“The gate…I opened it.”
What if,
instead of getting on a spaceship and going home,
E.T. stayed in suburbia and became Elliott’s love interest?
“E.T., I love you.”
As wacky as that sounds,
this is essentially the premise of Stranger Things.
And while it’s plain as day to see Spielberg’s influence on the series,
it’s worth digging into the underlying psychology
of this particular update to the original inspiration:
Why make the alien an object of romantic and sexual attraction?
“You look at her all, like, ‘Hi, El!
El!
I love you so much!’”
In fact, this whole story of monsters and upheaval,
triggered by the arrival of a strange girl,
could be read as an allegory for the onset of puberty.
“I felt it everywhere.
Everywhere.”
When Eleven shows up, the lives of four inexperienced boys
are rocked by forces they find both scary and awesome.
“She’s our friend and she’s crazy!”
And that take over their bodies,
making them feel they’re not the same people anymore.
As the catalyst who introduces the kids to this disturbing
yet magnetic new reality, Eleven is the symbol of puberty itself.
“You’re blind— blind because you like that a girl’s not grossed out by you.”
And at the same time,
she’s the character we watch experience puberty most intensely.
“And I never leave!
Nothing ever happens!”
So here’s our take
on how Eleven’s arc can be read as a parable of puberty,
and how this brave and unusual character shows us
how to find power
in even the most trying, strange phases of life.
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Eleven is the ultimate ‘strange thing’ of the show’s title.
“Do you think she's acting weird?”
“You're asking if the weirdo is acting weird?”
When she shows up in season one,
she is like an alien to Mike and his friends.
“I’ve just never seen a kid with a tattoo before.”
And the Duffer brothers
actually told Millie Bobby Brown to base her performance on E.T.
There’s a pretty relatable metaphor operating here:
prepubescent boys easily might see girls as if they’re another species.
"We never would've upset you if we knew you had superpowers."
Small touches reinforce
Eleven’s association with the early cues of adolescence:
she regularly bleeds, which is something her peers haven’t seen before
and which freaks everyone out.
She causes boys to lose control over themselves and their bodies.
And she disrupts the social order,
creating friction in a same-sex friend group.
"Because she's trying to sabotage our mission.
Because she's a traitor!"
When the androgynous-looking Eleven first meets the boys,
she could easily be one of them.
“You think you can steal from me, boy?”
And it's noteworthy
that she doesn't really see any difference.
She even starts taking off her shirt in front of the guys,
which sends them into a panic.
“Over there?
That’s the bathroom.
Privacy.
Get it?”
So, while Eleven has been raised more or less oblivious
to any gender divide,
it’s clearly ingrained in the boys’ mindset,
and they feel the need to teach it to her.
Eleven’s nickname, given to her by Mike,
“Maybe we can call you ‘El.’
Short for Eleven.”
sounds like the French word for ‘she,’
reinforcing that she represents the feminine.
Mike quickly gives her a makeover to make her more girlish
and distinguish her from the boys.
“Pretty.”
It’s striking that he takes so much agency in shaping Eleven
to match his idea of what “a girl” is like.
It’s as if she’s a blank slate
he projects his conceptions of sexuality onto–
and that supports the sense that she represents puberty
in general here.
“Do you like Eleven?”
“What?
No.
Ew.
Gross.”
It’s significant, too,
that Eleven’s arrival coincides with Will’s disappearance.
“Do you really think it was a coincidence that we found her on Mirkwood,
the same place where Will disappeared?”
“That is weird”
On one level, it’s as if Will has been lost to,
or taken over, by puberty.
And he’s not the only young person
whose life changes when Eleven enters the fold–
days later, Mike’s older sister Nancy loses her virginity to Steve
and Nancy’s best friend Barb ends up in the Upside Down.
“NANCY!”
Eleven is the one who opens the gate to the Upside Down,
which feels like a metaphorical space for the loneliness that can come
with maturing for an adolescent.
Our fear of the changes happening within can alienate us from others.
“He might get irritable.
He might lash out”
In the season 2 premiere, the first sign that Will isn’t himself
is when he starts to envision the arcade he’s at with his friends
turning into the Upside Down world–
suddenly he’s all alone, cold and unsure.
Even though harmony is restored and Will is eventually saved,
the entrance of Eleven (or puberty)
effectively ends the boys’ innocent, carefree childhood.
The monsters she unleashes,
by opening the gate, reflect the dark, terrifying side of adolescence.
And the monsters never really go away– an individual beast can be defeated,
but another always seems to show up to take its place.
“It’s almost more like a-a feeling.”
Thus through the metaphorical space
of the Upside Down and the suffering
that this transition causes Will and his friends,
the series captures just how traumatic the changes of puberty can be.
And they articulate a sadness that—
for all that's gained with the access to a new world—
something precious is also lost.
"What matters is that he is your best friend.
And then this girl shows up and starts living in your basement,
and all you ever want to do is pay attention to her."
Eleven isn’t just a symbol of the boys’ puberty,
through her, we get to see a girl’s experience of this phase.
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”
Eleven begins as a very unusual girl who wants to be normal,
and this is a feeling that puberty brings out in all of us,
as our rapid changes might make us fear we’re freaks.
“What’s wrong with you?
What is wrong with you?”
Like the innocent child before puberty,
Eleven has grown up totally cut off
from the larger world’s cultural expectations.
But she’s suddenly given a new set of social rules.
“You go to school dances with someone that,
you know, someone that you like”
Without a mother figure to look up to,
“Do I have a mother?”
she’s fascinated by Nancy
as a model of what it is to be a teenage girl.
“Pretty.”
There’s also something inside Eleven
that gravitates toward typical teen girl things
and feels excited by this new world.
“You look beautiful.”
One of the trickiest things about this time of life is that
these characters have one foot in adolescence
and one still in childhood.
“Will wanted me to give him some space so I’m giving him a few feet.”
They’re on the border between the Upside Down and our regular world.
“You know when a view master— when it gets like—”
“Caught between two sides?”
“Yeah, yeah like that.
Like one side’s our world.
And the other…
the other slide is the Upside Down.”
So to move more firmly toward maturity,
Eleven has to take steps to assert and differentiate herself,
and to free herself from adult control.
Increasingly frustrated by her house arrest,
she turns into the textbook hormonal, irritable, impulsive teen.
“I hate you!”
The way she abuses her powers,
when upset, is like a heightened version of the average adolescent's mood swings.
She acts out the typical teen rebellion- blatantly disobeying Hopper’s house rules.
“Rule number one: always keep the curtains drawn”
and running away to see her long lost sister Kali,
who brings out her punk side.
“Bitchin’’”
In this next stage of teenhood, instead of trying so hard to blend in,
she’s ready to stand out
and express her feeling of being a freak.
“I'm just curious, you know,
why all of a sudden you look like some kind of MTV punk.”
During this rebellious phase,
she might remind us of the title character of Carrie–
another young woman whose powers are fueled by
her uncontrollable emotions and rage at what she’s suffered.
“[chants] Plug it up!”
As Eleven leans into her darker side,
she briefly considers going full Carrie by using her abilities for violent revenge.
“You hurt mama.”
But unlike the social outcast Carrie,
Eleven is motivated by the desire to protect her friends.
“There's nothing for you back there.
They cannot save you, Jane.”
“No.
But I can save them.”
who have always seen her difference as a good thing.
“So, do you think Eleven was born with her powers, like the X-Men,
or do you think she acquired them, like Green Lantern?”
So there’s a message here
that all those things we find weird about ourselves
and are tempted to hide, are actually cool–
as long as we surround ourselves with the right people, who get that.
"And besides, why do we even need weapons anyway?
We have her."
"She shut one door!"
"With her mind!"
For a long time, Eleven views her powers like a dark curse–
echoing how teen girls tend to internalize
hatred and disgust for their bodies.
“We’re looking for some stupid monster.
But did you ever stop to think that maybe she’s the monster?”
Her supernatural abilities are mixed up
with pain and anger at the trauma she’s experienced—
just as a teen's great developing adult potential
can coincide with dark feelings and confusion.
But when Eleven finds a way to use her powers for good,
they no longer make her feel so monstrous.
“I’m the monster.”
“No, no El, you’re not the monster.
You saved me”
“I can do it.”
So she embodies
how young women need to find an outlet for their emotions.
“I want you to find something from your life.
Something that angers you.
Now channel it.”
to channel whatever rage or frustration they feel into something
that gives them self-worth.
“Her physical therapist taught her to channel all her rage into sports.”
It’s symbolic that in season two she closes the gate,
which resembles a wound,
alluding to her vision of Dr. Brenner.
"You have a wound, Eleven, a terrible wound.”
So the best thing about Eleven’s powers is
that she can use them to heal herself.
In other words,
by embracing and not fearing what’s weird and scary within us,
we can empower ourselves.
“What you can do is incredible.
It makes you very special, Jane”
We can be strong enough
to face and process where the confusion and shame come from
to work through those feelings, instead of letting them eat us alive.
“They won’t understand.”
“Eleven would.”
“She would?”
“Yeah, she always did.”
“If we’re both going crazy, we’ll go crazy together, right?”
“Yeah, crazy together.”
Stranger Things puts forward the argument that friendship
is the antidote to the pain and confusion of puberty.
“What is ‘friend?’”
“Is she serious?”
“Um, a friend is—”
“—Someone that you’d do anything for.”
In season two, the Shadow Monster can only live in cold temperatures.
“He likes it cold.”
And this coldness it desires really symbolizes isolation.
In the end, Joyce and Jonathan use heat to exorcise the monster out of Will—
but the other source of warmth,
in this scene,
is the love of the family and friends gathered around his bedside.
Likewise, Eleven finds salvation in her new group of friends
who become her chosen family.
“I never gave up on you.”
And the show offers an optimistic vision of relationships
during this phase of life—
Eleven and her friends figure out how to navigate
these new challenges together
“Do you wanna dance?”
“I don't know how.”
“I don't either.
Do you want to figure it out?”
As the person who opens the gate to the Upside Down
and the only one with the power to close it,
Eleven is the bridge between two worlds.
Just like puberty itself,
she brings a lot of discomfort and unwanted change for kids
who thought they were fine as they were.
“You hurt me.
Do you understand?”
But, as her story shows,
there are also amazing things that come along with the bad—
like a new sense of autonomy and identity,
the introduction to adult adventures and pleasures,
and the kinds of firsts that we remember for the rest of our lives.
Even though her appearance causes a rupture in the established order,
it ends up making everyone's lives more interesting and deep
in surprising ways.
“She’s basically a wizard.”
“She has superpowers.”
“More like a yoda.”
We may not all be so lucky in our experiences of puberty
to find such amazing friends—
and for some of us, that feeling that
the girls or boys you like are ‘aliens’ may stick around for a while.
“And plus she skateboards, so she's pretty awesome.”
“Awesome?
You haven't even spoken a word to her.”
“I don't have to.
I mean, look at her.”
But we can look to Eleven for perspective on how to survive,
not just puberty, but any difficult transition.
“I can fight.”
“Better than any of us.”
She offers us the playbook for how to slay the monsters that terrify us:
Build unbreakable friendships,
“Friends don’t lie.”
channel our painful emotions into healing ourselves,
“No more”
and know that our own strangeness is our ultimate superpower.
"She's a weirdo."
"Why does that matter?
The X-Men are weirdoes."