The Hawkins pool in Stranger Things: the summer of 1985, Billy and the sauna

The municipal pool, the summer of 1985

The town spends the summer outside. The mall has just opened, the teenagers leave the basements for the lounge chairs, and the municipal pool becomes the most exposed set of Hawkins. People show themselves there. People work there. People tan while, elsewhere, something is already recruiting.

It is not a mythical place drawn to last five seasons. It is a summer facility, with hours, a locker room, and a team of lifeguards. The show films it in the sun, then uses it at night. The contrast is the subject: the same tile serves as a postcard and as a trap.

To place the pool among the other places of the town, the map of Hawkins puts the center, the woods, and the mall back. The pool, for its part, does not need a sign: everyone knows where one goes swimming in June.

The story does not give the name engraved on the front, nor the number of lap lanes. It gives the use. One comes because it is hot, because the summer job pays, because downtown is two steps away by bike. It is a passing place, not an address one looks for on a map.

1. June 1985 The pool opens the season

   Billy is at the water's edge, a lifeguard, and the town lives its summer in the sun.

2. June 29 The night at the steel mill

   Billy is taken. He comes back a lifeguard, but he is no longer alone in his head.

3. Late June Heather disappears from the pool

   Billy takes his coworker on June 30, then, on July 1, her parents, Tom and Janet Holloway.

4. The sauna The party heats the room

   They lock Billy in. The heat makes him suffer. The thing does not come out.

5. Early July The hosts melt

   The possessed leave their lives and join the mass that is taking shape.

6. July 4 The fair, then the mall

   The pool is no longer the stage. The night plays out elsewhere, under the signs.

Billy, lifeguard

Billy Hargrove occupies the edge of the pool the way he already occupied the hallways: chest offered, a look that chooses. The summer job suits him. He has the car, the whistle, and an audience of mothers. The show lingers on this pose because it is going to turn.

The lifeguard is the first human host of the summer. One night, at the steel mill, he is taken. The next day he takes up his post again, same tan, same smile, and he starts choosing who else must come. The recruiting happens in the sun, in front of people who think they are watching a coworkers' argument.

What the party already knows, since the previous year, is that heat hurts what possesses. So they go get Billy where he works, not at his house. The pool supplies the room, the pretext, and the witnesses.

There is also the audience. A missing lifeguard gets noticed: the children are in the water, the parents on the lounge chairs, and the post is empty. The show turns an absence in the schedule into an investigation. Before the monster, there is a hole in the team.

Heather and the staff

Heather Holloway is Billy's lifeguard coworker. She has a job, parents, a house where people have dinner. She does not belong to the middle school party. That is exactly why her disappearance weighs: possession leaves the circle of teenagers and takes an adult who had a paycheck.

Billy takes her from the pool. Then come Tom and Janet Holloway, at the family dinner. The workplace serves as the entrance toward a house. Heather's portrait, the meal, the melting: all of that is already told elsewhere. Here, the point is geographic. The pool is the place where one comes to fetch the next one.

The third episode of the season carries, in the original version, the title The Case of the Missing Lifeguard. The missing lifeguard is her. The title says the genre of the story at that moment: a summer disappearance, not yet a flesh monster.

The sauna test

The next episode is titled The Sauna Test. The party locks Billy in the pool sauna and pushes the heat. The lesson comes from the year before: what possesses fears heat. They apply the rule to an adult body, in a room meant for sweating, not for exorcising.

The test half succeeds. Billy suffers, the thing in him struggles, but it does not leave him. He nearly kills Eleven before she throws him through the wall. The pool, a postcard set an hour earlier in the season, becomes a confrontation room.

The rest of this creature, the rats, the melting, the battle, is in the article on the season 3 monster. The sauna is only the proof of it: one can hurt the host without freeing him.

The other pool: at the Harringtons'

Two years earlier, another pool had already served as a threshold. In November 1983, Nancy accepts a party at Steve Harrington's. The Weirdo on Maple Street tells the evening: Barb cuts her thumb opening a beer, refuses to swim, and stays alone at the water's edge while Nancy goes upstairs.

Sitting on the diving board, she bleeds into the water. The lights fade. Then there is nobody left. That pool is private, behind a house, not municipal. It has no lifeguard. It has a guest who did not want to be there.

Barbara Holland's portrait takes up what follows that night. Here, the comparison stops at the place. Hawkins has two pools in the story, and both swallow someone. One in November, at high schoolers'. The other in June, under a summer-job sun.

What the pool says about the season

Season 3 likes new and public places: the mall, the July 4 fair, the pool. The monster no longer waits in a wood. It recruits where the town gathers. The pool is the first of these happy places to turn, before the mall.

It also says something about Billy's body. One films him desirable, then one films him possessed in the same swim trunks. The viewer does not have time to change sets. The fall is all the sharper because the tile has not moved.

After July 4, the story leaves this pool. It does not come back to make a monument of it. It is a place of one season, and that is enough: the time of a summer job, of a coworker taken, and of a room heated too hard.

Rereading the summer from this tile changes the order of the images. One starts with the tan, one ends with a mass of flesh under a mall. Between the two, a room that is too hot has already stated the rule. The pool is not the battlefield. It is the place where the town, still in swimsuits, learns that it is already taken.

The locker room sums up the rest. Towels, a whistle, a room one can close from the outside, then nobody left to film the pool. The public summer stopped there, without a plaque and without a return.

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