Issue 16: Special Issue - Stranger Things
Hey there!
Long before (well, months before) Netflix released the fourth season of Stranger Things, we knew we’d be devoting at least one issue completely to the show, because…come on, it’s Stranger Things! It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of eighties media tropes, lovingly if imperfectly formed, brought to life by a slew of smart, terrified, prickly, and lovable characters. Most of whom are kids or teenagers–prime real estate as far as this newsletter is concerned.
Whether digging into the latest season or taking the series as a whole, we found plenty to write about for this issue: Alex discusses the sinister monsters and moody teen girls of season 4, and Claudia celebrates the show’s transformative brand of eighties nostalgia.
Alex on Monsters
By now I’ve seen enough horror that scary movies don’t tend to scare me. I come to them for the aesthetics, the suspense, and the characters stretched to their breaking points. In other words, I don’t watch Stranger Things for the monsters. But in this essay, I want to focus on the show’s possessed teen girls—Eleven, Max, and Nancy—and in Stranger Things, monstrousness and teen girls are linked.
By itself this thesis is pretty obvious and pretty boring. The monstrous and the feminine are all but synonymous in so much classic horror; just watch Carrie (or The Exorcist, or Jennifer’s Body) for a period-blood-soaked crash course. Puberty is icky, alien, and dangerous, filling girls with unnatural hungers and explosive emotions. Puberty and periods also mean the possibility of pregnancy and birth, which means that, in more ways than one, teen heroines can assume power over life and death. Obviously, this is all a little gross and a little scary for patriarchal society.
Stranger Things leans hard on that classic interpretation of the monstrous feminine. It’s full of Carrie-reminiscent imagery, like the nosebleeds that precede Eleven’s bouts of telekinesis. The Upside Down, which is moist, squelchy, and sometimes blood-tinted, resembles a giant womb. But the show also mines its best horror from male blindness and ambition. Whether it’s Dr. Brenner kidnapping Eleven and raising her in isolation, or Billy Hargrove threatening to kill his stepsister Max, there’s always some guy determined to shape the Upside Down and the girls who move through it towards his own ends. Season 4 links Eleven, Max, and Nancy’s storylines by pitting the monstrous feminine against its own vision of the monstrous masculine—a sinister force that abuses and misunderstands female creative power.
Though Stranger Things isn’t explicit about the physical ickiness of puberty, it understands the darker, scarier transformations going on beneath the skin. By season 4 Eleven, Max, and Nancy have all struggled for independence and in the process made choices they consider monstrous: Eleven apparently massacred other test subjects after failing to escape Hawkins Lab, Max wished Billy would just die already (the show has both a literal psychic homicide and a figurative one), and Nancy abandoned her best friend for sex with her popular boyfriend. Growing up isn’t bloody and ugly just because of zits and periods. For girls especially, freedom can feel both impossible and dangerous. It’s testing boundaries, hurting the people closest to you. Sometimes, in order to break free, you have to become a monster.
Enter Victor Creel, (aka Vecna, aka One), Brenner’s patient zero. After Eleven pushed him into the alternate dimension that’s become the Upside Down, Creel took control of the entities that would hunt the girls and kill their friends and families. He’s an expert at engineering impossible choices and weaponizing guilt, an interdimensional serial killer, and an entitled douche. And he’s blind to the true potential of the forces he’s messing with.
Creel is physically connected with one of the Upside Down’s few, but significant, bits of phallic imagery, the snaky, penetrating vines. He’s also dependent on the Upside Down, unable to physically leave that space, and vulnerable within it, since his physical body can be destroyed. Movies like Carrie are terrified that awkwardly morphing, moody teenage girls are granted power over life and death, but apparently Creel hasn’t seen Carrie. He points out that Eleven “[made him] into this” without really realizing that this means she can unmake him, too.
So Creel’s vines may be less phallic and more umbilical, and Stranger Things’ purest embodiment of the monstrous masculine isn’t an all-powerful monster but a clueless, murderous child. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t effectively messed with the girls’ heads. In order to defeat Creel, Nancy, Max, and Eleven each have to face their fears and plunge back into the Upside Down. Max, who’s spent most of the season pushing friends away, has to psychically join forces with Eleven, opening up the neediest corners of her mind. While they battle Creel in Max’s memories, Nancy takes out his body with a flamethrower. Along the way, she tentatively reconnects with her ex-boyfriend. Whether psychically or literally, all three girls confront their monstrousness and harness it in their efforts to defeat Creel. They also reevaluate their past choices, delving into the painful and murky emotional territories they’ve avoided.
In Stranger Things, the monstrous masculine rises out of contempt for the monstrous feminine. Creel claims he was reborn in the Upside Down, but birth isn’t bringing more death into the world. It’s creating new life, which is a messy, scary, and necessary process that the show links with the girls’ rocky journey towards growing up. The monstrous feminine rises out of the true transformation that comes with self-awareness and accountability. It’s about rebirth, and in the Upside Down Eleven, Max, and Nancy finally start the bloody, monstrous process of being remade.
Claudia on Nostalgia
I was homeschooled by a mom who immigrated from Kazakhstan, so my knowledge of American pop culture in the eighties is slim to none. My dad was in his teens for most of that decade, but he’s always been more interested in the sixties and seventies. So I grew up watching Soviet cartoons and listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but never watched Back to the Future or read Sweet Valley High. Stranger Things was my first awareness of the media nostalgia for those years.
I’m interested in how viewers and critics interpret this nostalgia, since it seems to evoke a degree of discomfort with as many people as it charms—the past is not always a very friendly place, after all. Grappling with how art interprets it forces us to reckon with how we’ve come to terms with, or, more often, have ignored the ugly parts of our history.
My favorite think piece unpacking Stranger Things’ eighties nostalgia is Lindsay Ellis’s video essay “Stranger Things, IT, and the Upside Down of Nostalgia.” Ellis seeks to answer the question of whether “the cycle of nostalgia” will “ever evolve—grow more sophisticated than ‘Hey, remember the thing?’” She argues that while It, the 2017 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, uses a deconstructive nostalgia that shows an eighties full of corruption, brutal bullying, and sexism, Stranger Things leaves these issues largely untouched, opting for a rosier view of the past.
It’s a great video and well worth watching, even if I don’t fully agree with all of its claims. (It was also created before the release of seasons 3 and 4, so some of the characters and plot points I’ll discuss here hadn’t been introduced yet.) The eighties of Stranger Things is certainly a brighter, kinder place than that of It, but I wouldn’t call its nostalgia naïve. Instead, it strikes me as aspirational.
Many of the tonal differences between the two works come down to their intended audience. Both the book It and its adaptations are skillful mythologizations of childhood, but they aren’t meant for kids, allowing for a much more overt exploration of the decade’s skeevyness. Stranger Things straddles that ever-tricky line of family entertainment and has less leeway to work with as far as explicit depictions of violence and prejudice. In other words, It can hand you the pill and tell you to swallow, but Stranger Things needs to hide it in some peanut butter.
The peanut butter is the way the show develops its characters, centering on storylines and emotional payoffs that wouldn’t have been featured in the books and movies it pays tribute to. Take Eleven, a telekinetic girl clearly inspired by another iconic Stephen King creation, the psychically gifted Carrie White. But Carrie was never afforded the closure Eleven gets: King admits that her tragic arc is “an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality.” Similarly, Robin Buckley’s queerness doesn’t block her from relevance or a romantic subplot, and former jock Steve Harrington’s journey from selfish obliviousness to a more tender version of masculinity has made him a breakout character.
By focusing on these and other character types (the frazzled mom, the acerbic tomboy) who were either never given significant screen time, or were never forced to reckon with the consequences of their actions in eighties sci-fi and horror, Stranger Things comments on the pitfalls of eighties media while simultaneously revising them, opening up the landscape and allowing a wider swathe of the population to imagine what life might be liked in a neon-tinged world of walkie-talkies, malls, and Kate Bush. In the conclusion of her essay, Ellis says the pull of nostalgia may be “because the past is a mirror, and we survived it then.” The eighties of Stranger Things is not so much a mirror as a painting—a beguiling simulacrum that uses the past as a vehicle to show how we can survive to be better, kinder people in the present.
Thank you so much for reading, especially if you’ve stuck through our spotty posting schedule! Going forward, Hey, Kid! will drop on the first Wednesday of every month, instead of the last. We’re hoping this switch will make posting consistently a bit easier for us. See you soon, and thanks again!
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia