[Like most of my
fellow humans, I spent a good bit of the late summer obsessed with Netflix’s Stranger Things. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of topics linked to the
Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an
expert on supernatural cultural texts!]
On three layers
to the show’s nostalgic embrace
of all things 1980s.
First things first: I don’t think
there’s any way to explain
the runaway popularity of Stranger
Things that doesn’t start with
80s nostalgia. I’m not suggesting that the show is only or even centrally a
nostalgia-fest; I hope that my posts all week have made clear the layers of
compelling characters and complex themes that have kept me interested and
engaged throughout eight episodes and a week of blogging alike. But as any David
Simon fan knows, great television doesn’t necessarily mean popular
television, and I would argue that our collective love for all things 80s went
a long way toward leading so many Netflix viewers to stream Stranger Things. Much has been made of
the prominent
role of nostalgia in producing so many remakes and reboots, including of
one TV show (The X-Files) that has a
lot in common with Stranger Things.
But Stranger Things offered a unique
and perhaps even more potent form of nostalgic art—an entirely original story
that nonetheless echoed a prior decade’s popular culture on numerous satisfying
levels.
I’ve written about nostalgia
in this space before, and made the case that it can be a limiting and too often an exclusionary perspective. It’d be difficult not to the say the same
thing about the 80s world nostalgically conjured up by Stranger Things—while one of the show’s three youthful protagonists
is African American (played by the wonderful Caleb McLaughlin),
he and an African American police officer seem to be the only two people of color
in an otherwise very white Indiana town. There’s no necessary reason why every
show has to feature a diverse cast, of course—but at the very least any show
produced in 2016 has to engage with those questions, as another great Netflix
original show (Aziz
Ansari’s Master of None) deals
with at length through its focus on an Indian American actor struggling to
break into the business. That is, Stranger
Things isn’t defined by the whiteness of its 80s world, but we can’t ignore
that element either.
Yet if the show is in many ways frustratingly
bland on that cultural level, it does offer—as I’ve argued in other posts this
week—interesting and often revisionary examinations of gender, social roles and
identities, and the possibilities of science, among other themes. And while
there would be many different ways a 2016 cultural text could bring audiences
into such re-examinations, I think Stranger
Things’ use of nostalgia to do so is particularly compelling: partly
because it taps into such a potent shared emotion to interest and draw in
viewers; and especially because it then offers characters and themes that
challenge just as much as they comfort those viewers. At best, perhaps such a
sneakily revisionist nostalgia could allow viewers to reexamine both their
memories of the 80s and their sense of its popular culture, all while still
allowing for enjoyment of some of that popular culture’s most prominent tropes
and trends. If that seems like a lot for one 8-episode supernatural thriller to
accomplish—well, I’ve seen stranger things in American culture.
Guest Post this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other responses to the show?
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