Not too much, not too little, juuust right: on "Stranger Things" and the contained storytelling of modern streaming

I wasn’t planning on reviewing television shows, but at the end of the day, why not? I don’t want to get bogged down in episode by episode recounting, but I do want to consider a series as a whole cinematic experience. There are sound reasons for this, I think.

The primary reason is that so much of what’s available - on streaming services in particular - is just that: cinematic. The quality of production and the use of what is nothing less than remarkable cinematography alone make a strong argument for how Netflix and Amazon original productions can vie with theatrical releases.

The second reason is that the storytelling and narrative arcs is so much deeper than what is available in many theatrical films. Sure, there’s a ton of dross out there, both on the small and large screens; however, when it’s good, it’s really good.

I want to take a look at Amazon’s Stranger Things because on the surface of it, it appears to be a clever homage to Spielberg, Dante, Carpenter, et al. and a loving embrace of 80s nostalgia; but I’d argue it’s more than that. The whole is greater than the sum of its pastiche’s parts.

A broad set-up of the story is that an arm of the U.S. Department of Energy had been exploring how to weaponize “gifted” children like Millie Bobby Brown’s El (short for 011, as she was tattooed) and Kali (008) while using them to explore a dimension that comes to be known as “the Upside Down”, a mirror dimension to ours, but formed of decaying vegetation and populated by Lovecraftian creatures like the Demogorgon, the demodogs, the Thesselahydra and the Mind Flayer (perhaps Cthulhu's cousin?).

These goings-on come to a head when El rebels against Matthew Modine’s “papa”, opens the Gate (causing a rift between the two dimensions) and goes on the run. This complicates the lives of town of Hawkins, Indiana, circa 1983. Will Byers mysteriously vanishes, sending the town into a panic and his mother refuses to give up the search for him, even after his body is apparently found. His friends Lucas, Dustin, and Mike mourn even as Mike takes in El and keeps her hidden at his home. Will’s mother Joyce continues to piece together clues and communicates with Will via a sequence of lights (they did, after all, watch "Poltergeist" together) and sows enough doubt in the Chief of Police’s mind that there’s something wrong with all this.

Shortly after Will vanished, captured by the Demogorgon and doing his best to hide from his captor in the Upside Down, Barbara Holland similarly goes missing. Will’s brother Jonathan captures a murky photo of the Demogorgon about to prey on Barb at a party she reluctantly went to with her friend Nancy Wheeler, Mike’s older sister. Jonathan was out looking for Will in hopes that he’d find him, but stumbled upon Steve Harrington’s party instead. Why did he snap those photos? His budding crush on Nancy? Curiosity? In any case, his disgust with his own creepy behavior leads him to take more of a compositional interest in Barb sitting out by the pool. One minute there; the next, gone.

This is very (very) briefly, the set-up. To go on would lead to writing a book’s worth of recap. Plenty of those are out there. What interests me more is how “Stranger Things” utilizes and transcends its influence. The show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, were out to create a long-form story about characters. They use the tropes of 80s pop culture to explore trauma, adolescence, and relationships in a unique way. If it wasn’t unique, there’d be little to write about.

I don’t want to spend too much time rehashing what others have done and I’d recommend two other sources of critique/analysis. One is a short YouTube video on intertextuality in the series here. Another is Karsten Runquist’s video essay on How to Introduce a Character. His idea of “character bounce” as a way of presenting each character through conflicts or arguments that reveal their individual personalities as an economic plot method is spot-on. Both videos are excellent.

To Runquist’s point, what the Duffer Brothers and the other writers and directors on the show have accomplished is simply – or not so – remarkable storytelling. There is much, much more going on than “spot the reference” or “find the homage”. Yes, from the theme music to the practical effects to select shots and composition, references abound. But how they’re used is far more than cute or winking at one’s cleverness.

Going into the series, if you’re a movie buff at all, there are numerous treats. If you’re not, though, that shouldn’t be a problem. The stakes throughout are high and rise higher over the course of three seasons but would be negligible if the characters weren’t interesting or unlikeable. The Duffers move beyond 80s Spielberg and into Cronenberg and Carpenter territory as a way of delineating the effects of brutality and the insanity of growing up. Relationships change, people grow apart or at least, into silos of their own activity. Lucas and Mike are involved with their own relationships when everyone returns in the second season. Dustin has met Susie, a Mormon girl (think Phoebe Cates, but better????) at science camp, leaving Will on his own. It’s bad enough that he’d spent so much time in the Upside Down only to return to the world to be out of step with his peers.

Joyce has met and falls in love with Bob, the manager of the town’s Radio Shack; Hopper has adopted Eleven as his daughter, but for safety’s sake keeps her shielded from the outside world, and Steve and Nancy parted ways as it became obvious that it was she and Jonathan who were destined to be together.

The details are worth discovering by watching the series but the overarching point here is that the characters grow and change organically (more or less; the hand of destiny or the writers is more pronounced in, say, Steve’s transition from idiot jock to sensitive guy and how he not only outgrows his limited sense of machismo to being increasingly accepting of those around him).

In terms of the larger threats that comprise the world of “Stranger Things”, they grow from an experiment gone wrong to a mission of international espionage. The Big Bads get bigger, physically, as well. We go from the Demogorgon in the first season to the Thessala Hydra in the second, to the Mind Flayer in the third as a Lovecraftian mechanism for an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” plotline. If I have a quibble, it’s that while “Stranger Things” excels at suspense, it merely scratches the surface when it comes to the dread that so many of the individual stories hint at. This is a quibble. Not everything has to be of Lynchian proportions of unease, but there are too many moments when the 80s brightness and the bending to Spielbergian influence does seem to keep the brothers from committing to a deeper, darker turn.

There is a substantial challenge in working with a group of young actors entering their teens and now in the middle of those years, but the themes of separation and change and coming back together are executed without schmaltz. The show is too smart to drift into mere sentimentality and I think that’s the advantage that longer form teleplays have over both network broadcast TV and mainstream cinema; there’s no need for the kind of manipulation to get people to feel things. Stretched out over a judicious amount of time and developing plots that are integral to the characters’ development, there’s a solid catharsis that is merited by those arcs.

I mentioned Steve Harrington’s growth above, but any of the characters could do, with the exception of David Harbour’s Hopper who in the third season was fairly poorly served by being reduced to loud, overplaying. I don’t understand why the Duffers allowed him to back away from genuinely discussing how he felt about Joyce or how or why he was tired of El and Mike’s relationship. I do to the extent that it drove the action of the plotlines but it didn’t serve the character well.

Hopper aside, everyone else moves on and deepen. There are some silly moments along the way, but these are to be expected. It’s the more painful moments that threaten to derail scenes and sequences (though, emphatically not the series) like Dustin and Susie singing “The Neverending Story” to one another when he needs to get Planck’s Constant numeric value to Hopper and Joyce. But these are few and far between.

More to the point are the moments when the characters are given time to breathe. When Jonathan and Nancy realize how they feel for each other, it’s gradual character development; the splitting apart of El and Mike is necessary for them to understand how complicated feelings really are and what lies ahead of them in growing up.  

It matters, too, that each character grows in relation to another. There are dyads throughout the series, duos that push each other forward, even when pushing apart. Then the groups reconstitute. The separations required by the plot are the separations we go through in life. At the same time, the discrete units hang together but don’t forget their friends. This may be what redeems Hopper at the end; perhaps that’s why he wasn’t intended to grow as much as the rest of the cast. It’s easier to say goodbye to a character that hasn’t shown as much progress. I know I’m way off base here; apparently, the internet had a meltdown over this past summer at the end of the third season. But I honestly had to admit, I felt robbed.

Hopper should have had a deeper storyline and characterization. For that matter, I feel like Joyce didn’t get that much, either. Thus, two fantastic actors were underused.

Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers is an interesting case. I don’t know that I find her likeable; but she is motivated out of love for her sons and driven by curiosity and an innate intelligence. She pieces together so much intuitively (sometimes straining credulity) and the way Ryder plays her on a manic Dennis Hopper (a “good” Dennis Hopper…think “Hoosiers”, not “Blue Velvet”) spectrum. To be fair, she’s been through a lot.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? The whole ensemble has been through a lot. Not since “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” has a group of people had to endure supernatural assaults of this order; unlike the Buffyverse, though, I can’t help but feel that everyone in “Stranger Things” is under a greater, more persistent strain. I’m not going to say that the Scooby Gang moved on unscathed from seven years of adventures and terror, but I feel deeply for the Hawkins contingent and how they’ll fare in the coming seasons.

A closer analog would be “Twin Peaks”; you know that no one in Lumberton is unaffected by the miasma that surrounds and infests the town. Similarly, it’s unlikely that the residents of Hawkins are likewise blighted but most don’t know it, despite the news and the disinformation campaigns of the U.S. government to cover up what really happened (that’s a whole other bottle I’m not opening.)

On that last note, I want to mention in passing that there are lapses in logic, plot construction, and dropped storylines but that they don’t seem to hurt the series. Setting aside elements like who’s looking after this or that kid or not (seriously, Mike and Nancy vanish for – well, we don’t really know – how long and their mom and dad just go on with their lives?) or just how convincing is a cover-up once your small, runty town has already had one?, this doesn’t really affect the overall quality of the series as a whole. In many ways, the digressions, dropped elements, and iffy resolutions of some plot points feel more like the result of unreliable narrators and/or told from the perspective of the kids themselves (who wouldn’t be concerned about such nuances.) It also speaks to a kind of internal logic, not so far removed from the dream logic, for instance, of the aforementioned “Twin Peaks” (which, rest assured, I definitely want to cover.)

What also impresses is that “Stranger Things” is, like “The Good Place”* and very few other domestic productions, earmarked for a conclusion (the upcoming fourth season may be its final one) and this lends a greater credibility, to my mind, of this type of serialization being something more like long-form cinema than short-form television of the old order. It’s not a mini-series, nor is it even a limited series (I’m thinking of everything from “Roots” to “Sherlock” under those rubrics); it’s more like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag” or Gervais’s “The Office” or “Extras”, all excellent series where the creators conceived them as contained, limited runs. They didn’t overstay their welcomes (and left some of us wanting more).

Netflix has come under fire for not bowing to the demands of theaters when it comes to releasing feature films for theatrical releases. The recent hullabaloo over “The Irishman” is a case in point. But it might be that we may start looking to streaming services to continue to provide more in this mid-length, high-concept storytelling; rather than suffer through the old age of series that came and overstayed their welcomes but we continued watching out of habit, like visiting an ancient family member in the senior home a few towns over, we can come to be entertained and challenged by this longer form that comes to pass but not to stay.

It’s this latter that may be the most important. Do we really need interminable tales? One of the reasons I don’t watch much of the newer, buzzed-about shows is that by the time I get to them, they’re in their eighth season or tenth or whatever, and I don’t have that bandwidth. (“Buffy” aside, thanks Joss, for not letting “Angel” grow long in the tooth…although, a couple of more seasons of “Firefly” would have been welcome….just sayin’.)

Note

* For the record, yes, I know “The Good Place” is broadcast on NBC; however, Michael Shur made it plain that it wouldn’t run for too long. This fourth season being the last is bittersweet; it’s been a wonderful ride, but there’s huge admiration for the piece itself and for not bowing to pressure to continue simply for profit or to prolong story upon story.