My relationship to Stranger Things is ambivalent. As a child of the 1980s, I remember the analog technologies and cultural objects that the show obsessively brings back to life. Now I’m old…
Archive for July, 2019
Recovering ‘The Body’: Generic Convergence and Parental Reassurance in Stranger Things
It has become commonplace to lament the loss of an American childhood in which unsupervised play and everyday encounters with moderate danger build independence, resilience, and creativity. Today’s highly-regulated kids…
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…
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…
Boys, Fractured: Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
1 After a game of Dungeons and Dragons, two boys bike home from their friend’s house on a night in 1983. They are unaware of the awful and awesome events…
Familiar Things: Snow Ball ’84 and Straight Nostalgia
The second season of Stranger Things concludes with a junior high dance, Snow Ball ’84. Barely emerged from recent horrors, the kids discover the rituals of straight adolescence by awkwardly slow dancing,…