There will only be one more season of the Duffer brothers’ Netflix hit, Stranger Things. This is just as well, because the child characters are beginning to look like undercover policemen and members of fashionable indie bands. The plucky kids of series one now have deep voices and mortgages and subscriptions to Mojo magazine.
I like Stranger Things. I’ve just finished watching the first half of season 4. (The second half is coming in July.) It takes place in the town of Hawkins, Indiana, and is set in the 1980s. This is very comforting for me, because when I was a child Ireland was also set in the 1980s. It remained set in the 1980s well into the 1990s, to be honest.
Like Ireland, Hawkins seems to be traditionally agrarian, but a lot of people are employed in the mad-science sector. And both jurisdictions employ a “Don’t ask questions” approach to inward investment. Pharmaceuticals, IT, meddling in the occult and opening up a portal to hell? Whatever your industry, you can do it here with access to our best graduates and our low, low tax rates, say the people of both Hawkins and Ireland.
Stranger Things is reliably funny and smart and well paced and charmingly acted—all while also being a harbinger of the end times and an admission of creative defeat in the face of past glories
Television and cinema have become increasingly backward looking over the past decade. Although Stranger Things isn’t a reboot of anything, it mashes up a number of pre-existing entities. The first series melded Stephen King’s It with Steven Spielberg’s ET. The newer series adds Freaks and Geeks-style school tribalism, a Nightmare on Elm Street-style supernatural teen killer (there’s even a cameo from Robert Englund) and a Cheech & Chong-style sidekick for Jonathan. Each time something like this is referenced, if you freeze-frame your telly screen you can see a Duffer brother winking at you.
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It probably speaks to contemporary anxieties about the future that our culture creators are now involved in a never-ending postmodern recycling project. “We have all the tools we need to fix the problems of… the 1980s!” the Duffer brothers are confidently saying. This doesn’t mean Stranger Things is no good, of course. It’s reliably funny and smart and well paced and charmingly acted. It just manages to be all of these things while also being a harbinger of the end times and an admission of creative defeat in the face of past glories.
As has been established in previous series, Hawkins sits atop a dark dimension known as the Upside Down, which is a nightmare vision of infrastructural collapse filled with raving ghouls and lost children. It looks a lot like the United States of today. And much of south Dublin. The teens of Hawkins now take the horrific creatures that sporadically emerge from hell in their stride. Whereas the first series was imbued with a genuine sense of dread, that dread is leavened nowadays by anticipatory wisecracks. The fan-favourite child know-it-all Dustin stops short of turning to the camera, shrugging and saying, “A monster in Hawkins? Here we go again!”
Eleven, the manic pixie dream infant, still speaks without contractions despite several years of interaction with other teens. We get flashbacks to her past in a government facility where the children all have the same haircuts, are repeatedly told they are special and can change reality with their minds. As an Irish Times reader, you’re probably already looking up “Secret facility in Stranger Things” in our educational league tables and thinking, It’s no less than my child deserves. Be warned, though: the secret experimental facility isn’t all good. It’s run by Matthew Modine cosplaying as the snow-haired auteur David Lynch. Oh, and most of the students die.
In this season Eleven has moved to Los Angeles with Joyce Byers, aka the excellent Winona Ryder, and Joyce’s hapless occult-prone children: the underused Will, who misses his time in hell with the shadow creatures, which at least gave him attention, and Jonathan, who has discovered weed and is becoming a bit of a shadow creature himself. Eleven is also in a long-distance relationship with visiting Mike, whose personality is that he is in a sulk and is morphing slowly into a member of The Strokes.
One of the characters must fight a monster whose head opens up sporadically to shriek and reveal a gaping maw of pointy teeth. I think I went to school with him
Meanwhile, Joyce is in a long-distance relationship with Jim Hopper (the charismatically lugubrious David Harbour), who has been taken to the 1980s Soviet Union, where his Magnum PI moustache has fallen off. The Soviet Union, youngsters on Twitter will tell you, is a socialist paradise with no flaws. In fairness, if you discount the beatings, Hopper is housed, fed and given a purpose (building a railway in the snow). On the other hand, it’s a prison and he must fight a monster whose head opens up sporadically to shriek and reveal a gaping maw of pointy teeth. I think I went to school with him.
Back in Hawkins, Dustin, Lucas, Robin, Max, Steve, Nancy, Erica and Eddie, a new character, have occult crimes to solve. Yes, there are a lot of teens in Stranger Things now. This is probably why a sulky cadaver with tentacles is invading the psyches of teenagers before levitating them, breaking all their bones and squashing their eyeballs. As a journalist, I feel it’s important we hear his side of the story. Luckily, like men on the internet, he likes nothing better than to ghoulsplain his views to young women. In the seventh episode he laments human society and its “made-up rules, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, each life a faded lesser copy of the one before. Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce and die.” Yes, he’s paraphrasing the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil programme for government.
He also speaks at length about his love for black-widow spiders, which is a bit random. I didn’t expect we were going to get into his hobbies: “Like me they are solitary creatures and deeply misunderstood. They are gods of our world. The most important of all predators. They’re mobile and feed on the weak, bringing balance and order to an unstable ecosystem.” Anyway, this is also from the programme for government. It’s in the section on building a new national maternity hospital.
I still really like Stranger Things. Unlike some other Netflix shows, its storytelling is really well paced, and, unlike half of Disney/Marvel properties, the stunts feel as if they involve real humans, not action figures and CGI hams. Meanwhile, the cast bring an old-school likeability and warmth you don’t get too much on telly these days. So it manages to stay charming and fresh four seasons in, seeming like more than the sum of its parts, even though all of those parts have things like “Property of John Carpenter: please don’t touch” written on them.
