Striking strangeness
Why a TV series that blends science fiction, fantasy and horror is a runaway success
Cultural productions like ‘Stranger Things’ remind us how deeply fraught with anxiety and pain young lives can be.
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It was on a whim that I started watching the Netflix series, and only then did I learn that I was a decade late in delving into one of the most beguiling onscreen alternative universes of our times. With its final episode airing on January 1, the Duffer Brothers’ ‘Stranger Things’ completed the 10-year-run as a compelling blend of science fiction, fantasy and horror in a contemporary setting.
Having grown up with the ‘Harry Potter’ books, where my own evolution into an adult had somewhat paralleled the main characters’ growth, I was accustomed to acquiring a slow yet thrilling experience of fantastical development rooted in reality. But observing the child characters of ‘Stranger Things’ turn into young adults within a span of 42 episodes provided another kind of thrill: one that hinged on the tempting habit of binge-watching but also immense psychological fulfillment.
While fantasy, sci-fi and horror are still disparaged as ‘low’ forms of writing and entertainment, their best expressions buzz with creativity that is at par with any well-constructed realistic production. And given their predilection for imaginative feats not bound by human understandings of space and time, alternative universes even retain a greater artistic elasticity than their true-to-life counterparts. It is this suppleness that spawns innovative ways of comprehending the meaning of existence in a world swarming with the unknown, the unexplainable and the unpredictable.
Set in the fictional American town of Hawkins of the 1980s, ‘Stranger Things’ draws together children and adults who befriend a mysterious girl called ‘Eleven’ born with extrasensory powers such as psychokinesis and telepathy. They all resist the derelict, dystopian and flaky world of the ‘Upside Down’. Accessible through web-like portals whose opening and closing constitutes the politics of the narrative arc itself, the Upside Down threatens to annihilate Hawkins and its citizens with every season.
At its heart, this is again a story of good versus evil, where the latter is configured in the form of interconnected villains, including the gigantic spider-like creature called the Mind Flayer, the malevolent ruler Vecna, his younger self Henry, and the faceless monsters Demogorgons. It is however in its telling that the series acquires an indelible ingenuity.
As season after season throws up a new set of challenges, a vast realm of emotional complexities and struggles lays itself bare, both through the protagonists and the antagonists. One of the highlights of contemporary long-form storytelling (especially films and web-series) is the focus on the mental make-up of human beings, and cultural productions attuned to the supernatural and young audiences are endlessly inventive in this regard.
While ‘Stranger Things’ does a fantastic job in chiselling out the familial, professional and romantic struggles of Eleven’s real-world friends, it uses Eleven and the wicked manifestations of Vecna on her and her friends’ minds to explore the intricacies of cognition as well as childhood trauma.
In an adult-oriented world that ceaselessly propagates dewy-eyed perspectives about children, ‘Stranger Things’ reminds us how deeply fraught with anxiety and pain young lives can be. As the Mind Flayer and Vecna seize control of the youngsters and the entire territory of Upside Down, we receive a grandiose and macabre vision of a landscape endlessly smothered in slimy vines and writhing roots, that together constitute the villain’s hive-mind. The abstraction of the mind is thus literally imagined as a gigantic place that latches onto other lives for sustenance and domination.
Among the series’ most terrifying scenes are those depicting the creepers imprisoning children in mummified, trance-like states, their mouths viciously gripped by the vine-tips shipping energy to the rogue’s body.
But for all the horror, it is the twin elements of the desire to be understood (or its absence thereof) and the freedom of making choices, that essentially undergirds the emotional core of the show. Somersaulting through numerous mindscapes, it illustrates the perils of growing up with supernatural energies as well as the consequences of divergent choices emanating out of them. Despite her being used as a guinea pig by the authorities who often rely on torture to elicit ‘scientific’ results, Eleven doesn’t give up her goodness. On the other hand, Henry, subjected to the same environment, chooses unhinged retribution against the world. And yet, he remains scared of traumatic memories from his childhood.
Such inventive steering of interiority recalls many references from the world of contemporary children’s culture, from Voldemort forcing his way through Harry’s mind in ‘Harry Potter’ to the playful jamboree of human emotions in the form of actual figures in the ‘Inside Out’ franchise.
As a whole, ‘Stranger Things’ indeed evolves as a homage to a wide variety of cinema and TV (from Steven Spielberg to Stephen King), as well as taps into a plethora of mythological tropes. And though one can interpret the title’s ‘strangeness’ in infinite ways, what most eloquently captures the series’ otherworldly glory is its rootedness in the culture of the Eighties.
While Vecna and Eleven’s supernatural sensibilities cast a strong grip on the viewers, they are as much enticed by the analog culture of walkie-talkies, roll-filled cameras, elaborate board games, mysterious radio signals, fireworks-as-weapons, and wily puzzle-solving techniques that the series resorts to. And it is also here that the show finds its most compelling anchor: music.
As Dumbledore quips in ‘Harry Potter’, music is “magic beyond all” other kinds of spells, ‘Stranger Things’ literally orchestrates this magic in the form of a positive force. Thus, in Season 4, we see the character Eddie Munson energetically strumming his guitar to Metallica’s thrash-metal classic ‘Master of Puppets’ to fend off the evil “Demobats”. In the same season, Max Mayfield listens to Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up that Hill’, that helps her stay conscious and at one remove from Vecna even in a life-threatening coma.
Thanks to its resurgence, this 1985 song quickly reached over one billion streams on Spotify a few years ago. According to Bush, the piece is “about swapping places with another person in an attempt to understand things from their perspective”. Through its period flavour and plea for regarding otherness, the composition has rightly become a perfect metaphor for the core idea of the series — strangeness — and, indeed, for that strangest of all things called life.
— The writer is a historian, cultural critic and artist from Shimla
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