Stranger Thoughts

Brief reflections on the latest in horror nostalgia

Fake miles and nostalgic horror

Like, you know, everyone else, I’ve been working my way through the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix, mostly while riding the stationary bike in the basement on days with bad weather for actual cycling. I finished the mid-season finale last night (with SteelyKid watching along and offering commentary), and lacking much other inspiration I thought I’d type out some scattered thoughts on this half-season of the show.

— On the whole, this continues to be enjoyable, but like all ongoing series it has a bit of a problem with the need to constantly expand things— new cast members, new locations, badder villains, etc. It’s still managing things reasonably well, but it’s right on the verge of A Bit Too Much, and I honestly wouldn’t mind a noble sacrifice or two to thin out the ranks a bit.

— To the extent that the expansion of the story is a problem, it mostly comes up through having so many subplots, which vary quite a bit in both tone and execution. The bits with the Vecna murders and Eleven reliving her past are very good, Hopper in prison is fine, the Joyce and Murray strand is a little annoying, and the bits with the boys in California are mostly kind of painful. The “El is bullied by characters out of a two-bit John Hughes rip-off” plotline was excruciating, but happily seems to have dropped out of the show.

— I remain unconvinced that anyone involved in the making of this show has ever watched an entire basketball game, let alone played in one.

— The Satanic Panic bit with the basketball team going vigilante is a little on the nose. I think it would’ve played better had there been any past suggestion that Hawkins had a religious community with a fundamentalist streak, but the “It’s the Devil!” stuff kind of comes out of nowhere.

— That kind of comes around to a more serious thought I had about this show and its presentation, which relates to Chuck Klosterman’s discussion of nostalgia in his book about the Nineties (which I wrote about earlier). I’ll be a little lazy here, and rather than digging up the text and transcribing it, will just quote a relevant bit from an interview where he specifically positions his book against “nostalgia,” which he defines as “looking at the past through the lens of your own personal experience and therefore changing the meaning of that memory based on the way you want to feel about your relationship to your own life.”

I feel like there’s a lot of that going on in this show, with the people making it projecting their current views and opinions back into the past in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect how things were at the time. This is most obvious in things like the in-line-with-2020-standards-of-diversity cast and the too-quick-for-1985 acceptance of Robin’s sexuality. It also shows up in things like the unrealistic level of secularism— I don’t recall any suggestion that anyone in Hawkins goes to church at all prior to this season, and that’s way off for that time (and probably place, though a bit more on that later). And despite having scenes of both bullying and jocks hanging out, there’s next to none of the casual racism, sexism, and all the rest that you would’ve gotten from kids that age in that time.

There are obvious commercial incentives behind this— it’d be really hard to market as a fun, nostalgic romp if it included the actual slurs that would’ve been used in that time and place— but it does feel like a kind of woke-washing of the past.

— Also in the “Thinking about this more than it’s really meant to be thought about” category, I continue to be baffled about what sort of town Hawkins is supposed to be. The town seems to employ about six cops, and the “downtown” areas that we see seem very small in a Steven-King-Americana kind of way. But then, they’re home to some kind of big government laboratory but none of the characters seem to know anybody who works there prior to the start of the show, and nobody seems to miss the staff when they’re all gruesomely murdered by creatures from another dimension. And the high school cliques seem to be unrealistically unaware of one another for a small town— there’s no way the basketball team wouldn’t’ve known that Lucas also played D&D with the Hellfire crew, for example.

It’s also a little unmoored in space— it’s supposed to be in Indiana, but the weather in season four is way too spring-like for even the tail end of basketball season. (Then again, it’s entirely possible that the people making the show don’t actually know what time of year basketball is played…) So not a lot about this setting makes sense.

— I was planning to say something about how it’s a little annoying that their half-assed analogies to the D&D Monster Manual always end up working so perfectly to describe the threats they’re facing, but then events in the the half-season finale may be undercutting that a bit at last. I guess we’ll find out in a week or so when the rest of it drops.

On the whole, I’m still enjoying this, and will watch the next half-season when it comes out. It’s definitely a kind of disposable entertainment product, though, and not especially rewarding of deep probing.

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And that’s about it for my recent media-watching. If for some reason this leads you to want to be among the first to learn my reaction to the end of this season, here’s a button you can click that will get you that in email in a few weeks:

If you want to argue with any of my comments, or point out other things in the show that don’t stand up to closer examination (the computer bits, perhaps?), the comments will be open: