Analog Nostalgia and the Promise of Props in the Digital Age

"To create an authentic period world requires thousands of specific decisions — that sheet, that cassette tape on that bedroom dresser." — Shawn Levy1

"It has always been something of a lifelong dream to create a monster and bring it to life on-screen. Not in the computer, but for real. To build it. Like so many filmmakers our age and older, we grew up on genre films that existed before computer graphics. There was something about the effects being so tangible in those films. [ . . . ] So from very early on we knew we wanted to build an animatronic monster."—Matt and Ross Duffer2

In interviews, Stranger Things' creators express fidelity to the late '70s and early '80s through appeals to discrete props and material effects. Levy's repetitions of that indicate these attachments, as do the Duffers' oppositions between animatronics and CGI. Fans and critics offer similar sentiments, often turning to listicles to inventory Stranger Things' nostalgia.3 Rolling Stone offers, for instance, "32 . . . cultural touchstones that make the show . . . so authentic," including outdated objects (Eggos, Dungeons & Dragons, wood paneling); old media (Alien, The Clash, E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial); and their conjunction in analog equipment like HAM Radio, rabbit ears, mixtapes, and telephone cords.4

To make sense of these props and the desires they anchor, we might compare them to declarations of distaste for contemporary media. Take the listicle, "Top 10 Ways Stranger Things Are Original," where Number 4 reads, "A Strong Case Why We Never Should Have Gone Digital." Bearing this out, the author celebrates "a world without . . . digital gadgets or apps," where "[t]here was no disembodied, omnipresent, invisible force that held one's mind in . . . suspension."5 The Duffer Brothers appear to agree. "We want the show to always feel grounded," reports Matt Duffer in a Netflix-produced interview.6 "That's the tone of the movies that we grew up [with], that we love. [ . . . ] [T]here was a realness and a grittiness to them," which, adds Wired magazine, complemented an era of "uncluttered, digital-distraction-free afternoons and evenings."7 The implication — computation is remote, sterile, and overly controlled — characterizes even academic distinctions between analog and digital. In these assessments, old media depict the world through direct, physical inscription, offering encounters that embody contingent, short-lived realities. New media, by contrast, rely on numerical code. They abstract substance, transposing it to virtual networks that loosen our grip, some scholars warn, on actual, "real-world" conditions.8

Still, if abstraction proves dangerous, then so, too, does contraction; or, better put, the trouble lies in efforts to oppose them. To be sure, new media transpose what old media inscribe, yet both assemble and disseminate this material in their own rights. Easy to overlook in the digital age, these operations persist despite the inequities global markets, "fake news," and online "echo chambers" administer. Presently, proximity seems preferable to remote orchestrations, but propinquity alone does not forestall alienation or dispel violence. Indeed, neoliberalism regularly locates and relocates resources and labor while reducing collective concerns to individual protections. Contiguity does not, from this point of view, save network society from distant abuses. Rather, care requires abstraction as well as immediacy to pull discrete entities into wide-reaching relationships. Stranger Things forgets this when it confines its affections to outmoded items and practices that pin old media to irrevocable structures. We must remember, therefore, that analog nostalgia issues from digital demands for more than narrow remedies or pervasive injuries. If recovered, these capacious demands not only draw past to present, but also restore the promise of all media for shaping the future.

In Stranger Things, props crystallize this promise, since they link gestures the series otherwise separates. As objects, props fortify the physicality of grainy titles, vintage synthesizers, and practical effects. As signs, they move narratives they likewise substantiate. Props are, in this regard, intermediaries, or interfaces, that broker meetings between matter and meaning. Traveling to and from storeroom and set, they gather and disperse embodied significance and fashion broad fields of interdependence. Stranger Things knows this, though it denies as much, exchanging the action of props for Eleven's powers and Will's "now memories." Reclaiming these forces, props return them to everyday environments, where they join analog to digital through their shared obligations to contiguity and abstraction alike.

Of course, Stranger Things largely avoids these obligations, using props "to provide support or help," as the OED suggests, "to some weak or failing cause or institution."9 The institution is, in this case, digital production, and the support, analog modes of representation. "We weren't making a slick, glossy version of the '80s," reports designer Chris Trujillo, "but, rather, a gritty, textural feeling that is lost in high-definition movie-making."10 Turntables, walkie-talkies, and landline phones — these are among the obsolescent, unfamiliar, and strange things that establish, in fact cinch, that texture on behalf of the series. To objects, it adds vintage techniques, including a score that tinkers with old resistors and patch cords and a variety of mechanical, as opposed to computer-generated, stunts and special effects. Whether prop, music, or animatronic, the result remains the same: Stranger Things leans on immediacy to avoid commitments to abstract distance. Hardly uncommon, this evasion links the series to shows like The Americans, The Get Down, GLOW, and The Deuce, all of which recover the late '70s and early '80s through songs, décor, and props. On this view, what the New York Times calls "TV's Big Bet on Nostalgia" only affirms the "digital-phobic rhetoric" Julie A. Turnock discerns among Hollywood's critics, scholars, and fans.11 This rhetoric, which "posit[s] we have 'lost' something essential, and essentially real" in the shift from analog to digital media, invites other definitions for prop, including "a boundary or line" that "keep[s] something . . . in place."12

Nevertheless, if Stranger Things wants to "prop up" the present through a return to the past, then its fondness for the late '70s and early '80s proves an odd choice. These are the years, after all, to which we owe handheld devices, wireless networks, and Hollywood's "high-cost, high-tech, high-stakes" blockbusters.13 Odd, too, from this point of view, are props Stranger Things omits. There are no computers in Hawkins, no cable TV, only talk of Atari, and until Season Two, no coin-operated video arcade. Finally, the Duffers in fact yield to a variety of computer-generated images. The "original goal," notes Ross Duffer, "was to do entirely practical effects," yet, as he and brother, Matt, soon learn, "doing practical is really hard."14 For this reason, the pair increasingly turn from mechanical to visual effects, splitting the difference in Season One before tipping the balance toward CGI in the course of Season Two.

This shift points to what the series generally represses: practical effects are often impractical, and the past shares more with the present than prosthetics and payphones imply. Turnock suggests as much in her discussion of New Hollywood's "hybrid style," which "merg[ed] the perceived solidity and realism of the photographic . . . [with] the imaginative plasticity of animation."15 Endemic to Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — both reference points for Stranger Things — this style ends in the '80s, when, she writes, a "transition in critical opinion" first set photorealism against putatively "empty soulless technologized spectacle[s]."16 Inheriting this legacy, the Duffers anchor their effects — both analog and digital — in sequences that smash, thud, teeter, and plunge, according to what Scott Ferguson calls an "amplified Newtonian mechanics."17 As with props, these displays tether "flights of fancy" to "substantial, proximate, and directly actionable" encounters.18 They let the Duffers have their old media while eating their new media cake.

However tacit, this hybridity matters for what it exposes: if immediacy props up abstraction in Stranger Things, then abstraction also props up immediacy. Indeed, media, like props, "hold . . . open" the structures they "hold up" and "keep in position."19 Props, writes Shannon Jackson, are at once "vital helpmate[s]" and non-integral, temporary supports.20 Their expendability is, in fact, what makes them indispensable. "The prop's resonance," she argues, "comes in the ease of its withdrawal, its shelving, its losing," which "elicit[s] . . . attachment," precisely because its comforts are extrinsic and fleeting.21 Put differently, props, like media, contract and abstract desire, as does the nostalgia they promise to redeem. A motif in Stranger Things, this promise accrues special relevance. First defined by Mike in Season One, Episode Two, promises are something, he tells Eleven, "You can't break. Ever." Still, the word's etymology suggests something far less stable. Coming from pro, meaning before, and mittere, to release, they precede, or prepare, not looking back or holding on, but rather, looking forward, holding open, and letting go.22

Displaced from props, this promise is transported by Stranger Things to less mundane experiences, particularly its depictions of telekinesis and telepathy. Implying motion and feeling at a distance, these powers exhibit contiguity and abstraction in name and in deed. In the show, telekinesis moves a variety of props — a can of Coke, the Millennium Falcon, even Troy's bladder. As evidenced by the chase in Season One, Episode Seven, telekinesis is particularly suited to action-packed physics. In this scene, a van from Hawkins Lab threatens the protagonists with a head-on collision — until, that is, Eleven sends the vehicle skyward with her projective intentionality.

Soaring through the air, the van crashes in close-up and with a resounding thud. A practical effect, it emphasizes mass and density, reducing nature and supernature to gross bodily contact. In this regard, telekinesis enhances the show's commitment to materiality. So, too, the bumping bikes and clapping girls that precede the van's approach. At the same time, the sequence betrays this focus on impact — most demonstrably through Eleven, who hoists the vehicle from afar, but also through Dustin and Lucas, who communicate remotely by headset. Once aloft, moreover, the van floats in slow motion as the scene drops to a vacuous tone. United in postproduction, not unlike the composite of children and vehicle, sound and image disclose the drift to and from terrestriality that defines this stunt inside and outside the storyworld.

When it comes to telepathy, meanwhile, Stranger Things proceeds in the opposite direction. As opposed to telekinesis, it relies on passivity and introjection. Rather than move objects, it moves — in fact, moves through — Eleven, who becomes, at the hands of Dr. Brenner, a receiver, which is to say, a prop. Put in the service of Cold War surveillance, Eleven relays Russian secrets before opening a gate to the Upside Down. In these scenes, it does not take much work to distinguish telepathy from telekinesis or to link it to abstraction. Sensory deprivation carries Eleven to a featureless black void, where few sounds are heard, save a foreign language, monstrous gutturals, or isolated splashes of water.

It takes more work to free abstraction — and, by extension, new media — from stock and trade associations with homogeny, isolation, and subjugation. Even so, Eleven's telepathy — despite her name and its instrumentality — evokes embodied presence, sensuous perception, indeed, feeling, though from a distance. In the void, Eleven draws near her target, circling the Russian as she delivers his words by speaker to men in a far-off room. Later, when she discovers the monster, it is her touch that opens the gate to the Upside Down, which, for its part, props up Hawkins.

Taken together, these events conjure the limits of mediation and its gendered presumptions. They also summon the paranormal possibilities mediation delivers to standard arrangements. Telegraphy offers a model in this regard, according to Jeffrey Sconce, who documents its influence on nineteenth-century Spiritualism. Inspired by the telegraph, female mediums conceived their activity in similar terms. They, too, "gave voice," he writes, "to previously 'invisible' beings, be they ghosts or [the] women" themselves.23 In fact, as Sconce demonstrates, mediums frequently used the dead to articulate covert challenges to lived conditions. They reshaped relationships between here and there, then and now, not unlike the device Samuel Morse invented. A description from the period conveys the strangeness of these configurations; it reports "a meeting of the employees of the American Telegraph Company . . . at — what place? that is the question — at no place, or at all places where there [are] Telegraph offices. [ . . . ] [M]embers together in spirit — in communication," it continues, "and yet in body seven hundred miles apart!"24 As with Spiritualists, telegraphy convenes and diffuses heterogeneous material, as do Eleven's powers and, later, Will's own appeals to Morse code.

Time and again, Eleven foments connections that defy the confines of age, social caste, geography, and temporality, even if Stranger Things, for its part, mostly upholds them. She does the same, moreover, for media and props in addition to telepathy and telekinesis. Take the conclusion of Season One, during which the Demogorgon is destroyed. Unlike her friends, who assail the monster with slingshot and rocks, Eleven attacks the monster directly but without touch.

To be sure, her assault is actively telekinetic, and the sound design, at times, frenetic and percussive. Still, a persistent strobe effect, along with focalized snarls, links these immediacies to telepathy's abstract void. In this context, it matters that the scene mixes a costumed man with a computer-generated swarm. It matters, too, that Eleven introjects its dissoluble body, which, in turn, releases her hold on Hawkins and Mike's promises of home.

From this point of view, Will's "now memories" supply another and, likely, better name for nostalgia and its assembly of past and present. Owing to Will's time in the Upside Down, "now memories" re-member, or re-collect, contemporary Hawkins, as Will's drawings, when strung together, quite literally divulge. Indeed, as images, "now memories" move toward and away from diverse registers, including abstract maps of actual waterways, immediate threats from virtual vines, and the as yet undisclosed future to which their entanglement points. In this, Will's visions resemble one final conception of props — this time, from Jean Laplanche, who links the physical to the psychic through what he calls leaning-on, or propping.25 According to this theory, desire emerges in dependence, when, as infants, we require "helping others," whose presence we internalize as an "irritative thorn," or painful "noise," that comes from outside to set fantasies in motion.26 We hear the residue of this encounter in comments about the Shadow Monster: "Some of him is there," Will tells Mike, "but some of him is here. [ . . . ] In me." We see it, too, in the show's latent acknowledgement that mediation, whether analog or digital media, manifests the hybridity they nonetheless share.

In the end, props, like media, reveal what Stranger Things endeavors to conceal — a compromise between contiguity and abstraction or, as Hopper calls it in Season Two, Episode Two, a com-promise. Unlike the first, this promise arrives, as com suggests, through mutuality, interdependence, and noise. More important, it remembers the limits and possibilities of old and new media, which come less through the assurances of analog nostalgia than through the promises of recovered digital demands.

---

Amy Rust is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. She is author of Passionate Detachments: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 - 1974. Her next book explores media and ecology in American moving-image culture from the 1970s to the present.

---

References