Finn Wolfhard and Millie Bobby Brown come to terms with their feelings. After a year of struggling with his feelings, Finn comes to terms with them and summons enough courage to ask Millie to his prom. But Hollywood pressures, selfish agendas, and t...
Mike Wheeler ran to Eleven's side. His brow was sweating, his heart was racing, and his knees were trembling.
"Eleven!" Mike shouted. "El! Please don't go! Don't leave me alone...again...Please don't go." His voice cracked tears rolled down his face. The twigs and fallen autumn leaves crackled under Mike's steps. All else was silent. They were in the same forest in which their characters had first met in the very first episode.
Matt and Ross Duffer--the brothers who created "Stranger Things" as a nostalgic tribute to the cinema of the 1980's--told Finn Wolfhard that a montage of Mike and Eleven scenes would play onscreen as Mike raced to Eleven. Finn pictured all of them in his mind to convince himself of the emotional weight of the scene. Good actors knew how to take control of their emotions; but great actors knew how to surrender to them.
Finn internalized all of them: the fear when Mike first met Eleven, the enfatuation he felt when he told her she was pretty, the romantic attraction that gripped him when he asked her to the Snow Ball, and the terror he had felt when he saw her fade back into the Upside Down at the end of the first season.
"Mike..." El uttered with a weak smile. She was lying weakly on the ground. Mike reached her side and knelt down. "El, don't worry. I'm here. You're back. You're going to be safe again. You killed the Thesselhydra and saved the entire town again. Don't you get it? We'll finally be free to live a normal life." Mike was out of breath, and his heart was still racing.
"You...promised," El replied. "Snow Ball?" Her eyes gazed into his with a longing that was born of a painful goodbye that was not certain of when hello would come again. When she last saw him in his school in Hawkins, Indiana, she genuinely believed that she was sacrificing her life to save her friends from the Demagorgon. She had lost consciousness and woken up months later in the Upside Down. She had been trapped in an unconscious, catatonic state within for an entire year before further scientific experiments in the Hawkins Laboratory altered the structure of the Upside Down's reality.
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"Yeah! Of course! I didn't go to my Snow Ball last year, El! I made myself a promise that I wouldn't have my first dance with any girl who wasn't you." Mike told her. He knelt behind her and helped her stand up. When the strength of her legs failed, her knees buckled, and she collapsed on him once more. "You're gonna be okay, El," Mike whispered into her ear. "We're going to go to the Snow Ball together this time." The camera captured a flood of emotions overcoming both Mike and Eleven at that very moment. Eleven was too weak to stand on her own. She could only bury her face on Mike's shoulder and place her full trust in his care one more time. The scene was filled with meaningful silence. And yet, their smiles said far more than words ever could.
Eleven had finally come home.
"CUT!" the director, Shawn Levy, yelled.
The word "Cut" is truly powerful on a movie set. It essentially serves as a switch that turns many cinematic elements off. High-powered lights behind the camera, microphones hanging over the actors, and the cameras themselves are turned off by the crew in a second. Most importantly, the artistic switch that powers the dialogue and emotions of actors during filming also turns off when the word "Cut" is yelled. Actors normally break character and smile or even laugh with their fellow actors onscreen. Sometimes, they go off-script and blurt out something like "Wow, that was awesome" even after a tragic scene is filmed. Their characters cease to exist and the actor snaps back to the set once more. This is the reason why the director is said to be the most powerful figure in a movie or television production--he literally has the power to cut off everything that goes on when he wants to.
