How can you make something original when everything has already been said by
Shakespeare or Kubrick or whoever else you admire? That's the question that has
plagued artists for as long as there has been art. It's what literary critic
Harold Bloom called "The Anxiety Of Influence" and on that note, I want to
talk about Stranger Things.
At first glance, this show feels completely unoriginal. Its 80s movie the
TV show, and is constantly referencing the works of Steven Spielberg, Stephen
King, and others. Yet even though it lives and breathes the ethos of the 80s,
Stranger Things somehow also feels unique. How did they do that? Last year,
video essayist Evan Pushack, creator of the Nerdwriter, posted a video on his
channel called Intertextuality: Hollywood's New Currency. If you haven't
seen that video, the thesis of his argument is this: a lot of Hollywood
sequels, remakes and reboots used references to their own history as a
frequent, but unsatisfying, replacement for actual drama. Khan: "My name is as Khan."
As an example, he points to scenes like this one in Star Trek Into Darkness where
Benedict Cumberbatch's character reveals that his name is Khan, a moment that only
works if you've seen the 1982 film the Wrath of Khan. He calls this cynical
strategy "weaponized intertextuality." Basically, it's fan service. Now, I'm not
here to dispute the argument in that essay, since I agree with it. But I want
to expand on it a bit. You see, what the nerdwriter is mostly talking about is
self reference. But as he also mentions, intertextuality as a whole is about how
any text shapes the meaning of another. There is a world of difference between
Star Trek Into Darkness referencing the Wrath of Khan and the Wrath of Khan
referencing Moby Dick. Real Khan: From hells heart I stab at thee.
Real Khan: for hates sake, I spit my last breath at thee. So good! Now Stranger Things is a form of intertextuality
that you'd call a pastiche, a work that imitates the style of another creator or
genre. It's sort of like the opposite of parody. Parody makes fun of common tropes.
Pastiche celebrates them. So Austin Powers: spy movie parody. Kingsman: spy
movie pastiche. With Stranger Things, I think there was a huge risk in
effectively doing the same thing that all of those self references do, just
with properties outside of your own canon. Replacing drama with "oh look thing
I recognize." If intertextuality plus cynically capitalizing on nostalgia
equals weaponized intertextuality, then it would have been very easy for
Stranger Things to be nothing more than weaponized pastiche. And that's becoming
its own phenomenon with films like the Lego Movie and Ready Player One. We
really are in the age of the pop-culture remix. But the most interesting thing to
me about Stranger Things isn't just that it uses 80's pop culture, but that it is
so often about how we communicate and understand each other through pop
culture. Mike, Lucas, and Dustin frequently settle arguments by using pop culture
metaphors to communicate more clearly. Dungeons & Dragons, the Lord of the Rings
and Star Wars have given them a code of ethics and a communal language. Dustin: "We
couldn't agree on what path to take so we split up the party and those trolls
took us out one by one and everything went to shit.
Mike: "You really wanna fight the demogorgon with your wrist rocket. That's like R2D2 going
to fight Darth Vader." Dustin: Nancy maybe Lucas: what if its the chief Dustin: Lando Calrissian! Lucas: Would you
shut up about Lando! A language older generations are not fluent in Chief: you said
he takes...what? Mirkwood? Mike: Mirkwood yeah. Chief: have you ever heard of Mirkwood?
Deputy: I have not that sounds made-up to me. Lucas: No it's from Lord of the Rings.
Dustin: Actually it's from the Hobbit. Using pop culture to communicate also ends up becoming a very literal
part of the story as well. In the first episode we see Joyce and her son, Will,
plan to go see the film Poltergeist. Later, when will gets trapped in
the upside-down, Joyce figures out a way to communicate with him through the
walls, just as the characters in poltergeist do. That shared experience
gave them the tools they needed to survive, and that's contrasted with other
pairs of children and parents who are completely unable to communicate.
And just as the characters understand each other through pop culture, the references
are also used to frame how the audience understands these characters. Eleven speaks
very little throughout the course of the show. Instead references are used to
characterize her and foreshadow her arc. It's a very effective tactic. The idea is
that you relate a character to at least two others from other pieces of fiction
and the audience will be left wondering which one the character will lean
towards. Eleven is constantly compared to ET both by the camera and in the plot.
She's on the run from the government, has supernatural abilities, and is hiding in
the suburbs with a young boy whose parents are unaware of her existence.
Major scenes include escaping on bikes and dressing up in a wig. The references
are so heavy in this direction that I wouldn't be surprised if the original
pitch of the series was "What if we made E.T. but E.T. was a young girl?" At the same
time, the peaceful innocence of ET is offset by references to two troubled
Stephen King protagonists, Charlie from firestarter and Carrie from well...Carrie.
Characters who are hunted and/or abused, but who have great supernatural power
that they use to cause a massive amount of violence, sometimes to innocent people.
Eleven is a dynamic character because there is an internal contradiction within her
that is articulated through intertextuality. The references paint a
spectrum of possibility for her character, leading us to wonder whether
her story will end with a tearful goodbye, or massive violence. Turns out,
sort of both. You can do this with a few of the other characters on the show as
well. Is Joyce, for example, going crazy but for good reason, like Richard
Dreyfuss is character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or is she
going literally crazy, like Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining. In
bringing new meaning to familiar tropes, The Duffer Brothers are able to overcome
The Anxiety Of Influence. In his book by that name, Harold Bloom argues that
poetry, and for our purposes, all art, is made in reaction to what came before.
Artists are driven by the paradoxical desire to both create something similar
to what our sources of inspiration have made, while also making something that
isn't derivative. In order to work ourselves out of that anxiety, we have to
engage in what he calls "creative misprision," which we can take to mean as
misreading. According to Bloom, artists need to willfully misinterpret their
predecessors work, and use that misreading to create something original.
Stranger Things takes the most familiar elements of 80s films and boils them
down to their most essential elements, fashioning a sort of mythic 80s that
sanitizes both that time period and its pop culture. The characters are
archetypes we've seen a hundred times before, but care is taken to put a little
twist on each of them. For instance, horror movies often have this weird
puritanical attitude about sex where the last survivor is always a virgin. In
Stranger Things, she's the first victim. Bloom outlines six ways that he feels
artists can overcome their influences, and there is a hierarchy to them. Now I
find these terms a little opaque and repetitive so in brief, the two lowest
forms are about revising the original work, making changes, or elaborating on
their arguments, while these three are all about purging yourself entirely from
influence. The final one, however, is really interesting. Bloom calls it
apophrades, or The Return Of The Dead, and it's when the poet stops running away
from his influences and instead invites comparisons. In that contest, they prove
victorious, overthrowing their precursor. Doing what
the precursor did, but even better than they did it. To the point that if people
didn't know which came first, they'd think that the precursors work was influenced
by you, instead of the other way around. Since stranger things is the child of so
many influences, I think it's impossible to put it firmly into any one of these
categories. In relation to ET, I think it's lower on the spectrum, since it
follows the original closely, but makes a swerve away from what the original did.
And yet, the show demonstrates such a mastery over its influences that it
managed to become a pop cultural touchstone, even for audiences who
haven't seen the films that inspired it. So for them, and perhaps for posterity
Stranger Things achieves apophrades, in that we can look at the genre films of the
80s through the lens of Stranger Things, and not just vice-versa. You don't have
to reinvent the wheel to be original. Embrace and understand tropes, and then
twist them in new ways. Intertextuality and influence
are inescapable. That's why you need to master your influences, or your
influences will master you. Thanks for watching everyone, and thank you to
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