In his anger upon seeing his stepsister with a black boy, the audience recognizes a history of white male anxiety regarding black male advances toward white women. That this violence manifests in Billy as bullying and bigotry is unsurprising. He calls Billy a “faggot” for primping in the mirror and, mere hours before Billy does the same to Lucas, presses his son against a wall by his neck area. Central to his father’s abuse are challenges to Billy’s masculinity. Where he initially presents as merely a sociopathic bully, the audience learns later that his father abuses him verbally and physically, making their relationship one of routine power plays and insults.
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The confrontation ends when Max stabs her stepbrother in the neck with a syringe full of sedative, knocking him unconscious.īetween these incidents are scattered insights into why Billy is the way he is. He kicks Billy in the groin to break free. Billy fights past Steve Harrington, a friend of the kids’ and Billy’s nemesis at the local high school, and throws Lucas against a wall, where he holds the much smaller boy around his neck. The climax of this cat-and-mouse game comes when Billy finally catches Max with Lucas and her new friends. Billy, cigarette dangling from his mouth, bursts out of the door seconds after Lucas moves out of sight. It mounts when Lucas stops by Billy and Max’s house later, and Max has to sneak him around back so they can ride off to confront monsters together. The tension is present in Billy’s glare after he sees the black boy in an arcade Max just left. That kid is one of them.”įrom this point, fear of what might happen to Lucas if Billy discovers he and Max are hanging out hovers over the protagonists’ adventures. And something you learn is that there’s a certain type of people in this world that you stay away from. “This is serious shit, OK?” Billy barks, grabbing Max’s arm.
The audience’s first hint that Billy has problems beyond excess testosterone is when he sees Max, his stepsister, leaving school in a huff after talking to Lucas. ( Editor’s note: Spoilers for the Stranger Things 2 ahead.) And the perpetrator is a white high schooler who embodies the white rage and disaffection that largely characterized Trump’s rise. They instead deal with a more ordinary specter: impending racist violence. But some of the more suspenseful passages in the Duffer Brothers’ supernatural thriller have nothing to do with demogorgons or shadow monsters. Stranger Things 2 isn’t lacking for tension. In Stranger Things 2, it was Billy Hargrove - the older stepbrother of Max - who seethes, and eventually explodes, when his stepsister becomes friends with her black classmate, Lucas Sinclair. In the Volunteer State on Saturday, these were the supremacists emboldened by the rise of President Donald Trump. Stranger Things 2 premiered on Netflix the same weekend that dozens of white nationalists and neo-Nazis rallied in Shelbyville, Tennessee.īoth events featured white men masking anxiety over their social status in racism and violence.
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