not quite strange nostalgia

“Nos­tal­gia is an ill­ness for those who haven’t re­al­ized that to­day is tomorrow’s nos­tal­gia.”
—Zeena Schreck
 

Upon watch­ing this third sea­son of Stranger Things (2019), I be­gan to no­tice that only the adults that lis­tened to the kids were of any con­se­quence. They didn’t wax philo­soph­i­cal about their eras. Hop­per didn’t prat­tle on and on about Led Zep­pelin.

And some­thing hit me, is this show us­ing nos­tal­gia to con­demn it?

For starters if Eggo Waf­fles, Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toons, and neon lit ar­cades were peo­ple, they’d re­sem­ble me (see pic). And ad­mit­ted­ly I’m a lil off.

“Holy shit, did you just make a He-Man ref­er­ence ?”
“Your ob­ser­va­tions did­n’t age well … you didn’t age well.”

Peo­ple shouldn’t be en­ti­tled to the thir­ty year cy­cles that me­dia of­ten in­dulges in. Back to the Fu­ture (’85) looked at the 1955, Some Like It Hot (’59) took place in the 1929, and Austin Pow­ers (’97) start­ed in 1967.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the most comedic of my ex­am­ples high­lights my point. Austin Pow­ers kind of shows that you can’t just re­mem­ber the high­lights of an era. Austin was a kind of skeevy. He ac­tu­al­ly comes to terms with him­self in the film and spends the lat­ter half apol­o­giz­ing to his col­leagues. In com­par­i­son Dr. Evil makes a much eas­i­er tran­si­tion. He just has to ad­just his ran­som rate for in­fla­tion.

But Stranger Things feels too easy. Those kids are not from the 80s. They’re so much bet­ter than we were. They’re blind to dif­fer­ences in every ca­pac­i­ty.

Case in point: If you were a brown, weird, re­li­gious kid in the 80s you would NEV­ER find more than one friend, and even they would look the oth­er way as you were force fed grass be­cause your mom made you wear a cow shirt to school (ac­tu­al mem­o­ry).

Stranger Things isn’t the 80s be­cause the 80s sucked! Peo­ple were ca­su­al­ly racist, ex­treme­ly xeno­pho­bic and ho­mo­pho­bic back then. And yes, our cur­rent era has that but that’s only be­cause an 80s icon is pres­i­dent.

In Austin Pow­ers and Hop­per fash­ion I looked at my­self with a crit­i­cal eye. Nos­tal­gia is a prob­lem.

It’s like en­ter­ing the base­ment of a burn­ing house. You can’t re­treat into the past if you want to thrive in the fu­ture.

Les­son learned.

No more He-Man jokes. Talk less. Lis­ten more. Learn from peo­ple who are younger than you. That’s free tu­ition in fu­ture school.
 
 

—louis her­nan­dez

Flom­mist Louis Her­dan­dez is ob­sessed with go­ing Bauhaus and be­com­ing The Ma­chine. Prefer­ably a drill press. Copy­right © 2019 Louis Her­nan­dez.

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