When Stranger Things premiered in 2016 it was an unprecedented success for Netflix, launching a new generation of child actors into stardom and provoking endless online discussion. Its depiction of 1983 felt tonally specific and visually generic, exciting a host of critics who had come of age in that period. Six years on and the show maintains a cultural dominance rarely granted to TV shows of the streaming age. As the show’s audience has grown the sets have become bigger, the budget increased and the now teenage cast is faced with gorier consequences. In the fourth season of Stranger Things, the Dungeons and Dragons monster inspired villain, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), stalks his victims for 24 hours before killing them, shrouding them in moments from their past, haunting them with their memories. After Max (Sadie Sink) is captured it is only the memory of her friends that propels her out of the Upside Down. Stranger Things wrestles with memory, characters’ recollections are tested, and a darker history is seen rippling beneath the surface. Yet these characters are themselves caught in a distorted reflection of the Duffers Brothers’ own memory, the creators’ nostalgia for a nonexistent time upending the show’s potential.
Dr. Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Le Moyne College, defined two forms of nostalgia: a historical, longing for a time you only ever experienced second-hand, and personal, yearning for a time in your own past. Understandably, historical nostalgia is more easily weaponised, easily curdled into half truths of “life was simpler back then…” While personal nostalgia can offer a degree of catharsis. When presented to an audience, however, it is difficult to distinguish between the two; therein lies the real problem for Stranger Things. Small personal moments, (a first kiss, an inside joke between friends,) are swept away in a wave of cultural references and symbols. Occasionally these moments buoy above the surface, balancing on the swell, but more often than not they are dragged under, briefly dipping out of sight, under the shadow of era-specific quips. A show that unwraps the candy coloured packaging of childhood to reveal a dark and bitter pill is at odds with a show that romanticises a whole decade, displacing and decontextualising it, yet Stranger Things endeavours to be both.
Unsurprisingly, the show is most alive when reckoning with the intangibility of memory. The Upside Down remains a potent idea, forcing time to stare in on itself and reckon with the things we chose not to see. Movement there is stilted, possessed by an unrelenting sluggishness, trapping characters in eerie landscapes that stretch on in red streaks. In season one, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) hides from the encroaching threat of the Demogorgon by seeking out his hideout, ‘Castle Byers’. It is introduced earlier in the season, when his mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder), remembers sweetly offering him tickets to see Poltergeist, an unremarkable moment laden with love. In this sense, memory does save Will, as it does when El (Millie Bobby Brown) faces off against 001. Crucially though, these memories are only momentary, surges of power, a respite in the search for home. When Max is running from Vecna the exact dimensions of memory can be calculated and drawn, a portal big enough to jump through. The past is not an inexhaustible source of energy, memories are only useful in propelling people to the future.
The series was created by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, who were inspired by the art they consumed growing up in the 1980s. “You know, there’s nothing in E.T. that earmarks it as really ‘80s. I like to think it still holds up.” Matt explained in an interview with Jen Chaney for Vulture, “ So that’s what we were going for.” Dipping into this well of nostalgia isn’t surprising — the movies you watch and books you read mark the contours and colours of childhood, weaving together a texture of young life. Artists are always going to be reckoning with the world as they see it, or saw it, but the predominantly young fan base of Stranger Things can’t hold the Duffers’ version of the 1980s accountable. This is a version of the decade threatened by cartoonishly evil Russians, drenched in the neon light of Starcourt Mall, it may not be inherently malicious but it is certainly undercut by the rampant capitalism and jingoism of the mid-80’s.
Dungeons and Dragons have built a reliable structure for the show, necessarily grouping the sizable cast and sending them on side quests. Change is the engine of Stranger Things, constantly reassembling and reconfiguring its actors in dynamic shapes. Forward momentum is the antithesis to nostalgia, but Stranger Things ultimately foregoes this by moving cyclically, shifting characters around in pairings that feel familiar even if they are technically new. This kind of shuffling means the show can reinvigorate itself without having to abandon the old formula, a simple, yet effective way of approaching the fluctuating shape of the show. After four seasons the scope has expanded but hidden beneath each layer is a recognisable pattern, every new villain harkening back to that first kidnapping. In this sense the show remains inward-facing, as the budget gets higher and sets more lavish, the world itself shrinks, and possibility slips away for the certainty of the heroes and villains that were first introduced. This season has been positioned as an overt horror, but it feels much more tonally aligned with the first sequence of the pilot. Beyond knowing more about the villain, nothing much has changed.
Despite a young cast that have grown into adults over the last seven years, Stranger Things positions itself against change. Like many properties over the last decade, it is more interested in untangling its own internal logic than carrying the characters into a new phase of life. Nostalgia is a reaction to movement, forcing people to suspend and relive simpler times, and yet this stasis is also antithetical to being human, which means shirking who we were for who we are. Perhaps season five will embrace this development with its rumoured time jump, or maybe Stranger Things will always be a place where childhood is disassembled and reanimated into something ghostly.
