Nostalgic Things

To give you all a little view into the window of my personal life, I’m currently earning my Master of Business Administration while working full time. After a stressful spring semester juggling work and 12 credit hours of classes, I decided to take the summer semester off for a break until the fall semester begins and enjoy some indoor leisure time binging on Netflix. One of my binge sessions included watching the much-talked-about Stranger Things over the course of four days.  

The series is set in Indiana of the early 1980s with four young boys whose past-times include playing 10-hour campaigns of D&D, talking over ham radio, and riding bikes through the woods. One of the boys goes missing and his three friends set out to find him, encountering shadowy government agents, monsters, and a mysterious girl with psychic powers along the way. 

Was it good? Very good! It doesn’t quite reach that sublime level of The Wire or Breaking Bad, but Stranger Things is extremely satisfying television.

What impressed me the most about Stranger Things was its attention to the details of the decade in which it’s set. Everything in this show reeks of the Reagan Era from the clothes, to the soundtrack, to the interiors, to the camera angles. Even the titles in the opening credits look like they were pulled directly from an 80’s sci-fi paperback sitting haphazardly on the shelf of a used bookstore.

Given the show’s tremendous success, I have to wonder whether its creators, the Duffer Brothers, or Netflix knew that the 80’s setting would draw a lot of viewership.

In a recent article from Forbes on nostalgia marketing, there is a quote from Gregory Carpenter, the James Farley/Booz Allen Hamilton Professor of Marketing Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management in which he explains the psychological need for nostalgia:

"People become especially nostalgic when they are anxious about the present and, especially, the future."

With the looming United States presidential election in November and subsequent results, I suspect that more people will turn to shows such as Stranger Things  for comfort.