Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: drama

  • On Watching “Adolescence” (2025) – Netflix Season 1

    This Netflix drama series does not focus on an activist narrative that many might passionately debate from various political or social perspectives. Instead, it explores how something unimaginably tragic can affect anyone or any family, regardless of their socioeconomic status, race, or cultural background. Committing a crime is not solely the domain of a degenerate or disturbed mind; rather, it can be seen as a sickness influenced by a combination of social factors and the inherent predispositions of individuals. And yes, this reality includes all of us.

    Here is an adolescent boy from a hardworking family whose father may have a temper but is kind and understanding and has a strong responsibility for his family. Hardly a likely candidate for the head of the dysfunctional family contributed to producing a psychopathic killer. Having a temper doesn’t mean you are automatically attuned to criminal minds. To that effect, the father of the boy is neither a saint nor a sinner, and his son’s problem is not of family but of peers; it’s from peer pressure under heavy intoxication with social media where your worth is valued by lookism and agism vying for popularity as key to success. A loser is an Incel whose insecurity is forced by the number of likes destined for a public whipping boy or walking sandbag. Yeah, it’s easy to label anyone who is not within a safe zone of being accepted, and you become a new outcast. If you are a woman outcast, then you are a new witch to be persecuted. 

    The problem with the boy here is his consequence and punishment, but that should not be relegated to the family. To ostracize the family of the sinner is a time-honored practice that never changes, just as there’s no new thing under the sun. While the drama shows the brutally realistic portrayal of the crime, the doer, and the family without overt display of emotions or elaborated scripts, it does not give the boy light of redemption in the person of the psychologist interviewing the boy. I cannot help but think that she’s there to get what she wants, which is to extort confession that he did kill the girl, and that is why he did it, not trying to help him cure the mind disease. She does not seem to be happy with herself either. 

    It was mind-disturbing and painful to see how the police handled the boy and the preponderance of shock that his family encountered on what might have been one of those ordinary mornings. Seeing his father criticizing himself for not being perfect broke my heart. Yet, no one is perfect; he is a good father with a strong sense of responsibility for his family and a good heart. That’s good enough. You see, bad things can happen to good people. Dad, please don’t blame yourself. You are a good father: good night and sweet dreams. 

  • Walking on Sunshine

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    After four consecutive days of rains and clouds, the sun is finally resplendent with its divine fiery halo in the high blue sky. What a pretty Saturday morning it is! Naturally, Bonnie could not help but perambulate the avenues and streets of Avonlea with her two twin brother and sister called Amy and Eddie in a perambulator. Bonnie and the twins became orphans when their parents died at sea from the sinking of Zeus five years ago. Since then, the children have lived with The Collies because Laura Collie is their distant maternal aunt. Laura and her husband consider them as one of their own, provisioning them with all the necessities of comfortable life. And yet, Bonnie feels that there’s a certain feeling of sadness, loneliness, and yearning all integrated into a crystal ball  of melancholy placed in a jewel box of her heart. It’s like having a dainty music box where you keep your sentimental treasure, such as jewels from your grandmother and your locket from your childhood, and put them on when you reminisce about the memories and are intoxicated with the fragrance of nostalgia that belongs only to you.

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    “Good morning, Bonnie! Are these twins your brother and sister? They are so cuddly! What are their names?” Betty Beaver is so enthusiastic to see the babies that she is almost panting with excitement. Betty has her baby brother named tommy, aged 3, and loves him dearly. But seeing this pair of twins makes her heart leap with ebullient joy. “They are Amy and Eddie. Amy was born three minutes earlier than Eddie, who was actually holding her plump ankle while coming out into the world.” Bonnie regrets providing extraneous information on the moment of the twins’ birth because she doesn’t like to be overly talkative, revealing too much about herself. But then it’s such a pretty Saturday afternoon promenade with her brother and sister that she could be lackadaisical about it and all other existential dealings that lay ahead of her.

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    After the nice brisk sauntering, Bonnie and Helen are having nice lunch together at Sylvanian Restaurant down on Petticoat Lane, where food is honest-to-goodness made on the premise 6 days a week. (The  proprietor is a very devout Catholic lady, so she attends every Sunday Mass.) Helen feels liberated from her domestic obligations for being a wife and a mother while she’s alone with her neighbor Bonnie. And Bonnie? Well, it’s not exactly freedom secretly entertaining because she never felt burdened with her duty to take care of her twins. But she could at least forget about worries and chronic anxieties about what tomorrow would bring  and dispel her occasional bouts of melancholy by wallowing herself in delicious food and confabulating with Helen. That’s a simple joy of life that Bonnie wants to keep with small pleasures that make her feel loved and content. Simple soul with streaks of melancholy as she may be, Bonnie ‘s philosophy of life is livable and lovable with all its artlessness and genuineness.

    thanks-for-reading-Rok-Hardware