that is a good point and [quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:17, topic:84745”]
the Duffer Brothers heavily researched the era and its cultural tropes (by necessity, since they weren’t born until 1984)
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I didn’t know that.
True here, too. Just three, then four channels of terrestrial British TV and no VCR until the 90s…so despite being older than the Duffers (although still not enough to have any ‘at the time’ memories of, say, ET), I guess it’s like how Star Wars or Indiana Jones being on TV at Christmas was a big thing for years and years after they came out, so cultural references lasted a bit longer than they do now, perhaps?
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Reading the criticism has, oddly enough, made me feel better about season 2. Initially I felt that Stranger Things would be better as an anthology series like American Horror Story with each season being an entirely new story. I felt the kids had been through enough. And while I knew there would be fallout I thought I’d be happier leaving some mysteries unsolved.
I get why @noahdjango describes the handling of Barb’s death as “more than a little off” but I liked the unsettling nature of it. I didn’t expect Barb to die and when it became clear she wasn’t coming back I thought, wow, all bets are really off. It left me wondering who was going down next–and all but certain Will was gone too.
Now, though, I find myself looking forward to season 2 even more because season 1 is simply the beginning of something much bigger.
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So since you weren’t always aware of the moments when the show was winking at you with a musical or cinematic reference to some artifact from the 80s, did the story work for you? I find myself in agreement with most of what Collins is saying in the article, that by borrowing so very many plot elements (and focus points) from so many other works of the period, it loses the focus needed to pack any kind of narrative wallop. Instead it just seems like a threadbare quilt stitched together from vintage Alien and E.T. and The Thing bedsheets.
(If they ever made bedsheets themed on The Thing, I’d buy a California King set today!)
It’s important to me as well, but I prefer it when it’s not so damned self-conscious.
I can’t fault them too much for that. Those Baby Boomers of genre cinema and fiction, the Steves King & Spielberg, the Joe Dantes, the John Carpenters, the George Lucases, they all got their inspiration from what they themselves grew up with, which was old Universal horror movies and Flash Gordon serials of the 30s and 40s rerunning on TV, in addition to the sci-fi and horror flicks they saw at Saturday matinees in the 50s. I remember seeing E.T. as a twelve-year-old in 1982, not too much older than Henry Thomas (who played Elliott) himself. I lived in a Southern Californian suburban housing tract indistinguishable from the one in the movie, and my buddies and I even habitually rode our bikes down the graded pads that didn’t yet have houses built on them, just like in the movie:
In so many ways, E.T. felt like a movie that was made expressly for me, though I never particularly liked it. (I found it insufferably mawkish and sentimental, with Williams’ most saccharine score.) But even I found myself being nostalgic for movies of and about earlier eras than my own. I can’t fault the Duffers too much for being enamored by 1983 and that era’s Spielberg and Carpenter movies; I totally get it. And there’s a lot to enjoy from that era and its aesthetic. (One of the things I appreciated by Stranger Things was that it didn’t try to fetishize everything from the 80s as being “classic” or “vintage” the way Ready Player One did. Let’s face it: huge swaths of Reagan-era culture sucked hard, both then and today.
I didn’t either, until I looked it up this morning. I was curious to see if they happened to be of my generation and just wanting to relive their childhoods vicariously through the movie, or if this movie were just aimed at GenX viewers by someone seeking to exploit our nostalgia. I was bummed, but not as surprised as I thought I should have been. Not because I think they would have been better filmmakers if they were a decade and a half older. Just because I think people who lived through the 80s and the movies made then would have absorbed the lesson that Collins thinks those movies imparted. Though maybe not. Surely there are just as many cynical opportunists in my generation as there are in others. Still, ST keeps giving me the impression that its nostalgia construct came before its story, and that’s a bummer.
I sure would like to think so. Still, I’ve been burned too many times in the past. It’ll be great if they know where they’re going with this, and it’s a satisfying payoff. It’ll suck if they’re just being handed a bucket of cash by Netflix to “give 'em some more of that.”
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yeah, man, I honestly felt engaged most of the time. I mean, it’s not the best show I ever watched, but I liked it and watched it all in 2 or 3 days. In contrast, I liked Mr. Robot but never finished the season because it seemed like they were stretching it out to string me along, I lost interest. Maybe it’s just subjective, but ST seemed well-paced to me. And I really did like MR.
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I’m glad it worked for you. It’s not really fair of me to insist it be at least as satisfying as Alien, The Thing, Poltergeist, Stand By Me, and the novel IT, but when it evokes all of those things for me in the first half-hour, the comparisons are bound to follow, and no movie can be all of those things.
I’d rather it just eased off a bit on the references, and just tried to tell its own story in its own way, even as a period piece. I think it would have succeeded better for me if it had.
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yeah, I think I would have been more put-off if I’d noticed all that, too. I pretty much forgot about Poltergeist, even though I saw it back then. I’m probably ~6 yrs younger than you, because I remember seeing ET in the first grade.
ETA: by the way, can anyone tell me who played Barb in the skit?
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I think it’s Jack McBrayer.
Edit: It was A.D. Miles, a writer for Fallon.
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I really enjoyed ST, your criticism is entirely valid… But Alien and Stand By Me are beyond iconic, and a yuuuge bar to set. I appreciate the quirky love letter they put together.
(I contend that no space slasher film has aged better than Alien)
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No one who has actually lived through the 80s as a teen looks back on it fondly, hence why we all ended up becoming cynical gen-x’ers in the 90s.
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I enjoyed binge watching ST at my parent’s place a few weeks ago. Maybe not the greatest thing ever, but it was well done and kept my interest. It helped that I was not going “ZOMG nostalgia!” because I didn’t care about that.
Anyway, this skit I think is beyond terrible. Cringeworthy even!
Edit: didn’t intend this as a reply to Clifford
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