Stranger Things

Goonies

Like many in America and probably the world I recently spent a chunk of time binge watching Netflix season 3 of “Stranger Things.”  It's a fun show that most directly in my mind connects me to the “Goonies” a kind of seminal experience of my child hood.  It came out in 1985 just as I was graduating high school and while most of the kids depicted were a tad younger than I, it still seemed to somehow frame my own childhood.  Maybe it was a last grasp at being young.  

“Stranger Things” harkens back to the same time period in its depiction of average American kids battling the evils of the world or in the case of “Stranger Things,” another world.  On the surface I find the plot doesn’t capture as much of me as the depiction of suburban America in the late 1970’s and 80’s.  The time that was mine.  The show does an amazing job of capturing the nuance of the time.  From music to iconic events and images.  It touches on the heartbeat of what it was to be a child during that time and how we saw the world.  Memories flood back to me as do the desires to explain what it all was.  Cultural references like Magnum PI to New Coke, crazy products, my first fast food jobs, to mall life.  Beaten up cars that were all that we had to drive in, they were all we could afford.  Suburban American life with neighbourhood friends playing board games to my first hot French kiss from Courtenay Longmire on the side of her garage while my parents waited for me in the driveway.  

It was a political world of “us vs them,” so easy to define.  We knew the Russians were the enemy, there was not much else to understand.  My girlfriend and my debate partner were Reagan loving Republicans while I was a hopelessly idealistic liberal.  Still we were all anti-Russian and beyond that the rest of the politics didn’t seem to matter much.  I still laugh every time I make a joke when a phone rings.  “I will get it!”  I yell out.  No one seems to understand as they pick up their cel phone and answer.  Anyone below 48 doesn’t remember the time when we only had one or two phones in a house attached to a wall.  Whenever it would ring it was a singular communication with the outside world that only the first to grab it would maintain.  Everyone was a secretary for everyone else as we scribbled messages that were likely unreadable.  Every call was subject to everyone else's ears as we crouched pulling the phone cord to its maximum extension and sat on the kitchen floor with our hand covering the mouth piece.  

I hate malls.  I hate everything about them.  I hate the parking lot dead zones that surround them.  I hate how they ruin towns, I hate the fake environment and the people that circulate in them.  All that said, when I watched them destroy a mall in season three I remembered and in a way, missed them.  When I was a boy everything was at the mall.  Everyone went there so it was likely you would see people you knew and the movie theatres were date activities.  It is weird to look at them alive in a show as I remembered them and at the same time know how dated they are today.  In Asia the mall lives on as a refuge from the heat, in America they are dying slow deaths as Amazon delivers package after package to our doors while we shop from our couch.  

It is strange to be 52 and find nostalgia for a period of time.  I am sure my parents felt the same way about the 60’s or the 50’s.  We used to see it in TV for them.  When I was a child the shows were Happy Days and Mash.  I used to ask my mom if life was really like Happy Days in the 50's?  She would then tell me how she was kicked out of Baylor University for smoking.  Regardless, these were shows that depicted the not so distant past and pulled them back to memories of their own youth.  

Somehow watching “Stranger Things” makes me nostalgic.  It pulled me back to a period of much more political clarity.  When divisions didn’t seem to be so great.  That said, like watching an episode of perfect American life depicted on Leave it to Beaver or I Love Lucy,  I know in my heart what I saw and what I felt in reality never was.  The world was never so simple and life was never so clear.  I was just young and the world seemed so new.  In reality my nostalgic feeling for a lost time of my youth is just another one of those “Stranger Things.”