*** Following post contains minor spoilers for Stranger Things ***
As a child of the ’80s, it’s fun to see film and TV finally start to explore that era beyond the hyper-capitalism and hair bands. What hasn’t been fun is watching a bankrupt industry apparently devoid of creativity attempt to appropriate the iconography of that same era to suit whatever modern day narratives a studio or director wants to attach to it, whether it’s for profit or for politics.
Stranger Things, the eight-episode series currently on Netflix, is every bit as good as everyone around you is telling you it is. No film or television series set in the 1980s has ever captured the nuance of it quite like Stranger Things has. The production design is flawless, the acting — and more specifically the dialogue given to the actors — isn’t tailored to modern sensitivities about bullying or sexism.
Characters talk how people and especially teens and pre-teens actually talk. The attention to detail on everything from bicycles to basements gives it an air of authenticity. Though Stranger Things pays clear and direct homage to films like Amazing Stories, The Goonies, Close Encounters, Nightmare on Elm Street, Jaws, ET & Stephen King’s It and Stand By Me, it never blatantly appropriates any of those stories in a way that feels coerced or fabricated. It borrows the best elements of those stories, combines them and pushes on to tell its own original story. The cult hit film It Follows accomplished this same task last year.
Now at the other end of the nostalgia spectrum, we have the Ghostbusters remake. Lady Ghostbusters attempted to simply cash in on the sentimentality of its 1980s predecessor, using the same logo and iconography of the original (proton packs, Echto-1, etc.) and basically note for note just retelling the exact same story. It certainly attempted to give lip service to the original with cameos and winks, but the filmmakers had no appreciation of the source material. They attempted to take a proven cultural entity and make it their own, and it simply didn’t work. It didn’t work within the confines of what they were trying to accomplish with their film, and it didn’t work at the box office.
The combativeness on social media of director Paul Feig toward critics and fans of the original era and film made clear that he had no interest in their feelings, writing off any criticism off as internet trolling and bullying. The lesson for Hollywood going forward with remakes (A gender-swapped Splash is in the works and a gender-swapped Weird Science has been tossed around) is that a project is much more effective, and will be much more successful, by embracing the fans of source material, as opposed to simply brushing them aside, labeling and calling them names.
Paul Feig was never interested in the nostalgic attachments fans of the original Ghostbusters had because he simply wasn’t making a new Ghostbusters for them and was pretty forthright about it. Lady Ghostbusters was simply made to satisfy a commercial and political agenda. Any doubts of that went out the window when the official Ghostbusters Twitter account blasted out Hillary Clinton’s campaign hashtag and compared the actresses to Clinton’s history-making Presidential nomination.
While the Duffer Brothers quietly preoccupied themselves with carefully crafting a detailed homage to what came before them, Ghostbusters was attempting to erase it, while simply attaching itself to an election year narrative and a politician. Stranger Things doesn’t worry about the political PC ramifications of calling a teenage girl a slut, because that’s what teenagers do. Feig meanwhile tormented himself with telling an ethnic joke because he just thought he might offend too many Irish people. In the end he decided to keep it, simply because he felt like he was breaking down the walls of racism and sexism in society.
The problem for Feig is that heroism in science fiction isn’t some great glass ceiling to be cracked. Sarah Connor in Terminator and Ripley from Alien are both prime examples of female heroines in ’80s movies, and neither role felt contrived or shoehorned in simply to satisfy 13 percent of the population that identifies as a feminist. Stranger Things borrows heavily from both Terminator and Alien as well in cinematography, musical scoring and shot framing.
Twelve-year-old Millie Brown (as the telekinetic Eleven) gives a more heartfelt and emotional performance with limited dialogue than Kate McKinnon does leaning into shots and making funny faces. The character of Barb (played by actress Shannon Purser, herself a Molly Ringwald dead ringer), the ill-fated best friend of the teen heroine, has become an internet sensation — not because she stands on the shoulders of feminism while warning her best friend about the dangers of staying over at a boy’s house. It’s because everyone knows a girl like Barb from high school — and if you shake your head saying you didn’t have a friend like Barb, it’s because you were Barb.
This is what Stranger Things got about nostalgic revisionism that Ghostbusters simply didn’t. While Ghostbusters was attempting to both cash-in on and co-opt the nostalgia of the original, while pushing away the virtues of fans who made it a cultural icon, Stranger Things was able to harness love for the genre and the material before it. Ghostbusters by just about every commercial measuring stick, failed. Stranger Things is a word of mouth hit of the summer.
