13 Reasons Why: Suicidal thought outside the box?

From L to R: Katherine Langford (as Hannah), Selena Gomez (Executive Producer), and Dylan Minnette  (as Clay). Gomez was originally to play the role of Hannah 

Disclaimer and Explanation

Am I the worst binge watcher in the world? As a boy, I used to watch a lot of TV, but I totally burned-out in the late '70s. The habit has been hard to get back, which is why even though I loved 13 Reasons Why, it still took me six weeks to get through it, watching ten minutes here, twenty minutes there. I can do much better if somebody else is there with me, but watching TV alone with ADHD, my brain is always nagging me about things I should be doing.

This means I'm one of last people in the world to finish and critique 13 Reasons Why available on Netflix. You can tell I was impressed by the how long this is. It left me gorged with words. I'm experienced with suicide, from surviving my own past suicidal tendencies, and from the grief of having a close, young relative kill himself. Maybe that's why I only watched it in small helpings.

Which is probably the way you should read this article. I've broken it up into headings, so people can pick and choose.

Spoiler Alert

Spoilers are inevitable in this kind of review/analysis. I've tried to herd the major ones to the bottom. Otherwise, proceed at your own risk. 
 

Simple Synopsis

The show, based on a novel by Jay Anson, is about the suicide of a 17-year-old girl, Hannah Baker (played superbly by Australian actress Katherine Langford) and effect that it has on her peers and parents. Hannah's dead to begin the show, so that's not a major spoiler. Instead of a suicide note, Hannah narrated the events leading to her self-destruction--giving the reasons for her decision, on seven cassette tapes. Then, she arranged to have them circulate in secret among the peers she deems responsible, castigating them from beyond the grave. Hannah's shifting the blame for her death to her friends is one of the most controversial points of the show, and—as I will argue—probably one of its best points.

The story opens with one kid, Clay Jensen (played with increasing intensity by Dylan Minnette) receiving the recordings.

Clay is puzzled. "What the hell is this thing? I'll Google it."

Hannah's voice warns him that there's another copy of the tapes, and not passing his copy to the next person on the list would cause them to be made public. Each tape is about one of her peers whom Hannah accuses of provoking her decision. She says if anyone has received the tapes, they're blameworthy. The recordings make up a single, nearly-chronological narrative.

Clay's tape is very late in the sequence, leaving him anguished for most of the season over what he did to push Hannah toward suicide. Meanwhile, her peers—the ones who already heard the tapes—dread what Clay might do when he learns of their misdeeds. Clay is almost a complete unknown to them, because he's quiet and stands separate. However, they all know he had a crush on Hannah, even if Clay hasn't realized it (oddly enough). They scheme of ways to stop him from whatever he starts to do.

Hannah (foreground) and most of her peers. Don't ask me to list them. The cast of 13 Reasons Why is huge. Go to IMDB and scroll through it for an hour. You may know somebody. Hell, you may be in it yourself and not know it.

Half the show takes place in the past with Hannah alive, half take place in the present as Clay interacts with the other peers on the tapes. The two time streams are visually marked by a bandage on Clay's forehead in the present. Some critics hated that, thinking it was more appropriate for comedy (1:20). I thought it was simple and elegant. The time jumps are smooth and artful, and give the show a fantasy feel that's needed to distant the viewer from an otherwise realistic and depressing story. Sometimes past and present unfold in the same shot and interact with each other, almost at though they're passing each other in a hall. I've never seen time transitions handled so well.

Critics' Complaints

You'd expect a show about teenage suicide to be controversial, and 13 Reasons is.  I'll get the simplest rebuttals out of the way.

To start, detractors accuse it of portraying suicide as empowering. Hannah holds her peers enthralled and affects their every action throughout the story. Critics also say the show makes killing yourself glamorous by using images such as Hannah's locker decorated with cards and flowers.

Too much sympathy for her own good?

Another criticism is that Hannah doesn't stand up for herself when she suffers all the insults and outrages. She keeps her anger and grief inside, until she kills herself. Other critics point out that the dialog says nothing meaningful about the subjects raised; not just suicide, but mental illness and sexual assault, for examples.

To rebut: it's unfair to criticize shots of Hannah's locker-shrine. For the director, that's the quickest way to show Hannah was already dead. When a student dies, classmates always make her locker a memorial. Whether her death was a suicide or not doesn't matter. It shows that Hannah was missed. Those points are important and poignant; not showing the locker would have made the show defective.

As for there being no dialog about the issues raised, a scripted movie is not lecture. A writer must avoid creating conversations that sound like they're speeches delivered to the audience (the soliloquy being the uncommon exception these days.) A story has to show rather than tell, especially when it's a “show.” Drama must make its points ways discourse can't.

As a writer I can say teenage dialog presents special problems. So many things go unsaid, for various reasons, therefore, a lot is going on under surface. I admire anyone who could write it and still get a point across. Even then, the audience has to listen and watch carefully to get it.
 

Could 13 Reasons encourage suicide?

It's not as easy rebut the biggest issue of all: the show's potential to encourage teenage suicide.  I give the directors and screenwriters high marks for trying to discredit suicide's allure. The best example: Hannah's suicide, which strips the act of any appeal. She's there, alone in the emptiest, darkest bathroom I've ever seen, in colorless clothes, and no sound except splashing and her cries of pain. In a TV show that's full of music, the soundtrack for Hannah's death is silent. 

Video media usually takes the opposite approach to death scenes, making them stirring through the use of striking cinematography and background music. By contrast, when Hannah perishes, no violins of the gods play; no angels sing her to thy rest. If music expresses the spiritual world in movies, the angels have abandoned Hannah.

The silence of the snake that swallows her whole

As she's dying, we see her pain and unrelieved anguish, but when she's dead, they don't show her face. No, we don't see her lovely countenance, white and beautiful as a classical sculpture, with her expression blissfully free of life's unjust ordeals. No, Hannah's just gone, no longer even existing.

Jodi Allard, at Role Reboot, watched it with her son, who was prone to being suicidal. She said,

Without those scenes, Hannah’s character could be viewed as empowered by suicide—achieving power in death that she couldn’t achieve in life. But those scenes showed the painful, ugly reality of suicide in a way that my son and I needed to see.

Stark and realistic, her death scene doesn't end there. Her parent's found her. It chilled my blood watching Hannah's mother sway as she found her daughter's body. I could almost hear her world crack. That should curdle any glorification anyone could possibly squeeze out of self-destruction. With this graphic and powerful scene, Hannah passes from the story, gone in both in the past and the present.

But not quite . . .

Yet, even with this graphic and mindful scene, I think their success is mixed. While I can't imagine a teenage girl would want to trade places with Hannah, teenage girls think far differently than I do. If 13 Reasons Why is connected to any real suicides, then the creators of this show have failed, in a way that costs lives. The universe has no shortage of hydrogen and irony. Therefore, it would be so bitter if 13 Reasons Why ends up on some dead teen's thirteen-reasons-why list found after the suicide. Alas, it possibly already has.

Then again, seatbelts cost some lives but save many more. Nothing on the Internet can ever be put back under wraps. So, the only thing we can do is look at what suicide statistics actually show us from the time when 13 Reasons Why was actually released.

Reasons for concern

Suicide ideation is baked into this story. Psychologists warn against showing any scenes of suicide to a suicidal person. Not because they'll copy it directly, but because it sparks suicidal thoughts. This subject and the age of the characters will hook the attention of suicidal teens, the very last people who shouldn't see it. Even Hannah's death scene, which I praised, flies in the face of advise from mental health professionals.

Even the scene that I praised above might be ill-advised. The guidelines from ReportingOnSuicide.org say this:

• Don’t sensationalize the suicide.
• Don’t talk about the contents of the suicide note, if there is one.
• Don’t describe the suicide method.
• Report suicide as a public health issue.
• Don’t speculate why the person might have done it.
• Don’t quote or interview police or first responders about the causes of suicide.
• Describe the suicide as “died by suicide” or “completed” or “killed him/herself” rather than “committed suicide.”
• Don’t glamorize suicide.

Those are guidelines by experts. None of which have been tested with any scientific rigor. It's more like people saying, "That doesn't sound like a good idea." They preserve suicide taboos, because they're afraid of what happens if it isn't. The effectiveness of this is questionable. Because the creators of 13 Reasons have put us in the middle of an experiment that can't be retracted, we might as well see what it shows us.

Still, to state the obvious, this show is heart crushing. Depressed people don't need more grief. By comparison, old soap operas might have been dismal, but they prevented suicides by making people want to see the next episode. Thirteen Reasons goes on six month breaks after the first season. At least horror stories, take place in an unrealistic world. They divert people's excess grief away from reality, and so provide them some relief. Thirteen Reasons is a realistic story, and there's no escape found within it. Yet, the non-linear story construction does help. 

This story isn't for the suicidal, but for those who know such people. If it works, they should learn a lesson that depressed people don't necessarily assign responsibility the way healthy people do.

Depressed dynamo

What's worse, the series gives a false depiction of depression from the very start. While it's not true, as some have said, that the production didn't consult mental health professionals, they give a wrong depiction of Hannah's depression. Most misleading is Hannah's energy level. She was able to create more than six hours of audio, and then she made sure people passed the tapes around exactly as she wished. She also drew nice little pictures all over the tapes. That's a lot of work and detail for a depressed person, who's already decided to die, whose motivation and planning abilities are impaired. A real depressed person would say "Fuck this," scribble out a note before they back-kicked their bucket. Depressed people lack energy; they're lucky to get out of bed; they have no concentration, and, subjectively speaking, minimal control over their time. Yet, Hannah is supposed to have planned and executed her tape scheme while working and attending school. It's completely misleading. Depression debilitates you.

The show's failure to depict depression correctly is made worse with Hannah neither looking nor sounding depressed, except for some brief times, like after a rainstorm. Hannah's tapes are impeccably recited. Did she ever stammer, choke up with her grief, or have to re-record? Why not? She's describing her worst traumas, in detail, at length, knowing when she finishes her death is imminent. That's a lot of pressure. Did she write out a script that her parents never found? How did she recite the tapes for six hours without one? A few scenes of Hannah recording, showing her overwhelmed or having to re-record because her voice cracked would have added so much to my credulity. These are not to impugn Langford's superb performance. Decisions like these are made by the writer and director, not the actor.

This flaw in realism gets worse. As Hannah is purportedly sinks into this progressive, fatal illness, which is what depression is, there are almost no physical changes: her clothes are clean, working-class denims, with no deterioration; her makeup's perfect; her hair isn't mussed; we never see her nauseated and turning down food; she doesn't appear to drop weight; she's never shown unable to get out of bed, and her attendance at school or work never becomes an issue. The only sign of depression is she gets tears in her eyes, which only enhance her attractiveness.

The net effect of this is make Hannah's decisions seem rational. As I will show below, her actions are anything but.

Glamorizing suicide, Hollywood style

Langford is a beautiful twenty-one year old woman, meaning Hannah looks like she could be the prom queen at any high school of her choosing. Real tween and teen girls will envy and admire her attractiveness, as people admire any captivating person. They'll want to do as she does. Hannah's persistent beauty, steady mood, and competence send completely the wrong message.

This flaw is not specific to the 13 Reasons creators. “The Cult of Beauty" is so ingrained in show business that it's contractual. Yet, this also extends to things like houses and cars. Hannah's parents are supposed to be in financial trouble, their house looks comfortable. Also, her parents buy her a nice car that really belies their money difficulties.

This urge to show beauty and wealth gets in the way of serious subjects like depression and suicide, where true-to-life physical appearance can go from beautiful to ugly. Here, keeping Hannah and her living conditions attractive inadvertently promotes copycat suicide.

Yet will it prevent more suicides than it encourages? That can only be judged by statistics, if it has a significant effect either way. Those can take months or years to be analyzed.

Hannah's blame: don't take her at her word

The story entangled me so much in Hannah's pain that I almost overlooked the repellent side to her character: Hannah doesn't leave even a suicide note for her parents. The writers have hidden this obvious cruelty in the backstory, but is very important to understanding her.

What I neglected about it: Hannah spends hours making tapes for all her peers, sets up this scheme to have them circulate, contrives that the story will come out unless they're passed to all the people on the list. Then she leaves no explanation or farewell to her parents! Moreover, she knew her parents would find her body and--having some empathy--she knew what it would do to them. It's as though she gave the people who wronged her simple lectures, then savaged her parent's very souls for no reason.

Six and a half hours of tapes, but no apology or explanation for this? 

Once I noticed, the pure callousness of her omission made me revise my sketch of Hannah. Missing this clue leads to misunderstanding what the show is saying. From her account, Hannah seemed to have a good, if bland, relationship with her parents. They loved her, she loved them, and so on. She didn't communicate well with them, but that's true about almost every teen. The only distress she mentions is their financial trouble. This, however, is all based on Hannah's account.

Not leaving a note seems out of character for her. Unless there was a fourteenth reason. If Hannah saved up lot of passive-aggressive anger toward her peers, it's believable she must have accumulated more toward her parents.

Her parents rationalize the omitted note. They understand it as a well-intentioned, their daughter's misguided effort at mercy on them. As they move forward, they tell themselves that their child was too ashamed, or despondent, and didn't want to hurt them with her suffering. In real life, this is what most parents would do if faced with their child's unexplained suicide. They don't let themselves think that maybe contempt was an ulterior motive. Yet, the messages she does leave points to contempt the most likely reason she says nothing to them.
 
She might not admit it on the tapes, but I think she blames her parents even more than she blames her peers. This means she had more than thirteen reasons to commit suicide, and one or more had nothing to do with her classmates. Seen from this angle, Hannah becomes an unreliable narrator and an anti-hero.

Home life is a teenager's baseline for normal. It's possible she couldn't even spot anything wrong between her and her parents because she thought every family behaved like hers. That doesn't mean she liked "normal" home life. I have another point to make about Hannah's cruelty, and her unreliable narration, but that's an extreme spoiler, so I'm placing it at the end. 

Hannah does not start out healthy

Detractors take Hannah's blaming others for her suicide at face value. They conclude that 13 Reasons Why attacks personal responsibility, and therefore has a flawed even contemptible theme. 

Except not if Hannah is an unreliable narrator and an anti-hero. This means she is neither the protagonist nor the moral center of the story. Instead, Clay plays those roles, and it's his transition that's most important to the story's meaning.

If we revise Hannah as an anti-hero, then that would be why she didn't start out as a happy-go-lucky girl. Instead, at episode one, she was already an anguished, fragile, lonely kid, who's barely holding on. A new kid in town, she left behind her best friend, Kat.

It's hard to understand how Clay didn't get a crush on Kat (Gloria Whigham) instead of Hannah.

The script gives hints that Hannah had a bad reputation at her previous school and was looking forward to a "new beginning." At the going away party, Kat says Hannah had a bad judgment about boys. We never find out what happened in the past, but we do know Hannah trying to recover from previous fiascoes.

Then, Hannah attends a college enrollment drive. We learn that her grades aren't good enough to get her into any of the better colleges. Then, before anything else happens, a scene in the counselor's office makes it clear she's already fretting over a future she sees as bleak.
 
So, from the beginning, Hannah didn't hang out with friends for fun. She already wanted to die, and she was searching for reasons to live. Instead, she then went from crisis to catastrophe. Her peers had no idea of how fragile she was. How could they have known? She didn't communicate. That was her responsibility, but withdrawal is a common symptom of depression.

 Critics have said that when things start to go south, Hannah doesn't defend herself. They've suggested she would have been alright if she rebutted the taunts.

This misses the point that a soiled reputation was insignificant to Hannah compared to the trauma of discovering she was in a universe where boys spread rumors about innocent girls. Comebacks and rebuttals do nothing about that worldly state. The only solution to that specific angst is to find another universe—or an afterlife—to exist in. Suicide raises its head as the solution. You might rebut that this isn't a sane way of seeing it, and that's my point.

From successive bad experiences, Hannah regarded boys as cruel and ignorant, and she tries to find someone to persuade her otherwise. Already looking at looking at a bleak, impoverished future, and the prospect for love was the last thing that gave her any hope. She came close to finding him.

Leper! Unclean!

People who are depressed signal it unconsciously to others; by facial expression and body language. Friends and peers then unconsciously steer away. That accounts for Hannah's solitude despite being attractive (a friend of mine disputes this, but I think Katherine Langford is very beautiful). In my non-expert opinion, Hanna didn't have to die as early as she did, but without eventual psychiatric intervention, she was doomed.

Hannah's insane

Hannah's blaming her peers for ending her life is an affront to personal responsibility, but only for those of us who aren't mentally ill and who blessed with the luxury of logic. The show makes a point: people with end-stage depression are not normal. Hannah doesn't think rationally. The way she hides her depression and anger is a hint. Her making those tapes about the end of her life is so bizarre. How many other depressed people have done that?

Her charge that her peers drove her to suicide shouldn't be interpreted as true. The real story is about everything that crushes Hannah: faithless friends, slut shaming, sexual harassment, rape, and other issues. Yet, blaming her peers for her suicide is so belligerent, and such a foul on the court of personal responsibility that it overshadows other issues raised.
  
Her recriminations still make an important point: perhaps we don't know how many suicidal people think exactly the way Hannah does. Harboring such blame is taboo due to our cultural individualism, so maybe the suicidal won't talk about it. When their depressive cycle turns upward, and they think like healthy people again, their minds rewrite history. So, we'd never hear about it. When they're depressed, they clam up again.

 Unfortunately, the thoughts depressed people are most ashamed of are the ones most likely to kill them. We can't presume a suicidal person is thinking of responsibility like a normal person. How many depressed feel pre-scorned even without this being mentioned? You have to get them to pull back from suicide first before the attitude about personal responsibility should even discussed.

Hannah shifting the blame is probably the most important plot element of 13 Reasons, one that could benefit depressed people in the real world. That's why, to me, this is the most fearless take on a suicidal person's mind, but people are mistaking her recriminations the lesson of the show. No, it's only Hannah's own tortured thoughts.

Hamlet's Ghost on Cassette?

As a horror writer, it occurred to me early on that 13 Reasons could easily be converted into a ghost story, with the ghost of Hannah haunting Clay, after appearing to the rest of her peers. A very short time after that, I realized 13 Reasons Why is very much like Hamlet.

If Hannah delivers her message to Clay via the afterlife rather than through tapes, then the story is about a spirit who implores its closest friend (or relative), to avenge its death. (This isn't exactly what Hannah does, but Clay acts like she does exactly that.) Now the resemblance is uncanny, isn't it?







Like Hamlet, everybody fears what Clay is going to do, and they scheme to stop him just like the characters in the classic play. With the character of Skye, the barista, you have Ophelia, the girl you know is attracted to Clay, who he rejects and teases repeatedly, though she's obviously interested.

Skye Miller (Sosie Bacon) "Go the to a piercery."

Clay also has a Horatio-like sidekick with Tony, who isn't on Hannah's list, but somehow knows about the tapes. He's like a super-Horatio, really. He seems older and he knows a lot.

Tony Padilla (Christian Navarro) You had a friend in high school like this, didn't you? Who always seemed to show up at the most auspicious times.

Spoiler alert: unlike Hamlet, everybody doesn't die at the end. Though that would have been cool, the characters are lucky that Clay's decisions, by the end, are much better than the Prince of Denmark's. 

Empowered Ghost?

I bring up the similarities with Hamlet to refute the complaint 13 Reasons depicts suicide as empowering Hannah. As in Hamlet, the “ghost” is neither the moral authority, nor the empowered character in 13 Reasons. Instead, it's about Clay, his decisions, and his morality. Clay is the protagonist in the show. Like the King's Ghost, all Hannah can do is provide information and appeal to the living for revenge. It's Clay who moves the plot. Hannah's other peers already heard the tapes and blew her off. That's the epitome of weakness.

This makes Hannah an anti-hero, also likely, the antagonist. She urges Clay toward a morally warped sense of responsibility, and tempts him to seek petty revenge. This sets everyone else against him. 

Clay digs deeper and seeks justice. Furthermore, the whole reason Hannah's peers listened to tapes is because they knew they were guilty; not of killing her, but they were all still guilty of wronging her in some way. They checked the tapes to see if she was honest about them. Some were probably baffled that she killed herself because of the minor thing they did. However, some were guilty far worse things than others.  I hope this puts to rest the claim that suicide empowered Hannah.

Warning: Extreme Spoilers After this Point

Proving Herself Right

I wondered why Hannah recorded her conversation with Mr. Porter the counselor? Maybe she anticipated he wouldn't help her, and wanted to end her suicide apology with that proof she made the right decision. Yet, how could she anticipate that and be so accurate?

I think it was a matter of the depression vibe she carried, and the fact that it could be so persuasive when the person is physically attractive (and doesn't seem suicidal.) She didn't send out that signal deliberately, but she believed she learned how people responded to her, by steering away, never knowing how her unconscious was betraying her. Also, she speaks to him in oblique, vague terms. She said at one point she wanted to “Stop her life.” He does a double take and asks her to clarify that, but instead she switches subjects. She was only a few words away from getting an intervention, but never said them.


In the narration, it's plain Hannah wasn't as upfront as she thought. Yes, he was responding to her unconscious signals, and was confused by the turns in the conversation, but he was the one with the training. As such, he was the only one on Hannah's tapes who was an accessory to the suicide. Clay comes to realize this. It's called negligent manslaughter. Yet, given what Hannah didn't say, I doubt the charge would stick.

All you need is love (and maybe something else) 

People say that the theme of the story is that people should love each other. No, no. It's clear in the story love alone wouldn't have helped Hannah. What killed her were failures to communicate as the shocks of adolescence took their toll. When the shocks were  followed by real traumas, she communicated even less.

The first shock was finding out that her future was so limited due to her grades. This happened even before she began to count the reasons why. Anything before is hidden in her childhood. It wasn't love that was needed, but awareness, and an ability to resist her vibe, to not move one's attention to something else. If people saw that she was falling away then, then the whole tragedy could have been avoided.

More Cruelty

Hannah was mean and manipulative in one instance: at the beginning, her tapes tell Clay that since he was on her list, he did something to make her kill herself.

This turns out to be a lie. Poor Clay, who had a crush on her. He goes through agony over ten episodes thinking he did something terrible, only to have her say, when she finally gets to him, “You really don't belong on here, Clay, but I couldn't tell the complete story without you.”

Fuck that shit. That wasn't the reason, and is was horrible of her. Meanwhile, Clay was so caught up in her by then, he doesn't consider how she teased his conscience. Did she even think about that? Maybe that cruelty seemed a small thing compared to the horror she was about to commit on herself? Maybe she overlooked leaving a suicide note for the same reason? Either way it was no excuse.
 
It wasn't that she needed him for the story. She wanted Clay to be the only one in the tape circle who wasn't guilty of anything; Clay, who had a crush on her. My guess is she intended for Clay to do exactly what he did: seek revenge. So the story is like Hamlet.

She probably knew he was the only person on the list who had the guts to confront the last on the list: Mr. Porter. She knew Clay had some integrity, and balls; even though they hadn't dropped yet.

And that's how Hannah's ghost got revenge. If only Hamlet had recording technology, and it was Ophelia's ghost who accused and appealed to the living for retribution. 

The Worst Idea

This was a great show, and if you're not depressed or suicidal, I highly recommend it. Except now they're going to ruin it with a second season.  I am baffled about how they're going to carry it on, and how they could keep the name 13 Reasons Why, when Hannah's story has been resolved. Why couldn't they just have a spin off with the same cast, but with a different name? I see that Katherine Langford appears as Hannah in the first episode. Did she make another tape? Storytelling and aesthetics won out over business in season one, but business has made a counteroffensive and won a second season.

And like fans of any original story, I have to see the sequel season, no matter how awful I think it could be. Looks like TV has grabbed me again. I can wound it, but I can't kill it. Anyone selling silver bullets?

Why Cassettes?

One thing you might wonder: why did Hannah use cassette tapes and not some computer format? Yes, cassette players are almost museum pieces. She also had to make an extra effort to get a recorder. Why take that trouble? I think she wanted to discourage people from making her account viral, at least before everyone in line had heard it.

Epilogue: The Book

I have finished reading Jay Anson's book. It's a lot simpler than the TV show. In the book, Clay listens to the tapes in one night. The book has no Hamlet parallel, that was added by the screenwriters. All the character interactions that take place mostly in the present are almost all gone. A few characters are quite different. Courtney, for instance, is unrecognizable.  

Most importantly, Clay refutes Hannah. In his mind, he answers what she says; and at the end, he rejects the blame she's flinging. This makes it clear that Clay was the protagonist in the original, and Hannah actually the antagonist. The lesson he takes away is not about love, it's to look closer for someone falling through the cracks, and help them. Don't let them push you away. 

Even though I love the show, the book was shorter, simpler, and clearer. Moreover, I didn't have to try binge watching it.