Mind Flayers and Mind Lairs: A Stranger Things Reflective on Mental Health

STRANGER THINGS. Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

Trigger Warning: This article makes references to depression, anxiety, PTSD, suicidal ideation, and death.

Spoiler Warning: There are also spoilers galore below for Season 4 of Stranger Things, so tread lightly.

If you’re like Max (or me), you’ve been blasting “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush on repeat throughout the past month.

When the much anticipated Season 4 of Stranger Things dropped at the end of May, I was expecting a fair amount of excitement after being reunited with the kids of Hawkins, a heaping dose of jump scares and squelching horror as the new villain was introduced, and a barrage of nostalgia for the 80’s (even though I was born in the 90’s).

What I was not expecting, however, especially after the fairly light and colorful Season 3 (miss you, Starcourt Mall), was for this season’s story to revolve so heavily around navigating trauma and the power of the memory. And as a writer and creative that explores those topics in her own work, I was genuinely surprised and elated to see that.

I believe wholeheartedly that media has the ability to shift societal narratives and aid in healing, and not only does this season avoid doing what so many shows tend to do by skirting around the fallout and consequences of past events in favor of a clean start, but it also embraces the messy inner lives of the characters and makes them an integral aspect of the plot so that they can rightfully move forward along with the story.

With the lights and vibrancy of the Starcourt Mall now in the past, this season visually and thematically has been darker than its predecessors, moving from a giant human flesh Mind Flayer and Demogorgons that stalk you in the shadows to a villain that infiltrates the shadowed parts of yourself. Guilt, grief, and fear are Vecna’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) delicacies of choice as the newest D&D inspired antagonist turns this season into a full-blown psychological horror.

While typically I would say creating a villain that solely preys on those dealing with mental illness and trauma (especially when they’ve been reaching out for help!) would be rather regressive, but in Stranger Things’s case this season, what could easily be a trope instead becomes an incredibly effective vehicle for thematic storytelling by the Duffer Brothers. Vecna isn’t just another (hive) mindless and faceless creature from the Upside Down; his want to kill and the visions he uses to do so are symbolic to a much deeper and poignant monster we all face - our own mind.

As we grow older, we tend to realize that monsters don’t live under the bed but rather in our head.

And what I use a cute mnemonic to say is that while our brains are wonderful, mysterious things that can do so many incredible things, they can also feel like prisons.

Memories of heart-wrenching events tend to overshadow the heartwarming ones. We relive regrets and ‘what if’ scenarios in our heads like movies, playing our greatest embarrassments and biggest failures in between like commercial breaks. While scars on the body may heal on their own, it takes conscious effort and work to close the wounds left in our hearts and minds.

It’s an incredibly important, yet incredibly sensitive, topic for the show to tackle, but just as the characters are growing up and maturing, so should the material in the show.

And I think they handle it exceptionally well.

While many moments crafted this season have truly been standout, with even the newly introduced characters that have already met their untimely end at the Freddy Krueger-like hands of Vecna given thought-out backstories and scenes, none have been more emotionally gripping and cathartic than the Max (Sadie Sink) centric episode of Season 4, “Dear Billy.”

After figuring out the common denominator between Vecna’s victims, Max realizes she’s next, and with her visions already starting, spends what she thinks could be her last 24 hours trying to figure out what to say to her friends and how to say it, while the rest of the Hawkins gang scrambles to find a potential way to save her.

What follows is one of the most emotional 1 hour and 18 minutes of television I have ever watched. And I’ve seen every episode of Lost.

Billy’s (Dacre Montgomery) death at the end of last season cast a long shadow over Max’s life, one she’s been walking through since, trying to navigate her way out of and back to the vibrancy of life she once felt. With her family splintered and one half of the group across the country, Max distanced herself from the friends she still had, retreating into her head, and her headphones.

And I’m not criticizing Max. I’ve been in her shoes. We see that she’s made the effort to speak with a counselor about what she’s been through, even if the conversations are short and defensive. She’s been trying, but sometimes the hardest people to talk to in life are the ones you’re closest with.

When Max believes she’s going to die, she writes letters to everyone instead of talking, even though they are right there, as Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) tries to point out. Words are not easy things to find, even when they could be the last ones you ever speak.

Which makes the last 10 minutes of this episode that much more powerful.

The one letter Max is able to speak out loud is to her brother’s grave. It’s a heartbreaking confession about the parts of herself she won’t let others see as she offers her shadow to a ghost. And that heartbreak quickly turns to horror as she learns that someone else was listening the whole time.

After hijacking every attempt Max has made thus far to reach out and find some kind of peace, Vecna ultimately drags her back into her head, making her come face to face with all things that have been haunting her, to the point where she’s literally running away from her own thoughts.

There is a very strong power and sway to emotions like grief, guilt, and fear and Vecna knows it, trapping his handpicked victims within their own minds and memories. Memories have their own kind of unique power, which can also be seen within Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) storyline in digging through repressed memories to get her superpowers back (which is wonderfully symbolic in terms of healing and identity itself) and Max’s visions from Vecna illustrate this in the most poignant way.

There’s a moment when all hope seems lost as Max, now trapped after having found her way into Vecna’s Mind Lair, sees no way out. Vecna is inches from her face, his motion to “end her suffering so she can join him,” nothing but a harrowing taunt toward death in her ears.

But then a song begins to play.

One that opens a doorway.

A doorway back to the real world. A doorway where Max, from inside of her own mind, can see her friends desperately screaming for her to come back to them.

She sees, maybe for the first time, that her friends are, and have been, fighting for her.

Something that the shadows had previously been obscuring from her view.

Which unlocks a flood of positive memories shared with those friends and family.

Music, as noted in the show, and other types of media, have a way to reach deeper parts of the brain that other things can’t. While Max earlier used music as a figurative escape, to give her some solace from the chaos she was feeling, it now presents itself as a literal means of escape. Only this time back to reality.

And while it opens the door, she still has to be the one to decide to go through it. As Max finally sees and understands that she’s never been alone, she breaks free of Vecna’s hold and chooses life. She decides to fight, her out-of-breath murmuring after breaking free of the trance of “I’m still here,” as much a reminder and promise to herself as it is an assurance to her friends.

Science fiction and fantasy have always been my favorite genres. They act as playgrounds, offering us the ability to hold up a mirror to ourselves or society and put names and faces to our problems, allowing the metaphors and allegory inherent within the genre to give us the tools and the space necessary to process and understand our own realities better.

One of the darkest moments of Max’s mindscape sequence is when Vecna, through an apparition of Billy, makes Max confront the reality that she has on occasion wished to join him in death. Something she certainly hasn’t told anyone else, and something she might not even have accepted herself yet. The lyrics of Max’s current favorite song, “Running Up That Hill,” even embody that desire, if not in a more palatable and cathartic way.

While I can relate with a large majority of Max’s trauma of grief and guilt, that specific moment struck me more than I had bargained for, as I had felt similar desires when I was around the same age. It’s not something I talk about often, and barely did then, as I didn’t even knew the terms for depression and suicidal ideation back then. But, even all these years later, even after therapy sessions and heart-to-hearts, I was able to swap places with Max for a moment and have my own cathartic out-of-body experience as I watched younger Abbey discover that way forward and stand up to the monster in her head, not giving in to the mental prison, and decide to fight another day for life.

And if that’s not the power of television and the reason I got into filmmaking in the first place, then I don’t know what is.

STRANGER THINGS. Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield and Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

Vecna provides a, while certainly exaggerated, look at what can happen when we forget our humanity and don’t allow the dark corners of our minds the chance for sunlight. Max provides the opposite. While the vibrancy of life can seem dim and far away at times, the door is always open for us to embrace the mess and beauty of continuously trying, day by day to heal ourselves with the help of those around us.

And while we can only choose to fight ourselves, sometimes we need a little help remembering and recognizing the positive influences in our lives that supply that glittering hope we can run to, like a well-worn song, or a well-watched TV episode.

A running theme throughout Stranger Things has been the power of memory. In this season, and early in the show, we’ve seen Eleven be advised to tap into memories that cause anger in order to grow stronger. One tempts this in Eleven as he attempts to manipulate her into helping him escape and regain control of his powers, and Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) gave the same advice in the not-so-fan-favorite Season 2 episode, “The Lost Sister.”

But Eleven, and now Max, have shown us that their power and drive to fight is derived from memories full of warmth and love, those of friends and family, of the times when they have been known and loved as they are. Their power comes from a place of connection and creation, whereas the others’ from a place of destruction.

Now, I won’t tell anyone how to live or which emotions to draw power from, as anger can absolutely be an asset, but within the context of the show and the storylines, the more antagonistic characters have used this anger as a manipulative tool, and to an extent its because that’s all they’ve ever known, no one showed them a different way like El found. But through both Max and Eleven, and many other characters within the show (Will (Noah Schnapp) didn’t survive in the Upside Down for a week just for me to forget him, damnit!), we witness how harnessing the power and strength of positive memories wins out every time.

Since my time as a teenager, I’ve come to view the shadow parts of myself not as enemies to fight, but as friends. My depression, my anxiety, and as I’ve come to learn, my c-PTSD, are all a part of me and I don’t intend to fight them, I intend to understand them. For when we can call a shadow, friend, we know that the thing we’ve found and given a name to is healing.

And watching the characters we come to love go through the same processes and realizations we have (minus the scary squelchy monsters and alternate dimensions), or helping us get to those realizations ourselves, are acts of healing all the same.

And while making friends with Vecna probably won’t be the key to defeating him, having friends to rely on and draw strength from sure will be.

And I know that bringing scenes like the one I’ve written so gushingly about above to life is a Herculean task, as so many elements - writing, directing, acting, editing, and so much more have to come together just right, just as Max’s friends did, to open a doorway for that kind of experience.

Now, whether you choose to escape to or from reality through that door is your choice.

P.S. - If you’re wondering what my favorite song is that would save me from Vecna, it’s “Trees” by Twenty One Pilots. Has been since 15-year-old Abbey heard it for the first time, and probably still will be for a while.

P.S.S. - And Duffer Brothers, so help me if Max dies in Volume 2 after so nobly choosing to fight and live, I’ll be running up whatever hill I need to in order to get that decision reversed for Season 5.