Matt e Ross Duffer
Stranger Things (stagione 1)

Stranger Things is a television series to be studied, to be shown repeatedly to incapable screenwriters, to make them understand what makes a story interesting. It's not the monster that attracts the viewer's attention, but the people who encounter it along their path in one way or another. Beauty (or rather terror) is in the eye of the beholder. The screenwriters know this well and exploit this narrative strategy to the fullest.

There is indeed a huge quantitative disparity between the episodes belonging to the paranormal and the reactions of the "normal" people who experience it. Paradoxically, the strange things are the clearest and most evident from the very beginning. We are interested in seeing how the characters will discover the truth, how the monster will affect their lives, how their relationships will change.

This starts from a non-trivial observation: a brawl between friends (or worse, rivals) is more impressive than an entire dark, upside-down world. Because things close to our real experience are more vivid to us, while paranormal horror only works when it reverberates on normal lives, like ours.

This very shrewd conception is exploited to the maximum in the series: we have many protagonists, diverse and well-characterized. Each takes a different path to reach the truth, and this inevitably affects their life, leading them to make choices and change their preconceptions. The different groups hardly ever communicate with each other (I write this having seen the first six episodes, not to be too influenced by the finale) and this allows for a range of different adventurous and informative paths.

This is the conceptual strength of Stranger Things: the characters are everything, every little detail of their lives counts, it's important to give strength to the mystery, which isn't much of a mystery, and especially to the shadows it casts on the more or less bourgeois lives of the numerous protagonists. They are built with an excellent mix of clichés and peculiar traits: they seem like two-dimensional figures out of the TV of the eighties, but they gradually reveal a different depth of character than one might predict. The chubby kid, Dustin, is exemplary: he plays the comic relief for a few episodes, but then reveals himself to be the most mature of the group. Everyone has something to say, every character has its own three-dimensionality, more or less extensive. The monster is therefore just a prod, a vibration that sets in motion the (often unexpressed) potential of Hawkins' protagonists.

There is also a whole aesthetic setting that cements the value of the series: from the music to the nerd references between comics, movies, and role-playing games, to the Eighties setting that allows drawing heavily from the Cold War imagination, not to mention the style in clothing, cars, and so on.

Stranger Things doesn't have the complexity of other serial products, but precisely because of this, it breathes more. It is also relatively simple in its narrative setup, but this does not make it simplistic. The viewer loves this microcosm that is presented to him because the pain is never too agonizing, and hope always prevails, the positivity of the kids, the courage of a policeman who goes beyond norms, the magic of Eleven. There is a background optimism that reverberates in every corner of Hawkins, even when a funeral is celebrated. Because, as said, what really matters is the protagonists' gaze on things, not the things themselves. And the gaze of ours is that of kids who think they are starting a new campaign of Dungeons & Dragons or exploring Tolkien's Mirkwood.

To make a series work, like a movie, you need good actors. Out of all, I was particularly impressed by Millie Bobby Brown's performance, who plays the role of the "weird" Eleven. Such a charismatic face for a 13-year-old girl really promises well. But one really can't complain about anyone in this series that brilliantly relaunches the concept of "ensemble cast."

Now I can enjoy the last two episodes.