At the beginning of the first season of "Weird stuff”, psychically gifted girl Eleven explains the central premise of the show by turning over a Dungeons & Dragons board, revealing its dark side. A small child went missing and searchers found nothing; Eleven says that she is "hidden" in an alternate dimension of evil that the characters in the series call the Upside Down. It's a great scene for several reasons. There is joy in the simplicity of the Upside Down idea and the frankness with which it is expressed. And children, around the age of twelve, are at the ideal age to accept such an idea. Seeing his eyes widen, his eyes widen as well.
After four seasons, the protagonists of "Stranger Things" are hardly tired, they're still shocked and horrified by what they see, but there's a sense in which they're past their wonder years. They are old enough to remember their younger, impressionable selves. “‘The NeverEnding Story’ – it scared the shit out of me!” one of them remembers. The new season is set in 1986, and "The Neverending Story" premiered in 1984. Now in high school, they can nostalgically reminisce about the horror movies they watched in high school; having become experienced monster hunters, they can calmly face the creatures that pursue them every day. What really scares them are things like applying to college or saying "I love you" to a girlfriend. When last season's villain finally explains his desire to destroy the world, he argues that human society is cruel and oppressive, a "deeply unnatural structure" that is "dictated by invented rules". Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades: each life is a faded and smaller copy of the last. Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce and die. They're all waiting, waiting for it all to be over, all the while putting on a terrible, silly play day after day." Adulthood, it turns out, may be the real Upside Down.
The new season is long: eight episodes of over an hour each, capped off by a two-and-a-half-hour finale, in part because it has to push the teen version of the show into a more adult environment. It's a laborious process, which seems to require almost every character to have a long heart-to-heart ("I see you," "I'm here for you," "I believe in you," etc.). But the overall effect is to raise the stakes for the show so that by the end of the season, it's an adult team facing potential disaster. (Stop reading if you want to avoid spoilers.) In the final episode, a giant portal to the Upside Down opens beneath Hawkins, Indiana, and the poisonous atmosphere of that nether realm spills out into the ordinary world. In one of the series' best scenes, Eleven walks through a field of vibrant wildflowers and comes to a ledge beyond which the plants are dead and gray. Go across to pick up a Withered Flower. It's a frightening picture of permanent environmental degradation, an adult problem, much scarier than coconuts from another dimension.
To some extent, all scary entertainment raises a serious question: what is evil? "Stranger Things" has always been a mixture of films and books of the past: Season 4 combines elements of "It", "The Matrix", "Aliens", "Pitch Black", "Carrie", "A Nightmare on Elm Street " . ”, “Poltergeist II”, “Terminator 2” and more, but the show also addressed this question of evil in a direct and orderly way. For the show's first three seasons, the evil in the Upside Down tended to be disgusting, slippery, and supernatural;era lovecraftiano, inasmuch as it emanated from a distorted, morbid, and hidden part of nature. Science tells us that insects are beautiful and mold is magnificent, but venture into a rotten basement or rummage through a damp log and you might not agree. The Upside Down is a rotten world, and our horror stems from the realization that its decay is predatory, haunting us even if we are innocent.
Season four changes history. In the end, a flashback to 1979 shows us a primordial and surprising Upside Down version that existed before the beginning of the series. It's not a pretty place - a tiny homuncular version of the show's tulip-headed monster roams the rocks - but it's also strangely primitive, as Earth might have been during some previous evolutionary era. Henry Creel, the villain, got there after killing everyone in the psychic experiment lab below Hawkins. (After murdering his own family with telekinetic powers, he became Subject #1 on the investigative show that later produced Eleven.) dimensions and pushes you through it.
It is Creel, we learn, who made the Upside Down what it is. At first confusing, his powers increased under the traumatic tutelage of Martin Brenner, the scientist who directed the Hawkins project; once Creel finds himself in the Upside Down, he reshapes his raw material in his own image. “I know what he did to you,” says Once a Brenner's Creel. You were different, like me. And it hurt you. He made you this. He's the monster, Henry, not you. That's a little dubious: didn't a young Creel, acting alone, use his powers to murder his mother and sister, framing his father for the crime? But the broader point is reasonable. Creel, in his demonic form, now looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and commanding an army of monsters, would not have been possible had he not been twisted by others. And that, in turn, means that the Upside Down could have just remained a nasty parallel world, rather than one that threatens to colonize our own.
This evil tale is familiar and realistic. Disturbed, incited and empowered people do lash out and commit unspeakable acts on a massive scale. (A warning card placed before the season's first episode, in which many children are slaughtered, notes that viewers may find this disturbing "given the recent tragic Texas school shooting.") In some ways, this more humane version and realistic of the Upside Down is actually scarier, because it embodies an evil for which we must take responsibility. But it's also less supernatural and, in some ways, less disturbing. This shift from the genuinely scary to the merely psychological, from the unknowable to the explainable, is another way "Stranger Things" has grown more adult.
Explain the evil works? For some of us, stories of why people do bad things can be satisfying. Putting together a chain of events, from the initial conditions to the final result, can make the horrible understandable. But for others, there will always be an element of the unexplainable. The demons in the Upside Down turn out to be the product of a sick human mind. But why are human minds sick? The alternate world that haunts ours was shaped by one person's imagination. But why are people so ready to imagine such horrors? Does some bloody vein connect our present selves to our evolutionary past, or is the entropic and destructive aspect of the universe somehow woven into our nature as well?
Emdavid lynchFrom "Twin Peaks", the adult version of "Stranger Things", the evil remains elusive and elemental, but the realism of the terrible acts around which the story revolves remains intact. The idea is that evil, while it must be confronted, can never really be explained; even "adult" forms of evil, including common heinous crimes, are haunted by something supernatural, making them terrifying. Watching the new season of “Stranger Things,” you might get the impression that as we get older, we understand more why the world is going wrong. But this can also be an illusion of youth.♦