Thanks, I Hate It: Stranger Things

As my good friend and fellow critic Sean T. Collins says, horror is a genre constantly in conversation with itself. The Babadook echoes Poltergeist and Rosemary's Baby. Midsommar consciously connects itself to The Wicker Man and Kill List. It Follows touches on many of the same themes and images as Halloween and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. These movies draw from their predecessors, repurposing and refocusing their thematic language to tell new stories redolent of the potent psychic musk of their forebears. Stranger Things just sort of grabs whatever recognizable ideas and imagery it can get its hands on, forces it all into a blender, and then pours the resultant extra chunky slurry over some moron's first draft script.

Pastiche isn't my favorite, but it's far from inherently bankrupt. Star Wars is pastiche! So is Quentin Tarantino's filmography, which I mostly very much enjoy. Stranger Things certainly incorporates a lot of 70s and 80s horror and sci-fi ephemera into its makeup. Its first season has the plot of Poltergeist, an Akira-esque psychic child, the literally picture perfect black void from Under the Skin, a soundtrack dripping with John Carpenter's whole deal, a monster taken straight from the Silent Hill rejects pile, and even a bunch of men-in-HAZMAT-suits scenes faithfully copied over from Spielberg's E. T. the Extraterrestrial. What it doesn't have is any sense of what made these artifacts of sight and sound special or interesting in their original contexts.

Take the HAZMAT suits. In E. T. Spielberg shot the government's masked and suited agents from low to the ground, a child's awestruck perspective communicating their confusing and frightful appearance. In Stranger Things they're shot at a flat angle and without another party with which to relate. The void which in Under the Skin served as a murky psychosexual membrane of obscure purpose and meaning is, in Stranger Things, merely there to look cool. In Poltergeist the rescue of the abducted child is accompanied by stirring, visceral amniotic imagery of birth as a metaphor for the renewal of the parent-child relationship while in Stranger Things it happens off-screen. The ultimate effect is of a child arranging alphabet blocks in meaningless configurations, unaware of their individual or conjoined significance.

Stranger Things is film by way of paint by numbers, art without cognition or purpose beyond imitation. Its monster is made to encapsulate the anxieties of adults, teenagers, and children and so fails to capture anything significant about any of them. Its characters exist to reference things. Winona Ryder, who manages to make even her shopworn turn as a faded prima ballerina in Black Swan sing, is given here material so relentlessly one-note and self-defeating that it swallows her whole. A chance to emote over her son's dead body? Nixed; she already knows he's alive. A meaningful moment of reconnection when she rescues him from the parallel universe the show refers to as the Upside Down (which, as my girlfriend said, is "some dollar store Neil Gaiman Cirque du Freak-ass bullshit")? Nope. The show skips right over it.

The Duffer brothers, whose name I will leave untouched, have created in Stranger Things a dullard's feast of unrelated pop cultural references. The show exists less to have a story or characters than it does to remind you that Ghostbusters exists and people really like it. There's nothing redeeming here, no spark of genuine wonder or terror to animate the rote material, though I suppose if you enjoy reading entire TVTropes pages to see exhaustive lists of which tropes occur in your favorite television program but wish it didn't involve so many dang letters and words it might conceivably be of some use.