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This article discusses the plot of Stranger Things 3.
Bullies are evil.
No.
Heart and logic say no. Growing up, is to learn that the tyrant is born of insecurity, fear of vulnerability. Growing up, is to learn that bullies are also bullied. This is often Why they intimidate. Bullies are tragic. It's an integral lesson and yet, no matter the age or experience, we like to watch the bully fall. Not only fall, but suffer. Because, deep down in our guts, we will always hate the bully as it manifests itself for us – him as a jock, she as a cheerleader or them as a person. " burnout. It's hard to forget the insults, the pin in your hair, the resentment that accompanies fear. You can say that you have forgiven the hangman of your childhood, but you are also lying. That's why, decades after he made life hard for Daniel LaRusso, we still love to hate Billy Zabka.
Bullies are wrong.
Stephen King understands that. This is why bullies occupy such a special place in his work. Where many authors offer their adversaries depth, dimension and redemption, King often pivots in another direction. heHenry Bowers, The body& # 39; Ace Merrill, Christine'S Buddy Repperton, and Under the dome Big Jim Rennie are all lively and well-drawn characters, but they are also broken, flesh-and-blood manifestations of all the supernatural evils that are simmering on the surface of King's worlds. They will call you names, but they will also hold you a knife in your throat. And when King brings us into their minds, we do not see a vulnerable and imperfect creature, but a cruel and corrupt soul. They want nothing more than to hurt us and, as such, they are exactly what we imagined to be our tyrants when we were kids. We were right to be scared.
The Duffer brothers also get it. The local bully carries a knife in Dustin's sweet and curly throat during the first season of Strange things. This executioner, Troy, is King's favorite no-passion type, but the Duffers left him with a broken arm. In retrospect, it is clear that Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery) was en route in his blue Camaro and that Billy is much worse than Troy. His casual look of quasi-sociopathy was exposed in Strange things'Second season, but King's fans saw the writing on the wall – when Billy met Mind Flayer, the situation would become ugly.
Enter Strange things 3, which can be subtitled as well Hargrove's anger. Of course, Billy was the dick that he always had when he was strutting in the red of his lifeguard – he reintroduced himself by calling a kid "donkey-donkey" cell that infects and corrupts the city of Hawkins, Indiana. What is really king is that Billy's encounter with the Mind Flayer is, in his own way, intended. The cause of the accident that pushed Billy into the steel mill is not entirely clear. Strange things it's all the better for that. Billy is here because Billy was supposed to be here. Billy is evil. And evil attracts evil.
The charismatic Montgomery is in agreement. "It's inevitable in some ways," he says of Billy's union with Mind Flayer, adding that the monster was, in his own way, "attracted" by Billy. Just as Pennywise is attracted to Henry, the poisonous dog tyrant he. Just like Leland Gaunt is attracted to Ace, the Body tormented executioner, belly of beer Things needed antagonist. They do not invoke evil; Evil feels them – related spirits, etc. One of the most troubling aspects of King's work is that evil belongs not only to the supernatural but also to humans. hefor example, is filled with characters – the Bowers clan, Patrick Hockstetter, Bev's father – who were, one might say, predestined for wickedness. And then there's King's post-apocalyptic The stall, where the survivors are divided into camps through prophetic dreams: one openly Christian in his concepts of humility and goodness, the other fascist. The fact that the survivors seem to have little choice as to the dreams they receive is interesting, it is reductive in a humanist way, but striking in the cosmic realm. The terror is unique to know that we are not only helpless against this grandiose project, but also simple pawns in the fighting of our gods.
What is fascinating about Montgomery, however, is how much he complicates this interpretation. When we discuss the potential of Billy's innate evil, he keeps coming back to the character's humanity, a facet for which he has fought since the first cast. Billy was introduced to him, he says, as the "stereotype" of the bully, but he did everything he could to make the character bigger. For example, Montgomery had the idea of having Billy harassed by his father towards the end of the second season, a scene that, in retrospect, turns out to be one of the best of the season.
"He can not just be mean because he's mean," he says. "How are we going to get the audience to actually participate in this character's journey?" And then they wrote the scene with the father, and I think it breaks the archetype somehow because you humanize the villain. I can not identify myself to a CGI monster because I do not know what it is, it does not exist in my world. I can not understand realistically. While you can understand Billy. We all have a Billy in our lives. "
Montgomery brings to Billy a painful and conflicting humanity that opposes his possession and, even in the midst of violence, releases a sad-eyed lassitude that imbues him with an aura of tragedy. It is a superimposed and percussive performance, and it embodies the way in which the Strange things is able to have his cake and eat it too. It's easy to criticize the show for its ability to cannibalize and display the genre properties of yesteryear, but Strange things is rarely content to recycle for recycling. Montgomery's Billy is Zabka, filtered through a Kingian lens, a sought-after, sun-spotted piece with a medium homicidal tendency. This in itself is a subversion of the archetype established by King, whose bullies tend to alienate more than to attract. Montgomery's humanist approach can undermine cosmic horror, but it also explains what makes Strange things Special – horror, sci-fi and action elements are never more important than characters.
Nevertheless, Montgomery knows in which series he is and that, despite his humanity swallowed up, Billy is not your average tyrant. He has a "god complex", a trait that Montgomery explains with a chuckle that he initially thought to take literally. "I wanted this complex idea that I developed for myself to have a reason," he says. "And the only way for me to find [that] He knew he was born of a virgin. A crazy idea, certainly, but he throws it into science, claiming that he envisioned his birth mother, a virgin, having conceived it by artificial insemination. The Duffers eventually decided to join his birth mother in other ways, but the Billy's God complex resonates, if only for the way he once again links the character to King's list of executioners.
After all, these are divine complexes that make the connection between so many of King's bullies. Desperate by power, they seek to transcend their status by force alone. What the supernatural presence offers is an opportunity for apotheosis, and one of the essential aspects of the respondent Kingian is that they willingly plunge into their dark destiny, and then see their own deification removed to them as soon as their utility takes end. The bully, who has become a pigeon, has become pathetic; King's bullies do not die in a torch of glory, but with a stifling groan. The evil that once was so threatening is made easy. There is tragedy and satisfaction in that.
It's not Billy's trip, though; he achieves the apotheosis, but it is a sacrifice that serves him as redemption, as he would never have received in a novel King. It works, however, after being deserved through a combination of emotional vulnerability and the belief that no one, no matter how shitty, deserves the physical and mental torture that he undergoes under Mind's grip flayer. In the end, Billy is an idiot, but he is not quite wrong-Montgomery, always empathetic, makes sure of that. Such a revelation may not reassure the bloodlust of the masses being bullied, but it is part of the innate optimism of Strange things, a show as indebted to the comedies of the 80s as it is science fiction and the horror of the decade. Sometimes a tyrant is just a bully. But Billy, the mullet and all the rest, was the one we loved to hate.
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