A tempting two-word phrase handwritten in pen on a sheet of high school stationery paper seems to offer the key to unlocking the mysteries, both psychological and supernatural, of the first half of the fourth season of “Stranger Things.”
Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Steve (Joe Keery) and Max (Sadie Sink) have entered Hawkins High and are reviewing the school psychologist’s files trying to find out if there is any connection between the victims. of Vecna, the big bad guy with a snake vein of the season, whose favorite pastimes include antiquity (this grandfather’s watch is a real find) and smashing children’s bodies while sucking their souls. As Max distributes the victims’ files to the darkened desktop, a pattern emerges. They had all sought advice for a common set of symptoms, including nightmares, headaches and nosebleeds. But the kicker comes at the bottom of the page, underlined twice: “past trauma.” Vecna, it seems, is a traumatic monster, which feeds on the anguish of the psychologically vulnerable.
The “past trauma” is a bright red trail, and none of Vecna’s victims are traumatized. Or perhaps more precisely, none is just traumatized.
It’s a clever twist, and more than a handful of critics have taken the bait, arguing that the series offers a “journey into the depths of psychological trauma” that is “surprisingly mature” and that the figure of Vecna, who predates “past trauma,” allows the series to explore the “response to trauma in children and adolescents.”
There is only one problem: the “past trauma” is a bright red trail, and none of Vecna’s victims are traumatized. Or perhaps more precisely, none is just traumatized. Rather, they all have symptoms of a different form of mental illness that psychologists have come to call moral damage.
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The most recent research on moral injuries comes from working with veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. As Pulitzer winner David Wood reports in “What We Did: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars,” even though tens of thousands of service members returned home with debilitating mental illness, they did not respond to treatment. standard trauma. This startling revelation led a group of AV psychologists to argue that many were not traumatized; they were morally wounded.
Moral injury seems like such an intuitive concept, it’s amazing that mental health specialists have only started to explain it in the last 20 years or so. To understand this, think of the drone attack that killed 10 innocent civilians when the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan last year. Both the drone pilot and the families of the dead are likely to be haunted by this tragedy, and until recently, we could have called the pain on both sides “trauma.” But doing so is pleasurable, for perhaps obvious reasons. One person fired the missile; the others lost family members in a horrible conflagration. Sure, everyone can suffer, but is that suffering uniform? Some experts now say no, arguing that the pain of victimization (trauma) is qualitatively different from the pain of perpetration (moral injury). They propose a relatively simple definition: moral injury is the mental anguish that sometimes affects a person who hurts, who breaks their own moral code.
Which brings us back to “Strange Things” and the real link that connects all of Vecna’s victims. They are all haunted not by “past trauma,” by what was done to them, but by what they have done. They are weighed down by the burden of their perceived jobs. Or more simply, this season of “Stranger Things” is an extensive meditation on moral damage and one of the most psychologically fascinating pieces on recent television.
It’s easier to see Vecna’s first victim, Victor Creel, played by Kevin L. Johnson and a later version played with surprising pathos by horror legend Robert Englund. Creel’s problems begin when he moves into the big old Victorian house that is also Vecna’s lair. Shortly after arriving, the demon begins to torment Creel and his family and finally kills his wife and two children. In a flashback scene, we learn why: Creel is a World War II veteran still tormented by his wrong decision to call a missile attack on a civilian neighborhood. Exploring the location of the bomb after the explosion, Creel sees the cradle of a baby in flames and discovers the horrible truth. The image of the cradle of fire returns to its nightmares and is the fuel on which Vecna feeds. But it is not a symbol of Creel’s victimization, nor of her trauma. It is a reminder of his complicity in the deaths of innocents.
Logan Riley Bruner as Fred Benson on “Stranger Things” (Netflix)
Vecna’s second contemporary victim, school newspaper reporter Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner), has a similar story. He has scars on his face, the result of a car accident from which he barely escaped. Fred is plagued with memories of the accident, but not because he is about to die. There was another child in the car, one who did not escape and died in the flames. Although the details of the accident are a bit murky, Fred feels responsible for the death of his classmate, and Vecna takes advantage of this pain, calling Fred a “killer” shortly before lifting him in the air and break all his bones.
“What if I’m not good? What if I’m the monster?”
As Max looks at Fred’s file in the scene mentioned above, he realizes that she has suffered the same symptoms, and when the revelation is revealed that she is Vecna’s next victim, we hear her incorporeal voice muttering her name. . But how does Max adapt to the pattern? Surely she, a victim of domestic abuse forced to witness the death of her brother at the end of season 3, is traumatized, not morally injured. The letter he reads to his brother in the poignant fourth episode, “Dear Billy,” suggests the opposite: “I play that moment in my head all the time. Sometimes I imagine myself running towards you, walking away from you. I imagine that if I had, that you would still be here, and everything would be, everything would be fine again. ” It is this feeling of guilt that he could have done more, that he could have avoided the death of his brother and he did not, from which Vecna feeds. It reminds him of his failure when he takes the form of Billy in the Upside Down.
Psychologists argue that one of the main features of moral injury is a relatively normal guilt response that sticks to speeding (just as PTSD is essentially the hyperfunction of one fear response from another). naturally). Many people feel guilty after committing an injury for a few days or even weeks. But the morally wounded, like Creel, Fred, and Max, are trapped in the mud of guilt and shame and find themselves unable to escape.
Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven on “Stranger Things” (Tina Rowden / Netflix)
And yet it is Eleven who shows what is perhaps an even more revealing symptom. In scenes significantly related to her friends ’nightly search in the counselor’s office, Eleven meets Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) at a desert restaurant. Owens is trying to convince El to return to Hawkins once again to join the fight against Vecna. But she looks him straight in the eye and resists, saying, “What if I’m not good? What if I’m the monster?” Here’s why he says this: Throughout the fourth season, El is haunted by memories of his time at Hawkins National Laboratory, and by a particularly bloody memory. In it, he stares at the blood-stained corpses of the other laboratory test subjects. Throughout the season, he comes to believe that he only escaped after killing dozens of people with his psychokinetic powers (though later episodes will prove otherwise). Morally injured people often come to feel irredeemable; the wickedness of his actions infects his own being. They didn’t do bad things; they are bad people. They are, in the term of El, monsters.
We later learn from the season that He is not a monster, and that a more vicious evil is hiding in Hawkins. But evil vice is also hidden in the real world. The fourth season of “Stranger Things” premiered a few days after the school shooting in Uvalde. Given that the premiere opens with a scene of children’s corpses strewn across what closely resembles a school hallway, showrunners decided to give a warning: “We filmed this season of‘ Stranger Things ’ a year ago.But given the tragic recent shooting at a Texas school, viewers may find the opening scene of episode 1 distressing. We are deeply saddened by this indescribable violence and our hearts go out to every family that cries. a loved one “.
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The study of moral damage asks us to remember that those who endure its unique taste of anguish are not monsters. But it also keeps us in close touch with the monstrous things (like school shootings) that we humans are capable of. “Stranger Things” also does these two things.
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