 "How Stranger Things succeeds in bringing out the emotional realism of coming-of-age")
We mistakenly assume that everything made for children and young adults must be simplified and lightened but their stories naturally give themselves to gnarly afflictions. From rhymes like pocketful of roses alluding to the plague, to the gothic, unforgiving worlds of Coraline and Studio Ghibli, where parents might turn into pigs and a second mother might try to switch your eyes out with buttons, there’s almost a direct relationship between a horrific turn of events and heroes too young to cope with them. The cost to life is sometimes a minor risk, in Roald Dahl’s books children might permanently change into mice or a different candy-coloured hue, or worse, suffer the unhappy fate of indentured labour, locked in a castle, spinning gold like in a Brothers Grimm tale. One theory is that children represent the ultimate underdog – such sure Davids in a world of Goliaths. As cartoonists like Charles Schulz worked out, adolescents have to occupy the same world that adults live in, a dark thought. Charlie Brown and his friends live in “a world occupied by children alone, with the parents faint off-screen bugles, very rarely heard and never seen. This is a vision neither comforting nor “cute.” The kids don’t inhabit a more innocent world; they inhabit the recognisable grown-up world of thwarted ambition and delusional longing, only without even the capacity to take the kind of minimal actions that adults can take to bring their ambitions into at least an illusory compact with their circumstances,” writes Andrew Blauner in The Peanuts Papers . Watching horror or tragedy happen to kids only adds to it, especially in the context of today’s child-locked childhoods.
It’s easy to forget in all the critically successful inventiveness of the show, that Stranger Things is about kids and young adults. An honest pastiche about the ‘80s would have to centre kids and teens. This was the era of many Universal monster movies like E.T., which is cited as a reference in the Stranger Things’ pitch bible, and when John Hughes exploded onto the scene and made teens the subject of narratives other than sanctimonious Afterschool specials. As Molly Ringwald, the star of many Hughes movies says , no one in Hollywood was writing about the minutiae of high school and almost never from a girl’s point of view.
It’s difficult to say whether the show is just being true to its myriad texts or leaning in and taking the young adult genre seriously. But it has repeatedly evaded the frustrating cardinal sin that all movie adults do of not listening to the kids.
Hopper and Joyce depend on the guidance of Dustin and Mike too. A sweet camaraderie develops between Steve, Robin and Dustin. In season 4, the Hawkins townsfolk follow the call to a witch hunt by basketball star Jason Carver, who takes things into his own hands. “What are you waiting for, you heard the kid!” says a concerned citizen to his fellow grown-ups.
