I'm late to the party, of course.
I honestly don't know why I didn't jump to watch the new season, the final season, of Stranger Things, immediately when it was put up on Netflix. I've been a fan of the show, as have many. But it's a very weird thing:
The show was created by the Duffer Brothers, who themselves were born in 1984, the year after the show begins. I'm two years younger, and while at this point in my life, a two year difference is pretty small, the amount of the 1980s that I actually remember must be significantly less than it is for them, or for my sister, who was also born in '84.
The show's young stars were a pretty impressive coup of child talent, but in the nine years since the show premiered, they're not actually children anymore. There's a weird, uncanniness about the fact that actors in their early or mid 20s are playing characters who are meant to be teenagers.
But the show seems aware of this:
I'd argue that the first season of the show actually treats Mike Wheeler as its main character - while Eleven is the superheroic figure who is actually powerful enough to fight the monsters, the show takes Mike's perspective more than any other character's, though even then it was largely an ensemble. Mike and his older sister Nancy both got a lot of focus, and have remained core characters, but their younger sister, Holly, was portrayed as a baby in that first season.
Season 5 is set in 1987, and so at most Holly ought to be 5, but she's not - she seems far more mature than that. Nell Fisher, who plays her in this season, is 14 - older, in fact, than Millie Bobby Brown was when the series started, and certainly quite a bit older than her character, who appears to still be in elementary school, is meant to be.
I was kind of shocked at this, and then the show hung a lampshade on it - when the Wheelers' parents are arguing after Holly has an incident talking to an imaginary friend at school, Karen berates her husband for not even knowing how old their daughter is (later, under more dire circumstances, Karen's age is stated to be 46 while Ted is merely "late 40s," which feels like a bit of "turnabout is fair play.")
Still, there's a kind of fourth-wall breaking here that nods to the oddness of having the final season take place four years after the first but come out nine years after the first one came out in the real world.
I think it could have worked out fine in they had just had things keep up with the actual march of time. Set this season in 1992 instead. Why not?
I have a confession:
I resent 80s nostalgia.
Nostalgia for decades past was a thing before I was born. Happy Days, a 1970s television show, was looking back on an idyllic 1950s, and that 50s nostalgia was a big part of the Reagan era. In the 1990s, we got a bit of a 60s nostalgia period, like with Austin Powers, and then, as I recall, something of a 70s nostalgia movement.
Before we even hit the 80s nostalgia trend, I didn't like the decade. It was mostly about music - I hated the heavy synths, the droning vocals. Compared with the alternative rock music that I discovered as an 11-year-old thanks to KOME in Northern California, all that 80s stuff, I just found it depressing and gross.
Over time, I've developed more nuanced tastes, of course. I can recognize that Kate Bush's Runnin' Up That Hill, which features prominently in this show, is a really good song. And I can look back on my sister's beloved Cyndi Lauper Greatest Hits album from our childhood with some fondness. I've also come to recognize the forebears of my 90s alternative rock homeland with bands like Pixies, whose consecutive-year 87 and 88 albums, Surfer Rosa and Dolittle, are very much in my regular rotation. I've even found a fondness for some of the early 80s metal (which to be fair is a bit more of something carrying over from the 70s) like the cheesy but awesome Holy Diver by Dio.
But while I wasn't really happy when 80s nostalgia took hold, I was at least comforted by the notion that soon enough, people would be bringing back the flannel and baggy jeans and listening to Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Cake.
It just feels like that never really came. It's like we got trapped in the 1980s. I mean, the dominant figure in American political life right now is basically the embodiment of the cocaine-fueled "greed is good" vibes of the 1980s. And we just don't seem to be able to move on.
What is it, exactly?
Cinematically, of course, the 80s were when the blockbuster took over Hollywood. And, look, there's actually a ton in film from that decade that rightfully induces a feeling of nostalgia. Stranger Things started off with a combination of Stephen King (especially what is probably his quintessential novel, IT) and Steven Spielberg (with the "Kids on Bikes" feel of E.T.) and John Carpenter (including the synth-heavy score).
But would Stranger Things just not feel right if it weren't taking place in the 1980s?
It's funny, because I could imagine that if this show had been created by people who were the age of the kids in the story, they might feel intimately drawn to the decade (I haven't finished a post about it, but I thought maybe that was why Mike Flanagan had set his Haunting of Bly Manor in the 80s, as he would have been roughly the age of the kids in that story). But the Duffers were only 5 at the advent of the 1990s.
I guess it's just that the 80s is a weirdly mythologized decade, but I feel like I'm surrounded by madness as the person who doesn't really care for it. The fashion was ugly, the music was depressing. And while things are worse now (to a degree possibly unprecedented until you go back to, like, the Civil War) the politics were also pretty atrocious.
My own nostalgia for the 1990s does have some rose-tinted element to it. But I wonder what it is that has prevented it form getting the same nostalgic treatment that the 80s got. By many measures, the 90s were a better time here in America, with the end of the Cold War (and not yet the War on Terrorism) and a better economy. Sure, those larger things might not hit you in the nostalgia the way that more personal, more cultural experiences do.
Maybe the 90s was when culture started to split. How, of course, could something like Alternative Rock occupy the mainstream? In the 1980s, everyone loved Michael Jackson. In the 1990s, we were horrified to discover that he was allegedly a pedophile.
Honestly, that might be it: there was less of a universal experience in the 90s. Not necessarily because everyone actually experienced the 80s the same way, but the 90s was when the cultural touchstones got diversified. I mean, the internet really started to be a thing in the 90s, and while it wouldn't really reach its current form until the 2000s, with the advent of social media, the way that life was portrayed in media was not so universal.
Hawkins, Indiana, is meant to be small-town, suburban America. It didn't have to be in Indiana. It could have been in Virginia or Massachusetts or California.
The heroes of Stranger Things live in this homogenous culture in this homogenous decade (every state except my home state of Massachusetts went to Reagan in the 1984 election. Same spread as Nixon's reelection in 1972 - which is why there used to be bumper stickers that said "Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts") and in addition to the supernatural monsters to fight, they're also fighting against that monoculture.
The series villain, the late-arriving Vecna (while I think that he's a cool villain and season 4 was the best season since the first, I do seriously question whether the Duffers had really planned his involvement from the start) is cruel and destructive, as well as judgmental, killing those for the bad thoughts they have in their heads. He controls the monsters of the Upside-down as the nexus of their hive-mind. While I don't know what is yet to be revealed about him this season apart from some vague and out-of-context spoilers on my damned facebook feed or in YouTube thumbnails, I think there's space for the fight against him to, among other things, represent a fight against control, authority, and even conformity.
Perhaps the 90s would be too late - the battle, if not the war, already won.
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