Stranger Things , Nostalgia, and Aesthetics
2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19346018.74.1.2.01
ISSN1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Media Studies and Communication
Resumoin the summer of 2019, the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–present) partnered with Eggo for a marketing campaign in the build-up to the release of its highly anticipated third season. The show, which follows a group of teens and adults in small-town 1980s Indiana as they struggle to keep at bay a succession of supernatural forces unleashed following the opening of a portal to an alternate dimension, was a surprise hit following its 2016 premiere, and it quickly became the streaming service's most recognizable original production. Eggo waffles—a favorite of Eleven, one of the show's teen protagonists—had seen a surge in sales following the show's premiere and gained iconic status within its fandom, so a partnership capitalizing on the hype represented a logical next step. The two franchises had previously collaborated on a trailer for the series’ second season, which premiered during Super Bowl LI, in which a vintage “L'eggo my Eggo” commercial was progressively interrupted and eventually overtaken by scenes from show's upcoming season. The much more elaborate 2019 campaign featured a variety of tie-ins, including an Eggo-branded Stranger Things spoiler blocker for fans’ internet browsers, recipes tied to each of the upcoming nine episodes, and instructions for making costumes using Eggo boxes. Eggo also bought billboards across the country in cities named Hawkins, the fictional town in which the series is set. These billboards featured the Eggo logo with blood dripping from the E—a nod to Eleven's frequent nosebleeds.This marketing effort culminated in two larger releases. In June, Eggo claimed to have unearthed a series of unreleased advertisements from 1985 featuring hidden teasers related to the show, which they subsequently posted across social media platforms. Following this, the company also created limited-edition boxes replicating the look of the ones they sold in the 1980s—identical save for the “Limited Edition 1985 Graphics” label at the top. These retro Eggos initially were available only online through Amazon but saw a larger release in select stores across the United States following the series’ July 4 debut.The latter two examples, the ads and the box, provide an acute illustration of the hyper-aestheticized nostalgia for which Stranger Things is the archetype. The ads, for instance, hinge on a nostalgia for consumer products and advertising that is entirely mediated and thus based on the recreation of an aesthetic object; the nostalgic allure of the ads, in other words, derives from their replication of the style of 1980s ads. Grainy visuals and tape distortions blanket one video showing a “typical” middle-class suburban breakfast table featuring milk, orange juice, and of course, Eggos before cutting to a screen that reads “One Eggo Can Change Everything.” These visual imperfections exist even though the ad was produced digitally and published exclusively online, thus bypassing the analog processes that created such imperfections in the ads being copied. The ads, in this way, are simulacra: detailed recreations of objects that never existed but are meant to appear as though they did in order to replicate the same response one would have had toward the originals, had they ever existed. The ad is, in other words, a thing that serves, at best, as a vague reminder of the thing it is parodying, and therefore the nostalgia it seeks to produce is further removed from its actual object.The boxes also emphasize aesthetics as primary content: while the packaging is retro-styled, the waffles inside—supposedly the product—remain unchanged. The only difference between the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos and regular 2019 Eggos is the package itself, and thus, in relation to the function or quality of the product, nothing substantial is different. The aesthetic, therefore, is the substance. Consumers buy Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos not for the Eggos, but for the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics. As with the ads, the sole draw of the product derives from its visual recreation of something from the past. The irony, however, is that this recreation is inherently imperfect because the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics label announces the boxes as a recreation, breaking the illusion of visual fidelity, signifying that it is, in fact, not the thing it is meant to look like. The Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos are, therefore, a reproduction whose status as reproduction is built into the item's appeal—it's not the real thing, but it sure looks like it.This is Stranger Things in a nutshell. The series’ nostalgic appeal derives from its seemingly faithful recreation and reassembly of a variety of tropes and aesthetic norms common to 1980s media, a hyper-recombinatorial approach to the past, in which the past is configured merely as a particular confluence of genres, tropes, and styles. Its nostalgia is thus primarily oriented toward cultural ephemera rather than grounded in past experiences. Though there is potential overlap between lived experience and the experiences represented in cultural ephemera for viewers of a certain age, it is significant that the lens the show provides for those viewers to reminisce about their lived experiences is explicitly tropological and mediated—it is accessed, if at all, through reference, genre, narrative structure, sound, and visual style. Like the Eggo ads, Stranger Things aims to recreate a thing that never truly existed: 1980s childhood, but only as it was depicted in films of the era and only through a kind of parodic pastiche—childhood in a hundred references. To the extent that the show depicts seemingly generalizable nostalgic experiences (e.g., children riding bikes in the suburbs), it regularly converts those realities into mediated references (E.T. [1982], The Goonies [1985]), distancing the nostalgia those moments induce from its mnemonic core, always already framed by media. Like the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos, Stranger Things is all about recreation: a copy whose entire function is to call attention to itself as a copy. Yet in doing so, it also announces itself as decidedly not the thing it is aiming to recreate. For Stranger Things, therefore, looking like the thing (sounding like it, feeling like it) is everything; as with the box, the aesthetic is the substance.In this regard, Stranger Things and the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggo boxes are the same product: hyper-aestheticized containers whose draw and value lie more in the exterior than the interior,1 whose form supersedes their substance, and whose interior qualities are artificially elevated by the nature of the exterior. In addition to the stylistic similarities, Stranger Things’ design shares an aesthetic paradigm with the Eggo boxes. Stranger Things is not simply an Eggo box; rather, it is functionally akin to a Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggo box whose contents are (for the sake of analogy) unknown: they could be plain, blueberry, chocolate chip, or perhaps some special Stranger Things tie-in flavor—or better yet, the box could be empty. An evocative exterior coupled with an indeterminant interior allows—even encourages—the consumer to project into the box whatever its graphics elicit for that individual, and the box is crucially never opened to reveal its actual contents. What one imagines inside the box is overdetermined by what one sees on the outside, and this act of imagination—or interpretation—is only partially delimited, allowing for a wide range of possibilities. Stranger Things thus produces a system of meaning-making through suggestion and accumulation; it is a pastiche whose signification allows for a seemingly endless range of interpretations.In the relatively short time since the release of its first season—despite what I have argued previously (or, as I will shortly show, because of it)—the series has become the subject of surprisingly diverse readings by fans as well as critics, both popular and academic. A gloss of the interpretive frames into which viewers have placed the show offers a glimpse into this myriad and often contradictory landscape: the series has been seen as a distinctly celebratory, nostalgic vision of the 1980s and its media (McCarthy; Genzlinger; Chaney); as a critique of the 1980s, Reaganism, and middle-class suburbia (Butler; Smith; Burges; Nussbaum); as an allegory or metaphor for the traumatic experience of coming-of-age and entering into a world of adult conformity (Khan; Butler); as a form of digital gothic or an expression of longing for the analog in a digital world (Landrum; Rust); as an exploration of queerness past and present as well as a critique of straight nostalgia (Burges and Middleton; Roach; Berns et al.; Briefel); as an example of a distinctly white nostalgia (Bering-Porter; Giovannone); and as a critique of white nostalgia (Reich).A list such as this would seem to illustrate that Stranger Things is a rich, complex, and perhaps even profound series. While there is textual evidence supporting any of the aforementioned interpretations, taken together the readings reveal that the core function of the series is to reconstruct a 1980s in which every major narrative incident or component, by replication or divergence, cites some “source.” The show's references, therefore, weave together potential meanings so vast as to embrace numerous self-contradictory interpretations, for which the show offers no path to a final judgment or method for achieving argumentative clarity. Stranger Things relies on ambiguity produced through connotation, and beyond overly familiar maxims such as “friendship is important” and “growing up is hard,” it provides no clear denotations. To the extent that we consider meaning to be a text's content, the series’ reliance on stereotype, trope, and genre provides both its form and its primary content. Put simply, it suggests a lot but says very little, and each new suggestive connotation diminishes its capacity for saying anything.The abundant critical readings, overwhelmingly devoted to elucidating the meaning encoded by the aesthetics, often mistake aesthetic posturing for thematic substance. Aviva Briefel's Post45 essay “Familiar Things: Snow Ball ’84 and Straight Nostalgia” exemplifies this mistake in its reading of season 2’s closing sequence, which takes place at a school dance. On its face, the scenes that occur at “Snow Ball ’84”—including, most notably, a dance between two of the series’ adolescent protagonists, Mike and Eleven, which signals the culmination of a heterosexual coupling the show had been building toward since early in the first season (and one of the central narrative components of season 3, which was released concurrently with Post45’s special issue and is thus not incorporated into Briefel's analysis)—depict a conventionally nostalgic vision of adolescent romance that could be found in many films produced before, during, or after the 1980s. Briefel argues, however, that the scenes pointedly “invoke the iconic and distinctly non-nostalgic prom scene from Brian De Palma's Carrie, which subtly counteracts the forced identification of Snow Ball ’84.” Carrie (1976) and Stranger Things, she argues, [b]oth show characters grooming in front of mirrors in preparation for the big event, deploy overhead establishing shots of the glittery gym and its painfully invested teenagers, and rotate the camera around the dancing couples. At the center of both sequences is a “pity” dance that serves as an initiation into heterosexual rituals: Tommy's girlfriend, Sue, forces him to ask Carrie to the prom to compensate for her own prior bullying of the outcast girl; in Stranger Things, Nancy invites Dustin to dance after he has been rejected by several girls his age. In both cases, the pitying character teaches the pitied one to dance through instructions to “just listen to the music.”Briefel seems to have fallen into Stranger Things’ referential trap. As the described evidence inadvertently indicates, there is no obvious visual link to Carrie in the scene unless one counts establishing shots and basic camera movements employed in practically every school dance scene in recent film history.2 The author's focus on Carrie, and the ignoring of more obvious links to ’80s films such as Footloose (1984) and Pretty in Pink (1986), seems to derive especially from the “pity” dance, which, although not unique to Carrie, is admittedly a more selective reference point. However, such a reading relies heavily on a flimsy correlation (that the dances are out of “pity”) that ignores key differences. In the scene, Mike's older sister Nancy—one of the show's unambiguously “good” characters—notices Dustin crying alone on the bleachers after his crush chose to couple up with his friend Lucas and after his subsequent request to dance with another girl was crudely rejected. After convincing Dustin to join her on the dance floor, Nancy offers advice: “Girls this age are dumb,” she explains as Dustin, now smiling, holds her waist. “Give them a few years, and they'll wise up. You're gonna drive them nuts.” Unlike Tommy, who as Briefel notes was “forced” to dance with Carrie, Nancy dances with Dustin out of sincere sympathy, and Dustin appears genuinely reassured. In contrast to Carrie, whose scenes of relentless bullying before the dance give audiences every reason to be skeptical, there is nothing sinister or foreboding in Nancy's encouragement, and the show itself provides no reason to doubt Dustin's newfound resolve. In fact, Dustin's trajectory over the third season unambiguously validates Nancy's mid-dance counsel and, in doing so, further distances their dance from Mike and Carrie's and thus from the critique of heteronormativity Briefel reads into it. Stranger Things 3 (2019), which takes place a year after Snow Ball ’84, concludes with the revelation that Dustin's mythical “girlfriend from camp” is, in fact, real and climaxes with the two performing a ham radio duet of the theme from The NeverEnding Story (1984). Heteronormativity may be inevitable in both texts, but in Stranger Things, its attainment is a source of triumph.Nonetheless, Briefel concludes, “With these allusions, the audience is invited to recognize the oppressiveness of dominant nostalgia narratives and turn to the cinematic memory of a horror film in which heterosexuality is an undeniable source of terror” (emphasis added). In other words, Briefel's reading requires an intertextual relationship in which the entirety of the scene's “meaning” is revealed by the reference: although the scene shows one thing, an intertextual reference proves that it is saying the opposite. Stranger Things, in other words, merely has to look like something else to borrow its message. The fact that the series elsewhere shows little to no interest in such a critique of heteronormative nostalgia (and often celebrates it) is seemingly unimportant because of its reference—or, to more precisely lower the allusive bar, because of its referential environment. Where everything is a reference, all potential meanings are subordinated to the connections.Briefel's article, therefore, typifies an apparent desire throughout Stranger Things scholarship to make the show transcend the confines of nostalgic pablum and say something, even if that means upending its nostalgic premise. The series, in this light, is functionally a husk that allows viewers to find within its panoply of ’80s cultural ephemera whatever they want to see. To be sure, Stranger Things is not unique in generating contradictory and/or mutually exclusive critical readings. What is unique, however, is that the source of this trend in Stranger Things criticism can be tied to a couple of specific factors, both of which have larger cultural and critical implications.The series converts nostalgia and the 1980s into aesthetics, participating in the same system of reference that, as Joel Burges and Jason Middleton have argued, distinguishes the 1980s as a historical period from the ’80s as a phenomenological object. Stranger Things is, in other words, not interested in investigating the 1980s as a historical moment or in reflecting the period beyond the show's invocation of cultural ephemera. In this process of aestheticization, in the move from the 1980s to the ’80s, cultural artifacts and historical realities become de- or re-contextualized markers—kids ride bikes as in E.T., and otherwise apolitical families have Reagan–Bush ’84 signs in their yards—hollowed of purpose and thus endlessly signifying. This vagueness produces a vision of the ’80s that is more indeterminant and thus more alienated from historical reality than traditional nostalgic texts.The series’ indeterminacy, however, is one of its central draws. Because its intertextual accumulation provides limitless interpretive ground, the series’ nostalgic charm and denotative vagueness facilitate prolific sites of viewer identification. Stranger Things is, in this way, a kind of choose-your-own-interpretation adventure. This is what encouraged, for instance, Burges and Middleton to dedicate over half of their introduction to the Post45 special issue to critical reflections on their own experiences as adolescents in the ’80s, framed by a passing reference in the series’ pilot to a particular issue of X-Men with which both writers were familiar; this nature is what, in the same issue, enabled Elizabeth Reich to read the Upside Down as “a metaphor for the extra-temporal, perpetually endangered, and suffocating existence of black life in the US” while at the same time allowing David Bering-Porter to identify the show's tokenizing treatment of race and its neoliberal brand of white nostalgia.While divergent readings are not unique to Stranger Things, there is something greater to reckon with here. As Amy Rust and others have noted, series creators Matt and Ross Duffer and executive producer Shawn Levy have continually emphasized their desire for total authenticity and fidelity, manifest in efforts to meticulously reproduce the ’80s through set design and props. This emphasis on authenticity seeks to obscure the brushstrokes of historical recreation in order to impart the notion that we really are seeing the ’80s and not simply an interpretation of it—recalling Neil Postman's claim that in a post-photographic world, “truth is in the seeing.” Despite Stranger Things’ investment in accuracy, however, its vision of fidelity (i.e., the location of the ’80s phenomenon that it posits) is overwhelmingly superficial, made up of sound and vision, haircuts and products. It is worth noting here that the Duffer brothers, for all their investment in ’80s nostalgia, were actually born in 1984, a full year after season 1 is set. So while Mike, Eleven, and the gang were learning about love and going on shopping trips to the Starcourt Mall in season 3’s 1985, Matt and Ross Duffer were teething. Their experiences as fifteen-year-olds in 1998 were surely quite different from those they have nostalgically created for their characters thirteen years earlier, and so their sense of the authentic ’80s is therefore drawn almost entirely from film and television rather than memory and experience. It's no surprise, then, that the series sees the ’80s as a matter of styles and things, access to which can be granted simply through reference and resemblance. The ’80s for the Duffer brothers—excepting whatever memories of kindergarten they may have retained—was never really anything other than a mediated object, pure aesthetic and affect. Stranger Things’ interest in other forms of reproduction, attempts at capturing some kind of ’80s zeitgeist or detailed historical reality, are similarly always born of and/or filtered through media and thus are attempts at recreating not a direct historical reality itself but the historical reality supposedly captured within the media of the period. The result is a series that seeks to reproduce in objective terms but does so through a necessarily subjective process. This is true not only in the creators’ act of deciding what captures the ’80s but also, as the diverse critical readings indicate, in the series’ process of making meaning through vague intertextual references that leave interpretation fully at the feet of the viewer. Though the series positions itself otherwise, Stranger Things’ recreation of the ’80s is thus a doubly subjective act.Through its focus on the ’80s as phenomenon, its emphasis on reconstruction through hypermediated reference, and its evasion of denotative clarity, the series cedes interpretive ground to its audience. By deemphasizing subjectivity in its representation and turning to media as the foundation for its reconstruction, the series implicitly configures the past as a purely subjective phenomenon. For Stranger Things, the ’80s is whatever you want it to be: Reagan, neon and synths, yuppies versus geeks, The Breakfast Club, bicycles, Duran Duran, stifling heteronormativity, triumphant heteronormativity, unparalleled freedom and/or danger, and on and on. There is no there there, just a listicle of events, traits, and tropes.Stranger Things therefore presents an interesting study in the conflict between nostalgia and history. In the twenty-first century, when the American public is constantly reminded, by film, television series, and news, of the sins of its past, conventional nostalgia poses a problem: how can viewers, especially the more socially minded millennials and zoomers who make up the plurality of Stranger Things’ audience, maintain an awareness of the AIDS and crack epidemics while simultaneously looking back longingly on the period in which they were most prominent? How can they yearn for a time of laxer parental supervision without being reminded of the horrifying reason that the practice has disappeared? The answer, the series suggests, is that they can't—at least not at the same time. The series’ aestheticization is its greatest resource for preserving its nostalgia, providing an answer to the question “how does one long for a time that is itself already fallen?”This is most acutely exemplified by one of the series’ simplest and most frequent images: kids riding bikes. Although markedly nodding to Spielbergian adventure films, even without this mediated reference, shots of the Stranger Things kids pedaling through town have broad nostalgic resonance; for many viewers, moments like these call back to specific lived experiences. At the same time, as with all nostalgic objects, these memories are haunted by the notion that they contain a now-impossible experience. Unlike arcades and acid-washed jeans, however, changes in attitudes toward childhood autonomy are not simply a matter of the passage of time, of fading styles and fads, but rather derive from the emergence of historical realities: namely, the rise in reports of child abductions and murders in the 1970s and ’80s and the intensified coverage on television news.3 There is, in this way, an additional, terrible layer to the series’ evocations. Rather than trying to ignore this unsavory resonance, Stranger Things acknowledges it. Season 1 of the series revolves around the disappearance of Will Byers, one of the show's protagonists, who goes missing in the pilot while riding his bicycle home after a night of Dungeons & Dragons at Mike's house. The show redirects the historical fact of abduction that haunts the incident to the aesthetic supernatural, with the abduction coming not at the hands of a child predator, but via a demon ripped from the pages of a D&D handbook—a revision of the substitution found in Stephen King's It (1986), but divorced from the novel's more deliberately metaphorical resonances. The series thus offers a knowing nod to one of the decade's horrors while also mapping it onto genre, and the threat of child predation to the show's nostalgia is thus removed through aesthetic displacement. Child abduction at the hands of the Demogorgon is therefore a stand-in for the real that, in the end, suppresses the real.Season 3 takes the series’ aestheticized abstraction of historical conflict to another level with its Red Dawn–esque Soviet invasion plot, which introduces the idea that the USSR is also conducting secret experiments involving the Upside Down deep beneath Hawkins. The season opens on a shadowy lab filled with workers in hazmat suits using some kind of ray gun to create one of the portals that link to the Upside Down while uniformed military officials watch over the process from a glass-enclosed control room. After the experiment goes awry, vaporizing several scientists and destroying most of the machinery, a brooding Soviet military official inspects the wall where a portal failed to open fully. “We are close,” the head scientist nervously protests. “You can see our progress. We just need more ti—” His pleas are cut off by the official's buzz cut–sporting henchman, who reaches out to choke him, lifting him off his feet as the Soviet marching song “The Red Army Is the Strongest” begins to play. “You have one year,” the general tells a second scientist as the first lifelessly falls to the floor.Stranger Things 3 is thus inaugurated with the replication of a particular kind of ’80s Cold War narrative, a cartoonish vision of unflinching Soviet bad guys determined to do evil, whatever the cost. This thread carries throughout the season but is most visible in Grigori, the aforementioned henchman who is later sent to kill Sheriff Hopper following his discovery of the Soviet operation. The ensuing action casts Grigori as one part Terminator, one part Ivan Drago, synthesizing the robotic, amoral determination of each, and the series, once again, relies on a preestablished trope for its resonance—one that is, in this case, particularly divorced from its historical context. In the series, the Cold War generally only loomed in the background through passing references until the third season—brief gestures toward verisimilitude but little more. The turn to the USSR in the third season thus represented a largely untapped well of ’80s phenomena for the series to exploit in its perpetual quest for material to revisit. Stranger Things’ expanded treatment of the hostilities is particularly interesting because, more than any of the series’ other sociohistorical inspirations, the Cold War resonated in the 1980s in a very different way than it does in the twenty-first century, and the series’ re-vision of the conflict is a product of that distance.For many Americans—and seemingly, for the show as well—because the threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Evil Empire never came to pass, its dissolution marks the Cold War as a closed narrative event. We know, in other words, how it ends, and the Red Menace no longer looms large. Indeed, not only has the threat long been dissipated, but in the age of terror attacks and forever wars, a war that never came to pass might seem quaint by contrast, producing for many viewers—especially those who didn't live through it—a kind of anachronistic dramatic irony within the series. The reality, of course, is that even though thermonuclear war never came to pass, events such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and US involvement in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East—not to mention the array of domestic policies and practices that emerged as direct or indirect consequences of the conflict—all certainly had, and continue to have, a profound impact nationally and globally. In Stranger Things, however, the Cold War threat is confined to the Soviet Union's desire to acquire advanced weaponry in its quest for the total annihilation of the United States. As such, Stranger Things’ representation of Cold War anxieties neither addresses nor invokes these broader legacies—and is, in fact, invested in the notion that the conflict was contained purely within the geographic borders of the United States and the USSR. Instead it pivots on a shallow caricature drawn from action movies. Grigori is a perfect representation of this, a trope derived from two characters initially constructed as vessels for specific cultural fears, subsequently redeployed in an era where those fears no longer have any cogency. In the end, he's nothing more than an ahistorical sideshow oddity, a kitschy testament to how silly it all was.This privileging of trope is also reflected in the third season's more extensive turn toward the conventions of ’80s action movies. Though the series has always featured action sequences, in the first two seasons they veered more toward those found in horror and science fiction, almost always pitting humans against monsters rather than against one another. Hopper's plot line in season 3, which casts him as a hard-nosed detective working to uncover the secret behind the Soviet presence in Hawkins, breaks this pattern with the inclusion of numerous action tropes. One such scene features an especially over-the-top interrogation, in which Hopper nearly dismembers the mayor with a cigar cutter: “Are you insane?” the mayor asks. “I don't know,” Hopper replies. “Let's find out.” In another sequence, Grigori and Hopper pursue one another with silenced pistols in a hall of mirrors, a scene whose neon lighting coupled with Hopper's pastel Hawaiian shirt nods more to Miami Vice (1984–89) and Magnum P.I. (1980–88) than to anything Spielberg ever produced. The season's penultimate scene is a fistfight to the death between Hopper and Grigori whose blocking and cinematography recalls late ’80s action staples like Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1989). These scenes and the generic shift they signify, accompanying the series’ turn to the Cold War, are yet another instance of Stranger Things’ reluctance to confront history without invoking trope, genre, or style.As with the show's treatment of missing children in season 1, season
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