Stranger things final conclusions
I wrote a blog article at the time of the first series so it
seems appropriate to write another article after the final episodes over
Christmas and new year.
My article was
sub-titled ‘Will got lost in the Woods’ and I discussed how the lost
child is such a prevalent figure in our culture and society. I referred to
paedophilia in the film industry (which is collectively known as ‘Hollywood’).
But the institutional abuse of children goes far deeper and wider. Stranger
Things seems to me to have gone full circle in terms of highlighting the
way that children are vital to a connection between the material world and
other dimensions (in the physicist David Bohm’s terms, the explicate and
implicate order).
That is the reason why the children are used in the
Government/Deep State experiments that are the basis for the beginning of the
series (although later series took the narrative off to other realms). And the
other narrative thread in the opening series was Will’s abduction in to the
Upside Down. In the final series, Vecna tells Will that he took him because he
was weak and vulnerable, and therefore a suitable conduit for him to channel
between the material world and the Upside Down (literally, as he tells the now
17 year old Will his younger self was creating the tunnels beneath Hawkins as
he slept).
Vecna says in the final series that he uses children as
their minds are open and susceptible. El challenges him and says that he has
underestimated that children are also strong and adaptable. I think there are
elements of both in the reason the powerful ab-use children – they want to use
the vulnerability to feed off the fear which they create in their victims, but
there is also an inner power within children. This is something inside all of
us, but the pressures of life, physical contamination and mental trauma and
indoctrination (much of which engineered by those same people in power) dull
the spark within us.
Vecna’s use of children to draw some sort of psychic power,
can be linked to the military/government scientists using the blood from Kali (aka
Eight, who was also a child in the experimental programme, who has psychic
powers) and before that Henry, to create a new series of children with psychic
powers.
In the final episodes, Vecna/Henry needs a new generation of
young victims in order to bring about his plan to draw another world from an
alternative dimension. He takes several schoolchildren, beginning with Holly,
the sister of Mike and Nancy Wheeler. Holly’s name carries significance, as the
plant was an important Pagan symbol. The Holly King was in a perpetual fight of
the seasons with the Oak King – the Holly King ruled from the Autumn Equinox
until his power peaked at the Winter Solstice. The opening season of Stranger
Things is set around Christmas, the second at Halloween.
The character Holly, when captured by the demigorgons and
taken to Vecna in the alternate dimension dresses up like Alice in Alice in
Wonderland. There is an old film poster of a Disney version of the film, on
the wall of Henry’s house, to emphasise the point. There are many theories of
an esoteric nature about Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson’s (pen name Lewis Carrol) story Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland. It was based on his
original manuscript ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ , which reminds me of the
Upside Down and tells about Alice being drawn in to a parallel, ‘nonsense’
world.
The phrase ‘down the
rabbit hole’ is now a staple to describe someone who becomes engrossed in
uncovering the truth from surrounding deception (or, in a negative sense, to
fall in to deceptive narratives and lose touch with reality). There’s also a
link back to the very first episode, season one, as when the security forces
kill the café owner who finds Eleven, and she runs away, Jefferson Airplane’s
song ‘White Rabbit’ is playing in the background. This song is a classic of the
late ‘60s psychedelic movement, with the line ‘Feed your Head’ an obvious
reference to psychedelic drugs. Much has been written that the counter culture
of this time, and the drugs, were created and pushed into the zeitgeist by
covert state forces. The MK Ultra programme which is explicitly referenced in
the first season of Stranger Things used drugs as part of the mind
control. Books like Chaos by Tom O’Neil have shown that the MK Ultra and
similar programmes were played out on a national and international scale
through popular culture and entertainment. Charles Manson was one major facet
of this. [An aside, the series biggest name star at its beginning was Winona
Ryder, now into her forties, who began as a child actress in the Eighties. Her
godfather was Timothy Leary, the 60s counter culture advocate for LSD, who was
a friend of her father, Michael Horowitz. Leary has been implicated in MK Ultra
and Dave McGowan in Weird Scenes inside the Canyon who wrote ‘Tim
Leary was known for being a painfully obvious CIA asset and also had a home in
Laurel Canyon.
Tim Leary and Charles Manson were both incarcerated in
California Medical Facility-Vacaville at the same time in 1974 with Dr. Donald
Lunde, who was appointed by judges or retained by lawyers, in some of the most
infamous CIA-MK ULTRA-MIND CONTROL cases of the Twentieth Century.’]
Girls in the Hood
When Holly puts on the cloak (not a red one, but still, the
image is very fairy tale-like) she breaks a prohibition from Henry to never go
in the woods outside the house. This is clearly a trope of old folk tales, one
we are all familiar with. Holly breaks the prohibition in a positive way, in
keeping with the early versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (or ‘Red Cap’ as
she was known in many places). Holly goes in to the woods because of a message
left for her by Max and finds out who Henry really is.
The original oral folk tale on which ‘Little Red Riding Hood’
was based symbolised a girl’s transition to womanhood and also narrated her
overcoming the wolf (or werewolf) through her own cunning and resourcefulness.
This was changed significantly by Charles Perrault in the first known literary
version of the tale, in the eighteenth century. Whereas the original peasant
girl is ‘forthright, brave, and shrewd’, Perrault wrote Little Red Riding Hood
as ‘pretty, spoiled, gullible, and helpless’ (Zipes 1993, 9). Her faults lead
her to be consumed by the wolf, punished for her deviance from the prescribed
route and behaviour. This new fate was given to the girl in line with new codes
of socialisation that were developing in Perrault’s time (Zipes 1993, 9).
Bettleheim complains that Perrault’s tale ‘is not—and was not intended by
Perrault to be—a fairy tale, but a cautionary story which deliberately
threatens the child with its anxiety-inducing ending’. Bettleheim goes on from
this to assert that it ‘seems that many adults think it better to scare
children into good behaviour than to relieve their anxieties as a true fairy
tale does’ (Bettleheim 1991, 167).
I referred in that article
in 2016 to how children being lost in the woods was a deep, perennial
motif within so many ‘fairy’ tales and folk legends that make up our cultural
DNA. Stories like ‘Hansel and Gretel’ featured children being separated by
their parents and lost in the woods. Of course, as I pointed out in my book The
Lost Child in Literature and Culture, tales like this weren’t just about
children losing their way, they were often about the parents deliberately
removing them from the home and abandoning them in the woods because they could
no longer feed them. Although the psychonalyst Bruno Bettleheim argued that
‘Hansel and Gretel’ had a positive message about a child growing into an adult
and learning to fend from themselves away from their parents, I would say there
is a rather deep scar embedded in this story and others like it, that a child
is a burden on their parents and poverty and the pressures of life, cause some
parents to be so desperate that they are forced to push them away, possibly to
death.
In a different way, this forced mentality is at the heart of
the modern ‘climate crisis’ agenda, which tells us that the human population is
too large, and we over-consume to place a burden on the Earth’s resources. And
this is causing environmental devastation. The answer, they say, is to reduce
the population. The stark reality of that is not clearly articulated in the
mainstream, of course, because ultimately that would entail admitting that the
agenda is saying that people now living shouldn’t be here – the world would be
better if they didn’t exist. In other words, many people now living should be
dead, and many yet to be born should never enter the world. As has been pointed
out by commentators such as James Corbett, the current ‘Green’ agenda, in its
institutional forms at least, is a delicate repackaging of eugenics, the
pseudo-science that advocated for sterilisation of those people deemed to be
mentally or physically unfit, or somehow inferior.
The 1980s, technology and time
This seems like a long detour from the subject of fairy
tales and Stranger Things. But, my interest in the “lost child” as both
a constant, tragic reality in human society, and as a metaphysical archetype
that transcends the material, can partially be traced back to the 1980s, the
decade in which the entire Stranger Things series are set. At
university, while studying English Literature, I was first captivated by Ian
McEwan’s novel The Child in Time. This was published in 1988, having
taken several years to be written, interrupted by McEwan’s fatherhood.
This started a trend for me, in seeing various themes both
of societal decay and of the disruption of time, around the figure of a lost
child. In The Child in Time, there is frequent discussion of quantum
physics through a character who is a
scientist. Probably influenced by McEwan’s relationship with Penny Allen, who was
a spiritual healer and astrologer, the novel weaves discussions about time and
childhood, with metaphysics and spirituality. This started my interest in the
way that quantum physics, and, more
recently plasma, give scientific explanations of much which is termed supernatural.
I think as well, there are many things that make the 1980s a critical decade in
changes in reality and time. On a material level, it was the decade of Thatcher
and Reagan, when much of the social fabric we have today was begun. Traditional
industries were broken up, much of the current globalisation started to gain
pace, and modern technological advancements started to take hold.
Throughout the seasons of Stranger Things, forms of
technology are prominent. From the early
episodes, Will communicates to his mother through a phone (in a crackly, static
way) and then through Christmas lights. Electricity crosses the boundary
between the normal world and the Upside Down. Perhaps a nod to the electric
universe theory.
I think the disruptions of time and our perceptions of
reality could be connected to the ramping up of the operations of particle
accelerators, most particularly CERN. The 1980s were the year of very notable advancements.
To mention 2 from CERN’s website:
11 June 1986 Heavy-ion
collisions begin
‘Just after the big bang the universe was too hot and dense
for the existence of familiar particles such as protons and neutrons. Instead,
their constituents – the quarks and gluons – roamed freely in a "particle
soup" called quark-gluon plasma. In 1986 CERN began to accelerate heavy
ions – nuclei containing many neutrons and protons – in the Super Proton
Synchrotron (SPS) to study the possibility that quark gluon-plasma was more
than just a theory. The aim was to "deconfine" quarks – set them free
from their confinement within atoms - by smashing the heavy ions into
appropriate targets. The first experiments used relatively light nuclei such as
oxygen and sulphur, and produced results consistent with the quark-gluon plasma
theory, but no real proof. In 1994 a second generation of experiments began
with lead ions, and by 2000 there was compelling
evidence that a new state of matter had been seen.’
In the final season of Stranger Things, there is
reference to ‘exotic matter’ which is given in the narrative as the means by
which the alternative dimension of the ‘Mind Flayer’ is being drawn in to our
reality. Exotic matter refers to ‘materials or forms of energy that possess
unusual properties, such as negative mass, negative energy density, or negative
pressure. Unlike ordinary matter, which is composed of protons, neutrons, and
electrons, exotic matter includes states like Bose–Einstein condensates, quark–gluon
plasma, and antimatter. These substances are often studied in theoretical
physics and have implications for our understanding of the universe and
potential future technologies.’
‘Exotic matter is typically associated with scenarios that
require violations of known energy conditions, such as traversable wormholes
and warp drives. […] These theoretical constructs challenge the standard
framework of general relativity, which assumes the dominance of positive energy
densities and matter. Exotic matter, in this sense, refers to hypothetical
materials that exhibit negative energy density or other unusual properties,
allowing for phenomena like faster-than-light travel, time loops, and the
existence of traversable wormholes.’ Exotic Matter: Theoretical Foundations
and Potential Applications in Modern Physics. Vikram Kumar. Department of
Physics, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi.
08 February 1988 Large
Electron–Positron Collider tunnel completed
‘The excavation of the tunnel for the Large
Electron–Positron Collider – Europe’s largest civil-engineering project prior
to the Channel Tunnel – was completed on 8 February 1988. The two ends of
the 27-kilometre ring came together with just one centimetre of error. The
picture above shows a tunnelling crew after completing a section of the tunnel
between points 2 and 3 on the LEP ring.’
14 July 1989 Large
Electron–Positron collider: First injection
‘With its 27-kilometre circumference, the Large
Electron–Positron (LEP) collider was – and still is – the largest
electron–positron accelerator ever built. LEP consisted of 5176 magnets and 128
accelerating cavities. CERN’s accelerator complex provided the particles and
four enormous detectors, ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL, observed the collisions.
LEP was commissioned in July 1989 and the first beam circulated in the collider
on 14 July.’
Another ‘side’ invention that occurred at CERN at the end of
the 1980s which has had the biggest effect on our material reality, in terms of
how we communicate to each other, and how perceptions of the world are
manipulated and transmitted, is the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim
Berners-Lee in 1989. I believe it is significant that such a huge advancement
in what has become the largest expansion in media since the printing press came
about in CERN as I believe there is much about the experiments that have led to
disruptions in perceptions of time and reality, if not the actual material
fabric of the world.
These scientific and technological milestones, that have
altered our world in practical, social ways, as well as potentially altering
the actual quantum ground of all there is. Probably appropriate that the ‘Mind
Flayer’ is like a giant spider, and Henry emulates the spiders he observes as a
child. Their webs are multi-dimensional, weaving through the layers of reality
and consciousness.
Demiurge as the lost child
My wife Liz mentioned before this final series about how Stranger
Things had elements similar to Gnosticism, as the character El/even
‘created’ the Upside Down, or at least broke down the barrier between that and
the real, everyday world. She calls the head scientist in the laboratory who
moulded her in the fictional version of MK Ultra/Montauk ‘Pappa’. The Gnostics
believed there was an original creator ‘Father’ who produced the ‘Aeons’,
similar to angels, and that Sophia was the last of these. The experimental
programme which produced Eleven, and ‘1’, aka Henry/Vecna, could be seen as a
scientific/man-made version of the Gnostic creation.
Liz also referred to Gnosticism’s belief in how the material
world was created as being centred around a lost child – as Sophia wanted to
have a child but she went about it in the wrong way: she conceived without the
involvement of her male partner or the approval of the Father. Her child was
the “demiurge,”
a misshapen, belligerent creature that was utterly unlike the other heavenly
beings.
Sophia immediately realized her horrible mistake and cast
her child out of the Pleroma (the Gnostic version of heaven inhabited by the
Aeons) . The demiurge, now alone, believed that he was the only being who had
ever existed, and created the material world out of his ignorance, foolishness,
and malevolence, trapping sparks of divinity within Adam and Eve along the way.
Because of her fall and its dire consequences, Sophia became
a flawed being. Her deficiency rendered her unable to remain in the perfect
“Fullness” of the Pleroma, so she was placed just outside of the Pleroma, in a
realm above that of her malevolent son. In anguish, Sophia repented, and the
Father agreed to bring her back to the Pleroma once what had become lacking in
her was restored to its natural fullness.
Sophia had broken the way conception was meant to be,
through a union of a male and a female Aeon. Sophia is the name given in recent
years to a prototype robot which was later awarded Saudi Arabian citizenship
(incidentally, the robot was produced in 2016, the year Stranger Things
premiered).
I think the promotion of transhumanism and AI is being
pushed partly as a replacement for real children, the children which those in
power want to either destroy, control or use to tap into their inner power.
-
Media, Manipulation and Hellfire
When finding their way through Henry’s memories to
‘shortcut’ to where he is, Max takes El and Kali through a school corridor to a
stage where hooded figures are doing a ritualistic style dance with ghost masks
on their faces (similar to those in the Scream films). The play is apparently
produced by Joyce Byers, Will’s mother, as she was at school with Henry. When
the curtain closes across the stage, Max pulls it back and takes them through
to Henry’s house where he is in a trance, joined hand-in-hand with the children
. This abrupt juxtaposition of the education system, then theatre, as two forms
of indoctrination, provides the portal to a scene where the inherent power within children is being used
to travel between dimensions.
The scenes of Henry hand in hand with the children with
candles lit around them was already reminiscent of a Satanic ritual. It was
during the 1980s that headlines on both sides of the Atlantic proclaimed a
‘Satanic panic’ and many of the stories were soon discredited as being false
memories planted by delusional or unscrupulous social workers and other
professionals. I would agree that such professions have increasingly been used
to create false narratives, with children and adults. But it seems to me that
much of the ‘Satanic panic’ hyperbole and counter discrediting was set-up to
hide actual abuse of children. This is alluded to in season 4 of Stranger
Things, when there is frequent mention of Dungeons and Dragons being
demonic, and the children who are members of the “Hellfire Club” come under
suspicion when Eddie is accused of murdering Chrissie.
Another layer to add of course is that ‘Hellfire Club’ was a
term used to describe several exclusive clubs for high-society rakes
established in Great Britain and Ireland in the 18th Century. The first
official Hellfire Club was founded in London in 1718, by Philip Wharton, 1st
Duke of Wharton and a handful of other high-society friends. The most notorious
club associated with the name was established in England by Francis Dashwood,
and met irregularly from around 1749 to around 1760, and possibly up until
1766.
A 1730s incarnation of the Club under Sir Francis Dashwood
met at the George and Vulture Inn. This version's club motto was Fais ce que
tu voudras (Do what thou wilt), a philosophy of life associated with
François Rabelais's fictional abbey at Thélème and later used by Aleister
Crowley.
According to at least one source, their activities included
mock religious ceremonies and partaking of meals featuring such dishes as
"Holy Ghost Pie", "Breast of Venus", and "Devil's
Loin", while drinking "Hell Fire Punch". Members of the club
supposedly came to meetings dressed as characters from the Bible.
Wharton's club came to an end in 1721 when George I, under
the influence of Wharton's political enemies (in particular, Robert Walpole)
put forward a Bill "against 'horrid impieties'" (or immorality),
aimed at the Hellfire Club. After his Club was disbanded, Wharton became a
Freemason, and in 1722 he became the Grand Master of England.
In Stranger Things, the checkerboard floor found in
Freemason lodges makes regular appearances through the seasons. In the final
series, it is the floor of the radio station that two of the older characters
broadcast from. This emphasises the connection between the occult, secret
societies, technology and the media.
-
Back to the Future
The Duffer Brothers apparently came up with the synopsis for
Stranger Things after originally thinking of a narrative inspired by the
‘concept of the 2013 film Prisoners, detailing the moral struggles a
father goes through when his daughter is kidnapped, and expand it out over
eight or so hours in a serialized television approach. As they focused on the
missing child aspect of the story, they wanted to introduce the idea of
"childlike sensibilities" they could offer, and toyed around with the
idea of a monster that could consume humans. The brothers thought the
combination of these things "was the best thing ever".’
So, lost children were central at the outset, and then the
fantastical ideas emerged from that. To me, this connects with the themes and
arguments of my book The Lost Child in Literature and Culture – the lost child
archetype is a material, real tragedy which is a massive rupture in our
societies, and out of that is metaphysical rupture in our reality, which disrupts
and traverses the boundaries between dimensions.
‘To introduce this monster into the narrative, they
considered "bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold
War" such as Project MKUltra, which gave a way to ground the monster's
existence in science rather than something spiritual.’ (Wikepedia). I would
say, as in the cross over between science and the spiritual in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time novel, that scientific
concepts such as quantum physics and plasma are different ways of expressing
the metaphysics of many spiritual beliefs, consciousness and the supernatural. The
‘bizarre’ experiments like MK Ultra were actually sickening and traumatic.
Rather than be dismissed as some madcap ideas, they should be properly
considered as the attempts to manipulate and control people, and disrupt
perceptions of reality.
The original working title for the series was ‘Montauk’, a
reference to the Montauk Project where it is alleged that huge numbers of
children were kidnapped and used for trauma based mind control experiments,
with an emphasis on trying to create and discover those who had telekinetic and
psychic powers. In the final epilogue of the last episode, Hopper proposes to
Joyce and says he has been offered a new job so they can leave Hawkins to move
to…Montauk.
Apparently, the
Duffer Brothers chose the year 1983 as the setting for the first season ‘as it
was a year before the film Red Dawn came out, which focused on Cold War
paranoia. Subsequently, they were able to use all their own personal
inspirations from the 1980s, the decade in which they were born, as elements of
the series, crafting it in the realm of science fiction and horror.’
The Soviet Union certainly do feature prominently in later
seasons, and they also carried out many secret experiments with the aim of
unlocking esoteric knowledge and breaking the barriers between the material and
metaphysical. But they are just another aspect in the period of the 1980s, a
critical time for a shift in the nature of things.
The other psychic child become adult in the final series is Kali,
another name chosen for its evocative esoteric connections. The goddess of darkness
and destruction who is also revered in Hinduism as the bringer of creativity,
as one must follow the other. The ‘Kali Yuga’ is the dark period of thousands
of years out of which our world is just emerging.
Stranger Things is not the only story in recent years that focuses on troubled or lost children and plays with shifts and ruptures in time and reality, set in our past of the 1980s. The film Donnie Darko and the German streaming series Dark are also very powerful. As we seem to splinter further in terms of our societies and our perceptions of reality, we seem to be increasingly drawn back to this past, looking back as we are haunted by our future.
