Narrative, Ideology & Binaries in Stranger Things

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Narrative
We start in Research Facility, Eleven has already escaped, start of story? It then progresses in a generally linear fashion (bar the flashback of Joyce Byers and Will Byers in Will's play hut)

Multi-Strand Narrative: Telling us multiple different stories that are all in someway connected, we have our main story line and then sub story lines:
  1. Disappearance of Will Byers
  2. Escape of Eleven
  3. The Growing Relationship between Nancy Wheeler and Steve Harrington
  4. Developing relationship between Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers
Todorov Narratology:

Identifying the equilibrium that begins the story and the disequilibrium that moves the story forward and the restoration that will end the equilibrium.
  1. Equilibrium = Everyday life, the normal world
  2. A disruption to the equilibrium = Something changes that world
  3. The world is restored back to that world, but something is off. 
3 or 5 stage of story:
  1. The Narrative start of the equilibrium
  2. An action or character disrupts the equilibrium
  3. A quest to restore the equilibrium 
  4. the narrative continues to a climax
  5. Resolution occurs, the equilibrium is restored
The Equilibrium in Stranger Things?
  • Start off in Wheeler house, two parent home, kids playing games, 
  • Nancy - teenage girl, still at home
  • Suggestion she's not fully involved with Steve Harrington yet, keeps that childhood quality to her in this equilibrium. 
  • Nuclear family, responsible parents caring for their children.
What upsets the equilibrium in Stranger Things?
  • Will Byers is kidnapped
  • The significance of the kidnappee being Will Byers is because he doesn't have a strong family; when he goes home to escape there's no one there to help him.
  • Reflects dominant ideology.
  • Eleven escaping
  • Steve Harrington getting involved with Nancy Wheeler's purity/innocence 
The New Equilibrium in Stranger Things?
  • Don't get a true equilibrium at the end of episode one
  • We get some sort of answer
  • Some questions are still unsolved
  • Eleven is still out from institution
  • Don't know what happened to Will Byers
  • Steve and Nancy aren't fully together
  • We find out Will is alive, Eleven almost gets captured but escapes and Nancy sort of rejects Steve's advances.
A new narrative enigma is given; Eleven & Who is she? what is her significance?
or Where is Will?
Ideology:
  • Working class Byers family depicted less positively than the Middle class Wheeler family
  • Will disappearing suggests that he's more vulnerable as a weak latchkey kid, reinforcing social  norms around the 'nuclear family'
  • However this subverts as the season goes on with the Wheelers caring less to what their children are up to and Joyce Byers going into the upside down herself to rescue her son.
  • The recognition of the disturbed equilibrium is focused around the masculine authority of Hopper and the police.
  • Patriarchal is challenged as the season goes through by Nancy, Joyce and Eleven,


Binaries:
  • Adult/Child
  • Male/Female
  • Popular/Outsider
  • Science/Paranormal
  • Middle Class/Working Class
  • Safety/Vulnerability
  • Known/Unknown
  • Nuclear Family/Single Parent Family
  • Bully/Nerd
  • Power/Weakness
  • Authority/Powerless

Claude Levi-Strauss
Society leads us to believe that one is better than the other.  

The character of Eleven problematizes these binaries, doesn't fit within these binaries. Mistaken as a boy in first episode. In later episodes she has to learn to be a female. 



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