Child's play
Is Stranger Things child abuse?
James Jackson in the (London) Times on 29th November asked whether he is wrong to watch Stranger Things with his eleven-year-old son. It’s a good question, given the story and scenes presented by the Netflix series: “a mix of horror, science fiction, mystery, fantasy and coming-of-age drama” in the words of Wikipedia. The story that stretched across the first four series focuses on a group of pre-pubescent boys andtheir parents, siblings and other adults in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.
I lost interest early in the first series, released in 2016. US government up to dastardly tricks? Ho-hum. Young boys racing around town on their bikes? Yawn. The love lives of their older siblings? Another yawn. After about the third episode my attention turned from Stranger to Other Things. Nevertheless, the hype surrounding series five, launched just over a week ago - not to mention the hypnotic credits and theme music - lured me back.
I tuned in on the second day that the new episodes were available, but such was the strength of public demand and the weakness of the broadband connection in the rural backwater where I live that I could only download the first ten minutes. That short time, however, was enough to show a terrified boy, Will, being pinned to a wall, a long alien tentacle inserted into his mouth and something thick and unpleasant systematically pumped into his stomach. At which point, thankfully, my broadband failed .
Are other children tortured in Stranger Things? I don’t know and I don’t want to find out. There is enough abuse of children - mental, physical and sexual - in the real world and my wellbeing will not be enhanced by watching children being abused onscreen even if their tormentors are fictional, supernatural beings. I do know, however, that Stranger Things is the latest in a long line of films and television that has emerged in the last decade or so where young children - some as young as four - are depicted in gory, frightening and physically intrusive scenes as victims or purveyors of horror.
Don’t misunderstand me. I appreciate horror, from the late eighteenth-century The Mysteries of Udolpho through Edgar Allan Poe, H P Lovecraft, Frankenstein, Dracula and their kin to such modern films as The Mist, Get Out and Creep. But in these stories children are either not involved or only in a minor role. Now, however, children must be seen to suffer fear, pain, terror and death or make others suffer the same. Stranger Things is not an innovator in this theme but from what I have seen it does not shy away from depicting the torture of children. The series is very popular, suggesting that millions of viewers are inured to such scenes; I must be an exception, for I find myself increasingly alienated.
The defence is presumably that horror stories are fiction and no child is actually harmed. Yet all fiction, even when it invokes the supernatural, is but a mirror, however distorted, of reality. What is the difference between a film in which a child is subject to physical abuse and one in which suffer sexual abuse? What is the difference between Will being raped by mouth or by anus? The terror, the physical pain, the injection of a substance into a young child’s body is no different whichever orifice is penetrated. I could even argue that the oral rape that the Duffer Brothers (the directors of Stranger Things) inflict on Will is worse because the physical impact on his body appears greater than most anal rape would be. And in neither case can we forget the psychological damage that would be caused by either action.
And what about the child actor in this and every other film where they have to enact fear and pain? What impact do these stories have on those boys and girls? I hope and presume they are protected from other forms of exploitation but what do they gain from being put into situations of horror and disgust? Experience, money, even pleasure at times, but what is the long-term impact on their subconscious? Do their parents / guardians and the filmmakers, whose primary interest is recouping their investment, have the best interests of the child at heart? In short, isn’t encouraging / forcing / enabling child actors to create images of terror, pain and fear in itself a form of abuse?
It seems that many of us take pleasure from watching children being frightened and tortured. As James Jackson points out, we even allow or encourage our own children to watch. Entertainment it may be; child’s play it is not.