A Tale of Two Nancys: how Stranger Things failed their teen heroine, and her namesake
In July of 2016, Stranger Things, a scifi/horror/thriller/mystery show filled with the most eighties nostalgia TV has seen since Glee’s Madonna episode, premiered on Netflix Since then, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, and the production of the show’s fourth season is currently underway. Much of the show’s appeal is due to leading actress Winona Ryder, and the mystery surrounding Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a child raised in a lab with superpowers. Despite a primarily male cast, Stranger Things owes its success to the women of the show.
And yet, it constantly fails its female characters.
Joyce (Winona Ryder) not only spends most of season three being yelled at by the man who supposedly loves her, but ends every season traumatised and unable to get help, because her role as a mother comes first. Eleven’s backstory and history of abuse are occasionally brought up, but usually take a backseat to the romantic entanglements of fourteen-year-olds. Max (Sadie Sink) has, surprisingly, been well-written so far, but I have doubts about the show being able to handle the nuances of a character having complicated feelings towards their abuser, especially one that has passed on. Robin (Maya Hawke) is the show’s first gay character, but would have been a “not like other girls” romantic option for Steve had Hawke not pushed for her to be a lesbian. Erica Sinclair (Priah Ferguson) played a huge role in uncovering season three’s mystery, but was also used as a mouthpiece for the show to spew capitalist propaganda. Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), the show’s first woman of colour to feature prominently, Eleven’s “sister,” and a super-powered teen seeking revenge on those who hurt her, was written out of the show with zero explanation. Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono) exists to either hit on teenage boys or give weak speeches about being a woman in the world, and we know little else about her — besides the fact she voted for Ronald Reagan. Every other woman on the show falls into three categories:
a) Dead (Barb, Heather)
b) Bitch (Carol)
c) Is Kind Of Just There (Claudia Henderson, Mrs Sinclair, Holly)
And then there’s Nancy.
When I first watched Stranger Things back in 2016, Nancy (Natalia Dyer) quickly became my favourite character on the show. She was an interesting spin on the “girl next door” trope; she wasn’t a damsel in distress, nor was she unrealistic and invincible. She was impulsive and occasionally selfish, but was still kind and understanding. Her single-minded focus on her own goals often made her blind to the wants and needs of others, but her heart was in the right place, and she was driven by a need for answers, and later, a need to get justice for her deceased best friend. Nancy was about as real as you could get for a teenage girl in a show about monsters in the 1980s, and it’s not a surprise that myself, and so many others, were drawn to her.
Nancy Wheeler, as she currently stands in canon, is not the same character I fell in love with four years ago. She has been reduced to nothing but a cheap attempt at “girl power,” with any nuance and depth removed. It’s as if the writers believe that all a female character needs to do to be well-written is to shoot a gun, and so they slap one into Nancy’s hands every season and hope for the best. At her core, Nancy is still flawed, and still deeply human, but the show portrays her as anything but. She still makes mistakes but we’re not meant to see them as mistakes, she doesn’t always say or do the right things but we’re meant to think she’s always in the right, she wants justice for herself and doesn’t care about what it will cost the people she loves. And all of this would be understanding if the show called her to task when it needed to, or Nancy ever actually learned something from her choices. But the show doesn’t and she doesn’t, and watching her scenes now just leaves me feeling empty. How could they make me feel anything but, when they accomplish nothing for the overall storyline, and don’t make Nancy look particularly likeable?
Of course, Nancy isn’t the most irredeemable character in the show, and quite a bit of the criticism she receives is rooted in misogyny. But it’s hard to enjoy and sympathise with a character that scoffs at her partner’s abuse and poverty, shows no care towards her traumatised younger sibling, makes no attempts at having relationships with women besides her mother, and thinks that having to do coffee runs as an intern is the ultimate form of oppression.
Nancy Wheeler is no longer a character. Nancy Wheeler is a cheap attempt at feminism, a stand in for the girl the writers didn’t get, a woman stripped of all her personality so it’s easier to shove her to the side.
But not only is she a butchered version of herself, but she’s a butchered version of her namesake: A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Nancy Thompson.
Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) was a Final Girl before the trope even had a name, and as a result, she’s managed to avoid being watered down or dehumanised for the sake of it. She isn’t invincible and she isn’t perfect. She doesn’t survive because she’s a virgin or because she sacrifices her femininity. Nancy Thompson is brave and strong, but she’s also scared and capable of making mistakes. She’s a traumatised young woman who feels like she could have prevented the deaths of the people she loves, and wants to help others avoid the same fate. Nancy Thompson stands the test of time because she wasn’t written to be some kind of feminist icon in a lazy attempt to be seen as progressive. Nancy Thompson stands the test of time because she’s simply trying to survive and live with her trauma. She only appears in less than half of the films in the franchise, but her presence across it comes second only to Freddy Krueger. Nancy’s greatest strength and greatest weakness was her humanity and vulnerability: she defeated Freddy and helped others with her mind and empathy, and it’s these same things that have her branded as a “lunatic” and lead to her demise.
She would not be as interesting, as engaging, and as human as she is if Wes Craven had written her as a perfect, constantly triumphant feminist hero. And because people so frequently misunderstand this aspect of her, Nancy Thompson is often imitated, but never duplicated. Nancy Wheeler is the most recent and obvious example, and has the show goes on, she loses more and more of those elements that make her human. She’s become a product of the cheap, watered down, Perfect Girl feminism that modern media loves so much: a girl with no flaws who can never be wrong, who exists solely to fill some kind of quota.
In the preface to the 2015 edition of the book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film — the book that coined the term “Final Girl” back in 1992 — author Carol J. Clover writes:
“As a sketch at least, the Final Girl does look something like a female hero — an effect, it has been argued, of the powerful discourses on gender during that era, above all the women’s movement. But a sketch is only a sketch. Fill this one out with the dimensions of affect, identification, pacing, and audience, and the picture gets kinkier. Yes, the Final Girl brings down the killer in the final moments, but consider how she spent a good hour of the film up to then: being chased and almost caught, hiding, running, falling, rising in pain and fleeing again, seeing her friends mangled and killed by weapon-wielding killers, and so on. “Tortured survivor” might be a better term than “hero.” Or, given the element of last-minute luck (she happens, in her flailing, on a cup of hot coffee or some other such item, which she throws into her assailant’s eyes), “accidental survivor.” Or, as I call her, “victim-hero,” with an emphasis on “victim.” It’s a great moment when she stops the killer, but to imagine that her, and our, experience of the film reduces her to that last-minute reversal is to truly miss the point.”
And it is this, unfortunately, that has happened to Nancy Wheeler. While she could be seen as a “tortured survivor” or a “victim-hero” in season one, she has now been reduced to those last minute moments. Nancy Wheeler is not seen as a survivor, or a victim, or a traumatised girl. Her “trauma” is only mentioned when the show needs to justify her relationship to a boy who took photos of her without her consent, a boy who she mocks and who she admits to not understanding. Her guilt and grief over Barb’s death started strong, but quickly devolved into Barb — a dead girl, whom we barely knew — becoming more important than Nancy herself. Nancy no longer needs to make any worthwhile contribution to the plot or speak to a majority of the characters, because the show presents her to be this hero of female empowerment no matter what. She has become a sketch of the Final Girl, a sketch of Nancy Thompson, and a sketch of herself.
In January of last year, the Stranger Things writers revealed that Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, would somehow be related to their fourth season. In November, they tweeted a list of the new main characters; all men, of course, but the list included Robert Englund, who played Freddy Krueger in eight movies, as a disturbed patient in a mental hospital. As amusing as their lack of originality is, I have my doubts about this homage being anything but a surface level reading of the film.
Dream Warriors is about Nancy teaming up with a new group of teenagers to try to fight Freddy, but it’s also about her grief, her trauma, and her regret. It’s about the lasting damage that Freddy had on her, her broken relationship with her father, her inability to have any kind of stable relationship in her life due to not only her experiences, but the rumours that resulted from them. Nancy wants to take Freddy down for good so she can close that chapter of her life, but also because she doesn’t want to let him hurt anyone else. She dies to save the other Elm Street kids, after Freddy used one of her weaknesses — her love of her father — against her. It’s an ending that’s more tragic than triumphant for the first hero of the franchise, but it doesn’t make any of the things Nancy did in her life any less important, or empowering.
And so, I have to wonder: how can a show that never properly explores trauma, reduces their own Nancy to a #girlboss with no care for others, and could never commit to killing off one of their heroic main characters, ever do the film justice? How is Nancy ever going to do her namesake justice?
Stranger Things came out in 2016, an almost love story to the horror and adventure films of the 1980s. But not only does the show fail to do more than surface understandings of the themes of those films, it fails to understand the characters too. more often than not, this leads to female characters who feel more hollow and underdeveloped than those that came four decades before them.
If it wasn’t so disappointing, it would almost be funny.
Almost.
