One of Netflix’s latest series, 13 Reasons Why, has fuelled opinion piece after opinion piece since its debut, not only on how suicide is portrayed, but also various other issues it touches on.

According to BBC, the series is an adaption of a cult book of the same name released back in 2007. After Selena Gomez and her mom read it, they bought the rights to it. Although Gomez was gunning to play the lead role, she settled for executive producer.

But before we get to some of the issues people have had with it, here’s the synopsis:

Based on the best-selling books by Jay Asher, the Netflix Original Series 13 Reasons Why follows Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette) as he returns home from school to find a mysterious box with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford)—his classmate and crush—who tragically committed suicide two weeks earlier. On tape, Hannah explains that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Will Clay be one of them?

And the trailer:

Right, so let’s get to it. Don’t worry, no spoilers here.

Vox’s Constance Grady watched the show and wrote about the “voyeuristic lens to rape and suicide” adopted, and argues that the results are a little more complicated than we think:

13 Reasons Why is, among other things, a show about the concept of the male gaze, the idea that when our culture tells visual stories, we assume the viewer by default to be masculine, heterosexual, and predatory. Under the male gaze, men watch, and women are watched, and the observed woman is an objectified sexual object.

It’s about the gaze, and about voyeurism, and violations of privacy, and about what it feels like to be a girl living in an objectified body under the patriarchy.

But one of the critiques that’s been levelled against the show since its late-March premiere is that it asks the audience to gaze too much. It depicts suicide and rape in graphic, cringing detail, and some viewers have felt as though the show is asking them to become voyeurs, to be titillated by watching a teenage girl’s body in pain.

Grady goes on to discuss the merits of such graphic scenes and whether they will make us, the viewer, complicit, or even make us believe, subconsciously, that 13 Reasons Why is about “the fantasy of suicide, and more specifically the male fantasy of a beautiful and mysterious sad girl who only you — the presumably male reader — truly understands and can save”.

However, she does argue that the show has made an effort to avoid “making depression, sexual assault, and suicide seem glamorous, or even worse, aspirational.” Here’s how:

[T]o compensate, it makes it uncomfortable to watch that depression, sexual assault, and suicide. It reminds us, insistently, that we are prying, and by extension that rape and suicide are not romantic fantasies to glory in. And it makes the violence of its rape and its suicide scenes obvious and visceral. It reminds us that the body at which we are gazing is a human body; it says, No, this is not romantic and sexy, this is happening to a human body, and it is unpleasant, and it hurts.

While some psychologists have argued that Hannah’s actions could serve as a go-to guide for potential suicides, others have credited the show’s ability to stir up conversations around the topics that are toxic in society.

So this is your chance. The show has the potential to allow a space in which to increase awareness and education of such issues – and if you have teens who are watching it, perhaps you should talk to them about suicide like you would talk to them about the birds and the bees.

[source:vox&bbc]