Stranger Things: what lies beneath

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:

http://www.noisesinmylane.co.uk/

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.

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Politics, void, and the child in time

(I am reposting this as it connects to my previous blog on Stranger Things...new content to follow soon)

There were a few critical comments from viewers of the recent adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time which was shown on the BBC. Some found the plot ‘baffling’ with the storyline involving Stephen’s friend, the politician/publisher Charles Darke and his regression to childhood a bit difficult to digest. It was understandable that an hour and a half was too short a time to shoehorn all the different threads of the original novel.

 

I am pleased that the political focus of the novel was not ditched entirely. McEwan used his novel (published in 1987) as a critique of the Thatcher government. The ‘Prime Minister’ is always referred to by this title, the author deliberately avoiding any reference to the incumbent’s gender (gender itself being another prominent subject debated within the novel). The novel is set in a fictional near future, extrapolated from the social policies of the Conservative government in the 1980s. The opening pages follow Stephen as he weaves his way through busy London commuters, on his way to participate in a government enquiry, supposedly contributing to the formation of a new ‘Childcare Handbook’. A young beggar draws Stephen’s attention, makes him think of his own lost daughter, and also the moral degeneracy of the government (which has introduced licensed begging to replace social security benefits payments):

 

To give money ensured the success of the Government programme. Not to give involved some determined facing away from private distress. There was no way out. The art of bad government was to sever the line between public policy and intimate feeling, the instinct for what was right (The Child in Time, McEwan 1987, 8-9).

The loss of a child is clearly a metaphor for a governmental abuse of innocence. This opening scene establishes the interconnectedness of the plot themes: politics, the state of a nation and different concepts of time, all passing through the spectre of a lost child.

 

However, although Stephen’s missing child is often described in ghostly, uncanny terms, sweeping down to inhabit any child on the streets of London, the possibility that the child has been killed is never broached. Indeed, neither the book nor its adaptation mentions even the possibility that Kate could have been abducted by a paedophile. Instead, like the public pronouncements of the McCanns, Stephen imagines his daughter growing up with another family, taken as a surrogate daughter, ageing like the computer-aged images of Maddy.

 

The absence of any mention of child murder and paedophilia is itself a haunting omission from the story. The current Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is due in 2018 to investigate allegations of child abuse and ‘exploitation involving people of public prominence associated with Westminster’.

 

https://www.iicsa.org.uk/investigations/allegations-of-abuse-by-people-of-public-prominence-associated-with-westminster

 

The Inquiry stems from the belated public exposure of the widespread abuses of Jimmy Saville. Allegations of high-level paedophile rings have persisted over decades. Many of these allegations are still derided as ‘conspiracy theories’ but, it must be remembered, Saville’s crimes were also confined to the realm of supposition through decades when he was a high profile celebrity. More significantly, his horrific, systematic assaults were carried out while Saville was a close friend to both politicians (most notably Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) and members of the British Royal Family (including Prince Charles). One of the intentions of the Inquiry is to uncover evidence of institutions covering-up or conspiring to enable such abuses to take place. For those members of the establishment who have recently reacted with outrage at investigations into former public figures and politicians, it must be remembered that Saville was allowed to destroy young people’s lives for the whole of his life, without anyone in authority questioning his behaviour. Allegations only seem to be taken seriously when the prominent person is dead, or very close to it, such as the investigation into the former Prime Minister Edward Heath:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41503143

 

At the time of writing, the IICSA was hearing evidence that the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith was known by security forces such as MI5 to be an abuser of boys. MI5 were aware that the Department for Public Prosecution had lied to elements of the press, denying having been sent reports of investigations into Smith’s crimes. A detective superintendent at Lancashire Police had actually made a damning report that stated

 

‘It seems impossible to excuse his [Smith’s] conduct over a considerable period of time whilst sheltering behind a veneer of respectability.

 

He has used his unique position to indulge in a sordid series of indecent episodes with young boys towards whom he had a special responsibility.’

 

This report was written in 1970, the year he first ran for office as an MP. The Inquiry heard that Margaret Thatcher would have been aware of the allegations prior to awarding Smith a knighthood in 1988. This was the year after The Child in Time was published. Although Smith himself was never in Government, other investigations and reports are uncovering strong evidence that so much abuse was known about during the years in which McEwan was writing his novel, and the decades leading up to it. The Conservative government Chief Whip during the leadership of Ted Heath in the 1970s, Tim Fortescue admitted in a national BBC television interview that they would help MPs who came to them with problems, including with ‘small boys’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwkOWPauu_A

 

I don’t believe McEwan had any notion of there being hidden paedophile rings within circles of power within Westminster. But, the narrative refers to child abuse of a different kind, with the Government creating their own ’Authorised Childcare Handbook’ which promotes an authoritarian, disciplinarian approach to bringing-up children. The author of this handbook is discovered to be Stephen’s friend Charles Darke. His retirement from politics to live in the countryside, where he can play at a ‘Just William’ cliché of childhood, symbolises the conflict within individuals and society about what childhood represents. But, in our current society, a man re-living his childhood would involve simply playing computer games and immersing themselves in a virtual world – which is how many men now continue living their lives into adulthood, which is an interesting, possibly depressing, thing to contemplate in itself. At one point in The Child in Time, Stephen watches a new Government endorsed, all-day television channel. He despairs of the childishness of the contestants and audience on a game show. As other critics have noted, McEwan was anticipating our current obsession with multiple channels, satellite and digital, and the domination of reality television.

 

The fictional storyline is a commentary on the way politics rejects those qualities that are romantically associated with childhood: a freedom of spirit and unfettered connection with the natural world. But the television adaptation introduces a darker suggestion of conspiracy within government: Darke is found dead in the woods, dressed in his schoolboy clothes. He has apparently committed suicide, unable to reconcile the differences in his “nature”. However, an earlier scene where the Prime Minister discusses with his colleague the inconvenience caused by Darke’s actions, combined with mentions that Charles is under surveillance, suggests that he was actually killed by security services and his death made to look like suicide. At least one of the public comments I read after the Guardian online review of the television adaptation likened this apparent suicide in the woods to the death of the government scientist Dr David Kelly. Perhaps, in symbolic terms, the ‘murder’ of Darke in his short trousers represents a child sacrifice.

 

Believers in Satanism view their practices as influencing or even controlling events in the physical world. It has been alleged that Satanic paedophile rings use children to tap into a youthful energy which will confer on them an increase in power. In the final episode of the first season of the HBO series True Detective, a series which features such rings, the half-sister of the principal abuser, when asked where he is, says he ‘is all around us, before you were born and after you die’.  This concept of timelessness is one of the principal themes of The Child in Time. Although the television adaptation omits the references to quantum physics, it retains the scene at ‘The Bell’ pub. Stephen stumbles upon a pub while on the way to see his estranged wife. It seems familiar although he cannot remember ever being there. He looks in the window and sees a woman apparently arguing with her partner. Later, his now ageing mother reveals how she contemplated aborting Stephen before seeing a child through the window and realising that this was going to be her son (the adaptation diluted this to avoid mention of abortion).

 

In the novel, Stephen collapses after seeing the vision, temporarily falling into some sort of time warp. It is unsurprising that many viewers of the television adaptation were confused about the portrayal of a mixing of past and present in an otherwise “realistic” narrative, without the context of the discussions of different concepts of time. McEwan himself seemed conflicted over the scene, having his neurosurgeon hero of the much later novel Saturday despair of magic realist novels, particularly one where ‘One visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him’ (McEwan 2006, 67-68). The neuro-surgeon, Henry Perowne, argues that, as a brain surgeon, he knows ‘for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs’ and ‘the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible’ (McEwan 2006, 67-68).  The scene seemed to offend McEwan’s self-professed love of science.

 

But, perhaps, the uncanny and imaginary must break the conventional veneer of a rational, logical society which has been built on abuse and deceit. The trauma of the lost child is a cause of social breakdown and it is also a symptom of a crisis within humanity. The final episode of the first season of True Detective had a similar break with realism. There had been earlier signposting to enable viewers to process Rust’s vision of a whirlpool-like void above the head of the child-sacrificing villain. Rust mentioned several times that he experienced occasional hallucinations as a result of his previous time undercover with drug gangs. However, the visual presentation of the void is so striking and “real” that it should be considered as something more than mere hallucination. This is emphasised by Rust’s final speech at the end of the series. He tells his partner that when he saw the void, at the point of what seemed like his own imminent death, he felt the presence of his dead daughter. She brought with her an overwhelming sense of love, a love that was outside of the material corrupted world. Rust ends by saying that light seemed to be winning its battle with the dark. This may be a statement which is overly optimistic in view of the depths of depravity which our world is full of. There can only be hope that by letting light and love come through the traumatic void which our lost children leave behind, the material world can fill its own hole. 

The Missing ripples beyond history

The first series of the BBC drama The Missing is another of many crime programmes and films which centre on the disappearance or murder of a child. This series came out soon after the success of ITV’s Broadchurch, British TV companies are tapping into the media exposure of several high-profile real stories. In a Radio Times interview, the star of The Missing James Nesbitt says “a lot of people have mentioned the Madeleine McCann case” in its similarity to the series’ plot:

                “But it’s much more of a thriller than that. That’s not to say there aren’t thriller elements in any child abduction. But it’s the notion of dropping a pebble in water and the ripples…the ramifications are huge.

                It’s not just about the father and mother and immediate family. It’s about other people’s lives being affected over a course of time. That brings the thriller element.” (RT, 25-31 October 2014, p. 11)

                This interview aligns the fictional drama with real life while placing it back as a creative work. It’s interesting that Nesbitt refers to a pebble and ripples – in a way the McCann case could be seen as the pebble and this drama itself is one of the myriad ripples which have proceeded from it. Except, of course, the ripples have been crossing the surface for centuries, long before our technological media was invented. The ramifications are indeed huge, and far below the surface.

                The academic Jack Zipes published a translation of the very first edition of Grimm’s fairy tales. This is the edition before the Grimms censored, edited and sanitised the stories for middle-class families, upholding Christian values. The tales are apparently much closer to those passed down orally through communities over many years and include such gems as ‘How the Children Played at Slaughtering’ in which a group of children play at being a butcher and a pig and a boy cuts the throat of his little brother, only to be stabbed in the heart by his enraged mother. Unfortunately, the stabbing meant she left her other child alone in the bath, where he drowned.

In these early versions, those tales we think are familiar are also harsher: the stepmothers of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel were, originally, their mothers, Zipes believing that the Grimms made the change in later editions because they “held motherhood sacred”. So it is Snow White’s own mother who orders the huntsman to “stab her to death and bring me back her lungs and liver as proof of your deed. After that I’ll cook them with salt and eat them”, and Hansel and Gretel’s biological mother who abandons them in the forest.

In ‘The Children of Famine’ a mother threatens her daughters because there is nothing else to eat: “You’ve got to die or else we’ll waste away,” she tells them. In response, the children give up life: “We’ll lie down and sleep, and we won’t get up again until the Judgement Day arrives.”  (Guardian.com, 12 November 2014,http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers-fairytales-horror-new-translation)

This shows that lost children (not only lost as victims of violence, but also children lost to innocence who perpetrate violence…) are sadly nothing new. The last story recalls an infamous scene in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure when the young son, known as ‘Little Father Time’, feels the burden of his parents’ poverty and kills himself and his siblings. He leaves a suicide note saying “Done because we are too menny”. Narratives of lost children are perhaps the starkest, most powerful way to convey themes of poverty and social exclusion. They draw attention to the brutal realities of contemporary life in the time in which they are written. The crushing of future hopes is starkly apparent when a child is the victim.

But they are also a reminder of time itself. Hardy’s child who chooses death is called ‘Little Father Time’ because he acts and speaks with world-weariness even though he is only a young child. He is youth and age, life and death in one small package. A doctor in the novel asserts that the boy is an example of a modern child who sees the “terrors” of life too early and embodies “new views of life” different to the previous generation. The figure of the lost child has been and is an embodiment of the conflicts of the modern world but is also a more profound symbol of something beyond history. 

In the first series of The Missing, the narrative continually switches back and forth from the present day to eight years ago, when the boy Ollie is abducted. This is a common narrative device in many TV programmes, films and novels with all sorts of subjects. But it is most appropriate in narratives of lost children, where we are forced to consider a future curtailed, what might have been, and the past stretching back, also irrevocably altered as every past event becomes redefined at the point in history – beyond history – where the story is broken, a silence opens up, the pebble hits the pond and the ripples go on forever.