CONTENT CAUTION: Contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5 and discusses childhood emotional and physical abuse.
When I was a child, I lived with a monster.
He slept in the big room at the back of my grandmother’s house during the day and only came out at night.
Unless you woke him up.
Unless he got angry.
To wake my grandfather was to wake the bear.
For the first twelve years of my life, my grandparents looked after us while my parents worked. My grandfather was a bank security guard who worked all night and slept during the day. His bedroom lay at the back of the house, by the single bathroom, across from the door that led to the basement.
We were constantly tiptoeing around the house, trying not to wake the bear.
But we were kids. And kids are kids.
My sister, brother, and I spent days running around outside or playing in the basement with my cousin, who was often left there for days on end while his mother was on some drunken bender. All those kinds trying to live and play without waking the bear could be an ordeal. We didn’t always manage it.
We were fucking kids.
I remember getting into a loud whispered argument with my cousin – we were maybe eight and ten? Ten and twelve? – right outside the basement door. We were going to play some board games or something down there. I remember he was carrying some long flat boxes.
Partway into our argument, the door to my grandfather’s room burst open.
Our grandfather emerged with a roar. Lashed out wildly. Grabbed me by the hair and smashed my head against the wall. He threw my cousin down the stairs. My younger brother and sister ran off screaming.
My brother and cousin got the worst of the physical abuse, which – my father assured me – was still far less than he’d gotten as a kid. I remember my brother, maybe six years old, trying to hide under the Christmas tree, screaming while my grandfather pulled him out from under it by his ankles.
That was the day my brother clawed free of my grandfather and ran out the back door. He ran and ran: through the yard, past the electric station, through the church parking lot. He just kept running, screaming and red faced, until my towering grandfather caught up with him, pulled him up over his shoulder, and hauled him back, still screaming. There was a bruise on my brother’s thigh in the exact shape of my grandfather’ hand that lingered for days.
I remember my cousin getting locked in the basement. Me, sitting outside the basement door while his little fingers peeked out from the underneath it. I’d sit in the basement alone sometimes, right at the top of the steps. Close the door. I’d press my head against the door and take deep breaths, and imagine myself locked down there. See, I’d tell myself, it’s not so scary, here in the dark. See, there’s nothing this monster can do to me that will break me.
It was good practice.
Stranger Things is, at its most basic, a powerful (and in the final season, not at all thinly veiled) allegory for childhood abuse. For what it’s like to be powerless in a world run by people bigger and stronger and more monstrous than you.
The show survived ten years of Hollywood and geopolitical upheavals; I’d forgotten just how desperately young all of these actors were when they started this show, when El first wanders around in the woods in a too-big coat with her big eyes and shaved head. And Will, poor tiny Will! Alone in the dark, eyes hidden under the bowl cut, pushed and pulled and fought over by monsters and adults alike for ten years (six in show time!).
I’m not a fan of flashbacks, but reminding us of how tiny these kids were (they were babies!!) of the abuse that Will and El endured throughout this entire run, was critical to sticking the landing in this final season. For making it crystal clear exactly what this story was about. The subtext was all text.
From the opening scene in season five, I was watching them put all their finale guns on the mantle: the radio tower, the electricity, Murray’s service runs. They laid it out with a thunk-thunk-thunk that on the one hand I found absurdly obvious, and on the other, gave me great confidence that they actually had a plan and knew what the fuck they were going to do. They were setting it up beat by beat.
Among all those beats, of course, there were endless talking scenes. So many talking scenes! Episodes that ran for over an hour that could have been 45 minutes. A finale with a run time of two hours that could have been an hour fifteen.
I rolled my eyes the whole time at the endless two-person talking scenes. Poor abused Will just – once again getting pushed and pulled around by the narrative. Joyce just sort of… there, with nothing much to do but be Will’s mom. Kali gets shoehorned in to make the alternate read on the ending work (I was baffled until the very, very end on what she was doing in this show at all. But hey! They WERE all there for a reason).
“For the love of god!” I’d mutter, as Max was in the cave giving one big backstory speech after another, or we’re walking through the goddamn memory palace scenes for the third or sixth time.
It was narratively painful. I kept yelling: “We need a Pope in the pool!”(Games of Thrones (in)famously relied on “sexposition” scenes to get across this kind of narrative and emotional exposition without bogging us down in the “two characters talking over tea” setup. If you’re going to give me two characters emoting, for the love of god, let it be somewhere interesting, where they are actively doing something. Every scene needs to be doing at least three things)
And, yet… despite all that…
Those motherfuckers got me.
What strange things, we humans are. Because while I can rail on all I like about how sloppy I felt these talky scenes were, the fact is, they did what they intended to do. I was fucking invested in these kids. I was yelling, “RUN UP THE FUCKING HILL ALREADY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!” I was screaming-crying when Will finally – FINALLY!!! – got to be a fucking sorcerer (“There were no sorcerers in first edition,” my spouse was quick to point out. LISTEN THIS IS NOT A DOCUMENTARY, PEOPLE!!).
Every time I thought I was objectively and critically above this ham-fisted shit, I’d get something like the Nancy and Jonathan breakup scene, one of the most powerfully real, gut-wrenching, honest, and frankly – emotionally mature – breakup scenes I’d ever seen in my life (and they Pope in the pool’d it! What a perfect backdrop for this scene! The whole room is literally melting around them! Perfection! No notes!).
In fact, the entire show modeled an exceptional level of emotional maturity and honesty. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show – or any season even of this show – where characters (adults OR teens) were this emotionally mature. Even better, as someone fascinated by portrayals of toxic masculinity, I realized about halfway through the season that nearly ever male main character was an actual complex human with refreshingly nontoxic expressions of masculinity.
Even when Dustin and Steve got into it, the release wasn’t just the fight itself. That’s something we’d see two guys do on any show: have a fight, pat each other on the back, go shoot things. Instead, the release was the emotional outburst it led to: Dustin admitting out loud that he was terrified Steve was going to die, terrified that he couldn’t go on if someone else he loved died again.
They made the kind of subtext that I took for granted and very much appreciated in more complex and “high minded” shows and just made it actual text.
And while all us critical adults with college degrees might find all this “subtext as actual text” too simplistic, consider where exactly we are in the state of the world right now. Look at the simplicity of the messages that are working. Look at how complex messages are failing.
You want to reach more people?
Tell them what you’re telling them.
Then tell them again:
Here’s what it’s like to grapple with big emotions and big feelings. Here’s how we do it in ways that maintain friendships and keep us mentally healthy. Not by harming ourselves or the people we love, but talking and hugging it out like goddamn adults.
What I wouldn’t have given for emotional modeling like that at 13!
God bless the GenZ therapy generation. I love them.
After growing up on a glut of superhero shows and lone wolf stories more interested in blowing up more buildings to build tension or solving problems by cutting oneself off from the world and just shooting somebody in the head and going off to die alone in the desert, here we were offered a counternarrative:
Nobody wins alone against the monster.
We have to work together to defeat it.
This is a story about child abuse, about what we do with the things done to us. But it’s not about overcoming that alone.
No, friends, this is a show about the goddamn Power of Friendship.
When that fucking twisted tree unrolled itself into the goddamn spider that was creeping over the town at the end of… season one? Season two? while the party assembles, I grinned so hard my face hurt. Because there it was. After watching so many shows cut off at the knees before they could finish, or make shit up season to season as they cycled through a raft of showrunners and writers and were never exactly sure how or when they’d end it, and major franchises (looking at you, Star Wars!!) just making it up film to film even in a fucking trilogy that’s supposed to be cohesive, to watch a show get the profound privilege of coming full circle and delivering on a premise they had clearly set up from the beginning to knock down was a goddamn delight.
Like, of COURSE they have to find the spider as a PARTY.
Of course they have to ALL KILL THE MONSTER.
IT IS THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP. IT IS THE D&D SHOWDOWN WE WERE PROMISED FROM THE BEGINNING.
I have rarely been so satisfied by a penultimate fight scene in a film or show of any kind. I get that this was also the storyteller in me, too. I’ve been deep in narrative this last couple years, setting up story beats to knock them all down, and watching someone else do it in such a satisfying way was extraordinarily resonant for me.
Of course, after we kill the monster and sacrifice the mage, we expect a nice tidy denouement. And if this was a different kind of story, maybe that’s what we would have gotten.
We’d be left with questions like: Does Will become a monster like he always feared? Does Mike start drinking and waste his life punishing himself for El’s death/disappearance? Do Max and Caleb stay together? Are Steve and Dustin still friends? Does Nancy become a Marine???
These were things they could have left us to wonder.
They didn’t.
Because that’s not the story they wanted to tell to a bunch of abused and hopeless kids.
I love me an open door ending (I mean, RAPTURE!). We could have sacrificed our mage and said, “Well, maybe she lived, here’s a waterfall!” and THE END.
We didn’t.
Why?
In the endless circle jerk that is online discourse, we often forget to ask these very basic questions of media, of art, of stories: Who is this story for? What is it trying to say? And does it succeed at doing that?
Stranger Things may have started out as many things, but here in the end, it very clearly put a stake in the sand for what it is.
Fundamentally, we just watched an “it gets better” narrative for a bunch of abused kids.
The last thing you want a lot of abused kids to sit around wondering is if it is, actually, possible for anyone to have a happy ending after all the shit that happened to them.
You want to KNOW.
This is the kind of ending that that these poor abused and traumatized kids needed and deserved. Life goes on. It gets better. It’s worth getting up and carrying on. It’s worth being here.
We’re raising a generation of kids bombarded by always-on screaming narratives about how the future is grim and only going to get worse and they’re doomed to walk the earth alone in a world run by abusive narcissists. What a balm this is to that unimaginative sad sack world.
I reserve right to nitpick this fucking show endlessly as I eyeroll scene bloat. But in our rush to point out imperfections of tentpole shows to make us all seem smarter, we often fail to take moment and appreciate triumph of actually making – and FINISHING!! – a show with something to say that nailed the landing.
What comes after the things that have been done to us? Do we really have a choice? Or are we doomed to repeat trauma, to become monsters ourselves?
Henry in the cave, beating a man to death. Henry in the cave, infected with a monstrous interdimensional traveler who wants him to destroy the world. Henry, who makes it absolutely clear that he knew he could make a choice. And he chose to become the monster.
This is a story about horrible things that happen to us as children. About the monsters in our lives who we must outrun and outlast, or the monsters we choose to become.
We don’t have a choice in what has been done to us. But we can choose what we do with the things that have been done to us.
My cousin died last year, of something very stupid. While there are those who would call some of the things he went on to do monstrous – that’s not my story to tell – I think often about the things that were done to him, done to us, and the anger and resentment and trauma we all carried.
The way we, too, often did monstrous things to other people.
And I think about how, when I met my spouse and asked him how he could be so upbeat after all the things that had happened to him in his childhood he said, “I was tired of being angry all the time.”
He was tired of being angry, and so he made a choice. It was a choice that led him to be the kindest, funniest person I know.
It’s a choice he makes every day.
I have learned a lot from him.
Stories are never objective. Art, for me, is fundamentally about holding out your hand and saying, “I have felt this way. Do you feel this way too?”
Half the experience of a story, of a piece of art, comes from the person reading or viewing it.
Critics hate to admit this. We want objectively good and objectively bad. Like a math problem. There’s a right or wrong answer. A piece of dialogue, a scene, an ending that works or doesn’t.
Creators find this frustrating, too. You can be as clear and obvious as you want. You can put your theme into a character’s own damn mouth, and you’ll still find people who insist what you’re doing is something else entirely. Sure, some of that is on you. Story is a craft. Story is hard. But just as often, the issue is that the people who read it this way simply aren’t the people you’re holding out your hand to.
A good story is one that makes that emotionally resonant connection.
We are all a collection of imperfections. We are all a collection of choices. We are all the stories we tell ourselves. We are the stranger things.
It’s Henry talking about choices. It’s the spider unfolding from the desert. It’s Nancy volunteering to be bait. It’s Will’s fear and terror of becoming a monster after being abused by a monster. It’s the desperate hope that when you really need them, your friends will still be there, even in the very darkest moment.
This is a story about abused children. This is a story about how it can get better. This is a story about the power of friendship.
And as that kind of story? Stranger Things was a goddamn triumph.
Imperfections and all.
Just like the rest of us.
