Film and TV

The Ultimate Continuum

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The much celebrated 2014 film Birdman, gives an insightful review of human (in)significance in one key scene between Sam [Emma Stone] and Riggan [Michael Keaton].

Riggan, an ageing actor and artist who is suffering an identity crisis, is counselled by his daughter as to how her recent stint in rehab helped her come to peace with her own anxieties. She methodically draws small dashes onto squares of toilet paper, 150 dashes per square, until she fills and entire roll.

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Then she unfurls the paper roll and points out that one meagre square of tissue represents the entire span of human existence. One dash alone equals a million years and the roll entire, the 6 billion odd years of space and time. In so doing, her own and Riggan’s agonies over life significance are put into perspective.

The illustration questions any worries about life achievements, fame, or success. Indeed, there seems little difference between doing ‘something’ and doing ‘nothing’ with ones life, little difference between becoming a trillionaire even, and becoming a subsistence farmer.

Any sense of achievement then is simply won in comparison to our peers, those whose admiration we might crave or whose love or fear we might seek. Ultimately, however, we remain a small fleck within an infinite sea of darkness, a darkness within which giant stars burn for millions of years and even they remain dwarfed by galaxies, in turn dwarfed by the magnitude of space and time.

Is such an epiphany calming? or more anxiety inducing? Why in fact should we make any effort? and for what ultimately, is any effort of value?

What indeed then, is the difference between committing mass murder verses committing ones life to charity and community service? If ultimately, we are atoms afloat in an infinite sea of nothing, then nothing indeed is of meaning, is it not?!

The story explores the primal questions that existentialist philosophers have asked for millennia. It brings us back to the ground of being which is in our feelings, our hearts, our emotions and our soul. The difference between committing one’s life to harm verses help, lies in the significance of the human experience, in our feelings, our heart and soul. We draw our being from love, not from our achievements, our wealth, our power, fame or grandeur.

We don’t draw our significance from our stature amidst infinite space and time, for it renders us ridiculously finite; we draw our significance from the face of love, which is the face of God.

The question still stands, to what do we commit our little life to then, the hours we have, the time in our hands? The biblical story of the ‘talents’ [Matt 25:14-30] expounds on this very point. If you have one talent, double it; if you have five talents, make them ten. Whatever you have, work with it, double it, increase it.

And more than anything, do all you do, with love.

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang!: When Men Write Women Bear Skin Digital by jen bishop

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang!: When Men Write Women

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I have recently completed several seasons of Peaky Blinders, a gangster series set in 1920s Birmingham, based on the real life family The Shelby’s and their illegal betting and black-market trading businesses.

The story is clearly a boys fantasy, while couched in history, the heroes and villains become caricatured and superheroesque and women fall into two broad categories, wives and lovers.

Initially, leading female characters seemed plucky, tough. However they soon devolve into wives with children who hover in the wings, or mothers vigilantly attending their sons. They’re sassy and have their own minor narrative arcs, trysts and adventures however they largely fall into two dimensional supports for the boys.

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang!: When Men Write Women Bear Skin Digital by jen bishop

To be faithful to bygone days, women did not have the rights and agency of men to run businesses, bear weapons, own property or take a professional career, nor do they have the physical strength to engage in fisty-cuffs as typified in gangster sagas. What is sorely missing is not girl-versions of boy gangsters, but females with rich, varied and nuanced existences, intellect, entrepreneurship, humour, allure, mendacity and creativity of their own.

Thomas Shelby, the gang leader, is a male fantasy. Women throw themselves at him one after the other, while men either love him or want to kill him [and even the ones who want him dead will happily collaborate with such a decent foe].

What presents as a nuanced period piece, the 1920’s world brought to life amidst IRA tensions, a young Winston Churchill in office, ethnic gang wars between gypsy travelers, Italian mafia and Jewish business empires, an wider back drop of the dying and corrupt Russian Empire, the early stirrings of communism and of a second World War, becomes a disappointing two dimensional fantasy of bad boys gone badder, rolling in money, cocaine and power, breaking all the rules except the code of brotherhood and seeing foes and beautiful women falling in front of them with ease.

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang!: When Men Write Women Bear Skin Digital by jen bishop

There is not one woman in the series who is not oriented to the men as lover, mother, wife or more crudely, an object of desire. No strong character, weak character, evil character or good redeeming character has any other place in the narrative except as part of the family or as a side interest. And this where good writing falls down.

Endings: the good, the bad and the insanely great!

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In this short video, screenwriter Michael Arndt, outlines the ingredients of what he believes make a great film ending. Oscar winner for best original screenplay, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ [2006] and best adapted screenplay ‘Toy Story 3’ [2010], Arndt also worked on the script for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ [2015] and is a true veteran of the craft.

Michael Arndt,

He emphasises several times throughout the presentation that he does NOT intend to state that story telling is formulaic. His analysis merely is an attempt to understand how great stories work by taking the viewer to the point of emotional catharsis.

Arndt points out that many scripts fail to deliver on their endings. While the girl gets the boy, or the hero wins the prize, much of the emotional catharsis of story resolutions are sorely lacking. With much reflection, he has identified three important ingredients for a great story, which when resolved create a great ending: a personal stake, an external stake and a philosophical stake.

To illustrate what he calls, ‘insanely great’ endings, Arndt uses ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ [1977], ‘The Graduate’ [1967] and his own ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ [2006], each which within only 2 short minutes, bring resounding emotional climax and catharsis for the viewers.

Watch the full video presentation via the link below:

Endings: The Good, the Bad, and the Insanely Great from Pandemonium on Vimeo.

When we decide what is right and wrong ...[spoilers within]

When we decide what is right and wrong …[spoilers within].

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4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. 

Genesis 3: 4-6

In May 2019, the epic HBO TV series Game of Thrones came to an end. The 8 season, 73 episode series was first aired on April 17, 2011 and the finale aired this year to a staggering 17 million viewers worldwide [not including illegal downloads]. Despite controversy and fan protest about the series conclusion, it has shattered all records for being one of the most watched TV series of all time.

When we decide what is right and wrong ...[spoilers within]

The now famously controversial final season was reduced from the normal 8-9 episodes to only 6 intense episodes full of battle scenes and special effects. At approximately $5 million-$10 million production budget per episode, the final season was ‘epic’ indeed.

In a poetic soliloquy to sum up epic series, Tyrion Lannister declares:

What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags?

…. Stories. There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.

And epic story it is. In an earlier post, I discussed the series in a post Game of Faiths, analysing its rich world of spiritual and religious ideas. Jon Snow is styled by George R R Martin to be an epic hero of mythic narrative. A Christ-like figure of messianic proportions.

It is Jon Snow who demonstrates he is a true leader, one worthy of this cosmic battle. He sacrifices for his men and gains their loyalty and trust. He is betrayed at the hands of his friends and murdered, but he returns from the clutches of death to prompt the Priestess of Light to declare him  Azor Ahai, the one prophesied to bring balance between light and dark, to end the Great Battle with the forces of darkness and death.

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However, the final series falls shy of such predictions. Jon does not kill the Night King, ending the long winter, nor does he take the Iron Throne to rule Westeros in peace. Instead he stands by and watches the demise of his love, Daenerys, maddened by grief and power-lust.

She falls prey to the same fate as her Targaryan ancestors, becoming a ‘mad queen’, torching the city that should be hers, mercilessly, and beckoning Jon to join her in creating a new future world, styled in her version of ‘goodness’.

With imagery allusive of post World War II destruction, Daenerys looks over a destroyed city, covered in a white layer of ash including human flesh incinerated. Unrepentant of such necessary evil, she summons Jon to join her to ‘break the wheel’ of tyranny and rule a new world together.

Daenerys ~ ‘It’s not easy to see something that has never been before. A good world.’

Jon ~ ‘How do you know? How do you know it’ll be good?’

Daenerys ~ ‘Because I know what is good. And so do you.’

Jon ~ ‘No I don’t’.

Daenerys ~ ‘You do. You do, you have always known. ‘

Jon – ‘What about everyone else? All the other people who think they know what is good?’

Daenerys ~ ‘They don’t get to choose.’

Daenerys words hearken to one of the oldest stories of human history, a narrative in which humans first fall when they wish to decide what is good and what is evil.

Alongside Nazi Germany and many other of history’s horrible despots, Daenerys goes the way of wicked men and women whose power consumes them and their humanity when they decide their standard of goodness in unique and superior.

Jon Snow, does not sit on any throne, but instead honours a greater standard of good to serve his family and his nation sacrificially.

Whatever you think of the final series of Game of Thrones, the 8 season epic drama has truly set new standards of televisions epic fantasy story telling.

For a good examination of why the final season so disappointed fans of the series, read this excellent article in Scientific American, by Zeynep Tufekci.

Out of Africa

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“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,”

And so in the lilting Danish accent of Meryl Streep, opens Out of Africa, a 1986 film directed by Sydney Pollack.

With sweeping plains of East Africa in view, an attractive cast including Streep and Robert Redford, bolstered by a beautiful musical score by John Barry, ‘Out of Africa‘ went on to win 7 Academy Awards and box office earnings of over USD $227 million.

Based on the memoir with the same title by Danish author Karen Blixen, [Isak Dinesen] the original book was first published in 1937, and recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The film script was adapted with additional material from Dinesen’s book Shadows on the Grass and other sources.

The book’s title is probably an abbreviation of the famous ancient Latin adage,

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.

Pliny, The Elder

Out of Africa, always something new.

Out of Africa Bear Skin Digital by jen bishop

The book and film are a lyrical meditation on Blixen’s life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire.

Noted for its melancholy, nostalgic and elegiac style, biographer Judith Thurman describes Out of Africa using an African tribal phrase:

clear darkness.

The tale covers the deaths of at least five of the important people in Blixen’s life, and is a meditation on her feelings of loss and nostalgia. She describes her failed business, and comments wryly on her mixture of despair and denial, of the sadness she faces there. A brave and hard working woman for whom almost nothing flows smoothly: marriage, love, business, health. Everything is challenging, even crushing.

Why then is such a story, so sad and so melancholy, yet so enduringly popular among movie goers and readers?

Perhaps in true modernist and existentialist style, Blixen captures the feeling of living, the sights, smells, and sensations of a foreign land and the strange and diverse people she meets there. The bitter-sweetness of existence is shared with us through her experience, marked by love, loss, desire, knowing, holding and surrendering.

Blixen was admired by her contemporaries including Ernest Hemingway, who is reported to have said on winning his own Nobel prize in 1954,

I would have been happy – happier – today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.

Big Little Lies

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I recently attended a debate in central London hosted by Intelligence Squared entitled ‘Identity Politics is Tearing Society Apart‘. The panel boasted an editorial director of BBC news Kamal Ahmed, and novelist Lionel Shriver among others.

Identity is defined in Oxford Bibliographies,

as a tool to frame political claims, promote political ideologies, or stimulate and orientate social and political action, usually in a larger context of inequality or injustice and with the aim of asserting group distinctiveness and belonging and gaining power and recognition.

Vasiliki Neofotistos (2013). “Identity Politics”. Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 27 October 2018. Retrieved 9th June 2019.

Arguments in favour of the motion focused on the fact that identity politics has in fact fueled a backlash of populism, bringing alt-right figures to the fore, destroying society’s broad sense of the common good, and increasing antagonism and fragmentation in our society.

Upon entry and upon exit the audience were polled for their agreement or disagreement with the debate title, and the majority 55% left the debate in agreement that indeed, identity politics was tearing society apart.

I, however, did not agree.

Recently I completed the 7 episode first season of ‘Big Little Lies‘ a HBO original series, produced by and starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. The American drama television series, based on the novel  by Australian author Liane Moriarty, premiered on February 19, 2017, and follows the lives and relationships of four women in Monterey, California, The women are united around their children who share a grade one class at the local school.

Their community is socially and economically homogeneous. The women are white Americans, upper middle class, heterosexual, well educated, and nice people. While there is an African American character, she is a vegan, yoga instructor who is socially and economically their equal. One character is single and working class but she is soon brought into the fold by the other women through shared experience. Under the surface of this idyllic beach-side life, where women share expansive homes with their handsome, domesticated husbands lies violence, lies, betrayal and hatred. Each character has layers, motives, jealousies and wounds which drive them through the story arc, Shakespearean at times in range and depth. It’s clear that this society is being torn apart yet – identity politics does not play one note the pain and violence which exists.

Surely there is something deeper than identity that tears our society apart?

Judeo-Christian theology, upon which our western society is based, teaches radical love and service to the ‘other’ most emphatically, the ‘other’ who is powerless, stateless, and voiceless. As such, duty bearers and power-holders have a mandate to identify with and support the recognition of the group who would otherwise be excluded from rights and privileges. Judeo-Christian theology is the very basis of ‘identity politics’.

So why do good, moral, people, feel identity politics has gotten out of hand, tearing at the fabric of society? Why does identity politics get the fall for the violence and dissolution of society?

A quick perusal of any history text shows that every generation of society has been riven by racial, geographical, class and religious wars – each tearing society apart in different ways. The 18th and 19th centuries were defined by class political wars, and the 16th and 17th centuries were defined by religious political wars. Earlier centuries were marked by ethnic wars and indeed the annals of history stretch back into time immemorial to tell of countless epochs of bloodshed.

It begs the question whether it in fact something deeper, something more human which is the enemy to human peace?

If it were identity which bred violence, one solution for humanity may lie in what the Buddhists teach as the denial of identity, the absolution of any ego-attachment to self or otherness and the blissful nirvana of non-being. It can be captures in the lyrics of the late-great John Lennon – ‘imagine’ a world where no countries, religion, or possessions exist, where humans live in peace and ‘as one.’

The challenge with such a philosophy is that it negates love which from the ground of self engages the ‘other’ and gives of self to the other.

In ‘Big Little Lies’ no one escapes the narrative to be ‘good’ or ‘ethical’. Everyone has their story, their motives, their depths. It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who wrote:

But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. 

It is not the negation of self that brings about peace, nor is it the eradication of ‘identity politics’ which will be the solution to our social ills or the healing of our social fabric. It is only when we address the violence that exists in the human heart that we can begin to find true and lasting peace.

The Orchid Thief

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The Orchid Thief is a 1998 non-fiction book by American journalist Susan Orlean based on an article that Orlean wrote for The New Yorker. It is based on her investigation of the 1994 arrest of John Laroche and a group of Seminole Indians in south Florida for poaching rare orchids in the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve.

Laroche, a Miami eccentric, hit upon the idea of collecting endangered species of orchids from swampland that was Seminole territory, by using real Seminole Indians to obtain his specimens and exploiting their legal right to use their own ancestral lands.

Laroche narrates a poetic passage about the beauty and mutability of the Orchid and the limitless shapes and forms they take to attract insects, insects which in turn imitate their shapes and coloring and fall in love with the flowers, propagating them in a curious dance of nature. Orlean’s writing centered on the power of singular passion to drive a person’s life.

Adaptation,  is a 2002 American comedy-drama, directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie [and Donald] Kaufman, based on Orlean’s book. Kaufman who had been hired to write a screenplay of the book, experienced writer’s block.  He ultimately wrote a script based on his experience of writer’s block while adapting the book into a screenplay.

Kaufman has a similar singular passion to Laroche, the passion to create a truly unique story, one that is far from the formulaic Hollywood scripts he abhors. The film then is a a pun, referring both to Darwinian principle of adaptation among Orchid species as lauded by Laroche, and the ordeal for Kaufman of adapting a book into a screenplay.

Kaufman co-credits the screenplay to his twin brother, a curiosity since Donald does not exist outside of the screenplay. Donald is everything Charlie is not – confident, successful with women, a hack writer. Faced with the surprising news that Donald’s script for a clichéd psychological thriller, called The 3, is selling for six or seven figures in Hollywood , Charlie resorts to attending a screenwriting seminar in New York to seek inspiration.

Needless to say the film slides from biography of man with writer’s block into a ludicrous conglomeration of elements of a Hollywood thriller, drugs, sex, guns, chases, even a crocodile attack. Charlie visibly perks up once he knows how to convert the book into a film and closes wondering which international superstar will portray himself in the film.

The film is both teller and told, both narrator and narrated. One is left realising that we have not watched a story of a man adapting a book into a screenplay, we have in fact been watching the story of a man telling the story we are watching, co-written by a character within the screenplay, leading us on a merry dance of adaptive creativity.

But what more would you expect from the writer-director duo who brought us ‘Being John Malkovich.’

Pygmalion

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Pygmalion (Πυγμαλίων Pugmalíōn) is a legendary figure of Cyprus, most familiar from Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses. He is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has carved.


Depiction of Ovid’s narrative by Jean Raoux.

Having crafted the perfect woman, Pygmalion makes offerings to Aphrodite at her festival day, quietly wishing for a bride who would be “the living likeness of my ivory girl.” When he returns home, he kisses his ivory statue, and finds that its lips are warm. He kisses it again, and finds that the ivory has lost its hardness. Aphrodite has granted Pygmalion’s wish. Pygmalion marries the ivory sculpture and they live happily together.

In modern times, George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, reexamines the myth through the story of underclass flower-girl Eliza Doolittle who is metaphorically “brought to life” by a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins. Higgins teaches her to refine her accent and conversation and otherwise conduct herself with upper-class manners in social situations. The play inspired the film My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn.


King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884, by Edward Burne-Jones, currently hangs in the Tate Gallery, London.

George Bernard Shaw’s re-telling of the Pygmalion myth also draws upon the Elizabethan ballad of King Cophetua. Titled “The King and the Beggar-maid,” the story is Cophetua, tells of an African king who one day while looking out a palace window, witnesses a young beggar, Penelophon, “clad all in grey”. Struck by love at first sight, Cophetua walks out into the street, he tells Penelophon that she is to be his wife. She agrees and becomes queen, and soon loses all trace of her former poverty and low class.

C. S. Lewis often used Cophetua and the beggar girl as an image of God’s love for the unlovely. In The Problem of Pain, he writes,

We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that [God] could reconcile Himself to our present impurities – no more than the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt…

In classical fairy tales, the maiden is woken from an enchanted sleep by the kiss of the Prince, just as Pygmalion, the sculptor awakens his bride, with a kiss. Moreover, Professor Higgins endows Eliza with dignity and pride, bringing her ‘to life‘ by bestowing upon her the graces of society. But these tales offer little nuance to what may occur to an unsuspecting creator once he has summoned a real life woman with agency and choice, into his life.

It is not love to to fashion a person as though an object, to be pure and good, endowed with life yet with the expectation it will remain good and pure in perpetuity? A mannequin or socially engineered project like Eliza Doolittle cannot truly feel loved nor genuinely love in return under such conditions.

Bernard Shaw’s play notoriously does not end with the fairy-tale love story of Ovid’s Pygmalion. Rather Eliza rebels from Higgins, refusing to fetch his slippers and he grows furious for “lavishing” his knowledge and his “regard and intimacy” on a “heartless guttersnipe” who he has made “a consort for a king.”  The Hollywood film version ‘My Fair Lady’ of course rejected such a realistic ending in favour of, well a Hollywood one.

What is reality then? The Hebrew prophets tell of a tragic drama between YHWH and his people, here depicted as a young girl taken from poverty to be the bride of the King. Ezekiel 16 reads:

10 I clothed you with an embroidered dress and put sandals of fine leather on you. I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments. 11 I adorned you with jewelry: I put bracelets on your arms and a necklace around your neck, 12 and I put a ring on your nose, earrings on your ears and a beautiful crown on your head.

However, the bride does not remain beautiful and obedient for the king. She soon rebels, turning to prostitution and idol worship and even giving her children up for human sacrifices.

15 “‘But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute… 16 You took some of your garments to make gaudy high places, where you carried on your prostitution... 17 You also took the fine jewelry I gave you, the jewelry made of my gold and silver, and you made for yourself male idols and engaged in prostitution with them. 

The prophet continues to lament all of Israel’s misfortunes as resulting from the self inflicted chaos of Israel’s choices, a once chosen and adorned bride who chased other lovers. He closes with a reminder of YHWHs eternal promises.

Soren Kierkegaard’s version of the ballad of King Cophetua, ‘The King and the Maiden’ retells the tale with the king willing to take on the clothes of a beggar to claim the woman he loves. It is he that abases himself rather than she he elevates, lest he overwhelm her with his power and grandeur and never truly claim her heart.

The King and the Maiden

This short story strikes at the heart of the reader, for love is true love not when the object of desire is bestowed with graces to make her worthy of love, but when she is met by the humbled heart of one earnestly and repeatedly wishing to know her win her heart, one indeed willing to suffer the pains of loving her and her imperfections and keep coming back to an eternal promise of love.

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S. E. Hinton

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 Susan Eloise Hinton (born July 22, 1948) is an American writer best known for her young-adult novels which she wrote during high school. Hinton was 15 when she started writing her first novel, The Outsiders, and 18 years of age when the book was published. 

Hinton is a brilliant example to aspiring writers to not be inhibited by age or inexperience.

The Outsiders, her first and most popular novel, is set in Oklahoma in the 1960s and was inspired by people at Hinton’s high school. It details the conflict between two rival gangs divided by their socioeconomic status: the working-class “greasers” and the upper-class “Socs” (pronounced ‘soshes’—short for Socials). Hinton wrote from the point of view of the Greasers, showing a desire to show empathy for the underdog.

Since it was first published when she was only 18 years of age, the book has sold more than 14 million copies and still sells more than 500,000 a year. 

The Outsiders is told in first-person perspective by teenage protagonist Ponyboy Curtis. It recounts Ponyboy’s relationship with his two brothers, his tough oldest brother Darry and the easy going and likeable Sodapop in the wake of their parents’ recent deaths in a car crash. Ponyboy’s soft and poetic nature is set against the harsh environment of his gang world. When fleeing the authorities after a gang death, Ponyboy cuts and dyes his hair as a disguise, reads Gone with the Wind to fellow fugitive Johnny, and, upon viewing a beautiful sunrise, recites the poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost.

The novel is essentially a coming of age story of disaffected youth, and its enduring popularity is testament to the young writers voice.

A film adaptation was produced in 1983, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring many of the top young actors of the ’80s including Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, and Rob Lowe. The film grossed $30 million from a $10 million budget and Coppola followed it the next year by adapting Hinton’s sequel, Rumble Fish and featuring many of the same cast and crew.

When the book was first released, Hinton’s publisher suggested she use her initials so that book reviewers would not dismiss the novel because its author was female. For a 15 year old female writing about her teen experience of the 1960s, Hinton’s work is a reminder to all aspiring writers to tell our stories without inhibition. You never know what enduring legacy the story you tell, might have.

The Stranger Things of Story

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There is perhaps no more striking representation of the battle between good and evil than in Stranger Things, the Netflix series which released its second season in late October 2017. This battle is seen through the eyes of children in a normal town of Hawkins Indiana.

Set one year after the events of Season 1, it is Halloween October 1984, and we are treated once again to pop culture references of ’80s movies including Aliens, Ghost Busters, Strange Encounters of the Third Kind, Dungeons and Dragons and arcade games such as pac-man and space invaders.

stranger things

In the first season of ‘Stranger Things’, we met Eleven, a girl with telekinetic powers who has been caged and tormented in a research lab, and who opens the door way to ‘the upside down‘. This nightmarish world is a dark shadow of our own, a literal ‘upside down’ version of reality where dark things lurk and various innocents such as Will and Barb are drawn and even lost.

In Season 2, we see the characters each dealing with the after effects of their adventures in season 1. Will, still connected to the upside down, is seeing visions of the evil menace over Hawkins and he warns his friends. They believe he is simply experiencing post traumatic stress flashbacks however soon he becomes affected by the “shadow monster” as though possessed by a demonic power.

stranger things 5

Can Eleven and the gang stop the forces of evil again before it consumes their friend Will, their town Hawkins and maybe their entire world?

As mentioned in earlier Bear Skin posts, many stories have a doorway metaphor allowing protagonists to pass into a magical or mythical world of adventure.  Indeed, classics such as “Alice in Wonderland” or ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, contain a literal door through which children pass into a magical land. Here a a battle of good and evil occurs, or at least a discovery of true self and courage. Other classics such as “Harry Potter” tell of parallel worlds [the worlds of muggles and of Witchcraft and Wizardry] which live in close relationship. Only the few special characters are able to navigate both and it is there the true battles of life and death are fought and won.

This metaphor duality of our world, of scientific objectivity on the one hand and the world of narrative and myth on the other, represents the division between the conscious and the subconscious, the natural and the supernatural. These stories and the journey of protagonists between worlds, through the doorway or portal, takes the reader or viewer on a journey into their own dream-state, to do battle with the evil which lurks there.

stranger things 6

‘Stranger Things’ and other doorway stories, shows how unexamined rationalism, or worlds without myth and legend, impoverish the mind and spirit. The ordinary world that denies the magical or mythical world does so to its own detriment. It seems that those who deny the chaos and disorder of the subconscious will eventually be ruled by it; 19th century humanist rationalism, ever optimistic about the greater and greater advancements of human knowledge, gave rise to the cruelty and chaotic destruction of the early 20th century regimes of Stalin, Hitler and Lenin.

And so what is the solution to our dilemma?

It is the hero who must bridge the two worlds, crossing between and doing battle with the forces or chaos within the subconscious. The hero-journey, so prevalent in narrative, myth and legend is the descent into the psyche as though into another world to encounter the monsters of chaos therein. The hero will face the beast he or she fears the most and there through acts of courage and often great sacrifice, vanquish them or contain them.

In returning, the hero can then seal up the fractured psyche, restoring the integrity of the soul. What magical force does this hero use? Well, the most powerful a mystical force available to humans – the force of love.