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An enticing two-word sentence, handwritten with a pen on a piece of high school stationery, appears to hold the key that will unlock the mysteries – both psychological and supernatural – of the first half of Stranger Things season four .
Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Steve (Joe Keery) and Max (Sadie Sink) have broken into Hawkins High and are searching the school psychologist’s files to find out if there is a connection between the victims of Vecna, the season’s snake-veined big villain, whose favorite pastimes are antiques (this grandfather clock is a real find) and cruelly mauling children’s bodies while he sucks their souls. As Max spreads out the victims’ files on the darkened desk, a pattern emerges. All had sought advice for a range of symptoms, including nightmares, headaches and nosebleeds. But the kicker comes at the bottom of the page, double-underlined: “Past Trauma.” Vecna appears to be a trauma monster that feeds on the torment of the mentally vulnerable.
Past Trauma is a brilliant diversion, and none of Vecna’s victims are traumatized. Or maybe more precisely, nobody is just traumatized.
It’s a clever twist, and more than a handful of critics have taken the bait, arguing that the series offers a “journey into the depths of psychological trauma” that is “surprisingly mature” — and that the character of Vecna, the hunt on “past trauma” allows the series to examine the “trauma response in children and adolescents”.
There’s just one problem: Past Trauma is a brilliant diversion, and none of Vecna’s victims are traumatized. Or maybe more precisely, nobody is just traumatized. Rather, they all have symptoms of another form of mental illness that psychologists call moral injury.
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The latest research on moral injuries comes from working with veterans who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. As Pulitzer winner David Wood reports in What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars, tens of thousands of military members, despite coming home with debilitating mental illnesses, have not responded to standard trauma treatments. This startling revelation led a group of VA psychologists to claim that many were not traumatized; they were morally injured.
Moral injury seems such an intuitive concept that it’s surprising that mental health specialists have only started explaining it in the last 20 years. To understand it, think of the drone strike that killed 10 innocent civilians as the US military pulled out of Afghanistan last year. Both the drone pilot and the families of the dead are likely to be struck by this tragedy, and until recently we might have labeled both parties’ pain as “trauma.” But doing so is tedious for perhaps obvious reasons. One person fired the rocket; the others lost family members in a grisly conflagration. Sure, everyone may suffer, but is suffering uniform? Some specialists now say no, arguing that the pain of victimization (trauma) is qualitatively different from the pain of perpetration (moral injury). They propose a relatively simple definition: Moral injury is the mental anguish that sometimes afflicts a person who does wrong, who breaks their own moral code.
Which brings us back to “Stranger Things” — and the real connection that binds all of Vecna’s victims. All are haunted not by “past trauma”, by what was done to them, but by what they did. They are weighed down by the burden of their perceived misdeeds. Or put more simply, this season of Stranger Things is an extended meditation on moral hurt and one of the most psychologically intriguing plays in recent television.
It’s easiest to see in Vecna’s first victim, Victor Creel, played by Kevin L. Johnson and a later version played with surprising pathos by horror legend Robert Englund. Creel’s troubles begin when he moves into the grand old Victorian home that is also Vecna’s hideout. Shortly after his arrival, the demon begins to torment Creel and his family, eventually killing his wife and two children. In a flashback, we learn why: Creel is a World War II veteran still tormented by his mistaken decision to order a rocket attack on a civilian neighborhood. When Creel explores the site of the bomb after the explosion, he sees a burning baby cot and learns the horrifying truth. Returning to his nightmares, the image of the fiery cradle is the fuel on which Vecna feeds. But it’s not a symbol of Creel’s victimization — or his trauma. It’s a reminder of his complicity in the deaths of innocents.
Logan Riley Bruner as Fred Benson in Stranger Things (netflix)
Vecna’s second contemporary victim, nerdy school newspaper reporter Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner), has a similar story. He has scars on his face, the result of a car accident he narrowly escaped from. Fred is haunted by memories of the crash, but not because he nearly died. There was another child in the car, one who did not escape and perished in the flames. Though the details of the accident are a bit unclear, Fred feels responsible for his classmate’s death, and Vecna takes advantage of that pain by calling Fred a “killer” just before lifting him up in the air and stripping his bones breaks.
“What if I’m not good? What if I’m the monster?”
When Max looks at Fred’s record in the aforementioned scene, she realizes that she is suffering from the same symptoms, and as the revelation dawns that she is Vecna’s next victim, we hear his disembodied voice muttering her name. But how does Max fit into the pattern? Certainly, being a domestic abuse victim forced to witness her brother’s death at the end of season three, she’s traumatized — not morally injured. The letter she reads to her brother in the poignant fourth episode, Dear Billy, suggests otherwise: “I play that moment in my head all the time. Sometimes I imagine myself running to you and pulling you away. I imagine that if, “I had it, you were still there and everything would be, everything would be fine.” It’s that nagging guilt that she could have done more, that she could have prevented her brother’s death can and didn’t, which Vecna lives off of, reminding her of her failure when he takes Billy’s form in the Upside Down.
Psychologists argue that one of the key features of moral injury is a relatively normal guilt response stuck in overdrive (just as PTSD is essentially the overactive of an otherwise natural fear response). Many people feel guilty after doing something wrong for a few days or even weeks. But the morally wounded – like Creel, Fred and Max – are mired in guilt and shame and find themselves unable to escape.
Millie Bobby Brown as Elf in Stranger Things (Tina Rowden/Netflix)
And yet it is Eleven who is showing what is perhaps an even more telling symptom. In judiciously stitched scenes with her friends searching the counseling office at night, Eleven meets with Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) at a diner in the desert. Owens tries to convince El to return to Hawkins one more time to join the fight against Vecna. But she looks him straight in the eye and replies, “What if I’m not good? What if I’m the monster?” That’s why she says it: During season four, El is haunted by memories of her time at Hawkins National Laboratory — and one bloody memory in particular. In it, she stands rigidly over the blood-spattered corpses of the lab’s other test subjects. As the season progresses, she comes to believe that she only escaped after slaughtering dozens of people with her psychokinetic powers (although later episodes will prove otherwise). Morally wounded people often feel irretrievable; the evil of their deeds infects their whole being. You haven’t done bad things; They are bad people. They are, in El’s term, monsters.
We learn later in the season that El is not a monster – and that a more sinister evil lurks within Hawkins. But malicious evil lurks in the real world too. The fourth season of Stranger Things was released just days after the school shooting in Uvalde. Given that the premiere begins with a scene of dead children strewn across a school hallway, the showrunners decided to issue a trigger warning: “We shot this season of ‘Stranger Things’ a year ago. But given the recent tragic school shooting in Texas, viewers might find the opening scene of Episode 1 harrowing. We are deeply saddened by this unspeakable violence and our hearts go out to any family mourning the loss of a loved one.”
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The study of moral injury challenges us to remember that those who endure its unique taste of torment are not monsters. But it also keeps us in close touch with the monstrous things (like school shootings) that humans are capable of. “Stranger Things” does both too.
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