Knots so old you mistake them for part of the ground
I may have mentioned that I’ve been managing some moderate, but persistent, pain in my leg. My massage therapist and my physiotherapist are in a long-distance duel with one another on the nature and meaning of this pain. They have never met and I am the proxy for this duel, and the nerves that run from my quadratus lumborum to my achilles tendon are the field.
On Friday my massage therapist found a maybe-knot in my vastus lateralis. This was after quite a bit of discussion between she and I that chronic pain can’t always be measured away with easy causes and effects; an injury is one thing, but, after a reasonable repair time, injury gives way to all the ways the brain can misdirect you on what the nervous system is reporting. “Multifactorial” is a word getting a lot of airtime right now, between stress, strain, aging, exercise.
And yet, digging into that knot the other day felt uncannily like a kill-shot to both of us; that scene in Last Crusade when, after insisting that X never marks the spot, Indiana Jones finds a literal X.
Part of the appeal of the idea that we’ve found the hidden cause of all the trouble, whether it pans out or not, is how the idea of this buried, undiscovered-till-now cluster of tension seems to tie itself loosely to my lifelong sense of the subterranean as a space of mediation; a place where a more aetheric reading of reality and consciousness is possible. I’m pretty convinced this entire fascination is built solely on my childhood memories of Fraggle Rock and Beauty & The Beast, but it persists into adulthood and more and more of my writing. Fraggle Rock seeded the ground with the reality-distortion field that must have existed somewhere in the Fraggle tunnels between Doc’s workshop and the Gorgs’ castle — Doc was clearly a prisoner of the real world, and yet you (the viewer) could mediate to a realm of pure fantasy by following a Fraggle into the labyrinth beneath Doc’s home. (This isn’t unusual in fantasy, of course; the idea of transitive realms that take you from one rule set to another. The rabbit-hole in Alice, of course, being the archetypal example. Doesn’t make contemplating the overarching reality of Fraggle life any less perplexing, though!)
In Beauty & the Beast, meanwhile — the series, not the movie(s) — Catherine Chandler discovers a Medieval egalitarian society living beneath the sewers of New York City. Rather than transitive, the underground civilization in Beauty & the Beast is just there. A second rule set overlayered (or rather, underlayered) upon the first, faintly echoing upward in ways that only those who have transgressed the barrier can understand. The people underground communicated with one another across the vast subterranean network by banging on pipes, echoing across the sewers and up into the world. More than once, I banged back.
I thought a lot about sewers as a child. The flow of water. The way they could be blocked. (It’s a god damned miracle I never read, or saw, IT as a young person. I’d have died.) I’d go back and forth to school on rainy days and kick globs of leaves out into the street to let the rainwater drain away. My friends and I would prowl the outflow grates in Sherwood and Chatsworth Ravine, sometimes finding something that wasn’t alive any more, waterlogged and stinking. Prying things loose with sticks. The idea of entire rivers under the city enraptured me. When I found this map my eyes rolled back in my head.
Eleven, you’ll always be number One to me… no wait not like that OH GOD WHY IS HE MURDERING EVERYBODY
Stranger Things always gets me; I mean, goes right fucking through me. I am no slouch on the wildly over-emotionalizing the narratives I ingest, but Stranger Things is like a horcrux or something. I thought some of that hyper-present emotional identification had receded in the three transformative (not in a good way) years since the third season dropped, but nope. I drew the curtains at a certain time last Friday, and a whole other time later on the same Friday, I had consumed Stranger Things 4.1 whole, and I lived inside it — and it inside me — as it always does.
Part of why Eleven’s early story in the season — episodes 1-3 — affected me so profoundly (besides the obvious: Eleven’s my girl and when people are mean to her I get angry) was the sheer commitment to the bullying arc, which always rings all of my bells. There’s a whiff of connective tissue suggesting that Eleven is a special-needs child who has been thrown into the shark tank of a regular high school (Joyce: wyd??), with poor Will as the only witness to the fact that there’s even a problem. I enjoyed the strong question the storyline raised about whether this child actually has a developed morality, or just happened to be around the right people at the moments when it counted. (There’s a rapid-cut montage of her straight-up murdering that lady in Hawkins Middle that reminded me that we’ve seen this kid do some gruesome shit — and cheered?)
After the incident at Rinko-Mania, Eleven gets sidelined off to the desert with Owens and (eventually) Brenner, and her part of the story starts to fall apart through a mild combination of over-ambition and over-indulgence. Eleven’s demi-flashback storyline in episodes 5-7 is subtly confusing, and suffers by being diffused across several episodes — intercut with the other, contemporary arcs — rather than contained all within a single, Eleven-focused hour. I realize the Duffers probably felt burned by the negative reaction to the Eleven solo episode in Season 2, but this piece of the narrative would have been improved by being given the same treatment.
Instead, we intercut Eleven’s mental unravelling of the incident in 1979 with the present-day material for all the other storylines across nearly four hours of screentime. For no reason I can deduce, there aren’t many signposts to remind the audience that what we’re seeing with Eleven takes place in her past. (The same thing happens with Hopper’s catchup flashbacks in episodes 2 and 3.) We tend to cut straight into the scenes, rather than approaching them via a reminder shot of 15-year-old Eleven floating in the deprivation tank. I found myself continuously having to remind myself that none of what we were experiencing with her was happening “now,” even though it was being told as a “now” story element, because Eleven’s amnesia meant she had to work through the narrative to discover the information at the end.
This confusing presentation is exacerbated by having 15-year-old (actually, I guess she’s closer to 18 now) Millie Bobby Brown playing 7-year-old Eleven, except in a few infrequent shots where she glances in a mirror to remind us that our bald heroine throughout this narrative is, in fact, far smaller and younger than even the version of her that escaped the lab in Season 1. Couple that with the fact that 7-year-old Eleven is substantially more verbal, and purposeful in her speech, than what tracks against what we know of her as a younger person, and I found myself bumping against those scenes almost constantly. Were they true memories — i.e. exact recreations of what happened? Were they observations of a past state by a current-state Eleven — i.e. the older self interrogating the faulty recollections of the younger self? Basically: was our heroine in control in those scenes, or just experiencing (a lot) of exposition on our behalf? If the latter, stretching the narrative across three episodes felt cruel in a different emotional-logic way, like the dictat of the story was retraumatizing Eleven at length to simply flesh out the backstory of the villain.
And what a villain. There’s a beautiful circularity to the arc of the season thus far; Eleven’s buried trauma creating a monster who invades his victims through their own buried (or poorly-buried) traumas. Her young(er) mind snapping and hiding that whole narrative from her, until it started to come out backwards and in ways that threatened to break and re-form the self. (I was really thinking, and am still kinda thinking, that we’re headed into Dark Phoenix territory before this year’s out.) Max’s episode the obvious lynchpin in all this, as her grief over Billy’s death puts her on Vecna’s chopping block, and her (somewhat earned) distrust of her closest social connections putting up natural, teenager-like barricades between Max and her own salvation. Episode 4 is, thus far, the highlight of Stranger Things 4, and between this and Fear Street, Sadie Sink is starting to pull some serious Final Girl credits.