Nostalgia, Memory Mining, and the Reality of Evil

Nostalgia is the activity of the meaning-seeker, broadening us out to see and feel and hear and believe. Nostalgia opens us back up to meaning.

I ended my last post on Stranger Things with this paragraph: 

In my next post, I will explore the intersection of this notion of technology unleashed, with the idea of nostalgia, in both its positive and negative variations. I will argue why Stranger Things is worthy of our attention, and flesh out a notion I will call “Mere Nostalgia.” We need to talk about the strangeness of things, and Stranger Things affords such an opportunity. We must “go back” and find out, vis a vis Mere Nostalgia, what we have missed. 

The show continues to “colonize” my mind and I have not been able to put it away. And besides, I promised a follow up, so here goes.  

Nostalgia is not the mechanism by which cynical ad men coopt the limbic nerve to move product.¹ Nostalgia is not a cope to obfuscate a too-dreary present with the gauzy memories of a “before times.” Nostalgia is the activity of the meaning-seeker, bent on finding something lost in the past which is necessary for today. It is, as Clay Routledge calls it, “memory mining for significance.” It is the search for things that were meaningful and need to be resurrected. Nostalgia is a pragmatic, future-oriented activity to open up things that have become stuck and inaccessible in the present. 

I enjoy trips down memory lane as much as the next guy, but this particular show is doing more than serving up junk food for the Gen X crowd, a guilty pleasure for the post 50 life. The last season hit more notes, even catapulting Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” to the number one spot on the charts a mere 36 years after it was first released. 

My good friend (and true OG Kate Bush fan) Jessica Mesman wrote this piece just after the release of the first season, noting that Stranger Things was hitting all the notes of our analog past and does so with the backdrop of the felt need for adventure and meaning. Her piece really holds up, invoking Spielberg, Stephen King, Freaks and Geeks, and the “pitch-perfect” soundtrack. The subsequent three seasons only broaden out those shoots from the first season. 

But what is going on here? What is the show doing? An equally perplexing question is why has it struck such a chord? 

In my prior post about the show I got a good bit of pushback from a few debunkers, dismissing the show out of hand as trash or overhyped. They always start off like this: “The show is just...” The “just” is the acid. Maybe they mean what they say, but it sure does feel like cynical posturing. These dismissals say as much about Twitter as anything. The comments that grate the most are those that do so under the smear of “nostalgia,” as if nostalgia is a kind of “beneath-me” weakness; soft feelings for soft minds. 

But as anyone who has set out to write a story knows, the varieties of choices the writer must make are all consequential. The biggest choice for a show like Stranger Things is setting it in the past. 1983, to be exact, in cave of a basement, a subterranean safe-space far away from the normie-world of the upstairs where mom makes nightly dinner and dad snoozes through the evening news. In the cave the boys are knee deep in the classic RPG Dungeons & Dragons, living out adventures, looking for treasure, and fighting off the Demogorgon. (Note the pattern)

As Robert McKee remarks in his masterpiece Story, we only set stories in the past when we can’t tell the truth plainly whilst set in “the now.” He says  

Therefore, the best use of history, and the only legitimate excuse to set a film in the past and thereby add untold millions to the budget, is anachronism—to use the past as a clear glass through which you show us the present. 

The truth we must see is too hot to set in the present, so we are given a screen into the “before times,” providing us some necessary distance with which to see more clearly. 

But why 1983? What is it about the “now times” that we are getting wrong? What is in the “before times” that we need for the “after times”? 

The show engages in a kind of double-nostalgia in which the characters are memory-mining in the present of 1983 just as we are memory-mining with a show set in 1983 but drawing out resonances and meanings necessary for now. 

So the Company’s quest is to rescue Will from the Upside Down. Joyce’s quest is to convince everyone that she is not crazy. What we are meant to rescue is of ultimate importance.

Stories broaden us—they provide us a mechanism by which we can see ourselves more clearly, abstracting out of fantastic fictive particulars, something universal and useful. A good story well told (and well received) increases our capacities to see and hear and feel and believe. They are powerful psycho-technologies. Dismissing them as “mere” entertainment ignores their enduring reality and their real power. Nostalgia opens us up to see and hear and feel and believe better, but not in a proscribed way. We are not some kind of meat-computer, waiting to be properly programmed. Stories are not programs but experiences. 

The Duffer Brothers have been forthright in remarking that the show is a great homage to the 80’s, but what they are doing is invoking old things that once made us feel something because we have forgotten. We must go a-mining in the “before times.” 

The “before times” is a phrase itself coined in an early episode of the first iteration of Star Trek in which a group of kids tell Kirk and the gang about the “before times” when their parents and adults had not yet been obliterated by a deadly pathogen...yes, really.²  But it is also a world about to be ripped open by a portal to an alternate and malignant reality—The Upside Down. And they are powerless against it. Hawkins has become a pass-through. In this 80’s idiom, we are flung back into a world when things meant, and so it provides us little breadcrumbs that lead us back out of a maze of forgetfulness. 

These “before times” resonate particularly powerfully because we see a world with no smartphones, no internet, no social media, and as Jessica points out, parents neglected their kids. Perhaps the capturing of a truly Gen X world resonates because we lucky few have these memories of that world and we know what we have lost. As James Poulos has pointed out, we proud few who lived then and are raising kids now have a responsibility to witness to a different way, a pre-digital way. An analog way. 

But I do not want to suggest that this phenomenon has been generated solely for technological reasons, nor political ones. Stranger Things appears to be a way of crawling back to retrieve something even more vital that has been lost. The grungy, brown and orange world of Joyce Byer’s house is almost refreshingly homey. Even the Wheeler’s much nicer, more upscale home is not exactly chic. The whole world of Hawkins, Indiana is just so dang plain and normal and unimpressive and textured. We are exhausted by the frictionless world we’ve created for ourselves and instead of luxuriating in its clean beauty, we are left feeling sterile and empty. Hawkins—small, pathetic, sleepy town that it is—really is the epicenter for an open portal to The Upside Down, the flashpoint in a cold-war gone mad between two super-powers. There is nothing quite cozy about that. 

So then, what are we not seeing about our now, now?  

We are not seeing the nihilism that threatens our now. The temptations to believe that nothing matters, the temptations to believe that nothing means, are signposts of a civilization in a death-spiral. This is precisely what Satan whispers in Eve’s ear in Paradise Lost.

Evil pounces when meaning fades. 

Like rust, evil never sleeps. No matter how much we ignore evil, or pretend it does not exist, or insist that it has been kept at a comfortable distance, it still has designs on us. The show shows it. Or re-presents it. This spelunking into the mines of has opened up a portal for evil that has leaked out into the Right Side Up. We too must contend.

The mendacity of man, in concert with inter-dimensional evil forces, renders us vulnerable to a malignancy more overwhelming than our various copes and dopes. We distract ourselves through hobbies, or sex, or fandom, or drugs, or careers. But these are therapeutics. Therapeutics are death delays. Evil requires action and eradication, and heroes willing to rise up. We need healing, we need meaning. 

So indeed, something is wrong—something has been forgotten. We must learn to see again. We have forgotten vital things—which for us have become stranger things—at our peril. Nostalgia opens us back up to meaning. 

1. I should add that ad men DO engage in this type of nostalgia. In a must see clip, check out the great Don Draper and the Carousel.

2. There are a host of fascinating parallels between the "mind virus” in season 2 & 3, the hive mind of the Mindflayer, and the pandemic we are fighting to emerge from. Perhaps more later.