My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 31): Stranger Things

Stranger Things (2016-19)

Written and directed by The Duffer Brothers

Starring Wynona Ryder

When I reviewed the compelling Donny Darko a few weeks ago, I read some articles saying how it had influenced many sci-fi and fantasy filmmakers over the start of this century, and particularly Spielberg-retro tributes like Stranger Things, a Netflix series that has now completed three seasons. Interested, I have binge watched it over the past couple weeks. It’s not something I would normally review, as it is wrenchingly popular entertainment. But I found it so staggeringly in-your-face imitative that I could not resist.

So what is the boundary between a work of art paying homage or tribute to an earlier classic work, and simply ripping it off? This is probably a meaningless question. Composers and artists have copied themselves for years, especially after a big hit: in classical music Massenet’s Manon begat Le Portrait de Manon, Bach’s Mass in B minor reuses many earlier pieces from the cantatas, and Strauss grandiosely quotes his earlier (and better) tone poems in  A Hero’s Life. In pop culture, movie sequels are ubiquitous (Friday the Thirteenth has eleven clones), remakes are common (and usually worse, see my reviews of The Manchurian Candidate films, fifty years apart), and in pop music it is considered honorable to recycle earlier works by other artists. But Stranger Things is different. It is not (exactly) cloning anything, but about every two minutes some film or pop reference from the late 1970s-1980’s shows up, making it the ultimate Spielberg nostalgia binge for people of a certain age. Not me—I was in medical school and residency most of that time, and have little fondness for that era, trying to block out the Reagan decade from my memory.

 The plot is nothing special. A monster tries to take over a small rural US town, and is battled by a group of plucky young teenagers (the voices of some of the guys change from seasons 1-3) and a far too earnest Winona Ryder, who seems caught between playing her tortured mom role for camp or for high drama, and achieves neither. The teen actors are decent without being special, the best being Millie Bobbie Brown as “Eleven”, a semi-mute child kidnapped by the CIA and experimented upon because she experiences telekinetic powers (see Carrie, 1976, Firestarter, 1984). She is taken into a gang of four adventuring preteen guys (see Stand by Me, 1986). As the town is infiltrated by the monster kept by the CIA, bright lights shine into the house (see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977) and the house becomes trashed by a spirit living in the walls (see Poltergeist, 1982). One of the boys is captured by the monster and emerges with horrible visions, revealed to his mother with drawings. She becomes obsessed and fills the house with a huge map of the monster’s lair (see obsession with models in Close Encounters). The teenagers prove smarter and more tech savvy than the adults and save the day (see War Games, 1983, Back to the Future, 1985). There are scenes of the giant monster chasing the kids driving away in a car (see Jurassic Park, 1993) and even a nerdy CIA programmer, dripping candy wrappers onto his keyboard, who gets eaten by the monster (again Jurassic Park). This all goes on while the soundtrack resurrects songs of the era by Vangelis, The Clash, Peter Gabriel, and others. Even the casting is referential. Ms. Ryder was picked in part because of her big career start in Beetlejuice (1988), Heathers (1988), and Edward Scissorhands (1990).  Even teen idol Matthew Modine (Private School, 1983, Vision Quest 1985) makes a cameo as a creepy scientist. Speaking of Heathers, the high school is very much a hybrid of that dark version of 1980s teendom and the more sappy John Hughes world of The Breakfast Club (1985) and Sixteen Candles (1984).  Ah, the old days…not a gay or transgender student to be found, except for some very mild, implied lesbian action (that really got going in the 1990s). The directors even used scanned filmstock from 1980s films to overlay their film, in order to give the picture the appropriately dated look, and found a real shopping mall to film the monsters invading teen bliss (btw, not sure how the big shopping mall got placed in a dinky town).

So, all in all, this was an almost obsessive mashup of 1980s teen and sci-fi culture. Does it really work? Well, I found all the references fun to recall, sort of like a “find the bunny” puzzle. The problem is, once you tire of all the references and nostalgia games, it is pretty thin soup. None of the sci fi or teen stories is remotely new (that is the point, after all), so the whole thing lacks surprise and novelty, which wears thin after a while. That said, Stranger Things is itself a boldly unoriginal mashup of a decade, novel in its winkingly, blatantly derivative nature. I doubt that it is worth repeating (do we really want to see 1990s trendiness again? The Blair Witch Project?) but if you feel warmth about that decade, it is worth a look.