So, I finally watched Stranger Things.
Launched in 2016, the series has been a massive success for Netflix, so it should not have been surprising to discover it was pretty good (thanks for making me watch it, Simon).
Set in a small Indiana town in the early ‘80s, Stranger Things tells the story of a group of D&D-playing kids who fight monsters from a mirror-image dimension they call ‘The Upside Down’. It is also a kaleidoscopic, kleptomaniac homage to ‘80s movies and TV shows. It has, pretty much single-handedly, created a genre that has become known as ‘kids on bikes’.
Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that 'Stranger Things' prompted people to give a name to a genre that sprang to life nearly 40 years earlier. Appropriately, tracing the development of ‘kids on bikes’ itself involves a bit of extra-dimensional fiddling about. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Goonies (1985), Stand by Me (1986) and the TV mini-series IT (1990) were, respectively, sci-fi, adventure, drama and horror; but they all had a structure and an aesthetic that is recognisable now as 'kids on bikes', despite the fact that nobody used the term in the ‘80s.
Stephen Spielberg’s E.T. is probably the best example, not least because - as I discovered on re-watching it - it's still a terrific movie. Like most of these films, it centres on a group (in this case a family) of kids living in an anonymous American suburb. They are slightly nerdy - playing D&D - and lightly supervised. This allows them to then have extraordinary - and in E.T.'s case, otherworldly - adventures. As children they are uniquely equipped to handle the events that unfold: both because of what they have learned from games and comics, and because they are able to see the world without the mundane familiarity that blinds adults to the extraordinary. They see and believe what sceptical adults dismiss as childish nonsense.
(Another reason why E.T. is a good example is that it contains the quintessential ‘kids on bikes’ image, of E.T. making Elliot’s bike fly across the face of a full moon, and closes with the defining ‘kids on bikes’ scene, as Elliot, E.T. and their gang escape on their bikes from the pursuing authorities across a suburban building site. The landscaping of the conventional adult dream becomes a fantastical childhood adventure.)
However, what I noticed most about E.T. this time round was how little I had noticed Dee Wallace the first time around. Wallace plays Mary, the recently divorced, emotionally fragile single mother of the three central characters. She is very obviously the inspiration for the character of Joyce Byers in Stranger Things, the recently divorced, emotionally fragile single mother of two of the central characters. But Joyce Byers is played by Gen X icon Winona Ryder and is hence a main character herself, whereas Mary is relegated to the scolding, fussy background.
Mind you, she gets more screen time than most parents in the original, ‘80s ‘kids on bikes’ movies. The parents in The Goonies, Stand by Me and IT appear only at the beginnings and endings, bookending adventures that focus on the kids. And unlike this first wave, Byers and many of the other parent figures in Stranger Things are relatively benign, especially when compared to the parents of Stand by Me and IT.
Both of these are adaptations of Stephen King books so perhaps it’s not surprising that they’re somewhat darker. Although they were made in the ‘80s, the children's adventures flash back to the ‘60s. Stand by Me is a pretty straightforward dramatic account of a group of kids who set out to find a dead body they have heard is somewhere in the nearby woods. IT is altogether sillier; it features a group of kids fighting an evil clown who lives in the sewers of their town, and then coming back together as adults twenty years later to finish the job.
In both, the parents - particularly the fathers - are not so much distracted (like Mary) as actively antagonistic. In Stand By Me, narrator Gordie’s father disparagingly compares him to his dead older brother, while his friend Chris’s family appears to be frighteningly violent. In IT, lead character Bill is neglected by his parents after the death of his younger brother (never be the brother of a King protagonist), and his friend Beverley’s father is outright abusive.
The world beyond the home, beyond the safety of the suburbs, is portrayed as dangerous, with terrors more tangible than monsters in the shape of homicidal bullies and baby-faced psychopaths (Ace Merrill in Stand By Me and Henry Bowers in IT). This was jolting for British Gen X’ers, who had gathered the impression from Happy Days and The Wonder Years that that American suburban childhood of the ‘50s and ‘60s was an idyll. In economic terms, of course, this had in some ways been true. A boom in post-war suburban development was coupled with a rising median income throughout the ‘50s and into the early ‘60s, filling American suburban homes with identikit families (white families, of course, this was still America, after all), comfortable couples, 3.5 children and a surfeit of entertainment and consumer goods. In 1950, 9% of Americans owned a TV; in 1959 that figure was almost 90%. Comics were booming; not just superheroes, but horror and sci fi too. And bicycle manufacturers were aggressively targeting the kids’ market.
Here were all the things you needed to have a ‘kids on bikes’ adventure: the fantastical worlds of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone; comic books like Tales from the Crypt and Universal horror movies full of information about how to kill a mythical beast; and a bike to get you there, and get you home again.
These ‘50s and ‘60s kids were the generation raised by Dr Spock, who broke with conventional child-rearing advice to recommend close emotional and physical contact between parent and child. They were going to grow up to be the Me Generation, the self-actualising, self-fulfilling, self-obsessed groovy young people of the ‘70s. As the ‘80s rolled in they were starting to have children of their own. How were they going to square their needs for individual expression with changing nappies? Is cocaine a good drug to be on when handling a toddler? Could they actually bear to grow up in time to raise kids of their own?
Perhaps the best example of this kind of parent is the ultimate manchild Roy Neary in Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which Spielberg has acknowledged as a kind of prequel to E.T.) We first meet Neary (Richard Dreyfus) playing with a toy train while ignoring his son’s pleas for help with his homework. Once he’s had his first ‘encounter’ with aliens he starts to actively drive his children away, obsessively chasing UFOs and building dioramas. Finally he abandons them entirely to go off to space with his new alien friends. (The family from E.T. has exactly the same composition as the one Neary leaves behind: a single mother, two boys and a small girl.)
Toy trains and dioramas have special meaning for Spielberg: he blew up a train set while making films as a kid, and on Indiana Jones the designer Norman Reynolds built models of the sets so that Spielberg could crawl around inside them while planning his shoots. We can see Roy Neary as Spielberg’s analogue for a film director, chasing a half glimpsed inspiration that will eventually carry him away. The whole film is an exploration of whether the creative life is compatible with family.
The arrival of this generation’s children coincided in the early ‘80s with an economic recession. Household incomes dropped from their late ‘70s high point; families became a more costly and stressful business. The mid-’80s saw the peak of US divorce rates, as well as a bulge in the number of households in which both parents took on paid work. Mom and Pop were out, sometimes not with each other, and their kids were letting themselves in with their latchkeys and fixing themselves some cereal in front of the TV.
These busy, harassed parents were starting to worry about what their kids were getting up to in - in that freighted term - their ‘absence’. In the UK (where the number of working mothers rose above 50% in the ‘80s), this is the period of terrifying public information films like The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water: stark warnings about the dangers of abandoned refrigerators and flooded quarries, about just how dangerous the world could be for children playing unsupervised. (These unsettling things, incidentally, are about as close as Britain got to a ‘kids on bikes’ genre of its own.)
Of course, there was more than just broken electrical appliances for the kids to play with. There were brand spanking new ones too. They had fancy new electronic gadgets like the Speak n’ Spell that E.T. reconfigures so he can phone home. They had weird and inexplicable pastimes like Dungeons and Dragons. They might even have had a computer, like David Lightman in War Games (1983). Look at all the stuff they have! Look at Elliot’s room in E.T. (‘This is no room… this is an accident,’ as Mary puts it), a chaotic pit of toys. Most of them, as he demonstrates to E.T., are toys from Star Wars (1977), made by Spielberg’s friend and collaborator George Lucas.
Star Wars established two cinema marketing principles. The first was that something that is ostensibly a kids’ movie - spectacle-driven, underwritten, genre-conforming - can be a hit of global proportions: in marketing parlance, a ‘four quadrant’ success (male, female, over-25 and under-25). And the second was that when you have one of these monster hits, you can market the heckins out of it. You can sell not only toys, but clothes and bed linen, tableware and Letraset stickers; junk to fill kids’ bedrooms all across America, all across the world.
Once these realisations sunk in there was suddenly a lot of money available to make kids’ films, and to make films about kids. Films about kids having the kinds of adventures the writers and directors had dreamed about having when they were young; films that explored the adult mysteries of their own childhoods and their anxieties about their kids’ childhoods. They could inhabit the role of the ‘good’ parent by lavishing child audiences with high concepts and huge budgets, and make stories in which children - despite divorce and working parents and frightening modernity - pull through, armed with mountains of comics and gadgets and TV programmes and toys and movies.
Stranger Things, then, is an odd concatenation of imaginary childhood settings. Its primary location is a fictionalised ‘80s that was first willed into being 40 years ago, but it is also sprinkled with fainter traces of the fictionalised ‘60s childhoods that existed as flashbacks within the first wave. This fictionalised ‘80s is altogether kinder than the real thing was, in that its children wholeheartedly embrace each other’s oddities and quirks, while its prosperous suburban setting anticipates the economic comfort of the late ‘80s boom.
Stranger Things is also much kinder to parents than the first wave had been. Parents’ back-stories are explored sympathetically, and they are shown as having legitimate pressures and preoccupations that draw understandable emotional responses. In Stranger Things parenthood is a goal, a redemption; as with the first wave of ‘kids on bikes’, at heart it is a story about parenthood.
When Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers undertakes precisely the sort of unhinged craft project that Richard Dreyfus’s Roy Neary indulges in, she does not distance herself from her children but instead is trying to bring them back to her. She strings her house with Christmas lights in order to communicate with her lost son, Will, who has been abducted into the netherworld of The Upside Down. Trophy suburban mom Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono) handles her children with deft empathy and careful listening. And just as Stephen Spielberg discovered that working with the child actors on E.T. made him consider becoming a parent himself, so the gruff, traumatised Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour) finds that going on an supernatural adventure with a bunch of kids helps him rediscover his protective, heroic role as a father, while jock-with-a-heart-of-gold Steve relishes his surrogate-father role, ‘babysitting’ the younger children throughout.
Stranger Things was made by the Duffer Brothers, who were born in 1984, making them younger than E.T. They are the children of precisely those ‘80s parents who fret in the background of first wave ‘kids on bikes’ movies. But what Stranger Things seems to be saying is that their parents needn’t have worried so much; that yes, ‘80s kids might have been left on their own an awful lot, at the mercy of a potentially dangerous world, but at least they got an extraordinary revolution in children’s entertainment to while away their lonely afternoons.
Apart from The Goonies. The Goonies was shit.
For more on ‘80s movies:
I LOVE Stranger Things! I always appreciate it when I find some morsel of popular culture that I can use to bond with my children and my daughter also loves this so it’s a win:win! Have to say I’m hanging my head in shame though because I also love The Goonies. Maybe it caught me at a susceptible age, but I think it’s a rollicking adventure - and who can resist that Cyndi Lauper song?
Never thought of Stand By Me as part of the same genre but I can see your thinking. Wonderful film and equally wonderful novella.
I had never really considered the idea of parenthood as a feature of these productions before but you make a really good point about the way that parents perceive their role and are perceived by their children. I think the baby boom generation certainly felt more keenly that they had to grow up on their own - that’s certainly the vibe I got from my parents. I remember my mum saying that she and my dad always made a concerted effort to tell us ‘I love you’, because that wasn’t necessarily something they got from their parents - and my grand parents were wonderful people, I hasten to add! Lots of food for thought. Little sad you didn’t mention The Red Hand Gang though 😉
Beautiful!