While there are many notable aspects about Stranger Things’ fourth season (including, of course, that Kate Bush moment at the end of “Dear Billy”), one of the most standout is the stereotype of the 80s mean girl: Angela. Played by Elodie Grace Orkin to cunt-rag perfection, her materialization begins in episode one, “Hellfire Club,” as she judges the shit out of El (Millie Bobby Brown) for choosing her “dad” as her hero for a school presentation. One that Angela interrupts to deliberately humiliate El a.k.a. Jane by pointing out “innocently” to the teacher, “I’m just, like, confused. I thought this was a presentation about a historical hero.” El is quick to interject, “My dad was in the newspaper.” Angela bites back, “Your local paper?” laughing along with the other students at El’s conviction that her father was a “real” hero.
Like most prototypical mean girls, including Rachel McAdams’ Regina George from the movie of the same name, Angela is passive aggressive with her meanness. Worse still, she tries to mask it behind something resembling beneficence. As Regina would say things like, “Oh my god! I love your skirt” then turn to Cady (Lindsay Lohan) or some other “minion” to say, “That is the ugliest f-ing skirt I’ve ever seen,” Angela coats her own cuntery in sugary sweetness as well, remarking further to El, “I just don’t think that’s what Mrs. Gracey meant by historical. This is supposed to be about famous people.”
El continues to defend her stance on selecting Hopper (David Harbour), but the damage is done. She’s been cast in the light of a “spaz,” as it was said in the 80s. And Angela clearly gets off on her ability to fit in and fall in line where someone like El can’t—instead thinks in a non-linear, non-literal way. Angela concludes her shaming with, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Gracey. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted clarity on the rules of the assignment.” But of course she meant to interrupt. The entire purpose was to deride El. Much like her teacher in a subsequent class of the day who says, “Very disappointing” openly about her F on a test. And yes, one does wonder how it was ever okay for teachers to be so public about students’ grades in a manner that pitted them against one another or made certain students feel like shit about themselves. But that seemed to be the entire name of the game in the 80s: making people feel like shit either for what they didn’t have or how they didn’t act.
El loses on both counts, as she doesn’t dress like the yuppie California aesthetic that Angela and her bitchy brethren possess, nor does El try to put on a veneer of any kind about her personality. Indeed, it is so often the purity of other souls that cause assholes’ fangs to come out. They want that purity eradicated, to decimate any innocence left within a person since they themselves were forced to lose theirs somewhere down the line.
Perhaps that’s why Angela still isn’t sated from embarrassing El in class—she has to up the ante afterward, just when El is in the home stretch of making it to spring break without any further chagrin. Thus, she trips El, so that the diorama (“cleverly” called diarrhea by another student) she worked so hard to make is also compromised. And even if it wasn’t already, one of Angela’s lackeys makes sure to step on it “accidentally” for good measure as well. Like fellow mean girl Taylor Vaughan (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) in She’s All That when she pours a drink all over Laney (Rachael Leigh Cook), Angela knows she can get away with overtly doing something and have none of the other onlookers narc on her. Even El herself won’t out Angela to Mrs. Gracey, who enters the fray when she hears all the mocking laughter. Asking her “who did this,” El quietly replies, “I tripped. It was just an accident.”
But Mrs. Gracey is no fool, setting her sights on Angela and grabbing her by the arm (again, something a teacher could never do today) as she says, “Alright Angela, you come with me.” Angela protests, “What, why? I didn’t do anything. Tell her, Jane!” Because every mean girl banks on the fact that the “losers” they constantly bully will do anything, including lick the assholes of those who have done harm, to get the approval of the popular kids. And they’re usually not wrong. Alas, even though Jane doesn’t tell on her, Angela still holds the event against her later, in the roller rink setting provided by the second episode, “Vecna’s Curse.”
To heighten the intensity of the scenario, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) has flown in from Hawkins for the spring break to spend it with El, who clearly has grand ideas about convincing her boyfriend that everything she’s written in her letters about loving Lenora Hills is true. Which is why she takes him straight to the Rink-o-Mania. Acting as though she goes there all the time with her friends, Will (Noah Schnapp) is the first to call out El for lying to Mike when he gives them a moment alone by going to buy socks that he can wear with his rented skates. Suddenly feeling like a fool for trying to pull the wool over Mike’s eyes about her status as a social pariah, the coup de grâce is about to be delivered unbeknownst to her. For it’s to the tune of Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” that Angela slinks in with her cabal of cunts, spotting El right away with Mike and relishing the opportunity of how much sweeter humiliating her will be in front of her boyfriend. In other words, “Some Guys Have All the Luck” is not a sentiment that applies here.
Going in for the kill when she sees El sitting with Mike and Will at a table, Angela foreshadows what she’s going to do with the comment, “Milkshakes! Yum!” Whisking her away to do a lap around the rink, one of Angela’s lackeys grabs El’s milkshake for “safekeeping.” Taking El to the center of the rink, she’s still perhaps naïve and innocent enough to believe that maybe Angela really does want to be friends (in that way that Violet Beauregard and Veruca Salt want to be “friends”). That notion is quickly dashed when the DJ proceeds to play The Surfaris’ “Wipeout” and the ghouls of the school circle her like vultures as they imitate her previous attempt to use her power on Angela with a bombastic arm gesture after the latter tripped her.
Trapped and terrified, El starts to look like one of the dogs in Pavlov’s experiments on learned helplessness as she cowers and covers her head with her hands, just waiting for it all to be over. Even though she must know on some level that the “big finish” is going to be even worse than what’s happening now. And it is—for that milkshake comes back to rear its chocolatey head as the same boy who was holding onto it splashes her with the entire thing like it’s the pig’s blood from Carrie. And it’s all caught on tape via the huge, cumbersome camera another person is using to film the humiliation.
Having fallen on her back after the milkshake-drenching, Angela skates up to her and, through the roars of laughter around her, asks, “Didn’t you see the sign, dummy? No food or drinks on the rink.” El is left in tears and emotional scars as she slowly picks herself up and retreats into a closet. But El is no ordinary target, and she’s not going to let Angela get away with this any longer, powers or not. So when trying to ask her nicely to apologize and tell Mike it was all a joke and that they actually are friends doesn’t work, El takes a more direct approach: bludgeoning her with a skate.
When the police question El later about whether or not her intention was to kill Angela, she replies that she doesn’t know. Because in that moment, El probably did want to kill her—Angela’s meanness begetting more meanness. So while the archetypal 80s bully—the one that baby boomers insisted helped “build character”—might have faded away, there are still plenty of other methods to go for the jugular of someone like El. In fact, there are more ways than ever thanks to the “wonders” of the internet and its ability to facilitate shame (#sextortion). And rather than a skate being used for retaliation, there’s the ol’ school shooting tactic now, which didn’t come to prominence until after El and Angela’s time (though the 80s did have a very memorable incident involving a knife between one mean girl and the person she tormented). Which is perhaps lucky for the other Angelas of that decade.
