Stranger things: a parable on Emotional Healing

Stranger Things has been so widely celebrated and given commentary, I’m not sure what else could be meaningfully said.  But I’ve recently binge-watched all four seasons again, so it felt worth making some reflections.

For me, this Netflix series has been a well-written, cinematographically beautiful, nostalgic parable on emotional healing and wholeness.  If you can’t handle science-fiction violence and gore, don’t watch it.  But if the 1980s are meaningful to your childhood and you’re now processing your own pain and trauma, you might want to tale a look.  The script is well-crafted (maybe with some exceptions in episodes of season 3), charmingly funny, and suspenseful.

No spoilers here, but if you watch pay special attention to the theme of believing and doubting throughout the entire story.  As various characters engage the terrifying world of the “upside-down” - a parallel world of violent creatures, trauma, and loneliness underneath and behind a sleepy Midwestern town - they each engage their own journeys of believing if this out-of-sight world even exists.  

Throughout the series, different characters often don’t believe each other’s stories about their experience of the upside-down.  Even after clear atrocities have happened in this monster-filled world, even after people disappear, even after characters evidence severe trauma accompanied by physical symptoms, even after the upside-down leaks into the relationships and shopping malls of the seen world, even after people die - friends and family simply still don’t believe.  It all sounds too awful and fantastical to be possible.  How could a small town have such intense evil near (even within) its homes, schools, and government.  Hawkins, Indiana, is in many ways the ideal expression of the American Dream - quiet, upwardly-mobile, and largely prosperous.  It can’t be that unspeakable evil lurks within its walls and underneath its farms and neighborhoods.

Or could it?

The evil that ever lurks near respectability in the series reveals itself in ways that are undeniable to some.  More sobering, even after particular evil events are a thing of the past, they recreate themselves in present horrors - what gentle, kind Will (a primary character in the series) refers to as “now-memories.”  For him, the past is constantly remaking the present in pain and fear.

After the world becomes less simple and less surface-apparent because of personal contact with this concealed evil, characters in the series respond in differing ways.

Some of the characters continue to mock the existence of the evil itself and the trauma it has inflicted in others - even after the evidence is hard to ignore.  These people are in complete denial.  Others, especially some parents and town officials, begin to advocate for those who are hurt although they don’t fully understand.  Their unconditional love or deep sense of responsibility make the pain in others impossible to ignore, but they don’t know what to do and aren’t equipped to respond effectively.  Still others are slow believers but steadily travel toward an expanded understanding of the upside-down through careful listening with their family and friends.  Loyalty and patience lead them to a new reality.  Some just want to quickly fix the problem and recklessly create more damage as a result.  Others turn out to be actual allies of the hidden evil - participating in abuse themselves as the evil plays on their weaknesses and wounds.  Still there are those in the system (doctors, law-enforcement officials) who try to help from within the system (often unsuccessfully), while others exploit their power in a system (government, for instance) to partner with evil and inflict more harm.  It’s in the interest of these leaders to cover up as much evil as possible.  Still other friends encourage anger and revenge from the abused as the only conceivable response to the gravity of the wickedness.

But in the midst of these complex responses, the heroes of Stranger Things are clearly visible.  The heroic ones are the friends, family members, and system-officials who overcome even their deepest doubts to simply journey with someone they care about.  They listen, they get in the car to drive to the place where evidence exists, they stay long enough to see the flashing lights, the rotting farms, the hidden laboratory.  They just stay.  They aren’t unthinking.  They have their own doubts and questions, but they remain present. 

By remaining present they stay around long enough to experience the horror of the upside-down, either directly or indirectly, through someone they love.  They see the monsters, they hear the shrieks, and they witness the emotional and physical damage in another.  They don’t mock or scold; they stay.  And since they stay, they can now minister healing to their loved ones from within the upside-down and its tangible effects.  They don’t sit as preachers above the trauma telling people how to get better, or even worse, telling people the trauma doesn’t exist.  

No, they’re here.  So now they can bring healing from within - if not from within the upside-down at least someone’s reliving of it.  Most often in the series, these people do this by reminding the internally tortured ones of the songs, experiences, and physical objects that communicated love in the inflicted one’s past.  This grounds the suffering one, and it reminds them that the monsters, violence, and isolation do not define their reality.  Yes, the upside-down and its terrible monsters are real.  But they are not all-conquering, all-powerful, or all-consuming.  Love and our memories of love are a more-real-reality than either the hidden and terrible upside-down or the fragile and pain-denying world of Hawkins, Indiana.  

And as anyone who has experienced trauma knows, it’s the friends, family members, and therapists like these who bring us back to the realest reality of all: love.  Even when the echos of monsters and monstrous experiences still sound in our chests and minds, these people take us back to love through their gentle presence and reassuring words.

This is why the moral and therapeutic vision of Stranger Things seems compelling to me.  It this world, the heroes aren’t the ones who know how to fix things or the ones who keep the peace at the expense of the truth.  Rather, the heroes are the listeners, the journeyers, the patient ones. They aren’t the ones eager to jump on a bandwagon of outrage or ignore the complexity of life, but those who are willing to just stay long enough to find out what’s happened - even when what’s happened is hard to look at.  Even if they don’t understand.  Even if they don’t know how to help.  Even if the world is far more expansively good and horrifyingly evil than they previously realized.

No surprise, most of the heroes in Stranger Things are children and youth.  They aren’t so sophisticated to think they understand everything.  So they listen and believe deeper and longer while the adults in the series often have to get past their own egos first before they can be helpful.

I’d like to be that kind of hero.