bumblebee

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/bumblebees-bungled-politics-john-cena-metaphor/"></div>The indications that John Cena was created in a laboratory are not few. They include: his hulking physique, more suggestive of metal than stone; his almost absurd generosity, which has compelled him to fulfill more Make-A-Wish wishes than any other human being; and his acting chops, which have catapulted him from the wrestling ring to the silver screen. Cena most recently appeared in Bumblebee, the latest flick in the Transformers franchise, as military hotshot Jack Burns, an agent of the US’s clandestine alien-monitoring group Sector 7. As Burns violently tracks down the film’s titular robot, he embodies a hyper-masculine, jingoistic American military ethos — that is, until the movie’s end, when he recognizes that Bumblebee’s alien-ness does not necessarily make him a foe.
It is in Cena’s character — in how the film frames and ultimately forgives his villainy — that Bumblebee expresses its ideological underpinnings. Though the film’s politics strive to be more progressive and refined than those of the American state during the Cold War, which serves as the movie’s historical backdrop, they turn out to be entirely tepid, bland, and ineffectual. They are, in other words, squarely at home in both Hollywood and the capital-R Resistance.
Bumblebee crash-lands in California after the Autobots (the good Transformers) lose a war against the Decepticons (the bad Transformers) on the distant planet Cybertron. After suffering immense damage during the landing, he takes the form of a beat-up VW Beetle and hibernates until teenage mechanic prodigy Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld) finds and repairs him. The fall, however, has left him amnesiac and speechless. A quite pleasant teenager-robot adventure ensues, but it is interrupted by the arrival of two Decepticons, who have correctly figured that Bumblebee holds information about the rest of the surviving Autobots. The Decepticons link up with Sector 7, which shares an interest in finding the mysterious alien robot that’s hiding in American territory.
As a film, Bumblebee repeatedly emphasizes its 1980s setting, from Watson’s adoration of the Smiths to a shot of a Reagan portrait in Burns’s office. The movie’s primary historical mission is to explore, through fairly stereotypical characterizations, the intersection of three generations: Baby Boomers (through Burns, a military man who likely came of age during the Vietnam War), Generation X (through Watson, an angsty latchkey kid), and Millennials (through Bumblebee, whose amnesia severs him from his historical context, and whose damaged speech system leads him to communicate by dialing his radio to certain songs, effectively forming a personal identity through pop culture). Though Bumblebee’s status as a pseudo-Millennial in the 1980s is ahistorical, it facilitates the film’s dual commentaries on the Reagan years and contemporary America. The saga of the generational trinity plays out as Burns, the Boomer, fails to rein in Watson, the Gen Xer, who socializes Bumblebee, the Millennial, by teaching him how to blend in with humankind and exposing him to pop culture.
The conflict between Burns and the Watson-Bumblebee duo resembles a seesaw: on one end, Watson tries to ground Bumblebee by rendering him inconspicuous; and on the other, Burns raises hell as he searches for Bumblebee, jolting the robot out of Watson’s control. Eventually, Burns applies too much weight and nearly kills Bumblebee — but when Watson revives the Transformer, he regains his memory and fights Burns with unprecedented fury. So while Burns perceives Bumblebee to be a grave threat to civilization, he fails to see how his own behavior has pushed Watson and Bumblebee further and further toward violent rebellion. It all comes full circle.
The grand political vision the film espouses is one of generational reconciliation. In order to realize that vision, it works to make each representative likable enough to warrant a truce. The movie evokes sympathy for Bumblebee from the get-go: he has a tragic backstory, he is dog-like in his adorableness, and his use of music as speech is genuinely charming. Watson, while a bit abrasive, is also endearing: we learn that her father died prior to the events of the movie, and she is still reckoning with both his absence and the intrusive presence of her stepfather. Her angst is understandable and believable. Burns, in contrast, is a big lift as far as likability goes. He may be less dangerous than the Decepticons, but it’s easier to despise him given that his evil is informed by Reagan rather than something extraterrestrial.
The film lets Burns off easy, though, by failing to interrogate the malice of his ideology. It’s true that Burns’s perspective on Bumblebee is fair: when confronted with uber-armed sentient robots, one would be wise to err on the side of caution. Accordingly, Burns initially resists teaming up with the Decepticons because he doesn’t trust them enough to let them access Sector 7’s surveillance network. But his commanding officer persuades him by explaining that the alliance would give the US leverage over the Soviets. To its detriment, the film doesn’t probe this familiar and flawed logic — no one questions the notion that gaining geopolitical strength is worth compromising the rights of Americans and aligning with unsavory political actors. Bumblebee doesn’t really care what Burns thinks about the US’s role in the world and its perpetual accumulation of power. Rather, the only conflict that concerns the film is Burns’s pursuit of its heroes. Burns is thus a flat villain, his antagonism stemming not from his political convictions but from the simple fact that he opposes the protagonists.
The straightforwardness of Burns’s villainy allows the film to redeem him with minimal effort. Toward the end of the movie, after watching Bumblebee valiantly battle the Decepticons, Burns’s opinion of Bumblebee flips and he salutes the robot. Bumblebee responds by jutting his fist upward, a move he learned from The Breakfast Club. This interaction is the film’s clumsy attempt at a political resolution: a peace-making between the old guard and the alien newcomers, between Boomers and Millennials. The movie imagines a compromise that could expand the ideological center to encompass Burns — the right — and Watson and Bumblebee — the left(ish). But what it actually offers is quietude at the cost of human progress. For, in the world at large, the center rarely grows to absorb the left. Instead, as the film demonstrates, it inches rightward, morphing into something slightly more reactionary.
As the US’s ideological center reliably moves to the right, it operates like a vacuum, sucking in the space and thought around it, gathering diffuse particles into a homogeneous mound of grey. It is in that mound that our contemporary Resistance lives. There, in the mound, we can think of ourselves as “progressives” while we revere the intelligence community; we can canonize “liberal” heroes who advocate for mass deportation and maintain that corporations are people; we can mistake doing nothing for doing good, feeling nothing for feeling good. There, in the mound, is where Bumblebee abuses the smooth, kind John Cena, weaponizing his supreme likability as a vehicle for half-baked centrism, giving demigod-like shape to the cognitive dissonance that has long marked American liberalism. There, in the mound, is where we can simultaneously salute Burns and raise our fists with Bumblebee, honoring a nation transformed but unchanged.
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Bumblebee’s Bungled Politics, Or: John Cena as Metaphor

Bumblebee’s Bungled Politics, Or: John Cena as Metaphor

ending-face-2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/horror-mandys-many-orgasms/"></div>In order to count the number of orgasms in Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy — a film that features no on-screen sex — one must first define the word &#8220;orgasm.&#8221;­­ We will, therefore, define it as follows: a reaction to cathartic or other pleasure that may, but need not necessarily, involve the release of fluid from the body either experiencing or causing said pleasure. According to such a definition, the orgasms in Mandy include the moment in which rugged lumberjack Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) cuts a man’s throat and gets showered with blood; the moment in which Red drives the pointed handle of his homemade axe into and through the mouth of a different man; and the moment in which Red pops yet another man’s head like a pimple and emits a post-coital groan.
Mandy’s orgasms are overwhelmingly experienced by men, which speaks to their conflation with the imposition of violence. They’re also the necessary byproducts — or rewards — of Red’s quest: after his partner Mandy Bloom (the haunting Andrea Riseborough) is kidnapped and killed by the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll cult of Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), Red goes on a vengeful killing spree through California’s eerie Shadow Mountains. His resultant journey, set in 1983 and dripping with red and pink and purple and synths, is a love song to 1970s and ’80s horror, to the slasher and body horror films that were in gruesome conversation with the politics of the Sexual Revolution and the Vietnam and Cold Wars.
Horror films of the era tended to either vilify the forces that repress sexuality, or pervert the audience’s understanding of sexual and non-sexual beings. The murderers in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), and Friday the 13th (1980), for example, all slaughter sex-having teens. In The Exorcist (1973), meanwhile, the demon possessing a young girl says, “Stick your cock up her ass, you motherfucking worthless cock sucker” — to a priest. Both approaches equate the ostensibly reproductive act of sex with destruction. It is a thing that teenagers do before some masked, reactionary avenger butchers them; just as it is a thing that tempts men of the cloth to forsake their supposedly higher callings. Sex is thus a source of physical pleasure severed from the future, devoid of lasting relationships, childbirth, spiritual transcendence, and other long-term prizes. In the realm of horror, sex resembles the a-bomb, a characterization reminiscent of Norman Mailer’s notion of the “apocalyptic orgasm”: a self-consuming burst of violent sublimation. One climaxes, and one ceases to exist.
It is such a tradition that Mandy gladly inherits — but the film is, remarkably, even less concerned with subtlety than its predecessors were. There is definitely subtext in Mandy, including the likelihood that Red fought in Vietnam and the extent of the childhood trauma that Mandy seems to have experienced. But the film is notable for how straightforwardly it treats its sexual symbols. The clichéd identification of phallic imagery, so at home in discussions of horror films, is no longer clichéd: the first thing the audience sees Red do is fell an immense tree, his body vibrating as his chainsaw digs into bark. Later in the film, Red hunts down a group of psychically devastated, sadomasochistic bikers who wear disturbing leather costumes — rumor has it that they’ve gone eternally bonkers thanks to a bad batch of LSD. One of the beasts dons a blade-penis that stands erect as he approaches (then dies at the hands of) Red. The physiology’s hazy, but the meaning isn’t: sex and death are one, and the penis is equally capable of inflicting both.
The most active penis of the film is that of Jeremiah Sand, whose sex cult kidnaps Mandy after Jeremiah takes a liking to her. The cult — the Children of the New Dawn — appears to travel the countryside ingesting large amounts of LSD and finding women for Jeremiah to have sex with. (The Children keep the monstrous biker gang on retainer with drugs and human flesh.) Once kidnapped, Mandy is drugged and exposed to Jeremiah’s dual horrors: the <a href="https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2018/09/17/hear-mandy-cult-leader-jeremiah-sands-weirdo-folk-record" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2018/09/17/hear-mandy-cult-leader-jeremiah-sands-weirdo-folk-record', 'disquieting folk song ');">disquieting folk song </a>he recorded and his messianic delusions.
In his time of trouble, Jeremiah says, God encouraged him to commit to hedonism: “He said you are not separate from all that is, so all that is, is yours. And he gave me his deepest and warmest permission to go out into this world and take what is so very much mine. All of it, mine. My wants, my needs, my pleasures.” Jeremiah delivers the line as part of a monologue that lasts for several minutes, featuring an extended close-up of his face from Mandy’s perspective. But at various points in Jeremiah’s speech, his face becomes Mandy’s — his features gradually, almost imperceptibly, get swapped out for hers — before becoming his own again. The swapping simultaneously enacts Jeremiah’s message of oneness and highlights how much the effectiveness of the message relies on LSD’s mystification.
Expectedly enough, Jeremiah now wants to have sex with Mandy, and he rises, opening his robe. His song, which faded out during his close-up, once again spins on the record player: “Every seed that gives us life / Every man must take a wife.”
“You made this song?” Mandy asks.
“Yes, I did,” Jeremiah answers, running his hands up and down his body.
“And it’s about you?” she asks, the camera still on Jeremiah.
“Yes, it is,” he answers.
But he has misread his audience, having not payed attention to the Mötley Crüe and Black Sabbath t-shirts that Mandy regularly wears. The camera cuts to Mandy, who laughs; maybe at Jeremiah’s song, maybe at his self-righteousness, maybe at the acid-soaked world, or maybe at the fact that Jeremiah’s exposed penis is flaccid.
It is telling that after Mandy laughs at Jeremiah, his cult burns her alive. On the one hand, Jeremiah is profoundly insecure; and on the other, consummation and death are kindred fates in Mandy’s hellscape. Jeremiah has his way, by orgasm or by fire.
Red watches Mandy burn. He is tied up, and clenching, between his teeth, barbed wire akin to Christ’s crown of thorns. Prior to Mandy’s death, Red was a tender and affectionate man. He was a loving partner to Mandy, who seemed to occupy a world of her own. She constantly read fantasy novels and created trippy (and impressive) art, suggesting a desire to escape from the forested seclusion of her home, or from her relationship with Red, or possibly from both. The couple’s relationship didn’t even feel particularly romantic. Red’s energy was fairly paternal and quite desexualized.
After Red loses Mandy, however, he embraces a mode of violent sexuality. In preparation for his warpath, Red forges a metallic battle axe — he is, in contrast to Jeremiah, unconditionally hard. Indeed, in terms of imagery and symbolism and power, Red comes to resemble a living, breathing hard-on. The visual is perhaps strongest when Red walks toward a member of the cult, intent on murder, and repeatedly revs a chainsaw only for his prey to pull out a comically long chainsaw of his own. The ensuing duel ends in one of the many apocalyptic orgasms Red induces: his opponent lying, face-down, atop a running chainsaw that tears the flesh of his abdomen, confoundingly evoking both impregnation and abortion through the mutilation of a male body.
Mandy culminates in an ultimate, mutual orgasm. Red finds Jeremiah underground — beneath the church that his cult is building — and grabs his head. Jeremiah falls to his knees, pleading for his life. “I’ll blow you, man,” he says, right about sex’s presence in the standoff, but wrong about how his hunter wishes to express it. Jeremiah quickly turns defiant, reiterating his status as God’s chosen one, but Red silences him. “I&#8217;m your god now,” he says, before crushing Jeremiah’s skull, sending an eyeball shooting out of its socket.
Red breathes as though he has finished. He sets the church aflame, and it burns like Mandy burned. Red, become Death, drives off.
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The Horror of Mandy’s Many Orgasms

The Horror of Mandy’s Many Orgasms

trollhunters

trollhunters-1

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/always-hero-magical-realism-trollhunters/"></div>In an interview with Entertainment Weekly about his film The Shape of Water — winner of four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture — Guillermo del Toro <a href="http://people.com/chica/guillermo-del-toro-golden-globes-best-director-speech/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://people.com/chica/guillermo-del-toro-golden-globes-best-director-speech/', 'said');">said</a> that “the movie works because it fuses the extraordinary and the ordinary, you know? It says to you, ‘You can meet an elemental god from a river, and you can take him home and put him in the bathtub.’” The Shape of Water, like much of del Toro’s work, engages a magical realist tradition of blending the fantastic with the ordinary. That erosion of boundaries can be terrifying (see: Pan’s Labyrinth), but it can also be life-enriching. In The Shape of Water, the fantastic offers Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) companionship and, in a sense, completion.
Another recent creation of del Toro’s also channels magical realism, albeit differently: Netflix’s Trollhunters, an animated show based on a book that del Toro co-wrote with Daniel Kraus. Trollhunters, which is set to release a third and final season later this year, follows Jim Lake, Jr. (voiced by the late Anton Yelchin), a teenager who, one day, happens upon a magical amulet on his way to school. The quasi-sentient amulet chooses him to be the first human “Trollhunter,” charging him with the protection of Heartstone Trollmarket, a subterranean dwelling of trolls. Because Trollmarket’s trolls avoid both humans and the surface — the sun turns trolls to stone — the most pressing danger they face is actually another group of trolls: the Gumm-Gumms, led by Gunmar (Clancy Brown), an exiled warmonger who pursues dominion over trolls and humans alike.
Jim lives with his mom, Barbara (Amy Landecker), a doctor, in a nice house on a quiet block in well-to-do Arcadia. The show introduces its protagonist with a peppy montage: Jim wakes up at 6am, does housework, readies three bagged lunches, and prepares breakfast in bed for his mom. When he goes to her room, however, he finds a note on the door. “Late night at work. Sleeping in.” Signed, Mom. Jim opens the door, lays the omelet and orange juice on the nightstand, takes his mom’s glasses off her face, cleans them, and heads out to school.
Jim, as his morning routine makes clear, has a lot on his plate. His father, also named Jim, left the family when Jim, Jr. was five years old; and because his mom is almost always working, Jim handles most of the household’s domestic labor. He has to balance that responsibility, in turn, with his studies, as well as the production of Romeo and Juliet in which he’s starring in order to get closer to Claire Nuñez (Lexi Medrano), a classmate on whom he has a paralyzing crush.
And, of course, there’s his secret trollhunting. Trollhunting, here, refers to everything that Jim does in his capacity as Trollhunter — which occasionally includes hunting evil trolls, but more regularly consists of relatively mundane tasks, like training, studying troll history, and taking on odd jobs around Trollmarket. While the work of trollhunting is plentiful, frequently arduous, and usually far less grandiose than it sounds, it gives Jim direction and purpose. Early in the show, Jim says, “I just need to know that there&#8217;s something more to life than high school.” He’s constantly bullied, inundated with homework and tests, and plagued by the fundamental terribleness of being a social creature during adolescence. But in comparison to high school&#8217;s manifold challenges and long-term payoffs, trollhunting yields more immediate benefits. Jim finds in the fantastic what eludes him in the ordinary: a father figure in the form of Blinky the troll (Kelsey Grammer), who trains him in the ways of the Trollhunter; attention, which he rarely receives due to his mother’s merciless work schedule; newfound confidence, which he wields back above ground; and more. Trollhunting, as fantasy so often does, edges Jim’s life toward the ideal.
When the fantastic is satisfying or otherwise pleasurable, escapism can be an enticing alternative to ordinary life. Such is the case in The Shape of Water, which ends with its protagonist seemingly disappearing alongside the aforementioned elemental god. Trollhunters, on the other hand, inverts expectations of escapism by making Jim want to escape not only the ordinary, but also the fantastic. At multiple points in the show, Jim tries to reject the title of Trollhunter, hoping to rid himself of the overwhelming responsibility that comes with it. But the role is not a voluntary one. The magical amulet chose Jim, and in doing so forced him into an ordinary-fantastic middle ground, a space that subjects him to demands from all directions. In “Gnome Your Enemy,” for instance, Jim can’t focus on tracking down rogue gnomes because he has to prepare for a Spanish presentation — and he can’t focus on preparing for his Spanish presentation because he has to track down rogue gnomes.
And so, unable to escape the fantastic or the ordinary, Jim actively melds the two in an effort to take control of his double life. He incorporates his training and questing into his daily routine, turning trollhunting into yet another after-school activity. He even goes so far as to involve Claire and his best friend, Toby Domzalski (Charlie Saxton) — one of the better characters of recent TV — in his adventures, though he leaves his mom in the dark. Throughout Trollhunters, Jim strives to generate a precise amount of friction between the troll world and the human one: enough to ensure that each realm is improved by the other, and that neither is harmed. (Jim’s history teacher calls him “Young Atlas” — meant in reference to the myriad burdens he bears, but also a fitting nickname given the Titan’s task of maintaining the divide between the heavens and the earth.)
Jim largely succeeds in balancing the ordinary and the fantastic, resolving dilemmas by the ends of episodes, but he fails in one significant respect. As he spends more and more time trollhunting, his mom becomes increasingly frustrated with his aloofness. Their relationship suffers tremendously at the intersection of Barbara’s suspicion and Jim’s immature response to it.
Barbara does eventually learn about Trollmarket and Jim’s trollhunting — Jim doesn’t fess up; he merely loses control of his secret life — but her knowledge is short-lived. A spell threatens her life, and lifting it requires erasing her recent memory. So, on the verge of mild amnesia, Barbara tells Jim, “Even before you found this amulet — way before all of this — you were always my hero.” She asks him to promise that he’ll tell her everything again. He nods.
Later, Barbara wakes up in a hospital room, and asks Jim what happened. With magical amulet in hand, Jim considers telling his mom the truth, but ultimately lies in order to keep her from worrying. “There was…an accident,” he says, putting the amulet in his pocket. “You fainted, you bumped your head. And I drove you here.” As he lies, Jim becomes a child once more, wielding no sword, wearing no armor but a strained smile. By exposing Jim’s youth — his vulnerability, immaturity, and confusion — Trollhunters acknowledges that granting completion through the fantastic would be too simple. Better to leave Jim caught between the ordinary and the extraordinary; for him to be painfully ordinary and painfully extraordinary, simultaneously.
In the hospital, before Barbara wakes up, Jim pulls a blanket over her — a gentle moment that echoes the show’s first episode, when Jim made his mom breakfast in bed and took her glasses off as she slept. The parallelism is a tribute both to how much has changed, and to how much has remained the same. Because although Jim wasn’t always the Trollhunter, he was always his mom’s son. He always loved and cared for her, and did whatever he could to fill the void represented by the “Jr.” that follows his name.
While completion is alluring, the fantastic’s potential to reconfigure incompletion is more meaningful. Jim’s gradual embrace of the Trollhunter mantle leads him not to abandon the ordinary, but to find greater happiness in it. The magic of Trollhunters is a matter of perspective: at the heart of the show is the understanding that Jim’s life-and-death duels have been no more gallant than the omelets he’s cooked for his mom. That he was, after all, always a hero.
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“You Were Always My Hero”: Magical Realism in Guillermo del Toro&#8217;s Trollhunters

“You Were Always My Hero”: Magical Realism in Guillermo del Toro&#8217;s Trollhunters

stranger-things-2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/strange-things-stranger-danger-domestic-fantasy-stranger-things-2/"></div>In 1983, Ronald Reagan declared May 25th “National Missing Children’s Day,” marking the four-year anniversary of Etan Patz’s disappearance in Manhattan. Six-year-old Etan was the first child to have his face printed on milk cartons nationwide, and his body was never found. He was declared dead in 2001. (Last April, a man named Pedro Hernandez was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Etan, but some<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/etan-patzs-convicted-killer-wants-another-day-in-courtwith-his-new-legal-team" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.thedailybeast.com/etan-patzs-convicted-killer-wants-another-day-in-courtwith-his-new-legal-team', ' doubt');"> doubt</a> his guilt and mental stability.) Etan’s disappearance shocked the country, and in its wake, laissez-faire parenting gave way to paranoid cynicism. Contemporary childhood was thus born, complete with curfews, cautionary tales, and warnings against talking to strangers.
In a different 1983, the one imagined in the first season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, another child goes missing. The victim this time is middle-schooler Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who, it turns out, is trapped by a monster — the Demogorgon — in a parallel dimension. Over the course of the season, Will is the subject of search parties, a premature funeral, and, ultimately, a successful rescue mission. In season two, dubbed Stranger Things 2, Will is again the target of nefarious forces: he becomes possessed by the Mind Flayer, a bigger and badder foe. But as imaginative and fantastical as the monster-flick premise may sound, it isn&#8217;t the most unbelievable aspect of life in Hawkins, Indiana.
Stranger Things 2 is set a year after season one, in 1984 — and Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), the single mother of Will and his brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), is understandably still reeling from the Demogorgon ordeal. As a result, her protective instincts have kicked into overdrive: she keeps track of Will at all times, regularly calls his school to check on him, and insists on driving him around rather than letting him ride his bike. Having experienced the traumatic loss of a child, albeit temporarily, Joyce struggles to return to her previous way of life. And the fact that her unwavering commitment to keeping track of her son contributes significantly to the defeats of both the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer is telling: she is a parent fit for her terrible time.
Stranger danger, meet Stranger Things. The two stories aren&#8217;t exactly the same, however: whereas Etan’s case lastingly shook the nation, the residents of Hawkins, Indiana seem to get over Will’s disappearance awfully quickly. Perhaps Will&#8217;s eventual rescue at the end of season one helps to restore Hawkins’ small-town tranquility, but Barbara Holland (Shannon Purser), a high-school student, remains missing throughout all of Stranger Things 2. (She was killed by the Demogorgon in season one, but, until the end of season two, her parents believe that she is still alive.) Nonetheless, life carries on as usual. Kids ride their bikes freely at all hours, and their parents ask few, if any, questions.
Nowadays, after Etan Patz, Amber Hagerman, and countless other cases of child abduction, Stranger Things 2’s safe and secure domesticity seems mythical. That domesticity — not the Mind Flayer — is the show’s true fantasy. And ultimately, the fantasy extends from the characters&#8217; social realities to their economic ones; the Hawkins children&#8217;s sense of security mirrors their parents’ financial stability. Even the Byers, arguably the show’s most financially troubled family, manage to make ends meet. Joyce supports herself and two children on a store clerk’s wage, after all.
Stranger Things 2’s fantasy exists in a unique historical moment: an era of fearless liberation, untouched by Etan Patz’s disappearance but radically shaped by America’s post-bomb familial upheaval. Counterculture, the Sexual Revolution, and the Women’s Movement have prevailed. The atomization of the nuclear family is underway, and almost all of the families in Stranger Things 2 deviate from the traditional units of husband, wife, and kids. Police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour), whose marriage couldn’t survive the death of a daughter, becomes a substitute father for Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a young, telekinetically gifted girl who has a difficult family history of her own — she was separated from her mother, raised in a lab, and refers to the man who oversaw the experiments performed on her as “Papa”; the Mayfields/Hargroves are a blended family; Kali Prasad (Linnea Berthelsen), another character with supernatural powers, lives with a band of outcasts that evokes modern understandings of chosen families; and more.
Even the seemingly conventional families in Stranger Things 2 appear to be on the verge of, or susceptible to, transformation. The season&#8217;s most charged sexual interaction, for instance, occurs when Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono) — a picturesque wife and mother — coyly reacts to the smooth talk of high-school-bad-boy Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery). Billy looks way better than he has any right to — shout-out to that wig and those all-denim outfits — and in his conversation with Mrs. Wheeler, he embodies a primal sex appeal that the housewife seems quite drawn to. Viewers get to witness Mrs. Wheeler flirt not only with Billy, but also with the idea that sex could be more than a thing she does (or doesn’t do) with her uninspiring husband, who sleeps on the living room chair while Mrs. Wheeler reads romance novels in candle-lit baths. Given the context of her marriage, then, Mrs. Wheeler’s exchange with Billy is exceptionally compelling; there’s more sexual tension in the pair&#8217;s brief bout of flirtation than there is in the entirety of Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan Byers’ will-they-won’t-they plotline.
And why not? The 1970s and ’80s saw a veritable<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html', ' divorce boom');"> divorce boom</a> linked to the feminist movement, and familial upheaval (and even relatively small self-emancipations like Mrs. Wheeler’s) was ever-present in the era, as it is throughout Stranger Things. Families ebb and flow, coalescing around circumstance more than DNA. The show’s young protagonists, by branding themselves a “party” à la Dungeons &amp; Dragons, essentially form a family of their own, free of commandments except for the one: friends don’t lie. It’s as good an ethos as any.
It bears mentioning that Stranger Things 2’s treatment of families can also be reductive. Viewers learn that Billy is abused by his father, and that he takes that abuse out on his stepsister. There is a striking parallel between the transmission of rage to Billy from his father, and the Mind Flayer’s possession of Will, but the show forgoes the opportunity to use Billy’s character to more deeply consider the impact of parental separation and abuse on teenagers. Instead, with archetypal high-school drama in mind, Stranger Things 2 ends up mostly limiting Billy to his role as a bully. He’s bad, and in the end he loses. Justice prevails.
But a 21st-century audience knows that the bubble’s about to burst on Hawkins; that the fantasy can only sustain itself for so long. Reagan is about to trounce Walter Mondale, win reelection, and further cut regulations and government spending while increasing the national debt. Families will continue to shift and adapt to a changing world, and kids will no longer ride their bikes unsupervised.
It’s easy to forget that Stranger Things 2 is fantasy — wondrous, enthralling fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. There’s genuine hurt beneath the show’s escapist sheen — the kind of hurt caused by real, not imaginary, monsters: parental negligence, deceptive governing, death — but Stranger Things 2, for the most part, keeps it at a distance. The show isn’t concerned with history’s uncompromising advance, with the ongoing disintegration of people and communities, save a shot of a Reagan/Bush lawn sign.
In a few decades, when the inevitable Stranger Things: Reboot airs, it will star a new party of adventurers — maybe the children of Will and his friends. Perhaps it’ll be set in 2017, and Will, after having been kidnapped and possessed by monsters, will have shipped off to Iraq. A rapid montage of his traumas will jump from the Demogorgon to the Mind Flayer to Fallujah. His kid will have a cellphone, and Will will call it regularly. There are some things that you just can’t forget.
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Strange Things, Stranger Danger: Domestic Fantasy in Stranger Things 2

Strange Things, Stranger Danger: Domestic Fantasy in Stranger Things 2

Niv M. Sultan is a writer based in New York. He tweets at&nbsp;<a href="http://twitter.com/nivmsultan">@NivMSultan</a>, and collects his work at&nbsp;<a href="https://nivmsultan.com">nivmsultan.com</a>.