“There is no there there,” Gertrude Stein
Centred on Otis (Asa Butterfield), an impressively dull teenage virgin who starts a sex clinic at his high school, Sex Education presents to its infinitely-scrolling Netflix audience a parade of sex-jokes, insecure teenagers and hormonal mishaps. It would follow, then, that a large part of the mass enjoyment of Sex Education would derive from its universality. This is not on account of the experiences of its characters being relatable, however, but more significantly because the physical, cultural and temporal geography of the show exists nowhere (physically) and yet everywhere (imaginarily). Filmed in rural Wales, every character speaks in an RP English accent. The cultural iconography of this English-Welsh ecosystem is entirely American, with varsity jackets and Breakfast Club lockers and literal mean girls. It is clearly set in the present, as certain cultural and technological reference points make us aware, but its characters dress in some amalgam of Sixties-Seventies-Eighties garb. It is simultaneously pastel-earth tones and neon-Eighties. Our protagonist Otis cycles from his Norwegian luxury lodge in a Welsh valley to his Extremely-American high school lifted from a John Hughes film via a leafy woodland road dotted with cute log bus stops. This film-world, then, is entirely placeless: no part of it is lived-in – although, ironically, you can now “live in” our protagonist’s Norwegian lodge in a bizarre twist of television-tourism. And yet, it should not be ignored that this film-world is also very real in the collective imagination of transatlantic pop culture consumers, whose dreams are seemingly informed by Wes Anderson and the Harry Potter universe as much as they are by a total cultural failure to imagine a better future (or any future at all).
Above all else, this demonstrates an inability to comprehend our global social totality. In Sex Education, there are no real differences between people, no real conflicts, and no real Other. Its placeless utopia exists in multiple decades, countries and cultures. But most of all, it exists at the End Of History (although here, the Berlin Wall didn't fall - it never existed in the first place). It conjures an entirely simulated liberal multiculturalism wherein the diversity of its characters is a given, stripped of politics or meaning. To recall Jameson: it is as though we have “become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience… an alarming symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.” In its homogeneous sludge, then, this placelessness constitutes a sort-of utopia, a wide-eyed and wholly theistic dream-world of collapsed time and place in which the blind can see and the lame can walk.
And so, despite its apparent situation in rural Wales, our placeless utopia is visibly multicultural – a liberal London in miniature. In this sense, numerous experiences are accounted for but immediately neutralised. These include: black gay best-friend; rich gay Asian; brown “pansexual” girl; troubled black boy with lesbian adoptive parents; troubled white posh boy who also might be gay, actually. Of course, the protagonist is a straight, white and very wealthy boy, for the mass-consumer needs someone exceedingly average and undeserving as their vehicle through this colourful landscape. The conceit is that if the show ever needs a subplot or a tokenistic appearance there is a character for that. Otis needs a girlfriend? Enter the daughter of a pornographic plumber (does anybody need their pipes cleaning?) with whom Otis evidently has no chemistry. Otis’s girlfriend gets bored of Otis? Enter the quirky girl with a tentacle fetish to woo her. Otis is a bit too vanilla? Don’t worry, he has an extravagant black-gay sidekick – and he is exactly that, a side-kick, who is predictably always in competition with the other out-gay character in the series and bullied mercilessly by our posh (and also maybe gay) antagonist (because, of course, homophobia stems entirely from repressed homosexuality). Representation here is an aesthetic not a means to an end.
With an almost impressive stubbornness, the show refuses to tackle the serious subject matter that it proudly proclaims. The above-mentioned Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), a gay second-generation African, is mercilessly bullied by the cruel and seemingly irredeemable (and white, upper-middle class) Adam (Connor Swindells). Eric, otherwise one of the show’s more substantive characters, and one whose performances are actually quite compelling, suffers homophobic abuse at the hands of Adam. The resolution for this, inexplicably and without any tension or build-up, is for the boys to end up kissing and masturbating one-another: Adam is also apparently gay (thus explaining his prior homophobia) and Eric’s anguish about being viciously abused is quelled, suddenly, by a symbolic concession to repressed lust. In Sex Education, deus ex machina becomes not plot device but the very language of every interaction and happenstance.
In another scene, Maeve (Emma Mackey) – our protagonist Otis’s improbable business partner – has an abortion. The purpose of this, narratively, is to set up our two business partners as opposites: Otis, who is wealthy and well-loved and high-achieving, does not have sex; Maeve, on the other hand, is poor and un-parented and ill-disciplined and therefore has loads of unprotected sex. As a troubled seventeen-year-old she thus needs an abortion. The depiction of Maeve undergoing the procedure is actually relatively sensitively done and has rightly received praise. Waiting outside the abortion clinic, however, are a couple of kooky pro-life protestors, seemingly dressed in patchwork quilts and squabbling over the misspelling of foetus (imagine!) and how the boyfriend had “cheated on Jesus” (how indecent!). The female protestor abandons her partner and trots away with Otis. He gives her some “advice” and she reveals herself to actually be quite promiscuous, listing numerous sexual acts (gasp!), before Otis walks away the moral victor. The protestors, in the end, are merely confused Christians. Perhaps more importantly, they are momentary twee comic relief lodged ungracefully into the scene to represent the bad in the world; they are temporary antagonists, introduced and then dismissed as a means of mapping some semblance of a political compass onto an otherwise ideologically flat world.
Again, the point here is that the show presents to us a world entirely neutralised. Struggle and solidarity – not to mention structural disadvantage – are subsumed into a post-political utopia wherein everyone is different and yet everyone is the same: this world "pays lip service to ‘solidarity’ and ‘collectivity’, while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold." In Sex Education we experience “the Other deprived of its Otherness – the decaffeinated Other,” as Zizek puts it. That is to say, Sex Education’s language is one of bodies divorced from ideas or politics; the mere notion of representation trumps the lived experience of said subject, or, worse, objectifies that subject. Again, the notion that Sex Education exists at the End Of History arises: because we cannot see beyond our present order (lets say this is called ‘capitalism’), the inevitable means of compromise is representation. Simply: liberal capitalism will apparently never be replaced but it will adopt the rhetoric of multiculturalism, the language of online woke culture, and employ the quantification of marginalised bodies on screen as a metric for progress.
Because Eric’s homosexuality is more a plot-point than an opportunity for political dissent, his masturbatory armistice with his bully Adam becomes an apparently heartwarming moment. The potential weight of Maeve (who quite explicitly represents the show’s “working-class”) having an abortion is counter-balanced by the pointless farce of also-troubled pro-life protestors whose antagonism is not vile, as it should be, but a cutesy misunderstanding of faith. Our totally individualised dream-world reduces struggle to plot (think also, for example, of the conflict between Eric's sexual identity and his family's Christian conservatism: it is reduced to an episode and, thereafter, all is well). And so, with every stereotype or identity-revelation, Sex Education’s nauseating parade of quotas and self-congratulatory nods reminds us that while its world is not real, its ideology is. It is a placeless utopia, and an impotent one at that.