Why Are We Haunted by the 1980s?: Stranger Things and the Notalgia Trap

This piece will contain spoilers. If you cannot enjoy something without surprise, come back after you've experienced it.

(Also, please note: all images of the series are taken from the Stranger Things Wiki.)

The alternate poster for season 1 (Netflix).

We talk about nostalgia a lot, so it's inevitable that we have to talk about Stranger Things. Full disclosure, Edgar and I enjoyed the first few seasons, and despite reservations we are also enjoying the third one. Those reservations are fairly strong, though. Some people have said that this is the best season yet. We politely but firmly disagree.

In preparation for writing this piece, I read a few essays from thinkers I enjoy the work of, to try to contextualize my own thoughts in a conversation that already exists. Grafton Tanner, the author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, wrote a fairly scathing essay entitled “Stranger Things and the Nostalgia Industry” that makes the assertion that season one of Stranger Things is the moment that 80s nostalgia jumped the shark – he describes the lovingly recreated environments, populated by analog technology and the kitschy accoutrement of the late cold war. He also points out that there's no sign that our current nostalgia boom is going to end anytime soon – and the exploding popularity of Stranger Things shows no signs of ending.

J.F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice (click through for links.)

On the other hand, J.F. Martel, one half of the Weird Studies podcast and the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, wrote a much more positive article – possibly due to his less explicitly political project in criticism – entitled “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”. It's a beast of an essay, clocking it at (I believe?) around ten thousand words, but is quite readable. In typical J.F. Martel fashion, it tends to range quite broadly, though it's less a ramble and more an exploration. In this, he argues that part of why Stranger Things resonates is due to the complete absence of digital technology early on, which he connects to the watershed moment of the 1984 Apple Computers ad (the Duffer Brothers, for their part, pointed instead to the release of Red Dawn in 1984 as the moment they wished to precede.) The basic premise seems to be that the show (season one at least) is intended as a sort of chance to resubmerge in a lived experience now lost– the analog world of flows of energy and information as opposed to the digital world of discrete units.

And, of course, I spoke to Edgar, one of the thinkers whom I respect the most, and they made the argument that the disconnection between seasons one and two and season three is quite simple: the first two seasons are an idyll of the 1980s. During that period, small town life was already in decline, and while there were certainly such phenomena as latchkey kids, suspicion of the federal government, and HAM radios in the 1980s, that world was fading away, being replaced by another one. In contrast, this new season is an idyll for the 1980s: it glamorizes the mall (utterly dropping the early plot line of the dying main street,) it embraces the Reganite paroxysm of anti-Soviet paranoia, and even puts a brief monologue glamorizing capitalism in the mouth of a little girl.

So while the first two seasons can function as a meditation on a lost way of life and experiencing the world, the newest season has reversed course and embraced the excesses of the period that it depicts. One of my principle gripes here is that it has added this in while jettisoning the mysteries that made the earlier seasons more compelling.

For example, one of the more interesting points that Martel brings up in his piece is the behavior and symbolism around the Demogorgon, the Heavy of the first season. Specifically the fact that it is attracted to blood, but is never attracted to the nosebleeds of the child psychic Eleven. Moreover, Martel interprets Eleven's escape and the Demogorgon's appearance as being interrelated: in short, to use his word, there is a complicity between the child and the monster. This mystery, the uncertain superposition of the relationship between the two – are they opposed? Are they related? Are they synonymous? – is best symbolized by the fact that (once again, as Martel points out) the Demogorgon, in the Dungeons and Dragons game that forms the bedrock of the series, has two heads.

The series bible for the unproduced Montauk miniseries.

This plot line is dropped in subsequent seasons. While I don't want to fall victim to the “they changed it and now it sucks” problem we have commented upon in the past, I will note that the description of early versions of the show suggest it may have begun with a more interesting premise. Early versions of both the series bible and the pilot script for the show – originally entitled Montauk and referring to the Montauk monster conspiracy theory (not the raccoon carcass that washed up and was called the Montauk monster several years ago; the pre-existing conspiracy theory involving psychic children and a dangerous otherworldly monster that one of them accidentally summoned.)

While the Duffer Brothers stuck to their guns on several key points – networks they pitched the series to wanted Hopper to be the central focus, and to drop the children entirely, for example – it seems to me that they had this very weird original idea, a dramatization of a wild conspiracy theory, playing everything that they could absolutely straight, and they have been stepping back from that over and over again as the series progresses, until we reach the red-baiting low of season 3.

Another idea that they considered and dropped was to do it as something like an anthology series, setting each season a decade apart: going from the 1980s in the first season to the 1990s in the second. If they had, by this point we would have reached the early aughts, following these characters into our present day. If they had, then the accusations of nostalgia would have been meaningless, because the nostalgia would have vanished eventually. They didn't do this one because they liked their cast, though I suspect there was another issue: can you imagine having to try to manufacture nostalgia for the era of the Bush Presidency? Still, it seems to me that the loss of this expansive focus limits the series, trapping it within the circle of characters they already have present.

A key scene in Season 2, featuring (L to R): Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp) and Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), and Bob Newby (Sean Astin.)

Despite the narrowed focus, there are things to suggest the second season – Bob Newby is a great character; Noah Schnapp finally got the chance to act on screen; Joe Keery managed to rescue Steve and give him relevance and pathos; and both Milly Bobby Brown and Winona Ryder continued to impress – but is was self-consciously written as the Aliens to season one's Aliens. And whatever you can say about Aliens, you cannot possible say that it is a smarter or better-written story than Alien.

The comparison stops there – season three isn't patterned on Alien 3. Season 3 draws a number of wells, pushing aside Stephen King and Steven Spielberg in favor of David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and George Romero. The Thing is a fairly obvious influence, given the villain and the prevalence of body horror, but the influence of filmic and televisual horror, as opposed to more character-driven prose horror is definitely present (some Stephen King remained, though: the human antagonist, Billy Hargrove, was patterned by Dacre Montgomery and the Duffer Brothers on Jack Torrance from The Shining – but, again, this is filtered through the film version by Stanley Kubrick.)

The iconic image from the end of The Shining, the totemic image of Hauntology.

So, once more, there is a tainted component, an ingredient that had gone off before its inclusion: the Russian base, somehow located underneath the new mall (thus placing the earlier-mentioned destruction of small town American business on the Soviets.) I may have been falling asleep when they went over it, but there is no explanation for how the Russians managed to bring everything in for their secret base, or how they knew about the events of prior seasons. In prior seasons, the conspiracy element was provided by the US government and had a hauntological angle (in the sense Derrida coined the term,) as reckoning with misdeeds and picking through wreckage of the past. There are two things that exemplify this: first by the adolescent plot line in season 2, centered around getting justice for Barb, and secon by Dr. Owens, played by Paul Reiser as the good mirror of his character in Aliens, Burke (an aside: say what you will for Aliens, at least they cast a corporation as the villain.)

They added facial hair and got rid of all the character development.

The use of Russians adds an unneeded element of camp to the whole proceeding. While camp was certainly present from the very beginning, as it is in all nostalgic projects, there is a certain balancing that needs to be done, and the inclusion of a Red Dawn plot line just soured the season for me, almost as much as David Harbour's Jim Hopper transforming from a “Kidz Bop” version of True Detective's Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) into a Magnum, P.I. clone. It's part of a broader attempt at creating a triumphant memory of a period when we had certainty about the world. A great outline of this idea can be found in the article “In season 3, Stranger Things’ celebration of ’80s pop culture becomes a political ideology” by Noah Berlatsky, subtitled, tellingly “We’re fighting the old wars again to see if they come out better this time” and pointing to the fact that:

From our own vantage in 2019, though, we know that the US won the Cold War. In that context, revisiting old fears is also a way to revisit old triumphs. In season 3, a Soviet scientist is seduced to the side of good, righteous Americanism by the quintessential capitalist display of a tacky Fourth of July carnival, complete with stuffed animal prizes. The Mind Flayer is defeated on the 4th in that monument to capitalism, the mall, by a bunch of kids shooting it with fireworks stored in a shopping basket. The US military (portrayed as the enemy in earlier seasons), rushes in as the cavalry to clean up at the end.

However, Berlatsky misses the point of his own essay, declaring that Stranger Things is an attempt to conjure a better future from the past, sending the audience back in time to witness the idyllic heartland's defense from weird invaders. The article ends with the statement that “Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer love the ‘80s, but they also realize that something in that idyllic past went horribly wrong and needs to be fixed. Alas, time travel doesn’t exist. If you want to kill the Mind Flayer, you need to kill it now.”

But it is this exact nostalgia that is at the root of the problem. I talked, last week, about how nostalgia (while not reactionary itself) is the keystone of reactionary thinking, and Stranger Things, as it currently stands, is nostalgic to its very core.

None of this is new thinking on the subject. What is?

Eleven makes contact with the Demogorgon — is she reaching into another world or her own subconscious?

What happens if you return to the dropped thread that I mentioned earlier, the complicity or synonymity between Eleven and the Monster of season one? As J.F. Martel mentions in his essay, there is the suggestion (borne out by season two,) that the monster is a part of a larger entity – that the show's nether realm, the Upside Down is not simply another world but a singular entity, a living nightmare that is somehow entangled with, or synonymous with, Millie Bobby Brown's Eleven? This would not reduce the show to mere psychodrama, but blow the psychodrama up into something else, using the metaphoric application of genre tropes to build one person's processing of their trauma into an epic story that involves multiple descents into the underworld and explores the spiraling-out of traumatic effects, finding correspondences in the experiences of others (Will's troubled home life and absent father; Hopper's lost daughter; Steve's entrapment within a toxic-masculine framework) and makes it a metonymy for all of the trauma processed.

And what would it mean for this trauma to be a tool, a weapon, a resource in geopolitical conflict? What does it mean for the powers that be to strip mine the dreams of a child? The show utterly refused (early on, at least) to give a straight answer as to why anything is happening – the only character that could have explained it, Doctor Brenner, has only a handful of lines in the whole season, and none of them are dedicated to clearing things up, encouraging a metaphorical read of the events, due to the fact that a causal read is so difficult.

I feel that this is where the show was going in season one. There are still some shades of it in season two, but it is absent in season three, where a soviet scientist is seduced by a Fourth of July carnival and the final confrontation happens in a mall (that is destroying the local economy, but somehow is also the fault of the scary Russians.) The show, which has always been nostalgic, has abandoned the conversation with its source material, and sank fully into the Nostalgia Trap.

It might yet escape. And, of course, I fully intend to watch season four when it comes out.

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