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I say that using so much of the “language” of the original movies is a crucial part of why Force Awakens was able to make a 45-year-old feel like a 6-year-old again.
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That movie was criticized for being too much of a retread of the originals, or being too much of an exercise in nostalgia to become a classic in its own right. The last time I can remember being so engrossed in something was - not that long ago, actually, since it was while watching The Force Awakens.
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I was completely on board for the whole thing, without that one-level-removed detachment I usually maintain when watching a movie or TV show. Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jaded Eye But Stranger Things made me feel like I was that kid again, completely wrapped up in the story and eager to find out what happened next, the same way I watched TV and movies in those innocent days before I took cinema studies classes and started a blog. As a result, it made me feel like a guy in his 40s reminiscing about the movies he loved as a kid. Super 8 seemed like it wanted me to appreciate 80s Spielberg from a respectful distance.
The Extra-Terrestrial to ripen from “spellbinding” and “uplifting” into “nauseatingly maudlin” and “difficult to watch.” Salem’s Lot scared the pants off me as a kid, but the scene that frightened me the most when I was eight years old seems pretty silly now. The story, though, is not the kind of thing they were making in 1984.Ĭalling it just a pastiche of scenes from 1980s movies ignores the fact that those scenes wouldn’t survive in 2016 unaltered. I don’t think the nostalgia is the end goal it’s a stylistic flourish, or (less charitably) a really effective gimmick.
Stranger Things, on the other hand, uses the “cinematic language” of the late 70s and early 80s to tell a modern story. It’s 2011 in “cinematic language” - the images are too sharp, and just look at those lens flares! - but it’s trying to tell a story that’s around 1984 in spirit. It’s like JJ Abrams’s American Graffiti, except he grew up loving filmmaking more than cars. Super 8 is a modern filmmaker’s attempt to reproduce the feel of late 70s to early 80s Spielberg. But essentially, I think Super 8 and Stranger Things are conceptual opposites. It makes sense, since they have so much in common. I’ve seen several people compare it to Super 8, which I liked a lot, and which is another extended love letter to early 80s Steven Spielberg.
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Instead of rehashing all of that, I’ll try to keep it (relatively) simple and just focus on how I think the references worked, and how they made the series resonate so much with me. Since I started writing this, there’ve been dozens of hot takes, explanations, recaps, and analyses written of the series.
In this case, a piece of art that’s both aggressively meta-textual and completely earnest. It’s the pop culture equivalent of the Higgs boson: proof of something that had previously been purely theoretical. But somehow Stranger Things doesn’t just strike the right balance between “inspiration” and “slavish recreation ” I genuinely think it synthesizes everything into a uniquely 21st century kind of storytelling. With all of that referencing going on, it could’ve ended up like nothing more than a dramatic adaptation of a VH-1 I Love the 80s special: a bunch of callbacks that amount to nothing more than vacuous nostalgia. Vimeo user Ulysse Thevenon made a compilation video with even more references in a side-by-side comparison.
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(If you haven’t yet watched all eight episodes, be forewarned it’s full of spoilers even from the first entry). On Vulture, Scott Tobias made a list of film references in the series. There’s hardly a single shot or character or situation that doesn’t in some way reference something from pop culture during the age when Amblin Entertainment Ruled the Earth. Stranger Things is so blatantly, aggressively an homage to the early 1980s that it’s amazing it works at all.
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