Stranger Things: Is it so naive to wonder...?

I’m smitten with Stranger Things. I know I’m not alone. I also know my fervent and declarative adoration for these 17 episodes of supernatural mystery and suspenseful sci-fi triggers eye-rolls from some... those who are the shrewder detractors who pin upon its all-out indulgence of that delicious, dopamine-splashing, intangible reverie we call “nostalgia.”

It (nostalgia) basically is a drug; something I’m high on… But not in some harmful or unhealthy way, like a Dream Cruise, or mythologizing the past as a Utopia. It's an emotion. And it's not a lost youth, it's just a lost sensibility....

I just wrapped up the second season, likely several days behind others even more enthusiastic or obsessed than I who binged all nine episodes. I’m not interested in mentioning or analyzing the plot or critiquing the overall narrative arc of each character, so there is no spoiler to worry about.... I just want to key in on, immerse myself, even…, in the feeling of this show, the swoon of wistful and woozy emotions that it stirs up in me.

You'll be passionate about very few things later in your life than with that same rare kind of fleeting passion you could channel in your youth. The muscle of naivety atrophies in adulthood. The only thing that ignites comparable poignancy in you through your 20's and 30's will be music. Should be music! More on that below...

Stranger Things comes right out and flagrantly taunts you with how nostalgic it wants to be... Four of its main characters are riding Schwinn's in full Ghostbuster jumpsuits with proton packs singing that 1984 film's theme song as they ride up to middle school on a tawny autumn morning. Ray Bradbury would have loved this show. He was all about the dopamine that nostalgic-autumnal-musings could bring...the energy of youth, and an existence that did not yet know cynicism.

So, yes, it is also about Lovecraftian terror manifesting in unassuming locales (like the burbs) where tween and teens have to creatively strategize a battle-plan and often rise to heroic occasions to save each other from real peril. It's a nice meditation on being scared of actual monsters in terms of putting your teenage dramas in a cafeteria into perspective.

But the show, as a unveiled manipulation of your nostalgia, is very much about reeling you back to that inexplicable and impossible-to-fight-off feeling of the warm and fuzzies that come from triggers like vintage technology, old movie posters, 30-year-old pop songs on the soundtrack, and quintessential depictions of coming-of-age. And the show, technically speaking, in its framing, camera angles, lighting, music cues, and its talented young cast, captures that energy in all its jubilant awkwardness, melodramatic overreactions, heartbroken tantrums....

More than anything, it's a framing of a companionship unlike anything else you'll ever establish in the years ahead...

I'm obsessed with different creations from the world of pop culture for different reasons. For Stranger Things, it's because I can revert..., and yeah, I know a psychologist is going to call that unhealthy..., but revert back to a state where I wasn't panicked. Mild panic accompanies every day's existence of adulthood. It's a nervous casserole of doubt and uncertainty. For some, it can take you back to when you had a much narrower worldview, but for me, I'm trying to use the emotions of nostalgia to meditate on how I can be living my life NOW....

Nostalgia gets a bad rap because its seen as a recycling, or an escape to the past where one can hide. But why am I so blissful after watching Stranger Things? Because it allows me to fully embody what it felt like to be blissfully ignorant. Slow dancing with someone and not having to say anything? Not knowing what to say, really, but not actually feeling so compelled to say something because your adult brain abhors a vacuum of sounds.

Or am I so blissful because I haven't fully quantified how disenchanting a post-Internet-world can be... The digital world is too much with us... ? Do I miss the simplicity and the quiet that much? Landlines? Stereos?

Am I really, most of all, smitten with how these charming characters spend so much time together, in person, shoulder to shoulder, at kitchen tables or in basements or in cabins or in Sheriff's Broncos..., sharing the myriad exhilaration of their every day existence..., be it a science project, trick-or-treating, a first kiss, or be it outsmarting an inter-dimensional hive-mind monster with carnivorous minions before it infects their whole town and kills everyone, together as a team! ... STILL... You feel the companionship.

But you also feel how fun it is....

What I'm saying is... This show makes me miss being in the moment. It makes me want to get back to practicing that idea of being present... And living the hell out of every moment, even the awkward ones, just as I did when I was younger... While that changed as I aged, the one thing that never changed was the goosebumps, the sensory meridian response, I get when I listen to music...

So, going off of that warm and fuzzy feeling, I put together a playlist. It has nothing to do with Stranger Things. It has everything to do with the feelings that that show arises in you... It is emo music without having any actual emo on it. It is naive, heart-on-the-sleeve, twitter-pated stuff that makes you feel like you're falling in love, or at least that makes you feel like your head' swimming with dopamine... And the sighs come easy... Alvvays isn't at all close to the orbit of the Stranger Things universe; but it's "Dreams Tonite" is a great place to start.