I wrote in my book The
Lost Child in Literature and Culture that the lost child figure is a void
beneath our world. Symbolically this is represented in Stranger Things by the ‘Upside Down’ netherworld of the
‘demigorgon’ (or the ‘Mind Flayer’ in
the new series) but also, in a more mechanical and “real” way by the
introduction of a secret underground military base that has been built by the
Russians under the Starcourt shopping mall in Hawkins. This underground base
works as symbol and representation on many levels. The references to the Cold
War (as the series are all set in the 1980s) serve as propaganda now in our
time when the Russians are again presented as one of the bad guy nations
threatening the democracy and family-values of America and its allies in the
west. Joann Conrad wrote in 1999 that during Reagan’s administration (the
dominant presidency in the 1980s) Russian Communism was presented as a threat
to the nuclear family (and what a loaded term that is) of America. The government
idealised the blond, blue-eyed child as a symbol of American wholesomeness
while introducing policies which damaged the family. The ideological enemy of
Communism and the nation of enmity, the Soviet Union, were presented as the
threat to the lives of American children when the real damage was being
inflicted on them from within American society. The presentation of a Russian
state guilty of infiltrating America and corrupting the minds of the young is a
convenient parallel with today’s anti-Russian media and governments. Surely it
should remind us that we are being shown the same propaganda now as we were in
the Cold War, and against Germany before the First World War, to give two
examples.
Which brings us to another metaphor: the Russian base is
constructed beneath a shopping mall. The series portrays the damage done to
small, traditional businesses of the small town, Hawkins. The mall is the place
to go for the residents, particular the young. The establishment was built with
the complicity of the corrupt city mayor but he is merely the dupe of the
Soviet Russian state. Therefore the programme neatly blames the corruption of
society, and particularly its children, on a foreign enemy rather than internal
forces. One of the series’ episodes is entitled ‘Mall rats’ which links the
now-common term for children who spend all their time in shopping malls with
the rats who are the initial carriers of the monstrous Mind-Flayer’s plague.
And rats are also frequently subterranean, travelling via sewers and burrowing
underground.
The motif in the third series of the small town inhabitants
being subsumed and taken over by the monster from ‘Upside Down’ was reminiscent
not only of the zombie films like Day of
the Dead (watched by the children who sneak in to the cinema to watch) but
also the Invasion of the Body Snatcher films
where humans become possessed by aliens who take away their soul, their
humanity. Of course, the earlier 1978 film Dawn
of the Dead set the zombies in a shopping mall.
This is an important message also – that people who look and
act as if they have free will are actually being controlled from outside, their
thoughts and actions are not actually their own. The ‘Upside Down’ is
supposedly an evil, inverted version of our world which threatens the wholesome
childhood games of small-town America. Except, in this series the Mind-Flayer
is trapped within our world, the darkness is within, like the underground
military base is hidden beneath the town of Hawkins. The monster even bites
into Eleven and a small sub-creature has to be extracted from her leg (after
which she loses her telekinetic powers). This is reminiscent of films like Alien, with the famous alien from the
belly, and David Cronenburg’s “body horror” – and this third series did seem to
make more reference to horror films of the 70s and 80s rather than the
predominant sci-fi and “family” film references from the era which the first
two series referenced.
Again, by having the underground base built by the Russians,
the story obscures the fact that our western governments have untold miles of
underground, secret military bases. They are frequently claimed to be sites
where the likes of the MK Ultra experiments were carried out on children (the actual
American government programme referenced in the first series of Stranger Things, which was given as the
source of Eleven’s confinement and torture). In series three, four of the young
people find themselves in the underground base, on a mission which the youngest
of them terms ‘child endangerment’. The two oldest youths are captured and
beaten and drugged while wearing sailor suites from the ice-cream parlour where
they work. They are representations of the children abused and used by the deep
state of many countries.
Many argue that underground bases are still places where
many of the hundreds of missing children in our society are taken. A man from
Ammanford, South Wales has recorded horrific sounds coming from under a
property he used to live next to. The sounds of the screams are so shocking I
urge people to be wary of listening while also stressing the importance of
listening so whatever is happening to these poor women and/or children will not
continue to be covered up:
Whether it is beneath a seemingly abandoned house in South
Wales, in a giant underground military facility (like the one that Isaac Kapey,
the Hollywood outer of alleged paedophiles, supposedly committed suicide
outside of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9VEKqNCmko)
, or the Epstein island, paedophilia is being committed beneath the ground on
which we walk and in the society where we try to bring up children. And it is
being covered up, not only by the ground but by the corrupt deep state and secret societies who control us.
Because paedophilia, and other crimes against children, are the most destructive
obscenity upon which our world is built, and to expose it is to uncover the lie
upon which the common perception of reality is built.
The child Eleven is herself a junction of the mental
potential of us all and the abuses of this by those who control us. The
character is also, in the first series at least, presented as
androgynous-looking (as Jay Dyer noted in his online analysis). She is human
but more than human and a link between “our world” and the ‘Upside Down’. She
is also the means by which the opening, the crack between the world and the
‘Upside Down’ is closed. The lost child is presented as both the conduit
through which the monstrous evil comes into our world (as Will’s disappearance
began the first series) and as the means by which we can confront and
ultimately block off this evil. This is at the heart of my discussion in my
book: that the lost child is a trauma in our society, which the fears of our
society centre around. The lost child is within the foundations, literally, of
our world. Jay Dyer wrote in his article on the first Stranger Things Series, on his Esoteric
Analysis website, that:
The sacrifice of the youth for
the dark designs of the shadow government is the ultimate conspiracy in the
series, but what is more remarkable than this is the explanation by the Man in
Black Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) that the sacrifice of sons and daughters for
the gorgodemon is for the good of America.
In other words, we are given the impression our villain knows the real
source of the dark power in Hawkins, the demonic, and that the sacrifice of
humans and blood draws it nearer and nearer.
Foolishly assuming this dark energy can be harnessed for U.S. supremacy,
Dr. Brenner is behind both MK Ultra and the SDI program that requires the
sacrifice of America’s “sons and daughters”!
This spiritual dimension is the accurate and insightful aspect of the
series, but the message is not all good.
The message is not in any way good. The title of Joann
Conrad’s essay, centring around the Jonbenet Ramsey case, refers to the ‘Lost
Innocent and Sacrificial Delegate’. One child, a child with an image which is
endlessly repeatable and conforms to the ideal presented as an embodiment of a
culture, is made to stand in for all the other children in the country as a
sacrifice to supposedly reinforce the
‘values’ of that culture, that nation. Actually,
the image of the child, the tragic loss of the child, only reinforces what is
inherently false and destructive behind those fabricated values.
In literary, academic research, much has been written about
Freud’s essay on the ‘uncanny’, which in German translates as ‘unheimlich’, or
un-homely. In the German word, the negative word contains within it the good
connotation, and therefore, through some linguistic contagion, the ‘good’ word, ‘homely’, contains at least the
potential for its subversion. The uncanny is that sense of something being not
quite right within the apparently normal and everyday, the sense of uneasiness
about the world around you which makes you feel unsafe. And it is important
that this uneasiness is also within language, because language influences, and
frequently controls, how we think about the world. Our world is constructed by
language and what we believe about who we are and where we are in the world is
governed to a huge degree by what we say, read, write and hear.
Which brings me to Orwell’s 1984, and his concepts of newsspeak and double-think, the way
control and manipulation of language can be used to eradicate dissent and
control meaning. A paragraph from the novel:
"It's a beautiful thing, the
Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and
adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It
isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what
justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other
word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you
have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will
do just as well – better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is
not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in
having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’
and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if
you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in
the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole
notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality,
only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea
originally, of course," he added as an afterthought."
This reminds me of un/Heimlich in German but here ambiguity
is ripped out of language so the wielders of power do not only control the
narrative, they control the words and therefore any thoughts. I have written in
my book The Lost Child in Literature and
Culture and also in my novel, The
Individual (available on Lulu.com) about how the lost child figure is not
only central to our society and culture, it is actually at the heart of our
language. Words now, as they are used particularly in the public spheres of the
media and politics, are empty or, worse, they say one thing and mean the
opposite. The most damning deception is the abuse of children at the deepest
and highest levels of society. I believe that this suppressed trauma is the
reason why so many stories in our history and our recent culture are about
lost, endangered or silent children.
Children who are outside of normal language (and Eleven’s speech is slightly
fractured as a result of her imprisonment in the government facility from an
early age) highlight the arbitrariness of meaning. Their inability to speak, or
to fully enter into the language which defines the world, shows that there is
an emptiness at the heart of what we say.
But also, as I have listened and read more people’s research
in recent years, I realise that the lost child figure in our culture is not
only an unconscious symbol which
repeats and reappears constantly, it is also frequently consciously placed in our sight to burrow within our minds. I have
written about how the lost child figure in stories and images acts as a screen
in the double-edged meaning of the word – it projects out like a TV screen (or
on a TV or film screen – like the children in Stranger Things), showing us what someone else wants us to see,
while also being a screen which is put up between us and the truth, so we
cannot see behind it. So we watch and are entertained, get our vicarious
thrills, perhaps taking our psyches to places which are supposedly forbidden,
and we do not see or hear or feel the real children who are stolen, spirited
away and buried beneath our feet.
.
