[Like most of my
fellow humans, I spent a good bit of the late summer obsessed with Netflix’s Stranger Things. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of topics linked to the
Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an
expert on supernatural cultural texts!]
On
contextualizing and challenging 80s texts that feature boys who are adrift and
endangered.
Another aspect
that links many of the youthful protagonists about whom I wrote in yesterday’s
post is that they are the children of divorce and single parents. That detail
is particularly overt
when it comes to E.T.’s Elliott,
both because his storyline opens with a discussion of where his absent father
is and because the film’s threatening scientist character (played by Peter
Coyote) is also a potential romantic interest for Elliott’s single mother
(played by Dee Wallace). But I would argue that it’s even more central to the
film that gives today’s post its title, The Lost Boys (1987):
not only are protagonists Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) the sons
of a recently single mother Lucy (Dianne Wiest) who finds herself in a
relationship with a threatening new man (Edward Herrmann), but that man turns
out to be the leader of the same group of vampires with which Michael and Sam
find themselves entangled. This clan of vampires represent one version of the
title’s “lost boys,” a misfit clan of teenage outcasts for whom Herrmann’s dangerous
father figure is looking for a mother; but Michael and Sam are clearly
positioned as another pair of potentially lots boys, an overt parallel to the
vampire clan that inspires its youthful leader (Kiefer Sutherland) to pursue
Michael as a new member of the group.
Will Byers, the character whose disappearance
sets off the events of Stranger Things,
is likewise the child of a divorced single mom Joyce (Winona Ryder) with a
social outcast older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) who is explicitly linked
to 80s counter-culture (represented in short-hand through his love for the British
punk rock band The Clash). As with the 80s film characters, I think both of
those social and cultural contexts offer valuable and interconnected ways to
understand these character types and their meanings. That is, the more obvious
and clearly salient social context would be the significant late
20th century uptick in divorce, a trend that has been at times
overstated (at least in our collective inability to recognize the longstanding
presence of divorce in American culture and society) but that nonetheless
both occurred historically and became and remains to this day a key part of our
cultural narratives. Yet just as relevant to these lost youthful characters and
their experiences and communities are the voices and lives on which Donna
Gaines focuses in her vital sociological oral history Teenage
Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (1991). Like Jonathan Byers, Gaines’s
1980s teenagers were social outcasts who found solace in the counter-culture
community of punk rock, yet whose future remained as uncertain and threatened as
those of an overtly lost boy like Will.
There’s one important difference
between Gaines’s focal individuals and those in most of the cultural texts on
which I’m focusing here, though: gender. That is, Gaines features both boys and
girls in her sociological purview, whereas in most of the 1980s films the
protagonists were overtly and importantly boys, with young women generally present
only as (as in The Lost Boys)
romantic interests or (as in E.T.) cute younger sisters. Stranger Things certainly does include a
number of complex and interesting female characters, as I’ll analyze in
tomorrow’s post; yet nonetheless, the show’s originating character remains a lost
boy, one pursued by a quartet of fellow outcast boys (his older brother and his
three best friends). As a result, it’d be important to link these texts to one
additional cultural context: our longstanding narratives of boys and men who
depart civilization, stories that lead them toward dangers (Rip’s 20-year nap,
the White Whale, the violence of the river world Huck encounters) yet also
allow them to escape for a time a society that is often overtly linked to
mother figures (Rip’s wife, Huck’s pair of maternal influences). Recognizing
that connection could help us not only contextualize but also challenge the
emphasis on lost boys in these cultural texts.
Next
StrangerStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other responses to the show?
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