129. STRANGER THINGS - Leave the Battles to the Children
I love the Netflix series Stranger Things. I’m supposed to. It is literally targeted directly at people like me: a weirdo child of the 80s. The font is, knowingly, the same font my favourite author, Stephen King, used on all his classic horror books back then. The title-music is evocative of a type of science-fiction and horror of the era that I loved and all the references in the show, from music, to television, to film, are explicitly designed to appeal to my own childhood. Ghostbusters is my favourite movie - the main characters dressed up as the Ghostbusters during Halloween a few seasons ago. And who, my age, doesn’t love Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’, the recurring theme of the latest season. If you think the parallels between the big evil kill-you-in-your-nightmares Vecna character and 80s hero of the video-nasty, Freddy Krueger, is a coincidence, then you didn’t notice Freddy Krueger himself, Robert England, portraying Vecna’s victim, Victor Creel, in the series. Oh yes - Stranger Things is perfectly tuned to appeal to me and my generation. To all the freaks and outsiders who grew up at that time thinking the world around them was crazy and finding solace and solidarity in offbeat interests lurking on the margins of popular culture.
But that doesn’t explain why I liked Stephen King’s IT the first time I read it. That childhood setting was in an American 1950s I had never experienced. Yet it remains one of my favourite books. Or those classic 80s Spielberg movies I grew up watching like The Goonies and ET, or Joe Dante’s less successful but still strangely compelling, Explorers, where the kids involved were just a little too old to reflect who I was at the time. Fred Dekker’s 1987 cult film, The Monster Squad, inspired a club of the same name that my friends and I ran at primary school, albeit without any actual monsters, but it would be another six years before I knew who either the “Stephen King” was on Sean Crenshaw’s “Stephen King Rules” t-shirt, or that it was parodying a famous t-shirt of the WWF wrestler I would come to love in the next decade, Hulk Hogan. And I certainly have not now, nor ever have been, a wizard. Yet when Harry Potter and his pals teamed up at Hogwarts to save us all from Voldemort I read every book and watched every movie.
Importantly, so did many other people. Harry Potter has been a global phenomenon. As has Stranger Things. And not every viewer of Stranger Things is a child of the 80s. Many of them are the children of right now, the 1980s as alien to them as the 1880s were to me. Of all the successes Stephen King has had, IT, despite being over 1000 pages long, seems to be one of his most enduring, with both a popular TV miniseries and two-part movie made off the back of it, whether we grew up in the 50s or not. Monster Squad and Explorers were far less successful, yet did not suffer obscurity and disappearance after their respective box office disappointments. Both went on to become enduring cult classics. Meanwhile ET and The Goonies both became legendary.
I mentioned Freddy Krueger earlier too. Why did this awful character - a child-murdering monster - become so popular that he carried a multiply rebooted film franchise across decades, as well as books and TV shows on his back? Why were all of those 80s slasher movies, so wonderfully evoked not only by Stranger Things, but by the equally popular and enduring Scream films by Wes Craven, so popular despite their blood and violence? Halloween? Friday the 13th? Michael Myers and Jason joining Krueger and Ghostface in their somehow iconic brutality?
There is a common theme to all of these successes. In all of them there is a big bad thing - a monster, a threat, an evil - that the adult world either doesn’t believe in, or seems to be part of, and only a group of teenagers, children, can stop it.
It made me think about why that might be? Why the trope of kids against a threat the adult world either can’t see or doesn’t do anything about has always been so popular.
I believe the trope is popular because we can all relate to that scenario. We have not necessarily had to do battle with a big supernatural evil but we have all been children looking at the adult world doing nothing about a terrible threat. It might be climate change, it might be a broken economic system not fit for purpose, it might be the unstoppable passage of time that we know means the demise of our youthful hopes and dreams is inevitable and that, one day, sooner than we think, we will become as boring as our parents!
Adults let children down all the time. Children are born into a world full of perils and dangers and the adults who were there before them appear to have just allowed it. Those children then grow up and try to make the world a better place. Sometimes they succeed. A little. Often though, they end up compromising their values, making do with minor improvements, maybe even becoming the very thing that they hated when they were a child. They look back at the energy and idealism - the optimism - of their youth and they think back to how much had seemed possible back then. Before responsibilities, jobs, bills. Before kids of their own.
I believe we relate so much to these stories of groups of kids ganging together in order to confront and overcome some existential threat because, through them, the adults writing them, producing them, and eventually watching them, can live out the fantasy of what they should have done back then when they could see something wrong with the world but nobody was listening. A world where the gang of kids are right, even if the adult world doesn’t acknowledge it, and where they do eventually manage to defeat the evil they are up against. And the kids who watch them can live out the fantasy of what they wish they could do - fight an identifiable enemy and win - instead of being powerless against the unspecific dread they face of a broken and imperfect world.
Sort of.
Because in a lot of these stories the evil never quite dies.
The monster in the slasher movie always returns for one last scream. We think Voldemort is defeated but then again, so did Harry’s parents (just as ours and our grandparents’ probably once thought fascism was defeated). Pennywise comes back to Derry about every 27 years to feed off each new generation of scared children. Maybe they got him this time, maybe they didn’t? While for the kids from Explorers and ET seemed as if their story was over when the end credits rolled, their enemy throughout was the government trying to stop their interactions with aliens, so whatever petty victories were won by the end of each movie we all know that their lives will never be free of interference going forward. Meanwhile, the amulet in The Monster Squad is a perennial threat too, vulnerable as it is one day in every century. I started watching the latest season of Stranger Things this summer believing it to be the final season: joke’s on me - evil never dies. The gang will be back again soon to continue fighting for Hawkins once again.
I’m not naive. I know that this is also about squeezing as much money out of these intellectual properties as possible. Sequel after sequel. Season after season. But there’s no thirst for new seasons or sequels without that initial love of the original. The spark of affection and intrigue that comes from the resonating metaphor of us as children vs the world. Leaving the ending open enough for the possibility of future threats in each work seems to further represent the truism at the heart of the metaphor: that the battles we think we won when we were children are never certain. They will forever seem tenuous and impermanent. Potentially upended at any moment and consumed by the grim reality of adulthood. Our powers forgotten, our friendships dispersed, our optimism soured. What we could do back then - what we might be able to do now - is fleeting.
Stranger Things is targeted at people like me, like you, like everybody who ever felt that the world they could see through their childhood eyes was a world where something was terribly wrong. A world where nobody in charge seemed to be doing anything about it. A world where we banded together with the people who could see it too - our friends - and bashed our heads against the wall trying to make the grown up world listen. The real question to ask, therefore, is why that grown up world continually fails to do so? Why even the grown ups who once were children fighting monsters themselves seem more interested in making movies these days, and perpetuating the endless battle in fiction rather than in continuing to fight the good fight and change the actual world? Why the monsters continue to win while we’re busy watching TV?
Author: DaN McKee
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