becomes mentally ill--are black and white issues. "13 Reasons Why" has a wide range of characters that deal with super heavy emotional moments in their lives. It should be just as important to discuss the mental anguish dealt to Hannah from her friends as it is to discuss the mental and emotional deluge she left on her tapes for certain people to hear. This is why Hannah is not exonerated. This is why I can't blame someone for walking away from this series and strongly disliking Hannah's character. Having remorse towards her character for what happened to her is completely acceptable and justified. Regardless of how anyone feels towards the other 6 and a half tapes not related to Bryce Walker raping her, the fact of the matter is she felt feelings! She felt lost. She felt worthless. And although tragic and upsetting, the show direction tries to make sense as to why someone at that age might want to end their life at that point. At least through the eyes of the camera lens, nothing seemed to go right in Hannah's life as a teenager. Couple that with simply being a teenager with more homework and more responsibilities, new hormonal imbalances, etc. and her world might have seemed like it was exploding. All of that said, none of it justifies her suicide and/or ruining the lives of 12 other people (Bryce makes 13, but he would deserve it, especially if no legal action is ever taken to incarcerate him. I think we could all make a fairly strong case for Justin, too, but I digress...) Case in point: Alex Standall attempts to kill himself at the end of the series, because he feels that Hannah Baker killed herself due to a teenage mistake he made as a teenager that he subsequently apologized for. I'm not saying what Alex did was right-- the whole "best ass in the school" list, it wasn't--but especially as a teenager trying to figure life out--a time period of adolescence where we're ALL trying to figure life out while sometimes being complete assholes--is not P.O.D. Unsure of whether the show has a second season that expands on Jay Asher's original story, the worst can be assumed about Justin and Tyler as well. Both characters acquire guns before the end of the final episode. Do they kill themselves? Or attempt to? If you're so strongly on the side of Hannah, do you even feel bad if they do? If mental illness is something we should be taking so seriously--as opposed to just the mental illness of Hannah Baker--then we should chastise most of the characters in this show for mutual causation of mental illness. All of them influenced each other negatively in some aspect one way or another with the Grand PooBah of all assholes being Bryce.

Personal Anecdote:

When I was in high school, I knew a guy whom I ran track and cross country with. He was a year younger than me. A really nice kid. I went to an all boys prep school in a wealthier area of the city (Philadelphia), and, other than my closer friends, he had one of lower pointed of noses. He was someone that, had he not been a year younger than me and more than an arms-length outside of my friend-sphere, I could see being good friends with. Unfortunately, that never happened. About a year or two after I graduated, it was tragically learned that he had committed suicide. I have no idea why he committed suicide. I have no idea what made him feel so low as to commit suicide, and to this day I still don't. Whether I'm reading a book or watching a show that uses suicide as a trope , I'm reminded of him. As an empath, I remember immediately feeling, other than sad and upset at his passing, "What could I have done?" I didn't know him all that well. I didn't try all that hard to know him well, either. But I definitely wondered if there was something I could have done. If there's one thing to learn from "13 Reasons Why," it's not to take people for granted and assume that some violent quip is sustainable to them just because a similar quip might be sustainable to you or I.

That's one way to look at it.

The other way to look at it is "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." When I was in grade school, I was mercilessly bullied from 1st to 8th grade. Many of my friends understand this about me, because a big part of who I am is not being defined by what other people think of me. I was bullied, because I didn't conform. I didn't play the games they wanted me to play. I was not their puppet. Instead of growing and strengthening my character, I could have felt differently--I could have turned on myself. Sure, there were days when I felt depressed, but nothing made me feel depressed enough to not keep fighting.

Lastly, and as this relates to Hannah, it's easier for us as the audience to see her get raped in the last episode and then think, "Well, I see why she killed herself now," than it is think "She could have been saved" or "She shouldn't have taken her life." But let's remember that it was before she got raped, before the worst thing to happen in her life that she started creating these metaphysical revenge tapes. Moreover, she plays this game-that-I-know-I'm-playing-but-you-don't with Mr. Porter in his office at school subsequently. I mean, yeah, could have Mr. Porter been a better guidance counselor? Absolutely. But the show portrays Hannah as playing a game with Mr. Porter, like: "After I had left the room, I had waited to see if you'd come running for me. You didn't. Time for me to die." Seriously? And not only "Time to die," but "Time to get everyone to listen to these tapes so they can suffer ten times harder than I ever did, muahahahaha." In that regard: Fuck you, Hannah. Fuck you, Hannah, glad you died? No. But fuck you for taking zero responsibility. Sorry that you suffered through some really tough shit, and didn't have the mental or emotional strength to persevere. What you don't know, and what Mr. Porter should have gotten across to you, is that whatever transgressions you faced from others, whatever tough things that happened, you would have come out of it 10 times stronger as a human being had you not taken your own life. You would have triumphed over the dead snake skin you shed. Thus, the reason Jay Asher wrote this story. He wrote a multitude of flawed characters, many of whom had redemptive qualities. When Jay was in high school, he knew a female student that attempted suicide (please refer back to the YouTube citation where he talks about this for verification). He took that experience and wrote this story to show anyone with suicidal thoughts a different perspective. What if the people that I perceived thought so little of me actually thought highly of me? What if I wrongly perceived an action someone took against something that I did i.e. Zach and the note written by Hannah that Hannah thinks he crumples and throws to the ground but actually keeps? Perhaps these seem like little things on their own, but it was the accumulation of many little moments--and a devastatingly big moment--that can be assumed for the reasons Hannah took her life.

Overall, "13 Reasons Why" is a frustratingly sad, thought provoking narrative about the darker sides of teenage life. The drama. The cliques. The blind-eyed faculty of the teenagers' school and parents. But as frustrating as the story is, it's worth seeing. It's worth discussing, not arguing, because, although the show and the characters are fictional, it deserves to be understood. I repeat: The show/book deserves to be understood. Not Hannah. Not Courtney. Not Justin. Not Alex. Not any one person in particular. It deserves to be understood so that we raise the next generation of kids to understand the power behind each word they speak and each action they take. Teenagers will make mistakes. Walking on egg-shells isn't the be-all end-all solution either, because of the aforementioned personal growth that occurs during adolescence, but that doesn't mean we can't forewarn them on their impact on other lives. The story deserves to be understood.

The story!

-PatInTheHat