We did a marathon of the newest half season of Stranger Things over the last couple of nights. As a spiritual guide, I think the strangest thing about Stranger Things is their ability to reimagine evil as demonic, predatory, grotesque, and cruel, while taking into account our newest understandings of trauma, in a way that is robustly super-natural as well as meta-scientific. We have allowed people to reimagine wicked demons and evil spirits for an age of quantum physics.
The truly strange part is that they seem to have no capacity to reimagine Good in the same way. There is a supernatural force of death, disintegration, and destruction. But absolutely no corresponding supernatural Source of Life, Integration, and Creation. Humans are left adrift in a cruel world to figure Good out on their own, while evil can infect us as a parasite from the outside of our dimension at any time, in any way.
In a way this fits our culture very well. We live in a culture that can easily dream up and conjure all kinds of bogeymen to hate and fear and rally against. But we don’t actually have solutions, just criticisms. We can imagine dystopia, but not utopia. Demons, but not Angels. Sickness, but not Health. I wonder if we can ever gain a Vision for healing and wholeness after living in our upside down culture for so long. Truly, we live in a world of strange things that is even stranger than Stranger Things.
Now I can think of at least two pushbacks on this: First, is the artistic pushback. It’s just art. It’s science fiction or even science fantasy. It wasn’t made to create a complete explanation of good and evil. It is just made to entertain. Perhaps. But it does seem like there are ethical and spiritual points that the showmakers want to make: About the value of love and friendship and hope as they contribute to human flourishing. And in order for a work of art to impact the popular imagination it does need to unpack what is implicit and hidden in the human imagination. To test the limits of our imagination, and to take what is inside and bring it out into the light for further inspection, even if that is in a kind of symbolic Jungian form.
Symbolically, this show clearly communicates the idea of supernatural evil without a corresponding supernatural good, and the power of disintegration without any source of integration. This symbolism would not have captured imaginations in many other cultures beyond the kind of culture we live in, where we have mythologized goodness with a technological nihilism (we rule the world but have no purpose), so we are dominated by materialist consumerism (you are what you own!) and totalitarian hedonism (you must be happy at all times!). For instance, one cannot imagine the tale of Stranger Things taking place in medieval Europe or Arabia, or first century Judea, India, Greece, or China. So, even if Stranger Things is “just art”, it is just art that shows us how strange our everyday world has become. It shows us an upside down image of ourselves as if in a mirror to our soul.
The second pushback I can think of is the religious pushback: Of course there is an answer to the anemic spiritual imagination depicted in Stranger Things! It comes by a return to the good old religion— take your pick which one— with its clearly delineated spiritual worlds and beings and exalted states and moral foundations. After all, this clearly seems to be where I am headed with my thesis. Other cultures could not have imagined the world without spiritual goodness that Stranger Things does because those cultures were drenched in religion and the supernatural. Now that we live in a culture where the media and market and science conspires to silence the voice of religion and make us into godless materialist consumers! And there is some truth to this. But that’s really not all there is to it.
As a culture, we could have done science and the market within the bounds of religion. Many cultures have before us, and presumably cultures after us may as well. So, why has religion receded in our particular culture and economy and media environment? The reasons for this are undoubtedly complex. Just as complex as asking all the possible ways one could take to go from New York to Los Angeles. But, could we at least speak of a general direction? What is the general set of reasons why our spiritual vision has become anemic and our religious landscape has been turned upside down?
I would say it is because we have tried to make religion and spirituality do everything except what they are intended to do. We have tried to make them a blueprint for how to run a society, a platform for gaining political power, a rule book for thought police implementing right think, and a science book to deny evolution and restore mankind to the center of the universe. We have used religion for everything but what its main function is: To connect people to the Divine Source of their existence, to give them hope and meaning in the Divine Goal of their existence, and to fill them with Divine Love as a moral compass and inspiration to guide their life choices between their Source and their Goal.
Yet, I don’t think most Christians have any real concept of a fundamental Ground of Life and Goodness which might inspire or animate acts of love and beauty. I can only judge by what people say and do. But it seems that 90% of people, whether religious or not, operate out of fear, threat, anger, and lack most of the time. And that is contrary to any of the great models of Goodness I know of, whether Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or Secular.
So, even if Eleven becomes the Superhero of the series, there is a sense in which it is all a stalling action to ultimate destruction. The infection is here. We can only put off the inevitable. Entropy and disintegration is Reality, and life and joy are merely temporary illusions.
To greater and lesser extents, this seems to be the theme of all our most popular fictional universes. Even universes that trend happy seem to share much of this: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel. I don’t think our cultural vision of Fundamental Goodness and Hope needs to be Christian. But I worry that we don’t have any version of it on offer.
And with all of that said, I want to end by hedging my bets: First of all, the end of season 4 has not arrived yet. So there could be a massive switch in trajectory that happens, and we could have a force of eternal, infinite, transcendent Goodness which saves the day. However, that might not feel true to the story, and wind up feeling like "Deus ex machina". Second, despite everything above, I don't want them to change the story. It is beautiful and brilliant as it is (for the most part), and I want to see where the writing and acting takes us. I do not think what I have described above is a fault in the storytelling, but rather a unique and "strange" window into the horizon of our cultural vision. And each culture deserves to have art which depicts it in all of its uniqueness.
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