Hollywood Has No Idea What Bullying Actually Looks Like

The final season of Stranger Things is currently airing on Netflix. Though I’ve never been a devoted viewer of the show, I have gotten a glimpse into the evolution of the show through fans who live-tweet about it on X. As they watch the show wrap up its threads and react to them in real-time, I get a glimpse into the perception and tropes the show resorts to.

One X user tweeted a clip from the show depicting a bully picking on Dustin Henderson, for which I, admittedly, have minimal in-universe context. The clip and the near-unanimous reaction to it, however, speak for themselves.

The clip portrays a scene where Dustin is being accosted by a high school bully, typical of 1980s tough guy tropes. Indeed, the show does take place in the 1980s, but the goofy dialogue, inexplicable physical scuffles, simplistic depictions of power dynamics, and cartoonish intimidation feel like a far cry from a relatable high school experience.

The original poster captioned the clip with, “s5 of Stranger Things is already off to a hard-to-watch start. The Lucas aura farm killed me,” and another viewer said the scene almost made them turn it off. With tens of thousands of likes, millions of views, and hundreds of responses vocalizing similar bully trope fatigue, it’s safe to say most people are in agreement that there’s something lacking about these depictions.

The Bully Trope

In storytelling, a trope is a narrative convention that acts as a shorthand for a concept the audience will easily recognize and understand. It can be a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character type, or a linguistic idiom. The bully trope is ubiquitous because it's a useful way to convey power dynamics through instantly legible and broadly relatable experiences (most of us have been bullied or victimized by someone at some point.) The ubiquitousness of a narrative device isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most stories, more or less, follow the same general format and rely on a handful of archetypes. 

However, tropes risk becoming clichés when they become intrusive, distracting, or unbelievable. The predictability of a done-to-death trope conveyed in such a narrow, uncreative way can take you out of a story and interfere with the suspension of disbelief. In that case, it's just bad writing. And that's what I take issue with when it comes to the high school bully trope. Nine times out of ten, they’re written so terribly, so on-the-nose, that you can't help but be confronted with the fact you're watching a fictional story depicting the same old tired formula. I’ve talked at length about my disdain for what they’ve done with the “strong female lead,” and the bully trope is in the same vein.

If I can predict, line by line, exactly what your bully is going to say, that's bad writing. It's bad storytelling. Your bully is a hollow, one-dimensional non-entity merely fulfilling a plot device. They lack any actual humanity, complexity, or richness. I don't care what happens to them; I'm not interested in their backstory. I don't even find them threatening because I can't relate to the incredibly out-of-touch depictions of the bully that are so obviously out of date.

Seriously, keep these old heads out of the writer's room in modern projects. I know it's crazy, but harassment tactics and social hierarchies have evolved since you went to school over forty years ago. The top comment compared the heavy-handed writing to those TikTok parodies of one-note American movie bullies who speak like Non Player Characters in video games (NPCs). Dialogue like "watch it, dork," "I smell nerds," and the obligatory threat of the knuckle sandwich are goofy staples of the genre.

That’s the sort of cliché I’m talking about. It’s exaggerated for laughs, but honestly, it’s not that far off from the so-called “serious” bully depictions we keep getting. The one-note insults, the goons functioning as the bully’s hive-mind, the cringe dialogue that would make any real person burst out laughing, and that bizarrely sociopathic impulse toward random, unprovoked violence are all played straight as if it’s in touch with modern society or was ever an accurate characterization to begin with. People intuitively recognize how cartoonish these depictions are, as evidenced by the ever-expanding genre of spoofs that exist online, as well as dumbfounded analyses of common bullying tropes in media that don’t resonate at all. 

The bullies are always trying to kill or maim their targets, way past anything that would ever count as contextually appropriate “school bully” behavior. The victim is inevitably a hopelessly passive doormat, and the savior always materializes at the ninth hour to drop some cringe Marvel-tier one-liner designed to make the audience soyface. “You remember that time my sister kicked your balls so hard you limped for a week? If you touch Dustin again, I’ll kick them so hard they’ll pop like water balloons.” Ohhh wow, a real tough guy over here!

I get that not everyone likes naturalistic dialogue. Film and TV stylize speech for a reason, namely because the way people actually speak is chaotic and unpredictable, and it would be too complicated and take too long when stylized dialogue works to serve the story just fine. Some people intentionally employ naturalistic dialogue as their signature, but generally speaking, character-speak, much like film logic, is all part of the suspension of disbelief. There’s a difference between the inherently stylized dialogue in TV and film (no one talks like an Aaron Sorkin character or they’d get punched in the face) and cartoonish dialogue that’s so absurd I’m crying with laughter instead of on the edge of my seat. The scene is supposed to create tension, not be unintentionally funny. 

The scene is supposed to create tension, not be unintentionally funny. 

Then you’ve got the obligatory “edgy nerd” archetype chiming in: “I say kick away. Stop this meathead from reproducing and further infecting the world with his unique brand of idiocy.” We literally just established this guy has anger issues and is violent, but somehow a skinny nerd going, “Hey meathead, you’re, like… dumb!” is enough to make him and his goons back off. Okay. As the kids say, “Looney Toons-ahh logic.” 

That was what I was getting at with my critique of this scene. The gist of my tweet was that high school bully scenes are almost always out of touch and incredibly off-putting. I credited Tina Fey with updating the bully archetype for the 21st century in Mean Girls, reflecting how bullies can often be calculating, cunning, backhanded, and hide behind a facade of niceties rather than the overt and crude "knuckle sandwich." It was a trailblazer for adolescent coming-of-age stories taking place in high school that felt really grounded and lived-in. The writing was excellent, the characters were fleshed out, and it reflected the evolving hierarchies of the early 2000s.

Though it went viral with pretty strong agreement, there were a few common criticisms I saw in response. That’s partly my fault for springboarding off random examples to make a point about broader media trends in pop culture without using extensive qualifiers. Nonetheless, I will address them.

Was the Clichéd Bully Ever Real?

The main criticism I received was that Stranger Things takes place in the ‘80s, so it doesn’t make sense to complain about it being unrealistic for a modern high school context. The tweet was really a comment on the trope in general, and I did caveat that it might resonate with the ‘80s high school experience, but made the point that these “old heads” need to stay out of writers’ rooms on modern projects because too often I see the same exact dynamics slapped onto shows set in the current year. 

But let’s address the claim that 80s bullying tropes were ever accurate characterizations. Even in their heyday, it is canonically understood that the 80s movie bully is a hyperbolic archetype, intentionally exaggerated to communicate mythic rather than realistic characterization. It was a useful plot device that communicated clear moral binaries between good and evil or between heroes and villains, and compressed emotional storytelling. They efficiently communicated stakes, morality, and status, without needing to spend a lot of time fully fleshing out social dynamics or committing to nuanced portrayals. 

The ‘80s were the first time that stories about kids were front and center, and at the time, the style was high-stakes campy portrayal, not gritty realism (because they were made for, starring, and about kids). The fact that critics and retrospectives now openly describe the ’80s bully as one of the decade’s most iconic stock characters should tell you everything about how stylized the archetype was. Articles from film aficionados affirm movies from the 1980s "follow a predictable formula" and "one of the most distinctive hallmarks of '80s comedies is the bully trope." Compilations celebrating just how indulgently menacing and cartoonish they were are abundant.

Screen Rant describes the bullies of the '80s as characters who constantly threaten and harm the protagonists and typically have pretty terrible morals (and it helps if he's wearing a letter jacket). In a roundup of the 10 Classic 1980s Movie Tropes Stranger Things Has Copied, they go through all the tropes Stranger Things intentionally riffs off of as a love letter to the ‘80s and affirm the Duffer Brothers 'use of familiar tropes to further emphasize the '80s influence.” 

In an interview for The Guardian, showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer describe the inspiration for Stranger Things as an idea born from a desire to take what Spielberg did in the 80s, “he took these kind of B-movie ideas, like flying saucers or killer sharks, and he elevated it.” That made them wonder, “In this new medium, can we go back and try and do a little of what he did, take something that’s been relegated to being cheesy, and can you do an elevated version of that?” 

In a 2016 review, then Vox senior correspondent Emily St. James described the show as an "elaborate collection of homages and references to '80s movies," which is a gimmick that usually didn’t work for her. She pondered why it works so well in Stranger Things and realized it doesn't really even try to subvert the tropes it employs. It deepens and expands them, but also largely adheres to them. So why does it work? "Because it captures the feeling of watching all the '80s movies it pays tribute to, for the very first time.” 

This provides context for why one of the responses on my post was, “the whole point of the show being nostalgia bait is that they lean into and subvert the tropes of the 80s. In this specific case, instead of the threat of violence being empty, he really does get his shit wrecked.” That’s fair enough, though I’m not sure this gimmick will ever work for me, seeing as I have no affinity for ‘80s cheeseball corny dialogue or cliches, but to each their own. 

However, it does contradict the responses claiming my criticism was invalid because the show takes place in the ‘80s and therefore wasn’t out of touch with the modern zeitgeist. Either the ’80s bully was always a fabricated, camped-up caricature designed for heroic catharsis and clean good-vs-evil binaries, and Stranger Things is playing with that knowingly (depicting not real ‘80s high school, but the iconic John Hughes version preserved in film history), or the trope was totally realistic. It can’t be both. My argument is that it’s always bad, no matter how knowingly the filmmakers are winking and nudging the viewers.

Wedgies or Subtle Social Warfare? 

The second criticism was that I was conflating the female social experience with the male social experience. More specifically, that I mistakenly believe that bullying that’s more passive aggressive and nonviolent is more common than is portrayed in the media because I’m a woman and women display social aggression in distinctly different, gender essentialist ways. Of course, female bullying is always going to skew more feminized (passive-aggressive, reputation destruction, backbiting, etc.) over physical violence and intimidation, compared to men. 

However, that doesn’t mean that bullying in the social media age isn’t inherently more underhanded than is depicted in entertainment due to the legacy of more brutish displays of dominance. A quick content search brought up a video from Gen Z YouTuber RAODY, who graduated in 2023. He cited several overused bullying tropes that he describes as out of touch with reality.

Those included bullying kids for wearing glasses or braces or for doing well in school, and bullies tormenting their victims with what he cheekily refers to as soft war crimes—wedgies, stuffing kids in lockers, and swirlies (sticking a kid's head in a toilet), especially when the victims don’t fight back. One stereotype he vouches for being rooted in reality but recently becoming undone by nerd culture going mainstream (something the Duffer Brothers agree with) is kids being bullied for having stereotypically “nerdy” interests like Star Wars or anime.

The real gem, though, is his anecdote about what modern adolescent cruelty looks like. “No one gets bullied harder in school than the teachers,” he claims. “Some kids would say the most vile stuff about teachers because they got a bad grade or got assigned some extra homework.” This would reportedly lead to students making up extreme rumors about their teachers, but God help you if they got their hands on your real dirt (and trust me, they’re doing civilian background checks on you in their spare time).

A third of students are involved in aggressive behavior, but it's mostly directed at social rivals... rather than letter jacketed jocks tormenting the kid with no friends.

He recalls the time kids found out their eighth-grade basketball coach got a DUI, “within hours, his mugshot was all over Snapchat; people were roasting him so hard, and the craziest part was he was completely oblivious to it. No one would speak of it to his face, so as far as he was concerned, no one knew about it.” What makes it particularly scary to be a teacher in the modern age is that a traceable digital footprint and savvy adolescents who fancy themselves internet sleuths with zero boundaries make for one potent, toxic cocktail. And these aren’t even kids’ immediate social rivals; it’s just chaotic cruelty emboldened by new technology.

The New York Times covered a few studies a number of years ago that contradicted the common sentiment that school bullies are maladjusted or aggressive by nature. Instead, they found that individual traits were overstated, and what was more important were the individuals' concern about status, especially in the middle to upper ranges. Rather than socially isolated kids being targeted by the most popular kids, the top 2% of kids were less likely to be aggressive, seemingly because they had no more social climbing to do. 

They also found that a third of students are involved in aggressive behavior, but it's mostly directed at social rivals, "maybe one rung ahead of you or right beneath you," rather than "the kid who is completely unprotected and isolated." Counterproductively, the overall rate of aggression "seems to increase as status goes up," suggesting that students think they benefit more from going after social rivals rather than letter jacketed jocks tormenting the kid with no friends.

More Compelling Than the Bully: Baked-In Cruelty From Every Angle 

The cafeteria scene in Mean Girls, where Janis and Damien map out the social ecosystem, introduced a fresh and more granular understanding of the social pecking order. Beyond the old “preps vs. jocks” binary, you get distinctions like “asian nerds” vs. “cool asians,” the “unfriendly black hotties,” "desperate wannabes," "sexually active band geeks," all of which were unconventional subversions of the stricter strata that dominated earlier teen media. It also dared to show how unpopular people can be “mean girls,” too.

Even Mean Girls, released over twenty years ago now, isn’t necessarily reflective of the modern zeitgeist, though it still holds up. The experience of modern adolescence, particularly what it’s like to grow up post-social media, where virtually every teenager is chronically online, has never been so aptly captured as in Euphoria.

It’s notable that Euphoria doesn’t actually depict any bullies in the traditional sense, unless you count some flashbacks in Maddie’s backstory that show her beating people up who gave her a problem, but it’s implied they messed with her first. The archetypal popular people all subvert the canonical tropes in significant ways.

Missy Will Explain analyzes Euphoria's reinvention of the mean girl trope through the character of Maddy Perez. “When you first meet Maddy Perez, you think you know her. You've seen her a hundred times before. She's the girl with the perfect boyfriend, the perfect outfits, and the perfectly intimidating stare. She is, for all intents and purposes, the final boss of high school—the mean girl.” But while we're conditioned to wait for her downfall, “Euphoria doesn't give us that satisfaction. Instead, it slowly, meticulously, unravels everything we think we know about her.” 

Rather than her power being rooted in a stable social hierarchy like wealth or privilege, her power is performance: a carefully curated aesthetic that conveys confidence and control but is also worn as self-protection. She's not arbitrarily mean or vindictive like Regina George. She retaliates after real injustice—being betrayed by the love of her life and her best friend. 

She’s not a true mean girl, "she’s a survivor playing the part of one because it’s the only role that offers her power in a world that’s constantly trying to take it away from her.” Her meticulous attention to her appearance is a way of exerting control when she feels powerless. She has real, genuine relationships and is a good friend, and her beauty and sexuality don’t protect her from male violence. In the end, she’s able to break the cycle and internalize real confidence and self-worth with the guidance of a wise older woman. 

Nate is a somewhat conventional bully depicted through unconventional means. His pathology isn’t about performative dominance for its own sake, but serious psychosexual damage through early exposure to his father’s self-taped illicit pornography with minors, repressed desire, and a lifelong resentment of his father’s predation and keeping his secrets. These shadows have burdened him for most of his life. As Rue puts it, "after an 18-year dick swinging contest, Nate had finally won.” 

I mentioned in my thread that I was struck by how the show captured an anomaly of modern culture that had not previously been represented in media. That anomaly is the erosion of benevolent sexism acting as a buffer or a social lubricant of amicability between the sexes. Benevolent sexism is characterized by prosocial attitudes towards and valuing of feminine-stereotyped attributes in women.  

These attitudes are paternalistic and chivalrous, and implicit in their belief that women ought to be protected, cherished, and treated with respectful deference is the belief that traditional gender roles are necessary to complement one another. Though it is considered a form of “sexism” that can be interpreted as patronizing, even feminists report finding benevolently sexist traits in men attractive. 

In the old days, you mostly saw male-on-male or female-on-female bullying. You might see male characters acting smitten with women or writing them off as losers to be ignored. Sometimes, this involved a plotline in which the woman transformed from an ugly loser into a newly discovered hottie with a body, all because she took off her glasses and let her hair down (another character cliché). However, you almost never saw the kind of sadistic, gendered hostility that exists so commonly in modern adolescence between young men and women.

The bully trope feels dead because the world that created it is dead, and most Hollywood writers haven't noticed.

I attribute this shift to evolving gender norms. Particularly, the erosion of benevolent sexism that shaped male-female dynamics preceding the 2000s. Back in the ‘80s, there were still baked-in expectations of chivalry and a generally amicable relationship between the sexes. It would be considered incredibly crass to show the same aggression and hostility you’d show another man to a woman. But today, boys and girls are far more resentful of each other and lack boundaries. Our very conceptions of masculinity and femininity have evolved, as have gender roles and gender relations. Without those old norms functioning as a buffer, young male-female dynamics can become a lot more vicious.

Ethan jokes to Kat that his Reddit username is IncelUprising, Kat, Cassie, and Jules are all victims of revenge porn, Nate (the archetypal popular jock) has a lot of problems—he’s a domestic abuser, a manipulator with dark tendencies, someone who puts paranoia into McKay’s head by slut shaming his girlfriend only to ultimately move in on her. 

Intersexual conflict doesn’t mean boys are beating girls up, but even teasing used to have the subtext of “he likes you.” Now, it can actually be totally divorced from a grade school crush and just be genuine sadism, and it can go in both directions. Women can harass young boys for being “incels,” while young boys can harass women for being “whores.” There are a few reasons for this, all of which are ever-present social forces in the backdrop of the characters’ lives: unfettered access to pornography from a young age, hookup culture, online humiliation rituals, social media discourse, and antagonistic gender relations.

Modern adolescence is chaotic and unmoored from the traditional grade school social hierarchy. That’s because, thanks to the internet, the modern social world isn’t conventionally hierarchical; it’s chaotic; it’s omnipresent. The cruelty comes from all angles and all directions. The bully trope feels dead because the world that created it is dead, and most Hollywood writers haven't noticed. The modern zeitgeist of adolescent cruelty is much more complex, insidious, and random. Rather than contending with that reality, Hollywood keeps recycling a hollow villain no teenager actually recognizes.