Created by Matt and Ross Duffer, Netflix’s Stranger Things is a beautiful love letter to the works of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and John Carpenter. Set in the sleepy town of Hawkins, Indiana, in 1983, the show follows a group of kids — and parents — whose lives are turned upside down when a boy’s disappearance, followed by the appearance of a mysterious girl, exposes the dangerous experiments at a federal laboratory. With season 4 delayed by the pandemic until next year, now is the perfect time for a Summer Binge of the hit series so far, starting with season one, released July 15, 2016.
“Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers”
Written and directed by the Duffer Bros.
Please be aware that this column will contain spoilers for the entire series up until this point, since Stranger Things lends itself to the binge-watching format so well. I mean, if you haven’t seen the show, what are you doing here? You’re welcome to come back, anytime.
1. The Spielberg Factor
I’m first and foremost a Steven Spielberg fan, so Stranger Things, with all its nods and homages to the great director, is like catnip for me. The premise resembles a cross between E.T. and Poltergeist, with Will Byers’s discovery in the shed proving to be a malevolent abductor from another goopy dimension, instead of a friendly alien. There are countless other similarities to E.T. — even the boys playing Dungeons and Dragons is a nod to Elliott’s brother and friends:
Unlike that film though, Stranger Things emphasizes the adults as much as the kids, which is where the influence of Spielberg’s other creature features can be felt: Sheriff Hopper brings to mind both Brody and Hooper from Jaws, while Joyce’s desperate search for her son recalls Diane in Poltergeist, or Melinda in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The emphasis on the reactions from the youngest Wheeler, Holly, also feels a lot like Jillian’s three-year old son in that film.
Likewise, while Will has Elliott’s background as a child with divorced parents, Mike Wheeler — the true lead among the boys — is established as having a large, nuclear family, meaning the show avoids being about a young boy’s daddy issues again — even if Mike’s dad, Ted, is kind of an ass.
2. The X-Factor
When Stranger Things premiered, it had only been five years since the release of J.J. Abrams’s Super 8, another love letter to Spielberg that was executive produced by the Beard himself, and which similarly asks, “what if E.T. was a monster?” Suffice to say, when I watched the show, I thought about that movie a lot. I like both, but — and maybe this is recency bias — the Duffer Bros.’ project seemed a lot more popular than Abrams’s, and I wonder if this is partly because the boys in Stranger Things are more relatable.
They’re picked on at school, they’re more diverse eg. Dustin has cleidocranial dysplasia, and they’re a lot more geekier, being D&D players who trade X-Men comics. Sure, the kids in Super 8 were filmmakers, but they weren’t as quirky, and seemed to be making a movie for the sake of it, whereas Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Will are established from the start as readily lapping up the lore and archetypes of fantasy, meaning their supernatural encounters tap into a degree of wish fulfillment. I mean, “Uncanny X-Men” #134? Who else could Eleven be but Jean Grey?
3. Real World Demogorgons
Speaking of being bullied, it was surprising to revisit the series and see how explicit the subtext about Will possibly being gay was: as Joyce tells Hopper, her ex-husband Lonnie used to say their son “was queer.” I couldn’t help but think about the murder of Charlie Howard, the hate crime in 1984 that inspired a similar scene in Stephen King’s IT (one of Stranger Things‘ touchstones), and I was stunned to see Howard had the same haircut as Will does. While the Demogorgon in Stranger Things is still a bona fide monster like Pennywise, there is some degree of man being the real monster, as Will wouldn’t have been targeted if it weren’t for the federally funded scientists.
Continued below(For the record, Will having “sexual identity issues” is a concept mentioned in the original show bible, Montauk.)
4. The Tactile Touches
Thanks to the time period, Stranger Things is a visual and audio feast, with all the outdated hardware that makes everything feel earthy and real, like the blaring flashlights, the scraping of the fan in Benny’s Burgers, or Hopper’s typewriter that smashes the letters “m-i-s-s-i-n-g” as he begins filing Will’s missing person report.
Could you imagine if the show was set now? Everything would be clean, virtual, and fake eg. the Hawkins lab team would use night vision goggles, or a drone to find out what happened below ground. Similarly, Mike, Dustin and Lucas would be hardly excited by the thought of contacting Australia in a ham shack, which just goes to show how much we take our extraordinary technology today for granted.
5. Stranger Danger? Nope
When we see Dr. Brenner for the first time, there’s nothing to suggest he’s evil: played by the silver fox Matthew Modine, we’re naturally drawn to him as our point-of-view when he accompanies the other federal agents examining the mess the Demogorgon left in the lab. It makes the ending all the more shocking when he appears after Connie Frazier murders Benny, the gruff but kind cook who cared for Eleven after catching her stealing from his kitchen.
Benny was such a good guy, who did the right thing calling social services, but unfortunately for him, the authorities are Eleven’s abusive parents. Intentionally or not, it’s a great illustration of one of the ways encouraging children not to talk to strangers can backfire, because there are probably a lot of kids like Eleven who’ve been abused and rendered unable to articulate what’s happened to them. Heavy subject aside, it’s a shame Chris Sullivan couldn’t be in more episodes of the series, but someone had to die to establish the stakes, and sadly for us it had to be Benny.
Other Things:
– Nancy Wheeler’s name is likely a reference to the protagonist of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
– Speaking of Nance, it’s funny one of the first things we learned about Dustin was that he had a crush on her.
– Science teacher Scott Clarke (Randy Havens) might be named after Alien director Ridley Scott, and 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clarke.
– Have you ever noticed the blue blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spark of electricity that destroys the Byers family home’s telephone? I did this time; I suppose it was a perfectly campy looking effect for the era.
See you all next week, for when we revisit “Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street.”
