Normal Things: On Stranger Things 4

 

`Normal Things:

SPOILERS, which I am honour-bound to report, though I’m sure there are embryos in  test tubes who got to the end before I did. . .

Skipped a bunch of episodes and finally gotten to the end. Much of my impressions constitute tidbits, which I will leak out in drips and drabs later, but suffice it to say:

a) it included my second least favourite cinematic trope: the one –sided military confrontation.

b) included my least favourite cinematic trope. 

I could see it coming a mile away. “Oh GOD!” I thought. “Don’t go there.

“Please don’t go there. Please don’t go there. PLEASE don’t go there. Please DON”T go there. Please don’t GO there. Please don’t go THERE. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEpretty please? With a lump of sugar on top? Pleasepleaseplease FORTHELOVEOFGOD don’t do that, having gotten so far. You can come up with something, you can think of something, all that creativity, all that ingenuity, all that je ne sais quois, you can do something, ANYTHING AT ALL! Any unseen, unforeseen, unanticipated twist or turn you can pull straight out of thin air, something, anything at all, but for Fuck’s Sakes, PLEASE DON’T GOT THERE!!!!”

I was lied to when I was young: saying “please” never works. They went there.

So Vecna’s got ‘em all down for the count, all our heroes on both sides of the Berring Straight hogtied in otherworldly tendril, all he’s got to do is snap is fingers to crack the portals open and flood our world with unspeakable Eldritch horrors. Checkmate right?

But no, the good guys still have a card up their sleeve. All is not lost. What ingenious, unforeseen ploy have the Duffer Brothers cooked up to knock us on our asses?

Get this: Mike loves El, see? So all he has to do. . .wait for it. . .

Tell her!

Yup, all he has to do is tell her he loves her, and that’ll give her the strength she needs to break free and save the day with her magic powers.

Why didn’t he think of it before?

So we come to my least favourite cinematic trope (at least for now. The old “Stalk her and she’ll learn to love me” one is probably worse.)  the last minute emotional steroid boost. A sudden gust of extra strong feelings that gives them the strength to break free. As if all we needed to achieve anything was to feel a bit more.  

Drives me up the wall. I mean, it’s been used effectively elsewhere – Disney’s Something Wicked This Way Comes springs to mind (it’s more complicated in the book). Hell, I’ve used it in my own fictions. But context matters, and while it made perfect sense in Something Wicked, it really doesn’t feel right here. Maybe it’s overused, maybe it’s too easy. To neat. Too “we can’t think of anything else”.  Too “beentheredonethat”: if there were a fault in the just about faultless first series, it was overreliance on El’s powers. Here they go back to it, and everyone else’s effort really don’t amount to anything. I mean, I suppose the other senior characters got to use flame throwers to good effect, but it was really an after-thought. The important thing was the El just had to try harder.

After nine episodes and more than a dozen hours of buildup, it seems more than a bit bathetic. It certainly dampened my enthusiasm, and made it harder to enjoy the epic goings on.   

And for all those cliches and contrivances, they still couldn’t save Eddie. Oh Eddie, poor ol’ Eddie, the most charismatic character on US TV since god-knows-when, and they didn’t feel like keeping you on. To think what you could have done and where you could have gone on further adventures[i]. Alas, alas.

How much more it would have meant if his sacrifice hadn’t been so senseless: supposedly, he was trying to buy time for the others, but by then they were already deep in Vecna’s clutches, so what was the point?  And Vecna didn’t need those batty things anyway, so Eddie achieved pretty much nothing.

At least he got to play a solo first. It would have been criminal to send him out without one.

To be fair, his character arc did rather suggest a kind of tragic redemption through sacrifice – this whole “I’m no hero” business. His scene with Dustin on the hill -
“Don’t change Harrison!” – was backed to the brim with foreboding, though that might have had more to do with idiot Twitter spoilers. Either way, I found it infinitely moving,  and I swear I teared up. Why? Maybe it was just moving to see this somewhat aloof jester-figure finally understanding how much he meant to his young acolytes, and how much they meant to him. But even more, because it felt such a corrective to the show’ relentless theme about change – yes, things change, but there’s also such a thing as consistency, and some things, like courage, integrity, individuality, and yes, friendship, ought not to be so fickle. Certainly, it was an antidote to season’s 3’s poisonous portrayal of role-players. Here’s the proper message: role-playing is cool, nerds are cool, and however you might grow or evolve over time, don’t ever stop being you.

So Eddie’s gone, but Hopper and Joyce are back, and Vecna’s vanquished, and about a hundred threads left untied – Dr. Owens? Dimitri? The General? Jason?[ii] There’s very obviously going to be another series. I do hope it continues along the same line – disappointments aside, it was gripping and moving. I liked the extra length episodes (though they wreaked havoc on the sleep schedule), for giving us a deeper story and more time with the characters, which still felt insufficient. A tenth episode would surely have wrapped things up more smoothly, but would the public had the patience for it?

For all my griping, my impression is still pretty positive. The series was gripping all the way through, clever, atmospheric, occasionally funny, but not so much to dampen a sense of menace. It gave the brain and the imagination a lot to chew on. And I haven’t been this invested in a set of TV characters since Peter Capaldi was Dr. Who. So despite reservations, gold stars all around.

Horns up. \m/

Final thoughts:

-          let’s give a shout out to the other awesome characters that don’t get enough hype. Murray (Brett Gelman) and Erica  (Priah Ferguson) lit up the screen every time they walked on. I even liked Robert Morgan’s world weary Officer Powell, who was clearly counting down his days till retirement, clearly sick of all that supernatural shit.

 

-          Good for Robin, who might get a happy ending after all.   

 

-          Vecna’s origins? Call me naïve or dim, but I didn’t see it coming at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[i] And the current repulsive trend of origin stories wouldn’t help: what’s the point of following a character up ‘til their starting point? Before all the major character development? Knowing full well he’s doomed? How are we supposed to watch and enjoy the character in action knowing their fate in advance? Never understood that.

[ii] I am reliably informed by https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Jason_Carver that he was killed in the end, I have no memory of this scene. Pitty. I’d be curious how these god-boys would behave in the aftermath.

(Stay off this site by the way. Don’t let obsessive fandom shape your impressions).

Being Roger Waters

 

So Roger Waters has gotten himself into the news by daring to declare himself more important than Drake or the Weekend. While it may sound like a dickish thing to say, he’s certainly not wrong. I know it’s unfashionable to declare some artists and some works superior to others, but give me a break: Drake is about as brainless as porridge, and if we’re still discussing the Weekend in thirty years, you can call me Monday.

 

Nor am I impressed by the ageist argument that old people always claim their own music was better than the rubbish the kids are playing now: as if that alone proves it false. Possibly old folks only choose to remember the good stuff they listened to, and have chosen to forget (or have pretended to forget) the rubbish they themselves listened to at that age. Nor does it apply to me: I was three years old when The Wall came out, so I can hardly claim it was music from “my day”. “My day”, if anything, was the height of grunge, which I barely tolerated at the time, opting instead for. . ., well stuff like The Wall.

 

 I’m not interested in debating that any further: folks will like what they like. I would like to say a few things about The Wall.

 

It’s an extraordinary work really. It may feel a bit cliched, as it sold a kabillion copies, but that doesn’t bother me – sometimes art and commerce do converge. If a work I consider profound happens to resonate with the masses, and happens to reward its creators I’m not going to complain. And if stuff I consider to be profound was at one point popular, or even - *(GASP)* - mainstream, well, what of it?  I find it mind boggling how stuff I like was once considered mainstream. If this is a very steep rabbit hole to descend straight back to kids these days!, I’d again point out that nothing I like has been mainstream within my living memory (does 3 count?), but that’s yet another digression, so I won’t go there either.

 

Like many a weird, spaced-out teenager, (though anomalously drug free), I took to The Wall like a bee to pollen (“fly to shit” really doesn’t sound flattering enough).  I didn’t like the movie. It quite literally depicted everything in the album, but seemed to lack its psychological horror. I mean, the actors were all doing what Waters and Gilmour were singing, but somehow it didn’t feel right. I think I was hoping for something less literal, more surreal and impressionistic. More Gerald Scarfe and less Bob Geldoff.   The “Comfortably Numb” sequence surely needed something more serenely psychedelic. Surely “Young Lust” wasn’t just about groupies. The first, what, two thirds were all rock star decadence followed by Oswald Mossly cosplay, with the connection between them not being made in any way a young audience could pick up on.

 

This seems an irresponsible omission. An a fully intentional one.

 

I know a guy who thinks all pop music is basically fascistic. Because of the way, via mass production, recording, and amplification, it manipulates emotions and appeals to base instinct. I think on some level Roger Waters believes this too. He’s drunk deeply of Rock-stardom, tasted its powers, and keenly sensed its dangers. This is a well-documented inspiration for The Wall. But it’s difficult to believe, that on some level he doesn’t also relish it.

 

Hence the all-too effective Rock spectacle pastiche of “In the Flesh”.  It’s absolutely intended to open up concerts in grand Wagnerian manner, going straight for the loins and the tear ducts. I’ve seen him do it: ’99 or some such year, at the then Molson Amphitheatre.  The band blasted the riff, Rogers strutted on stage, raised his arms to the audience, and crossed them at the wrist, forming a large O above his head. We of course, all his puppets at this point, did the same. I’d bet good money he was perfectly aware this was also how the Oceanians saluted Big Brother in Michael Radford’s film adaptation of 1984.

 

Music does that to you. On some level (that phrase again!), you want it to do it to you.

 

That’s the danger of music.

 

Waters recognized this, but is too damn good at it to subvert it. He made an album about the dangers of pop-culture Rockstar hero worship that made people want to worship him even more. He’s not done much to dissuade them. Just watch footage from his 1989 concert in Berlin. Massive stage, massive set, dozens of musicians, hundreds of choristers (including the bleedin’ Red Army! In Berlin!), maybe a hundred thousand people in the crowd, and him at the centre of it all! And when he finally dons the military outfit in the style of some South American dictator, is he really not enjoying it?

(The Red Army should have sung “Waiting for Worms”. Now that would have brought the fascist overtones home!)

 

None of this is to condemn Roger Waters, a tremendous talent I admire and respect. Just I think he was (is) too invested in it all to really follow his thesis through. As we all are. Pop music is so central to most of our identities that we really can’t envision a world without it, nor do we want to. ‘tis why neither the film nor the various stage presentations of The Wall  could actually come out and say “pop culture is like fascism”.  People don’t like to hear it, and the Record labels and Studios sure aren’t going to promote it.  A lot of folks in this society will shrug off criticisms of their religion or their political beliefs, but woe betide anyone who criticises their favourite band.

 

I can’t be too hard on Rogers for not going the whole nine yards. If he had, The Wall probably wouldn’t have been as good. It’s tempting fruit this stuff. If he doesn’t exactly mind thousands of people stroking his ego, even while objectively recognizing the risks, I can’t say I blame him. In his place I’d probably do the same thing.