Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Stranger Things, Season 4

Director’s Note: With the summer heat crushing down on the bunker, turning it into essentially a giant lobster pot, everyone here in the Division has been hard at work trying to keep the peace in the house so as to not see a repeat of the Summer Funstravaganza Incident of 2012. In our torpor, we’ve managed to catch everyone in Bunker Ops up on Stranger Things (they hadn’t seen a single episode) and then we powered on through season 4. We had many thoughts about the series, which we will share below.

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A great poster, so thematically appropriate

Stranger Things, Season 4 (Netflix)

This is one of those shows that will be talked about for years to come. Already is has moved the zeitgeist of popular culture into unforeseen directions, re-invigorating Dungeons & Dragons, The Neverending Story, Kate Bush, and the careers of Matthew Modine and Winona Ryder for the general public. It made a star out of David Harbour and Millie Bobby Brown and pushed the other kids into the limelight so hard, so fast, it’s as if we’ve all collectively forgotten the cautionary tales of the Bratpack of old, the Olsen Twins, and Drew Barrymore. In providing a meta-commentary on the 1980s, it’s become a self-regenerating harbinger of the excesses that made the 1980s the very thing the show is attempting to chronicle.

That’s all well and good. But far from being a mere meme generator and a love note to Stephen King (and just about every other pop culture icon of the decade, from music, to art, to film, to TV, and all points in between), this show, collectively, is the most Generation X thing to come out in the 21st century. It’s written by Gen-Xers, for Gen-Xers, and more importantly, it’s about Gen-Xers. This is a primer for understanding people ages 45-59.

It’s like VHS box art. On purpose.

I’m sure there is a larger, more formal essay in my future about this, but it is going to wait for the final fifth season so I can be sure to cover everything, but I will briefly run some stuff down:

The parents aren’t clueless, but rather self-absorbed. In season 1, only Wynona Ryder is a helicopter parent, out of the necessity of Will being missing for the entire season. Every other set of parents is confident that their children aren’t being murdered, until, you know, a couple of them are murdered. Prior to that, as long as the kids had bikes, they were pretty self-sufficient. Even Dustin’s mom, clingy as she is, stops at her own doorstep and lets him run wild.

I won’t run down what this poster is referencing. You should know.

This makes the kids self-reliant, but it’s not bad parenting. When the Hellfire club is openly exposed in season 4, they all share a look of concern, but real quick they come to the conclusion that their kids aren’t Satan-worshippers. Oh, they are cooperating with the authorities, but they aren’t buying the narrative being served up to them.

There is no bad character, except for maybe Vecna, who isn’t so horrible that they don’t get a redemptive arc. Only the bullies are made to be one-note menaces, and they are nearly all just mean, rotten assholes. But there’s a banality to them; they trip the geeks, and pick on El, and then they do, what? Laugh like hyenas and wander off. They are empty vessels. Tulpas to be loathed and forgotten as larger concerns take hold.

I mean, COME ON! You know what this one is, right?! I had the original poster hanging over my bed for years. And I still had girlfriends. Unbelievable.

Steve, and later Billy, and even Papa, all have reasons for being the way that they are. When El tries to tell herself she’s a monster, Papa explains that there are no absolutes, only shades of gray.

That lesson, right there, was something we learned from a dozen different sources, all throughout the 1980s, thanks to the prevalence of Post-Modern cultural studies. Nothing was ever simple. There was no black and white. Not for us. Not growing up in the shadow of impending nuclear holocaust, where we knew there were people in Russia who wanted us dead, but not the everyday Communists, right? Surely they were okay.

A bit obscure, but not really. Even the new Firestarter movie aped the original movie poster with Drew Barrymore.

Stranger Things touches every movie genre, makes deep references and drops actual Easter eggs in the form of dress codes, scene shots, throwaway lines, set pieces, and story concepts. Kids on the run from the government? Check. Secret scientist enclaves working with psychics? Check. Nearly every iconic scene from Stephen Spielberg’s bag of tricks? Check. Deep cuts for cult classic films, like Evil Dead, Buckaroo Banzai, and Big Trouble in Little China? Check, check, and check. Movie posters hang in every kid’s bedroom, and they are movie posters that it would have been difficult for those kids to get their hands on, I can assure you, unless one of them had an in at the movie theater, passing them the posters when they were through with them. But that’s neither here nor there.

Evil Dead? Evil Dead?! Where?

The show initially wanted you to know, to see, to acknowledge, that these things were present. They were context clues, and they were also actual easter eggs to be hidden in the background, as only a true Easter egg (not to be conflated with a plot point, as the rocket scientists on YouTube love to do) can be hidden. There are so many of these references that some of them zoom right by you, not because they are obscure and you don’t catch them, but because they are so ubiquitous that you don’t notice them.  It’s like when people type the the word “the” two times in a row (see what I did, there?).

I mean, this one is obvious, right? So Very Obvious.

I’ve tried not to give anything away, contextually, on the off chance that someone on the planet hasn’t seen the show. I can say now that having watched them in a massive week-long binge, some of the perceived transgressions in seasons 2 and seasons 3 are greatly diminished by watching the shows back-to-back, without the year-plus long build-up between each season. And season 4 is simply off the hook. It’s my favorite for a number of reasons, personal and professional.

All of the essential elements in place, here on this poster.

All that being said, I think the shows get better, because they have increased confidence to be able to do what they want to do without reprisals. At this point, they have offered up what will likely be the Last Word in 1980s nostalgia, equal parts “Remember that?” and Reinvention. Stranger Things manages to actually cover in spirit if not in actual reportage what it was like to be a kid in the 1980s, to have older friends who were like de facto big brothers to you, to have parents be both incredibly essential and effectively useless, to be scared of something, everything, all of the time and also to be able to navigate those fears with a few friends and a good bike. Girls. Malls. Movies. Communism. And in the case of the show, some D&D-esque monsters that keep screwing up life for everyone else.

It's been said that season 5 will be the finale, a wrap-up season that may well kill more people we’ve come to love. Provided that the story is well served by such carnage, I am okay with it. I don’t mind the slight anachronisms that creep in from time to time, either in dialogue or from the timeline being out of synch. The “Master of Puppets” needle drop was worth cheating up the release of the album a bit and if that level of detail is derailing you from the show’s finale, you are (and I say this will love and affections) So Doing It Wrong.

I would totally be on board for a Steve and Dustin spin-off. Maybe they could go to college? Fight crime? I don’t know. Robin can come along, too. They make a good team.

The original poster for the show. Kids. Bikes. Flashlights.