How Stranger Things succeeds in bringing out the emotional realism of coming-of-age

We mistakenly assume that everything made for children and young adults must be simplified and lightened but their stories naturally give themselves to gnarly afflictions. From rhymes like pocketful of roses alluding to the plague, to the gothic, unforgiving worlds of Coraline and Studio Ghibli, where parents might turn into pigs and a second mother might try to switch your eyes out with buttons, there’s almost a direct relationship between a horrific turn of events and heroes too young to cope with them. The cost to life is sometimes a minor risk, in Roald Dahl’s books children might permanently change into mice or a different candy-coloured hue, or worse, suffer the unhappy fate of indentured labour, locked in a castle, spinning gold like in a Brothers Grimm tale. 

One theory is that children represent the ultimate underdog – such sure Davids in a world of Goliaths. As cartoonists like Charles Schulz worked out, adolescents have to occupy the same world that adults live in, a dark thought. Charlie Brown and his friends live in “a world occupied by children alone, with the parents faint off-screen bugles, very rarely heard and never seen. This is a vision neither comforting nor “cute.” The kids don’t inhabit a more innocent world; they inhabit the recognisable grown-up world of thwarted ambition and delusional longing, only without even the capacity to take the kind of minimal actions that adults can take to bring their ambitions into at least an illusory compact with their circumstances,” writes Andrew Blauner in The Peanuts Papers. Watching horror or tragedy happen to kids only adds to it, especially in the context of today’s child-locked childhoods.  

It’s easy to forget in all the critically successful inventiveness of the show, that Stranger Things is about kids and young adults. An honest pastiche about the ‘80s would have to centre kids and teens. This was the era of many Universal monster movies like E.T., which is cited as a reference in the Stranger Things’ pitch bible, and when John Hughes exploded onto the scene and made teens the subject of narratives other than sanctimonious Afterschool specials. As Molly Ringwald, the star of many Hughes movies says, no one in Hollywood was writing about the minutiae of high school and almost never from a girl’s point of view. 

Hopper and Joyce depend on the guidance of Dustin and Mike too. A sweet camaraderie develops between Steve, Robin and Dustin. In season 4, the Hawkins townsfolk follow the call to a witch hunt by basketball star Jason Carver, who takes things into his own hands. “What are you waiting for, you heard the kid!” says a concerned citizen to his fellow grown-ups.

In many ways, the show has also visualised the emotional realism of coming of age. Since the first season, it cuts its cheery nostalgia with age-agnostic depictions of trauma and grief. Nostalgia has a functional value. In the previous seasons, memories were grounding. Joyce, Jonathan and the gang take turns in relaying stories to Will about their past to help him fight possession by the shadow monster. El does the same with Billy. In season 4, almost every episode deals with reminiscing but Vecna uses memories to trap his victims in prisons of guilt and existential dread. One urges El to harness her bad memories to become stronger but El overpowers him when she decides to tap into her happiest ones. Love, as any teenager will tell you, is a matter of life and death.

Where at the core of Scooby-Doo, there is the certain knowledge that the monsters aren’t real and that the face revealed at the end will reveal motivations and machinations, there is no such reassurance in Stranger Things. Dungeons and Dragons is not just a silly game played by nerds, it’s an applied structure to understand the Upside Down. The monsters may not even be as sophisticated as the tabletop game’s tokens –  the shadow monster and the mind flayer are essentially teardrops with spider legs but terrifying nonetheless. They look like they emerge from a child’s imagination. But the show works best when it treats these creatures as bonafide demons.

In the new season, the game is wrongly deemed a Satanic ritual of a highschool club. In a Breakfast Club manner, stereotypes are created and then annihilated. What else can a nerd, jock and an outcast become? Stranger Things gives us an answer. If the teen content began to bloom in the 80s, it’s taken us till the 2010s to deeply and respectfully understand their emotional universe. Teens are represented with empathy in shows like Sex Education, Euphoria, Normal People and Derry Girls. And so Stranger Things is a product of today. Young adults are heroes and heroines tasked with saving the world. They are activists and the Upside Down is the polluted Earth they have inherited.

Stranger Things season 4 is streaming on Netflix

Eisha Nair is an independent writer-illustrator based in Mumbai. She has written on history, art, culture, education, and film for various publications. When not pursuing call to cultural critique, she is busy drawing comics.

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