A Stranger Things 4 Reflection
There are Stranger Things 4 spoilers in this, so open at ya own risk. Don't say nobody told you.
Have you finished Stranger Things 4 yet?
I finished Stranger Things 4 a few weeks ago and I’m still proud of the fact that I avoided all the spoilers. I did comethisclose to having the ending spoiled because of some pointless doomscrolling one evening. Overall, just like the previous three seasons, I loved Stranger Things 4. Volume One kept me on the edge of my seat and when Volume Two came out earlier this month, I wasn’t exactly excited about losing any more sleep to the graphic depictions of Vecna’s curse, but I had listened to enough of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill to keep my mind from thinking about it at 3 am and stay fairly calm when the lights in the house started flickering during a thunderstorm.
My kids were the main reason I wasn’t able to finish season four sooner, and when I finally did have the chance to binge-watch Volume Two on my iPad one Saturday, my overly curious 7-year-old son kept trying to spy on my screen. I told him he was in for a nightmare he wasn’t looking for if he kept watching. “This ain’t whatchu want,” I said, but I was too late as he caught a glimpse of Vecna’s hideous face when I paused the screen for a moment to run to the other room. No nightmares yet.
I’ve enjoyed a lot about Stranger Things in the previous seasons. I’ve even written about a few of them before here and here. I’m a Christian, but I’m not the type of person that goes out of my way to find spiritual or theological connections in the movies and shows that I watch or more than that, offer commentary about them - probably because I’m not that great at it - but this season hit on something that I thought was pretty unique for the sci-fi/ horror genre. The show hasn’t really made any spiritual or theological references throughout its four seasons (which is good, in my opinion) and this season was, I believe, the first time a Bible verse was even quoted, Romans 12:21 which was made by high school jock and rich athlete Jason Carver when he interrupted the Hawkins townhall meeting trying to convince citizens that satanic cults were responsible for the murders in Hawkins. Jason’s appearance at the town hall pointed back to the days of “Satanic Panic” in our country during the 80s, 90s, and even presently, where people believe that satanic rituals and fascination with occultism were the cause of rampant evil. There’s a whole ‘nother article that could be written about the evolution of satanic panic, but maybe I’ll save that for another day.
There’s something else that is spiritual in nature that stood out to me this season, and I think it has the potential to be even scarier than satanic panic or the violently contorted ligaments and gouged-out eyes of Vecna’s victims. It’s what’s beneath or even at the core of Vecna’s curse: guilt and the trauma caused by it. From Chrissy Cunningham’s eating disorder to Fred Benson’s car accident which killed another student, to Patrick McKinney’s physical and verbal abuse from his father, to Max’s grieving over her fractured relationship with Billy, and Nancy’s regret over her friend, Barb’s murder, guilt is Vecna’s foothold into the minds of his victims. In Episode 3, as he searches the minds of Hawkins’ residents from the Upside Down, Vecna encounters the thoughts of the bullied and the pressured, people in denial about their health, the manipulated and the abused, all of whom are experiencing guilt from their circumstances that they’ve either contributed to or have been affected by. It reminded me of how people deal with guilt and mainly, how our supernatural enemy uses guilt against us in our lives.
Now granted, the guilt that we face in this reality probably isn’t going to cause us to fall into haunted, clock-filled trances while levitating in the air or suffer the tortuous effects of Vecna’s powers. But guilt is both a soul-destroying force and something weaponized by a supernatural enemy to destroy our souls. Its corrosive power extends to the deepest parts of who we are creating its own customized concoction of anxiety, fear, shame, frustration, and finger-pointing while leaving us with the lasting effects of despair, hopelessness, depression, and any number of stress and mental health-related issues. Guilt will take hostage any situation in our lives, no matter how minor or major, and use it to demand our submission to its lies. Lies that tell us that giving into guilt is a way to end our suffering from it. Lies that tell us that we’ll never be enough and that we deserve to feel guilty. Lies that tell us that we are every bit as bad, if not worse than we’ve ever imagined ourselves to be and who we are along with the things that we’ve done are irredeemable.
Spoiler alert, this happens in Episode 4 where, in Vecna’s first attempt to kill Max, he speaks to her through a blood-stained version of her deceased brother, Billy, whom she’d just read a heartfelt letter at his gravesite. In the trance Billy tells Max, “I’ve been waiting to hear those words…But it wasn’t the full truth, was it, Max?” and then he continues, saying, “You know, I think there’s a part of you buried somewhere deep, that wanted me to die that day. That was maybe even relieved”. While Max denies Billy’s words, the voice of Vecna tries to persuade her that what he says is true and that she can admit it. “No more lies. No more hiding.”, he says. “That is why you feel such guilt…and why, late at night, you have sometimes wished to follow me. Follow me into death.” This is guilt’s power.
In a way that functions much like the Upside Down, guilt creates its own inverted reality in our minds. In that reality we are humiliated, ashamed, inadequate, condemned, unloved and unlovely. And from this, the Upside Down of guilt attempts to evoke from us a dark and inverted confession that acknowledges these things as truth. “Admit it,” guilt says. “This is who you are and this is how you really feel.” The thing about guilt is that while it can tell us lies, sometimes guilt’s confession might be true. In the season finale, just before Vecna’s second attempt to kill Max, she admits to Vecna,
“I thought about what you said. About how I wanted my brother to die. I thought that you were just trying to upset me; to anger me. But you weren't were you? You were just telling the truth. Billy, he made my life a living hell….so sometimes, when I would lie in bed at night, I would pray that something would happen to him. Something awful…I wanted him out of my life. Forever. I wanted him to disappear….and I’ve tried to forgive myself. I’ve tried, but I cant. So now, now when I lie in bed at night, I pray that something will happen to me. That something terrible will happen to me.”
Sometimes guilt exposes the depths of evil and brokenness within us, and in response guilt, and the enemy wielding it against us, would lead us in a confession that would drive us to our destruction. And so when we fight against guilt, we might try things like denial, deflection, or try to cover up and ignore the feelings of guilt or whatever it is that’s causing those feelings, but none of those responses is successful against guilt’s power. So what works? In everyone’s favorite episode from Volume One, Max’s favorite song, Running Up That Hill, by Kate Bush was her liberator from Vecna’s suffocating tentacles, and in the end, it would be Eleven’s powers along with Nancy, Steve, and Robin who confront a vulnerable Vecna with a sawed-off shotgun and flaming bottles. How beautiful - wait, how awesome - would it be if we could confront our guilt with our favorite songs or weapons of choice? Sometimes the songs might work temporarily, but when it comes to guilt, it’s more like the Apostle Paul says, our struggle isn’t against flesh and blood and the weapons we fight with aren’t of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We need something more powerful in our fight against guilt because guilt is a stronghold that’s spiritual in nature.
This is one of the reasons I love Psalm 32. David writes these lyrics on the other side of a guilty conscience. When he reflects on what he felt in his previously unsuccessful fight against guilt - guilt that he had incurred on himself - his words sound something like what Vecna’s victims might’ve felt in their final moments. David says,
“When I kept silent, my bones became brittle from my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was drained as in the summers heat.”
Vecna’s curse adds its own dramatically destructive flair to guilt’s already debilitating power. But in the clutches of guilt in Psalm 32, no song comes for the psalmwriter. As helpful as they can be at times, no friends can rescue him with weapons made by human hands. The power that David needs, and we need, to deal with guilt is ultimately found outside of ourselves in someone else exponentially more powerful than guilt, God. “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not conceal my iniquity. I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” Whether it’s because of sin or being sinned against, when guilt presses us to make its Upside Down confession, we don’t have to be silent or deny or ignore it. Guilt does not have to drive us to destruction. Instead, guilt can be an interstate to grace. We can acknowledge the truth about ourselves, our experiences, our shortcomings, sufferings, failures, and flaws and be met, not with death and rejection, but with forgiveness and acceptance. In this Right-Side Up reality, that’s what confession to God leads to.
Forgiveness and acceptance from God are the outcomes for whoever confesses their guilt to him, and that’s possible because someone who loves us made a deal with God to swap our places. (Romans 4:25) Let me stop…
Stranger Things 4 did an amazing job highlighting the horror of guilt in a way I’ve never seen before in the genre. Prior to searching for my own song that would free me from Vecna (The College Dropout’s, Never Let Me Down), it was a good exercise searching for the things that might give ol’ boy a foothold, and then confronting those things by talking to God.