Last Friday, Netflix released its adaptation of Jay Asher’s 2007 Novel Thirteen Reasons Why. The show centers around a a group of high school students dealing with the aftermath of a girl who committed suicide, who recorded thirteen tapes before she died, each one addressing a particular person and detailing how they influenced her decision to end her own life. The show expands to deal with a variety of topics, including high school relationships, substance abuse, sexual assault, and suicide, but the show immediately struck me with the two ways it marries technology and death.
Here’s a link to the trailer: ► 1:59
The first and obvious way the show and book marries death and technology is with the tapes that Hannah records before she kills herself. Clay, who the show mostly centers around as it moves between past and present as he works his way through the tapes, initially receives them in an ambiguous package, only to pop in the tapes and hear Hannah addressing him seemingly from the beyond. The premise reminded me of the spirit phone even though we know Hannah is very much dead. While the book came out the same year as the iPhone, Netflix updates the technology for today’s high schools, but stays true to Hannah’s decision to use tapes – an outdated form or recording – to address her classmates. There are a few exchanges surrounding this decision: Clay struggles at first to find something to listen to the tapes on, and there is a scene in which one of Hannah’s friends tells her mixtape are a lost art. Just like how burning someone a CD in high school rather represented a thoughtful act rather than just sharing a playlist with someone, the nostalgia and intimacy of the tapes seem to be a more appropriate medium for a posthumous address. While the technology is modern enough for Hannah to address her classmates after death, they seem to represent the fact that these students are haunted by their past, and I do not believe a simple recording on an iPhone or a purely digital medium would have had the same effect.
The show also speaks to how technology has affected high school relationships and friendships and how it exacerbates a lot of problems people that age already face: cliques, rumors, and reputations. Hannah’s downward spiral begins when she’s on a date and a playful photo taken at a playground ends up becoming a photo of the view up her skirt. The boy’s friends see it and quickly spread it, and by the next class period all of the phones in Hannah’s class are pinging off with the photo, and suddenly like a virus the rumor spreads that they did a lot more than just kiss. This rumor haunts her as she tries and forms friendships at her new school, and if you believe in the butterfly effect, a single photo ended up driving a girl to kill herself. The show can be tough to watch at points given some of its content, but definitely still worth watching.