But it’s October, and my wonderfully witchy roommate insisted. So please feast upon these first impressions, and relive vicariously. Remember your first time binging on this well executed nostalgia trip.
This homage to 80’s sci-fi takes place in its own referent universe, setting itself like 80’s teen movies, complete with pop-cultural name-drops, while more silently quoting its Spielbergian and comic-book influences. I’m impressed with how the show blends a familiar past of the realistic 80s--the slang, the accurately rock-blaring radios, the television programming--with our categorized science fictions of zap-flickering technologies and snarling slimes. Where does their diegetic universe end, and our own begin?
E.T used a similar tactic of dropping a handful of Star Wars references in its own alien-movie. Like E.T, Stranger Things uses a backdrop of bulky media technology for supernatural communication. There’s also the kids on bikes.
E.T bore its own surreal connective watching experience to a contemporary TV show, which I only bring up as a segue into the spookier coincidences and connections this show brings up for me. While I was watching my partner ran into our friend, Abby, with whom I associate most with Stranger Things. Last year, she gasped and mockingly shook her head when I confessed to not having seen it.
It’s unsettling for the show’s missing child to be named Will, to hear it called out repeatedly with the frantic, desperate tone. Kidnapping was a deep childhood fear. So were aliens. Books on UFOs, monster movies, the occult, I checked out weekly from my school library. They were reliable for their disturbing effect. I can still remember two frightening dreams they incurred. Speaking about this to adults posed challenging. You can see how resonant then, I find the supernatural lore which the children alone must face in Stranger Things. I’m relieved this did not come out when I was the age of the protagonists.
Stranger still is the uncanny resemblance between the character Eleven and me as a freshly buzz-cut 13-year-old (far too long a backstory/explanation/commentary to unpack here). I feel deeply for her character, if only on a narcissistic, surface level of identification.
So now, with all the narcissistic reflection and connection out of the way, let me heap on the praise for the acting, character-development and script. While still relying 80’s teen movie character tropes, the kids and adults alike are more dimensional than any member of the Breakfast Club. Just three episodes in, and we’re already glimpsing the caring emotional side of the popular douche-bag, already seeing the middle school boys take agency in the face of danger, getting to watch parents express heartfelt worry in a world they’re supposedly in charge of. That, I find more engaging the nursed along paranormal mystery.
The title sequence and theme song dazzle me. The close ups on that red-glowing typography against the black background, suggesting the gleaming sinister portals this show opens up to us as viewers. The music I find more contemporary than retro; its sparse synth sounds hypnotize like the Xx or Beach House more than The Cure. But hey, no complaints.
As for the midwest 80s as the enticing setting, I’m still parsing it apart. Anything with a decade label garners hype like a dog gnashing for meat from behind its cage. We love to fantasize about the past through the lense of its relics. The Cold-War and a lab’s development of a human super-weapon strike our political paranoia nerve, sure. The bulky tech backdrop, I mentioned earlier, as well as the homagistic product placement, feel allegorical to our own over-advertised and screen-fiending modernity. Perhaps Stranger Things suggests our lack of progress, shows the short line from then to now, by pointing out the visual difference.
I guess only more episodes will tell. Expect more reports from down this rabbit hole.