Stranger Things Asks Us To Remember Something That Never Was

There is a scene in the first episode of the new season of Netflix’s Stranger Things where characters Steve (Joe Keery) and Robin (Maya Hawke) are lamenting the woes of their respective teenage love-lives while stacking shelves at the video store where they work. At the end of Robin’s rant about the pitfalls of closeted lesbian crushes in a small town, she says, ‘Oh, I think I’ve found our morning movie.’ It’s Doctor Zhivago, David Lean’s sweeping historical romance from 1965, here standing in as a bit of set dressing and a nod to the fact that a fair chunk of this season of the Duffer Brothers’ streaming juggernaut is going to take place in a snowy Russian prison camp. Steve baulks: ‘Ugh…you know I don’t do double VHS!’.

It’s a throwaway reference in a throwaway moment in a show that throws out a lot of them, but it caught me off guard. Was this a joke about the fact that each episode of this new season is almost feature length? Is it a joke about how our patience for long and difficult art has been whittled down by a decade of streaming content slop?

I don’t know what Stranger Things wants from me, but it reminds me a bit of the old pervert who’d drive around my neighbourhood in his unmarked white van asking us kids if we wanted a lift. There is something of the lurker in its twin roles as pop culture touchpoint and pop culture grave robber. It’s a show that repeatedly insists on deifying the dead while simultaneously defiling them, and I find being made witness to its ongoing acts of public necrophilia a little tiresome, to say the least.

For the uninitiated (or, those like me who were made to watch the previous seasons but have totally forgotten what they were about and who these characters are), Stranger Things follows the misadventures of a pack of teens and tweens as they seek to uncover the mystery behind a set of disappearances in the perennially cursed town of Hawkins.

From its first season, it has marketed itself as the intersection of all that was fun, cool, and totally wicked about 1980s pop culture, particularly its cinema. It was pitched to us as a blend of Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, Joe Dante, Ghostbusters, The Goonies, Twin Peaks, Poltergeist and more and more and more of the load-bearing tentpoles propping up a generation’s unquenchable nostalgia. Here were all these ‘ancient’ texts—whispered about like they were missing chapters of the Enchiridion of geekdom—strategically stitched together and stretched out like one of Leatherface’s ghoulish masks in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

​​But Stranger Things is all about exhuming artefacts that were never buried. We see this time and time again, as the show regurgitates the tidbits of 80s media that have managed to cling to the cultural consciousness, like vomit to a ruffled velvet dress at a high school prom.

Stranger Things is all about exhuming artefacts that were never buried. There is something of the lurker in its twin roles as pop culture touchpoint and pop culture grave robber.

Be it Eleven being submerged into a sensory deprivation tank like William Hurt in Altered States, Steve dressing and acting like a bootleg Tom Cruise in Risky Business, nods to John Carpenter’s The Thing that range from heavily inspired monster design to a poster in a character’s room to the film playing on the TV in the background of one scene, to the recreation of the train-track walk from Stand By Me, Stranger Things seems reverse engineered as a show designed to make 42-year-old neckbeards nudge their waifu pillows and ask: ‘Hey, do you get it?’

But what do all those nudges amount to in the great oceanic swill that is Netflix’s content library? Netflix is to film preservation what Jack Torrance is to a family vacation: it takes to it with an axe. From its very inception, Netflix hacked at the way people think about and engage with TV and cinema, methodically whittling down people’s natural curiosity and inclination to explore old work and new, burying anything made before 1980 and doggedly chipping away at the idea of the ‘classic movie’ until it was nothing more than some Gen-Xers’ idea of a teenage pizza party circa 1984.

By burying what it seeks to emulate, Netflix manages to make its desaturated content husks seem like bountiful banquets. It drowns us in 8-10 hours of dreck all at once so that we are left with no room for even the thinnest of wafer thin mints, just that uncertain feeling you get from being stuffed to the gills while also being undoubtedly, horribly, hungry. Remember that gum you used to like? Well, it’s back—only this time it’s sugar-free, flavourless, and as chewable as cud.

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In this season, Stranger Things seeks to satiate that hunger with what feels like fan fiction dug up from the darkest corners of Tumblr. Characters are thrown together and around like they’re in a filler episode of a long running shonen anime. There is a subplot that involves dadbod cop Jim Hopper (David Harbour) surviving in, and being rescued from, a Russian forced labour camp—shot on location in a former prison where the actual Gestapo tortured their prisoners—which honestly feels like science fiction mashed with the worst of Tom Clancy.

The show’s editing brings to mind a Wikipedia page that’s being altered as you’re reading it. The tone lurches from comical to maudlin to sadistic at the rate of the aforementioned Mr King on a coke bender, and you’re left wondering how we’re expected to view these characters, who go from witnessing (what are admittedly) some of the most gruesome deaths on TV right now (or ever), to discussing who they’ve got a crush on as anything other than complete sociopaths.

From its very inception, Netflix hacked at the way people think about and engage with TV and cinema, methodically whittling down people’s natural curiosity.

But it’s one thing to consider how Stranger Things wants us to think about its stories and characters, and another thing entirely to consider how it wants us to think about the past.

Stranger Things asks us to remember something that never was. I’m not talking about Hawkins’s cartoonified small town version of Reagan’s America, its shopping malls, its roller discos, or its big hair and shoulder pads—all of which comes together to create a setting that feels as hollow, empty, and staged as the backless shopfronts of an old Western set—but instead the very way in which we used to live with, and for, art.

While writing this piece, I rewatched one of the Duffers’ biggest influences: Steven Spielberg’s 1982 family classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I was struck by how Spielberg’s characters, the children specifically, live in a world that is so clearly lived in and full. Much is made of Spielberg’s love of The Movies—and E.T. itself is a tribute to the sci-fi invasion films of the Cold War, albeit with their politics tipped on their head and recast through Spielberg’s unfalteringly humanistic worldview. As such, E.T. is not without its references to the media that inspired it, nor the world in which the characters live.

My favourite scene, for example—the liberation of the soon to be dissected frogs—has within it a shot for shot (really, a shot by shot) recreation of the kiss from John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). It’s not just a matter of Spielberg nodding to a film he loves, but a moment where said film is the empathic (and telekinetic?) link between E. T., Elliot, and the film’s ideas regarding love, courage, and (heck) the movies.

Spielberg’s nostalgia does not work as it would in Stranger Things (as a namedrop or as allusion), but instead as a textural, tangible and tactile linking of E.T. the film, E.T. the character, Spielberg the person, and us, the audience.

E.T. is all about packing its characters and world with life, whereas Stranger Things seems more concerned with showing that it likes the same movies you do.

Stranger Things attempts similar tricks throughout each of its seasons but is undone by how impersonal its pandering feels—as smooth and textureless as a G. I. Joe doll, and about as far from its influences as said doll is from Deerhunter. In the show’s very first episode, we are introduced to the show’s core group of boys, itself a nod to the scene where we meet the boys in E. T., each set of characters sitting around eating pizza and playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons. This scene wants you to know that this show is influenced by Spielberg’s classic—by Spielberg himself—more than it wants you to believe its central characters are anything but central characters. Compared to the scene it’s riffing on it has an uncertain uncanny quality: the scene in E.T. is all about packing its characters and world with life, whereas Stranger Things seems more concerned with showing that it likes the same movies you do— that there is life out there somewhere, if not here in the room with these characters, or at home with you, the viewer.

Like Stranger Things, E.T. makes us constantly aware that its young characters live in a time and place where pop culture now forms the bonds between people as much as family, religion, or nationhood ever did. We get a lengthy scene of Elliott introducing E.T. to his Star Wars action figures; E.T. even seems to recognise Yoda when a kid dressed as him passes by them on Halloween. But these nods and winks don’t seem sly so much as they seem like Spielberg being like: hey, these characters live and breathe in the same world that we do—of course this little kid is going to want to show his alien friend his Greedo toy, Greedo is as much a part of his world as his dog, his bike, or his little sister.

To me there’s one scene in E.T. that best exemplifies what Stranger Things wants but can never have. It’s the scene where Michael (Robert MacNaughton) is rifling through the fridge while singing Elvis Costello’s ‘Accidents Will Happen’. Wherein Stranger Things similar moments are used to slap the audience awake and bark ‘HEY DICKHEAD, IT’S THE 80s!’, here it’s just used to add a granular sliver of life to a character’s existence, an indulgence the former seems unwilling or unable to afford itself as it bends everything to serve the relentless bingeable demand made by its plotting.

Stranger Things offers many simulacra of that little moment, but all of them pass through the lens of reference and history to be translated back to us, the savvy modern content consumer, who can bring up a listicle of ‘10 pop culture references you might have missed in last night’s episode’ quicker than we can recall what happened in the season (or episode) prior. See how it wields Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ in the most viral moment of this new season: not as a part of its world’s landscape, organic and present, but instead as a deus ex machina, sitting like a chainsaw in the shed until a hero runs in, grabs it and rips its cord to use it to lop off some big bad’s head.

Stranger Things makes both itself and the viewer seem alien to the texts it claims to love. There is a disconnect with these texts that stems from its inability to truly appreciate the past and the texts that it’s so intent on fetishising.

Stranger Things makes both itself and the viewer seem alien to the texts it claims to love. There is a disconnect with these texts that stems from its inability to truly appreciate the past and the texts that it’s so intent on fetishising. A part of this is its complete separation from the way in which those texts were made, on both an economic and technical level. With each episode of this latest season costing almost US$30 million, it can’t have the subversive trickery of the schlocky slashers that it is so keen to replicate, nor the snappiness required of a self-contained genre story. Likewise, the very way in which Netflix makes its content—its insistence on a specific type of digital camera, desaturated colours, and binge friendly pacing—severs Stranger Things from the look, feel, and nature of what it aspires to in a way that’s as pathetic as it is grotesque.

The radioactive nature of capital-C Content in the streaming era means that Stranger Things attempts to reach into the media of the past and drag it towards itself instead infects that media with the same black rot that makes the streaming age so reliably drab and dull. By absorbing that media into its references and mimicry it just makes it another curling tentacle on the Akira blob that is Content, crushed and suffocated as it is by the monstrous tumours of capital.

To the Duffers, the past is a prop. Culture and history become as dim as the show’s lighting. Through that dimness, a shopping mall and a gestapo blacksite are both given equal value, no matter how hard you may feel the urge to squint.

Back in that strangely lifeless scene in the video store, I was confronted by the shades of not just a time and a place but a way of being–a way of consuming, costuming, and courting culture which is no longer available to us. Walking amongst Stranger Things ‘tombstones, one does get the sense of the show’s inverted hellscape, the Upside Down: our nostalgia as a hall of mirrors, in a culture that’s come to resemble a dilapidated haunted house.