As luck would have it, the long-awaited fourth season of the cult series stranger things reached the general public in the days of the savage shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers. It was the week that marked the 20th anniversary of the premiere of the documentary ‘Bowling for Columbine’ that shook, then we saw that not enough, consciences around the world to denounce the arms business and its effects on another great massacre in a school in the United States.
If Michael Moore’s film did not achieve important changes in the laws, despite public opinion and the emotional and rational charge that it unfolded with the help of cinema, the Texas massacre did not take long to dilute the citizen response with old and hackneyed arguments: There are not enough pistols in the streets, there is a lack of mental health. Y if there is something left over, surprise, they are violent video games, violent cinema, but not real rifles and weapons, that which continues to flood American neighborhoods and lives. Can anyone understand that logic?
“Graphic violence against children”
Thus, ‘Stranger Things’ premiered with special labels, introduced against the clock, in which he warned that the series shows “graphic violence against children & rdquor; to avoid damage to sensitivities. Little is appreciated that it is perhaps that cinematographic language, that cultural narrative that can most help young people to decipher the world around them, to overcome the difficult emotional moments that they will go through throughout their lives and that as soon as they have early awareness, it is more difficult to assimilate.
The series by the brothers Matt and Ross Duffer is a perfect distillation of what audiovisual fictions have been giving brushstrokes here and there, a precise machinery with the exact chords, including Kate Bush’s song ‘Running Up That Hill’ from 37 years ago years at the exact moment to shoot the most accurate message that a kid needs to capture.
youth suicide
The catalog of troubles of life that a teenager will go through is all there: absent parents, domestic violence, evictions, bullying, crushes and heartbreaks, misunderstanding, anxiety. The latest youth barometer of health and well-being of the FAD throws up some more than disturbing data: 44.3% of Spanish adolescents surveyed have ever thought of taking their own lives, and eight out of ten admit to having felt emotional discomfort in the last year. A sample that is just the tip of the iceberg of a problem that has exploded with the fatal combination of the pandemic: social isolation, fear of the unknown, abuse of technologies that lead to addiction.
Unclog emotions
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What are the young protagonists of ‘Stranger Things’ if not kids overwhelmed by a phenomenon they don’t understand, relationships they can’t decode, an emotional weight that sinks and haunts them, that they don’t know how to explain and even less share? Empathy, putting yourself in someone else’s place, is the king method to unclog emotions, and pandemic anguish has its dramatic mirror in a virus from another world that spreads and spreads if you don’t have a remedy to immunize yourself. The friendship of ‘Stranger Things’ as a recipe is not a bad remedy, for many shots and blood and deaths that surround the plot of the story.
But if there is a possible herd immunity, the best we can dream of is the one that inoculates the absolute record for hours of viewing of the series: according to Netflix, smashed records in a first weekend of release with 286.79 million hours worldwide, while the hymn song that closes chapter 4 and rescues the eighties Kate Bush competes in the Top of Spotify with Bad Bunny and Harry Styles. A promise for the future against adolescent trauma.