Stranger Things and the Spectacle of Collapse

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

When Entertainment Becomes Containment

There is a reason Stranger Things works even when it cheats.

The show is not successful because it is airtight, realistic, or even especially disciplined. It works because it performs a cultural function that appears every time societies enter periods of prolonged instability: it contains fear by reshaping it into spectacle.

This is not new. It is patterned behavior. And once you see the pattern, the show becomes easier to understand — and harder to take seriously.

The Busby Berkeley Precedent

During the Great Depression, Hollywood did not respond to economic collapse with realism. It responded with Busby Berkeley.

Berkeley’s films in the 1930s featured enormous synchronized dance numbers, impossible camera angles, and mass choreography that no audience member could physically witness in real life. The point was not story. The point was order. Perfect motion, perfect timing, perfect symmetry — all delivered while the real world was unraveling outside the theater.

Those films were not distractions in the shallow sense. They were emotional stabilizers. They reassured audiences that coherence still existed somewhere, even if it no longer existed in their daily lives.

Stranger Things operates on the same logic.

Prestige Television as Modern Spectacle

Despite its trappings, Stranger Things is not prestige drama. It is a live-action comic book elevated by budget, nostalgia, and self-awareness.

Its narrative shortcuts are not bugs. They are features.

Military ignorance, town-wide denial, evaporating consequences, and implausible secrecy persist because realism would break the emotional container the show is designed to maintain. The audience does not want to see institutions function correctly. They want to see fear externalized — made visible, fightable, and finite.

The Upside Down is not a setting.
It is collapse with a shape.

Monsters as Acceptable Fear

In the 1950s, Cold War anxiety could not be addressed directly. Nuclear annihilation was too abstract, too terrifying, and too uncontrollable. So Hollywood gave audiences monsters: invaders, mutations, pod people, radioactive horrors.

Those films allowed people to sweat safely.

Stranger Things performs the same task for a different era. Late-stage capitalism, imperial decline, permanent economic precarity, institutional failure — none of these have clean villains or final battles. They are ambient, systemic, and exhausting.

So the show gives us Vecna. It gives us gates. It gives us a war that can be won.

The logic does not matter. The relief does.

Why the Cheating Is Forgiven

The audience forgives narrative incoherence because the show offers something more valuable than accuracy: emotional closure.

There is a villain.
There is a team.
There is an ending.

Real life offers none of these things.

This is why the show’s popularity feels disproportionate to its quality. It is not being judged as art. It is being consumed as psychological infrastructure.

The Obscenity Beneath the Comfort

Here is where discomfort enters.

Like Berkeley’s spectacles, Stranger Things generates enormous wealth by selling emotional anesthesia to a population under stress. The imbalance between the comfort delivered and the capital extracted is impossible to ignore — especially in an era where most viewers are materially worse off than when the show began.

This does not make the show evil.
But it does make it historically revealing.

When a culture turns to nostalgia-soaked spectacle and monster narratives, it is usually because it cannot confront the systems that are failing it in plain sight.

What the Show Will Mean Later

In the future, Stranger Things will not be remembered for its plot holes or character arcs. It will be remembered the way we remember Depression-era musicals and Cold War horror films: as evidence of what people needed to feel in order to keep going.

That is not an insult.
It is a diagnosis.