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.

strangerthingsposter

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.

ET

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.)

carrie

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.

The New Season of Daredevil: Can You Love to Hate a Character?

The new season of Daredevil—the Marvel franchise—came out on Netflix, and guess what I did:  I spent the past week lying in bed, binge-watching it.  I watched it on my computer screen–the machine going on for so long late into the night that it left a warm spot on my bed.  How I loved that warm spot.  I would curl up on it and drift off to sleep.

Daredevil is a comic book series that chronicles the escapades of Matthew Murdock—lawyer by day, superhero by night—who patrols Hell’s Kitchen to dole out vigilante justice in a world overrun by violence.  Murdock is an extraordinary superhero because he is an ordinary man, and one, in fact, hampered with a disability—blindness.  But his disability also gives rise to enhanced sensory perceptions and superior fighting abilities.  He can hear heartbeats, the sound of a man breathing in another room.  And this makes the young esquire both ordinary and extraordinary, human and relateable.

daredevil

Daredevil first arrived on the scene in the 60’s, but the comic book enjoyed its greatest revival in the 80’s when comic juggernaut Frank Miller took control of the franchise.  The television show recasts Miller’s version of eighties New York—a time of extreme violence–somewhere in the nebulous zone between then and the here-and-now.

The 80’s is significant for the themes of the show:  vigilante-ism.  This was a time when Bernhard Goetz, a meek mild-mannered subway rider made national news and came to be known as the “subway vigilante” by gunning down four muggers in the rat-infested subways.  This is not the slick gentrified New York of Russian Oligarchs and Chinese playboys—the New York that has been polished and spit shined like a pair of banker’s wingtips.  This is the New York that is grittier—the New York of white flight and urban decay that spawned vigilante groups like the Guardian Angels:  ordinary citizens in red berets who took the law into their own hands.

Goetz

The show is definitely worth the viewing.  There’s a lot of action—a ton of violence.  The introduction of the Punisher and Elektra—two other superheroes with their own comic book franchises—means that there’s a lot of guns and stunts and acrobatics and martial arts.  Oh yeah, there are ninjas.  Did I tell you there are ninjas?  A whole lot of them.

My take-away from the show rests on this one interesting issue.  You see:  Daredevil has this one quirk.  He is a vigilante but he is not like Bernhard Goetz:  he has a code.  That code is to never take a life.  And he’s really uptight about it.  So he’ll beat the bejeezus out of a ninja but won’t actually follow through and kill him.  And he’ll bend over backwards to avoid killing anyone, as if he were some Honest to Goodness Buddhist monk.

Given a choice between saving twenty hostages or saving the world, guess what Daredevil will do.  Yup, he’s that shortsighted.  He will always go for the idiot choice:  saving the people who are immediately before him, the people in need.  It’s as if he were Charlie Brown–always running toward that football.

monk

The paradox is that, quite often, this means that a lot of people actually end up dying because Daredevil doesn’t dare kill.  Ninjas keep waking up from getting punched and, like characters in a video game, they’re back into play.  Or Daredevil will command one of his superhero cronies not to kill some random ninja…that stops them in their tracks…and then the ninja sticks a sword into them.

It makes you get really annoyed at the masked man in the red suit.  So much so that I started screaming at Daredevil to stop it already.  But at the same time, I wonder if that’s the mad genius of the show:  that Daredevil has a clearly defined through-line and this through-line is the source of dynamic tension.  The fact that we hate Daredevil because of this very predictable quirk also means that we feel for Daredevil…and some emotion is better than none at all.

What do you think?  Is making you hate a main character an important part of engaging an audience?  Is wanting to throw things at the computer screen a sign of getting a little too caught up?  Have you ever found yourself in a relationship with someone you can’t stand because they exasperate you?  Have you ever wanted to leave that person but decided to stay because, you know, at least you’re feeling something…and at least they’re keeping you warm in bed?

Death Valley Superblooms & Oscar Night

Sorry I’m late about doing this blog post. Usually I try to post regularly, but I had to make a choice this weekend: Write a blog post or go to Death Valley to see the Superblooms.

What are the Superblooms? The Superblooms are a wildflower event that happens once every decade or so, in Death Valley. Death Valley is on the eastern border of California and Nevada. It is one of the driest places on earth.  It only gets 2 inches of rain a year. But not this year.

Death Valley

This year was the year of El Niño or the Super El Niño which didn’t quite happen in Los Angeles–because of a high pressure system that blocked the flow of the jetstream–that would have transported rain our way.  El Niño did happen in a big way in other parts of the state.

superblooms

This means that Death Valley–a desert basin where the Panamint mountains deposit their minerals on a sinking floor and where pioneers crossing the California landscape met the road block of ill fortune that gives Death Valley its forboding name– is now awash with wildflowers. The wildflowers are golden and purple and white.  They are lacey and bulbous and spiny.  Some are hearty colonizers.  Some bloom one night, seeking shade underneath the umbrella of other plants, and fade the next day.

But the dominant color is gold–everywhere–gold.  The most common flower, the Desert Gold, boasts an uncommon beauty.  It looks like a cross between a dandelion and a sunflower with serrated petals that are cadmium yellow up against a pollen-y center that is exactly like the amber of a runny egg.

All of these wildflowers have existed dormant on the valley floor waiting for rain, and even though they do pop up regularly during the Spring, this Superbloom is super crazy.  There are vast ribbons of yellow in some spots like a beautiful girl who is suddenly confident in the first blush of her beauty.  There are sprinkles and dustings and scatters in other spots–spots that remind you of the barren-ness of this, the hottest place on earth, a place that is cracked and barren and toxic.

Death Valley

One of the great things about going to a National Park is that you meet a lot of interesting people from all casts of life.  And this time, there was an added bonus that made these people really cool: They were the kind of folks who are going to the National Forest not as your run-of-the-mill tourists.  Rather, they were people who know that this event is important– that it only happens once in a blue moon.  They were pilgrims with a purpose.

I met a man at a gas station–the last stop for a fill-up in the town of Baker, just outside of the park– who was Vietnamese like me. “Are you Vietnamese?”  I didn’t need to ask.  I could tell by his accent.  I could also tell by his clothes:  unflashy, utilitarian, practical.  He was dressed for the theme of the outing:  khaki shorts and a clean pressed souvenir shirt from Yellowstone National Forest.

“Yes,” he told me.   “This is been so exciting.  This is only time I see the Superblossom.”  He told me that he missed it fifteen years ago and had been kicking himself ever since, checking the reports every year and every year, disappointed.   “So this time, it come, I say ‘oh boy’ you better jump on this opportunity.”  He made me promise that we would drive into the National Park together, right after he took his kid to the bathroom to take a leak.

I could understand his enthusiasm.  I had missed the poppies last year in the Antelope Valley, just north of LA, where they go on a riot of display in March.  Legend had it that last year was the best of any other year–and I kept putting off the drive out of sheer laziness–and then a hot spell descended upon the Southland and destroyed those delicate gold flowers in less than a day. Moral of the story:  Wildflowers don’t negotiate.  They wait for no one.  They just don’t give a fuck.

At the end of the day we met two sisters– Belgian – who were on the way from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. The younger sister was finishing her PhD in Aquaculture, and the other sister was a court stenographer working underneath a famous judge.  We met around a fire pit at the local watering hole.  And we watched them quietly and diplomatically fend off two men who could have been their fathers.

Be-map

“I have some…”  Then he put his thumb and index together and let the air out from between his lips, while pressing his fingers to his mouth–the international sign of marijuana.

“Maybe later,” said the aquaculturalist.  But I knew there would be no later.  There would be no sexual Superblossoms in the desert night of Death Valley, at least not for these hopeful gentlemen.

The man put his hand on the young woman’s shoulder and gave it a good shake.  “Maybe we’ll see you later at the campsite, then.  After dinner.”  And the two old men walked into the overpriced sit-down restaurant where only old men with jobs and bank accounts can afford to eat–the restaurant where young men eat, only if they are with their parents.

The younger sisters remained by the fire eating their nachos and chicken wings.  I was drinking a beer and sneaking swigs of whiskey that I had poured into a tiny Perrier bottle.  And they told us about their itinerary.

perrier

The pair had flown to Las Vegas for an International Conference on Aquaculture and the younger sister was going through an anxious time at a major moment in her life:  she was about to start filing her dissertation. It would take the remainder of the academic school year and she named all the steps toward the final goal–the proposal, exam, defense, submission–toward that moment of achievement and release.  Afterwards, she was going to travel with her age-appropriate boyfriend throughout the world for year.

“Do you know how I know somebody is really done with their dissertation?” I asked.

“Tell me.”  The young woman was truly interested.  She stopped eating her chicken wing, which she held like a baton.

“When they start talking about their signatures.”  This is actually a crucial moment, because most people talk about filing their dissertations for years and never get to the final stage.  “If they are talking about writing something perfect, I know they are still very early in their progress.  But if they are talking about signatures, that means they will file within weeks, if not days.”

That got us onto a discussion about traveling. You see, my wife and I also traveled after I filed my dissertation.  We actually traveled for a few years, because we thought this would be the one opportunity to do this kind of adventure.  So this launched a kayak into the ocean of conversation, and we compared notes about different places: some of the crossovers in the Venn Diagram of our itineraries, some of the things to avoid, some of the pitfalls–how, for instance, to avoid getting drugged in India.

My wife and I cast before them the pearls of experience.  My tip for dealing with people in India (bribe them). What the what the money situation is like in Argentina (lousy). And what the situation is like in Bolivia (deeply inconvenient but immensely rewarding).  These were all points in a conversation that unfolded naturally and pleasantly as the sky emptied itself of its color and our faces caught the light of a flickering fire pit.

venice

“We will be staying in Venice Beach when we leave for LA the next morning,” the younger sister told me.  While the other sister–the stenographer– took notes, I recommended a few places for them to tour, and I suggested to them a few options in the event they wanted to be among people for the Academy Awards, which were to occur that following evening.

They were thrilled to be lodging in Venice.  It was where Janis Joplin had her ashes scattered and they wanted to walk into the ocean that was her final resting place.  And they wondered about what happens to the landscape of the city when an event like the Academy Awards sweeps into its plains–a hard driving rain waking the people from a world built around the somnambulism of dreams.

We are all Lotos Eaters in Los Angeles.  We are all addicted to our opium dreams.  That at least is common wisdom.

That night, I looked up through the transparent fabric of my tent and was amazed to see that I could see to see, quite clearly, the Big Dipper and the wide expanse of the Milky Way.  The ranger guide says that half the park happens at night–that the firmament is its own display just as spectacular as wildflowers…though perhaps not nearly so evanescent.  And then I realized I had to get back to the city because I had dinner plans for Oscar Night.