Stranger Things season 1: beneath the superficial image of “peace and prosperity” in 1980s small-town America, there was the painful legacy of countless atrocities committed by the American government in the name of ‘freedom.’
Stranger Things season 4: evil Russians (not Soviets) have sent our All-American Hero to the gulags which apparently still exist in the 1980s and it’s up to us to save him 🇺🇸🦅🫡
There’s probably a term that already exists for this but if there isn’t I’m gonna call it ‘Rambofication’ in honor of its probably most well known instance: Rambo First Blood was about a soldier, John Rambo (that’s his actual name I’m not doing a bit), returning home from the Vietnam war, so traumatized by war that he brought the war home with him to a small town, unable to adapt to life without strict military discipline and hierarchy. Subsequent Rambo movies were about how John Rambo was the only supersoldier tough enough and patriotic enough to kill faceless hordes of dastardly foreign commies.
Ergo, ‘Rambofication’ is the process of a series starting with a relatively nuanced or subversive narrative before its sequels become a shallow embrace of the very narrative it originally subverted. It happens surprisingly often!
In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective.
Listen, recuperation is definitely a very real and very useful concept but like, c'mon. It's "the process by which *politically radical* ideas and images are twisted" to fit into bourgeois politics.
Stranger Things certainly became worse over time, but are those themes actually present or consciously developed in the first season?
One of the main heroes is a cop. The show valorizes free enterprise, consumerism and vulgar american patriotism. To the extent that it contains any radical politics it's because the show is a pastiche of shows and movies from the 80's made by directors who may genuinely have held radical political views *and themselves undergone a process of recuperation*.
Listen to George Lucas talk about the Viet Minh or David Cameron talk about the portrayal of cops in the Terminator series and you'll get an idea of what actual recuperation looks like. The Duffers don't really appear to hold strong politics at all, or if they do they aren't apparent anywhere in their work. What vestiges of radical politics might be evident in season 1 are echoes of echoes of potentially radical politics from the 80's.
