The (Bad) Taste Test: What Stranger Things Gets Wrong About Nostalgia
Whenever I think about nostalgia, I think about Mad Men. How at the end of the show’s first season, when he’s pitching Kodak, Don Draper calls it “the pain from an old wound.” Nostalgia, in ways that are both explicit, or working under the surface, has been an increasingly popular way to create and sell culture - whether that nostalgia is about pain, or instead, offering someone a more rose-tinted view of their own childhood, or an era that they might have wanted to experience. Seeing Fran Lebowitz in conversation, she bemoaned the ways in which people talked about nostalgia; always wanting to grow up in New York in the 70s or 80s, looking back at an imagined past, and the life that may have emerged from it.
One of the shows that’s most able to understand that visceral feeling of nostalgia, both first and second-hand, is the Netflix blockbuster Stranger Things. Whether or not its accurate to the 80s itself doesn’t matter when it comes to what the show wants to do, and how it makes its portrait of a time that may or may not have been. Because the nostalgia of Stranger Things isn’t informed by the 80s themselves, but by the pop culture that made the 80s look like the 80s for a generation raised a generation afterwards: it’s why the show is so indebted to Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Stephen King - the latter with the strange, homicidal bullies that populate the fourth season, and who only seem to exist in Stephen King stories.
And so, with Stranger Things inevitably moved towards tackling queerness in season four - via the closeted Will and his unrequited love for Mike - the way it relates to not only the nostalgia, but the cartography with which it maps the 80s, would end up running into something brutal and unforgiving: the 80s themselves.
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At the beginning of the season, the kids among the cast that are in California - as opposed to the majority of the cast, still in Hawkins, Indiana - have to make a portrait of someone they think of as a hero. Will chooses Alan Turing, because of course he does. Whether it wants to or not, this choice ends up capturing one of the problems with using nostalgia and cultural references to not only create the visual style of your show, but define your characters: everything from Kate Bush or Metallica, to Dungeons and Dragons, even The Neverending Story, all play a vital role in how these characters define themselves. And if you’re a queer kid in the 80s, your options for anything in mainstream culture were limited; its no wonder he’s left with Turing.
Before even watching the final episodes of the season, my Twitter timeline was full of people in tears over Will in the back seat of a car; sun coming through the windows, after he “comes out” - but not in those terms, not with that language - to Mike. The two are talking about the problems between Mike and his superpowered, super-traumatised girlfriend, Eleven. And the more that Will talks about the fear Eleven might have of being perceived as different or broken, the clearer it becomes that he’s talking about himself. This scene feels like Stranger Things pulling back the curtain on itself, stepping away from the sheen and appeal of nostalgia in order to reveal the reality of a time that this nostalgic gaze can’t gloss over. It’s difficult to tell if this move is deliberate, or even how the show wants audiences to react to Will’s tearful confession. It’s a moment when the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia come off, and the show has to try and survive contact with the one thing that it’s been avoiding the whole time: the reality of its setting.
“What nostalgia normally offers is a kind of comfort, like a remix of history; it can take things that seemed bleak or inhospitable and say it will be okay this time.”
I knew this scene happened before I watched it; the day that the final episodes were released, my Twitter timeline was full of gifs and clips and all-cals reactions to The Outing of Will Byers. The relationship between the internet and stories of queer adolescence has been reinvigorated lately, with shows like Heartstopper offering a portrait of the kind of open, Out youth that so many of the viewers might have lacked, as if the show is a kind of wish fulfilment: here’s what you can imagine having, even if the real thing wasn’t quite as good. It feels almost like nostalgia, but not quite; or at least, not in the way its normally used or defined in pop culture. For all of the praise its gotten for being a feel-good story, Heartstopper feels like, for a certain subset of its viewers, that ancient Greek definition of nostalgia: the pain from an old wound. It might feel good to watch, but it can’t do that without inflicting a little pain on the audience - it works because it knows not everyone got to grow up like this.
The nostalgia of Stranger Things moves in this direction the closer it comes to embracing queerness - which it doesn’t do out loud, with actor Noah Schnapp confirming the “fan theory” around his character’s sexuality in an interview. Ironically, its the queerness being unsaid - or rather, being impossible to say out loud - that makes it work in the context of the show, that makes the neon-lit, synth-scored 80s of Hawkins become all too real, even for a moment. These aren’t the kinds of things that need to be confirmed by actors, or treated like a theory by fans looking to ship two characters together. Confirming a character’s queerness doesn’t make them any more queer, just like having them not define themselves out loud doesn’t stop them from actually being queer. Sometimes, saying the words out loud is too painful to do, and that’s okay. And sometimes that pain lingers on through decades, through the strange time machine of a show like Stranger Things. What’s most interesting about it is that it doesn’t offer anything to the audience about this pain in terms of how everything will turn out: it can’t say to them everything will be okay because it might not be.
What nostalgia normally offers is a kind of comfort, like a remix of history; it can take things that seemed bleak or inhospitable and say it will be okay this time. In a way, this is what Heartstopper does, even if the nostalgia for that viewers is only for a time that’s ten or fifteen years ago - like the moment in Noah Baumbach’s post-graduation slacker comedy Kicking and Screaming where a character says he’s nostalgic for something that hasn’t happened yet because it will be better in his memory. But there’s a limit to this kind of wistful nostalgia, and there are certain things that it won’t be able to withstand. For Stranger Things, a show defined by nostalgia, as fed through a pop-culture-will-eat-itself series of cultural references, that moment comes when the references run out; when there’s no moment or example the show can turn to. There were no anguished, angry, queer young men in the films that are the sacred texts of Stranger Things, and the show can’t be nostalgic towards something that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist.
Words: Sam Moore
