Like most other patriotic Americans this last weekend, I celebrated Independence Day at home with my family, bundled up with eggos and coffee to binge-watch the long-awaited third season of Stranger Things.
I laughed. I cried. I gasped (a lot). And in one of the most powerful closing moments, one of the main characters states what could be the season’s thesis statement, and it’s a moment that has stuck with me ever since we finished the season finale:
“…I know you’re getting older, growing, changing. I guess, if I’m being really honest, that’s what scares me. I don’t want things to change.”
With that sentence, in the final ten minutes of the episode, I started tearing up. It’s incredible, actually, how a show makes you nostalgic for its own beginning. This fictitious world became so real to us that we find ourselves wishing we could go back and start it all over, to experience it for the first time all over again.
Like any popular story, Stranger Things catches so many people’s imaginations. When we look closer, the show’s own popularity points us to deeper truths about our society—what we like, what we miss, what we hope for. Of course we don’t all get our big cinematic showdowns in everyday life, but that nostalgia for simpler times—wishing that things were back to the way they “used to be”—well, we all feel that, don’t we? We know change. It’s all around us.
Though we might not like it, sometimes it takes change for us to realize how much something mattered to us.
I come from a family of seven. We’re best friends. We’re our own pack. We know each other better than anyone else in the world. With the exception of transient seasons of our lives—leaving for college, traveling for a few weeks, visiting friends—we’ve lived together our entire lives.
That’s why last week felt strange (no pun intended). My youngest brother was out of state on a mission trip, but his flights back to California were delayed because of an earthquake. This same weekend, my older brother packed up all his worldly possessions in the back of his car and departed for a long-awaited new job and a new life in a big city. His leaving means that I get his old room—a room of my own, for the first time in my life. Which means that I won’t be roommates with my sister anymore. Our girly movie nights and late night conversations and story planning talks will become memories too.
All of these changes—big and small—are oddly accentuated by watching Stranger Things 3 this weekend, which, at its heart, is ultimately about dealing with change. Art echoes reality. If you look closely at the art, you’ll begin to understand the thoughts and questions of our human condition at any given time in history.
A huge part of Stranger Thing’s appeal is the play on 80’s nostalgia: the music, the fashion, the lifestyle, the small-town America feeling. With so many references and callbacks, it’s easy to look back and long for “the good old days.” To imagine that things were better, simpler, a few years or decades ago. It’s easy to romanticize the past, because it’s over.
But even as I romanticize my own past, I wonder how often we see our history with rose-colored glasses. At any given point in your life, you have always dealt with problems—say, a demigorgon, or the repercussions of a worldwide war on an entire lost generation, or adjusting to life in your twenties, or middle school—and those conflicts and problems tend to fade in the rearview mirror. Who knows if maybe the 2010’s will someday be labelled “the golden years” by a generation that never lived them. Maybe someday, Snapchat and Siri and veganism and memes will as sentimental as callbacks to cherry slurpees and neon malls and Coco-cola and jazzercise.
Nostalgia is tricky. If you long for the past, for the way things once were, then you cheapen your experience of the present. It’s true, things change. But all we will ever have is now. As a wise wizard once said, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
<3 Olivia Grace
