Trend Chasing: Stranger Things is bad.
You have a moral duty not to watch shows that disrespect you.
Usually these trend posts consist of 3-4 feuilletons, of which one is free. However, I had so much to say about Stranger Things that I wrote a huge thing about it. I’ve divided it into several sections. The first: “Season 5 is Shit from a Butt” is free, but you have to pay for the remaining two sections below it: “A lukewarm defense of the ending of Stephen King’s IT by way of comparison with Stranger Things S1,” and “I Serve the Soviet Union.”
To quote my very beautiful fiancee: “The thing about Stranger Things is that it thinks it’s Stephen King, but really it’s Ready Player One.”
Finally a trend I can get behind. Stranger Things season Whatever has come out and The People on Substack are up in arms. Everyone hates it! To quote Amiri Baraka: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
Before we get into it, two things: 1. I hate, hate, hate this show, and I have hated, hated, hated it since July 2019 (Season 3), but also S2 sucked in retrospect. Even when it came out I thought it was boring and silly. 2. I hated S3 so much I haven’t watched Stranger Things since then, but, because I love you all (at least the 40ish of you who pay me), I made the ultimate sacrifice and watched one episode of the latest season to see if it was still dumb, poorly-paced treacle for Millennials who are nostalgic for the first time we had a bumbling dotard as president.
Sidenote: Biden and Trump were both older than late-era Brezhnev for, like, all of their presidencies. Soviet gerontocrats look comparatively spry in the American context. Yuri Andropov was 69 when he died—just a kid! I firmly believe Andropov, had he survived, would’ve been a high Wins Above Replacement Soviet Premiere; he was a multi-threat player, just like Billy Beane. While Billy Beane could not have saved the Soviet Union, Andropov would have won a World Series as the Oakland A’s GM.
Season 5 is Shit from a Butt
I am happy to report that Stranger Things is still stupid! I feast! I love this shit! Fuck this show! Hahaha! It is so bad that it’s unwatchable without a second screen—just as Netflix intends—and I had to physically restrain myself from checking my fantasy football scores every time the scene changed.
I’ve seen a lot of people ragging on how old the kids have gotten. Before watching S5 E1, I thought to myself ‘How bad can it be? People can’t endure a little suspension of disbelief these days, wusses.’
But no, holy shit, you guys are right on this one. The kids look so old. They look so physically out of place. Their character design hasn’t changed much over five seasons; their haircuts have gotten more extreme, becoming parodies of their S1 and S2 manifestations, they wear similar color clothes and cuts and they just generally look disconcertingly adult. The way they carry their bodies has changed. They are not convincing.
Finn Blowhard looks like he should be playing D1 basketball because they have him wearing a too-short jacket that gives him a roughly 8 foot wingspan. Caleb McLaughlin looks straight-up 40 years old. Charlie Heaton qualifies for Medicare. Natalia Dyer has the harried beauty of a woman in a WPA photograph; I can easily imagine her telling Bob Caro: “Yes, we had running water. I always said we had running water because I grabbed those two buckets up and ran the two hundred yards to the house with them.”
Much of this stems, it would seem, from Netflix’s refusal to let the Characters age. The consistency in character design, hair, makeup and costume only emphasizes how dramatically different these people are than they were a decade ago, when S1 was filming.
This is part of the overall disrespect of the viewer thing that’s endemic to the second-screen streaming form: How would the rubes who pay for our service possibly remember what actors look like? Make the 22 year old look like an 11 year old! The de-ageing will continue until morale improves.
Such trouble extends to the writing. Much of the 70 minute (brevity is the soul of wit) runtime of S5 E1 is given over to exposition for things the characters know. In one notable sequence Blowhard and Dyer spend 10 minutes explaining the group’s Search And Destroy method for finding the big baddie to the rest of the cast; in that dialogue, and later, we learn this is the 37th time they’ve done this exact operation. Why couldn’t this be conveyed to the audience in a slick, sexy, sixty second montage? Because Netflix thinks its viewers are too busy asking ChatGPT who Kate Bush is to pay attention to a show the company spent $450 million dollars making (all that for one season lol).
The bad writing extends to other things as well. In Season 2, David Harbour (Sheriff Hopper, I think) harbours Millie Bobby Brown’s character, Eleven, as a fugitive from the Feds (or maybe that’s in S3, I’m not totally sure, they blend together honestly) and they have this elaborate prisoner system where she is completely unfree but completely safe. Now in S5, with the military actively doing S&D sweeps over Hawkins and its psychic mirror-image in the Upside Down, Harbour lets her run around an open-air obstacle course that he’s set up in his backyard. Why don’t the military find this? Why doesn’t a single army intelligence officer ask around town about the old Sheriff’s weird habits? The town’s like 40 square miles and a few thousand inhabitants—a UNITE HERE municipal canvassing team could find this bitch in like two shifts on the doors.
But Eleven needs to have a contrived conflict with Hopper, and her confinement was too boring for viewers, so she gets to do the obstacle course, but not fast enough for Hopper’s tastes, but also Hopper won’t explain the stakes of her being slow to her. This tension kinda just ends in the episode, maybe they pick it back up in E2, but I don’t care.
And E1 of S5 also looks like shit visually, the color is a little dull, the action is too-clearly staged, VFX that could’ve been done easily in-camera are instead obvious digital forgeries. Brown has an action scene where she’s supposed to be hauling-ass, special forces style; instead she looks like she’s running a 14 minute mile. That’s no shade on her physically; it’s mostly the lackluster cutting, the bad camera angles, the inability of the Duffers to organically convey the movement of human bodies in a physical space. All of those make a series of images that just emphasize how slow and ungainly her character is in this environment, how her psychic powers have become The Force from Star Wars but with nosebleeds. The resulting visuals are bad and do, like, nothing, to advance the plot.
But hack VFX are fine, TBH, under certain circumstance. In The Fugitive, the greatest film ever made, Andrew Davis threw a dummy with a Harrison Ford wig on it off a dam, and god damn it the shot works because the smallness and the ragdoll physics of the dummy emphasize how lonely Ford’s character is, how massive the forces arrayed against him are (law enforcement, like hydropower, being an instrument of state modernity), how he is totally alone and falling through mortal peril at every moment, towards a cold, uncaring void (penal system, icy river) that must swallow him or dash him against its sharp-edged rocks. How his choice is to be confined forever within the state-concrete pen, held up like water, the great force of his personality locked away, or to trust only in himself, only in the force of falling and the arbitrary judgement of mortality. Bad props and silly action works if it is thematically consistent with a text’s concerns; I digress.
More broadly, the treatment of Brown’s character, an actual psychic, as a gung ho athlete is particularly stupid and shows how little the Duffers understand the characters they’ve “written” or the genre in which they’re “working.”
In another lengthy sequence, Jonathan Byers and Steven Harrington race up a radio mast to do some maintenance on it. You can very obviously tell they aren’t climbing anything in an actual location and everything about it looks so fake and annoying I almost stopped watching. Alan J. Pakula shot a fistfight on top of the Space Needle 50 years ago, you can find a way to make the sky look real in a $60 million episode of television.
It is inaccurate to say that characters don’t change in Stranger Things. Hopper, for instance, goes from a bumbling small-town cop to a one-man army. But they do not develop. They are instead props for zany, atonal Millennial humor. Byers and Harrington’s relationship, despite developing over more than 4 years of story time, in S5 is a Cro-Magnon prick-measuring contest. Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) is alternately a determined, resourceful, blue-collar mother who fights hard for the sons she doesn’t understand, and a mewling caricature of a scared, irrational woman who makes bad decisions because the plot needs someone to make them. And that sucks because she carried S1 on her back.
The dynamics of the core four boys haven’t changed much either. These guys aren’t characters, they’re the classic American action movie squad: Bourgeois do-gooder protagonist, working class kid with emotional problems who is smarter than he looks, fat ethnic white whose personality is the average of his friends, and the black guy who makes jokes. Two of them get girlfriends, sure, but Mike’s (Blowhard) relationship with Eleven is an unconvincing marriage of convenience and Lucas’ (McLaughlin) attachment to Max Mayfield is undercut because the Duffers put Max in a coma and keep her there so that they don’t have to dwell much on the romance between a black boy and a white girl.
Dustin Henderson supposedly has a GF in S3, I think, but she goes to another school. They’re going to make Will Byers come out as gay for the cheap pathos of him confessing his feelings to Mike because they can’t write convincing friendships; maybe one of them will die because American television can’t tolerate men fucking. That’s okay though, because Byers was queercoded in S1. But I guarantee you they won’t have Mike make an AIDS joke, which is what any Indiana protestant with a girlfriend would do in his situation, god forbid our 15 year old protagonist be cruel to his friend. Because really this show doesn’t take place in the 1980s at all.
It tells you it’s the 80s, with its songs, its cars, its hair. But the ruin of the rust belt? Absent. The prevalence of drinking and underage screwing? Absent. The hard-edged violence of a fragmenting industrial world, capable of creating genuine, world-ending terrors and real, heart-stopping beauty? Absent. The terror and the panic and the slow, paranoiac dread of that long, long, long Thermidor is just completely vacated. There was some of it in S1, but by S5 the historical backdrop of this show is just a series of cultural references for people who think the Democrats are serious about improving the healthcare system.
There is no bigotry, no texture, no feeling in this world. Look! They said a line from a Spielberg movie!!
You have a moral duty not to watch shows that so intentionally disrespect you.
Okay so that sucks, but S1 was good right? There wasn’t a completely fatal flaw in the show’s conception that meant it was only ever tolerable? It was good right? it wasn’t just nostalgia-slop from day 1, right?? Right???
A lukewarm defense of the ending of Stephen King’s IT by way of comparison with Stranger Things S1
Now I’m not saying S1 of Stranger Things should’ve ended in a fuckfest. But I think that there is a key weakness to the show that is not present in the source material from which it draws.
