Review: Stranger Things

How can I describe STRANGER THINGS?

Attempt#1: Imagine John Carpenter and John Hughes decided to join forces to write a TV series, then called up Steven King for editorial supervision.

Attempt #2: Premise: the Goonies, the kids from Stand By Me, and half the characters from the Breakfast Club team up, eventually enlisting the help of Chief Martin Brody and Carrie….and they go off to stop the Thing, as well as the gov’t scientists from E.T., not to mention to rescue Carol Anne from the ghost realm.

Attempt#3: Put “Scary Movie” and “Not another Teen Movie” into a centrifuge, suck out the comic goofiness, and blend the rest.

STRANGER THINGS, a Netflix original show, is the meta-scifi-series of meta-scifi-series, a postmodern patchwork quilt of 1980s nostalgia that somehow manages to take itself, and be taken, entirely seriously -- even as 90% of what it does is rehash and re-spin 1980s movie tropes. The show has simultaneously the most derivative and most original plot you can imagine. It is self-aware yet also completely takes its plot and characters seriously. It is the mashup fanfic you always wanted to write about your childhood big screen heroes.

Ok, fine, in a word, it’s just freaking awesome.

I won’t give away much in the way of spoilers, although since “you’ve seen this movie,” there’s not much to spoil…or is there? My description in attempt#2 pretty much encapsulates the first season story arc. Yet a combination of good acting and excellent suspense-building kept me on the edge of my seat…especially once I discovered that the series gleefully gives us one 1980s horror/teen movie trope after another, only to tilt them all 45 degrees. Horny teenagers making out as a monster approaches? Check. Hard-luck weirdo from the other side of the tracks attempts to woo prim suburban princess away from popular jerky boyfriend? Check. Kids stumble upon massive supernatural event that adults are clueless about? Check. Evil government conspiracy? Check check.

Except no. Every single damned time we are treated to what is very self-consciously an homage (how self-consciously? Someone is reading a copy of Cujo in one scene. In another scene, a poster of “The Thing” is in a kid’s room. Someone hides in a closet ala ET), we get a twist. Case in point -- iconic scene where a woman is running from a monster, gets into her car, frantically fiddles with the ignition, the car won’t start…you know how this scene goes….

….except the car starts. And she starts to drive away. And then she STOPS. She turns off the car, gets out, and walks back into the monster’s lair, because dammit, she’s going to save someone.

Yeah. It's like that.

But what really seals the deal of awesome on STRANGER THINGS for me is the soundtrack. Yes, a lot of it is 1980s synthesizer music (hell, the show uses 1980s fonts and animations in its credits), but there’s a large amount of classic 1980s hits…

….every one of them spun through a mirror darkly.

An absolutely chilling cover of “hazy shade of winter” plays during a freaky scene. A slowed-down, bluesy cover of “we can be heroes” is played ironically after the protagonists have a massive setback. My all time favorite  -- a girl is pursued and devoured by a monster while Foreigner’s “I’ve been waiting for a girl like you” is thundering on the soundtrack…and you take the scene entirely seriously. And don’t even start me on my private theory that an entire subplot of the show (the world of the "upside-down") is actually a subtle tribute to the A-ha video for “Take on Me.”

In short, the Duffer Bros., who created the show, have served us up a thinking-man’s “adult swim,” a tour through our 80s memories that asks us to go back as adults and re-examine some of the things we thought we knew (without -- importantly! -- shitting on them. Robot Chicken, Family Guy, and their ilk always seemed more than a little self-hating about our 80s selves and what we loved). STRANGER THINGS is more nuanced. Despite its meticulous attention to 80s clothing, cars, technology, and, as mentioned, music, the sensibility is subtly informed by the present era. Eg, the cops are doing research in the library, and it’s a painfully long and frustrating montage, and you KNOW that scene is in there as the internet-era looking back on old modes of storage.

The nerdy preteen D&D player kids who are some of the primary protagonists? They are smart, in a very real way, and think deductively, and it’s clear that it’s because of the way roleplaying games and comics trained them. You can tell this script was written by an adult geek looking back, ala Neil Stephenson, on how kid nerds grow into the people most competent to actually get things done...they just have to survive adolescence and bullying and, to use the most oft-repeated phrase of the show, “mouth breathers.” (Yet even there, we don’t fall completely into cliché – there is a scene where one of the kids uses that phrase not just to describe bullies, but to denigrate an ordinary well meaning person who just isn’t “in the know,” and the modern-day geek viewer cringes, remembering how, once we’re in our own element, we can be just as needlessly condescending to “mundanes” as they were to us. That kind of perspective could never have arisen in the 80s themselves – we were too much in the thick of it, and had no real power yet).

Beneath all the tricks and whistles, STRANGER THINGS ultimately tells a story that I think can only be told in an 1980s setting. The way that awkward kids, both pre-teen and teen, bond with one another for support, so grateful to find a fellow traveler…that’s no longer a thing, not in the same way. Today, the internet gives everyone immediate plugins with like-minded people with their interests. Social media means you can’t really ever be lonely enough to NEED those fellow travelers, to stay with them, even when they’re jerky, because no one else understands how lonely it is to be a “freak.” Besides, the subcultures that made us freaky aren’t subcultures anymore…the protagonists speak reverentially of “Professor X,” knowing that name makes no sense to anyone else around them – and I wonder if any of that even makes sense to a younger audience today, having been exposed to a zillion big budget X-men movies. Being the only kids in town who know how to use technology is an unthinkable concept nowadays. Face it, we are living in a world where Syndrome, the villain from The Incredibles, won – when everyone is a geek, no one is a geek.

So some maudlin part of me sees STRANGER THINGS as a nostalgic group hug to be shared between adult geeks, a “remember when” and “wasn’t that cool” and “who woulda thunk,” before you turn off the screen and return, post-catharsis, to the real world.

Who would have imagined that we would have longed for a chance to spend just a few more minutes with the monsters (human and otherwise) of our youth? STRANGER THINGS gives us that, while never quite letting us free of our tether back to the modern world.

(and yes, before  you ask, there is indeed a version of the iconic scene where an explorer on a tether is going into the monster’s lair, and then all we see is the tether going berserk and eventually reeling back with, well, not the entire explorer. Whoever said nostalgia was safe?)

Rating: A+