Cultural Phenomenon of Stranger Things

Stranger Things is a television show on Netflix that recounts the story of a missing boy, a frantic mother, and three friends looking for an answer. The show is a pastiche of popular 80's movies and television shows that featured monsters like E.T. and telekinetic children like Charlie in Firestarter. While the show does not hit on anything original, it does manage to hit a nerve among fans and has swept the nation with its sweet whispers of nostalgia. The show perhaps invites people to reach for their own ideologies in life vicariously through the main characters. Althusser discusses ideologies in his piece, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" and Bell Hooks examines desire and resistance in "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance" that can point towards a better understanding of such a fast-growing cultural phenomenon.

Althusser defines ideologies from a traditional standpoint as 'world outlooks. However, Althusser admits they do not link to reality and are admittedly, largely imaginary (Althusser, 2006). While they establish an illusion, within this schema, some believe ideologies can convert allusion to reality. All that is needed to understand and accept the world behind such invented representations is interpretation. He mentions two models of advanced ideology to this regard and they are: "...mechanistic type, in which ideology is a distorted mirror held up to the (economic) Real and the 'hermeneutic interpretation' in which Real is the essence manifesting itself through the dross of ideological phenomena which must be peeled away to arrive at the kernel of truth" (Althusser, 2006, p. 100).

When it comes to Stranger Things, the children are the first to truly embark on the journey of discovery, of reaching for the truth behind the 'smoke screen'. They are the ones that imagine and believe in things that are then translated to reality through action and circumstance and the help of someone like Eleven. Eleven is the 'kernel of truth' or 'distorted mirror' that when held up, manifests itself via telekinetic abilities that enable progress for the children in finding their friend. She is an ideology that serves as both the anchor point and bridge from illusion or allusion to reality.

The question then posited is why people require this type of imaginary transposition of reality to find meaning and representation of themselves? Althusser answers by stating "...men make themselves an alienated representation of their conditions of existence because these conditions of existence are themselves alienating" (Althusser, 2006, p. 101). Essentially, deriving from this perspective, ideology is not a mere method or tool from which ruling classes enslave and exploit lower classes. Instead it serves as how people aim to compensate for a painful, intolerable existence.

The kids from Stranger Things are a representation of ideologies that include innocence, friendship, discovery, love, and the classic structure of bildungsroman. Except instead of just having regular children find their missing friend, it throws another ideology that many people secretly desire to be true, the ability to supersede reality and bend it to one's will. Eleven can flip vehicles, kill people that get in her way, and provide her friends a way to know of another world/dimension that was otherwise 'make believe'. In a world where reality is harsh and often unyielding, it presents as a comfort to see a little girl do the unimaginable all while still retaining her innocence, love, and desire to help her friends.

In "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance" Bell Hooks discusses and examines desire. "...that desire expresses itself most fully where only those absorbed in its delights and torments are present, that it triumphs most completely over other human preoccupations in places sheltered from view" (Durham, Kellner, & Hooks, 2006, p. 366). Desire puts humans in odd circumstances. The first major event that happens in Stranger Things is the disappearance of Will. His disappearance fuels his mother and his friends' desire to find and rescue him. That desire led Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and Eleven into a journey peril and self-discovery.

While desire is defined under a quote from The Oppositional Imagination y Joan Cocks, it serves as a starting point in exploring desire. Hooks uses desire to examine race and cultural taboos showing how the 'real fun' is when all the darkness of one's desires is brought up to the surface where the unconscious imaginations become real and acknowledged. Going back to Stranger Things Mike has a special connection with Eleven that leads to their first kiss together. While Mike may not have acknowledged his feelings for Eleven on the surface, they crept up on him when he moved forward to kiss her. The act of bringing things from subconscious into conscious territory is what draws people into the frenetic and often interchanging perspectives and actions of the characters in Stranger Things.

While people may be resistant to their desires and try to hide their shadow selves from the real world, Hooks explains there is a means of provocation that can bridge the gap and create a means of delving past the surface. "Provocation -- unlike seduction, which allows things to come into play and appear in secret, dual and ambiguous -- does not leave you free to be; it calls on you to reveal yourself as you are" (Durham, Kellner, & Hooks, 2006, p. 367). Eleven has could appeal to fans of the show on many levels. She is the one they look for when they attempt to generate an icon of the show. She is perhaps the clearest sign of provocation in the series.

Her actions result in people dying and even in the monsters that emerge from the other dimension. She provokes the behaviors of Lucas, Mike, and Dustin to go out and find their friend and change their perspectives on the world and on each other. She serves both as a desire and provocation. This dual purposes promotes a deep response in the views of the show and identify her as the source of purpose for the story.

Hooks continues by exploring nostalgia and the effects of nostalgia on the masses. "In mass culture, imperialist nostalgia takes the form of reenacting and reritualizing in different ways the imperialist, colonizing journey as narrative fantasy of power and desire, of seduction by the Other" (Durham, Kellner, & Hooks, 2006, p. 369). Stranger Things is a nostalgia trip where most of the characters are white and live in a world with simple manifestations of society. People do not have to deal with political correctness or assimilation of other cultures and instead live in simplicity and ignorance. Maybe this kind of nostalgia further creates the desire in viewers to continue watching, because it brings them back to a world that was simpler and easier to understand.

In conclusion, Stranger Things has become a cultural phenomenon in a matter of months. It has done so because of the desires and ideologies expressed within the narrative. It shows this through Eleven. She serves as a means of accessing a new world within a simple, nostalgia inducing town that shows the world for what it used to be, easy. While the girl is not real and the story is not based on reality, it hints enough of reality to soothe and comfort those that desire to believe in such things.

References

Althusser, L. (2006). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In The anthropology of the state: A reader (pp. 86-103). Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

Durham, M. G., Kellner, D., & Hooks, B. (2006). Eating Other: Desire and Resistance. In Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (pp. 366-376). Malden, MA: Blackwell.