Stranger Things

I don’t think I ever want to go to Hawkins.  Luckily I won’t have to, as it’s fictional, and it’s in 1983 (at the start of series one).  But the odds of having a good time there, especially for the residents, seem low.  This is because the town’s main employer, Hawkins National Laboratory, appears to be a force for evil as well as one of its biggest employers.  In Stranger Things, this kind of gets skirted around.  Its exact purpose is nebulous, but I’ve seen the mighty big car park from aerial shots and that place has room for a lot of workers.  Interior scenes always seem fully staffed.  The turnover of personnel from on-site fatalities must be costing them a fortune in death-in-service insurances payouts.

But this is part of the fun: it doesn’t matter.  Stranger Things is all about the adventure.  Surely, the less able we are to explain things, the stranger those things are.  Therefore, the show has freed itself from having to follow any well-known mythology, building from scratch a belief system that feels perfectly at home in its 80s setting.  I can’t explain more without giving away the mysteries of the first series, but we can go into detail on what makes the show so appealing where other supernaturally themed programmes have failed to capture such a dedicated audience, treating each strange thing in turn:

The perfectly observed period setting.

Millennials can’t get enough of the 80s, and nothing is more 80s that Stranger Things.  Even the 80s themselves.  The music, the outfits, the smoking, the hair, the references: it’s a joke that we’re all in on.  Of particular importance is the 80s technology.  This was a time of walkie-talkies and landlines, enormous video cameras and huge arcade games.  Whenever a TV appears in an episode, we are aghast at how poor the picture quality is.  I’m right back to sickdays as a child, when my parents allowed the spare black and white telly into my bedroom, complete with channel change by turny knob and more snow in the picture than in a Raymond Briggs animation (about a snowy character – not one of the normal ones).  Every classic film of the period has been mined for inspiration and the result is a winning formula on screen.

The opening credits.

I’ve talked before about the importance of opening credits to establishing a show, massaging viewers’ minds into the optimal state for embracing every item of storyline that is about to be thrown at them.  From the first mmmmmmmmmmmmvvvvvvvvmm of Stranger Things’ opening credits, you’re right back at primary school buzzing your socks off at getting to watch a video in class.  You can almost hear the chunky cassette noisily shunting itself into position inside the VCR.  Netflix offers you the chance to skip the credits, sparing binge watchers a chilling reminder of how many episodes they are consuming, but I have always opted to indulge in the full sequence with Stranger Things.  It’s at once wonderfully tacky and completely beautiful.  It’s about as sophisticated in execution as a PowerPoint, but everything has been planned with meticulous cunning to get the tone right.  There are even tiny white flecks that appear, blending our HD viewing experience in 2017 with the limitations of the 80s tech we remember.  And then, the chapter heading floats into view before fading off with glorious tackiness, and I swear to myself that my year six teacher has let us watch Badger Girl.

Winona Ryder.

This is spot-on casting.  As a hysterical mother, Winones is in her element.  She is welcome to chew the scenery as much as she wants, as the chipboard walls are some of the chewiest scenery I have ever seen.  I can’t get enough of her and the show’s creators can’t seem to get enough of torturing her character.

Friendship.

If you can’t identify with the 80s because you’re too young (well done) or have never seen the films Stranger Things so closely references (booo!) then at least the relationships between the characters should warm your heart.  Even when being cold to each other (for example, Nancy ditches Barb to join the cool kids) there’s a lot to identify with.  At the heart of the show and governed by the very just motto “Friends don’t lie” is the Party.  Here they are in order of how much I like each character:

Lucas

He is just a lot of fun on the screen.  He just gets on with things, pedalling about on his BMX, looking shocked when shocking things happen and furrowing his brow when mysteries need solving.  Holding a walkie-talkie like a boss, I really enjoy his little face.  In series two, he steals more and more scenes, so we just need more of Lucas please.

Dustin

You can tell that the show’s creators love having Dustin swear.  Nothing is funnier than him shouting “Son of a bitch” at his friends’ parents.

Will

Perhaps the tiniest boy ever seen, with his bowl haircut being at least 60% of his total volume.  He spends most of the first series absent (and I do wonder what the toilet situation was during that time as I don’t imagine the facilities are great in that dimension) and most of the second series probably wishing he was still absent.  Anyone with Winona as their mother is, let’s be honest, not going to have a great time.

Mike

The whiniest member of the Party, his negativity has got him fourth place on the list.  His hair is also not as good as Will’s.  It’s like when best friends copy each other’s appearances and one ends up being the better version of the other.  I might as well mention Eleven here as well, as she is, at times, party to the Party, at the insistence of Mike.  She and Mike deserve each other really.

I only really struggle with two elements in Stranger Things.  One is that so many scenes are set up with an all-American period car pulling up in front of a house.  Given that I own neither a house nor a car, both are items that lack significance for me and so tend to look the same.  Ultimately, it never matters about not knowing who is in the house or the car, as the characters’ eventual emergence always reveals this to my limited brain.  But, I reckon, on average, ten minutes of each episode is lost to this tool, and it’s ten minutes I could spend watching something slash getting through the full set of episodes more quickly.

Secondly, it’s that tissue paper that floats about in the air.  I won’t say when and why it appears, as that’s technically a spoiler, but it gets quite distracting.  I keep wondering if it’s real or CGI.  What does it taste like?  Does it hurt if it gets in your eye?  I think it probably stings a bit.  At least it’s a special effect you can create at home with matches and loo roll, should you want to, bringing to life a 4D viewing experience, like when a plant fell on my friend when we first watched Avatar on DVD and she thought Pandora was bursting into the living room.

In conclusion, don’t go to Hawkins in real life.  But do go there via the medium of watching both series of Stranger Things.  Then your life will have meaning, as you can weigh in on office discussions about which was better out of series one and two (series two has a better overall structure but of course lacks the surprise and delight of the first as you already know what’s going on).  Enjoy the mysteries and the magic, safe in the knowledge that I am doing enough worrying about the practicalities of Hawkins Laboratories’ finances for all of us.