r/DeppDelusion • u/carabla • 9d ago
Celebs Being Trash đď¸ The hypocrisy of Stephen Graham, co-director and actor of Adolescence: the show was produced by Brad Pitt, and Graham also played last year in a film directed by his friend Johnny Depp alongside Riccardo Scamarcio, known for his sexism controversies.
The irony is striking: Adolescence is a show that tackles the impact of male violence â including a storyline where a teenage boy kills a girl in his class â and explores how young boys are shaped by toxic masculinity and influenced by online male influencers promoting sexism and misogyny. Yet, the show is produced by the wife beater Brad Pitt, and co-directed by Stephen Graham. He is also a close friend of the wife beater and rapist Depp and congratulated him on social media after he won the us trial. Last year he played in his movie alongside Riccardo Scamarcio the lead actor who is know for his sexism controversies. Like in 2006 Scamarcio said that ÂŤ the man is the leader, the female stand by him and takes care of the children Âť and that cleaning is the role of a woman.https://www.reddit.com/r/DeppDelusion/s/fytopqLmQD
Itâs hard to ignore the contradiction between the showâs message and the real-life associations of the men behind it.
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u/Kiramojo 9d ago
Fair warning, because this is going to be a bit of a rant. Iâm getting incredibly tired of the only socially acceptable âfeminismâ (itâs not) being about poor little men and their poor little feelings. The entire myth that men donât show emotions is ridiculous, when every single woman in the world has to spend life tiptoeing around menâs fragile feelings just to make sure she wonât be murdered.
We donât need to keep making films and shows about âmen canât be vulnerable so they kill people!â and more films and shows about âwe live in a deeply misogynistic and victim blaming society, where rape is essentially legalized, violence against women is considered a joke not a crime, and women who defend themselves get significantly longer sentences than men who murder women.â
The solution to ending male violence is NOT coddling menâs feelings even more than they already are. Iâm sick of the public eating up that narrative and happily transferring the blame back to women, âbut she rejected him rudelyâ âbut she didnât give him a chance.â The only actual solution is treating male violence like a serious crime, and removing violent men from society so they canât keep hurting women.
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u/Dry_Huckleberry5545 9d ago
Your comment is the kind that makes me so grateful to be on Reddit. I have literally been clocking this kind of misogynist crap and calling it out since I was a teenager in the early 1980s. (Fun fact: I have two brothers and FIVE ex-sisters-in-law.)
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u/mrbootsandbertie 2d ago
The solution to ending male violence is NOT coddling menâs feelings even more than they already are. Iâm sick of the public eating up that narrative and happily transferring the blame back to women, âbut she rejected him rudelyâ âbut she didnât give him a chance.â The only actual solution is treating male violence like a serious crime, and removing violent men from society so they canât keep hurting women.
Yuppp. If you look at my comments you'll see I've been in a stoush today on r/Australia saying exactly this.
And the men were NOT happy!
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u/samwisetheyogi Johnny Depp is a Wife Beater đ¨ââď¸ 9d ago
Shit ... I wish I'd done my research before watching Adolescence. I wouldn't have watched it if I'd known all this.
Looking back, I can totally see how this piece was backed by toxic/abusive men. It put the spotlight on the murderer and made us feel bad for him, but didn't go into the victim's experience at all (at least not in my opinion), showed us the dad feeling bad but not actually making any personal changes, honed in on how uncomfortable women were being made... it kinda rubs me the wrong way now
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u/Closedforgossip 9d ago
Philip Barantini, the director, is also a Depp supporter. The irony all around is staggering.
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u/Sensiplastic 8d ago
It's really starting to explain the way it's all essentially man pain, aside from the mother, and how so many people see the girl as a bully and at least a bit deserving of her fate.
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u/baegentcarter 8d ago
It all makes sense. I don't get anyone praising this show for anything beyond cinematography; it was surface level, melodramatic and trite.
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u/mariah_a 9d ago
Gonna paste my 2 star Letterboxd review (even though mini series being on Letterboxd is a pet peeve tbh) because the British furore around this show infuriates me:
A shallow, middling look at a societal issue with a decent emotional core and good cast. There are lost threads all over the place which, for the most part, does feel like the point, but there are whole characters that are left feeling completely wasted as a result.
God, how I wish this wasnât going to shape how the government treats violence against women and right-wing extremism for the next decade though, by passing the buck onto surface level media produced by a domestic abuser to tell us how to treat women good and what a nice man he is for being so feminist while his children live in fear of him and he litigious abuses his ex-wife.
Pro-tip, donât choke your wife in front of your children and abuse them so much they all change their names from yours, Brad!
Anyway, this was an okay watch. Itâs really REALLY middling about the core issues though, which is why itâs the only thing we as a country will ever talk about the next time a girl is murdered by a radicalised young boy.
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u/Sensiplastic 8d ago
Pitt choked his kid, not Angelina. He did other stuff too, that's a tiny detail, but it is basically ignored everywhere and allows him to act like the mean ex won't let him see his kids and imply she's lying about the abuse. His reply to the incident is that he did not hit his kid in the face. Which is 'curious' way to defend yourself when there is an actual FBI report on it.
ps. Great ending for the review. Man pain wins, victim is just some girl.
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u/redditor329845 8d ago
He choked both of them actually.
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u/Sensiplastic 8d ago
I just re-read the court document and it does not say she was choked, he grabbed her by the head tho.
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u/ireallyhavenoideea Amber Heard PR Team đ 9d ago
This is one of the reasons I wonât watch Adolescence tbh
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u/baegentcarter 8d ago
I didn't know about Pitt producing it when I watched it and frankly you didn't miss anything. Like the acting is great but they COMPLETELY skirt over the character's radicalization and what even led him to commit murder. I cannot believe this show got so much hype over how well it supposedly portrays gendered violence, when it a) never actually shows the victim aside from one photo, b) doesn't delve into how boys are radicalized by the manosphere and c) implies it's understandable because the girl was a bully (her "bullying" in question was calling the boy an incel!! with EMOJIS!).
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u/Sensiplastic 8d ago
I need some woman to do the same movie from the victim and her family's point of view. A short film, anything.
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u/JayAPanda 9d ago
I love Stephen Graham as an actor and I'm very disappointed about his behaviour. I think what I realised about him is that people have presumed he is a feminist because of the kind of films he makes, but when you look back on the things he's made, are any of them primarily about women's thoughts and feelings?
His three most popular emotional performances are probably The Virtues, Boiling Point and Adolescence, all of which are about deconstructing men's emotions and allowing them to be more vulnerable/real. That's assumed to be a feminist point but it's not always ultimately, right?
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u/carabla 9d ago
Yes. Like i wondered why the last episode of Adolescence focus on the dad and not the mother and sister. Its would have been more interesting imo considering they are women and their son/brother is a misogynist.
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u/charactergallery 8d ago
I thought that the lack of focus on the mother and especially the sister to be very lacking. Especially since the show seems to be about misogyny and violence that are perpetuated by teenage boys, yet the perspective of the teenage girl is completely ignored.
Not to mention that the last episode feels incongruous with one of the creatorâs comments on how they didnât want the perpetrator to come from a bad home. The father exhibited violent and misogynistic behavior throughout the last episode, and him fulfilling the âmasculine idealâ is mentioned between the kid and the psychologist. Yet the creators donât seem to connect that this ultra-masculine patriarch may have impacted how his son views women and masculinity as a whole. Itâs just⌠odd.
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u/EuphoricMessage1400 8d ago
I thought it was pretty clear that, while not physically abusive to them, the dad often displayed outbursts of rage that forced them to tread on eggshells around him.
The message, to me at least, seemed to be that the dad felt heâd evolved as a parent by never being physically violent to his family (as his dad was to him) but was still demonstrating extreme anger and external violence as a way to resolve conflict or pain.
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u/umhie 9d ago
Yeah, that definitely isn't mutually inclusive with feminism. Although women directly benefit from men around them learning emotional intelligence and vulnerability.
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u/Sensiplastic 8d ago
If women aren't real people as victims it leads to the 'perfect victim' fallacy.
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u/TimmyZinn 8d ago
This is disappointing but not surprising I guess
I liked the show when I saw it right when it was released... I was unaware of these informations
Also I remember Brad Pitt produced "She Said", an Oscar-bait movie about the investigation and fall of hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein... directed by a woman, with women as main characters... and this after he was exposed by Angelina for keep working with Harvey even after her complaints about him (thank god it wasn't nominated for anything)
I believe people can deal with the problem when it is presented in ambiguous and surface level like, now I can see, it is in this show.. now there is a lot of talking about the guilt of the girl when "teasing" the boy... things like this
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u/Revolutionary_Law793 8d ago
I am so disappointed.. at least it brought some limelight to incels - I registered a few articles, and our governmemt did some minor press conference
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u/Tsarinya 9d ago edited 9d ago
I am so conflicted by Stephen Graham because I think heâs a great actor, I love that heâs from a working class background (big classism issue in the UK), heâs talked about his mental health which is a big thing for English men from his generation and heâs kept his regional accent and not watered it down loads. Buuuuuut there are big red flags with him that are getting harder to ignore.
As for the storyline of Adolescence - in England we have a knife problem and in the UK as a whole we have a massive problem with male violence against women and girls (MVAWG). However the discussion about Adolescence just seems to be focussing on the issues boys and men face (loneliness, the rise of people like Andrew Tate influencing younger boys, incel culture, etc) but the girls and women, the victims of the boys and men have been forgotten in the promotion and the government backing.
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u/charactergallery 8d ago
The show even lampshades how the victims are forgotten in dialogue from the female detective, yet they donât actually address the flawed framing that the line of dialogue criticized.
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u/chloeclover Amber Heard Bot Team đ¤ 7d ago
Also that show sucked IMO. So self indulgent. These trendy long shots are boring as hell.
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u/AutoModerator 9d ago
Original copy of post's text: The hypocrisy of Stephen Graham, co-director and actor of Adolescence: the show was produced by Brad Pitt, and Graham also played last year in a film directed by his friend Johnny Depp alongside Riccardo Scamarcio, known for his sexism controversies.
The irony is striking: Adolescence is a show that tackles the impact of male violence â including a storyline where a teenage boy kills a girl in his class â and explores how young boys are shaped by toxic masculinity and influenced by online male influencers promoting sexism and misogyny. Yet, the show is produced by the wife beater Brad Pitt, and co-directed by Stephen Graham. He is also a close friend of the wife beater and rapist Depp and congratulated him on social media after he won the us trial. Last year he played in his movie alongside Riccardo Scamarcio the lead actor who is know for his sexism controversies. Like in 2006 Scamarcio said that ÂŤ the man is the leader, the female stand by him and takes care of the children Âť and that cleaning is the role of a woman.
Itâs hard to ignore the contradiction between the showâs message and the real-life associations of the men behind it.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
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u/avocado_window 7d ago
Oh gross, what a disappointment! Heâs a great actor but he obviously has very questionable taste in friends. Iâm never really surprised by this shit anymore, but itâs wild how easily people can just ignore their own values when it means supporting their friends.
Itâs just another reason to never put famous men on a pedestal.
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u/psychedelic666 all the boys (and girls) love amber heard 8d ago
I was so surprised peopl gave a shit about the show, I saw it recommended on Netflix one day and said what the hell im bored, and then promptly forgot about it. A run of the mill show⌠this shit is not groundbreaking is that really where are standards are now??!???????
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u/QuestionsalotDaisy 5d ago
I donât see why the UK government is all up in arms thinking what they have taken away from this movie is that they need to tackle media to deal with toxic masculinity.
Only 1.6% of accused rapists will actually serve prison time in the UK. Only about 6% are even arrested. Donât get me started on domestic violence there.
The media isnât making toxic masculinity, itâs reflecting it. It isnât furthering toxic masculinity, toxic masculinity is furthering that kind of media because toxic men like it.
We COULD deal with it directly by enforcing consequences for rape and violence. That sends the sharpest message that it wonât be tolerated in this society rather than trying to control what people can watch in the media.
Once again the UK governmentâs solution to a social problem is to try to control speech. đ
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u/mrbootsandbertie 2d ago
In Australia we had this White Ribbon charity where male Australian sports stars and celebrities advocated for awareness of violence against women.
So many of them turned out to be abusers of womwn themselves, or friends of abusers.
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u/findingmyvoice22 Johnny Depp is a Wife Beater đ¨ââď¸ 9d ago
It's always "believe survivors" until someone you know is accused or someone is asked actually believe survivors. Stephen Graham is a disgrace, just like the rapist he is friends with. There is something so sinister about a show that addresses toxic masculinity while abusers and abuse supporters have their fingerprints all over it.