Eleven and the Boys: A Look at Stranger Things
She is your friend until the ocean breaks Simple Minds, New Gold Dream, 1983 Stephen King is, if nothing else, a big nerd. He understands better than any other mainstream novelist what is means to be ostracized, and how nerds deal with being ostracized is a recurrent theme in his fiction. It is this theme that has made his novels and stories as popular as they are, more so than the horror they inspire and maybe even despite the horror. There have been many King rip-offs over the years, but now we have a show that has taken up King's age-old themes and bettered him. We have Stranger Things, which offers a more profound answer to isolation and loneliness than King's two best novels – Carrie and IT – offer individually. And it does this precisely by weaving them together while remaining equally faithful to both. The themes of ostracism and the loneliness and the fierce loyalty ostracism creates are the main reason the show is as popular as it is, and why it deserves to be. |
Stranger Things owes more to Stephen King than it does to Steven Spielberg. King's themes are so dominant in Stranger Things that you might begin to wonder just how much to King Spielberg owes himself. Stranger Things is also a love letter to the 80s sci-fi and horror movies; but Stranger Things isn't an 80s movie commenting on 80s culture: it's a 21st century show commenting on what it was like to grow up in the 80s. It's set in the 80s, sure, but Stranger Things was made by people acutely aware of whom the show is for, and it's thus less of a nostalgic guilty pleasure, even less a period piece, but more of clever and not altogether unsuccessful attempt to show what it would have been like to grow up in the 80s if the monsters were real.
But before we talk about monsters, what is a nerd? When I was a kid, the word carried negative connotations that it no longer does; what word is replacing nerd I'd love to know: I believe nerds are no more accepted now than they ever were, no matter how many Big Bangs are on television. A nerd is someone who delights with and obsesses about things that will always be outside the appreciation – and perhaps intelligence – of the general public, and suffer because of it. Being scrawny and unattractive are merely accidents to the essential thing that makes a nerd a nerd, whether it's a love for quantum physics, fantasy role-playing games, or horror movies. America's temporary but nevertheless crass indulgence of fantasy and comic-book movies is merely an ephemeral trend. What does Stephen King have to say about how nerds deal with being ostracized? He offers two answers: one is very sad and one a little more optimistic, although not as happy as a TV miniseries would want. Carrie and IT are the two of King's works – except perhaps the unfortunately disowned Rage – that alike develop this theme the most strongly, and with Carrie he deals with ostracism in an absolute way that he doesn't, to my knowledge, attempt again elsewhere. Carrie is a story about a gifted young girl who, left utterly alone in a society that rejects her, is tragically forced to use her gifts against that society. If Carrie knew why society does not accept her, perhaps she could change and adapt. But because she is ignorant, Carrie is lost, and I think Carrie goes back and forth between examining, blaming, and then ultimately accepting what she is more thoroughly because of this ignorance than if she had been rejected – say – because she has a shaved head. Thus Carrie is not so much a nerd as I defined it above, but an outcast, someone so far on the fringes that maybe not even nerds want anything to do with her. This is on purpose, after all. Carrie is a loner who is tormented in an absurdly overzealous way, and because we never know why – is there ever an answer? – we can put ourselves in her shoes and root for her. Her suffering is a black hole capable of suffocating any light nostalgia might have and has the destructive capacity to absorb our particular resentments within her complete vacuum of unhappiness. Only one character reaches out to Carrie, the doomed Mrs. Desjardin, but all she offers is a safety blanket, not compassion on equal footing with Carrie's pain. Even Sue, who tries too late to makes things right, doesn't see Carrie as an equal so much as a need to redress her own brutality towards Carrie; a brutality we are never really, despite her crocodile tears, able to forgive her for. But there is more going on with Carrie than redeeming Sue. Carrie is getting angry, and she's torn between two choices: one that could lead to bloodshed, and can one that can only lead to sorrow. The central conflict of Carrie is not Carrie verses her high school, but Carrie's high school verses her mother. Carrie's mother is the only counterbalance she has, the only recourse to and escape from the cruel tortures her classmates callously commit and then callously refuse to accept punishment for. Acceptance and admission into society is one possible path that Carrie considers; submission to the sado-masochistic insanity of her mother is another. She chooses to give society a chance, and when society betrays her she returns to her mother, and then – in one of the most heartbreaking confrontations in the history of film – her mother betrays Carrie in turn. Carrie believed, despite her mother's prophetic warnings, that she could have friends, but Carrie's mother is not there for her after she learns that she can’t. By trying to accept society even after its sundry humiliations, Carrie made herself more vulnerable than ever and was humiliated beyond the pale, and by even giving society a chance it didn't deserve she lost the only love – albeit an abusive love, love all the same – she ever knew. This final rejection by her abusive mother, a rejection as tragic as anything this side of Sophocles, causes Carrie to bring her world altogether to a Samson-like crash that offers neither satisfaction for Carrie, nor redemption from the world that continues to hate her even after death. But for a brief moment, Carrie is the incarnation of feminine rage against senseless humiliation, a rage secured in its righteousness because Carrie has finally learned to value herself. She is Carrie White, the one who knocks. Carrie is the bleakest story King ever wrote, and for that reason the most profound: Carrie never had a chance, and God does not condescend from the whirlwind to even tell her why. A much sunnier version of nerds is offered in IT. Instead of a single loner, in IT we have a group, collectively known as The Losers Club, and this group is ostracized for reasons. One of the children is fat; that's supposedly good enough. Another stutters, and he's for some reason the narrator. Yet another is the daughter of the school janitor, and thus poor. These are rather superficial reasons you might not expect from King, but they work in the context of IT because it isn't society at large that rejects The Losers but only a gang of bullies (sometimes those greaser punks just keep coming back) and a few precocious bitches who only appear peripherally, make fun of the janitor's daughter and are then either killed by Pennywise or edited away, whichever suits your fancy. So instead of a cruel world that offers fake acceptance, then only douses you in pig's blood and desecrates your grave, The Losers must battle a shape-shifting clown that devours their classmates. Besides avenging Georgie, one wonders why the Losers even care, given the bullies and bitches. Yet Pennywise cannot be a symbol of society at large no matter how much he resembles Ronald McDonald. The theme that matters more in IT than token isolation is how The Losers bond in ways alien to and perhaps impossible for the bullies that torment them. The bullies are as murderous and dangerous as the clown, and it is precisely this constant danger that creates a love between The Losers capable of overcoming isolation. IT has a happy ending: Pennywise is killed (twice: once as the clown and then less satisfyingly as a snow-crab thing with a fluorescent belly); the asthmatic virgin dies; and even Olivia Hussey is brought back to life by a bike ride. But IT isn't about defeating a clown, or even bullies, but about how collective suffering through shared exclusion creates powerful feelings of love and loyalty that cannot be created, certainly sustained, by acceptance alone. If the children in IT were popular to any degree, I doubt they could collect as a group that wouldn't shatter at the first stink of shit hitting the fan. The bonds in IT are indeed so strong that they survive adulthood and bring each of the adults back to Derry to defeat the clown again, at a risk of dying made more poignant by the fact that all the adults except the black one are phenomenally successful. Yet the end of IT leaves you wondering whether the bond was just strong enough to last only in opposition. The fay boy and his long lost love get together, but it's hard to imagine Billy and Richie staying in contact. Once IT is dead along with the last bully (who teamed up with IT after a hilarious prison break; he predictably tries to murder the black man) there remains no need to stay together because the Losers never bonded beyond what was needed to survive. The group fell apart after they believed they had killed Pennywise the first time, and it's no real shock that one of Losers would rather kill himself than face Pennywise again. All for One and One for ... fuck it I'm out. Stranger Things uses these themes too, only by the end of the show the catharsis is much more powerful. At least it was for me, and I pride myself on the fact that I hardly ever cry. Yet at the end of Stranger Things I was bawling my eyes red and wondering how an incurable cynic like myself could be so affected by it. And after months of coffee and contemplation, this is the best answer I have. The kids in Stranger Things are typical 80s nerds: they play Dungeons & Dragons and slay the science fair on such a regular basis that small-minded middle-school politics rears its ugly head and rigs the system. They're picked on by bullies: at first teasingly, then violently, finally with attempted murder. (It's not a good idea, generally, to go the police and explain how your arm was broken by a telekinetic girl after a bollixed murder attempt, and right after, as far as you know, a boy just died from supposedly falling off that very cliff.) While they don't suffer the full isolation that Carrie does, they come together in the face of opposition to rescue a friend from a monster more interesting than Pennywise. The boys are close from the beginning, but as the show moves along the loyalty and readiness for self-sacrifice they feel for each other grows in proportion to the danger they face. Had Stranger Things been a story of these boys, it would have been merely a retelling of IT, but Stranger Things goes further than IT by giving us a character more sympathetic than the boys – Eleven. Eleven suffers on a level maybe even beyond what Carrie suffers, and she ultimately pays a price for friendship that Carrie's isolation might not have allowed her to sympathize with. Isolated by incarceration almost from birth and forced to use her powers as a weapon for forces she can't understand, Eleven is instantly sympathetic to such an extent that I found myself almost indifferent to Will's plight and worried more about what would happen to her. Eleven's character arc of how she learns how to be a friend and then thoughtlessly sacrifices herself for her friends is one of the most tragic stories I've ever seen. After she's accepted by the boys, Eleven spends some time adjusting to life outside the military complex, becoming more and more involved with the boy's rescue of Will. She becomes so invested in rescuing Will, not for Will's sake, but for the other's, and when jealousy breeds within the group and causes her to run away, it is her love for her friends that eventually brings her back and saves one of them from a nasty death. It's significant that when Eleven returns to save Mike she no longer wears her wig. She has no interest in society at large – mouth breathers – and might have willingly gone back to the military complex if not for her friends. The parallels with Eleven and Carrie are obvious, as with those of The Losers and the boys; but Eleven is more compelling because – unlike Carrie – she has something to lose. Carrie only has one prom, one dance, a date and then death; Eleven has to be told what a school dance is. Carrie, however, has no friends. Thus Stranger Things takes the bleak themes of Carrie but offers a third option to Carrie's dilemma: beyond society at large and a military institution (it is no accident that Eleven calls Matthew Modine Papa (Momma), and that Papa will lock her up in a prison cell (prayer closet) whenever she misbehaves), Eleven has the option of friends. With Carrie, any sympathetic person might want to jump inside the screen and comfort her, tell her that she's not ugly, she has value, a future because she's not alone. With Stranger Things the boys do this for us, albeit clumsily. Carrie is solipsistic: it indulges the loneliest fantasies and resentments; Stranger Things is social, allowing us to sympathize with Eleven because, and this is perhaps the most profound aspect of Stranger Things, Eleven is in a category beyond a nerd. Her suffering is greater, her isolation based not on rejection but her powers, powers that will always isolate her and cause her to be hunted down and feared. Thus we have three relationships to King’s fiction: how the boys reflect the Losers, how Eleven reflects Carrie, and how Eleven's sacrifice transcends The Losers temporary solidarity and offers a path, through love, better than Carrie's absolutist warpath of revenge. The Losers fight IT first to avenge Georgie, then as adults to protect the next generation, which is perhaps worth saving this time. The boys in Stranger Things are out only to save Will, and when the course of that rescue reaches a point where all might die, Eleven sacrifices herself to save her friends. (I know Eleven will probably return in the second season, but that doesn't affect her sacrifice in the first. She appears to be very seriously convinced that she is about to die.) Eleven represents Carrie's utter loneliness, and her acceptance into the boy's group reflects an acceptance Carrie never had. Thus her self-sacrifice is so powerful because Eleven accepts the boys in return. It is not how society views us and whether or not an alteration here or a compromise there will make us happy: when someone accepts us who has suffered more than we have, besides whom our own suffering is slight, then we begin to see ourselves through their eyes and can finally discover the better angels of our nature. A telling detail at the end of the show is that, just before disappearing and possibly dying, Eleven tells Mike – and Mike only – goodbye. I think this line is the heart of Stranger Things. Eleven had escaped the military complex just long enough to begin to enjoy life. Yet her only regret for giving up this life is perhaps that she knows that by sacrificing herself, she is hurting Mike more deeply than he's been hurt before. Almost anyone, I think, would rather see anyone else die rather than Eleven. But this is where the problems of Carrie and IT come full circle and Stranger Things surpasses its source material in a way previously unseen. Rather than have Carrie murder people at the prom (Eleven doesn't, although she easily could, kill the bullies), Carrie instead saves her friends from her mother. As far as the Demogorgon and Carrie's mother are both symbols of the destructive dark side of human nature, Eleven destroys the Demogorgon because it threatens her friends: not the bullies, not society, but a monster she was complicit in creating. The Demogorgon is not a reflection of Pennywise; it is connected with Eleven in the same way Carrie is connected with her mother's sadism, just as Eleven's relationship with Papa is a reflection of Carrie's masochism. If Eleven returns to the military complex, there is the possibility that she could be forced to create more monsters, which will always threaten her friends. And if she chooses to stay in society to be with her friends, the military men will always hunt her down, and therefore also put them in danger. Only by destroying the Demogorgon, as thus herself along with it, can her friends remain safe. Another telling detail is that only Mike seems to miss Eleven, and although the surface reason for that is obvious, I think that in a deeper way Mike misses not so much the experiences he had with Eleven but the experiences he could have had. Everything I've written might be more than what Stranger Things in fact offers. But to anyone who has suffered and had true friends to suffer with, I don't think it's altogether wrong to love Stranger Things for at least trying to remind us that, both in our past and in the unknown future, we are not alone, that our suffering unites us even more strongly than the forces that cast us aside, and that it is by their reasonless hate that we learn to love for reasons that withstand even the most bleak and cruel realities of life. |
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