The Ecology of the Upside Down; or, The Possibility of Black Life in Stranger Things

Stranger Things is a show invested in the biopolitics of black life in the United States, though we watch its racial engagements through 1980s visions of white suburbia and explorations in experimental weaponry. At first glance, Stranger Things appears nostalgic for early Reagan-era optimism about the financial and domestic security of the nation. But, in fact, irrepressible fear and knowledge drive the show. In the age of hopeful trickle-down economics, the show's dangerous, underground tunnels of biomedical experimentation and contamination — called the Upside Down — are precisely where that down doesn't trickle. Rather, the Upside Down is a metaphor for the extra-temporal, perpetually endangered, and suffocating existence of black life in the US. The Upside Down's metonymic function, which evolves across the episodes of the two seasons, reveals the inextricable links between black suffering, US economic and political policy, and environmental devastation. Race is present in the show's apocalyptic ecology, most viscerally and vividly in the second season's proliferating, rotting pumpkin patch, where we watch a small black child survive a frightening encounter with the police. Rotting along haphazard vines and infecting neighboring trees, the pumpkins in Farmer Merrill's popular Halloween destination trace out a cartography of governmental violence and the Upside Down's destruction.

I approach the racial inclusions and exclusions in Stranger Things through a thought experiment about Afrofuturism, in which race appears in the show's environment rather than its characters. I understand Afrofuturism as expansive artistically and politically; a continually-arising form of black expression tied to a political commitment to imagine black life otherwise and that here calls out the earthly realities of racism as fundamental to black speculative art. Stranger Things operates among a proliferation of Afrofuturist explorations of race, speculation, and temporality in shows like Luke Cage (2016-2018), Sense8 (2015-2018), Westworld (2016—), Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018), and Janelle Monae's music and emotion picture Dirty Computer (Andrew Donoho and Chuck Lightning, 2018). My thought experiment enables me to understand characters, temporal and ecological landscapes, and even the Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque premise of Stranger Things as critical of US racism and invested in creating alternative worlds where youth, especially youth-of-color, can fight hegemonic systems of power by recognizing that they are Audre Lorde's "master's tools."

I consider the figurative and imaginative discourse of Stranger Things over and above its representational (possibly token-ist) approach to race.1 I find the violence of racialization not in the show's raced characters as much as in its articulation of an apocalyptic ecology. I know that such an approach carries risk. When one of the primary features of race and its treatment in society is its visibility, one can't simply fail to attend to the representational. But merely tracing the depiction(s) of black characters — particularly core protagonist Lucas — would be a mistake because the structure and violence of American race/racism appears in Stranger Things less through the register of the representational than the metonymic. We have to recognize race and its violence in the show's ecology, such as the pumpkin patch or the spatialized, temporalized, Upside Down world that Eleven brings with her. Through her whiteness, Eleven's relationship to the Upside Down reveals the racialized logics that govern its distribution of life and death. The Upside Down's catastrophic slow violence enacts the abuse, persistence, and, in particular, coevalness of hegemony and an endangered black ecology.2

In the first season, Eleven introduces viewers to the Upside Down. At first, Eleven is a refugee from a secret, militarized and government-affiliated lab, where, ironically, her weaponization had begun to turn the state inside out. The lab is initially a sometimes-portal to an alternative time-space, and later a less centrally located superstructure. Eleven's escape from the lab, the portal, the superstructure, reveals the structure's importance as a locus (in its vernacular, mathematical, and biological senses alike). It is to this structure that Eleven and her friends must return, over and over again, to try to liberate Eleven from her ontological — or categorically-given — un-freedom. It is also the site where they must return to free themselves and their society from the shadow world that is rupturing and, increasingly, subtending what they had taken to be real life. A locus of "the real," the site also stands in for governmental authority and the shadowy, greater power that constitutes such authority. And ultimately it is through this site that a unique contamination spreads — one that figures the lived-realities of environmental contamination in racialized spaces and the texture of the experiences of suspended and endangered life to which US racialized bodies are subject. Eleven exposes an ecology that is not only of black life but also of black life — her whiteness makes stark the differential life chances for racialized bodies in and beyond the Upside Down.

Stranger Things represents contamination ecologically and spatio-temporally. The ecology of Stranger Things is a system, related to fixed, mappable land (as we see with the strange, connecting tunnels Will draws from his Upside Down consciousness); and it is a time-and-place construction that is not stable, that shifts across registers, dimensions, and duration (a character may be alive in the Upside Down for what seems like quite a long time but turns out to be a very short one in the diegetic "real world"). In the ecological schema of Stranger Things, then, both environment and time-space are in an alternative but breachable dimension to that of hegemony. The time-space, called the Upside Down (after a reference to Dungeons and Dragons), is characterized by loss of life, loss of bodily boundaries, loss of habitation, loss of sustenance, loss of the meaning of the human, randomized and terrifying destruction, irreparable horror, and all-but-total entrapment. The Upside Down is also a place in which time and space function differently. Space moves through time in a mode that does not correspond clearly to that of the hegemonic world; and organic bodies are absorbed into the environment of the space, often forever. A few characters do manage to enter and exit the Upside Down, and some straddle it for the duration of the show (thus far). Yet they remain largely subject to its temporal, spatial, and violent effects afterward with no predictability or logic.

The Upside Down, with its destruction of personal safety and environmental habitation; its roots in a centralized but disavowed government institution; and its spatio-temporality of impossible movement is an apt representation of an ecology of black life. It is also, in an upside-down way, also an ecology of the present, with the show being produced amid the surging visibility of racist anti-black groups, movements, and governance. And it is an ecology of Stranger Things' indexed history in the 1980s, with the Reagan administration's thorough criminalization and suppression of black American resistance, local and national.

With "ecology," I refer to the standard definition — of an environment of interacting organisms — and the understanding of human-environmental relationships explored through the environmental turn in recent humanistic scholarship. Much of this scholarship has avoided understanding the environment as co-constituted by and co-constitutive of race.3 Race matters epistemologically: discourses of the savage and the African are bound to and by the natural world.4 Race also matters politically: the mechanisms of colonialism, imperialism, and domestic racism manage, engineer, divide, extract, and chart the earth, creating racialized ecologies and what Sylvia Wynter (1992) has called "archipelago[s] of poverty."5 This is perhaps why so much contemporary scholarship coming out of black studies, from Christina Sharpe's In the Wake to Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds, is thinking through the construction of blackness as a structure of being (non)human in earth-space.6 These scholars recognize that earth-space and racialization are one and the same.

A series of scenes in Season Two, however unintendedly, presents an unusually stark connection between the show's earth-space and the violence of racialization. Here American nostalgia and environmental catastrophe figure the difficult-to-picture racialized nature of the Upside Down. These scenes focus on the cartography Will has frenetically produced through his access to the Upside Down. The Upside Down inhabits him as a form of spatio-temporal knowledge that is itself, like his map and what it indexes, structured rhizomatically and geologically (literalizing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1988) metaphor of the rhizome).7 In this map, Upside Down tunnels do not remain contained — either in the alternative time-space or by their underground location — but rather permeate quotidian Hawkins. The tunnels spread the rot and viscosity of the Upside Down across portions of a forest and a large pumpkin patch, which is already stinking by the time Police Chief Hopper is called to investigate. Hopper enters the mucosal, writhing, living tunnel system, which attempts to digest him. He encounters the suspended gravity and time of the Upside Down, where particles of living matter float slowly across the thick, suffocating atmosphere, an oppressive climate of the "wake."8 The time he spends there, choked and restrained, progresses slowly. Though he struggles to breathe and loses pallor across the minutes and episodes, he is still somehow alive by the late hour at which Will's mother Joyce and her boyfriend Bill arrive to save him. Similarly, in Season One, Will, though deprived of oxygen for days in the Upside Down, could still be revived. Hopper's and Will's survival expresses how white bodies differentially encounter state-sanctioned ecological terror; their whiteness enables the possibility of breathing even after encountering this violence. Eric Garner, Tamar Rice, and others subject to racialized state violence do not have the same guarantees.9

This introduction to the tunnel space of the Upside Down reveals its link to an explicitly raced American ecology. After Hopper surveys the destroyed pumpkin patch and maps the spread of the rot across the woods, he finds himself at night in an open field. Here — after a brief close-up of his shadowed face — in a long, panning shot, Hopper observes the horror of what appear to be whole tracts of wrecked pumpkins, their ruined tops shimmering in a strange silvery fog illuminated against a black sky. The panning shot continues, now encompassing Hopper as an object in its circular sweep, as though he too were part of this landscape. The shot comes to an abrupt stop as Hopper — still staring ahead toward the pumpkins — undoes the snap to his gun holster and readies himself to draw. He hears a noise, and there is a gunshot. The camera swings around a frantic 180 degrees to find a car with a small black body beside it aiming a gun. The image jump-cuts to a mid-shot; the tiny African American cowboy (a five- or six-year-old in a Halloween costume) shoots twice in succession into the camera.

With an eyeline match, the camera returns to Hopper, who has stayed his gun, and is breathing heavily in simultaneous relief and fear. In a reverse shot, the cowboy shoots again and says, "You're dead." Hopper responds, "Yeah, you got me, kid. Happy Halloween."10 This moment of racialized fear — visualized through the experience of the white policeman — is the introduction to the death ecology of the pumpkin patch, and the extensive ecology of the formation of the Upside Down beneath it. The Upside Down is right there, below where the cowboy and Hopper stand together. This is a new rendering of the Upside Down, now not only as a time-space that at moments and enduringly occupies the time-space of Hawkins, but also specifically as an ecology. And this ecological rendering is marked by the threat of racial terror, the realities of black death, and the military-medical apparatus of the US government that, in search of new weaponry, opened the Upside Down in the first place.

The scene depicts Stranger Things' racial ecology. Nostalgia for a politics that never was — a cop who keeps his gun holstered against a perceived threat from an African American male — stands in for the idea of racial egalitarianism, a strange America that has never been but in which blackness survives, mostly unmarked, within and alongside hegemony. In this ecology, visual re-presentations of pre-post-racialism give way, with Hoppers' thrusts of the shovel and descent into the tunnels, to an archipelago of underground contamination. This ecology is in fact not strange at all, but rather recalls the slow violence of leaded water in Flint; the ruined environment of Latoya Ruby's Braddock, PA; the "insidious workings...[that] derive largely from the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time."11 Stranger Things' representational racial inclusions serve as an unintentional foil for the harder to spectacularize transtemporal, transpatial racial catastrophe unfurling.

By the end of Season Two, the protagonists are locked in mortal struggle for Will's life and the destruction of the Upside Down. Eleven has also found herself part of a transracial, transnational sisterhood in which she has learned to use her power to get out her "anger" so it won't "fester." Releasing her festering anger, she joins in kinship with sister Kali to destroy the violent race ecology of the Upside Down and generate new conditions for survival. She and Kali levitate and flip vehicles in Chicago. They pursue and destroy some of the men who turned them into supernatural beings. And we are introduced to a new, primarily black location in Chicago, where Afrofuturist force and imagination drive an ongoing, successful mission to destroy the government agents who have turned Eleven, Kali, and those like them into multidimensional weaponry. These are young women whose ontologies cannot be disarticulated from the impossibility of their survival and their enduring a-humanity, their demonic ecology of "the bush, mosquitoes, the native, and disease."

As the season comes to an end back in Hawkins, focused on the struggle of the original five protagonists, Stranger Things has begun to produce a new time and space of raced and gendered futurist power. Audiences can't turn away from race in Stranger Things because this unusual science fiction series' nostalgia attunes viewers to a nauseating knowledge that the whole 1980s populace understood already too late: inhabitants of the US live a racialized ecology of death that, at this late, late hour, only a radical Afrofuturism in Season Three might fully expose.

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Elizabeth Reich is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author of Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism and the Transformation of American Cinema and her co-edited collection, Justice in Time: Critical Afrofuturism and the Struggle for Black Freedom, is under contract at University of Minnesota Press. She is also coeditor of "New Approaches to Cinematic Identification," a special issue of Film Criticism. Her next monograph is on time and reparation, and recent essays have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Film Criticism, Screen and African American Review.

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