The Political Conservatism of Stranger Things

By Zack Boehm on August 3, 2016

Stranger Things, the latest in Netflix’s ever enlarging brood of original programming, is a show that basks in the tawny, Christmas-light glow of the 1980s. It’s a show that I’m almost certain my mom would love. It’s a show that bends, strains, and contorts itself in a nostalgic dance so balletic and vivid that the only thing betraying its contemporaneity is that sweet, sweet 1080p.

via ign.com

On a superficial level, Stranger Things is a near perfect homage to 1980s storytelling. From the brooding, Technicolor title sequence to the blocky white typeset of the opening credits to the faultless casting to the immediately redolent textures and styles, the show is a meticulously constructed piece of ersatz eighties fiction. Rather than manufacturing some sarcastically kitschy, plastically banal portrait of the decade, The Duffer Brothers, the show’s creators, render a 1980s that feels familiar and authentically lived-in. The show generally avoids ham-fisted visual signifiers and overdetermined sign posts. There are no blown out perms or gaudy neon tracksuits to bludgeon us over the head with reminders that “yes, this show takes place in the very strange and funny looking decade of the 1980s.” The show’s creators are smart about how they paint the picture. They’re fluent in the decade’s nuanced iconography, and they understand, to the show’s great benefit, how to leverage that fluency into the creation of a world with subtlety and depth.

However, an effective homage can’t get by on look alone, and even more important than the Duffer Brothers’ polished visual intelligence is their deep, structural understanding of how stories were told in popular 1980s film. For The Duffer Brother’s to have succeeded in creating a creditable pastiche of eighties storytelling, they first needed to understand the broader contexts which informed those stories, and to understand those contexts is to recognize how fundamentally the philosophy of American conservatism influenced the dramatic sensibilities of 1980s storytellers.

via theverge.com

In the US, the 1980s were the decade of Reagan, the Cold War, and Spielberg. It was a time where political conservatism flourished under the auspices of perhaps the most popular Republican president in history besides Lincoln. Reaganism was the defining feature of 1980’s American politics, and it was his presidency, which lasted nearly the entire decade, that arguably popularized the principals and precepts that characterize modern conservatism (although The Donald’s subversion of any and all political orthodoxy may be signaling another epochal shift on the right). Against the backdrop of the Cold War’s civilizational conflict narrative, a number of patriotic Americans were eager to adopt the ideas propounded by their charismatic president, and inevitably these ideas began to sift into our cultural identity, to influence the way that we told stories about ourselves. This much is clear in Spielberg’s ET, Stranger Things’ most obvious inspiration, where the capital “G” Government plays a decidedly nefarious role.

The conservatism of Reagan’s 1980s seared itself onto American mythology, and it seems that the Duffer Brother’s internalized this. There are echoes in Stranger Things of ET’s vigilant, almost manic suspicion of government (and, to an extent, government funded scientific research). The government in Stranger Things is positioned as a looming, impenetrably secretive, malevolent specter, a distant and corrupted evil who at any moment is liable to snatch your loved one and subject her to years of cruel and devastating experiments. Indeed, even state government is looked at askance in the world of Stranger Things, and ultimately the only noble actors are the gruff, boozy local police chief and a coterie of young, inventive DIYers. Stranger Things sees average individuals being tormented and terrorized by a cold, unfeeling government agency whose sole priority is to exploit the vulnerable in order to develop weapons that will ensure the preservation of its own despotic power, and our heroes only triumph when they mount a violent insurgence against their oppressors.

via ign.com

This kind of deep, abiding distrust of impersonal institutions that are seen as manifestly evil is the same basic storytelling trope that appeared in eighties movies like ET, and it is the same political presupposition that constitutes the framework of modern conservatism. What makes Stranger Things so evocative of popular eighties storytelling is how closely it hews to the political sensibilities that were motivating actual eighties storytellers.

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