“Children’s fiction” brings up the question I’ve been discussing with my students all semester: the idea of the “children’s movie,” childhood as a selleable commodity, category, fiction. How the 1980s simultaneously created this genre—exploited it, enriched it—and 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 “a curiosity voyage”, 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 child’s 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 suffering—not the other way around (Netflix’s 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, “As crimes pile up, they become invisible,” echoed later by Derrida’s, “In this century, monstrous crimes (‘unforgiveable’ then) have not only be committed—–which is perhaps itself not so new—–but have become visible, known, recounted, named, archived by a ‘universal conscience’ better informed than ever.” I think this is why people—why I—love Stranger Things. We don’t 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 “promises” (everyone says “Promise?” 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 child’s duration. The human’s duration. The child’s time (remember Mikey’s great utterance to the Goonies in The Goonies, “This is our time”). It is the time and time for the child to enter our thwarted scene. To show us how it’s 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 adults–—who were either absent or corrupt—and, in the process, tried to change the world.
