(RNS) — “Stranger Things” is finally returning to Netflix with its fifth and final season starting Wednesday (Nov. 26). And while fans hope the beloved pop-culture classic will come to a satisfying close, I have another hope, too: that the sheltered Latter-day Saint character of Suzie Bingham will get to leave her house and battle danger directly.
I love Suzie, and so far I’ve been delighted by how the series has presented her. That was surprising because some recent television series have given us flat, one-sided portrayals of the religion and its people.
But “Stranger Things,” created by two brothers who don’t appear to have any history with Mormonism, offers a more nuanced depiction. That’s impressive, particularly considering that the screen time allotted to Mormonism is so brief. Suzie is complex, fulfilling some LDS stereotypes on one hand while also challenging them again and again.
When viewers first glimpse Suzie, it’s like she came out of central casting for a wholesome Mormon girl. She is in her Salt Lake City bedroom reading peacefully, the seeming tranquility of her domestic life standing in stark contrast to the cosmic war raging far away in Hawkins, Indiana, where the show is mostly based. She is dressed in pure “Little House on the Prairie” garb, an ankle-length white-and-pink nightgown tied with a pink bow at its very high neckline.
No other teenage female character has been depicted like this, which immediately marks Suzie as different. In keeping with the old-fashioned purity motif, she is holed up, almost Rapunzel-like, in what appears to be an attic bedroom.
All three of Suzie’s scenes in Seasons 3 and 4 take place in this room. A critical reading of how LDS femininity is portrayed might note that Suzie never leaves her house. Unlike the other teenage characters who battle terrifying monsters and face the constant specter of death, she is as protected from that dangerous world as LDS leaders would have wished her to be when they proclaimed again and again in the 1970s and 1980s that women should stay at home.
There’s an innocence to Suzie. Although she provides lifesaving scientific advice at key moments, the main characters seem to engage in an unspoken pact to keep her out of the worst of Hawkins’ ongoing apocalyptic woes. They won’t even swear in front of her — Mike’s “holy s**t!” becomes a tame “holy heck!” in Suzie’s presence.
So, in some ways, Suzie’s character showcases a particular kind of Mormon-approved femininity. Girls are removed from the battle lines, offering cheerful support from the homefront. They also seem to live to serve the needs of men. In keeping with this trope, Suzie drops everything three times to help Dustin and his friends — once to provide Planck’s constant, once to assist them with geolocation and once to upgrade Dustin’s D-minus in Latin so it won’t ruin his grade-point average.
But Suzie’s not all sweetness and light, which is where the screenwriters’ portrayal of Mormon femininity in the 1980s becomes more nuanced. She does not seem to have internalized any ecclesiastical or cultural rhetoric that it will be her sole job to have babies and be a good wife someday. She’s clearly preparing for a career in science, and her family is supportive of that goal to the extent that they seem to have paid to send her for a month to Camp Know Where, the science camp where she met Dustin.
And she is light-years ahead of most of the other characters in terms of what she knows about new technologies. When the fourth season takes place in 1986, she’s already fully aware of how to access the nascent internet, which the other characters have never even heard of.
Suzie is also in clear violation of Mormonism’s religious and cultural boundaries for dating. She’s too young, for one thing. The general rule for adolescent dating was “to date only after age 16 and even then not to pair off exclusively with one partner,” as a 1985 LDS parenting guide counseled. Suzie, who is just 14 years old when she starts dating Dustin in Season 3, is clearly not upholding this standard. She’s also ignoring advice not to date anyone outside the church, since her “Dusty-bun” is not a member.
If Suzie’s character upholds some Mormon stereotypes while defying others, so, too, does her family.
In Season 4, Episode 6, when Dustin’s friends pay a surprise visit to Suzie in Salt Lake City, we meet her seven brothers and sisters of varying ages. On that point, the fictional Binghams are in line with the large family sizes of Mormons of the period. Suzie’s parents seem to have taken the church’s unambiguous anti-contraception memo of the 1960s and 1970s with the utmost seriousness, resulting in the stairstep births of Eden, Suzie, Tabitha, Cornelius, Sterling, Tanner, Tatum and Peter. It’s also possible that additional siblings exist offscreen.
The family is huge, but in other ways they are radically and comically unexpected.
For one thing, Suzie’s siblings are positively feral. The moment the front door opens, her little brother Cornelius shoots a Nerf arrow directly into Mike’s forehead. Two other children are also at war, standing on the coffee table in the living room having a vigorous pretend sword fight and hurling medieval insults at one another: “Away, you starveling! You elf-skin!”
Another sister is in a bride costume, writhing on the floor and crying for help as her brother, Sterling, films her for a home movie. In the kitchen, two other children are cooking something for the family. When asked where Suzie might be, “Don’t know, don’t care” is her sister’s callous response. Finally, Cornelius opens the circuit breaker box and turns off the electricity, plunging the house into darkness.
From the opening of the front door to the loss of electricity, the entire scene takes just 58 seconds, but it’s a packed tableau of juvenile chaos.
This is not the hyperreligious Mormon family the Hawkins visitors had likely pictured in their minds. It’s not the house of order that Mormon leaders of the 1980s encouraged from the pulpit. It’s entropy, and the children are clearly and comically in charge.
We rarely see Suzie interacting with her siblings. They’re wreaking havoc in the house, but she’s not setting aside her scientific pursuits to make them sandwiches, mediate disputes or change anyone’s diaper. She has reading and building to do. In fact, when the oldest sister, Eden, barges in to demand that Suzie “pull [her] damn weight” with supervising their younger siblings, Suzie rebukes Eden for her foul language and unceremoniously pushes her out the door. Suzie doesn’t promise she’ll be down soon to help with the family; instead, she turns to her visitors to see what she might do to help them.
The second way the Binghams deviate from expectations is that Suzie’s mother appears not to exist. If there is one predictable trope about onscreen portrayals of Mormons, it’s that women will generally be depicted as nurturing and somewhat subservient. In the Bingham family, though, Suzie’s mother is nowhere to be seen and her father is an overwhelmed and easily overruled authority figure, locked in his home office and intervening very little in the lives of his children.
That Suzie’s mother would be absent — not even mentioned — introduces a complex gender dynamic to the portrayal of Mormonism. Presumably, Mrs. Bingham is out at work. In the mid-1980s, this would have been a deeply controversial decision, as LDS leaders linked working mothers to all kinds of social ills. Then-apostle Ezra Taft Benson told members in a 1981 General Conference that women were divinely ordained to be helpmeets, supporting men in their careers by staying home with the children. He cautioned that mothers who neglected this sacred responsibility could expect serious repercussions.
In some ways, the Bingham family is Benson’s worst nightmare. Yet it is belied by the fact that the kids seem to revel in their freedom and have generally used the time to cultivate their talents and imaginations. At some level, the chaos is working. Suzie and her fierce, resourceful siblings have free rein to develop their artistic, culinary and scientific pursuits.
In Season 5, I want Suzie to continue to test the boundaries of the church’s gender script. I want her to keep on saving the world by being smart, funny and heroic. But I’d also like for “Stranger Things” to allow her to test herself outside the home because Suzie doesn’t need anyone’s protection.
This column is adapted from a larger article written for the anthology “Religion, Theology, and Stranger Things: Studies from the Upside Down on Evil, Ethics, Horror, and Hope,” edited by Adam J. Powell and Andrew J. Byers (of no relation to Will, Joyce or Jonathan Byers in the show).
