Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss: Stranger Things and the Digital Gothic

Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss: Stranger Things and the
   Digital Gothic

   Jason Landrum

   Intertexts, Volume 21, Issues 1-2, Spring-Fall 2017, pp. 136-158 (Article)

   Published by University of Nebraska Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/itx.2017.0006

        For additional information about this article
        https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721369

[ Access provided at 6 Feb 2022 14:54 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss
                Stranger Things and the Digital Gothic

                             JASON LANDRUM

Released on Netflix in 2015, Stranger Things, created by Matt and Ross
Duffer, is set in the everytown of Hawkins, Indiana, in the year 1983.
The eight-episode first season and nine-episode second season follow
the adventures of four boys—Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), Will
Byers (Noah Schnapp), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), and
Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin)—and one girl, Eleven (Millie
Bobby Brown), as the boys go from just playing Dungeons & Dragons
to struggling with a real-life version of the popular fantasy role-playing
game. In the first episode the series’ three animating events happen; a
monster attacks the mysterious Hawkins National Laboratory, Will Byers
vanishes, and Eleven emerges from captivity, held for experiments at
the same lab as the monster. Throughout the remaining seven episodes,
the boys battle with the monster, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) does all
she can to get her son back, and Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour) helps
Joyce when no one else does. At the end of both seasons, the Duffer
brothers successfully fuse together the reality of Hawkins and the people
who live there with a world just beyond their grasp, a world of monsters,
darkness, and unexplained phenomena. The two worlds exist side by
side, but most of the citizens of Hawkins are unaware of this mysterious
world, a world the boys refer to as the Upside Down. In terms of the
narrative, Eleven and her telekinetic powers are the conduit between the
two worlds; aesthetically, the Duffers link these two worlds with lights,
specifically light bulbs powered by electricity, which flicker whenever the
two worlds intersect with each other.

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    Before any discussion of Stranger Things can move forward, however,
we must begin by reimagining what it was like to be in a videogame ar-
cade in the 1980s. We went to arcades in the mall, and these places were
separate worlds—darkened rooms full of flickering screens, in which we
could get lost for hours at a time. The time you spent in these dimly lit
and isolated worlds depended on a combination of factors: your amount
of quarters, your skill level, and the rules (or lack thereof) established
by your parents for how long you could be gone. The arcade was a place
to get lost in the various fantasy worlds of games like Frogger, Pac-Man,
and Galaga. Key to the arcade’s appeal was its separation from the rest of
the world. In the arcade, the most inadequate athlete or uncool mathlete
could be a conquering hero, a delicate fantasy always threatened by re-
entry into reality. Returning to the real world brought changes to our
bearing. When we emerged from the cocoon of the arcade, we squinted
our eyes and blinked until our sight readjusted, a physical reaction that
forced us to recognize that we had left the darkened room and to accept
the shock that went with our leaving the fantasy world for reality. Today,
in the digital era, videogames have changed significantly. People can now
play games as prosthetic extensions of their bodies. Videogames today
are like Pokemon Go, which uses digital technology to braid together
the real world with the fantasy world of the game. The two worlds are no
longer separate; instead, they operate together, the fantasy woven into
the fabric of our reality. In the article that follows, I would like to sug-
gest that the aesthetic appeal of Stranger Things rests on this distinction
between the arcade of the 1980s and digital mobile-phone technology of
the twenty-first century. Stranger Things is built like a new digital game
while masquerading as one from an arcade in the 1980s. It appeals to our
desire to separate from one world and get lost in the next, but it never
leaves us feeling like we will not return.
    A remarkable aspect of Matt and Ross Duffer’s Stranger Things is how
it activates a tapestry of signifiers from the 1980s. Indeed, each and every
one of these popular culture signifiers from the1980s are worthy of their
own individual discussion. The show’s playlist includes a range of well-
known music from the decade, bringing together punk, post-punk, pop,
and metal. Music by New Order, Joy Division, the Clash, Corey Hart,
the Bangles, Devo, and Ratt figure prominently in the plot and help

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provide richer meaning to the characters. The show employs visual cues
and references to movies made by Stephen Spielberg, John Carpenter,
Brian DePalma, and David Lynch. The storytelling and characters could
be borrowed from the pages of Stephen King novels and Dungeon &
Dragons campaigns. The score calls attention to composers like Tangerine
Dream and Harold Faltermeyer. I could probably fill the entire space of
this article listing all the references Stranger Things uses to nostalgically
replicate the world of the 1980s, but the aim of my argument is much
more limited. I am primarily interested in how Stranger Things digitally
recreates the analog technologies, signifiers, and mise-en-scène of the
1980s, and how these aesthetics relate to the idea of loss. Stranger Things
contains narrative and aesthetic techniques from the traditional Gothic
style, updated for the digital era, and the Duffer brothers follow a familiar
Gothic practice of haunting the present with strange and frightening
images of how we used to live. Typical of the digital Gothic, the story
and style are driven by braiding together the analog past with the digital
present, the former haunting the latter. In this essay, I argue that the
1980s operates not only as a historical referent for the story, but also
in similar ways to the show’s mysterious underside, the Upside Down.
In other words, Stranger Things nostalgically reminds us of a time, the
1980s, when we could actually get lost or go missing (in the positive and
negative sense of those ideas). It is as if the show opens up the possibility
of getting lost, but much like a Spielberg movie, brings back the missing.
The contrast between now and then is primarily technological. We live
in a time dominated by the idea that nothing should be lost, and all
digital technology obsessively concerns itself with this central aspect of
life. Digital technologies like GPS, cellphones, high-definition television,
Fitbits, and so on operate on the idea that loss should be impossible.
Stranger Things, therefore, relies on traditional Gothic tropes to scare us
with the idea of getting lost in the analog 1980s while constructing the
show with the totalizing potential of today’s digital technology.

   The Gothic Gaze

To better understand the ways in which Stranger Things depicts the po-
tential for loss as nostalgic, I want to combine the psychoanalytic con-

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                    139

cepts of Jacques Lacan with Gothic aesthetics. In its use of flickering
lights as the dividing line between the visible world of Hawkins, Indiana,
and the invisible world of the Upside Down, Stranger Things invokes a
series of Gothic signifiers designed to provoke our desire to see more
and less of the events surrounding the vanishing of Will Byers and the
emergence of Eleven, the young girl with telekinetic powers who escapes
the Hawkins Lab.
    Lacan refers to the objects that provoke our desire as the gaze, a
concept that has recently undergone significant revision from how it was
used in film theory prior to the twenty-first century. Theorists such as
Joan Copjec, Slavoj Žižek, and Todd McGowan have successfully rescued
Lacan’s conception of the gaze from its Foucauldinizing in the 1980s.
Prior to the twenty-first century, the gaze was often misunderstood and
misapplied. In its fundamental sense of the term, the gaze is a visual form
of the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. The gaze is a blank spot or
stain that occludes some portion of the things we look at, thus provoking
our desire to see more. In other words, we desire to see more because
we cannot see everything. Mari Ruti explains, “The Lacanian Gaze is
the very opposite of the mastering (male) Gaze that Mulvey analyzes:
the Lacanian Gaze destroys mastery, bringing with it the impotence of
unintelligibility.”1 Hugh Manon further simplifies the gaze by arguing it
is neither absence nor presence in the field of vision. Instead, he uses
the term partialness to show how the gaze is an object that arrests our
vision, not as an object fully perceived or fully grasped, but as an object
in the process of being revealed.2 For new Lacanian theorists, the gaze is
a partially revealed object-cause of desire in field of the visible.
    The new Lacanian conception of the gaze comes from a close and
faithful reading of Lacan’s anecdote about working on a fishing boat. The
story Lacan tells about himself serves as the foundation of his thoughts
on the gaze. As a young man Lacan took a job working on a fishing
boat, leaving behind the comfortable environment of his middle-class
and educated upbringing. In his words, he “wanted desperately to get
away, see something different, throw [himself] into something practical,
something physical, in the country say, or at sea.”3 He goes on to describe
daily boat trips and how they range from the dangerous to the dull. One
particular day on the boat, a fisherman named Petit-Jean pointed to an

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object floating in the water, a sardine can glittering in the sun, and asked
Lacan “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!” Lacan ex-
plains that Petit-Jean’s comment left him feeling unamused and suggests
the comment’s designed intent was to make him feel “rather out of place
in the picture” of the working-class men fishing for a living on this boat.4
For Lacan, the moment with the sardine can and Petit-Jean illustrates
how “the point of the Gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the
jewel. And if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the
screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot.”5 Petit-Jean’s inscrutable
comment about at whom the sardine can is and is not looking invokes
an anxiety in Lacan about his place in the boat and the fishing village. He
is only playacting at fishing, making Lacan, in his mind, feel as if he is
out of place, like the sardine can, in the village. But Lacan’s anxiety is also
provoked by the partialness of Petit-Jean’s comment and the can floating
in the water. He can only understand both by filling in the blank spots
with his imagined sense of self. Or, as Ruti explains, “The sardine can is
a vaguely unsettling object that looks back, a blank spot in the ocean’s
surface that distorts this surface in the same way that Lacan distorts the
surface of life in the fishing village; it’s an uncanny entity that signifies
that something is slightly off.”6 A partially revealed object, or an “uncan-
ny entity,” at the edge of our vision, signifying that “something is slightly
off,” is not only the best way to describe Lacan’s conception of the gaze,
but also works as an effective definition of the Gothic.
    At the center of Gothic art, architecture, and literature is a sense of
the past haunting the present. Whether it is an historical crime from the
past returning for revenge in the present, or a sacked and abandoned
religious edifice reminding us of past violent transgressions, the Gothic,
as an art form, provokes our anxiety for what used to be. But what we
see in the present never tell us the whole story of what happened in the
past. At best, the present form or its representation tells us a story that
we only partially engage because full engagement with the past misdeed
would invite engagement with a truly traumatic experience. Marc Ol-
ivier explains that the literary Gothic form is formed by an attachment
to a specific past. He argues that early Gothic literature almost always
situates its characters in the period of pre-Reformation England and
torments the living with the past as represented by specific places like

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                   141

ancient abbeys, churches, castles, or ancestral homes.7 Echoing Olivier,
Fred Botting explains the specific forms of torment we find in the Gothic
tradition: “In Gothic fiction certain stock figures provide the principal
embodiments and evocations of cultural anxieties. Tortuous, fragment-
ed narratives relating mysterious incidents, horrible images and life-
threatening pursuits predominate in the eighteenth century. Spectres,
monsters, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks and nuns,
fainting heroines and bandits populate Gothic landscapes as suggestive
figures of imagined and realistic threats.”8
   Botting, moreover, isolates the setting of a Gothic story as the locus
of trauma. Decaying, bleak, and full of hidden passageways, the abbeys,
churches, and castles of Gothic literature harken back to a past associated
with superstition, barbarity, and fear.9 Initiated by Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto and reaching a peak of popularity by 1810, Gothic fiction
traffics in anxieties created by events like revolution, industrialization,
urbanization, sexual progress, and scientific discovery. Novels like Ann
Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) plumbed
the anxious depths readers had about the rapidly changing world of
nineteenth-century England. Often set during the historical evolution
from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Gothic fiction represents
how the shadow of the former haunts the present of the latter. Manon
argues for the significance of these shadows and their aesthetic, not just
historic, meaning. Shadows, as Manon explains, exist on the limit of
knowledge in a Gothic text. When shadows appear, they insist that “over
there, a past peephole at the edge of our mundane reality, lies a gaping,
inscrutable beyond. In Radcliffe’s texts there exist inaccessible regions
that are implied, but beyond sight. Whatever we see, there is more to it.”10
Shadows partially evoke, in Gothic fiction, a sense that we know why
the haunting is taking place, but something ultimately blocks us from
the whole picture. That incomplete picture might be an understanding
of plot elements or historical context, but whatever is missing from the
picture, the Gothic form relies, from the eighteenth century to today, on
positing the darkness beyond that threatens enlightened, logical ways of
seeing and knowing in the present. A shadow emerging in Gothic fiction

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operates as a “structure that arrests our vision by making clear that things
are partly unclear”11—much like Lacan’s conception of the gaze.
    For all of its comparisons to Spielberg movies, King novels, and
Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, Stranger Things functions much more
like a nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Set in the Reagan 1980s and
during the waning days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the series
invites viewers to see the Cold War’s haunting fallout on our contemporary
twenty-first-century culture and politics. Like the monster unleashed
from the scientific overreach at the Hawkins National Laboratory, the
Cold War operates like a repressed historical referent standing ready to
always return as a reminder of why we live the way we do now. The Duffers
never engage the historical Cold War, except metaphorically, leaving
it to operate like a historical shadow, but the show runners do invoke
secret government programs like MK Ultra and Stargate, programs run
by the Central Intelligence Agency and US military, designed to teach
subjects to use their minds to, among other things, remotely view events
happening all over the world and employ psychokinesis as a weapon.
Both programs aimed to see and know more about Soviet activities
than the existing technological capability of US intelligence agencies.
In our contemporary era of total surveillance, these secret government
projects—as depicted by the character Eleven and the Hawkins National
Lab—seem barbaric, on the one hand, and woefully insufficient, on the
other. Like its nineteenth-century predecessors, Stranger Things posits
our Cold War past as a monster that escapes from a mysterious realm
that can no longer be adequately guarded by the institutions entrusted to
do so, casting a historical shadow on our present age. Finally, for the gaze
to be Gothic, the narrative requires an object arresting and blocking our
vision at the intersection of an unseeable, haunted past, which can only
partially be understood in the present.

   Lights and Loss

The haunting beyond represented by Cold War experimental practices
looms over Stranger Things, but it is the depiction of the parallel worlds
of Hawkins and the Upside Down that fuels the show’s connection to
the Gothic. As I explained in the previous section, the best way to un-

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                     143

derstand the concept of the gaze is the word partialness. In other words,
our desire for something we see (or hear, touch, or taste, for that mat-
ter) is guided by objects in the process of partially revealing themselves.
Therefore, the gaze sparks our visual desire precisely because it is partial
and not because it shows everything. Our visual desire is often arrested
by things that are unclear. Lights, however, are designed to show all by
illuminating a darkened room or street corner, thus allowing us to see all
that is there. When they flicker, they only partially reveal what is there,
thus arresting our vision and making us desire to see more. The flicker of
lights is central to the Duffers’ overall aesthetic design of the first season
of Stranger Things, and the flickering arrests the characters’ vision in a
partial revelation of the Upside Down.
    In the tropes and plot scenarios described in the previous section,
the Gothic makes the crucial point that the gaze is not on the side of the
subject, but on the side of the object. Typical desire allows subjects to feel
confident about walking into a room, looking around, taking things in,
and feeling like they are the center of things, but the Gothic encounter
typically exists to shatter the subject’s confidence with a half-seen object
of strangeness from which something seems to look back. The strange-
ness of Stranger Things emanates from Joyce Byers’s interaction with the
lights in her house and their connection to her lost son, Will. Joyce has
the ability to partially communicate with Will through the lamps in his
room and, later, the strings of Christmas lights she hangs throughout
the rest of the house. Nothing about Joyce’s interaction with the lights
leaves anyone feeling self-assured; instead, it makes all the characters
aware of the partialness of Will’s unseen presence. Moreover, the quasi-
Ouija board she draws on the wall of the living room further inflames
our sense of a haunting presence in the Byers home. At one point, Will
can be seen through the wall, trapped in a world beyond. Still later, the
monster appears in the Byers home coming through the walls and roof
to invade the reality of the characters. Each one of the moments where
the beyond is invoked is set-up by the flickering lights, a signifier of par-
tialness. When the flickering lights appear, they posit the sublime possi-
bility of a world beyond, in which Will is still alive and communicating
with his mother, but they also represent the limited access the characters
have to the Upside Down. Like Lacan’s conception of the gaze, the lights

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             Fig. 1.

activate our desire to see more while also being an obstacle to seeing all
there is to see.
   The first episode introduces and then repeats our encounter with the
Gothic gaze of the flickering lights and the haunting, inscrutable be-
yond in the pre-credit scenes. The structure of these three scenes effec-
tively operates throughout the ensuing eight episodes. In the opening
shot, the camera tilts down from a starry night sky to an extreme, high-
angle, long shot of the Hawkins National Laboratory. The Duffers seem
aware that shots of these kinds of Cold War–era government buildings
should resonate with American viewers today in the same way an aban-
doned, decaying Catholic monastery did for readers of Gothic novels in
nineteenth-century England (see Figure 1). This shot invokes a haunted
Cold War past when governments and corporations experimented with
limited analog technology, the rest of the population going about their
daily lives unaware of their sinister intent. In the second shot of Stranger
Things, we see flickering lights inside the lab. Cutting from the estab-
lishing shot to inside the lab, we see a closed, hatch-like door shrouded
in shadows made by the flickering fluorescent lights. We hear the hum
of experimental technology—a type of hum typical of magnetic-based
analog technology, ubiquitous to these kinds of locations—and watch as
the camera dollies toward the closed door. The hum is interrupted by the
door bursting open and a scientist running toward an elevator through
a maze of indistinguishable government hallways. The scene ends with
two point-of-view shots: one of the scientist looking at the half-lit and
mysterious hallway, and another of him looking up at the creepy noise

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                  145

              Fig. 2.

coming from above his head. Juxtaposing this mysterious introduction,
the Duffers cut to a less-threatening domestic scene. Opening with a
close-up of a sprinkler and following it with an establishing shot of a
suburban family home, we hear a voice-over narration ominously tell
us that “[s]omething’s coming, something hungry for blood.” Then the
Duffers cut to a scene where young boys are in the middle of playing a
game of Dungeons & Dragons. Mike Wheeler, the now-embodied voice-
over narrator and dungeon master, continues describing the scenario for
the other three players, Will, Dustin, and Lucas. Mike warns his friends
of the looming trouble they face, telling them “[a] shadow grows on the
wall behind you, swallowing you in darkness. It is almost here.”
   The juxtaposition introduces us to two of the key sites where the dra-
ma of the show plays out, but it also invites us to consider the ways in
which the partiality of the beyond arrests our imagination. Mike’s de-
scription of the campaign he and his friends are playing essentially repli-
cates the preceding scene of the scientist’s encounter with the mysterious
entity. The Duffers, in effect, braid together the world of the unseen be-
yond with the real world of Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will, suturing them
together with the Gothic signifiers of the flickering lights in the lab and
Mike’s description of the shadows swallowing you in the darkness. To
further braid together the two worlds—one of government experimenta-
tion and the other of pen, paper, dice, and imagination—the scene ends
with the lights over Mike’s carport flickering, the boys turning on the
headlights of their bikes, synthesized music playing on the soundtrack,

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            Fig. 3.

and Will’s headlight turning on and off before he sees the monster for the
first time. Finally, the opening scenes end with a close-up of a light bulb
(see Figure 2) in the shed where Will is taken, its brightness gaining in
intensity until we hear a pop and Will disappears, upon which the light
goes back to normal and the scene fades to black. The scenes leading up
to the vanishing of Will Byers are followed by the now iconic credit se-
quence, which also replicates the same kind of Gothic partialness.
    The opening credits crucially establish the fusion of analog and digital
aesthetics employed throughout Stranger Things. Part Tron, part Stephen
King book cover, part John Carpenter movie, part New Order video,
part arcade video game—the credit sequence, designed by Michelle
Dougherty, with music composed by SURVIVE, a band from Austin,
Texas, arrests viewers with its combination of images and sounds. In
a video explainer created for the website Vox, Christophe Haubursin
interviews Dougherty, a graphic designer at Imaginary Forces.12 In every
one of Dougherty’s answers, we can hear her state clearly that her artistic
goal in combining digital technologies with analog practices is Gothic
partialness. First is the choice of font for the show’s titles. According to
Dougherty, the graphic designers at Contend used ITC Benguiat font—
the font typically found on the covers of Choose Your Own Adventure
and Stephen King novels. Moreover, ITC Benguiat has been long been
used as the font for the FBI warning against piracy at the beginning of
home videos. Once the text of the logo was created, Imaginary Forces
added its distinctive flicker. Dougherty further explains in the Vox
interview that she and her team wanted to replicate the manual way that
old credit sequences were made, by filming each individual cell of the

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                     147

              Fig. 4.

minute-long sequence. Then they took their manual, analog creation
and fused it with newer digital practices. During the manual, analog
portion of the title creation, the team at Imaginary Forces used an old
film stock called Kodalith, well-known for its high-contrast images.
Once they shot the separate cells for the sequence, they shined a light
through the back of the cells and re-photographed them (see Figure
3). As Dougherty explains to Haubursin, the designers backlit the film
cells to replicate the inconsistencies, mistakes, contrast, graininess, and
flicker of older Kodalith photography. Finally, they digitally animated
the whole sequence and enhanced each element of the crude, analog
aesthetics. As the logos slowly build on screen, letters emerge from
claustrophobic extreme close-ups, which make it impossible to see
each individual letter by itself, until the entire title comes together, fully
revealed in a much more comfortable medium shot. All of the letters
and surrounding black space in the title sequence slightly flicker, and
graininess can be seen all over the screen, giving the titles the look of old
film running through a projector. The music accompanying the credits
extends the sequence’s analog partialness. SURVIVE is best known as
a synthesizer band that prefers to use older, analog equipment rather
than newer digital keyboards and computers. Band members Kyle
Dixon and Michael Stein explained to Rolling Stone magazine13 that they
used older Moog, Roland, and Korg synthesizers to compose a series of
irregular intervals and atypical notes for the ethereal, pulsating music
that accompanies the onscreen text. The two musicians, moreover, drew
on their interests in Dario Argento and John Carpenter films, and they

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referenced scores created by noted synth forerunners Tangerine Dream
and Harold Faltermeyer.
    The music composed by SURVIVE, the Kodalith technology recre-
ated by Imaginary Forces, and the logo’s font used by Contend, all fuse
the analog inconsistencies of the past with the digital present. The mu-
sic, the text, the colors—they all flicker like the lights in the show, and
the flicker invites us to feel the haunting presence of the past of analog
tech, Cold War–era experiments, and government buildings. As final re-
inforcement of the importance of the flickering lights and the haunted
past to the tone and narrative, the Duffers finish the first episode with an
image of the enigmatic Eleven as the boys stumble upon her in the rain,
their flashlights shining through the dark on her unspeaking presence
(see Figure 4). The first episode ends here: lights in the dark connecting
Eleven, the girl escaped from the shadowy laboratory, and the three boys
looking for their missing friend, Will.
    Later in the first season, the flickering lights operate as a conduit
between Will and his mother, Joyce. In episodes two and three, Joyce
discovers that she can communicate with Will via the lights in her
home. From her first encounter at the end of episode two to the end
of episode three, Joyce starts talking to a lamp in a quasi-séance with
Will, then collects all the lamps in the house to talk to him, and finally
strings together multiple strands of Christmas lights throughout the
house in hopes of better communication. Ghosts communicating with
the living through electricity has long been a trope in literature, film, and
television. Stranger Things invites viewers to see a connection between
Will’s flickering presence with that of Carol Anne in Poltergeist (1981),
the electromagnetic ghosts in Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971), or
the woman crawling out of the well as seen on the evil VHS tape in The
Ring (2002). However, Will is not a ghost. Will is alive but trapped in
the unseen beyond that parallels the reality of the other characters. The
flickering lights that Joyce uses to communicate with Will open up partial
breeches into the unseen Upside Down. In episode two, a creature pushes
itself through the wall of Joyce’s home while she tries talking to Will via
her lamps. In episode six, Joyce sees Will alive through an opening in the
wall of her living room. The lights create a way for Joyce to communicate
with Will (see Figure 5). She learns from talking via the lights that he is
alive and not safe. She also learns that the monster can travel from the

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                     149

               Fig. 5.

Upside Down to the Byers’s home, the lights linking passage between the
two. In each case of Joyce’s communicating with Will via the flickering
lights, the Duffers use the lights as signifiers of loss. But loss in Stranger
Things is not some inscrutable and unsolvable X. Instead, loss is partial.
Rather than letting Will’s vanishing remain hidden for much of the series
or killing his character, the Duffers hide him from the everyday world of
his family and friends while letting the lights create both a connection
and barrier to seeing him.
    The lights that cut in and out in the Hawkins lab, the lamps and
Christmas lights in the Byers’s house, the shadows described by Mike
during the Dungeons & Dragons campaign, the bulb that shuts on and
off when Will is kidnapped by the monster, the Kodalith film stock used
to give the credits an analog look, and the analog synthesizers used by
SURVIVE for the show’s theme song: all of these examples reside on
the show’s line between the reality of the characters and the beyond, an
aesthetic border created by a flickering partialness, a Gothic gaze, ar-
resting our attention and desire throughout each episode. Each aesthet-
ic element is carefully calculated to invite our desire to see more while
partially blocking our access to see all. The Gothicness of its aesthetics
is created by the relationship between the analog-looking world we see
onscreen and the hidden digital practices that created it.

   Nostalgic Returns

If there is a trend in the criticism about Stranger Things that verges on a
type of consensus, it is the show’s nostalgic appeal. Many think pieces on

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the quality of the nostalgia of Stranger Things litter the Internet, focus-
ing mostly on questions about the show’s pop-culture signifiers. Articles
by fans and critics alike typically agree that the depiction of the 1980s
in Stranger Things is at the heart of its appeal. Whether providing an
analysis of the music, toys, fashion, or technology, Internet think pieces
typically focus their insights on how the show deploys its well-known
signifiers in service to the show’s narrative and characterization. Given
this trend in popular criticism surrounding Stranger Things, I want to
pivot off all the insights these writers have about the importance of such
objects—like the Demogorgon action figure, the Millennium Falcon,
and Realistic walkie-talkies—to argue for a kind of unifying theory of
the show’s deployment of nostalgia.
    Fusing the show’s Gothic gaze with nostalgia reveals how much
Stranger Things operates as a fantasy of distance. While Eleven and the
boys fight onscreen against a monster from a haunted beyond, millenni-
al audiences watch a show set in a pre-Internet age in which the kids can
get lost and might not be found. In an article about the show’s nostalgic
use of Lovecraftian tropes, Joshua Rothman describes the depiction of
childhood in the 1980s as a pocket universe far away from the problems
of the twenty-first century: “Hawkins, Indiana, comes across as an en-
chanted and uncanny pocket universe in which barely supervised chil-
dren enjoy freedoms (and confront terrors) from which they’d be insu-
lated in our helicopter-parenting age. The show’s gifted and charismatic
young actors convincingly embody eighties kids who, having never seen
an iPhone, are accustomed to using their imaginations.”14
    Rothman essentially argues that the 1980s operate as the last pre-
digital decade and nostalgically depicts this decade as a time when kids
could avoid capture by the authorities by just being kids, depending on a
knowledge of the world based on toys, games, and comic books. In psy-
choanalytic terms, Rothman’s illuminating insight about Stranger Things
helps us to see how distance—distance, as Lacan would put it, from the
suffocating presence of the Other—helps fuel the fantasy at the heart of
the show. To fully explain the fantasy of distance operating throughout
Stranger Things, it is important to do two things. First, I want to devel-
op a psychoanalytic theory of fantasy by connecting it to the gaze, and
second, I want to connect this theory to the show’s depiction of surveil-

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                       151

lance, which is presented to millennial audiences as nostalgically limit-
ed, thus pointing up its daily, and Gothic-like, presence in the lives of
people living in the twenty-first century.
    Earlier in this article, I explained Lacan’s fishing experience and its
significance to his theory of the gaze. It went something like this: La-
can sees a sardine can floating in the water while on a fishing boat he
had no business being on. A real fisherman, Petit-Jean, points out to
Lacan the can’s utter disregard for Lacan’s presence, making the young
psychoanalyst-to-be realize how out of place he is in this tableau. For La-
can, this moment is the beginning of his theory of desire always staining
our ability to see, making what we cannot see just as important as what
we see. The gaze, in other words, lures our desire to see while also block-
ing our ability to see without being influenced by our, for lack of a better
term, psychological baggage. Our baggage, therefore, is why we often feel
like we are not seeing the whole picture of any given situation, which cre-
ates the suspicion that our access to total sight is being blocked by some
unseen Other, an ideological rift that manifests itself as anxiety in our
psychological well-being. To fix our anxiety, we turn to fantasy. Fantasy
allows us to cover over the gap between wanting to see clearly and the
feeling of being blocked. To better explain the ideological relationship
between the gaze and fantasy, let me humbly add my own fishing meta-
phor to Lacan’s. When we go fishing, we cast lures into the water hoping
a fish will bite. We stare all day long at the screen formed by the water
between us and the fish. As we bob back and forth in the water, waiting
for a fish to strike or suffering the defeat of its refusal, we cannot help but
imagine why any particular fish takes our bait. But our imagination of
the whims of why a fish does what it does cannot fill in the blank space
between us and them. Because the screen partially blocks our ability to
see the fish in action, we must invent fish desire, attributing to fish all
manner of behaviors designed to make us look foolish for trying to catch
them in the first place. Once we begin imaging the evasive behaviors of
the fish we are trying to catch, we have moved into the realm of fantasy.
Fantasy is a psychological space in which we imagine we can access the
motivations of the Other. If we catch a bunch of fish, we imagine them as
stupid creatures that fell for the lure of our bait. If we do not catch a lot of
fish, we imagine them laughing at us and our stupidly deployed bait. Ei-

152                                     intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

ther way, we imbue the fish with a narrative that fills in the blank of what
we cannot see. The narrative, in a way, suggests the fish steal our satis-
faction by robbing us of our ideal belief in ourselves as clever enough to
lure fish to their capture. Fantasy provides an answer provoked by the
gaze, providing us with the belief that, while we cannot see everything,
it is because someone or something is blocking us. A nostalgic fantasy,
therefore, mollifies anxieties produced by the idea of the Other robbing
us of our enjoyment, replacing it with a domesticated image of a time
when plenty of fish took our smartly crafted and presented bait. If only
we could return to this time, the nostalgic fantasy goes.
    Slavoj Žižek argues nostalgic objects, whether they exist in the sub-
ject’s reality or in screened entertainment, work to hide antagonisms
limiting the totality of what we can see. He explains: “The answer to
our problem is clear: the function of the nostalgic object is precisely to
conceal the antimony between the eye and the gaze—i.e., the traumatic
impact of the gaze qua object—by means of its power of fascination. In
nostalgia, the gaze of the other is in a way domesticated, “gentrified”;
instead of the gaze erupting like a traumatic, disharmonious blot, we
have the illusion of “seeing ourselves seeing,” of seeing the gaze itself.”15
Most cinema produced by Hollywood, and its close relative, the stream-
ing television series, aims to do exactly as Žižek defines nostalgia. Our
cinematic and televised entertainment mostly works to hide the antag-
onism between the eye and the gaze. In other words, Hollywood almost
always creates entertainment about the missing, but the missing always
returns. Whereas real desire never reaches satisfaction, Hollywood,
more often than not, employs a narrative and aesthetic formula that
relies on an integration of the dissatisfactions of desire with the satis-
factions of fantasy. In his groundbreaking book, The Real Gaze, Todd
McGowan rethinks Lacanian film theory and Hollywood movies. He di-
vides cinematic history into four categories based on their relationship
to the gaze: the cinema of fantasy, desire, intersection, and integration.
The cinema of integration is the largest of these categories and the one
to which most Hollywood movies conform. McGowan argues that the
cinema of integration “is the predominant cinema in the world today.
Though it has its roots in the filmmaking practices of Hollywood, the
cinema of integration exists throughout the world and manifests itself in

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                   153

both commercial and independent filmmaking. This type of cinema . . .
offers subjects the opportunity to experience the traumatic enjoyment
of the gaze while remaining safely within the structure of fantasy.”16 For
Žižek and McGowan, the structures of nostalgia and fantasy are the two
primary ways we try to avoid encounters with the gaze. McGowan also
makes the gaze central to the way we enjoy our cinematic and televised
entertainment, reminding us that we watch movies and television shows
primarily because they allow us to see more than we do in reality. But
they almost always keep us safe from any real trauma.
    Stranger Things divides its narrative and mise-en-scène into two
worlds: one of desire and one of fantasy. The world of Hawkins, Indiana,
contains the daily dissatisfactions typical of our lives. Kids struggle to
understand why and how grownups do the things they do, and the par-
ents do the best they can to support and love their children despite the
ups and downs of adolescence. The Upside Down, however, is the world
of fantasy. It is a parallel world, similar to the Dungeons & Dragons cam-
paign played by the boys, which operates unseen in reality (see Figure
6). The Upside Down is a space that Eleven can see because of her teleki-
netic powers, but only she can. Eleven dramatically explains how the two
worlds exist separately but together when she flips over the boys’ game
board, the black underside of the board signifying the world where Will
is lost and the monster dwells. In the fantasy space, we often see replica-
tions of reality—like Will’s fort, Castle Byers, and the boys’ school, where
Eleven sacrifices herself—but these places have been overtaken by decay
and are covered in the floating ash we see all throughout the Upside
Down. Traditional Gothic entertainment typically keeps the haunted
world beyond our vision, hinting at its existence with shadows. Stranger
Things invites us, however, to see the beyond haunting our reality. More-
over, characters can cross in and out of one world and into the next. The
monster can move in and out of Hawkins because Eleven accidentally
opened a gateway between the two worlds, and at different points in the
show, every character finds their way in and out of the Upside Down.
The fantasy structure of the first season is ultimately completed when
Will Byers is rescued by Hopper and Joyce, and the second season when
Eleven shuts the door connecting the two worlds. In both seasons, the
Duffer brothers domesticate the terror of the Upside Down by making it

154                                     intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

             Fig. 6.

knowable and beatable. Whether it is the return of Will, Eleven’s ability
to see into it, or the free passage characters and monsters have into it,
Stranger Things allows us to feel the threat of the Upside Down but safely
returns us to stable reality of Hawkins.
    While the characters defeat monsters and missing kids return to
their families, the nostalgic feelings created by Stranger Things are much
more dependent on the current predicament of viewers in the twenty-
first century than on the Duffers’ recreation of a Spielbergian 1980s.
The show’s Gothicness depends on the division of the world between
Hawkins and the Upside Down, the haunting of the former by the latter,
but there is another world of unseen practices that exists in the reality
of Hawkins instantly recognizable to contemporary viewers: the world
of government surveillance. In the opening of this section, I suggested
that Stranger Things offers us a fantasy of distance, and in the Lacanian
sense of the word, distance means the ability of the subject get some
breathing room from the overproximity of the Other. Throughout both
seasons, government agents are shown surveilling the world of Hawkins
in hopes of finding the escaped Eleven. The surveillance is primarily
eavesdropping through tapped phones or parabolic microphones. Agents
also pose as repairmen who work in the neighborhoods in which the
kids live. In all cases the surveillance tactics are beholden to an outdated
notion of tactics. By outdated, I mean the tactics are designed to blend
into the normality of the world of Hawkins. All of the eavesdropping
happens through hidden taps on phones, with agents at the Hawkins
Laboratory listening to hours of conversations while huddled in dark,

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                 155

smoke-filled rooms. The eavesdropping via parabolic microphone takes
place as normal-looking vans drive through suburban neighborhoods,
the spying government agents capturing snippets of conversations going
on in the homes they pass by. The agents also spread out through the
neighborhood posing as repairmen working on telephone poles and
power lines.
    In Stranger Things 2, the surveillance increases. As the Hawkins Na-
tional Laboratory tries its best to disarm the locals about the dangers of
its experiments, it increases its peeping into the lives of the people who
live nearby, especially those involved with Will and Eleven. In episode
four of the second season, Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan
Byers (Charlie Heaton) decide to avenge Barbara Holland’s (Shannon
Purser) death. Doing so raises red flags at the lab, and government
agents start following Nancy and Jonathan. The Duffers do something
interesting here. As Nancy and Jonathan wait in a park to talk with Bar-
bara’s mother, Nancy begins to notice her surroundings, not because
something is out of the norm, but precisely the opposite; things are too
normal. The adults read newspapers, walk dogs, jog, play with kids, and
so on, but Nancy notices—through a skillfully edited montage of shot-
reverse-shots—how each agent is trying too hard to not look like they
are watching. The Duffers know contemporary viewers live in a world
of constant surveillance, and a scene depicting agents trying to blend
in with other folks at the park is too obvious. Nancy notices the agents
for who they are, and she and Jonathan try to run away but fail. The
agents are unable to create an air of unsuspicion necessary to public
stakeouts. Their presence becomes suffocating, and to demonstrate the
building anxiety for Nancy and Jonathan, the montage cuts increase in
pace. While the surveillance of the people who live Hawkins is some-
times easy to discover and other times not, the show’s scenarios always
return to the idea that surveillance in the 1980s was easier to notice and
avoid. For the characters, the practices of government spying were like
many of things consistent with the adult world, oblivious and unhelpful.
One thing remains clear, however. In the 1980s of the show, surveillance
could be avoided. With the right amount of smarts and determination,
the characters defeat their would-be surveillers because analog technol-
ogy fails to totally blanket society.

156                                     intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

   The Gothic Present

As Žižek reminds us in the quote used earlier, nostalgia presents us with
the illusion of “seeing ourselves seeing.” His point suggests that nostalgia
invites us to feel satisfied that when we are confronted with the past nos-
talgically, we will look upon it without being traumatized by it. We will
see everyone who lived in the past as naively satisfied with the way things
were. Gothic stories, however, invite us to see the past as haunted and
worth repressing. The stories advise us to not open specific doors or go
inside particular houses for they might erupt with the hidden traumatic
past. Stranger Things pulls off a kind of reversal of these coordinates.
Rather than hide the possibility of loss, Stranger Things romanticizes it.
We see this in every aspect of the show’s narrative and aesthetics. The
Duffers have braided together the differing worlds of the Gothic and
nostalgic, analog and digital technologies, small-town America and its
haunted parallel dimension, and surveillance practices both new and
old. These combinations are designed to not only tell a Gothic tale about
the 1980s but also remind us of what horribleness lies beyond today.
Twenty-first-century audiences live with constant awareness of being
watched. We are watched by cameras everywhere. We know that nothing
we do on our computers is ever truly deleted. We worry that our cam-
eras on our phones and computers are recording us. We worry that Siri,
Alexa, and the Google Assistant are listening to us. We know that what
we say on the phone is being data-mined for threatening keywords. We
know that any email we send can be retrieved to be used to incriminate
us. We know our Internet browsing creates a profile of who we are and
what we buy, a profile that is then sold over and over again to various
corporations and political organizations. We know that, ultimately, we
cannot evade those who want to watch us. The nostalgia of the two sea-
sons of Stranger Things rests on the fantasy of there being a time in the
not-so-distant past when we could get lost. Like Will Byers in the Upside
Down. Like Nancy and Jonathan, who disappear and expose the lab by
going to an investigative journalist. Like Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Eleven,
and, later, Max, who manage to evade government agents trailing them
by using their bikes and imaginations. Like all the characters who go into

Landrum: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss                                            157

the Upside Down and return. As we watch the Duffers’ depiction of the
1980s, we become nostalgic for a time when people knew a lot less about
the lives of others—and we are haunted by the world we live in now.

Jason Landrum is the Faye Warren Reimers Professor in the Humanities
and Associate Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana Universi-
ty, where he teaches and researches psychoanalytic approaches to film,
television, and literature. He has recently published articles on fathers in
Breaking Bad, the death drive and the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, and
media representations of criminal profiling.

Notes
   1. Mari Ruti, Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman (New York: Bloomsbury,
2016), 46.
   2. Hugh Manon, “Shadow, Blur, Glitch: The Gothic Route to Contemporary
Digital Aesthetics,” Paper presented at American Comparative Literature Associa-
tion Conference, Harvard University, March 19, 2016, https://www.acla.org/annual
-meeting/about-annual-meeting/annual-meeting-archives.
   3. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1998), 95.
   4. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 96.
   5. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 96–7.
   6. Ruti, Feminist Film Theory, 47.
   7. Marc Olivier, “Glitch Gothic,” in Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality
from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, ed. Murray Leeder (New York: Bloomsbury,
2015), 253.
   8. Fred Botting, Gothic (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2.
   9. Botting, Gothic, 2–3.
   10. Manon, “Shadow, Blur, Glitch.”
   11. Manon, “Shadow, Blur, Glitch.”
   12. Christophe Haubursin, “How Stranger Things Got Its Retro Title Sequence,”
Vox, October 25, 2017, https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/10/25/16544860/stranger
-things-logo-intro-font.
   13. Christopher Weingarten, “‘Stranger Things’: Meet the Band Behind the Show’s
Creepy, Nostalgic Score,” Rolling Stone, August 1, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com
/music/features/stranger-things-survive-talk-their-creepy-nostalgic-score-w431789.

158                                         intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017

    14. Joshua Rothman, “The Old, American Horror Behind ‘Stranger Things,’” New
Yorker, August 17, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/the
-infinite-nostalgia-of-stranger-things.
    15. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 114.
    16. Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2007), 115.