Stranger Things and the Asylum Trope

Recently, Netflix began dropping trailers for the fourth season of one of its biggest hits, Stranger Things. One trailer has already grabbed 6.5 million views on YouTube.

Given this attention, I think it’s worth looking at how the show deals with mental illness—in particular, how it uses old Hollywood asylum tropes to accentuate its horror. The results are fascinating. Warning: Past season spoilers included.

In Season One, we find the protagonist, Eleven, fleeing from a mysterious military installation in the middle of the Indiana woods. Everything about the Hawkins National Laboratory summons our celluloid asylum history. It is an isolated, creepy building with long, gloomy hallways, it inflicts dubious treatments, and is lorded by a brilliant, evil, scientist. This place imprisons innocent outsiders whose difference makes them dangerous.

Matthew Modine plays Dr. Brenner, the evil scientist. His main objective is to exploit his key patient and use her as a weapon against the Soviets (this is set in the Eighties). His strategy seems to have backfired. Not only has Eleven, the patient, escaped but she has unwittingly opened a dark dimension that threatens the destruction of our world. Dr. Brenner has an arsenal of classic asylum-superintendent tools at his disposal, including armed thugs, mental manipulations, and a cold smile.

The treatments at the Hawkins National Laboratory are suitably diabolical. Eleven is taught that love only comes when she performs tests, such as immersing herself in a sensory deprivation tank and making her mind find certain foreign targets, or destroying coke cans. When she misbehaves, she is tossed into a tiny cell. Her mistreatment is symbolized by her name, which is a number, like one would give to a lab animal or a robot.

We later learn that Eleven’s mother, Terry Ives, is also the victim of Dr. Brenner. She had been subjected to a battery of psychedelic drugs in a Cold War effort of CIA-mind control experiments. (This is a reference to actual CIA mind-control experiments, MKUltra). The experiments somehow transfer psychic powers to her baby in utero—Eleven—who is then raised in the lab by Brenner. Terry is later “taken care of” via electroconvulsive therapy, which reduces her to a burned-out vegetable. This is a classic film trope. Evil doctors cranking up scary ECT devices to punish rebel patients go back to the 1940s in film, with the classic instance being Jack Nicholson writhing in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

When Eleven escapes from the Lab, we see her dressed in a pale hospital gown. That she is wearing a johnny gown at all is itself absurd. No long-term care facility that I know of has patients who live around the clock in johnny gowns, which are typically used for surgeries. What is most interesting about this is how Eleven seems to be summoning the classic Woman in White role.

In the hugely popular 1860 novel, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, a girl named Anne Catherick is put in an asylum by a scheming aristocrat. She escapes, dressed in white, and sets in motion a lengthy plot of intrigue and revenge. The white dress signifies innocence betrayed, redeemed only when the victim escapes the hospital to reveal the dark truth behind her imprisonment. Ever since then, asylum fiction and film have had young women breaking out in white dresses and white hospital gowns. Riffs on this can be seen in everything from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to Kiss Me Deadly (1955) to Star Wars (1977). Innocent (white) waifs, trapped by evil mind-controllers, escape in their white dresses to drive plots of revenge and adventure.

Eleven is a kind of modern Woman in White. The johnny gown reinforces her innocence of the world and its dark ways. Repeatedly throughout the episodes to come, this innocence is reiterated. She doesn’t know what friendship is, she has never seen a kiss, she almost undresses in front of a group of boys because she has not learned “shame,” and so on.

We know that the evil doctor must be destroyed, and he apparently is at the end of Season One. But the formula is not to be broken. In Season Two, we have a new evil doctor at the Lab. Actor Paul Reiser plays a different kind of insidious. He puts on a kind face, and seemingly wants to help Will (the character possessed by a demon in Season One) get past his trauma. But of course, he’s working for the bad guys, recording the sessions for viewing by dark government apparatchiks.

Punishment Essential Reads

A Curious Question About Physical Punishment of Children

Why Do Children Punish Unfairness?

There’s more, but you get the gist. Stranger Things works and is popular because it so deftly taps common horror tropes. We recognize what we are seeing. The fictional asylum is one of these things.