Weaponised tropes in ‘Stranger Things’
JULY 24TH, 2016 — POST 202
An alert: I probably won’t be able to help spoiling parts of Stranger Things. It’s criminally good. Watch.
It started with an ad plastered across the side of a bus. Specifically, it started with the wordmark. A distinctly dated typeface, styled in a way that reminded me of the Lucasfilm wordmark. Three boys on bicycles look in horror at a fallen bicycle on the road before them, its rider apparently vanished. The wordmark reads “Stranger Things”. Having heard about Netflix’s newest original series online somewhere, I had largely decided it would fall into the category of Mostly Mediocre™, an ever-expanding class of television as the long tail of the Golden Age is pulled spindly thin. But that wordmark grabbed me. I gave it a shot on Friday night and all I want from today is my partner to come home from work so we can get through the final two episodes of the eight-episode first (and maybe only) season.
The general noise I heard about Stranger Things was that it read like a catalog of every pop-cultural reference of the 1980s that have maintained relevance into the third millennium. The main group of boys, those featured on the bus ad, play DnD, talk in Star Wars references, and adorn their communal space with posters of John Carpenter movies. Some looked at the series with knowing derision: it’s like E.T., The Thing, and Twin Peaks all rolled into one. Through this lens, it’s a condensation of “nerd culture”, pitched perfectly to today’s fandom, aggressively consuming cultural products of this ilk. And the wordmark, an animation of which gorgeous serves as each episode’s opening credits, at first blush seemed to be playing this game. Stranger Things, I thought, fuelled its engine with nostalgia.
But if Stranger Things is nostalgic, it doesn’t pander to an iconoclastic nostalgia like Star Wars: The Force Awakens or an expanded universe centrism like the recent cycle of Marvel movies. If Stranger Things is nostalgic, it yearns for a return to classic story forms, to a reinvigoration of what we now consider to be tropes. And yet there’s something in the handling of these tropes that feels as if they’re being discovered anew: as if the series is less a throwback and more the genuine article.
The opening credit sequence is deceptively simple: one might think its just ticking off a laundry list of visual icons to render a retro aesthetic. But with each episode, the tasteful detail in this sequence becomes more and more evident. The names in white seem to dip opacity when fading out, but there’s more going on. They pass from white down to red to invisible, calling to mind the primitive digital effects systems of the early 1980s. The shimmering glow of the red wordmark, as it takes form out of abstract lines and angles, feels organic, a far cry from the digital precision suites like Adobe After Effects give. And yet its tasteful, not interested in dialling up the aesthetic cues for ultimate nostalgia effect. Like the series as a whole, this opening sequence feels authentic.
The tropes that underpin the stories construction a similarly presented with a authenticity that feels almost as if the last thirty years didn’t happen. We’ve got the nerdy boys — bullied at school but super smart with technology and deductive reason — in search for their missing friend, justifying their fleets of heroism from the way their DnD characters are played. We’ve got the supernaturally powerful young girl: possessing powers of telekinesis and telepathy whose nose and ears run bloody at the exertion of mental force. We’ve got the awkward teen romance — between the misfit boy and the cutesy goody-two-shoes girl — united in the pursuit the girl’s friend. We’ve got the “wounded” police chief, becoming a detective in the search for the missing boy. We’ve got the unequivocally evil scientific organisation whose meddling with science has unleashed a monster on the world. And we’ve got the “world under our nose” — the “upside down” — a parallel dimension from which the monster was released and which holds our missing persons.
Taken all together, it’s any wonder the series is able to manoeuvre under the weight of cultural history at all. Any one of these tropes has been worn sheer and by themselves serve as the central conceit for some classic genre film or another. And yet in concert, Stranger Things is able to do the impossible: make these all feel utterly novel. The expressivity of sound and visual show such disciplined restraint to never descend to cynical winking, gratuitous indulgence in any retro aesthetic, or resting on assumed knowledge of how known tropes ought to be handled.
The costuming and production design are handled with the dignity of a prestige movie. There’re no 1980s caricatures here. Even the voluminous hair of Steve — our goody-two-shoes’ boyfriend who’s really just a dick — feels as if the character styled it himself every morning, never the same twice, the single curl drooping different daily. The constant slow dollies in and out of the camera yield a perpetual unease, of impending dread, with the conviction of Kubrick’s The Shining. And the sound — oh god, the sound — layers in a hyperreality to all lights and electrical connections to render the doom as utterly inescapable. The creators are the kind of fans you want making TV and movies: utterly dignified and respectful of the field on which they’ve chosen to play.
Stranger Things is then the best live-action Netflix original since House of Cards and arguably the best TV all year.
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