Early on in Stranger Things, Netflix’s 80s movie-inspired fright-a-thon, school bullies force Dustin to make a weird clicking sound with the joints in his arm, then recoil in horror when he does so. “I think it’s cool,” his friend Mike says comfortingly. “It’s like your superpower!”
This scene occurs before the show becomes a place of real superpowers, shadowy government agents, another dimension called the “upside down” and a flesh-sucking monster who is a cross between the Predator and Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. Despite all of that – and some truly terrifying sequences – it was this moment that most stuck with me.
Stranger Things is a treatise on the triumph of misfits over the pressures of conformity. Yes, it is a show about a monster terrorising ordinary people, but they are hardly the normal teens you might find in, say, Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. They’re all, well, a little odd.
The most obvious evidence is with Will (Noah Schnapp) and his friends, who are all AV-club outcasts at school. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) has a rare condition that has stopped his front teeth from growing, leaving him with a lisp and the nickname “Toothless”. Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is not only into Dungeons and Dragons, but seems to be the only black person in all of Indiana. And Mike (Finn Wolfhard) has the worst 80s haircut since Dynasty went off the air. They’re outsiders, so they understand another outsider, escaped lab-rat Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) when they meet her and decide to help her.
Eleven – a strange, near-silent girl with telekinetic powers who’s run away from the sinister government lab she’s been locked in her whole life – helps the others try and save Will after he goes missing. But the three friends are the ones with real superpowers. It’s their bond that teaches Eleven about friendship and loyalty and it’s because of this that she seemingly sacrifices herself to protect her new friends from the Upside Down monster. In this world, it’s the freaks who save the day and allow the normal people to spend another safe night in their beds.
Joyce (Winona Ryder) and police chief Hopper (David Harbour) started their adult lives seemingly conventionally, until grief turned them both into loners. Hopper reacted to the death of his daughter by becoming a drunken wastrel, while Joyce was unhinged with sadness when her son went missing. On top of that, she suffered the indignity of the whole town thinking she was deranged and refusing to believe that Will might still be alive. It’s through their alienation and shared experience of loss that they’re able to eventually trust each other and work together to try and rescue him. Above all, it was their outsider status that brought them together.
The teenagers’ relationship with normalcy is the most complex. Nancy (Natalia Dyer) wants to be the preppy homecoming queen with a popular jock boyfriend, so when Steve’s (Joe Keery) parents go out of town she drags her nerdy friend Barb (Shannon Purser) to his house for a party. Barb becomes a literal victim of Nancy’s quest for conformity, ending up the fifth wheel at Steve’s party who is left alone and easily picked off by the monster.
It’s Nancy’s desire to do right by Barb that pushes her to team up with Will’s brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) – they’re the only two willing to buck the conventional sentiment that Barb ran off after a fight with her mum. Still, Nancy bristles when Jonathan accuses her of being just another suburban girl rebelling in a cliched way. Nancy is torn between being true to herself and wanting everything she’s told a popular girl should want. It would seem that her run-in with the soul-sucking demon would get her off the track to becoming just another housewife on a cul-de-sac. But by the end, the pull of conformity proves too much for her.
Yet Nancy is the only one who eschews the lessons she learned exploring the Upside Down with the other misfits. Mike and his crew play just as much Dungeons and Dragons as before; Joyce and Hopper put everything on the line to fight the monster. But Nancy has no one to remind her she’s better than Steve and she appears to fall victim to expectation and bland normality – the biggest threat of all.
Stranger Things is on Netflix now.
