The Violence of Nostalgia, or, the Crisis of Middle-Class Modernity

1.

Vanishing from the charts only to appear again years later, pop songs are good at evoking memories of the past. When George Michael's "Freedom 90" resurfaces now, decades after its release, it calls to mind the teenage summer I put that hit on multiple mix tapes. And when Taylor Swift's more recent "This Love" pops up on a playlist, it resonates with fresher memories of a breakup that went at far too protracted a pace a few years ago, as if I still were a teenager untutored in romance. Such songs and albums are a soundtrack to a past you recall in ambient images and musical echoes, a past that manages to be both vivid and vague. There is almost always nostalgia, here, that likewise feels vividly specific and remarkably vague, the music set free of its moment of historical emergence and attached to lived experience anchored in affects that once did have irreducibly particular causes, impressed upon you in that irretrievable past.

One such song for me is the Bangles 1987 cover of Simon & Garfunkel's 1966 song, "Hazy Shade of Winter." The lyrics themselves reflect on nostalgia: "Hang on to your hopes my friend / That's an easy thing to say / But if your hopes should pass away / Simply pretend that you can build them again." I adored the Bangles cover as a pre-teen when it came out on the soundtrack of the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero. The film starred many from the so-called "Brat Pack," including Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, and Robert Downey, Jr. The Bangles cover, though, is the best thing the forgettable film bequeathed to us. I was twelve years old when it came out. It evokes early puberty for me, but without specific memories: no particular content, no exact referent. Maybe what I feel is more echo than memory, since whatever it is resonates in the pop-synth beauty of "Hazy." I sort of remember, the song makes me feel like I remember. It makes me momentarily nostalgic, but — for what?

I'm not the only one who feels the mnemonic power of "Hazy": it appears on the soundtrack to Stranger Things, where it illuminates the violence of nostalgia, showing how force is at the core of this feeling's form on the Duffer brothers series. The song marks the culmination of a scene that is utterly nostalgic and undeniably violent. The violence of nostalgia is effect and affect of a middle-class modernity in crisis due to the uneven development of the good life for Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials.1 Where at least the racialized fantasy of the good life once looked like a guarantee, now middle-class modernity looks more like middle-class morbidity. The violence of nostalgia registers and resists that morbidity, internalizing a wider crisis, the secular stagnation of contemporary capitalism that on Stranger Things becomes the stagnation of a decaying middle class.2 In the face of that stagnation, Stranger Things ends up making violence itself an object of nostalgia in an era characterized by the exhaustion of what we used to call the bourgeoisie.

2.

Nostalgia is a vividly vague form of longing for a past imagined to offer plenitude that contemporary conditions withhold. It mixes, achingly and amorphously, pleasure and pain over that lost plenitude as a counter to scarcity in the present. Pain springs from the knowledge that time moves in one direction, making return impossible; pleasure springs from fantasizing a return nonetheless.3 As such, a language of loss dominates the scholarly discourse on nostalgia (along with critique and redemption, which I bracket here almost entirely4).

But a more violent idiom appears at times. James Phillips describes nostalgia as the effect of someone being "wrenched" from their home, and as the effect of an original "sundering."5 Susan Stewart goes farther. She writes that, "in order to awaken the dead, the antiquarian must first manage to kill them." These scholars are talking about psychological cleavage and cultural death, not literal killing and physical injury. But they mean that nostalgia arises in response to that which has been violently eliminated. And this nostalgic "murder of the thing," as Stewart calls it, not only stems from violence, but also produces it.6 Nostalgia for a better and bygone world often leads to brutality. The attempt to remake the world often means the attempt to unmake — to cage and kill — those imagined to be responsible for its demise and to be blocking its restoration to greatness.7

But on Stranger Things, violence neither precedes nor follows from nostalgia. They are crosscut with one another. Violence feels interior to nostalgia.

The most nostalgic moment in Stranger Things, for me, is the scene that ends the first season's second episode, "The Weirdo on Maple Street." "Weirdo" dramatizes the loss of childhood through the unsettling introduction of sexual difference and desire into the homosocial groups of friends that define Stranger Things. The all-boy group of Mike, Dustin, and Lucas has its same-sex homogeneity disrupted when Eleven shows up. Mike christens her "El," homophonic with the French word for "she." He has a crush on her from almost the moment they meet, which intensifies across the first two seasons. (Max reintroduces the problem of girls and crushes in Season Two as an object of desire over whom Dustin and Lucas compete.)

In the same episode, sexual difference and desire disrupt another homosocial grouping: Barb and Nancy. Barb and Nancy are best friends. But Steve, king of Hawkins High, is pursuing Nancy. Nancy's pleasure in his pursuit leaves Barb alone, isolated, and eventually dead as she watches her more normatively pretty friend enjoy becoming an object of desire for a cool rich guy who parties on school nights, drives a BMW, has a private pool, and styles his hair with product. At the end of the episode, Nancy chooses to lose her virginity to him, which strips away the asexual simplicity of childhood that Stranger Things everywhere projects and symbolically marks the loss of childhood.

This libidinal fantasy about the loss of childhood makes the end of "Weirdo" the most evocatively nostalgic moment in Stranger Things thus far, for me. But the Duffer brothers rhyme the scene of Nancy losing her virginity with Barb losing her life, employing the technique of crosscutting or parallel editing. Crosscutting is central to the visual style of Stranger Things, as Jason Middleton shows in his essay for this cluster. The series frequently juxtaposes two characters, events, or times to produce emotional responses in the audience in ways that would make D. W. Griffith proud.8 The parallel editing at the climax of "Weirdo" occurs after a tense conversation between Barb and Nancy. Barb tries to do as Nancy earlier asked (disingenuously, it turns out): keep her from going all the way with Steve. Barb fails, and watches Nancy ascend to Steve's bedroom. Their friendship fractured, Barb sits alone outside on the diving board of the pool, nursing hurt feelings and a hurt hand, which got cut on a beer can during the school night festivities at Steve's house earlier in the evening.

The parallel editing begins. Partly mediated by shots of Jonathan photographing all of them from the woods, the editing alternates between shots of Nancy and Barb, the one with Steve, the other left behind and lonely in the light of the pool. This point-counterpoint contributes to the nostalgia, creating a visual rhyme — or slant rhyme — of girlfriends going in different directions at the end of childhood. This end is violent. It draws blood — and does so, as the crosscutting stresses, twice: in the unseen moment of Nancy's first time with Steve, and in the visually arresting composition in which drops of blood spill from Barb's hurt hand into an illuminated nighttime pool, hemoglobin red diluting in trails of watery color against chlorine blue.

Figured first by the blood, the violence of nostalgia is amplified when the Demogorgon, the monster hunting and killing kids, erupts into the frame to abduct Barb, which eventually leads to her death. The loss of childhood that sexual difference and desire introduce thus has horror at its heart on Stranger Things. The loss of childhood entails a character's murderous brutalization, ultimately resulting in her decaying in the Upside Down.

The most evocative moment of nostalgia for me is, it turns out, among the season's most violent — and affects me yet more given how it feels like a queer kid has been killed.9 By the show's logic, the wrenching murder of things is part and parcel of engendering nostalgic longing in us. To awaken nostalgia, Stranger Things must kill Barb.

This is not surprising given the allusions at work in the crosscutting of violence and nostalgia at the end of "Weirdo." And in the series more widely: Stranger Things is nostalgic for the culture of horror of the 1970s and 1980s, most clearly at the moment of Barb's abduction alluding to Stephen King's recently re-adapted It (1986) and Ridley Scott's iconic Alien (1979). It crosscuts the horror of that novel and that film, both of which overflow with brutality, with our less violent memories of what Nancy and Steve's romance evokes: movies such as Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and Sixteen Candles (1984). In mixing up allusions to and memories of horror, comedy, and romance from the 1970s and 1980s, however, Stranger Things is not trapped in its mass-cultural past, but, rather, tuned into what it is like to be middle class at present. The violence of nostalgia is a way of feeling like middle-class modernity is in crisis. It is an affect for how a bourgeois way of life seems increasingly gone for good as we approach the stagnant, morbid end of the post-1973 era.

3.

The middle class has been contracting for decades in the United States. It declined from 61% of the population in 1971 to 52% in 2016. By middle class I mean, here, the middle-income bracket, defined by the Pew Research Center as those households "with an income that is 67% to 200% (two-thirds to double) of the overall median household income." As Pew notes in a 2015 report, the decline has stabilized since 2011. But, though the contraction of the middle class has stopped for the moment, financial gains have mostly gone to those in the upper-income bracket.10 Meanwhile, those in the lower-income bracket have seen significant losses. Those 65 and older saw the greatest gains, with those between 45 and 64 trailing, but still in positive territory. Those 30 to 44 experienced effectively no income gain or loss. But, "the youngest adults, ages 18 to 29, are among the notable losers with a significant rise in the lower-income tiers."11 The post-1973 era is a time marked by the uneven development of income, which Americans living through this period often apprehend in generational terms. "Baby Boomers" are doing well, "Generation X" is fine, and "Millennials" are suffering. Income inequality is bad, and worst for the youngest. Amid this context, we find nostalgia for middle-class modernity and the fantasy of the good life it continues to offer, however much remaining attached to it wears people down.12 That nostalgia is palpable in the title of Pew's 2015 report: "The American Middle Class is Losing Ground: No longer the majority and falling behind financially."

Indeed, the good life — long term employment and rising wages; home ownership and retirement funds; consumer goods and technological innovations; improving health and living longer, not to mention living well — was the modernity of the middle class. It was supported by the post-WWII economic boom, when income gains were relatively evenly distributed among brackets.13 But even that "boom" was a moment of transition and "twilight," as Andrew Hoberek has described it, setting up the situation of contraction in which the middle class now finds itself. In the years following WWII, the bourgeoisie went from being a class of business owners and small-scale producers to salaried employees whose wealth was redistributed to houses, cars, and appliances.14 As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has shown, this redistribution of wealth was also thoroughly racialized. The ongoing dispossession of black people in the United States underwrote the good life, and still underwrites the fantasy of the good life that keeps nostalgia for middle-class modernity going at present.15

The Pew report, with its nostalgic title, came out in 2015, the year that the Duffer brothers were pitching Stranger Things to networks. In its summary of the report, Pew writes, "In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and upper-income households combined, a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point." The phrase "tipping point" registers anxiety over the middle class in crisis, since a crisis refers etymologically to a decisive point in the progress of some process or event. The tipping point achieved legibility as the facts on the economic ground, especially about income, became vividly palpable to those studying, talking about, rallying around, campaigning on, and living through the apparent crisis of middle-class modernity.

That crisis has seemed even more decisive because both blue-collar access to that modernity and middle-class professional work have been, as the post-WWII transition to salaried employment prepared them to be, swept into a wider and longer "obsolescence of labor" that I have described elsewhere as also taking on increased legibility since the turn of the millennium.16 The result of automation as much as globalization, that obsolescence has led people towards jobs defined by contingency and low wages, especially the gigwork of the sharing economy.17 These jobs are the opposite of the kinds of work associated with the good life. By the time Stranger Things was in production, then, that good life was more fantasy than ever, and the modernity of the middle class was at a decisive turning point.

The lost childhood so painfully and pleasurably remembered on Stranger Things is also this lost middle-class modernity. The ludic images of bourgie play that pervade Stranger Things — and the nostalgia they inspire — is an effect of middle-class modernity at a tipping point. So is the violence of nostalgia. The crisis of middle-class modernity shows up, monstrously, when Barb bleeds in the pool and the Demogorgon brutalizes her. The monster is the crisis.

The violence the monster introduces into nostalgia at the end of "Weirdo" enunciates what it feels like to be caught up in the crisis of middle-class modernity. In this, the violence of nostalgia is affect as much as effect of the American middle class losing ground. It is an affect, moreover, that lets you feel like the crisis of middle-class modernity might be dramatically overcome, since the crisis appears on Stranger Things as a monster that characters from across income brackets (lower, middle, upper) and generations (Boomers and Gen X'ers in particular) come together to defeat in a kind of late-bourgeois unity that was already long in a state of breakup by the 1980s that the series invents. And it lets the generations most responsible for the huge popularity of Stranger Things (Gen X'ers and Millennials) enjoy the violently nostalgic restoration of a middle-class modernity that, in reality, is undergoing a crisis too menacing to be easily defeated.

Violence is not only crosscut with nostalgia in Stranger Things, but is itself an object of nostalgia. Nostalgia for violence is an effect of secular stagnation, the post-2008 economic condition, during which capitalist crisis is often less violently explosive than perniciously creeping, producing "an ambient affect tending toward narratives and images of decline, de-development, stasis, stagnation, ill health, and morbidity," accompanied by "a generational fascination with images of ennui, directionlessness, and failure, paired with a real rise in depression, drug dependency, extended adolescence, and childlessness."18 This is the affect of the Upside Down, to which Barb and others are abducted to become reproductive host and decaying source of nutrition for the creeping spread of its toxic ecology, whose morbid reach surfaces as a baleful threat to the middle-class way of life in Hawkins. Stranger Things so far suggests that this threat — in its morbidity, in its stagnant creeping qualities, in its subterranean toxicity — is much harder to overcome than the violence of the single monster destroyed at the end of Season One.

The violence crosscut with nostalgia in scenes such as the one at the end of "Weirdo" might thus belong to a larger desire for violence on Stranger Things, a desire for a mode of monstrosity — a version of crisis — that erupts rather than creeps, that can be confronted head on rather than a mode that, hidden underground, slowly but surely diminishes you. The violent nostalgia of Stranger Things is a longing to do violence, to find a means of confrontation, and maybe not just one that would preserve a middle-class modernity enervated right now, but also one that would open a way forward beyond the enervated crisis of that modernity so that we could forsake the longing to restore it.

4.

This violence is, finally, what I sort of remember when the Bangles cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" plays at the nostalgic end of "The Weirdo on Maple Street." On its own, the cover vividly and vaguely evokes my own middle-class childhood in a Connecticut suburb, where summers often were, in the early 1990s, devoted to mix tapes, hot days, and nighttime play. It was not purely ludic, for me, but it was a very lucky way to grow up. Given my fractured relationship to being a boy, the pleasures of childhood were often shot through with pain. The pain stemmed not from my budding desires for men, not from the fact of my homosexuality, but from how those desires felt violently legible every time some other boy called me a faggot despite me not coming out till college. Much like Barb at the poolside party in "Weirdo," for me, especially as a teenager, summers in particular could be highly isolating due to this fracturing, caught up in a longing to get out and move on from even the friends I had. That I could eventually move on, though, was due to what allowed for the ludic and lucky qualities of Connecticut summers before anything else: the comforts of the good life that my mother, a divorced Baby Boomer, worked hard to provide. At the end of "Weirdo," however, the good life of those summers ends in violence when the monster erupts into the frame to secret Barb away to the Upside Down.

The song's purpose at the climax of "Weirdo" is to punctuate, musically, the episode's violent end. It begins to play just after the Demogorgon seizes Barb, and just after Nancy and Steve fall into his bed to have sex, sonically marking the painful and pleasurable loss of childhood these rhymed events embody. A nostalgic reflection on this very kind of loss, as noted at the start of this essay, the Bangles rendition also contains an almost violent break. After an intro in which the band mellifluously sings, "Time, time, time / See what's become of me," as Salvation Army bells eerily chime, electric guitars erupt, propelling the song into power-pop mode. At the end of "Weirdo," that eruption is an echo of the Demogorgon's arrival moments before. With the guitars, "Weirdo" cuts to the credits over which "Hazy" gloriously plays, musically reinforcing the show's nostalgia as being crosscut with violence.

The song also draws out the crisis of middle-class modernity, especially its uneven development today — the creeping way in which it has lost ground for successive generations. The Simon & Garfunkel original appeared in 1966, popular with Baby Boomers. The Bangles cover was aimed at their children, Generation X, when it was released in 1987. And on Stranger Things, it gets a new audience among the Millennials with whom, along with Generation X, the Duffer brother series has been a hit. "Hazy" is a rock anthem to lost possibilities for which its speaker — an unpublished poet, as lines that the Bangles cover cuts from the original tell us — is impossibly searching at a late date in life, the season turning from autumn to winter much as it is in Season One of Stranger Things, which is set in November 1983. In the context of that setting, I hear a speaker less individual and more collective, not a failed poet but a failing class, the good life it prized for decades entering a time of thrift and scarcity. In this respect, the critical lyrics, the chilliest ones, are these:

Hear the Salvation Army band
Down by the riverside's
Bound to be a better ride
Than what you've got planned
Carry a cup in your hand
And look around you
Leaves are brown, now
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

Hang on to your hopes, my friend
That's an easy thing to say
But if your hopes should pass away
Simply pretend
That you can build them again
Look around
The grass is high
The fields are ripe
It's the springtime of my life19

While the second stanza above sardonically invokes a nostalgic fantasy of growth and abundance, the cold reality of "Hazy" is in the first stanza. In that reality, it tells us, the season of easy plenty is at an end, as burned out as Millennials have contentiously been described to be.20 As such, "Hazy" becomes a soundtrack to the crisis of middle-class modernity on Stranger Things. It is the score for the contraction of the middle-income bracket and the loss of the good life of which that contraction is a symptom, which Boomers, Gen X'ers, and Millennials are unevenly and unequally — but collectively — experiencing. Punctuating the brutality that concludes "Weirdo," the song voices the slow motion crisis to which these three generations are all witness at present, uncertain about what's next, except, probably, winter.

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Joel Burges is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of English and Director of the Graduate Program in Visual & Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. He is author of Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture (2018), the co-editor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (2016), and is at work on Literature after TV: The Double History of Watching and Writing.

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