Transcription
One, and welcome back to another analysis video. Today we're going over the cabin scene, and we're starting off with this season three parallel: Ella's upset and Mike for lying to her in both season three and season four. Talk to you at all? Not much. It's extremely important to look at this parallel because it confirms to the viewer that Mike was lying during his monologue. If you weren't aware, by all the visual cues and the obvious contradictions he made himself in the season, plus his behavior in season one, he was lying, and Elle was aware of it. "Do you lie?" "What? No." So she slams the door. Of course, this time she doesn't slam it completely; she leaves it open three inches because of Hopper. Ever since he died, she's been very sensitive towards that. Of course, we know he's alive now, but she didn't know that in that moment. I mean, a little bit. Dr. Brenner.
I want to pause here because this couch is very, very important. I went back to season three to see what happened with this couch, and I wanted to show you some screenshots of what I found. Here's Jonathan and Nancy. They put this up against the door. You can see the blanket hanging off the back there. Blanket then falls off, obviously because gravity. They go to escape; Jonathan pulls it back down. And here's the final positioning of the couch before they leave. You can see it's actually in front of the bathroom door. So that means they moved it over while they were cleaning, and they also neatly folded up the blanket and put it back on the couch. But they didn't do one thing: they purposefully did not turn this couch right side up. This couch is still upside down, and if that's not a metaphor for something, a visual metaphor, I don't know what is. He says that she wasn't ready, and now she's starting to think he was right. That's crap. To zoom you guys out here because look how beautiful this scene is. Lighting, the thing—so much is going on here, and I want to show you a little clip from The Duffer Brothers.
"We want it to feel as much as possible like a movie, not like a television show. That goes to the way we shoot it and the way we light it, all the way down to, of course, visual effects." They talk about lighting; they specifically show Hopper's cabin. So I want to stress that the lighting in the scene is extremely symbolic and important. It's also interesting audio sound effects here that you can't really hear unless you're wearing headphones. So I'll try to put annotations of what they are on the screen. If it wasn't for her, if she hadn't left the lab, Max wouldn't be alive right now. I know. What does birds chirping have to do with anything? I'm gonna bring up a dawn chorus, which is a phenomenon of birds singing in the morning. We know that this season is set in March, which is spring, and dawn choruses are more common in the spring. In spring, they usually are doing this to defend their breeding territory, calm the flock, or trying to attract a mate, which is just interesting that we're finally hearing birds in a moment between these two characters. I'm just putting it out there.
Let's talk about body language. I want to point out the fact that Will here is nervously fidgeting at his pants leg. His legs are crossed, and they mirror Mike's, whose legs are also crossed at the ankle, which is usually a sign of fear, holding back, playing uncertain, even. But you'll also notice that their feet are also pointing at each other, the bottoms of their feet. In body language, when your feet are pointed at another person, it's usually shown to express attraction or interest in that person. The fact that we're getting it from both is showing mutual attraction. "She's um, she's never lost before, not like this. She'll have another chance." Let's hope not. Being is really interesting. This faraway shot where they're talking about El; they're not making eye contact. In fact, every time they glance at each other, the other one's looking the other way, which is really, really unusual for these two. In fact, we don't get them in their normal kind of eye contact mode until Will says, "This one is dead and rotting. He's not—" This also triggers a camera perspective switch. We are now in Mike's perspective of the scene. "Now that I'm here in Hawkins, I can feel him, and he's hurt. He's hurting, but he's still alive." This whole conversation is a mirror to season two, as you guys know. It also is setting up the fact that Will is still intrinsically tied to the supernatural upside down plot. You can see how this affects Mike's perspective. It's strange knowing now who it was this whole time, but I still remember what she thinks. And now we see Mike focused, absolutely focused on Will. He's barely blinking; he presses his lips together sadly, remembering the past and how he thinks [Music] ever, not until he's taken everything and everyone. We have to kill him.
Let's talk a little bit about the lighting in the scene. We begin the scene beautifully lit; so much symmetry, and there's literally birds chirping. And as Will begins to speak about his connection with Vecna, we see that light drain from the room. Here you can clearly see there's sunlight coming from the window, but those sunbeams that we were seeing earlier vanished. And kind of see a sunbeam here on Will, but it's still so dark, as if it's reflecting the conversation that they're having, setting this mood as a very, very ominous right now. Real sunlight doesn't work like this; this is only done in films and TV, and it's to signify mood changes, symbolism, etc. It's so important that this lighting is still on Will, despite the fact he's literally talking about being connected with this hive mind and killing Vecna, two very dark subjects, but he's still in light, although dimmed, but still light. This is signifying his type of character; he's not the type that's going to turn into a villain. And Will is the opposite of Vecna. We'll go into that in a later video. Back to the beginning of the scene where we see Elle literally walking out of the sun rays. Notice that this room isn't as peachy and reddish, rosy color like it is when Mike and Will are initially sitting on the couch. The sunbeams aren't as intense; almost seems gloomier in a way, and that's because it's reflecting Elle's mood. Hopper's room is extremely lit up because he's still alive. Is that when these two sit down together that the room suddenly gets warmer? The sunbeams are more intense, and it's almost like there's a rose filter on here.
"Will, will you really think so?" "Yeah, yeah, I really do." "You won't? We won't let him." These two different touches in two different seasons have the same meaning of reassurance, but they're on a deeper level in the later one. The difference between these two interactions is that Mike's grasp is a lot firmer in season four than it was in season two. It's kind of loose in season two, and I think this is because Mike has already gone through this experience with Will and knows exactly how bad it can get, and it will probably get worse. It's almost like he's giving Will a death grip; he doesn't want to let go of him again. A death grip is basically just an extremely tight grip usually exerted by people who are in panic or fear of their life. In this case, this would be Mike being panicked for Will's life, and he doesn't want to let go of him. You can see him actually press his fingers further into Will's shoulder. You can tell he is extremely worried for him in this moment. We don't get much physical touch in this season, and this is so important here because Mike closed himself off to Will, and now he's the one reaching his hand out towards him again. And now back to the couch. This couch is upside down, and it's upside down on purpose. They could have easily lifted it up and put that blanket on properly, but no, they put the blanket on it and moved it while it was still upside down, which means the set designers did this on purpose. Plus, this exact blanket that I'm referring to is green, and if you've seen my Byler color cutting videos, the mix of blue and yellow, AKA Mike and Will, makes green; it's their unity color, and it's right behind Mike, who reaches out to Will later on in the scene. You can interpret this in a lot of different ways, but to me, this is Mike finally reaching back out to Will after two seasons of being frankly closed off to him and you're uniting that unity that they used to have. The couch symbolizes Mike and Will in the upside down; the cushion on the right side, I think, is El. I have these interviews with The Duffer Brothers talking about original pairings of season one coming full circle, things like that. If this is foreshadowing, to me, this means Mike and Will are going to be in the upside down for a significant amount of time, and El's probably going to be the one outside this time. I find this exciting because I think Mike needs more supernatural stuff to happen, so I want to see him in the upside down. So many hints of Elle's independence this season and in season three as well. I think this is the most likely outcome, and the fact that Will is so tied to the upside down and Mike is so tied to Will, I think this is the most likely outcome of this. But what do you guys think? Let me know in the comments what you think the symbolism of this couch and stuff could mean, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye-bye. That makes sense. Yeah, vaguely.