‘Firestarter’, ‘Stranger Things’ and the Fear of Female Power [Matriarchy Rising]
When Stranger Things first premiered in 2016, comparisons to Stephen King’s It were immediate. The 1980s-era sci-fi series about kids on bikes fighting monsters felt like an homage to King’s classic 1986 novel. But the sprawling story about childhood fear and a sewer-dwelling clown isn’t the only classic title in the author’s vast canon to have inspired the Duffer Brothers. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) was directly inspired by Charlie McGee, the main protagonist in King’s sci-fi horror classic Firestarter.
Both characters are young girls with incredible power. Among a host of other abilities, Eleven is telekinetic and has the ability to move, alter, or destroy things with the force of her will. Charlie’s power is more specific, but just as formidable. She is pyrokinetic; a firestarter with the ability to produce heat, flames, and explosions with her mind. Connections between the two characters have always been there, but they’ve never felt so explicit. With the long-awaited return of season four of Stranger Things and Keith Thomas’s substantially different remake of Firestarter both released this year, we see fresh chapters in both girl’s stories. Charlie and Eleven not only have similar powers, but both fear that they are monsters due to the tremendous things their bodies can do.
The newest adaptation of Firestarter opens with an infant lighting the mobile of her crib on fire. Charlie’s father, Andy (Zac Efron), rescues her seconds before it collapses into a burning heap in the crib. Born with this power, her abilities come from genetic mutations her parents developed in a government trial to study a mysterious serum called Lot 6. This trial was overseen by a shadowy agency known as The Shop (DSI in the film) and it would love nothing more than to get its hands on Charlie.
Because of this threat, the MacGee family lives off the grid. They keep to themselves and avoid all technology to keep the Shop agents from finding them. They’ve also taught Charlie to fear and suppress her power. Inexplicable fires would make their way into the news and so she must never reveal the truth about who she is and what she can do to anyone. It simply isn’t safe to openly be her authentic self.
Eleven has been raised in a much more restrictive environment. Stolen from her mother at birth, she’s grown up in Hawkins Lab, a testing ground where Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), or Papa as his child test subjects call him, experiments on children with psychic abilities. He puts them through a series of tests and lessons hoping to focus their powers and turn them into weapons.
After escaping the lab, she meets a boy named Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) in the nearby woods and begins hiding in his basement. But the agents are on her trail as well and will kill anyone who stands in their way. Eleven eventually moves into a shack in the woods with her adopted father, Jim Hopper (David Harbour). But like Andy, he has strict rules about where she can go and who she can see. Hoping to keep her safe, he hides her away from the rest of the world.
Fearing that she will hurt herself and them, Charlie’s parents have instilled in her a debilitating fear of her pyrokinesis. They’ve told her her gift is a bad thing and that she must never use it. Instead of teaching her to control her powers responsibly, they’ve taught her to repress them. Though she doesn’t know much about The Shop, she can feel her parents’ fear when they discuss her abilities. She sees the looks that pass between them and she knows their fear is all because of her. And this turns out to be justified.
After learning the truth about her powers, Charlie lashes out in a fit of rage and frustration. The heat explodes out of her and she severely burns her mother’s arms. She can hardly be blamed for this reaction, having never learned to control her powers. In a quiet conversation earlier in the film, Charlie asks her mother if she’s afraid of her. Her mother says no, but it’s clear that this is her greatest fear. Her parents have essentially asked her to be someone she’s not. She’s afraid that her failure to live up to their expectations will make her unloveable.
In season four of Stranger Things, Eleven feels like a monster as well, though her fear is more complex. Having moved across the country, she’s struggling to fit into her new school in California. She confronts Mike about why he never says he loves her anymore and it’s clear she’s also struggling to find an identity. After a year of teenage bullying combined with the loss of her powers, Eleven doesn’t know who she is anymore. If she’s no longer a superhero, maybe she’s actually a monster.
Though they take different roads, both girls end up in the same place. They’re afraid the power that makes them special, also makes them unloveable. It’s a common fear among many young girls. Growing up in the patriarchy, anyone who doesn’t identify as a white cisgender, heterosexual male is dehumanized and dismissed. Girls are taught to be pleasing above all else; the beautiful flower decorating a room controlled by men. We’re told it’s our job to produce and care for the next generation and in order to do so, we must attract a husband to protect us. We are taught to shrink in, to demure, to stay silent, and to serve. The roles of Girl and Woman are narrowly defined, but the overarching theme is that we exist under the umbrella of male control.
But Eleven and Charlie are uncontrollable. Though not indestructible, they can do the impossible and cannot be contained. They do not need protection. It’s this power that makes them feel like monsters. Charlie and Eleven both know the unspoken rules of what “normal” girls are supposed to be. And they know they don’t fit into it. Though they both possess deadly psychic abilities, they feel monstrous because they challenge the power structure adopted by the dominant culture.
Once Andy finally does start to teach Charlie to use her powers, she admits that it feels good. As it should. She is exercising a muscle and using an ability she was created to use. But this revelation that she likes the feeling of burning is met with a look of alarm from her father. Even the film treats her as if using her awe-inspiring gift is something to be feared. In order to regain her powers, Eleven finds herself in another version of Hawkins Lab, this time buried deep within the desert.
She reluctantly partners with Papa again to unlock the mental block keeping her from accessing them. In order to do so, she must confront a painful memory she’s been repressing. She regresses to a forgotten time in the lab when she found herself standing alone in a room full of bodies. As blood pours from her eyes, Papa bursts in and asks in horror, “what did you do?”
She represses this memory because she can’t bear the thought that her abilities caused such a massacre. But as she uncovers more memories, she learns that another test subject, One (Jamie Campbell Bower), is actually responsible for the deaths. He murdered everyone and she responded by using her own powers to send him to the other dimension. But in doing so, she accidentally created the Upside Down, a portal filled with monstrous threats to her friends and family. She now feels responsible for putting them in danger. Papa subtly encourages this guilt, telling her that she needs his protection in order to avoid hurting anyone else.
Like Eleven, Charlie finds herself back in the clutches of The Shop and burns down its headquarters to keep them from victimizing anyone else. Though we don’t really get a satisfying resolution to her feelings of monstrosity, she begins to use her powers in an intentional way, her confidence steadily growing each time she does. Eleven finally manages to free herself from Papa’s control in a fiery escape in which she expels her rage by smashing a helicopter into the ground.
But before she does, she confronts Papa about what he’s done. In seeking to control her, he has caused all of this destruction. He is the one who imprisoned her as an infant. He encouraged the other kids to bully her. And he caused the massacre of the rest of the test subjects by imprisoning One. Eleven may have been the weapon that created the Upside Down and Vecna in the first place, but Papa is the one who loaded the metaphorical gun.
Eleven eventually discovers that she is not the monster. She is a result of monstrous work, but she is also a complex human being with the ability to choose her own destiny. The end of Charlie’s story is a little more muddled, but we can only hope she comes to the same conclusion. Both girls accept and begin to embrace their powers in order to fight back against the monsters who created them. They have spent most of their lives controlled by fear of themselves and what their bodies can do.
But the real monsters are the people who feed this fear, who would use the girls to increase their own powers. In Firestarter, Charlie’s father has shamed her and made her terrified to use an ability she was born with. His intention is to protect her, but in doing so, he subtly tells her that she is incapable of safely being herself. Papa resorts to imprisoning Eleven, even using an electroshock collar to keep her subdued. He treats her like a wild animal who must be controlled for her own good. And it’s no coincidence that both of these controlling forces are father figures to the girls, agents of a patriarchal system built on the model of a nuclear family with the father in the ultimate position of power.
The fear of female power runs rampant in our culture. But no matter how powerful we become, we are not the monsters. The true monsters are those who try to control us. Those who have built and continue to feed a system that tells us that having power will make us scary. That protesting will make us look ugly. That speaking out will make us unpleasant. That saying the truth will make us unloveable. It’s another way of controlling our power. Because when the oppressed begin to discover how strong we are, we threaten those at the top of the patriarchal ladder.
It’s in their best interest to keep us afraid. Stereotypes about the shrill woman, the angry Black man, the sexually deviant queer person, among many, many others exist to keep us from living our lives as we choose. We’re told that if we threaten the norms of the dominant culture, we will be rejected, tossed aside, or even killed. Sacrificed on the altar of the status quo. And that is the true monstrosity.
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