October 27, 2017: Stranger (Things) Studying: ‘80s Nostalgia

[This Friday, season 2 of the wonderful Netflix series Stranger Things will be released. So this week I wanted to share once more this series of posts AmericanStudying 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?

October 26, 2017: Stranger (Things) Studying: Pretty (Badass) Women

[This Friday, season 2 of the wonderful Netflix series Stranger Things will be released. So this week I wanted to share once more this series of posts AmericanStudying the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]

StrangerStudying the show’s three badass female leads (with apologies to a fourth, the much-beloved and –lamented Barb).

1)      Eleven: Without question the show’s breakout character and star is Eleven, the telepathically powered runaway girl played with a perfect combination of creepy dissonance and youthful hesitancy by British actress Millie Bobby Brown. While Eleven certainly has her 80s antecedents, including Stephen King’s Firestarter and the girl from Poltergeist, I would argue that she represents, especially in her evolving relationship with the show’s young male protagonists, a unique blend of “other” and “average kid”—a combination that makes (SEMI-SPOILER ALERT) her ultimate, crucial acts of courage and heroism that much more striking and moving. Indeed, making Eleven into a protagonist and hero as much as an outsider or threat distinguishes Stranger Things from many of the boy-centered texts about which I wrote in yesterday’s post.

2)      Joyce Byers: Critical and fan opinions seem a bit more split on 80s star Winona Ryder’s comeback turn as the grieving and desperate mother to missing young Will Byers. I agree with critiques that Ryder’s performance is a bit over-the-top at times, although I imagine that virtually no reactions or behavior would be truly out-of-bounds for a parent who has not only lost her young son, but suspects that he remains somewhere close and yet frustratingly out of reach. Moreover, while Ryder’s histrionics might draw the most attention, the truth is that in many of her scenes she is not only emoting but also and most importantly taking action, and that by the season’s end she’s proven entirely right about what is happening to and with her son. Which is to say, in her crucial partnership with David Harbour’s pitch-perfect Sheriff Hopper, Joyce is truly the lead investigator.

3)      Nancy Wheeler: Both Eleven and Joyce are unique and compelling leads, but for this viewer it’s Natalia Dyer’s teenage Nancy who represents the show’s most innovative female character. On the surface, Nancy seems to be drawn very fully from John Hughes romantic comedies—the shy pretty girl who is torn between the asshole bad boy and the sweet but awkward outcast. Yet while that love triangle does persist until the season’s final moments, the truth is that Nancy also kicks as much monstrous butt as any character on the show—and significantly more than either of those love interest men. I’ll have more to say in tomorrow’s post about how Stranger Things utilizes but also revises nostalgia for 80s pop culture, but certainly the character of Nancy falls more in the latter category, and reflects a show that’s aware of the gendered limitations of many of its influences and determined to move beyond them.

Last StrangerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?

October 25, 2017: Stranger (Things) Studying: Lost Boys

[This Friday, season 2 of the wonderful Netflix series Stranger Things will be released. So this week I wanted to share once more this series of posts AmericanStudying the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgic thriller, leading up to a Guest Post from an expert on supernatural cultural texts!]

On contextualizing and challenging 80s texts that feature boys who are adrift and endangered.

Another aspect that links many of the youthful protagonists about whom I wrote in yesterday’s post is that they are the children of divorce and single parents. That detail is particularly overt when it comes to E.T.’s Elliott, both because his storyline opens with a discussion of where his absent father is and because the film’s threatening scientist character (played by Peter Coyote) is also a potential romantic interest for Elliott’s single mother (played by Dee Wallace). But I would argue that it’s even more central to the film that gives today’s post its title, The Lost Boys (1987): not only are protagonists Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) the sons of a recently single mother Lucy (Dianne Wiest) who finds herself in a relationship with a threatening new man (Edward Herrmann), but that man turns out to be the leader of the same group of vampires with which Michael and Sam find themselves entangled. This clan of vampires represent one version of the title’s “lost boys,” a misfit clan of teenage outcasts for whom Herrmann’s dangerous father figure is looking for a mother; but Michael and Sam are clearly positioned as another pair of potentially lost boys, an overt parallel to the vampire clan that inspires its youthful leader (Kiefer Sutherland) to pursue Michael as a new member of the group.

Will Byers, the character whose disappearance sets off the events of Stranger Things, is likewise the child of a divorced single mom Joyce (Winona Ryder) with a social outcast older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) who is explicitly linked to 80s counter-culture (represented in short-hand through his love for the British punk rock band The Clash). As with the 80s film characters, I think both of those social and cultural contexts offer valuable and interconnected ways to understand these character types and their meanings. That is, the more obvious and clearly salient social context would be the significant late 20^th century uptick in divorce, a trend that has been at times overstated (at least in our collective inability to recognize the longstanding presence of divorce in American culture and society) but that nonetheless both occurred historically and became and remains to this day a key part of our cultural narratives. Yet just as relevant to these lost youthful characters and their experiences and communities are the voices and lives on which Donna Gaines focuses in her vital sociological oral history Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (1991). Like Jonathan Byers, Gaines’s 1980s teenagers were social outcasts who found solace in the counter-culture community of punk rock, yet whose future remained as uncertain and threatened as those of an overtly lost boy like Will.

There’s one important difference between Gaines’s focal individuals and those in most of the cultural texts on which I’m focusing here, though: gender. That is, Gaines features both boys and girls in her sociological purview, whereas in most of the 1980s films the protagonists were overtly and importantly boys, with young women generally present only as (as in The Lost Boys) romantic interests or (as in E.T.) cute younger sisters. Stranger Things certainly does include a number of complex and interesting female characters, as I’ll analyze in tomorrow’s post; yet nonetheless, the show’s originating character remains a lost boy, one pursued by a quartet of fellow outcast boys (his older brother and his three best friends). As a result, it’d be important to link these texts to one additional cultural context: our longstanding narratives of boys and men who depart civilization, stories that lead them toward dangers (Rip’s 20-year nap, the White Whale, the violence of the river world Huck encounters) yet also allow them to escape for a time a society that is often overtly linked to mother figures (Rip’s wife, Huck’s pair of maternal influences). Recognizing that connection could help us not only contextualize but also challenge the emphasis on lost boys in these cultural texts.

Next StrangerStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other responses to the show?