âChildrenâs fictionâ brings up the question Iâve been discussing with my students all semester: the idea of the âchildrenâs movie,â childhood as a selleable commodity, category, fiction. How the 1980s simultaneously created this genreâexploited it, enriched itâand resisted it. Movies for kids were not childish in the 1980s. Children were left to their own devices, unsupervised, often lonely. They were actively looking for something, working things out for themselves, outside of their parents, beyond their immediate family. Children were autonomous interested subjects on âa curiosity voyageâ, as Dustin puts it to the town librarian in season 2 of Stranger Things, when she tells him he cannot take out 5 books because he already has 5 checked out. He steals the books. Double curiosity. Curiosity is the way Stranger Things pays its debt (Lyotard: childhood is a debt that can never be paid off) to the 1980s. Not with retro songs, clothes, movie references, mis en scene. But with the Freudian idea of the child. That the childâs curiosity was its destiny. Its greatness. And being interested, as Adam Phillips writes in "The Interested Party", "links us to the past." The monsters in the show only serve to bond people. Ethics are required to survive the world. To live with others. To overcome struggle and sufferingânot the other way around (Netflixâs crimes of the father saga, Bloodline). Childhood is both a historical invention and duration, so if we want to understand the crimes of history, children are one way to do it. And, as Brecht said, âAs crimes pile up, they become invisible,â echoed later by Derridaâs, âIn this century, monstrous crimes (âunforgiveableâ then) have not only be committedââwhich is perhaps itself not so newââbut have become visible, known, recounted, named, archived by a âuniversal conscienceâ better informed than ever.â I think this is why peopleâwhy Iâlove Stranger Things. We donât have anymore crimes left to uncover. We only have things left to protect, salvage, save, and attend to. These kids (along with Joyce and Hopper) attend to each other. Stand guard, hold vigil, talk, listen, protect. They make âpromisesâ (everyone says âPromise?â on the show) and keep their promises. Love is a leitmotif. Everyone is paying careful attention. No one is keeping secrets. No one is trying to get ahead. No one is pretending they can live without each other. No one is lying. Everyone is asking for and accepting help. No one is forgetting. No one is forgotten. Everyone is mourning, indebted. The 1980s here is not some pure time, or duration. It is, in the case of the show, the childâs duration. The humanâs duration. The childâs time (remember Mikeyâs great utterance to the Goonies in The Goonies, âThis is our timeâ). It is the time and time for the child to enter our thwarted scene. To show us how itâs done. For adults to step aside with their broken duration. With their terrible corrupt stories. The consummate humans, children did things in the 1980s that they are not allowed do today: they forsaked the inhuman world of adultsââwho were either absent or corruptâand, in the process, tried to change the world.
