Stranger Things: An Awesome Netflix Experience

 

Stranger Things is one of the hot new shows on everybody’s lips, and I’ve been watching it nonstop as the forest fires rage through the dry brittle Southern California landscape.  It feels like Christmas here, what with the white flakes floating through the air.  We’re not supposed to go out for fear of the damage we could do to our lungs.  But you have to go out every once in a while…to see that roiling orange ball of gas–that thing we used to call the sun–veiled by the welter of gasses that are now a part of our air.  You’ve got to leave it to pollution:  It makes everything in the atmosphere look like it were a painting.

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The Netflix show is a paranormal thriller, wrapped into a mystery, with elements of horror—one part Steven Spielberg, one part Stephen King.  A young, nameless girl appears in the lives of young teenage boys—a nerd-group, the fourth of which has mysteriously gone missing at the same moment she has landed in their lives (coincidence?).  The girl arrives almost pre-verbal—her head shaved—sporting only an Auschwitz-like tattoo stamped on her wrist.  It is her name:  011.

Eleven is not unlike ET—a supernatural creature from another world who has to be hidden from adult eyes.  She can even do ET-like things, like manipulate radio signals to communicate long distances with things that should not exist in our mortal coil.  And this seems to be the modus operandi of the show, which exploits as its main appeal, the way that it is built on other narratives:  specifically, the greatest hits of eighties narratives.  We are feeling much nostalgia for that moment nowadays, even if some of us never lived through that time of regrettable fashion choices and synthesizer music.

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In this vein, the boys are not unlike the heroes of suburban ET, especially in the way they ride their bikes through the streets.  They are also like those kids from the Goonies.  They hide 011 and slowly discover that she is gifted with psychic powers—powers like telepathy and telekinesis.  So, she’s kind of like King’s first bestseller Carrie.  We slowly see that she has escaped a local government laboratory—Firestarter anyone?—where she has been trained to become the Cold War machine that she is.  011 is formidable.

The narrative occurs in the landscape of a small town in the heyday of the eighties when such towns were still prospering.  We’ve got a sheriff—the figure who functions as the primary figure of ratiocination.  He’ll get down to the bottom of it.  Yes, he will.

We’ve also got that most Stephen King element:  the weirdos and social types that occupy a small town:  the rich boy, the middle class family, the trashy divorcee who lives in a double-wide trailer—all these people are represented and done so richly.  Stephen King knew these elements so well, having grown up in rural America and, later, having moved to rural Maine.  (When he was run over later on in life by a drunk driver on a rural road, the driver would say “I was just going to the store to get a Marses Bar,” and Stephen King would lament that he was almost killed by one of his own characters.)

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This is probably the mystery I think about the most as the sky roils with its blood orange sun above me and the ash of a thousand acres falls upon the city and ruins my paint job:  What has become of originality?  Yes, the show is absolutely fun to watch and some of the best watching I have experienced in a long while.  But the show is a greatest hits—a pastiche—and it looks back with nostalgia to an era that, with all its faults, was all about what was new.

Binge-Watching Showtime’s Penny Dreadful

I’ve been binge-watching the television program, Penny Dreadful—a show set in 1891, the latter end of the Victorian era.  For those who have been living under a rock, the Victorian era, one that has long suffered harsh judgement, has returned with a vengeance into fashion.  Nowadays, we see hip young men with waxed moustaches and tweed waistcoats upon which dangle gold watch fobs at all the juice bars across this fair nation.  Penny Dreadful is eye candy, if you’re into that kind of thing—the illegitimate love child of Guy Ricci’s take on Sherlock Holmes.

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The show follows a motley crew of occultists as they embark upon a quest to find that most typical of Victorian quest-figures:  a young fair-haired woman, Mina, who is abducted by the evil forces of the dark side.  Mina is the daughter of a famous Victorian explorer, Sir Malcolm Murray, who has charted deepest darkest Africa—a virile old patriarch played by a former James Bond, Timothy Dalton.  He is joined by Mina’s childhood friend, Vanessa Ives—a woman dressed perpetually in black who is gifted with occult powers:  tarot, clairvoyance, curses, hexes, spells.  The backdrop of the show is smart:  the late Victorian era was as much consumed by advances in science as it was fascinated with the occult.

As we wend through this labyrinthine world of Victoriana, we encounter the greatest hits of the period—hits both literary and historical—that would make any English major feel that their accumulation of useless knowledge is worth it. Dr. Frankenstein is recruited to become one of the crew.  Later, we meet Dr. Jeckyll who is rewritten as an Anglo-Indian from the colonies.  Dorian Grey is a fellow traveler.  We encounter Dracula.  There is even a werewolf, played by the long lanky Josh Hartnett who has aged well over the years.

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The attention to historical specificity is both the shows making and unmaking.  If you love the Romantic poets, you may feel smugly superior in catching all the references to Wordsworth and Blake and Keats.  They are everywhere.  And the show attempts to lodge itself in specific historical moments like the death of the great poet, Tennyson–a smart narrative device.  There is also an intelligence in the way the show methodically works through all the obsessions of the Victorian era—obsessions like Egyptology, theosophy, taxidermy.  For someone trained as a literary critic, binge-watching this was brain candy.

But for a literary critic, there are many gaffs, too, that come as a result of the shows commitment to historical accuracy.  For instance, the show opens up at a traveling Wild West show in London where we encounter the sharpshooter, Josh Hartnett.  The show tells us that the date is 1891 but any literary historian can tell you this is well-nigh impossible.  1893 is the year that the American frontier closes, according to the anthropologist Victor Turner.  He made this declaration at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, across from the Wild West display with its assembled spectacle of Indians and Cowboys.  It was only after the Columbian Exposition of 1893 that these shows would pack up and rove across Europe.  And so when we encounter Josh Hartnett, it is in all likelihood no earlier than 1895…if we take into account the time lag of travel.

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But the genius of the show is that it takes into account these historical inaccuracies by the central metaphor that is embedded into the title: Penny Dreadful.  The Penny Dreadfuls were broadsides that were sold cheaply to a mass audience.  They were descendants of the novel, which were a popular form that had risen into bourgeois respectability and out of the reach of the beggar’d masses.  Penny Dreadfuls were the precursors of comic books and reveled in elements of the sensationalistic and lurid:  murders, suicides, supernaturalism.  They often cribbed from other sources, anthologizing, digesting and skewing the material for mass consumption.  And they made no claim to any accuracy.