Stranger Things

The Ghost in the Christmas Lights

I can still picture the exact moment *Stranger Things* stopped feeling like a clever nostalgia package and started feeling alive. I was halfway through season one, watching Joyce Byers staple cheap Christmas lights across her floral wallpaper and wait for her missing son to answer back. Up to that point, the Duffer Brothers’ 2016 series looks assembled from familiar ingredients—Stephen King dread, Spielberg tenderness, a layer of John Carpenter synths humming underneath. The references are so obvious you can practically see the corkboard behind them. Then Joyce sits in that living room, staring at the alphabet on the wall, and the whole thing stops being a curated 1980s exhibit. Suddenly it’s its own strange, desperate little nightmare.



On paper, that scene is almost ridiculous. A mother, half driven out of her mind by grief, turns her house into a homemade Ouija board and waits for lightbulbs to answer. But the show plays it absolutely straight. The camera hangs on the messy wires, the ugly glow, the dead hush in the room before anything flickers. It doesn’t frame the moment as sci-fi wonder. It frames it as panic. That’s why it works. The magic is all extension cords, bulbs, and blown fuses. If the sequence had been some glossy burst of CGI energy, I don’t think it would have landed nearly as hard. The cheap plastic reality of those lights makes the supernatural feel close enough to touch.



And none of that lands without Winona Ryder. She came back to the center of things carrying all the baggage of 90s fame and the lousy tabloid exile that followed, and she uses every ounce of it. Her Joyce is not noble or composed. She is frayed raw. Her shoulders stay jammed up near her ears, her eyes keep darting as if she’s hearing some signal other people can’t, and her voice sounds like it might split open at any second. *The Ringer* was right to call it "a one-woman show of panic, elation, and loss." Ryder makes the show’s monsters believable because she refuses to sand Joyce down into a saint. She’s difficult, messy, and totally convincing.



That clash between messy human feeling and carefully arranged homage is where *Stranger Things* really lives. It does wobble sometimes. Whenever the characters sit around explaining the mechanics of the "Upside Down" instead of trying to survive it, the momentum drops. Willa Paskin, writing for *Slate*, called the show "a paean to the Duffer brothers' own youth masquerading as a compliment to a master," and there’s truth in that. The show absolutely wears its influences on its sleeve. But under the *E.T.* bike rides and *Alien* hazmat imagery, there’s a real tenderness to the way these kids keep reaching for each other in a world that has turned unsafe. Maybe that’s not enough to guarantee immortality. For those first eight episodes, though, the feeling was real.