Pop-Culture Addendum on Appreciating Derivative Stories
From "Stranger Things" all the way back to Aeschylus
A side post on pop culture, but which pulls in the history of great art and literature. This post won’t supplant Tuesday’s normal post on the nature and study of history.
Over the Summer, I finished the fourth season of Netflix's Stranger Things (much better than seasons 2 and 3 in my opinion). Part of the selling point of Stranger Things has always been the 80’s nostalgia and scenery, with lots of visual Easter eggs aimed at the childhood memories of Gen X viewers, and season 4 leaned into this even further. Roller-rinks and popular 80’s movies serve as backdrops for entire scenes, and a popular song from the 80’s literally saves a character’s life.
Stranger Things has always taken obvious inspiration from famous movies and fiction, including Stephen Spielberg and Stephen King; the core plot of teenagers riding their bikes around town and fighting evil mostly without adult supervision is deliberately meant to evoke The Goonies, Monster Squad, or E.T. As with the product placement nostalgia, season four leaned into these inspirations even more deliberately. In addition to more than one nod to the horror-film Carrie, the main villain is an homage to Nightmare on Elm Street (the actor who played Freddy Krueger even has a minor but important role), and a secondary plot involving Russian prison camps turns into an 80’s action movie, complete with a flamethrower that Sigourney Weaver could’ve grimly used in Aliens. Near the end of the season, a central character pulls a Luke Skywaker in Empire Strikes Back, leaving to go rescue friends and fight the Big Bad without finishing their training (there’s even a telekinetic lifting of heavy objects, reminiscent of Luke’s X-wing). There’s no shortage of videos that point out these details (obligatory spoiler warning).
All these obvious nods and inspirations can invite criticisms of Stranger Things as being derivative, and this gets at a much larger critique of current pop-culture. There are no shortage of takes and complaints about Hollywood’s originality crisis in a world full of reboots, sequels, and super-heroes. We are in Ross Douthat’s Decadent Society, and the original stories have disappeared. For that matter, popular music doesn’t seem much more innovative either, in a world where Super Bowl halftime shows often feature AARP members.
I don’t have anything particularly original to say on this topic, which has been discussed ad nauseum. At most, I’ll add as a partial reason (among many), that I think perhaps we’re coming out of a period of remarkable artistic creativity, and new artists haven’t determined how to get out from under the shadow of the older icons yet. That, and we’re still experiencing life in the shadow of the boomers.
However, the observation that a lot of famous art is derivative is actually itself somewhat…derivative.
We’ve been here before
It’s no secret that many of our most iconic films and stories were already genre mashups and loving homages to older art forms. There’s a very large Wikipedia entry just on the inspirations for Star Wars, many of which are widely known (the crawling text intros from Flash Gordon, Joseph Campbell’s Hero's Journey, etc). So too, for Indiana Jones. You can even find beat-for-beat comparisons of the opening scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark with earlier serials.
This past year, my seven-year old son finally got to watch all of A New Hope, which gave me an opportunity to imagine seeing Star Wars from scratch again, but as an adult. I was intensely struck by just how much nothing in the film was new. An orphaned hero of destiny unites with a space-wizard samurai who practices a form of Eastern gnostic dualism, all to rescue a princess from the most stereotypically evil empire possible, and with help from a rogue smuggler straight out of an old western (the relationship between westerns and space operas is a good one - new frontiers, freedom of travel over great distances in a harsh environment, the absence of civilization and law, etc). Visually, the film is inescapably grounded in an imagination shaped by the Second World War; from the Imperial-Nazi uniforms, to the Millenium Falcon’s B-29-inspired cockpit and gun turrets. X-Wings are clearly P-38/P-51 hybrids, imperial Tie Fighters are as fragile as Japanese Zeroes, and Princess Leia observes the final battle from the rebel version of the RAF’s control room in the Battle of Britain (mixed with elements from a U.S. Navy combat information center).
When George Lucas first made Star Wars, he was making a low-budget B movie that recycled just about everything (the props and costumes especially look cheaper and flimsier than in the later films); this wasn’t supposed to become the most famous piece of pop culture of the last fifty years. Somehow, recombining a whole bunch of old pieces worked brilliantly to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Given the rest of George Lucas’ career, I think this serves as a point in Socrates’ favor in the Apology when he says that the poets often can’t explain their own works of art as well as their audiences.
I think this grounding of the Star Wars universe in existing genres is an underrated reason for why everything after the original trilogy has underwhelmed. Lucas, to his credit, actually tried to do something interesting with the prequels, but they lost their derivative homages in a mess of CGI green screens and atrocious dialogue. The newer sequel movies ironically trapped themselves rebooting the original trilogy; they are tedious because they derive from Star Wars and nothing else. It’s not an accident that the only Disney-era Star Wars content that’s been generally well-received is The Mandalorian, which is very consciously grounded in classic westerns; the bounty-hunting main character even sounds like Clint Eastwood, and the music is clearly inspired by Enrico Morricone. John Favreau, the creative hand behind The Mandalorian, also booted up the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the first Iron Man film. Say what we will about Marvel, but many of the films in the MCU have riffed on other story genres (Winter Soldier was a Cold-war spy thriller, Ant-Man a heist film, etc.) to their benefit.
When derivation and inspiration succeed, part of the enjoyment stems from catching the nods and references. Done badly, these cues are dull fan-service, but done well, they can enrich and deepen a story. In the original Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s samurai motifs deepen his character and give you a sense of a larger world only barely glimpsed. Your familiarity with the trope and its internal rules fills in all the details for you. The story then becomes one that can be appreciated both on the surface level (as a child watching Star Wars or reading Harry Potter for the first time), and on the adult level, where the reference conveys much more than can be explicitly stated.
Stranger Things has succeeded in much the same way; telling a story made up of recycled tropes and familiar product placements, that nevertheless adds up to something new and compelling; the nostalgia moments in Stranger Things actually make the recombination of plot elements feel more unexpected, juxtaposing the familiar and the (heh) strange. There’s a scene in Stranger Things where Eddie, a “freak” who listens to Metallica and plays Dungeons and Dragons, is learning about the monstrous alternative dimension in the show’s universe, and he makes a Lord of the Rings reference, saying, “you want me to go to Mordor.” Steve, a rich-kid jock, provides a comic relief moment of utter confusion (“what’s Mordor?”). On its own, the nod to Lord of the Rings could be a gratuitous piece of pop-culture fan-service. But in context, the line is a perfectly appropriate reference for Eddie’s character to make, as he processes entering the literal inversion of faerie that is the Upside-Down. Meanwhile, Steve’s confusion successfully demonstrates to the audience how much our own cultural moment is different from the 1980’s; reinforcing how the 80’s are both familiar and strange at the same time. This is far removed from the walking zombies that were the J.J. Abrams Star Wars sequels.
Beyond Stranger Things and Star Wars, and all the way back to Homer
Stranger Things and Star Wars are vivid examples of successful story derivation, but you can easily say the same things about Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia. All three stories have roots in prior history, literature, and mythology so deep that there are practically academic sub-fields of study on them. This derivation isn’t limited to movies and books; most popular forms of 20th century music were formed by recombining earlier genres, such as folk music, blues, and spoken poetry. The history of musical movements and visual artistic schools is almost always a story of rejecting, responding to, or riffing off of, what’s come before.
Tolkien’s genius in particular for recombining old genres and motifs is staggering. Tolkien wrote one of the definitive narratives for heroism in the face of the cataclysmic destruction of the World Wars (here’s a good essay arguing that ours is the age of the Tolkeinic Hero). But to tell this very modern story, Tolkien recombined a mountain of ancient and early medieval poetry and mythology, some of which is very subtle, but often quite overt. Tolkien has as many Easter egg references to medieval poetry as an episode of Stranger Things does the 1980s; the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit are lifted straight out of the Scandinavian Poetic Edda, and Gandalf and most of the Hobbits have names taken from existing history or poetry. A number of Bilbo and Gollum’s riddles are Anglo-Saxon, and Where now is the horse and the rider is a straight excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer. Bilbo’s burgling of Smaug gives name to the thief from Beowulf that rouses the dragon, Gondor and Numenor at times feel very “Byzantium,” and to hold this whole world together, Tolkien retold the Biblical tale of creation in The Silmarillion. Even the appendices in Return of the King are self-aware, as Tolkien composed them all within a frame narrative to make the reader feel as if they’re reading a translation of a work copied down over the centuries in an archive somewhere. As a result, a book which feels thousands of years old provides one of the definitive takes for processing the horror of the Somme and the 20th century’s “long defeat.” The elder remnants of Western Civilization sacrificing themselves in order to defeat evil and make way for something new.
Even the greatest literature in history often uses derivation, as high school freshman encountering Virgil’s Aeneid after reading Homer find out. Dante’s Comedia is not subtle about this; Dante is physically guided through Hell by his literary role-model, and in the circle of the virtuous Pagans, Dante brazenly writes himself into the same company as the greatest poets of antiquity. The term for “romance” originally referred to medieval stories set in classical antiquity, about Troy, Alexander the Great, and Rome (“romances” were simply stories about Rome). Geoffrey of Monmouth and Snorri Sturluson both “rebooted” their peoples' histories of Briton and Scandinavia by claiming original descent from Troy, and as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s treatment of King Arthur gained popularity, his “exotic” Welsh legends were woven into continental romances and and produced the definitive Arthurian canon of authors like Chretian des Troyes and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
And we haven’t even mentioned Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, or Cervantes. You don’t need to know all these references (and I know I’m only scratching the surface with these connections, experts can take you much much deeper) to enjoy these works of art; they need to be able to stand alone on their merits. But the layering of inspirations and references are one of the best ways to provide deeper meaning and wonder. Almost no art exists in a vacuum.
The great mythological canons have been recombined and rebooted as often as comic book superheroes, with new stories always told with one eye on the source material. Were we to demonstrate our knowledge of Homer to a group of Greek bards, they’d probably huff at us and tell us how we can’t “really” understand why the gods chose different sides in the Trojan War unless we could go back and listen to so and so’s retelling of the source material that came along a hundred years before the Iliad was first written down. If the Marvel movies become lasting cultural touchstones, some future art critic a century from now will astonish audiences by digging through the original comic books to explain long-forgotten tropes and features of key characters and stories that to us, feel boringly obvious.
In fact, Greek playwrights all worked with an extended mythological universe. The great plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were routinely set within already-established canons of mythology and history, using a cast of gods and humans already familiar to audiences. The audience for Oedipus Rex already knew who Oedipus was, and his significance as the King of Thebes. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus’ audience already knew that Clytemnestra would kill Agamemnon (and why); part of the enjoyment came from hearing a new story set in a very familiar universe. At the end of the cycle, when Athena and the Athenian jury acquit Orestes for his mother’s murder, the audience also knows that not only has the cycle of blood-feud vengeance been broken, but also a curse that ran all the way back to Tantalus and Zeus, making the triumph of the Athenian justice system an epochal moment.
All of history is like this, but most art is forgettable
I should state plainly that I am not trying to elevate Star Wars, Stranger Things, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the level of Homer or Aeschylus, even if I think there are parallels in the construction of ancient mythologies and modern extended universes. One important thing to keep in mind about modern films and stories, is that time has not yet winnowed out the dreck. In every age, most art simply isn’t very good, and it can take awhile for the verdict of history to enshrine the classics. The Greek classical age produced the highs of Aeschylus and Sophocles, but the Hellenistic playwrights that came later are generally considered inferior, complete with stock characters and repeated plotlines. Contemporary witnesses also aren’t always the best judge of what will become timeless; Johan Sebastian Bach was relatively unpopular at the time of his death.
What I want to close on, however, is to note that this meditation on creative influences extends beyond art, and applies to most subjects of historical inquiry. Great thinkers, movements, and institutions, are almost always products of what came before, recombined in new ways, and historians of various subfields will often expend great effort studying events and persons sometimes several generations earlier than their stated topic. I think my first real exposure to intellectual history came from reading about military history and the development of ideas, doctrines and weapons crafted in response to what had come before. You have to understand the Mounted Knight before you can understand the Swiss Pikeman who countered him.
There’s a popular image sometimes of “good” art existing in a vacuum, where the artist creates something new, ex nihilo. However, most of this art is likely just as dull (perhaps even more so?) as the derivative works; we just remember the small number of famous rebels who succeed in creating the new genre. The history of intellectual and artistic movements is the history of many dead ends, and just a few successful new shoots. Even attempts to willfully break from the past and start over are just as much defined by their opposition; the rebel who tries to tear something down is still defining themselves by their antagonist.
But simply, all of this is a very good reason for learning as much as you can about art, literature, and history. The more you know, the more you pick up from the world around you and the stories you encounter. Think of a time when you had a powerful “ah hah” moment when something major clicked into place, and then think how many more of those moments are still out there.