Passion Plays?: Why The Chosen and Stranger Things Captivate Us
My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow. As Passiontide kicks in and we look to Holy Week, in yet another time of war, I have been thinking how our culture tells stories about despair. The horror-fantasy TV show Stranger Things, which drew to a close recently after a decade-long stretch of five seasons, is a pretty good measure of this.
Set in a small town in Indiana during the mid-eighties, the narrative kicks off with a group of kids playing Dungeons and Dragons, who stumble on an alternative world under their town, which they call “the upside-down.” It is a nightmare place that mirrors the everyday world but in a degraded form, where no light penetrates and slimy black tentacles twist around houses and trees, the air floating with what looks like polystyrene fragments. It is a realm where vulpine humanoids with venus-fly-trap heads drag people off to be offered to a diabolical entity.
Over five seasons, to a drumbeat of fantastical Cold War themes, the show juxtaposes the worst with the best of humanity. At the heart of the horror is Vecna, a psychopathic entity who warps and manipulates everyone in his path. One of his favored torture techniques is the dislocation of the human body, though his ultimate tactic involves invading the mind of his victims, finding their weakest points and exploiting them.
In the final season [SPOILER ALERT!] we realize that the plot is even thicker than we thought. Vecna, once a man named Henry, is himself possessed by an alien entity: this is the true Mind Flayer, the source of the upside down and of Henry/Vecna’s powers. Set in a pre-internet age, the show seems to point to our own time, when the tentacles of the internet eat young minds for breakfast.
Ranged against this seemingly insuperable evil, the forces of good in Stranger Things are rooted in down-to-earth elements. The heroic resilience of a mother, the dogged loyalty of friends, and the old-fashioned American instinct to protect vulnerable and displaced people. I lived in the U.S. during the period when the show is set, and remember the era fondly: the bouffant hair, the vinyl records bringing us the enduring sounds of Kate Bush and David Bowie. One of the most attractive elements of Stranger Things is the way powerless people, beginning with children, use their wits, alongside an array of hilariously low-tech weaponry, to ride into combat. It is no surprise, at the very start of the show, that Tolkien is referenced, and as time goes by, an inter-generational Fellowship forms (albeit using language that JRR would hardly endorse!).
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A debate has raged around the conclusion of Stranger Things, due to the apparent suicide of its central character, Eleven. It is this element that I want to dwell on now. El is the true super-hero figure in the show, endowed with psycho-kinetic powers bred through a terrifying lab-rat childhood where she first met Henry, as he was then. She is the trump card that the fellowship must employ to defeat him now, though it seems as though all she has achieved so far is to drive him deeper into the realm that fuels his hatred.
By the same token, El comes to see herself as a threat to her own friends, and the wider world, since her blood carries the markers of the antagonist himself. Plus, guess what? The U.S. army wants to make super soldiers from her DNA. Her adopted lab-rat sister, Kali (the embodiment of the Kali Yuga the perrenialists speak of, perhaps), tries to persuade her that once Vecna is killed, El herself must also die, in order to protect humanity.
This is heavy stuff. It is a fact that suicidal ideation involves self-loathing: the desire to scratch out your own DNA and end your “line.” It is also a fact that existential despair is often rooted in the disconnection between past and future identity. It is a dis-location, an ab-ortion. The closing in of an airless space on a being that needs oxygen and connection to grow and thrive.
El’s adoptive father, Hopper, tries to persuade her that she has everything to live for (whatever you might think of the show as a whole, his character conveys a wonderful, wonky Josephine presence). He knows how earnest her desire to do the right thing is, in spite of all the trauma she carries. He does not want her to despair of the possibility of an existence which allows for some sort of normality. It is here that a second tether to hope occurs, in her love for Mike, one of the original fellowship. She knows what it will do to her soul-mate, too, if she dies. And yet, apparently, she chooses to go through with it.
Except that gut-wrenching jeopardy is not the end of the story. Eighteen months after the destruction of Vecna and all his slimy works, with El disappearing in the mix, Mike furrows his grief toward an alternative explanation. After they graduate from high school, he tells his friends another story. During their final mission in the upside-down, El made a pact with Kali, whose superpower was the ability to project an illusory reality. Kali, who significantly heard Hopper’s pep-talk to El, would make it appear as though El were standing in the rift between the worlds: whilst cloaking her real body so that no one would see her disappear from the scene and make her escape.
Many viewers did not find this explanation credible, which arguably makes for a flaw in the narrative (the Duffer brothers have admitted to feeling at sea with the final resolution). When I questioned friends and family on their take, they all said that Mike’s story is just that: something you could believe if you want to, but not something that genuinely consoled them. Yet after noting all the plot points, the imagery and the dialogue, I find Mike’s minority report curiously coherent.
First and foremost there is the story arc of Eleven herself, the capacity for love which is firmly embodied in her in spite of her background. Her horror at the sight of heavily pregnant, sedated women in the military lab, being infused with and poisoned by the same “super blood” as hers, is palpable. It is one of the most disturbing images of the final season. Along with the anti-Christ elements of the plot (and they are legion, from violent jocks to a deranged military), there is also an anti-Marian horror here. The one time the words “holy mother of God” are exclaimed is when the hellscape of the Mind Flayer drops into close contact with our world (the words feel more like an invocation for protection than a blasphemy).
In stark contrast with this is the scenario that Hopper puts in front of El, of a future in which she might be able to protect and nurture her own child—not a pro-life message so much as a vision of life without coercion, without artificiality. Similarly, in El’s final moment of communion with Mike, when she pulls him into her mind and tells him that one day he will understand what she is doing (NB: she does not tell him what this is), she establishes clearly the ground of her hope. That there is one human being on the planet who truly understands her, even if his anguish in the moment consumes him. And presumably Mike will know her well enough to eventually figure out what her final move consisted in.
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I will leave it there and turn to another TV series which you are more likely to have been watching in recent years: The Chosen, an ecumenical effort to portray the life of Christ through a slow dramatization of his mission. I came to this show somewhat reluctantly a couple of years ago, after being persuaded by my eldest daughter. While I have something of an allergy to what I call Jesus-riffing, I have to admit that The Chosen is, as they say, on the side of the angels. The actor playing Jesus is compelling. A Catholic of Lebanese and Irish descent, Jonathan Roumie embraces his role like a participant in a mystery play, with inhabited conviction. Roumie has said that his own prayer life has been deepened by the role, which he first undertook in the pilot of 2017 (season one premiered two years later, after a crowd-funding campaign). His great gift is to embody the full humanity of Christ, without flattening the divine.
While I have sometimes felt The Chosen could have benefitted from a British script-editor, I have been struck by how they have unpacked the narrative threads around the lives of Christ’s early followers. The impact of the call is powerfully portrayed, for example in the scene where Simon-Peter encounters Jesus in the most abject moment of his life. Most of the plotlines, spinning off from the known elements of the Gospels, are pretty convincing and in keeping with the Gospels.
I know some Catholics have niggles with the Marian material, but personally I love the depiction of Our Lady, especially in the Wedding at Cana, a favorite passage of mine. Overall, I like the exploration of female discipleship. One of the most moving scenes in season six, which covers Holy Week up to the point of the arrest of Jesus, is the alternative Seder with the women—obviously a non-scriptural element. The story arc of Mary Magdalene also stands out, her steadfastness woven closely in contrast to the vacillating shadow that engulfs Judas in this last season.
Overall, The Chosen strikes me as a sincere communication of the world’s most compelling story, the evangelium, complex and psychologically part whilst being historically situated. This is, as the mythographer Martin Shaw might say, a story with a zip-code. We need such storytelling at this time. We need the hope it conveys.
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But there is one interesting contrast to draw out with Stranger Things, and it concerns a crucial matter. In The Chosen, Judas betrays Jesus not because he does not believe in him. He betrays him because he believes, somewhere in his manipulable soul, that Jesus is superhuman. In a revealing dialogue with his brethren, he posits that the Son of Man will indeed be put to death: but only to reveal his power by defeating death and his enemies in that same moment, and unleashing the messianic age. Pause there for a moment and think about what is happening in the world right now.
Then go back to Stranger Things. El is not a Christ-figure. She is not even an angelic figure. She is a superhero, which is an entirely different trope. Superheroes are simply power-endowed human beings. What they do with that power is the hinge on which everything turns. El extracts herself from her compromising situation in a very different way from Judas. She surrenders the power to harm. My gut feeling is that this motive does not actually endorse suicide. It simply endorses sacrifice: of known security, known life. Beyond that, we do not get to follow her.
Back to The Chosen. The point about Jesus is that while both human and divine, he is precisely not a superhero. He will not, as Judas believes, slay his enemies at the last moment: that has never been his MO. Judas’s main flaw is a failure of the imagination, which you could characterize as, simply, bad theology. This is the scandal of Christianity. The author of life, in some way, must die. The Christ will descend, voluntarily, into the valley of bones, through the agony of the Passion. The agony of defeat: of real, absolute, undeniable death. Already in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see him being mentally tortured by what is coming, and by the sleepiness and fearfulness of his followers. Nicodemus caught in his ivory tower trying to belatedly join the dots. Peter and James and John bewildered and afraid. The apostles clutching a few primitive weapons as a ten-ton-truck hurtles down the infested freeway of hell.
No one is on point. No one is going to win. Jesus knows all this. His human body is racked with fear and troubled to the point of collapse. But he goes to meet his betrayer anyway. What follows is the cry of the innocent the world over and through to our time, this time, this terrible moment in history. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
No super-heroes here. Only the awful mystery of Divine Love. Nevertheless, not mine, but Thy will be done.
