“13 Reasons Why,” the Netflix show about a beautiful teen-age girl who slits her wrists in a bathtub after recording thirteen meticulous cassette tapes detailing who is to blame, has become a runaway hit. Netflix doesn’t release ratings, but the show, which is based on a young-adult book of the same name, by Jay Asher, was tweeted about eleven million times in the month after its March 31st release. It has inspired many sombre reviews that recommend the show for being socially important, as well as a bevy of tongue-in-cheek memes on the preteen-centered social network Musical.ly. It has also provoked such a strong and collective reaction in its intended audience—teen-agers—that schools across the country have been sending letters home, warning parents that “13 Reasons Why” might have an effect that directly contradicts its stated project. Rather than starting a valuable conversation that could help students who are struggling with mental-health issues, the show, these schools fear, might push students with issues over the edge.
The series opens on the posthumously decorated locker of Hannah Baker, who is played, in extended flashbacks, by the Australian newcomer Katherine Langford. She smiles out calmly from the frame of a photo: dark brown waves, blue eyes, full lips—the looks of a John Hughes heroine. Paper flowers and notes surround her face. “You were always so good and kind. We miss you so much,” one message reads. “Hey, it’s Hannah,” she says in voice-over, as an acoustic folk song plays in the background. “Hannah Baker. That’s right—adjust whatever device you’re hearing this on. It’s me. Live and in stereo, no return engagements, no encore.” The perspective shifts to a hapless-looking teen-age boy named Clay Jensen, played by Dylan Minnette, who goes home after the school day to find a package wrapped in brown paper at his doorstep. It’s a shoebox filled with tapes. Gentle, anticipatory music begins swelling. “I’m about to tell you the story of my life,” Hannah says. “Or, more specifically, why my life ended. And if you’re listening to this tape, you’re one of the reasons why.”
Each of Hannah’s tapes—which are all, like her intro, written and delivered with an implausible, maudlin aplomb—singles out an individual who abandoned her on her journey to suicide. There’s the girlfriend who slapped her, the guy who designated her as “Best Ass” on a list, the guy who published her poetry nonconsensually, the guy who let another guy rape his unconscious girlfriend at a party while Hannah was hiding in the room. The narrative progression of the tapes is chronological, dire, and thematically monotonous: over thirteen episodes, Hannah goes from an earnest and hopeful young woman to a helpless victim of slut-shaming and sexual assault. Clay, the other main character of “13 Reasons Why,” is the subject of the eleventh tape, but he’s an exception to the pattern: Hannah admired him, and noted that he didn’t do anything wrong. Tape twelve is about the aforementioned rapist, who also raped Hannah, and the final tape is dedicated to the school’s counsellor, who failed to see her predicament clearly when she came to see him on the day of her planned suicide.
Hannah’s tapes function as a sort of chain letter: a second set will be released to the public, she warns, if the people named in the tapes do not listen to them in full and pass them on. In the book, which was published in 2007 and hit No. 1 on the New York Times_ _Y.A. paperback best-seller list, Clay listens to all of the tapes in a single night. In the TV show, he draws out the process for days on end, out of some combination of puppy love and masochistic self-indulgence; he wanders around town, retracing her steps and confronting his classmates. In both the book and the show, Hannah’s history and Clay’s present-tense story are intertwined, and the tone is set by Hannah’s coy, melodramatic narration: “A rumor, based on a kiss, is just the beginning . . . And Justin, honey, stick around. You’re not going to believe where your name crops up next.” But the book is paced quickly, and is stylistically economical; the show demands that you listen to a suicide note for nearly thirteen hours, while the suicide in question is built up as the grand climax, the mystery whose specifics will finally be revealed. It’s somehow grotesque and dull, didactic and indulgent all at once—“Gossip Girl,” minus the pleasure and personality, crossed with the 1971 best-seller “Go Ask Alice,” a diary of a teen-age girl’s drug spiral that is now widely understood to have been fabricated by a therapist as a sort of flamboyant P.S.A.
The team behind “13 Reasons Why,” which includes Selena Gomez as executive producer, the playwright Brian Yorkey, and the “Spotlight” director Tom McCarthy, has made it clear that its members think the show is indeed performing a public service. This is why, as they’ve explained in interviews, and in a companion episode called “Beyond the Reasons,” they decided to depict Hannah’s suicide in such “unflinching” detail. In the book, she swallows pills. In the show, she saws vertically at her forearms with razor blades, sobbing and screaming in an overflowing, pinkish tub. I am not a squeamish consumer, but the scene is unhelpful. “Suicide should never be an option,” Gomez says in “Beyond the Reasons.” But it can, apparently, be the whole point of a show.
In the rape scenes, too, the TV series diverges from the book, which is not to say that the way Asher renders the scene on paper is low-key. In the book, Hannah gets in a hot tub with Bryce, whom she has recently seen raping her ex-friend, and Clay thinks, “You knew what you were getting into, Hannah.” (His nice-guy shtick frequently feels unbearable: in the book, he becomes vaguely afraid of Hannah when rumors start circulating that she’s slutty; in the show’s final episode, he says, “I cost a girl her life because I was afraid to love her.”) Hannah, in turn, narrates her assault like this: “You were touching me . . . but I was using you. I needed you, so I could let go of me, completely.” Given the weight and complication of what Asher is trying to capture in this scene—simultaneous acts of rape and sexual self-destruction pushing a teen-age girl closer to her death—the simplicity of this language can seem almost lewd.
But the scene ends quickly in the book. In the show, it goes on for a very long time, as does the earlier rape scene. Physical details not given by Asher keep the eye of the camera: Hannah is held down and raped from behind; Bryce, a smiling meathead, pulls her hair back enthusiastically, then pins her head against the tile. Her eyes gradually go dead, and she drags herself home, thinking, “I decided no one would ever hurt me again.” In other recent TV shows, like “Jessica Jones” and “Sweet/Vicious,” a young woman’s desire to exert control after trauma is the foundation of a story line; in “13 Reasons Why,” it is the story’s end. Hannah is a mere illustration of the fact that rape exists, that it occurs physically, and that it is spiritually destructive. In “Beyond the Reasons,” it’s dizzying to watch Justin Prentice, the actor who plays Bryce, say, “As a society, we tend to shy away from these hard topics. . . . This says, ‘No, this is a problem, and it needs to be addressed.’ ” And it’s true: after watching that rape scene, which the show films in closeup and, with cuts to the present, stretches across almost four minutes of screen time, I did indeed come away with a sense that there was a problem I hadn’t thought about deeply—one of TV shows giving themselves license to shovel trauma at their audience while assuring their audience that it’s actually healthier this way.
“Beyond the Reasons” is supposed to counteract and explain the seemingly gratuitous violence in the thirteen hours that precede it. It’s supposed to ward off the phenomenon of suicide contagion that school administrators have recently become afraid of, for good reason—a phenomenon that the “13 Reasons Why” writers wrote directly into the show, having a character named Alex attempt suicide toward the end of the season. (This does not happen in the book.) A perversely dutiful banner at the bottom of the screen asks “Need Help Now?” and points viewers having suicidal thoughts to 13reasonswhy.info. And if I had less faith in the ability of teen-agers to know bullshit when they see it, I would worry about what they might take from “13 Reasons Why,” which never touches on the subject of mental illness, and which presents Hannah’s suicide as both an addictive scavenger hunt and an act that gives her the glory, respect, and adoration that she was denied in real life. But I am more troubled by the show’s smarmy, disrespectfully pedagogical aesthetic. In her 2011 book “The Art of Cruelty,” Maggie Nelson writes about cultural products that “seem designed to analyze themselves, and to make a spectacle of their essentially consumable perversity.” In the last episode of “13 Reasons Why,” we see one of the characters planning a mass shooting. On Sunday, Netflix announced that the show had been renewed for another season.
