My partner has not seen Stranger Things, so we've been watching through seasons 1 to 4 in preparation for the final installment dropping in a few days. When we got to Stranger Things 4 and Eleven travels in her own mind back to Hawkins Lab and her childhood as an experiment in psychic weapons, it triggered a memory in me. If you're a few years either side of 40 and did your primary schooling in Australia, there's a decent chance you came across the 1992 Brian Caswell novel, A Cage of Butterflies. Now, it has been several decades since I have so much as thought about A Cage of Butterflies, let alone read it, so I'll be working from memory and internet resources, as I couldn't lay my hands on a copy and this is pretty time-sensitive. In the novel, seven teenagers with genius-level IQs form a Think Tank at a government institute where they discover five seven-year-old subjects with psychic abilities known as "the Babies". Our heroes rescue the Babies with the help of two teachers and the novel goes basically where you'd expect for the era. Oh, and the Babies all have shaved heads.
Now, that's a pretty bang-on description of Hawkins Lab as presented in Eleven's memories in Stranger Things 4, and there's a butterfly reference in season 1 (blink and you'll miss it though), so just how deep do these similarities go? Well, not that much further. None of the child or adult characters in A Cage of Butterflies truly have an analogue in Stranger Things and the latter clearly owes a lot of its DNA to popular films of the 1980s as much as cult and pulp stories. I really don't believe that the Duffer Brothers would have so much as heard of A Cage of Butterflies, as tied-in as it is to a specific time and place for so many. No, I believe both works are more likely drinking from the same well of influences, from the obvious 1980s films like Firestarter and Village of the Damned to real life conspiracies like MK Ultra and the Montauk Project, the latter being so obvious as to get name-checks in Stranger Things. Of course, creepy psychic children goes at least back to The Coming Race, but the fact that both these texts landing on the same visual language is pretty interesting to analyse.
Brian Caswell was born in the 1950s, so he's certainly a "Baby Boomer", whereas the Duffer Brothers are around my age, so "Elder Millennials", one would think that their influences in media would have led to an at least somewhat different interpretation of essentially the same concept, but somehow it didn't. It's like how almost all cosmic horror owes some debt to Lovecraft, even unconsciously, but with creepy children and hospitals. One might even draw comparison to the "Black Eyed Kids" of popular conspiracy mythos and be pretty comfortable in that assertion. As I don't spend a lot of time with the horror genre, I can't be sure just how widespread these tropes are, but from my metafictional readings of Stranger Things, I feel they may be pretty standard. Stranger Things is an obvious bricolage of ideas and concepts that came together really well, it's really no surprise that other versions of similar ideas are floating around out there. I don't remember A Cage of Butterflies all that well, but the fact that an entertainment juggernaut of the 2020s reminded me of a book from the 1990s that I had to read once felt worth at least noting.
(PS. One of my overriding memories of reading A Cage of Butterflies is that one of the teen characters goes on holiday with his family at some point. In the middle of the action, one of our leads disappears for a chapter or two to visit Queensland. As a child it baffled me that this guy would just bugger off during a daring operation to free exploited children, but that may be my memory fogging with time.)
No comments:
Post a Comment