STRANGER THINGS: Why I Do Not Understand this Phenomenon

I envy my editorial colleagues. That unrestrained joy of engaging with Stranger Things. I decided to add a spoonful of tar to this enormous barrel of honey. A barrel shaped by ubiquitous hype, admiration, and cult following. All of which I personally do not share. Perhaps you feel similarly.

One must ask what Stranger Things actually is, and what it could be. I have the impression that many favorable opinions about the series relate mainly to the positive, casual aura surrounding it. In this case, I mean that colorful, comic-book-like, youthful coating, which, referring directly to the 1980s, turns nostalgia into a tremendously effective tool of influence.

Is there anything wrong with that? Of course not. E.T., The Goonies, or even the Super 8 – this is the kind of “eighties” cinema that worked and still works today, also because of a sense of sentiment. In my opinion, however, the condition should always be that nostalgia for a specific period is treated as an addition, a supplement, a stylization, or a result of an interesting story. That the 1980s, with all their attractions, serve as a natural backdrop, emphasizing the unique character of the story. However, when watching Stranger Things, especially the third season, I noticed something quite different, somewhat disturbing.

Here, it is precisely the artifacts of the past – fashion, style, music, and the peculiarities of pop culture of the time – that constitute the main course for the series, with the plot serving only as a warm-up, a sparse soup.

The Duffer brothers clearly went overboard. What in the first season resonated as a harmless curiosity, giving a coming-of-age story its attention-grabbing personality, was elevated in the third season and fourth season to a primary creative motivation. To the status of essence. Just as, in my opinion, one cannot plan a family gathering at an aunt’s for her name day in a way that is fun, enjoyable, and atmospherically correct, so one cannot design the atmosphere of a work of art, because it will always come out artificial.

Atmosphere should be something natural, spontaneous, something resulting from the reception of the work, something accompanying the characters and their fates, not something that can be plotted on script pages.

I have the impression that the creators focused more on properly maintaining the 1980s style, competing to stuff the plot with as many references to that period as possible, than on creating an interesting plot. In the first season, those kids and their adventures genuinely interested me because I knew in which direction the story was heading. A certain mystery had to be uncovered, a certain character had to be saved. So I waited with anticipation to see what would happen. Of course, everything succeeded, so by the second season, my interest slowly began to wane. Because why make Will a victim again?

Repetition became boring, although certain promises made by the creators still sounded appealing. By the third season, the kids had become completely indifferent to me. One could say I basically passed through that season, unable to engage with the fates of the characters at all. The creators doubled their efforts to craft before my eyes the illusion of change and freshness.

After all, Dustin is misbehaving in a different group for almost the entire time. The girls also stick together. But it is only an appearance. It is again art for the sake of art – to be cool, fun, and… painfully contrived. And the surprisingly tragic finale, poorly composed in relation to the whole, cannot give the series seriousness.

That monster was not meant to scare me. It was meant to reference Alien. That musclebound guy was not meant to inspire dread. He was meant to reference Terminator. The same story with Billy and the human puppets he created – that is just a checked-off Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And Max? Such a strong female character, you say? That is Carrie, do you not recognize it? And so on and so forth, all wrapped in iconic music, iconic songs, iconic pop imagery. Like an extended music video. The more of this appeared on screen, the more I lost interest in the series, whereas it should have been the exact opposite.

Stranger Things has one fundamental problem – it is a clearly over-aestheticized product. I cannot accept calling Netflix’s production a hollow shell, because that is not the point. It is not that the story is empty inside. It is more that this story has absolutely no meaning if you remove all those stylistic trinkets that form its construction. The Duffer brothers reversed the order of operations, wanting to give the audience the atmosphere – the series’ calling card – first, somewhat neglecting the need to build its foundations. And the viewers, unfortunately, fell for it.

When thinking about the phenomenon of Stranger Things, I always ask myself how long nostalgia for the 1980s will last. And what will happen in twenty or thirty years. Will the times we now live in also be remembered with nostalgia? Can you imagine a youth series deliberately set in the first or second decade of the new millennium? What would then constitute the main substitute for its atmosphere? YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the smartphone held in hand? Fortunately, that is a topic for quite a different discussion.