Interesting post, Virginia. I believe your closing observation - about GenXers identifying with their younger selves - actually gets very much to the crux of the matter. For me, what Stranger Things has exposed - at least in part - is the degree to which youth / teenage life was so heavily coded in film and TV of the 1980s, and that these codes remain in play today, thus functioning for both nostalgic adults and younger viewers alike. While social phenomena like rites-of-passage have always existed in human cultures, the modern concept of ‘adolescence’– as a category – is itself still relatively young. Though prior media ‘modellings’ of youth culture existed – e.g. Rebel Without A Cause, etc. – I’d suggest that the broader cultural understanding of teenage life that we still work with today coalesced in the audio-visual cultures of the 1980s. In my view, it was primarily in the mainstream films of the 1980s that the most prevalent and influential codes for this still emerging category of adolescence came into being. And, despite seismic cultural change in the intervening decades, those codes largely still remain intact. Digital culture has not so much altered how those codes work as enhanced and extended them. Nevertheless, I believe you’re entirely right: the identificatory structures in Stranger Things are more complex than they were in the older films that the show references. However, I think the codes that inform those structures remain largely the same. In a weird way, the nostalgia at work in Stranger Things is a nostalgia for something that has never faded from view. In some ways we never left the 1980s. It’s always there beneath the surface of our reality – just like the ‘upside-down’ alternative reality in Stranger Things. (Which might just be another way of saying there are a lot of stalled adolescents in the world.)

Virginia, Thank you for your post and for kicking off this week's discussion on Nostalgic Media. When I start to think of the role Nostalgia plays in contemporary media, television specifically, and Stranger Things in particular, the designed manifestation and application starts to feel quite produced (even as it works magic upon audiences and critics). In some of my previous analyses of this series, I play with the concept of period pieces (nostalgic artifacts) as the raw materials of a contemporary genre mixing process. Following this logic, I see connective tissue in how you bring in varying generational character (and audience) groupings as an extension of this formula. You also bring in some rich excerpts from the Duffer Brothers interviews. I would love to read the interview in full if you could add a hyperlink below. Just as the interview and your post reference Propp, I have sensed a great deal of Structuralist Theory underneath the surface of their story.