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There’s a moment in the final episode of the fourth season of “Stranger Things,” which streamed on Netflix in spring 2022, when I sat up in my chair and pointed at my TV like that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio that the internet loves so much.
Max (Sadie Sink) is in the hospital, gravely injured from her battle with the demonic villain Vecna, and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is reading to her. He’s reading from “The Talisman,” the 1984 epic quest novel by Stephen King and Peter Straub. The passage he’s reading sounded a little familiar, but it was the cover — the same hardcover and dust jacket sitting on a shelf just feet away from me, both then and now — that really jumped out.
When I was a young adult, I remember being similarly electrified as I was reading “The Talisman” — I read everything either King or Straub put out back then — and the novel’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn-like travelers, Jack Sawyer and Wolf, turned up in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, just a few miles from where I sat as I read it.
My mind was boggled. Muncie has always had a pop cultural life of its own — the first half of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was set there, Ball canning jars were invented there, as was Garfield the cartoon cat — but to have two of my favorite writers set a couple of chapters in my city was wondrous.
I’ve been enjoying “Stranger Things” since its 2016 debut, especially its small-town Indiana setting that reminded me of where I’d grown up. But the inclusion of one of Muncie’s many cultural touchstones clinched it and has me eagerly awaiting the fifth and final season of the show, due out on November 26.
A promotional trailer for season 5 of “Stranger Things” (Netflix via YouTube).
“Stranger Things” has faults for sure, including the self-indulgence of its creators, the Duffer Brothers, as the series has grown to become a huge hit – that fourth-season finale was two hours and 20 minutes long, for Pete’s sake – but it does one thing better than just about any other filmed entertainment has: depict what it was like to grow up in 1980s Indiana.
Now, I was certainly older than the kids in “Stranger Things” then, having already started my career in journalism while they were still in middle school. But the show’s truths about that time and place are incontrovertible.
Previously On…
I’ll make this quick, since a lot of you are likely familiar with the show: “Stranger Things” is set in the fictional small city of Hawkins, Indiana, with a population of fewer than 20,000. In Hawkins, a group of middle-school students and a couple of parents stumble across a cosmic threat when young Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) disappears. His friends — a group that grows over the course of the series — investigate and find his disappearance is tied to a local research facility that has, as is slowly discovered, opened a portal to another dimension. The “Upside Down” is a wasteland version of Hawkins and it’s populated by monsters.
The friends also meet Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a young escapee from the laboratory who has X-Men-type mental abilities from experimentation on her during her upbringing at the lab. Eleven and the other kids lead the effort to find and return Will, expose the lab’s experiments, and battle the monsters from the Upside Down.
Over the course of four seasons, and soon five, the battle moves from the small and personal to the epic. Lives are lost and the town is changed forever. The fourth season ended with Eleven and her allies standing on a hill overlooking the town, which has been torn asunder by the battle with Vecna.
Everybody who’s seen the show knows it for its appealing cast of teens and adults, hideous monsters, wild plotlines, and needle drops for some of the hits of the early-to-mid 1980s. Most prominently, Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God)” got a ton of play in the fourth season, nearly 40 years after the song’s release.
What might not be known, especially to viewers who didn’t know Indiana in the 1970s and 1980s, is how amusingly accurate the show’s depiction of a small city in the Hoosier state can be.
Save Our Town
There’s an internet joke about historic downtowns that they all look the same, the almost identical collection of old buildings housing a couple of restaurants, a couple of department stores, a drug store, a five-and-dime store, and sometimes even a Radio Shack.
Then, in a lot of cities in the 1970s, a mall opened and the downtown was decimated.
In my hometown of Muncie, the mall opened in 1970. Huge retailers like Sears and JCPenney relocated from downtown to the mall and took a lot of smaller stores with them. By a couple of seasons into “Stranger Things,” even the Radio Shack is gone, an outcome precipitated in part by the death of the store’s owner, Bob (Sean Astin, the “Rudy” star who knew something about Indiana cities and, thanks to “Lord of the Rings,” also knew something about dealing with demons and hellscapes).
The new Hawkins mall is a central plot point in the third and fourth seasons of “Stranger Things” (Credit: Netflix via IMDb).
Unless I missed a reference to it, the fictional Hawkins didn’t try the same “save our main street” gambit as my hometown, which in the 1970s closed a major downtown street to car traffic and turned it into a pedestrian mall, to no avail. The downtown is now better off than it was four decades ago, but it was a long road back.
The series’ third season revolves around the mall, that most quintessential American and Hoosier landmark. The same mall that would have likewise helped decimate downtown Hawkins by drawing teenagers away from the center of the city also holds in its deepest recesses a way station to the Upside Down. To balance out the hellmouth, the mall did have a Gap and an Orange Julius. As in a lot of cities, the mall in Muncie is now struggling. I wonder how those retailers would be doing in Hawkins today.
Out There
The young heroes and heroines of “Stranger Things” are as well known for riding their bikes around Hawkins as for fighting monsters from another dimension. Bikes were a staple of 1970s and 1980s kid lifestyle, and the series understands that well. And there’s plenty of the pop culture of the early 1980s in the series, from comic books to music. The show’s take on the pop culture of the day might have peaked in the second season, when the core of boys in the group went trick-or-treating dressed as the heroes of “Ghostbusters.”
My trick-or-treating was long over by the early 1980s — nobody wants to see an adult nerd dressed as Han Solo on their doorstep — but a thing that the show absolutely captured about small-town life for young people was the fervor of trick-or-treating. I’ve written about it before and will again, and the Halloween ritual is still important, but it’s hard to imagine it’s as central as it was forty years ago or earlier.
Characters trick-or-treating as “Ghostbusters” in “Stranger Things” (Netflix via IMDb).
Hawkins is located about 80 miles from Indianapolis, the show tells us, a bit farther from Indy than my hometown. But Muncie and Hawkins appear similar for how relatively easy it was for kids to roam the streets, narrowly avoid getting into trouble, hang out with friends, and, with some imagination, find monsters to battle. My hometown, which has also been cited as the inspiration for the TV series “Parks and Recreation,” is plainly a good setting for any Indiana show, macabre or funny.
Another couple things that “Stranger Things” has absolutely nailed about the small-town experience is the presence of offbeat, even oddball citizens and their capacity to unsettle us. Is that guy who lives on the fringes of the community and hangs out at basketball games a harmless eccentric or a threat, we wondered as kids?
Some people in those towns and small cities embrace the oddballs. In “Stranger Things,” the kids become known as eccentric characters themselves for their unbelievable battles with monsters, which are explained away by society as explosions and earthquakes.
In a big city, the offbeat and monstrous can stay below the radar or get lost in the crowd. In towns like Hawkins, they’re members of the community. Even if we take it with a grain of salt when they start spouting off at school or the store about unexplained disappearances and infestations of rats that seem to share a single mind.
The reference to “The Talisman” in “Stranger Things” is especially appropriate given the novel’s story, which sees its young protagonists fighting not only the worst creatures from an adjacent dimension, “The Territories,” but also encountering the worst that the towns they pass through have to offer. Both “The Talisman” and “Stranger Things” offer an earnest view of small cities and towns at their best and worst.
Stranger Things streams on Netflix. The first half of its fifth and final season premiered on Wednesday, November 26.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post ‘Stranger Things’ Cements Small-Town Indiana’s Pop Culture Legacy appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
