21 pop culture moments in 2017 that spoke to the zeitgeist
By Amy Woolsey
Stranger Things 2. Image: Courtesy Netflix
Stranger Things
When Stranger Things won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble at the SAG Awards, actor David Harbour used his acceptance speech as a “call to arms”. He spoke passionately about the importance of art, kindness, and unity, and the celebrities in attendance responded with a rousing ovation. My response was: “Huh?” Like, I admire your enthusiasm, buddy, but Stranger Things is flagrantly retro ‘80s pastiche. It couldn’t be less relevant.
Oh, how things changed.
I don’t know if it’s because the show drastically improved, or I was just in the right mood, or I read too much into escapist pop culture nowadays. But after the first season left me indifferent, Stranger Things season 2 devastated me. Suddenly, every character and relationship seemed precious, like the essence of goodness. (Don’t even talk to me about Bob.) The nostalgia, which I previously dismissed as trite, now felt honest, shot through with exquisite melancholy; it wasn’t a means of retreating from the present, but a means of confronting it.
Like most genre fiction, Stranger Things deals in metaphors. In season 2, a monster seemingly made of pure darkness invades the sleepy town of Hawkins, Indiana, causing pumpkin patches to rot and unleashing an army of demon-dogs. Other than a somewhat on-the-nose comparison to mind flayers, Dungeons & Dragons creatures that view themselves as a “master race”, there’s no attempt to explain the monster. You can see it as an incarnation of trauma, or depression, or evil; it doesn’t really matter. All we need to know is that it’s bad.
Rather than diluting the threat, this elusiveness makes it all the more urgent. How do you fight something you can’t define? For once, a sequel raises its stakes, and it pays off. An individual Demogorgon is scary. A shadow hive mind that infects the earth and possesses people’s psyches and keeps growing is downright terrifying. Deep down, you know this is the sort of story where the good guys win in the end, but for a while, things look pretty freaking bleak.
Watching Harbour’s speech now, I want to weep.