Kathleen Hudson
Abstract: The Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-2017) negotiates the boundaries of genre and gender in its depictions of female rage. While ‘strong women’ archetypes in 1980s horror and science fiction novels and films are often labelled problematically ‘other’, the proactive emotional investment of characters such as Joyce Byers and Eleven positions female anger, particularly when directed against a patriarchal representative, as a source of power. This power moreover affirms female identity, denying the impulse to marginalize angry women as irredeemably ‘unfeminine’ or hyper-feminine. Joyce Byers’ furious performance of ‘motherhood’ and Eleven’s rejection patriarchal oversight subvert the popular classification of female rage as monstrous. These characters’ constructive emotionality suggest an unease within nostalgic re-imaginings of the Reagan years, as well as contemporary developments in the era of Trump and the #MeToo movement in which female indignation has emerged as a viable form of socio-political expression.
Introduction
The political events that defined 2016 – the year in which the Netflix series Stranger Things was released – sparked a wave of female rage in the United States of America. In November of that year the first female major party presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, narrowly lost the election to Donald Trump, a man who had openly bragged in the past about sexually assaulting women. Discourses on women’s health, sexual commodification, gender identity, and ‘family values’ dominated political and social life and exposed profound, seemingly irreconcilable divisions in the national ideology. Moreover, the language applied to Clinton, in particular, illuminated a pervasive assumption that women in public spaces must repress their emotional responses as part of a culturally-informed behavioral standard. Gendered norms problematized any actions or words made by women that might be construed as aggressive, rendering those who allegedly violated this standard alternately ‘unfeminine’ or monstrously hyper-feminine. “Censorious anger” was widely identified as a “liability” for women, to the point where one critic noted that many “are so sure that our resentments — especially any resentments toward men — are corrosive, and make us appear pathetic and vengeful, that we ask for divine help to simply stop feeling them” (Traister).
The concept that angry or frustrated women threaten both socio-political stability and gender identity itself is hardly a new one. Midcentury psychology and sociology, such as that organized in Orville G. Brim Jr.’s “Table of Traits Assigned to Male and Female” (1958), based off Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales’ materials in Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (1955), suggests that “Quarrelsomeness,” “Revengefulness,” and “Insistence on rights” are not only traits that are primarily female but are also “incongruent” or contradictory characteristics of the proper ‘performance’ of that gender (Brim 203). While based on a faulty understanding of biology, it hardly matters whether such assumptions are scientifically accurate or not. As Kate Millet argues in her examination of this study in Sexual Politics, in many social discourses that define gender roles “the vices of the oppressed and all their serviceable virtues are acknowledged, with the usual implication that the under class […] is expected to bear its ignoble status with a better fortitude and a more accommodating mien than it does” (Millet 232). Female anger and frustration, regardless of how justified such emotions might be, are frequently characterized as irredeemably and almost monstrously paradoxical parts of female identity, and thus subject to strict social and personal policing.
The Duffer Brother’s Netflix series Stranger Things openly marketed itself as a homage to the 1980s. Featuring 90s ‘It Girl’ Winona Ryder and a collection of stock characters and familiar tropes plucked from a number of beloved films and books, the show incorporated a patchwork of popular culture which signaled a return to a politically and socially complex decade and suggested that we view this period, at least initially, through the lens of sentimental nostalgia. However, deviations from recognizable cultural references provide audiences with new negotiations of gender politics. For example, in the show’s second season Eleven is tasked by Kali to use her telekinetic abilities to move a disused train compartment from one end of a field to another, and by tapping into an inner source of power she manages to do so. This moment is taken directly from the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back, the second installment of the original Star Wars trilogy. In this film protagonist Luke Skywalker is taught to use the ‘Force’ to move objects without physically touching them. However, the homage in Stranger Things differs from its source material in two very important ways. Firstly, both trainee and mentor in the show are female. Secondly, instead of freeing oneself from aggression, as Yoda instructs Luke to do in Empire, in Stranger Things Kali tells Eleven to “find something from your life… something that angers you” and use the emotions those memories inspire to accomplish her goal (2.07). Unlike Luke, who is told that fear, anger, and hate lead only to suffering, Eleven interrogates and embraces feelings of resentment and channels those emotions into a constructive manifestation of rage.
Though initially coded as recognizable female archetypes drawn from the horror and science fiction films of the 1970s and 80s, Stranger Things characters Eleven and Joyce Byers speak to a contemporary moment. At the beginning of 2017 many disaffected voters, despite the prevalence of rhetoric that identified female fury as monstrous, began more actively embracing the image of a righteously angry “nasty woman” whose emotional response is a natural reaction to social injustice.[1]Protesters turned out in force for the Women’s March in January 2017, just a few days after the presidential inauguration, and women soon began running for political office in record numbers. The #YesAllWomen and #MeToo movements emerged as a parallel, related attempt to promote female-centered narratives and thus expose the full extent of sexual harassment and gender-based violence in a variety of professional and social situations. These Twitter hashtags offered platforms through which women and men could share stories of suffering, abuse, and alienation, providing a plethora of real-world examples of the widespread impact of rape culture. They eventually became just a few of the more well-known movements gaining ground after 2016 that utilized female anger and the female narrative as a means of enacting social change. The instant popular appreciation for Eleven and Joyce as well as the full-throated calls by the show’s fans for ‘Justice for Barb’, referencing a character who is on one of the lowest levels of a high school hierarchy and who is killed in Season One, underscores the Stranger Things viewing audience’s willingness to not only accept complex women characters but to also utilize politicized anger in defense of those who are unfairly marginalized or abused. Rejecting self-censorship and recharacterizing their own emotional narratives, women have increasingly accepted that, as Laurie Penny’s Teen Vogue article suggests, “Most Women You Know Are Angry — and That’s All Right” (Penny).
Both conforming to and deviating from the generic tropes that inform their characterizations, Eleven and Joyce’s attitudes and attributes in Stranger Things problematize the allure of uninterrogated nostalgia and recontextualize negotiations of female anger in both the show’s setting and in contemporary discourse. Living on the border between monstrosity and victimhood, Eleven and Joyce suggest that anger against a regressive regime is justified and constructive when undermining oppressive systems and developing personal identity. Both women are positioned in opposition to the monstrosity and/or incompetence of the ‘father’, and their weaponized anger is most often depicted as an affirmation of the self. Perhaps most critically, Eleven and Joyce’s depictions suggest that anger does not diminish one’s gender identity – it may complicate reading of gender from a socio-cultural perspective, but ultimately female anger does not detract from either Joyce’s role as a mother or Eleven’s ‘coming of age’ story. Boyish ‘Final Girls’, androgynous ‘others’, and the bald-shaved almost-mother Ellen Ripley from the Alien film franchise haunt the text, invoking popular and critical discourses while complicating easy assumptions regarding gender and emotional self-expression. Though heavily reliant on 80s novels and films as source materials and hampered by an overarching reluctance to compromise ‘heroic’ male characters, Stranger Things pushes the boundaries of its own ‘nostalgia’ by inviting re-imaginings of female anger in both new socio-political contexts and classic cultural works.
Part One: Man creates monsters
Eleven both defies and re-imagines 1980s gender norms from the moment she is introduced. Sporting a shaved head and a tattoo of the number from which she takes her name, and clad only in a hospital gown, she is at once both a vulnerable girl-child and a powerful potential monster, a prepubescent Ripley. She has escaped from Hawkins Lab, a government-funded research center, and a series of flashbacks reveals that Eleven has been abused there, forced to develop her powers under the supervision of the ominous Dr. Brenner. The relationship between Eleven and Brenner echoes a father/daughter dynamic – she calls him ‘Papa’ and he is responsible for raising her – while also suggesting the amoral corporate exploitation, the obsession with constructing and mass-marketing hyper-masculine violence, that shapes the Alien universe (Caldwell). Eleven’s telekinetic powers and ability to ‘dream-walk’ between dimensions violate the boundaries of known science and moreover affect Eleven physically and psychologically – her telekinesis gives her nosebleeds, and she is only able to enter other worlds while in a state of intense isolation and sensory deprivation.
There is a long-standing cultural connection, noted by Barbara Creed, between menstruation and the ‘otherness’ of vampires and witches, and Eleven’s use of her powers immediately evokes a number of gendered signifiers (Creed 74). As with Carrie White from the 1974 novel and 1976 film Carrie and Regan McNeil from the 1971 novel and 1973 film The Exorcist, the overlap of blood, isolation, and superhuman abilities throughout Eleven’s development echoes a common conflation of female identity and supernatural power in Gothic horror and emphasizes Eleven’s liminal prepubescence. Both Carrie and Regan are similarly cursed with an alienating ‘otherness’ which manifests through female-specific bodily abjection, the horror of burgeoning sexual maturity. The advent of Carrie’s first menstrual cycle, prefaced by a “sensual, even erotic” interlude, results in horrific bullying by her peers and rejection by her mother, and for Regan the lurking promise of sexual development is made grotesque when an “invasion” by a “male devil” inspires acts of self-harm, most notably in the infamous crucifix masturbation scene (Creed 79, 32). Carrie, Regan, and Eleven all possess inhuman strength or powers that threaten the (often masculine) authority figures who attempt to control them, and it is notably only through these characters’ relationships with their mothers that they find some semblance of identity (for better or for worse). Charlie McGee in the 1980 novel and 1984 film Firestarter also displays these qualities, although her abilities are accompanied by a problematic pleasure which again underscores cultural and pseudo-scientific fears of female autonomy and empowerment. Such abilities suggest a broader repudiation of female anger – like her predecessors, when Eleven uses her powers she makes herself and others bleed, and blood literally attracts the show’s actual monster, the Demogorgon, thus framing female rage as inherently uncontrollable and destructive.
Such ‘othered’ power is also quasi-coded as violating the very gender norms it ostensibly explores. Eleven is a version of the “Final Girl” of 1980s slasher horror, the “transformed boy” with her gender-neutral name, shorn head, and reliance on oversized male clothing, a female who is ‘unsexed’ by her own identity and who shares traits with the “decidedly androgynous” monster (Clover 55). Eleven is frequently mistaken for a boy, and this not only upends attempts to understand and contain her, but also makes her, in the words of one schoolyard bully, “a freak” (1.07). When this character later tries to describe Eleven’s monstrosity to a group of incredulous adults, his main source of offence seems to be that “she doesn’t even look like a girl” (1.07). Such descriptors suggest the anxieties explored in horror films such as Sleepaway Camp(1983), where the ‘big reveal’ hinges on an act of forced ‘re-gendering’, or in Alien, where the alien Xenomorph impregnates both men and women without discrimination using its monstrous combination of pseudo-genitalia, effectively erasing boundaries between the genders in its relentless quest to reproduce and consume.
Eleven’s monstrous un-gendering (or hyper-gendering) is also problematized when the all-male friend group, the show’s central characters, give Eleven a ‘make-over’ so she can integrate more effectively. This is ostensibly a comedic moment during which, as Sarah Gilligan describes it, the “discerning male” assigns “value to the beauty of the ‘real’ woman” (Gilligan 171, 169). The scene clearly references Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and illuminates Eleven’s ‘alienness’, yet when she is given a dress and a wig, Eleven assumes the identity of the ‘normal’ child free from any special abilities. In her more feminine form she is identified by the main male character, Mike Wheeler, as “pretty” (1.04). He adds “…good… pretty good” at the end of his compliment to try to cover his growing attraction, but the underlying assertion is clear – the girl who represses her powers (and by extension the aggressive, monstrously feminine tendencies those powers suggest) is labelled “pretty” and “good” as opposed to ‘ugly’ and ‘bad’. Eleven seems pleased with the appellation, although the note of relief in her tone suggests that she is perhaps more concerned with successfully passing as normal than she is in fulfilling gender roles.
Moreover, Mike’s personal attraction suggests Creed’s reading of the vampire as a menstrual monster filled with “an active, predatory desire” and “dripping blood”, casting Eleven as a pseudo-vampire – the child who comes back from ‘death’ and passes as normal in order to attract those who can provide for her (Creed 63). For Mike, “rebellion is presented as monstrous yet immensely appealing,” suggesting an “ambiguous aspect of abjection” within depictions of the transgressive, powerful female as an “alluring but confronting figure” (Creed 37).
Later, Eleven allows herself to be ‘made over’ again in order to gain acceptance from Kali and her group, and she gleefully informs Hopper that she looks “bitchin” (2.09). This look remains during her subsequent fight sequences but is later abandoned, and relatively conservative make-up and clothes are chosen when Eleven finally attends the school dance with Mike in Season Two. The repetition of “pretty” and “bitchin” in both seasons and the attitudes attached to the ‘make-over’ trope reinforces the idea that gender is a construct. However, within this negotiation Eleven also demonstrates, as Judith Butler suggests, that the “power of language to work on bodies is both the cause of sexual oppression and the way beyond oppression” (Butler, Gender Trouble 148).
At least initially, then, Eleven’s characterization suggests a conservative reading of femininity and female anger in particular, interrogating Butler’s argument that “the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings” (Butler, Gender Trouble 23). However, significant attention is paid to what occurs when the “incoherent” or angry female is allowed to unleash her rage, and questions who is ultimately responsible for what results. Though a vulnerable child and a victim of abuse, Eleven is always a potential weapon for both Brenner and the new friends who attempt to incorporate her into their group, sometimes functioning as more of an object than a person. When Eleven resists restraint or fails to conform to regularized codes of conduct, often because she cannot translate her illicit knowledge of the ‘other’ and her emotion-based powers in ways that are acceptable to her male counterparts, the consequences are swift. Mike furiously demands to know “What is wrong with you?” when Eleven fails to properly explain the ‘Upside Down’ universe and when she uses her powers to throw Lucas against a car in order to break up a schoolyard scuffle (1.03; 1.05). In both instances Eleven’s intentions are misunderstood, and the lead male character’s shrill, ill-informed rejection categorizes female anger as monstrous within patriarchal patterns of intimidation, erasure, and blame.
Teresa Bernardez argued in the 1980s that patriarchal “domination is kept in force by convincing women that if they feel anger, bitterness, and resentment this is a sign of their inferiority, sickness, lack of virtue or lack of femininity, not the result of their unequal status” (Bernardez 4). In this rhetoric a woman’s anger or resentment (or even her presence in a public space) signals a ‘lack’ of femininity or an extreme, hysterical femininity bordering on the ‘other’. Emotional responses are recharacterized within the show as uncontrollable extremes and coded using images of blood and/or the threat of castration, emphasizing the possibility that an angry woman may violate male authority and, by extension, embody those abject elements which threaten the maintenance of the social and personal hygienic body. To express oneself in such a way exposes one’s “inferiority” and thus excludes one from participation in social discourse.
Eleven’s use of her powers, and by extension her female anger, results in social upheaval and rejection, and rejection in turn leads to Eleven’s further un-gendering. Temporarily cast out from the group, she flees into the woods where, unable to fix her now-ruined wig, she unleashes a pulse of telekinetic power in frustration. Female power goes hand in hand with Eleven’s failure to perform traditional femininity, to translate her own identity and meaning in a way that is palatable for her male audience. Eleven recognizes, clearly, that “gender is always a doing,” a performance, and one which for her is constantly undermined by the fact that she cannot use her powers without a dribble of blood from her nose ‘outing’ her (Butler, Gender Trouble 33).
As Lucie Armitt notes, Gothic horror posits that “any girl might find herself grotesque at any moment,” in particular if she fails to self-moderate and falls prey to what Mary Russo identifies as “a kind of inadvertency and loss of boundaries” (Armitt 65; Russo 53). The resulting self-loathing, which Bernardez notes is integral to the process of gendered oppression and which suggests Butler’s description of the “passage from bondage to unhappy consciousness” and the resulting fear-based ‘othering’ of the self, leads Eleven to believe that she is in fact a monster (Bernardez 5; Butler, The Psychic Life of Power 42, 35). Later, after using her powers to rescue Mike from a pair of homicidal bullies, she collapses in exhaustion and weeps, explaining that she accidentally opened the gate between worlds in a moment of panic while attempting to communicate with the Demogorgon at Brenner’s insistence. Her terror when confronted with the roaring monster, combined with her own psychic abilities, is powerful enough to literally rip a hole between worlds and unleash the Demogorgon. Eleven is identified as monstrous insofar as her extreme emotions are border on the uncontrollable or ‘hysterical’ and, following the pattern in which feelings of anger and fear are internalized and repressed, she accepts this burden.
Part Two: Monster eats man
However, Eleven is not ultimately responsible for collapsing the boundaries between the self and the monster, and it is rather Brenner, who plays out Vietnam-era anxieties by ordering her into the ‘other’ space and then attempting to dismiss her very justified fears, who emerges as the show’s main human villain. In this, Eleven exposes failures of the transgressive status quo, as Creed suggests in her reading of The Exorcist’s Regan, because she “demonstrates the fragility of those laws and taboos” prescribed by the “symbolic order” (Creed 40). While Eleven’s powers are problematized as a destructive extension of her gendered ‘otherness’, Stranger Things also envisions female anger as a weapon against patriarchal abuse. The boys eventually reconcile themselves to Eleven’s haphazard physical identity – she keeps her dress but also dons a boy’s jacket and forgoes the wig, and Mike assures her she is “still pretty” – and Eleven in turn uses her powers to find the missing Will Byers and wipe out most of the government agents sent to recapture her (1.07). As in The Exorcist, Carrie, and Firestarter, the powerful girl-child’s destructive tendencies are turned against what one character in Stranger Things identifies “the big bad man” with a “capital ‘M’”, and, as in the Alien franchise, the female hero offers a range of alternative which succeed where hyper-masculinity fails (1.06). This subverts patriarchy both literally and figuratively – like Carrie, Eleven’s “fury is as justified as it is frightening – irrational in its power and force, perhaps, but rationally motivated” and thus a repudiation of the law of the father (Sobchak 151). Because patriarchal figures are also responsible for harming the ‘child’, both Eleven and Will, the show directs its focus to those “depictions of youth subjugated to an adult community that produces monsters” which Sarah Trencansky notes punctuated slasher horror films during the Reagan years (Trencansky 68). Indeed, since Reagan’s political legacy for women is tarnished by his removal of the Equal Rights Amendment from the GOP national platform, his backing of the Human Life Amendment, his attacks against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the parallel rise of the ‘New Right’ in America, 1980s political discourse is somewhat defined by the concept of an overreaching authoritarian male. Eleven’s personal development becomes a process of confronting “the legacy of the monster,” or in her case the legacy of the monstrous ‘father’, and then differentiating between father, monster, and self within the boundaries of her own psyche (Trencansky 71).
Indeed, as Eleven distances herself from Brenner and cultivates new friendships, her use of telekinesis becomes less tentative and is signaled by a more unapologetically aggressive glare. Such a ‘look’ is frequently used by powerful females in films such as Carrie and Firestarter, and it is one that Linda Williams argues “offers at least a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of nonphallic sexuality” (Williams 24). Her increased sense of power and independence also illuminates what Vivian Sobchack identifies in films from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to The Shining (1980) as depictions “of paternity refused, denied, abandoned, hated; of patriarchy simultaneously terrified and terrorizing in the face of its increasing impotence; of patriarchy maddened by a paradoxical desire for its own annihilation” (Sobchack 153). When Brenner finally catches up with the group and scoops up a nearly unconscious Eleven, he seeks to re-establish control over her through a twisted revision of familial roles. In her haze Eleven calls him “Papa” and he tells her that he “is going to take you back home… where we can make all of this better, so no one else gets hurt” (1.08). He attempts to erase Eleven’s ‘real world’ experiences and bend the child-weapon to his will, echoing the Gothic pattern in which girl-children “become ensnared in patriarchy’s refusal to let them mature” (Armitt, 61). Eleven, in response, repudiates patriarchal attempts to appropriate and redefine her narrative and quickly identifies Brenner as “bad,” reaching out instead for Mike and the promise of normal adolescent development. Eleven’s interactions with patriarchy are defined by her heavily Gothicized heroine-child role – the ‘father’ is an omniscient tyrant who erases the ‘mother’ and threatens the future ‘lover’, and it is only through the heroine’s examination of monstrosity (both external and internal) that domestic normalcy is achieved. This negotiation reaches a fitting climax when blood from an earlier violent showdown summons the Demogorgon, again problematizing Eleven’s powers and Brenner’s overreach, which attacks and (presumably) kills Brenner.
Stranger Things also utilizes an alternative view of patriarchy and female identity represented through the mother figure, Joyce Byers. Winona Ryder’s casting as Joyce, a transgressive mother, invokes her past work in Beetlejuice (1988), Heathers(1990), and Alien Resurrection (1997) and while Ryder’s career famously suffered after a series of health issues and a conviction for shoplifting led her to take a break from acting, her recent return to large-scale creative projects demonstrates how the actress’s reputation became “one of her greatest strengths” (Dockterman). As works such as Stranger Things embrace “nostalgia, Ryder becomes ever more useful as a conduit to exploring the recent past,” and in an age where male actors creditably accused of sexual misconduct continue to freely negotiate their own ‘comeback’ schedules, Ryder’s current popularity sheds some light on the disproportionate, heavily gendered criticism that colored her earlier hiatus from acting (Dockterman). Though drawn partially from ‘action mom’ figures such as Aliens’ Ripley, Joyce Byers is also similar to the spiritually-sensitive Diane Freeling from the film Poltergeist (1982) and the working single mother Chris McNeil in The Exorcist. Patriarchal discourse infantilizes Joyce by suggesting that she is an inadequate mother and that her son Will is monstrous, undercutting the mother/child dynamic. However, while Joyce may not have superpowers, her perception of transgressive patriarchy and her resulting feelings of anger and resentment do manifest in ways that are fundamentally destructive to the status quo. Government agents, family members, and police try to console her with false or inadequate information and comfort and attribute Joyce’s resistance to hysterical grief, marginalizing her as a ‘hysterical’ woman unfit for public spaces. However, like Diane and Chris, Joyce insists on her own narrative truth and points out the ‘father’s’ inability to accept otherworldly explanations for events, and in doing so maintains the link to her missing child. Moreover, by furiously insisting on her ‘mother’ role – Joyce repeatedly identifies Will as “my son” and makes it her mission to defend him – she undermines assertions that she lacks the relevant knowledge and skills to handle the situation (1.07).
Joyce does not remain silent, and in fact only grows more obstinate as the show progresses, weaponizing ‘motherhood’ to expose the patriarchy as an incompetent as well as a monstrous force. When she and Police Chief Jim Hopper are caught breaking in to Hawkins Lab, the calmly threatening Brenner encourages her to help him “save your son” and the sons and daughters of everyone in the town, though he is of course only interested in returning Eleven to her warped child-weapon status (1.08). Joyce responds aggressively:
“Stop. I know who you are. I know what you’ve done. You took my boy away from me. You left him in that place to DIE! You faked his death…we had a funeral! We BURIED him. And now you’re asking for my help? Go to Hell.”
Joyce invokes images of her own grief while Brenner is exposed for “who you are,” a father “simultaneously terrified and terrorizing in the face of [his] increasing impotence,” someone who wants to co-opt the ‘mother’ in his ongoing violation of familial boundaries but who has failed to convince Joyce of his own superiority (Sobchack 153). In 2016 and 2017, as the fallout of the American presidential election, the rise of the #MeToo movement, and life in a ‘post-truth’ world reshaped cultural awareness, Joyce’s unabashed resistance to attempts to marginalize her voice suggests the potentiality of political female rage, of Ripley shouting down recalcitrant marines, of Chris McNeil berating doctors and priests, and of Diane Freeling optimistically articulating her own beliefs. This scene contrasts sharply with an earlier moment when Mike’s mother Karen’s verbal protests are interrupted by Brenner, who calmly insists that “you have to trust me” while Karen’s husband nods along agreeably (1.07). Karen, with her permed hair and her tidy house, performs an idealized version of motherhood more effectively than Joyce, but she is also effectively cowed by patriarchal authority and alienated from her children, domesticity silencing her in a way that it doesn’t for the more scattered, furious single mother.
The limits to Joyce’s compliance are also apparent in the show’s second season. Though forced to sign several non-disclosure agreements and return to Hawkins Lab after Will’s trauma, Joyce never fully trusts the doctors now in charge of her son’s care. When Will’s PTSD worsens she grows more skeptical of their abilities, and when Will is possessed by a new monster, the Mind Flayer, her resistance is solidified. In a scene directly referencing The Exorcist, Joyce sits around a boardroom and argues with a group of exclusively white male doctors about the medical care they are giving her child. They question why she hasn’t brought Will to see them before now, casting subtle aspersions on her parenting skills and trying to negate Joyce’s anger by suggesting that “I get that you’re upset… I would be, too, if I were in your shoes, but we’re all on the same boat here” (2.06). When the head doctor attempts to moderate her behavior, she throws his own rhetoric back at him and demands that Will be transferred to a “real” hospital, effectively devaluing the knowledge and skills of the doctors at the Lab. The men look at her blankly as she slams her hands down on the table in frustration and demands to know “What is wrong with my boy!”
Joyce’s anger is not an overtly effective weapon against patriarchal aggression. She is hampered by the effects of Will’s PTSD and by the non-disclosure agreements she is forced to sign – both of which were anachronistic concepts in the 1980s but are frequently used in contemporary politics to undermine the reliability of women’s testimonies regarding traumatic events and to protect powerful figures from the consequences of their actions. In Season One Hopper circumvents Joyce to make his own deal with Brenner, and Joyce and Hopper are forced to rescue Will with almost no assistance. In Season Two the best Joyce can do is remove Will from the doctors’ care and leave them to be eaten by the otherworldly monsters they have failed to contain. Once she is freed from the influences of the scientists and the government, however, Joyce is able to fight the monster on her own terms, retreating to Hopper’s isolated cabin and performing a makeshift exorcism. Moreover, she is frequently empowered by both her knowledge of the ‘father’s’ failures and her ‘mother’ skill-set. She uses Hopper’s memories of his own child to engage his sympathies, kicks her ex-husband out of the house, and rejects Brenner’s emotional indifference. She communicates with her missing son using Christmas lights, uses crayons to draw an outline of the Mind Flayer, and helps construct a map of an underground tunnel-system using paper and tape. All the tools of domestic femininity and childhood creativity, a creativity which Joyce actively encourages in both of her sons, are turned against the monster while the ‘father’s’ commercialized science fails utterly.
Part Three: Woman inherits the earth
Season One of Stranger Things includes numerous instances of constructive female anger, but its final moments ultimately suggest the rhetorical characterization of such anger as monstrous. Immediately following the rejection of Brenner, an event which exposed the limits of patriarchal control, Eleven comes face to face with the Demogorgon, the monster she had unwittingly unleashed. The visual contrast between the tiny Eleven and the towering Demogorgon once again places Eleven and her abilities outside of the realms of normalcy even while highlighting her vulnerability and victimhood, positioning the actual monster as a ‘mirror darkly’ version of the powerful girl-child. Despite Mike’s hopeful promises of a future where Eleven is integrated into traditional family life, the Demogorgon can only be exorcized when the female who invoked it embraces her own monstrosity, and by extension the possibility that the rage that makes her powerful also prevents her from ever being ‘normal’. When she uses her powers to destroy the Demogorgon it is in fact a moment of self-destruction in the service of the status quo. Eleven vanishes when the monster does, suggesting that, while Eleven’s anger is a powerful weapon, it necessarily excludes her from adolescent development and social acceptance.
Season Two subverts this dynamic by examining the means through which grief and rage develop into acceptable mechanisms for political and personal change, offering an alternative route through which the angry female can be effectively integrated into society. At the end of the first episode of the second season it is revealed that Eleven’s act of self-effacement was not permanent, and that she instead had been temporarily transported into the ‘Upside Down’ and forced to claw her way back into the human world. After fleeing into the woods Eleven is discovered by Hopper, who hides her in an isolated cabin and becomes her new father-figure. While a definite improvement over Brenner, Hopper’s problematic parenting suggests other fictional fathers who, Sara Martín Alegre argues, “are split between a masochistic need to assume their guilt and take punishment and a sadistic need to deny guilt and recover their lost privileges” (Alegre, 108). Hopper lost his own daughter years ago to illness, resulting in a kind of guilt-driven aborted fatherhood that shapes his attempts to control Eleven. Responding to the pressures of her benevolent captivity, Eleven breaks the rules created by Hopper and reacts violently to his accusations that she is stupidly reckless and his demands that Eleven “grow the hell up” (2.04). Hopper and Brenner take unsettlingly similar positions regarding Eleven, a fact which Eleven points out when she angrily informs Hopper that “you are like ‘Papa’.” Though their reasons for doing so are different, both men attempt to keep her in a state of stunted childhood where she must perform as an adult, accepting the consequences of patriarchal policing while being denied the friends and learning experiences meant to shape her as a person. According to the authoritarian father the emotions that define her, including her anger, frustration, and grief, also make her unsuitable for socialization and self-realization, a rhetoric which echoes broader socio-political assumptions. Their argument ends abruptly when Eleven locks Hopper out of her room, blows up all the cabin’s windows using her powers, and collapses, weeping, in the corner. Eleven’s use of her powers suggests a breaking point, as well as a symbolically significant ‘break out’ as Hopper is reminded that he holds no real power over the angry girl-child and cannot keep her imprisoned without her consent.
However, the alternatives available to Eleven are extremely limited. Eleven eventually discovers information about her mother, Terry Ives, that Hopper has hidden, and realizes that Hopper has effectively denied Eleven access to her mother and stored the evidence of Eleven’s origins in the crawl-space where he keeps his own unhappy memories, including boxes labelled ‘Vietnam’, suggesting Hopper’s war service, and ‘Sarah’, a reference to Hopper’s deceased daughter. This violation of trust again problematically aligns Hopper with Brenner, and after seeking out and finding her mother Eleven discovers that she has once again been denied the chance to make a human connection – Terry is nearly catatonic as a result of Brenner’s abuse. Using her abilities to enter Terry’s mind, Eleven is able to see the relentless cycle of memories from which her mother cannot escape, including Eleven’s birth and abduction by Brenner, Terry’s attempts to find her, and finally Brenner’s final act of silencing the mother through electro-shock treatments. Brenner’s methods for marginalizing Terry, an increasingly isolated woman whom doctors, government officials, and family members dismiss as unhinged, tellingly echo those he employed when dealing with Karen and Joyce in the first season. While Joyce ultimately subverts Brenner’s attempts to control her, however, Terry is effectively trapped her in her own mind. The kaleidoscope of memories offers a stark view of the relative powerlessness of the single mother when facing patriarchal authority, a narrative that Eleven then incorporates into her own moral coding and sense of justice.
Using the visions of her mother’s trauma, Eleven then seeks out another child from the Lab, Eight who has renamed herself Kali. Kali is a young woman of South Asian descent and shares her name with a deity who, within Hindu mythology, is alternately defined by her status as a righteous protector and by her sometimes uncontrollable and destructive anger (Pintchman 44). She provides Eleven with a new method for processing her anger and controlling her powers, and Eleven is quickly adopted into Kali’s diverse gang of punk vigilantes, her powers co-opted in their attempts to rid the world of what remains of Brenner’s original research team. Kali recharacterizes Eleven as special rather than monstrous, repeating phrases articulated by both Joyce and Terry, the two mothers who see Eleven as a gift rather than a threat and who offer her familial support. Kali is a pseudo-mother figure, but she also connects with Eleven as a surrogate sister and draws important parallels between Eleven and herself, telling Eleven that “I was just like you once. I kept my anger inside. I tried to hide from it, but that pain festered… it spread… until finally I confronted my pain, and I began to heal” (2.07). She represents a more radical, intersectional version of feminist self-realization, one that pays little regard to maintaining the patriarchal status quo. She encourages Eleven to confront her own pain, leading to their training session and her suggestion that anger can be used as a source of power. She asks Eleven to return to the emotionally fraught experiences figures such as Hopper and Brenner often dismissed and argues that directing one’s anger towards the proper target is healthy, a subversive suggestion given the social prescripts against female rage.
Eleven’s chosen memories are notably male-centered. She envisions Mike and the newest female member of the group, Max, and fears that Mike has chosen a ‘normal’ girl over her. As Kali encourages her to “dig deeper… your whole life you’ve been lied to” and imprisoned, she remembers Hopper’s falsehoods, her captivity at the hands of Brenner, and her final argument with Hopper, conflating the two characters as a single representative of patriarchal abuse (2.07). Kali reminds Eleven that “the bad men took away your home…your mother…they took everything from you” and the on-screen visuals cut between Eleven’s intense and angry glare at the train and her memories of Brenner, the Lab, and the original Demogorgon. With the final exclamation that these men “stole your life” Eleven succeeds in dragging the train, screaming as she does so. Her shriek notably coincides with Kali’s verbal categorization of the visual representations of Eleven’s past – these two young women give voice to a narrative of abuse that has hitherto been silenced, and in doing so transition from passive victims to active agents. When asked how she feels after releasing her rage, Eleven replies: “Good.”
Kali frames both her and Eleven’s anger as a justifiable and healthy emotion, and although she is the leader of a fringe group structured suspiciously like a cult, she is an agent for change whose actions are framed as righteous, particularly when prefaced by flashbacks of Kali being tortured with a cattle prod and Terry being shocked with electrodes. Notably, however, a vision of Hopper and Mike in danger is what finally pushes Eleven to return to Hawkins – Eleven ultimately chooses ‘good’ men and white suburbia over a diverse, radically political group. When Kali insists that her old friends “can’t save you” Eleven doesn’t disagree, and rather insists that she can “save” them (2.07). This moment aligns Eleven again with Joyce by positioning female anger as particularly productive when used to protect the worthy male. Repeated attempts by the men and boys in Hawkins to label her son a homosexual, “zombie-boy,” and “freak,” are met with corresponding threats by Joyce that “I swear to God, I will kill them,” as Joyce’s boyfriend (played by Sean Austin, whose role in The Goonies (1985) further complicates the show’s nostalgic negotiations) admiringly notes that “you punch back” (2.03). Toxic masculinity must be rejected or corrected, and the hyper-masculine Hopper in particular develops during his time away from Eleven into a more sensitive figure – he attempts to call and apologize to Eleven, assuring her that he “never wants her to be hurt,” and later describes his personal struggles with grief to her (2.06). Despite her fears that he has forgotten her, Mike has similarly attempted to contact Eleven for nearly a year and defends her throughout their separation. Eleven’s decision to return to Hawkins and suspend her exploration of Kali’s vengeance-fueled rage posits that men who are aware of the failures of patriarchy and resist or oppose repressive rhetoric are worth preserving, even if that suggests the subsequent tacit support of a problematic socio-gendered hierarchy.
This decision to return to Hawkins is also an attempt to undo the previous patriarchal acts which made female power monstrous in the first place – when Eleven returns to defeat the Mind Flayer, she is tasked with undoing what she had unwittingly done at the behest of Brenner in Season One. She must close the gate on the ‘other’ space that her trauma initially unleashed by again tapping in to the pain of her past, engaging in the very act which links female anger and power with monstrosity. This time, however, it is a process which she controls and directs, thanks to Kali’s tutelage. It was fear rather than anger that causes the original rift in reality, and it is anger rather than fear that ultimately closes it. As she and Hopper are lowered in front of the gate and hover before the shadowy figure of the Mind Flayer, Eleven is moreover visually rendered unhuman – her eyes go glittery and black in the light, she grow almost vampirically pale, she bleeds heavily from both nostrils, and she even manages to levitate herself. Remembering Kali’s command to “find something from your past, something that angers you” and “channel it,” she envisions the Lab, the Demogorgon, and telling Mike that she opened the gate, returning to the moment she first verbally self-identified as a “monster” (2.09).
Most notably, this sequence also includes a memory of an image of Brenner that Kali, using her own powers, had conjured up in an earlier episode. The fake Brenner, channeling Kali and Eleven’s fears, informs Eleven that she is suffering from “a terrible wound,” an internal rot that will eventually kill her (2.09). This idea is repeated as a voiceover during Eleven’s showdown with the Mind Flayer, and there is an underlying implication that Eleven is in fact angry that she is angry, that Brenner and others have made her anger monstrous without her consent and thus profoundly fractured her identity. There are clear visual parallels between her showdown with the Demogorgon in Season One and her later battle with the Mind Flayer, yet her second battle is intercut with memories of abuse and she is depicted as furious rather than resigned, embracing her ‘otherness’ rather than rejecting it. She shuts the door on the monster rather than destroying it and herself, and when her task is completed she remains safely in the human world, Hopper holding and soothing her. It seems she has found a way to process and expel her own negative emotions and to come to terms with her power rather than aligning herself with the actual ‘other’ – she is the monster that both Brenner and the generic tropes of the show’s nostalgic re-imaginings have made her, but she is also in control of the boundaries and limits of that ‘othered’ self. She is both the product of the female characters of the 1970s and 1980s who preceded her, and her own uniquely individual creation. The second season ends with the two new ‘fathers’ – Hopper and Dr. Owens, Brenner’s replacement (played by Paul Reiser of Aliens as a significantly more altruistic version of his earlier ‘company man’ role) – working together to allow Eleven to attend a school dance with Mike and assume her place in the ‘real world’ in spite of, or perhaps because of her recourse to female anger.
Mona Eltawhawy argues that if society “taught girls the importance and power of being dangerous” we all might come to the realization that “angry women are free women” (Eltawhawy). Widespread recognition of the double standard applied to female anger has made it more tolerable, if not completely acceptable, for women to be angry in public spaces, while films, books and television programs still tend to prioritize the male character’s crisis, suggesting that female trauma is secondary, and that female anger must never be directed at the more enlightened males. While certainly guilty of some underlying conservativism, however, Stranger Thingsalso subversively posits that women are not responsible for supporting the maintenance of oppressive patriarchal institutions. Female anger does not render the character inherently ‘un-female’, but rather serves as a tool against hyper-violent (predominately male) aggression. This runs contrary to the Jedi code in Star Wars that fear, anger, and hate are intertwined emotions which lead to destruction and ‘the dark side’, but in fact recent fan reactions to contemporary Star Wars sequels such as The Last Jedi (2017) illuminate the on-going critique of sentimental, nostalgic readings of the ostensibly simplistic (and gendered) moral coding therein. Stranger Things, a study of the 1980s, notably questions the limits of its own nostalgic re-imaginings through its ongoing negotiation with depictions of constructive female anger. This is perhaps in part a creative response to social and political movements still underway today, but it is also thanks to the popular adoption of a rather peculiar fan-favorite – a little girl identified in posters, Halloween costumes, toys, and dolls by her shaved head, bleeding nose, and angry glare.
Works Cited
Alegre, Sara Martin, “Nightmares of Childhood: The Child and Four Novels by Stephen King”, Atlantis, vol. 23, no. 1, July 2001, pp. 105-114.
Armitt, Lucie, “The Gothic Girl Child”, Women and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 60-73.
Bernardez, Teresa, “Women and Anger: Cultural prohibitions and the Feminine Ideal”, Work in Progress, no. 31, Wellesley Centers for Women, 1987.
Brim, Orville G., “Family Structure and Sex Role Learning by Children: A Further Analysis of Helen Kock’s Data”, Selected Studies in Marriage and the Family, edited by Robert Winch, Robert McGinnis and Herbert Barringer, 2nded. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962, pp. 619-626.
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999.
Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Caldwell, Thomas, “Aliens:Mothers, Monsters, and Marines”, Screen Education, iss. 59, 2010, pp. 125-130.
Clover, Carol J., Men, women, and Chain Saw: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1994.
Dockterman, Eliana, “90s Icon Winona Ryder Is Making Her Comeback”, Time, 27 June 2016. time.com. Web. 27 October 2018.
Eltahawy, Mona, “What the world would look like if we taught girls to rage”, NBC News, February 1, 2018. nbcnews.com.Web. 22 June 2018.
Gillian, Sarah, “Performing Postfeminist Identities: Gender, Costume, and Transformation in Teen Cinema”, Women on Screen: Feminism and Femininity in Visual Culture, edited by Melanie Walters, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp.167-184.
Millet, Kate, Sexual Politics, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Penny, Laurie, “Most Women you Know Are Angry – and That’s Alright.” Teen Vogue, 2 August 2017
Pintchman, Tracy, Constructing the Identities of the Hindu Great Goddess, New York, State University of New York Press, 2001.
Russo, Mary, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, New York: Routledge, 1994.
Sobchack, Vivian, “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange”, The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film,edited by Barry Keith Grant, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 143-163.
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back. Directed by Irvin Kershner. Lucasfilm, 1980.
Traister, Rebecca, “Hillary Clinton is finally expressing some righteous anger. Why does that make everyone else so mad?” New York Magazine,15 September 2017.
Trencansky, Sarah, “Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression n 1980s Slasher Horror”, Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 29, no. 2, 2010, pp. 63-73.
Williams, Linda, “When the Woman Looks”, The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film,edited by Barry Keith Grant, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 83-93.
Biographical Note:
Dr. Kathleen Hudson earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Scranton and her Master’s degree and PhD in English Literature from the University of Sheffield. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, and her new book Servants and the Gothic: 1764-1831will be published by University of Wales Press in 2019.
[1]This phrase was used by then-candidate Donald Trump when referring to opponent Hillary Clinton during the third presidential debate on October 19, 2016. The phrase has since been widely adopted by various outlets.