My take on the issues surrounding Netflix removing 13 REASONS WHY's graphic suicide scene

Earlier this week, Netflix announced it was making a fairly surprising change to 13 REASONS WHY's first season finale. After two years of controversy, the streaming service decided to completely remove the graphic scene of Hannah Baker getting into the bathtub and slitting her wrists. The scene had been a flashpoint for debate since it debuted, with some critics arguing it risked provoking imitative behavior.

There's a pretty thorough write-up on the backstory of this debate on The Hollywood Reporter.

Since I've blogged a lot about 13 REASONS WHY, going so far as to make public my spec episode of the show, I wasn't surprised when a regular reader went to my old post discussing this issue and asking if I had any reaction to the edit. I do. And I've given this matter a lot of thought - so much thought that I feel obligated to do more than just give a reaction to a digital platform essentially erasing something from existence almost entirely.

I wade into this with zero illusions I will change anyone's mind on either side of the debate. If you're against the show, I don't think anything in my power will persuade you any different.

There are a lot of issues tied up in this so let me try to break them down so my position is clear.

Where do I stand on media depictions of suicide? My understanding is that there's a far more conclusive link between the reporting on real suicides and the result of suicide contagion than there has been demonstrated to exist between fictional suicides and any resulting copycats. I feel like the lack of understanding about that distinction is certainly a factor in the thinkpieces that have debated this with regard to 13 REASONS WHY.

This Vox article speaks somewhat to this point and talks to experts who note that the findings of a recent study that purported to link the show to a rise in suicide rates, "should be interpreted with caution."

felt that this report that tried to show a link between the debut in the show and a rise in male suicides was pretty inconclusive. Plenty of other people got thinkpieces out of showing the fallacy of assuming correlation was causation. The report didn't even demonstrate that any of the people who killed themselves in that peak had even been exposed to the show. But for people who read only the headlines, in their mind, this study proved the show got people killed.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I believe most of the people upset by these findings are genuine in their concern. I think the study itself has a lot of problems, problems that are compounded by media coverage that took the most sensational spin on the findings themselves. I'm not here to insult anyone who saw an article about that and got misled by the framing.

If you were to ask me what I really would like to see, it would be a comprehensive study on the impact of fictional suicides. It'd be great if that study wasn't so myopic as looking only at 13 REASONS WHY. There's plenty of suicide media out there. No one ever brings up A MILLION LITTLE THINGS despite my feeling that it handled their core suicide FAR more irresponsibly in terms of what motivated the character.

Do I think the show romanticizes suicide? I don't. I really don't. It's clearly not the intent and I think it requires some amount of bad faith on the part of the interpreter to come up with that reaction. I feel like the arguments for this position do a lot of cherry-picking. Some of this goes to how we evaluate a creative work. Briefly, let's tackle two questions:

• Did the creators intend to romanticize suicide? This seems to be an emphatic no. I've read dozens of published interviews with the writers and it's clear that their intent was 180 degrees removed from that, to the point where they explicitly avoided common pitfalls of these scenes, such as the "beautiful corpse," or showing her drifting off peacefully.
• Does the work itself romanticize suicide? I don't believe it does. I personally don't see how anyone watches the show and comes away thinking, "The message of this whole thing is that if bad things happen to you, you should kill yourself." I don't understand the mindset that sees the pain Hannah's death causes so many - particularly the "good" characters of Clay and her parents - and thinks the show is endorsing that act. 

I make this next comparison very cautiously, but it reminded me of people who were offended by THE WOLF OF WALL STREET because they came away thinking the movie lionized Jordan Belfort. No one involved with that movie was trying to make that statement, nor does the movie really make him look heroic if you take it as a whole. But if you cherry pick things like, "He has sex with insanely hot women and more money than he knows what to do with," then yeah, you might come away with the feeling that "This is so cool."

Is it fair to hold creators accountable for some segment of the audience coming away with a completely incorrect understanding of the work? It's one thing to make them own what they're actually saying, but to take them to task what people erroneously THINK was being endorsed is an entirely different thing. That kind of thinking is a pathway to art that doesn't make any bold decisions for fear that the audience won't be able to follow.

All this is to say I don't want this to come down to an argument where the two sides are "I hate this and therefore it's bad" and "I like this and therefore it's good." If you hate Katherine Langford, or you think Brian Yorkey overwrites his dialogue, that's not really supporting data for "Why Netflix should erase this show." There are plenty of shows I dislike, hell, even shows that I think reflect some ugly values. I'll point it out, but I'll never say, "this should be wiped from existence."

Also, to challenge any claim that I'm a pure 13 REASONS WHY partisan, I'll toss out there that I really have no desire to defend a different controversial element of the show - the sexual assault and attempted school shooting in the season two finale. I have a lot of issues with that subplot both in concept and execution. Even so, I think I'd be bothered by the implications of wiping that scene from the record entirely, post-release.

Does this mean I think the show should be viewed by everyone? NO. Obviously, people at risk for depression and self-harm should be amply warned about the content. The same way we rely on trigger warnings for articles or videos dealing violence and sexual assault is exactly what we should do here. I don't think the answer will ever be a wholesale ban on a particular kind of media or story. I think the solution is to be more responsible about how that media is put into the world.

To give you an example, we know that when younger children are exposed to pornographic and sexual material at an early age, it can rewire their brains and severely impact their behavior and cognitive development. I don't think you'll ever see someone seriously propose "Let's ban pornography altogether" or "Let's ban all nudity or sexual activity from Netflix completely." There we understand that with warnings and content ratings and responsible parenthood we're doing what we can to protect people in need of protecting.

By the time I came to the show, they'd put warnings up on all the more intense episodes and for season two they were even more aggressive with their content warnings. I understand some of this outrage comes from the fact Netflix took a few weeks to add some of those extra warnings, and that's unfortunate.

Could someone still ignore the content warnings? Sure. Just like someone could ignore the warning not to take a hair dryer in the shower with them, or to not put metal in a microwave. If someone is determined to do something even after the risks are explicitly put there ahead of them, there's not much that would stop them anyway.

I'm wary of giving too much weight to anecdotal stories. For every person I've seen say the show was a dangerous trigger for those who self-harm, I've read posts and articles by people like this one by B.J. Colangelo, whose piece for Birth.Movies.Death explores how much she related to what Hannah was going through, how as a survivor of sexual assault and a nearly successful suicide attempt, she found the show powerful and effective at showing suicidal teens that suicide wasn't the answer.

Colangelo fits the profile of the sort of at-risk viewer we've been told we need to protect from this material - but the show didn't trigger her the way the show's detractors claimed it would. I don't offer this to refute the stories of those with the opposite experience, but merely to underline we can't know that there is a direct, always predictable reaction to the show, even within the at-risk subgroup where all the discussion is being focused.

I'm old enough to remember the heavy metal panic of the late 80s, when a lot of parents got concerned that subliminal messages in Judas Priest's music provoked two men to attempt suicide. It seems silly to our ears now. These were men who obviously had mental health issues and no causative link between the music and the suicides could really be made. This whole debate feels like the modern version of that.

There's a poetic irony to the articles I've read by people drawing a connection between specific suicides and exposure to the show. The concept of the show is that Hannah Baker is laying out the thirteen experiences that put her on the path to taking her own life. Each experience was instigated by a different person on the tapes.

When you watch the show, do you blame all of them for Hannah's suicide? I think many of these kids treated her poorly. The two who sexually assaulted her, one of them extremely violently, absolutely deserve to be punished for what they did to her. But did they kill Hannah Baker? Were their actions, taken individually, enough to make them culpable?

I don't believe they were, even if you choose to believe that it doesn't matter that many of the people named on the tapes had no intent to do that harm. Hannah's suicide was the culmination of the domino effect of mistreatment. Do we believe that Sheri, who knocked over a stop sign in an act of carelessness that later got another student killed, is as important a factor in Hannah's suicide as the boy who raped her?

No. We don't.

Bryce Walker raped Hannah Baker. There's no doubt he should be held accountable for that violence... but is he responsible for her suicide? Or is he just a very strong link in a long chain? The show presents Hannah's attempt at explaining what motivated her suicide, but in the end, the lesson seems to be that no one factor alone was the magic bullet that claimed Hannah.

And ultimately, isn't that what we're being asked to do of the show - to give it blame for a tragic result that was already set into motion by hundreds of other factors? There may be a strange form of comfort in being able to point at this boogeyman and say "This is what took someone I love away from me!" But it's never that easy, and the answer never is "Burn this, salt the earth below it and never speak of it again!"

"Okay, enough of this. Where do you stand on the removal of the scene?" 

If a creative work has been put out there, I'm always against the original version being made completely unavailable so it can be supplanted by a newer one. If Netflix wanted to put out this new version, while letting the old one co-exist, that's great. If they want to set the safer version as the default viewing option and make the "historical one" only available after going through menus and viewing addition warnings, I'm totally behind that too.

I have no beef with the existence of alternate versions as long as they don't erase what already was. Here, I'm speaking broadly. The same issue I have with "Greedo firing first" is the same issue I have with the removal of the suicide scene and the reframing of the subsequent discovery of Hannah's body by her parents - don't change the work I've seen and try to pretend it always was this way.

I'm aware that one motivation for these edits is that a new season will drop, and with that, new viewers will discover the show. I appreciate them giving the matter that kind of thought and sensitivity, but I still find this revisionist motivation to be troubling.
The other conversation to be had, the one that would have felt crass and reductive had I leapt here without treating the charged material with due sensitivity, is the morality behind any distributor being able to completely wipe something from the digital record. This was a lot harder to do in a world where physical media was prevalent, but we're trending to an era where most content is going to live digitally more than it will on DVDs and blurays.

Ponder if you will, the next Bill Cosby in every sense of that word - a successful groundbreaking comedian, someone who kicked in doors and was a pioneer for an entire race or class of people, the man who everyone who came after him pointed to as their influence. Then one day, like Bill Cosby, ugly details from his past arise. His series is cancelled.

No, not just canceled - digitally erased from every platform, made as inaccessible as if it never existed. GONE.

Our culture is our history. The thought that significant and influential parts of it could be completely erased from the record because of the misdeeds of another Bill Cosby or Louis CK is... chilling. I'm not morally comfortable with that. Even if I don't think I'll ever watch The Cosby Show again, it's still an important chapter of TV.

I can understand the rationale behind Netflix's decision while still be wary of the Pandora's Box it opens. So if you're asking me what I feel about these edits in the abstract sense, I'm concerned.

Do I think all of Netflix's concerns about the impact of the show on teens is in good faith? Yes, and as I said, I think the same of many of the concerned parents who read these somewhat shaky studies and came away with honest concern for what they read.

Do I think it will satisfy the anti-13 REASONS WHY advocates? No.

This won't end the conversation so much as it will stoke the passions on both sides. The show's creators speak often of hoping to start a conversation about suicide. For too long, that conversation has been less about the issues the show addresses and more about the harm the show is feared to do in speaking of those issues. I hope with this concession, Netflix has given all concerned parties a way to move forward and past the argument that has raged for two years now.