Critical Mass

Aggressively retro: Stranger Things

This photo from the Instagram feed of the Vancouver, British Columbia, artist known as Steelberg shows the imaginary VHS cover he created for Netflix’s Stranger Things, a 1983-set supernatural mystery series that evokes the work of iconic directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as well as lesser known ’80s genre films and TV shows.
This photo from the Instagram feed of the Vancouver, British Columbia, artist known as Steelberg shows the imaginary VHS cover he created for Netflix’s Stranger Things, a 1983-set supernatural mystery series that evokes the work of iconic directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as well as lesser known ’80s genre films and TV shows.

We are not masters of our own taste. What we like owes much to what we were exposed to in a relatively narrow window of experience. Our parents and peers imprint us, the television shows and movies we attend to between the crucial ages of 10 and 13 will become our stuff. (That's why some people get so protective of objectively silly artifacts like 1984's Ghostbusters.)

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The existential comedy BoJack Horseman has evolved from satire to a meditation on the modern condition.

These were the movies (and shows and songs) people were exposed to when they were vulnerable. When something evokes their style, a warm charge of recognition supplements the characters, situations and plots of these entertainments. It's a clever and relatively inexpensive trick that bites surprisingly deep. That's why so many young adults recently plodded along looking for cute monsters on their phones, and why so many people who came of age in the '80s have such a visceral response to the nostalgia of a show like Netflix's 1983-set, eight-episode Stranger Things, which is available for streaming and bingeing.

The show, from twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, is interesting enough to be watched innocently without any particular awareness of the vintage shows and movies it quotes from. But there's also something fascinating about its aggressively retro look and feel, which transports its ideal viewer back into the Reagan era, where vinyl records and audiocassettes predominated and no one thought too long and hard about middle-schoolers tooling around after dark on headlamped banana bikes.

While I suspect the period details have -- like a pop song mixed for AM radio -- been pretty highly compressed (banana bikes, I recall, were more a late '60s/early '70s thing, no?), the point is not that the show feels like the reality of the '80s (I would submit that FX's The Americans or the import Deutschland 83 are far more verisimilitudinous, though they also sometimes program anachronistic music), but that it feels like the fictional '80s as filtered through the imaginations of Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Richard Donner, Rob Reiner, George Lucas, John Carpenter, Stephen King, et al. Like all nostalgia, Stranger Things describes a world that never really existed except in the wishful hearts of consumers.

All that's fine, though it might bear considering how the '80s got to be the go-to decade for young teen protagonists. Before Jaws and Star Wars, most major Hollywood movies were aimed at a demographic older than young teens and pre-adolescents. While there were always "family movies" and films that featured younger protagonists, they weren't generally seen as potential blockbusters until Spielberg's and Lucas' blockbusters changed the way studios looked at marketing movies. Post-Star Wars, it became apparent that one of the best strategies for making money was to load up on movies for young people whose tastes were just being developed. These kids had disposable income and a lot of summer leisure time. They'd see movies over and over. They'd incorporate them into the culture of their tribes.

Maybe what no one really realized was that they'd be hooked for life on these movies, that they'd grow up wanting to make movies like them (see J.J. Abrams' Super 8 and Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special for especially well-made examples) or that, thanks to emerging home video technologies, it would be easy for them to expose (and infect) their children with the virus. Just as the popular music of the '60s and '70s has had an echo effect through various generations (the cultural hegemony of the baby boomers is such that a seemingly ephemeral act as The Monkees has survived as a viable engine of capitalism for more than 50 years), a lot of the people responding in special ways to Stranger Things acquired their '80s fixation secondhand.

They didn't experience these films in the theater. Like the Duffer brothers -- born in 1984 -- they likely saw it on TV.

It may be that the most significant breakthrough in human history was when we figured out how to freeze and store little slices of time. We don't think it all that awesome that we can hear the voices and watch the animated likenesses of people who have been dead for decades, but how difficult would that have been for someone in, say, the 18th century, to imagine? Just as literature allows us access to the thoughts of others, moving pictures afford us a kind of time travel. When you watch The Goonies today, you are literally looking back into the mid-1980s, into the stylized mise-en-scene of director Richard Donner and to the actual world lingering just outside the frame. You're seeing the fictional character Brand and the young Josh Brolin playing him.

Stranger Things engages a lot of moviegoers on a fundamental level because that's how it's designed. Netflix used the algorithms it derives from the data it collects on its users and studies of Hollywood entertainment products to fashion incredibly specific templates for its original series. They're applying science to art, which sounds a little buzz kill-y, at least until you consider the inevitability of it. It is show business after all and every potential avenue for revenue enhancement is going to be explored.

The better you measure, the more effective you can be. Bill James and armies of sabermetricians changed baseball by pointing out that the conventional wisdom is often wrong. Hollywood wrongheadedness is legendary -- see William Goldman's famous observation that "Nobody knows anything."

That's not quite true. They know what the grosses were. Now if they can just find a way to duplicate the results.

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While Stranger Things is fun, it's by no means the best thing on streaming television. That distinction may go to the suddenly black and existential comedy BoJack Horseman, which in its third season (also on Netflix), has pivoted from a punny (and sometimes obvious) animated show business satire to maybe the saddest, truest meditation on the modern condition available now.

This season, BoJack -- the lead character, an anthropomorphized horse who starred in a Full House-style sitcom in the 1990s -- has achieved full-blown movie stardom thanks to his acclaimed lead role in a Secretariat bio-pic (a performance complicated by the fact that BoJack wasn't fully present during filming). And things seem easier for him. People actually react to him in the way he assumes they should. He even occasionally discovers in himself a little empathy for others and hits upon a little kernel of authentic wisdom: "In this terrifying world, all we have are the connections that we make."

Right, and while BoJack's connections still tend to be only of the most superficial kind, the baby steps of progress he's making lend the series a palpable sense of hope. It's a truism that sitcom characters never really grow and change -- with every episode they are reset in their specific folly, primed to repeat the same mistakes again and again. And surely BoJack will relapse, he'll fall back into being an insecure boor and all the other characters will continue their established orbits around his empty celebrity, but at least for now, the show has taken on something of the strange magic of poetry. You laugh at its non sequiturs, but not since I cared about "Moose and Squirrel" has a cartoon so informed my life.

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Hank Williams famously died young -- he didn't make it to 30.

Because of the legend that surrounds him (the unhappy circumstances of his death, the almost constant pain that was the defining fact of his life), we tend to take him as a ghost, an achy croaking voice speaking to us from the other side.

But in 1951, in the days before the infantilization of American pop music, Williams was very alive and relatively well. He was a star, contracted to appear on a daily 15-minute show on Nashville radio station WSM, a clear channel giant whose signal reached most of the United States and served as the host of the Grand Ole Opry. Because Williams was on the road constantly that year, these programs, sponsored by Mother's Best baking flours, were tape recorded rather than broadcast live. And so they were available to be found, years later, by photographer Les Leverett, who wondered about what might have been on the acetate recordings he found in the trash.

These recordings -- 73 shows, 142 tracks -- are collected on 15 CDs in The Complete Mother's Best Collection ... Plus! (Time/Life, $129), which was re-released recently. (The shows were originally released in 2010 in a deluxe package that won a Grammy for its packaging, a replica of an old radio.) In addition to excellent liner notes by country music historian Colin Escott and a DVD full of interviews, the recordings reveal a Williams in good voice and better spirits, a remarkably relaxed performer fully in sync with his excellent band the Drifting Cowboys (guitarist Bob McNett, bassist Hillous Butrum, fiddler Jerry Rivers and steel guitarist Don Helms, who also performs a few lead vocals). His then-wife and manager Audrey -- she of the infamous voice -- also shows up to duet and sing a few on her own.

While we've been flooded with "new" Williams material in the past couple of decades -- there was the 10-CD Complete Hank Williams in 1998 comprising all of Williams' known releases, augmented in 2009 by a three-CD set of unreleased studio work -- it's difficult to overstate the significance of these releases. "Imagine finding a half-dozen unreleased Beatles LPs or a stash of previously unheard Elvis Presley recordings," Escott writes in his liner notes. "That's how significant these Mother's Best Hank Williams radio shows are."

Well, maybe not quite. But there is a flavor to these tracks that's qualitatively different from the iconic recordings of Williams' hits that we've grown used to. Here they come across as songs, not the elemental texts of country music. This Williams isn't a legend, he's a pro -- albeit one capable of flubbing lines and admitting, "Gosh, I've written so many songs with the same melody."

It's important to remember that Williams is not who he is because he died like he died. His voice is at once as raw as Charlie Patton's or Robert Johnson's and as supple as Frank Sinatra's or Bing Crosby's. It is capable of illuminating corners of the lyric other singers wouldn't dare explore. His poetry is rich in nuance, yet immediately understandable. He was and is country music. He didn't invent it, but he opened up its themes and showed it was possible to plumb the depths of the troubled mind in something so apparently lightweight as a pop song.

If he didn't have the transcendental culture-warping power of Presley or the seemingly unlimited artistic command of Sinatra, Williams is at least the greatest country singer ever and possibly the greatest country songwriter ever. But before he was a legend -- before he was a ghost -- he did these shows.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 08/07/2016

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