Noah Schnapp – Memphis Flyer

When it comes to film and TV, my viewing experience is different from yours. The average American sees four films in the theater every year. In 2019, I’m on pace to see well over a hundred films in theaters and probably at least an additional hundred films at home.

I’m also a filmmaker, which makes me a functionalist. When I watch something, I think in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Does a scene do what the filmmaker intended it to do? Does it transmit the information and convey the emotional impact needed at this moment in the piece? “Does it work?” is a subtly different question than “Is it good?” A film or show can “work,” but the piece itself can be bad. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is one of the most loathsome films of the decade, but it works because it effectively uses all the little tricks of film grammar to make you sympathize with a guy we first meet slaughtering Iraqi women and children. I recognize the craftsmanship, but you couldn’t pay me to watch it again — and I got paid to watch it the first time.

(l to r) Sadie Sink, Noah Schnapp, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and Caleb McLaughlin

It’s easy for me to crawl up my own … crawlspace and just tell everybody to pack it in and go watch Shoplifters because the modest little Japanese film about a dysfunctional family of petty criminals rocked my world. But as a reviewer who writes for a general audience, I feel like it’s my duty to be aware of and reveal my biases, so even if you don’t agree with me, you can say, “Well, he wasn’t into Fast & Furious 27: Bald Men Punching Each Other, but it sounds like something I’d like.”

All this is to say, I am an absolute sucker for Stranger Things.

Yeah, there it is. I admit it. Matt and Ross Duffer have my number. I am powerless against their Spielbergian riffing. I understand at some level that Stranger Things, whose third season premiered on Netflix on Independence Day, is basically just Happy Days if it was set 30 years later and directed by John Carpenter. I understand that I would use “cheap ’80s pastiche” as a withering criticism for most other shows. I think the level of nostalgia the show trades in is probably unhealthy. And yet, here I am, ravenously chomping down on it and then sopping up the sauce with a biscuit.

In my defense, Stranger Things still works. The ensemble cast of teenagers, led by English actress Millie Bobby Brown as the psychic superweapon known as Eleven, is one of the finest on any screen right now. And at least there is an acknowledgment of the passing of time. The first season’s core group — The Party, as they refer to themselves in D&D terms — of Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Will (Noah Schnapp), and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), with the second season addition of Max (Sadie Sink), begin season three united, then, as any group of kids do, start to slowly come apart. Dustin’s pet project Cerebro, named for Professor X’s telepathic enhancer, is really just a souped-up shortwave antenna he wants to use to contact his girlfriend from Utah he met while away at summer camp. Sure, like he’s got a girlfriend in Utah, right?

The onset of puberty is hitting The Party pretty hard. Will and El have discovered puppy love, until her guardian Hopper (David Harbour) intervenes, and Max teaches El when it’s time to “dump his ass.” This group discord comes at an inopportune time, as mysterious forces are once again messing with the portal to the Upside Down, and the spectral Mind Flayer is back, this time with a side order of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Reagan ’80s had a lot of good movies, but there was a lot not to like. Stranger Things season three points more clearly toward the bad parts, beginning with the soundtrack. The first two seasons were awash with the rediscovery of vintage synth sounds, while the new crop of songs draws from the pop sludge that dominated the airwaves in 1985. The corporate colonization of the economy is represented by the new mall, which is shiny on the surface but evil on the inside. Joyce (Winona Ryder, effortlessly incredible) feels her job in Downtown slipping away and distracts herself with yet another paranormal investigation. Economic insecurity manifesting as creeping paranoia was a subtext in the ’80s horror and sci-fi films the show references, and that remains as relevant as ever. Maybe William Faulkner understood the real secret of Stranger Things‘ success when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Unlike a movie studio or traditional broadcast network, Netflix is not in the business of appealing to a mass audience with each new release. Instead, for their original productions, the streaming service tries to create shows that will find a niche audience. The business model for a show like NBC’s America’s Got Talent involves delivering ads to the largest number of people at once. But Netflix doesn’t sell ads. It sells subscriptions, and its execs know that it will only take one great show to hook someone into paying that monthly fee. Netflix doesn’t release rating numbers, but shows such as Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Sense8, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have enjoyed critical praise while amassing large enough loyal audiences to justify their existence. In the traditional advertising model, the interests of the networks are more closely aligned with their advertisers, but selling subscriptions directly to the audience switches that allegiance to the fans.

The latest successful product of this realignment of forces is Stranger Things. Netflix took a chance on a pair of twin brothers from North Carolina, Matt and Ross Duffer, a pair of newbies with a killer pitch: What if we remade all of the films of the 1980s at once? Well, not all ’80s movies, just the low- to mid-budget sci-fi and horror films of the type Hollywood rarely makes any more. Like The Goonies, the heart of the story lies with a group of precocious kids. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is introduced as the dungeon master in the midst of the weekly Dungeons and Dragons session with fellow tween dweebs Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Will (Noah Schnapp). After a 10-hour bout of snack food and polyhedral dice, the boys bike home, but Will is intercepted in the dark woods of rural Indiana by a sinister, faceless monster who kidnaps the boy into a spooky parallel dimension that resembles the spirit world from Poltergeist. The next morning, Will’s mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder), calls the police, sending Chief Hopper (David Harbour) on a search for the missing boy.

Winona Ryder

Meanwhile, a young girl wanders out of the woods. Disoriented and almost mute, she has a shaved head and a tattoo on her wrist identifying her as “11.” When the owner of a diner offers her aid, a group of shadowy government agents show up in pursuit. Led by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), the staff of Hawkins National Laboratory seem to be somehow involved with the monster’s parallel universe and responsible for Eleven’s telekinetic powers, whose depths are slowly revealed as the series progresses through eight episodes.

Matarazzo, Brown, and Wolfhard channel ’80s horror.

The Duffer Brothers follow the Tarantino formula of creating a pastiche out of loosely related genre films, taking images and moments from films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Stand by Me, and Flight of the Navigator and sculpting them into something fresh. Stranger Things subverts as it mimics. Mike’s older sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), escapes the sexual punishment aspect of ’80s horror, while her prudish bestie, Barb (Shannon Purser), disappears into the netherworld. The crumbling Midwest of the Reagan era is painstakingly reconstructed, and the Duffers’ meticulous world-building pays off again and again, such as the way they luxuriate in 1983’s lack of cell phones, allowing them to keep information selectively hidden from their characters while letting the audience in on the bigger picture.

None of that would work without good characters, and Stranger Things has those in abundance, led by Winona Ryder in pedal-to-the-metal parental hysterics mode. The other adult standout is Harbour as the deeply damaged police chief, haunted by memories of his dead child. The heart of the show is Millie Brown as Eleven, whose combination of spooky intensity and wide-eyed innocence personifies the appeal of Stranger Things.