SPOILERS!!
Stranger Things is probably not going to win any awards for best acting or for artistic subtlety and nuance. No one is claiming that. But what I love about the show, and this past season in particular, is that there is very intentionally no single savior. All the characters, in all their occasional cheesy glory, save each other. I don’t mean just one person saving another person like a knight in shining armor saves a damsel in distress. That almost never works out in the long-run. I really mean save each other. Hopper and Joyce risk everything–they break back into the jail with the monsters–just so that maybe they can give their kids a fighting chance. Nancy, Robin, and Steve venture into the dangerous unknown themselves instead of waiting around for the police or the government or their parents or their more high-voltage friends to swoop in and save the day. Even Eleven, the one they all call “superhero,'' can’t do her signature bloody-nose yelling thing in the Upside-down without first being saved from her own insecurities. Mike’s love gives her the strength to free herself from Vecna’s hive-mind vines by finally saying what she’s needed to hear: that he loves her with or without her powers, that he was never scared of her, but rather the thought of her being far too exceptional to need the likes of little-old ordinary him. And Mike can’t find the courage to be that vulnerable with El in the first place until Will saves Mike from his insecurity by convincing him of his importance as the “heart” of the group, despite Will’s own pain at not being the one Mike loves that way. Even superheroes need someone to love and ground them, which Will is much more cognizant of after watching El continue to struggle with fitting in, even outside of Hawkins and absent her “freakish” powers.
Unlike many hero’s journeys, there is no epiphanic moment where the warrior-savior decides s/he must go it alone, that the allies and sidekicks cannot help in this darkest of places. It takes all the main characters in all their various dimensions and geographic locations doing what they can–giving what they have–to overcome Vecna, who’s gotten his hive-vines into everything. Joyce’s crew kills the demogorgons in Russia, which weakens the hive-vines that are choking Nancy’s group in the Upside-down, setting them free to each deliver a blow to Vecna’s corporeal form, none of which would have been enough on its own to defeat him. And El doesn’t even save Max by herself once she breaks free from the hive-vines, because Vecna has already overcome Max with his darkness. She flashes back to the way Max showed her how to love herself even before Mike did, and that love is what gives her the strength to bring Max back from the dead. And all the while, Lucas is grounding Max in reality, reminding her that he’s there, that he loves her, in return for her waking him up from his cool-kid-basketball trance to remember who he is and where he really belongs.
It’s so tempting with all the horrifying crises in the world right now to look for the One, a savior, the person or even group who can rescue humanity from the darkness that seems to be enveloping us. But that’s too easy. It won’t work. It’s not a coincidence that Vecna’s true super-villain name is revealed to be One. That’s his only weakness, it seems. Being just one. Yes, he is a powerful one who has infested the minds of many by tapping into their darkness and convincing them it’s all they have. Ultimately, though, he is fighting alone, and fighting from fear, despite perceiving himself as a kind of potential alter-savior of humanity. (Beware false idols, anyone?) No one, not even “The One,” can save all of us. We have to stop waiting for it. Yes, sometimes a person can and needs to save him or herself alone, but ultimately, if we want to save ourselves from the Upside-down we’ve created in the real world, we’re going to have to realize that it’s up to all of us. Our real-world monsters look different on the outside from those in Hawkins, but they’re all rooted in the same exact thing: fear. Fear of not being enough. Fear of not having enough. Fear that if someone else has something, there won’t be enough left over. Fear of being different. Fear of letting other people down. Fear of losing, of being ridiculed, of having our hearts broken, again.
The thing is--and we all know this on some level--fear is powerful, but it’s not the most powerful thing. The most powerful thing is love. But it can’t just be love of self. That’s not real love until you realize that you are actually part of a much bigger self. The other thing is--and this is where it can get really confusing--love doesn’t always look like holding hands and singing kumbaya. Season 4 of Stranger Things gets this right, too. El tries to appeal to Vecna/One this way when she empathizes with the painful experiences that led to his hatred of humanity, but he’s too far gone into his own darkness. When that happens, sometimes all that’s left to do is fight. But fighting from a place of love is different than fighting from a place of fear, because it’s not about winning. It’s not about being right. It’s about saving the people you love. And maybe someday, the people we love will be all of us, and then there won’t be anyone left to fight. That’s probably what happens when we all finally decide we’re ready to tear the curtain down and look straight at the light, the love, the everything we are. And then fear has no more power at all, and maybe we all get beamed back up to the Mother Ship. But until that happens, while we’re still in these fragile, miraculous human bodies living these fragile, miraculous human lives, sometimes we’ll have to fight from love against those who have gone too far into the darkness and are hurting others in an attempt to conquer their own pain and fear. Sometimes that fighting will end in bringing that fearful person back into the light right here and now in real human time. Other times it won’t look that pretty here on Earth. Make no mistake, those people are still part of the bigger divine thing, and that spark is somewhere inside them. But if they won’t let themselves be saved, if they can’t admit they need anyone but themselves, their rightness, their fear, then the only thing left to do is fight to stop them from spreading that fear and pain and hurting everyone around them, sometimes on a smaller scale (interpersonal relationships) and sometimes on a massive one (mass shootings, terrorism, war, pollution, exploitation…). Can we do that and maintain compassion for the broken ones causing their own and others’ suffering? Probably the Dalai Lama and a few others can. The rest of us have some practicing to do.
Another thing that’s hard is to realize that each of us is also the person fighting from fear sometimes. We aren’t going to be the Warriors of Light all the time. It’s not as simple as good guys vs. bad guys, heroes vs. monsters. Sometimes we convince ourselves that we’re the good guys, that we’re fighting from love, when in that moment maybe we’re really just fighting to be in control because it helps us pretend we’re not afraid. So the more (gently) honest we can be with ourselves and each other, the more we can challenge ourselves to figure out when the cause is righteous and when we’re fooling ourselves. As David Foster Wallace writes in an essay about the controversial films of David Lynch, “...please notice that the responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. [...] This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force.”
Stranger Things supports Wallace's thesis in many ways, despite being–for better or worse–much more commercially appealing. El’s moment of fear/anger/evil is what begins Henry/One down the path of transformation into Vecna. When she blasted him into another dimension, it seemed in the moment like she had “won.” But she ultimately only made him more powerful because she was fighting from fear just like he had taught her, from a “memory that made [her] sad, but also mad.” Her fear fed his, and his power grew. Enter another face of evil: Papa. The one who uses “love” to manipulate, control, and abuse. The one who ironically asks his “daughter” Eleven, “What have you done?” after she defeats his original, murderous “son”/protege. As if she created the environment in which all of this pain and fear festered, in which all of these children with miraculous gifts were encouraged to view each other as competition instead of companions. For all the “I’m not the monster, you’re the monster,” and “He’s not the monster, I’m the monster” talk in this season, I think maybe the point is that we’re all both monsters and not monsters because every moment contains a choice, and part of being human is making wrong choices, sometimes of monstrous proportions.
Importantly, Eleven was also fighting One alone that first time, which wasn’t even what he wanted. He didn’t want to be alone: he wanted her fighting everyone else by his side. This seems to indicate that perhaps as a lonely little boy, he could have been saved by an adoptive family who had the ability to understand him better than his biological one ever did. But, much like other charismatic (read: narcissistic) grown men forged in the hell-fires of neglectful and abusive childhoods, he throws tantrums of such epic proportions as to threaten the very fabric of society. El joining him at this point would necessitate adopting his complete surrender to Darkness, and since she, too, has been starved for love under Papa’s sterile upbringing, she knows no other way to fight him than with the darkness inside of her, that is also inside of all of us.
That darkness of El’s never grows into capital-D Darkness only because she is saved by the love of Mike, of Max and Dusty and Lucas and Will and Joyce and, eventually, by memories of her own mother bringing her into the world and whispering, “I love you.” And, maybe most importantly, by the man who becomes her true father, and whom she in turn saves by giving him the opportunity to redeem himself from his past by loving her: Hopper. Yes, sometimes love means fighting, but more often it means being there in the boring, in-between moments. Before and after the blockbuster saving-the-world stuff has to be the quieter kind of love: the banality of toasting waffles and enforcing unpopular rules about keeping doors open, of sweeping out and fixing up a safe place for a friend to heal, of sorting donated children’s clothes and making PB&J’s for people whose homes were destroyed during a heroic part of the story. Of staying invested in a relationship after a friend comes out and it’s clear there is no potential for romance. Of one brother reminding another (in what I had to remind myself was a necessarily on-the-nose heart-to-heart) simply that he will always love him, no matter what.
When those foundations of banal, everyday love are there, that’s when heroes can emerge in quantities great enough to actually save the world, though it may require huge personal sacrifice. It’s not that such sacrifice isn’t difficult when you’re doing it for the right(eous) reason. Like Max said after risking (and before giving) her life to bait Vecna: she wasn’t ready to die. People sacrifice themselves for love not because they have nothing to lose if they do it, but because they have everything to lose if they don’t. It's no coincidence that Max's anthem is Kate Bush's "Running Up that Hill." The chorus is all about loving someone else so much that you would take on their pain: "And if I only could/I'd make a deal with God/And I'd get him to swap our places." But it's not a co-dependent, victim-mentality kind of love. It's about being strong when someone else can't be (which is all of us, some of the time): "Be runnin' up that road/Be runnin' up that hill/Be runnin' up that buildin'." Of course we can't always do this for the people we love: we would be robbing them of the valuable lessons that are so often born out of struggle. But some pain, some struggles are too much for one person to bear alone, and that's when a human being who is willing to climb down into the depths beside another is a superhero, if only for a moment. It’s time for this country–this world–to stop waiting around for a superhero and start stepping up (or down) to defend each other in whatever humble, scrappy ways we can. I know it sounds like a long-shot, but stranger things have happened.
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