‘Stranger Things’ Is A Scary, Sorrowful Meditation On The Generation Gap

It’s been said by many folks already that Stranger Things is a delightful jolt of nostalgia. It’s Stephen King as done by Spielberg in the age of JJ Abrams. But beyond being a fun throwback about trapper keepers and bike riding and scary things that go bump in the night, it’s also a poignant meditation on how children can’t connect with their parents. Throughout the series, we see portraits of mothers and sons, fathers and daughters torn apart by time and space and, yes, the generation gap. Demogorgons be damned, the real fissure our heroes have to beat isn’t between dimensions, but between generations.

Stranger Things centers around a missing boy, Will Byers, and the quest to pull him back from a mysterious netherworld, an alternate dimension the show affectionately calls “the Upside Down.” For the first half of the series we watch as Will’s mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) goes halfway batty trying to prove that her son is not only spiritually still alive, but trapped in some alternate dimension. She sets up lights and a signaling system to communicate with him and is confused when he tells her that he is “right here” in the house.

So, throughout Stranger Things, Will is still stuck at home, but in an alternate reality from everyone else, and we follow his mother’s journey to break through these barriers to reach her boy again.

That’s literally what the show is about, but it’s also a striking metaphor for the parent/child relationships presented throughout the entire series. Stranger Things presents a seemingly wistful look at ’80s suburban Americana, but it’s built around broken family relationships. Hopper still aches for his deceased daughter Sarah and occasionally talks about her as though she’s alive. Eleven is torn between feeling fear and affection for her domineering “Papa” — who in turn is divided between seeing the girl as his daughter or his mad science creation — while her birth mother sits dumbly in a rocking chair, ruined forever by their separation. And then you have the Wheeler kids: Nancy, Mike, and little Holly.

The Wheelers are held up as the quintessential ’80s nuclear family. They come from the perfect house at the end of the cul-de-sac, their mother does seem to care about what’s going on, and yet we see all three children embark on dangerous adventures without their parents knowing. At one point in Episode 7, the clueless Mr. Wheeler, dumbfounded by what’s going on, says to the Hawkins people, “Our son with a girl? I mean, believe me, if he had a girl sleeping in this house, we’d know about it.” It’s a chuckle-inducing line, especially when you see his wife’s knowing side-eye. She knows that her daughter’s been sneaking boys in the house, so she’s smart enough to know that her kids are living separate lives from her under her very own roof. She knows they aren’t in touch with their kids.

Nancy and Mike aren’t trapped in a different dimension from their parents, but they may as well be. Mike holds Eleven up in the basement for days, while Nancy entertains multiple guests in her upstairs bedroom. It makes for a great visual metaphor since we almost always see the parents on the main ground level of the home; The kids are living on different planes in the same house as their parents.

And yet…they aren’t so far away as they think. As Jonathan snidely tells Nancy in the woods, she thinks she’s rebelling against her mother, but she’s actually setting herself up to live her mother’s life. The mother and daughter are moving on the same closed track, but they are at different points. They just can’t connect in a way to see it. Mrs. Wheeler tries, but Nancy refuses to make the connection.

Let’s talk about Jonathan, though. He’s seemingly a loner, but he’s actually the most connected character in the show. He’s tight with his missing brother and his harried single mother. In fact, Joyce and Jonathan are the only parent/child pair we see in any sort of sync. The two love each other and defend each other, but they still spend a huge hunk of the plot away from one another. Hilariously, if they had only been working together, they could have solved the mystery so much sooner! In fact, it’s only when the kids and the parents team up that the fight against evil can come to a head.

This is the great tragic irony of the show: The kids and their parents have been fighting for the same thing this whole time, but instead of seeing it like that, they’re working at cross purposes, on different dimensions layered on top of one another. Both sides screaming and scratching to reach the other side whether they can see it or not.

Perhaps that’s the true elegance of Stranger Things’ obsession with nostalgia. The setting puts modern day adults back in the mindset of their childhoods, while creating a window for today’s kids to appreciate the zeitgeist of the past. The setting isn’t just there to look cool and kitschy; It is the doorway between two generations’ different worlds. It’s an alternate dimension where we can find some sort of common ground — where we can come together to fight the Demogorgons and win.

[Watch Stranger Things on Netflix]