Stranger Things Promised More Than Self-Expressive Individualism Could Deliver

On the Finale's Collapse

So, there are basically two schools of thought on Stranger Things 5, after the season finale was viewed by over 35 million people:

1. Stranger Things 5 totally sold out to the libs, and I’m mad, and I feel betrayed.

2. Stranger Things 5 did everything we wanted it to do and the people complaining are dumb and have daddy issues.

I feel neither of these ways about the season finale, and both of these ways.

Here’s my final assessment of the season finale:

Stranger Things fulfilled its promise. It did not fulfill its potential.

And that’s because Stranger Things smuggled pre-modern goods—place, time, embodiment—into a secular story that couldn’t ultimately sustain them.

The Appeal of Stranger Things

Let’s zoom back in time and try to remember why we loved Stranger Things.

“Nostalgia”, yes. But I think that’s too surfacy. Nostalgia for what?

Stranger Things tapped into our nostalgia for specific goods:

1. Place. Hawkins, Indiana was never presented as an idyllic small town. It was always presented as a run-of-the-mill, somewhat ugly little town in the middle of nowhere. And yet, we came to love it. Why? Not because of what it was, but because of who was there. We knew the sheriff. We knew the science teacher. We knew who ran the hardware store (ironically we did NOT know the school Principle, who was inexplicably caught in the crossfire of a public smearing by Dusty-buns in the show’s final scenes, why, we’ll never really know poor guy).

2. Embodiment. No one is on their phone in Stranger Things, and there are very few scenes (if any) where non-scientists are looking at a computer. There is eye contact. There are Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. It’s a world where physical media still exists: movies you put in the VCR, record players, malls, cassette tapes, neon lights, action figures, posters, etc. Nothing is digitalized. You can touch it all.

3. Time. There is a sense of slowness in Hawkins, Indiana, that is inescapable because no one can get somewhere else on a screen. There are long bike rides going nowhere that unfold into deep-state mysteries. People get bored. Probably the way we experience this most in the series is in the way things must be sequenced, rather than instantaneous. So, rather than googling something, research in 1988 requires a series of steps: go to the library, request a room, find your resources under such-and-such a file, implement the Microfilm, discuss.

4. Stakes. The series gives the sense of small narratives colliding with a larger narrative with a clear sense of good and evil. It’s Hawkins, Indiana vs. the Deep State. The stakes are high, life and death…cosmic even. And somehow everything depends on the everyday happenings of this small town and the characters who live there.

5. Community - At the end of the day, all of these factors were leading us toward something else: the idea of a real community. Communities (not online “communities”) must exist in time. They take time. They must be embodied. They must be committed to a place. And ultimately, they must be committed to a shared mission/set of virtues: stakes. Community is the longing behind all the nostalgia. It’s what it’s all about. And Stranger Things is a recognition that we need to live in a radically different kind of society to earn it.

We could name more than this, but these, I think, were what made Stranger Things uniquely special to watch. The problem is this: the secular individualism that so saturates the last two episodes is simply not a thick enough worldview to hold these things together.

The Finale

As far as finales go, I didn’t leave feeling upset. I thought the show fulfilled its promise. In a way I found pleasantly surprising, we did not introduce moral ambiguity or throw in things for shock value.

Good overcame evil.

To me, that was a win.

But there were other things that didn’t land for me.

First, everyone leaves Hawkins for something bigger and better on the east coast. I get that the viewer needs to be encouraged to move on from the show, and that they’ll be okay without this world. But the fact that almost every single character is literally ready to never see Hawkins again (they must meet in Philadelphia, because Hawkins is just-the-worst) tells us the show was never actually about place at all. It was about getting over it. Come on, guys! Don’t be such Mouthbreathers!

Second, no one commits to embodied community. No one commits to each-other, really, except Hopper and Joyce (apparently the second traumatic loss of his daughter-figure healed him, go figure). Will, who is ostensibly terrified of living alone, goes off to the east coast to hook up with boys at the bar, thus playing into the thing he’s most afraid of: he’s scared of being abandoned, but his happy ending is abandoning his friends to explore his sexuality elsewhere. I just don’t really understand this. Nancy and Jonathan separate to pursue their careers elsewhere. Sure, there is the commitment the older friends make to meetup once a month outside of Hawkins, but if you’ve lived for any length of time you know that’s never going to happen, it’s just something old friends say as a sentiment.

Third, no one seems fundamentally changed by these five years of trauma and courage and friendship. What did anyone learn, here? The value of leaving your friends to find the ideal career? To give the bird to the principle because then the hot girl will talk to you (poor Suzie-poo! Where’d she go?)? To express yourself no matter what? And how do these lessons follow from the story?

Short answer: they don’t.

And here’s why: the season finale, rather than challenging us in any meaningful way, doubles down on populist cliches about self-expressive individualism. It opts for mass Netflix-appeal and user ratings rather than truth-telling. And that, ultimately, is what shot the finale in the foot.

This is why the last hour feels like a kind of frantic handwaving: “Look away! Look away! There’s nothing to see here! We have nothing to offer. There is no man behind the curtain. Move on, for goodness’ sake, please have mercy on us and just move on from this world. Don’t stare at the fact of its emptiness. Enjoy the good you had in it, but don’t expect more from us.”

That’s fine. It still fulfills the promise. But it really didn’t, in my mind, fulfill the potential the series had to really challenge life in modernity.

The Secular Bellyflop

Plato, famously, in his Republic, wants to outlaw poets from his ideal city.

The reason?

Poets say truer things than the rest of us, but they do not understand what they say.

I’m not actually with Plato on this one.

I think we need artists to say truer things than they mean to say. This is why I’ll continue to love, and rewatch (I’ve seen it three times now) all five Stranger Things seasons.

But it’s clear to me the Duffer Brothers said truer things than they could understand, when they created this world: secular individualism does not have the capacity to hold things like place, embodiment, time, community and stakes that shape life in any real, tangible way.

And so?

At the end of the series, everyone learns to express themselves.

The End.

It doesn’t follow from the story’s premise.

The story had the opportunity to surprise is with endings that were counter-cultural and surprising (and still could have. I actually think Monsters University was one of the most underrated and best juke-outs/posterizations of self-expressive individualism I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t written as far as I know by Christians).

Instead, it ended in unearned cliche. That’s because:

• Secular individualism despises the idea of place. Place is what keeps us from fully expressing our inner selves. The community is what entraps us, not what liberates us.

• Secular individualism hates the idea of embodiment. Our bodies are traps, keeping us from being what we truly want to be sexually or genetically. We must escape them or transform them or mutilate them to “arrive”.

• Secular individualism warps our ideas of time. Time can be overcome. It can be managed. We can air-condition our way out of seasons. We can have the light of our phones when the sun isn’t out. We can, ultimately, escape time if we so choose.

• Secular individualism undercuts any sense of moral stakes. All of our ideas about good and evil, after all, are just cosplaying after Christendom. All we really want is to do whatever we want - that’s the ultimate virtue - and for everyone to step out of our way - the ultimate vice.

• And so, finally, Secular individualism destroys community. Of course Stranger Things had to end with a community being blown up for individual pursuits. That’s the only trick in Secular individualism’s bag.

And so of course we end up with a finale that destroys everything it promised to us. Just like most of Western society, we long for the architecture of things we no longer have the blueprints for. We are aching for a Christian world, where creation is a gift, not a curse. Where bodies are given. Where moral stakes are high, and real. Where community is possible because of the gospel.

That’s what we all want. But this is not the gospel Stranger Things offers us. It offers us the ache for these things, then systematically blows them up systematically before our eyes.

Steve’s Redemption

But wait. There’s more.

Because maybe, if we look carefully, there is some redemption in the season finale.

Thanks to my friend Ben Hein who was kind enough to read an early draft of this post, for as much angst as I have about the Duffer Bros’ philosophical ineptitude, I do think they produced one great philosopher in this series who, ultimately, patches the season finale together, and gives us a glimpse of hope: Steve.

Maybe the Duffer brothers don’t “get it”, and maybe no one else in the story “gets” the value of time, place, embodiment, virtue and community. But sometimes, poets also write characters who have more wisdom than they do.

That’s Steve.

Steve, at the beginning of the series, is literally the worst. He’s privileged. He’s a bully. He’s a womanizer. But as the show progresses, we watch Steve grow. He’s the reluctantly responsible babysitter. The friend that doesn’t need to be a lover. The guy who sticks is neck out rather than asking others to do the dirty work.

And in its last scenes, we see Steve come full circle:

• He’s the one who still loves Hawkins. He can’t understand why no one else does. He’s committed to the place.

• He’s coaching a kids’ baseball team in Hawkins. His weapon of choice (a nail-infused baseball bat) becomes a tool of channeled grace toward young punks like himself. The more I think about this, the more significant this becomes. A baseball bat is the kind of tool that encourages embodiment, like a hoe or a rake or a knife. He’s teaching the value of embodiment to the next community.

• And why baseball, not basketball? Because it’s Spring. That’s what time it is. So yes - there’s a commitment to slowness, to rhythm, to not rushing past things to get to the thing you really want. It’s a commitment to time.

• He’s actually looking to start a family with “six little nuggets” to watch after. He’s committed to the idea of a real, solid community.

• All of these things give Steve something to fight for, unlike the other characters. It’s a framework for virtue.

Maybe he’s portrayed somewhat pathetically, sure.

But I’m with Steve here. He gets it.

Which is why I, for one, won’t be closing the door to Mikey’s basement anytime soon.

PS - If you haven’t heard “Steve” (or “Djo’s”) album, it’s all about these simple things, and it’s one of my favorite albums from the last few years. If you haven’t listened yet, you’re welcome. I highly recommend the extended cut.