First of all, if you're thinking about watching 13 Reasons Why, it's a show that explicitly shows a suicide, two rapes, and physical assault, as well as I think there was also a point where one of the kids experiences domestic abuse. I'm not someone who usually thinks too much of warnings, but as someone who usually isn't fazed by much shown on television, this is one of those rare circumstances I think that a warning for this kind of thing is in place. I do however support the notion that there are few things that should really be censored or not shown, and I can't fault the show for showing these things, I can only praise or criticize the intent behind it and the usage thereof. I also can't really talk about the show without talking about the things contained inside, which means this will be a post talking explicitly about suicide, rape and physical assault. Either way, spoilers will follow, so maybe watch the show first if you don't want some of the bigger elements to be given away. The show isn't easy to watch, this wasn't easy to write, and this serves as a warning to anyone reading this that might need to prepare themselves or avoid content that is triggering.
Trying to speak to the objective qualities of the show is impossible. It demands feeling and emotion, and anything I write is going to speak from my subjective experience. The shows does have a couple things it does do objectively well, and others it fails in. But for the most part, 13 Reasons Why is as much about what happens to the characters as it is about the experience of the individual watching it.
The ending shook me. As I watched Clay and Tony drive off into the distance in the Mustang, and Clay gives one last smile. After all the awful things that happen, Clay smiles. The tapes have been passed on, he's done what he can. He's said his piece. And maybe, just maybe, things might just get a little better.
But it feels out of place.
13 Reasons Why is heavy, from start to finish. It's a show that never lets up on its oppressive atmosphere. Any moment of levity is undercut by the ever lurking tension. Everything from the sound design, to the lighting, to the cinematography is designed to let you know just how bleak everything is. I think I have to praise just how violent and dreadful 13 Reasons Why has made its setting, which is honestly just another public school. A school that could in fact be your school. Every moment of it feels like something that could happen in the real world, something that can happen to you, or could have happened to you. And to be very honest, it depicts events that do, unsettlingly often, happen in the real world.
A very clever detail you might not notice is in the lighting. The past is bright. It's lit by these warm colours and bathed in a light that makes everything that happens before Hannah eventually commit suicide, seem like there's a small tinge of hope. The present is cold. The colour is drained out of the world. It's bleak.
To be honest, it's hard to watch. I felt like my experience watching the show was mirrored by Clay's listening of the tapes; It just couldn't happen all at once. I had to take breaks in between. I had to turn it off.
There's a beautiful moment where Tony is telling Clay not to listen to the tapes because he wasn't in the right headspace. And I felt the same way. Some of these scenes are genuinely hard to watch. after one big emotional blow, you have to stop for a bit, regain yourself, and come back in again. The show doesn't relent. It's one blow after another to Hannah, who obviously doesn't get a happy ending. I doubt any character really got a happy ending. You don't even know if we get justice for what happens to Hannah and Jessica.
The show just ends, with Clay and Tony driving off, hopeful that things may get better, the only warmth to be found in the picture is the red of the Mustang against a bleak, grey world.
I think I would like to address a criticism about the show, and the most often cited one, that it glorifies or at least romanticizes suicide.13 Reasons Why is not a PSA condemning suicide or a poster on a highschool wall telling you everything will be okay. It's not trying to be, and while I personally don't know if I believe anyone who doesn't already severely need psychological help will attempt to recreate or imitate the events of the show, there are things to remember about 13 Reasons Why. It's not a kids show. Despite the highschool setting and young actors, 13 Reasons Why is a dark, unnerving and graphic. This isn't some boy meets manic pixie dream girl highschool romance. It's about the real darkness in human nature that turns what might seem like a superfluous mistake into a genuine consequential event that leads to the death of a fellow human being. I think when you start, Hannah's suicide is treated as a non-thing. She died, the world moved on without her, everyone has to now deal with the consequences.
For the most part, Hannah's suicide isn't actively condoned or condemned,
it just is.
Afterwards, you have to decide whether you agree with Hannah's motivations for doing what she does, and by that I mean leaving the tapes, not committing suicide. You have to ask yourself, if you're going out anyway, if it's okay to put people what Hannah puts people through. Listening to those tapes are genuinely traumatizing. It's akin to psychological torture. But it punishes those who did what they did. Most people get their comeuppance.
I think I have to praise the characters. No one is innocent, but no one is entirely bad. Bryce is a genuine friend and help to Justin, who comes from a broken home with no money. It makes it all the more heartbreaking and unbelievable when you find out what he's on the tapes for. Justin, who is a monumental ass, has a sense of justice. He makes mistakes, but he feels genuine remorse for his part in it all. Zach does a childish and petty thing to Hannah when she rejects him because of a severe to mild case of nice-guy-complex, but the fact remains that Zach is actually one of the nice guys. He's a good big brother. But all of these characters do genuinely bad stuff, with varying degrees. Only Tyler and Marcus come off a little one dimensional, but that's more a flaw with the writing rather than any fault with the performance of their respective actors.
And Clay and Hannah, they are genuinely flawed people. Clay is a compulsive liar, and he's damn good at it. He's stoic, he's awkward, and he just
lies. He lies even when it's entirely unnecessary. He's secretive and distrusting. Clay says exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. But Clay (maybe arguably Zach as well) is one of the only truly innocent people on the tapes.
Hannah can be vindictive and spiteful. She pushes people away, and expects others to understand the hidden intentions in her actions. She can treat Clay especially badly, who does genuinely try to connect with Hannah. She fins amusement in exploiting the awkwardness of others, and often bears this pretentious air of intellectual condescension. None of which justifies any of the things that happen to her, of course,
nothing could justify anything that happens to Hannah. But you don't immediately like Hannah. I'd go as far as to say that you're going to get to the end and not really know if you even like Hannah, despite feeling remorse and sympathy for her.
And can I just say, episode 10 can go fuck off. I felt myself getting so angry watching it. Hannah experiences trauma, and it catches up to her during a moment when she and Clay finally connect, causing her to literally
repeatedly scream at Clay to "get the fuck out of here", with tears in her eyes, having witnessed exactly what she had just witnessed. Clay, then does exactly this, but Hannah later reveals in the tapes that she
didn't want him to leave.
And I think this is a problem at the heart of the show, for all it's condemnation of ignoring consent, when someone actually listens to someone taking back her consent, and then that someone
stops like a rational human being would, the show backtracks with the same mentality of some neurotypical saying "We build up walls to see who cares enough to tear them down". I felt so angry because the entire seen is just condoning ignoring someone explicitly not consenting and I had to stop again.
I understand that this is the logical flaw that Hannah's entire character is based on, and the message is clear, you won't receive help if the way you ask for it is to lash out. But there are hundreds of better ways that scene should have gone down, and I just had to stop fuming for a few moments before I could continue watching.
Another gripe I had with the show was Hannah's narration.
Hannah has a little bit of this aloof, monotonous voice over, and it's meant to indicate how numb she is at this point, where she has decided to end herself, and that she'd punish the people who drove her towards it. This is where it gets a little personal for me, and I'm to try not let my personal experience interfere too much with my thoughts on the show, but I don't think I can write this review competently without bringing them up. I've struggled with depression for years, and I've been where Hannah was. I wrote two suicide letters, or at least, I got halfway through each before the actual act of what I was doing caught up with me, and I managed to pull myself back from the attempt each time, and have since not tried or attempted it again. Things did get better. I did make it out. I got to the other side and I'd like to think I'm a stronger person for it.
But I remember the state I was in.
I remember my hands trembling as I wrote and I remember scream-crying and I remember the gargantuan lump in my throat. I remember being practically unable to breathe. Hannah's voice over, sounding decidedly like a morning radio-host over anyone on the brink of ending themselves, is jarring. At times, it broke my suspension of disbelief, and I think anyone who has ever gotten to that point might experience the same thing.
Otherwise, the rest of my gripes are minor. I think the indie/folk tracks the show use are a little melodramatic, they can take away from a genuinely sad moment and give the show that quirky feel you'd get from your usual boy meets manic pixie dream girl films. The intro sequence also has a little too much
quirk for me, it just doesn't mesh very well with the entirely oppressive and bleak atmosphere of the show. Swap out
The Social Network or
500 Days Of Summer or
It's Kind Of A Funny Story or
The Perks Of Being A Wallflower or
Easy A for whatever comes after the intro sequence and I doubt anyone would really think it out of place. Some dialogue can be awkward, some lines can be a little cringey, but nothing overly so.
The pacing can be a little slow, but that's more on account of about a two hour film's worth of source material being stretched into twelve hour-long episodes. Nothing deal breaking, but it makes watching the show all it once harder than most other things (like my Jessica Jones binge, and I have absolutely no regrets, Jessica Jones was fucking fantastic).
I do think the overbearing atmosphere works against 13 Reasons Why after a while. There are very few moments of catharsis. And even fewer of levity. An episode that broke the tension and just showed what everyone was like without anything going wrong for once would have been nice. All the hallucination scenes overstay their welcome really quickly, and 13 Reasons Why takes a weird joy in embarrassing Clay, which means as the viewer experiences the story through Clay, you'll be receiving a lot of secondhand embarrassment.
One thing I do like is how little agency Clay has. He is the eleventh person to hold the tapes. He doesn't act, he reacts. Things happen to him, he does make much happen himself. Clay is the lens through which we view, but I think Hannah is really the main character of the story. Clay is the Nick to Hannah's Gatsby.
Overall, 13 Reasons Why is actually a lot more nuanced than it initially seems, it's deep and complex with intensely complex characters. Morality is murky, and it isn't a going to preach anything to you, if anything, the show can be a little nihilistic at times. It's a show that asks you to make up your own mind about it and the themes it contains within. It's hard to watch, it's overbearingly bleak, it's sad and tragic and I definitely don't recommend watching it all at once.
But it's good. It's worth watching at least once, if you have the stomach for it. The show has genuine issues, and I don't even know if I can say I was entertained by any of it, I felt deeply unsettled for most of the experience. But I think that how unsettling it is despite its highschool romance setting speaks to how subversive it really is, and I can almost guarantee you haven't seen anything like it.
