Nostalgia as Political Currency in Stranger Things and The Get Down
Two Netflix tentpoles inhabit entirely different valleys of memory. Stranger Things excavates a fictional Indiana washed in the sodium glow of the early 1980s, where the Cold War is a kitchen-table conversation. The Get Down descends into the burnt-out Bronx of the late 1970s, painting a city staggering through bankruptcy and disco. They share more than a streaming shelf. Both use the past as a political instrument, and both show how that instrument can cut in opposite directions.
Streaming has turned nostalgia into engineered product. An emotional anchor in the viewer's own youth produces an almost automatic sense of belonging. What separates these two series is the claim about who got to belong in the first place, and that claim runs through every choice of music, costume, and camera movement.
A Politics Built on Borrowed Light
To ask about the politics of nostalgia is to ask whose version of the past is being assembled. In a market saturated with reboots and curated playlists, the past becomes a flexible resource, and the viewer is sold a feeling before a story.
The two series demonstrate two directions that feeling can take. Stranger Things hands back a replica, polished and warm. The Get Down hands back a question, asking the viewer to notice what official archives left out. One depends on the viewer recognising themselves inside the frame; the other depends on recognising the gap beside it.
Stranger Things and the Reaganite Hauntology
The Duffers have built a sleek replica of Reagan-era Americana, from orange-and-brown wood panelling to the tactical drop of The Clash on a teenager's stereo. The series asks viewers to feel safe inside that replica even as something monstrous lurks beyond it. The politics of this nostalgia are essentially conservative: a restored suburb, a restored nuclear family around a cathode-ray set, a restored national self-image that may have only briefly existed.
The horror comes from a government lab in Nevada, as if the apparatus itself is the only real threat to a community left to its mythic cohesion. Casting Winona Ryder, a fixed reference point of late-1980s teen cinema, presses the claim that the era itself can be inhabited rather than interrogated. Role-playing games and Eggo freezers become relics of a softer civic order. Readers curious about how this make-believe operates in adjacent media can find related work in the site's games section.
Dusted-Off Icons of the Hawkins Era
- Dungeons & Dragons as the moral and tactical backbone of childhood
- Steve Harrington's feathered hair and the return of the cocky older brother
- The Walkman and the mixtape as symbols of portable interior life
- New Coke, arcade cabinets, and the mall-as-commons of the early Reagan years
- Eggo waffles and RadioShack as markers of suburban consumer plenitude
The Get Down and the Bronx Counter-Archive
Baz Luhrmann and Stephen Adly Guirgis offer the mirror image. Where Stranger Things reassembles a dominant nostalgia, The Get Down works against the grain of official memory. The series treats the late 1970s South Bronx as a place erased by news cycles but dense with invention. Its archive is graffiti tags, block parties, a busted speaker rattling under a fire escape.
Hip-hop here is not merely soundtrack. It is civic infrastructure, a way of speaking back to a city that had stopped listening. Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc, and the formation of Afrika Bambaataa's Zulu Nation are presented as a constitution written in breaks and rhymes. The past is not a refuge but a workshop.
Sonic Hauntology and the Politics of Sound
Music carries most of the political weight in both projects. Stranger Things leans on a synthesiser-driven score with arpeggios that recall Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter as much as arcade machines. The Get Down moves between disco gloss and raw breakbeat archaeology, never settling. Both weaponise anachronism: the synth palette of Stranger Things signals a future that never quite arrived, while The Get Down's vinyl crackle signals a past the official record tried to flatten.
The synthesiser in Stranger Things does the work of innocence, humming under long shots of suburban streets and lending the speculative a sense of wonder. A long-form piece on this site, The Sound of Solitude, argues that a carefully composed score does the political labour of framing, deciding what counts as melancholy and what counts as menace. The relationship between score and setting is never neutral.
Australian Waters and the Local Past
Australian viewers meet this double nostalgia through a particular lens. The 1980s here meant the 1980 launch of SBS, the rise of Paul Hogan on sketch television, and the long boom that produced Crocodile Dundee. Local streaming catalogues have spent less energy excavating those years. An Australian subscriber to Stan or Binge in Melbourne or Brisbane encounters both shows through curatorial choices shaped in Los Angeles.
Australians talk about binging over a long arvo, slotting in jokes about "servo" and "brekkie" without irony, and the shows' dialogue lands without translation. Still, the nostalgia these series traffic in is mostly imported. Local productions that mined 1970s and 1980s Australian memory, from pub-rock to the early SBS schedule, rarely receive the same glossy resurrection.
Australian Touchstones That Rarely Get Resurrected
- The Melbourne inner-north pub circuit that incubated the Saints and the Birthday Party
- The 1983 America's Cup win and the way it rewrote national confidence
- Hilltop Hoods, Def Wish, and the late-1980s beginnings of local hip-hop in Adelaide and Sydney
- SBS's 1980 launch and its multicultural reimagining of Australian childhoods
- The Brisbane and Perth scenes that fed the early Triple J rotation
Platforms, Pricing, and the Curated Past
The streaming economy in Australia adds another layer. Subscribers here typically juggle three or four services at once, since no single catalogue carries everything. The price tension between Stan, Binge, Netflix, and Disney+ nudges viewers toward algorithmic thumbnails, and algorithmic thumbnails love a recognisable decade. A 1980s-coded drama gets a poster slot above a locally made 1980s documentary almost every time.
The global past receives the marketing budget. The regional past receives the search bar. A piece about the Brisbane punk scene sits quietly in the catalogue while a glossy American recreation dominates the homepage. Choice narrows even as the on-paper catalogue expands.
| Dimension | Stranger Things | The Get Down |
|---|---|---|
| Decade invoked | Early 1980s, USA | Late 1970s, USA |
| Setting | Suburban Indiana | South Bronx, New York |
| Aesthetic mood | Restorative wonder | Excavatory grief |
| Dominant sound | Synthesiser, rock pastiche | Disco, breakbeat, graffiti cadence |
| Whose memory | Mainstream white America | Black and Latino New York |
| Political direction | Conservative re-memory | Counter-archive |
| Streaming run | Sustained global hit | Cult favourite, then cancelled |
Nostalgia is rarely just a feeling. It is a budget line, a casting decision, a colour grade. When a viewer in Adelaide settles onto the couch with a streaming box humming in the lounge, the shows offer a choice between two ways of remembering. One hands back a comforting replica, complete with the reassuring hiss of magnetic tape. The other hands back a set of questions about whose tape was recorded first.
The decision belongs to the viewer. The long reads here treat both forms of nostalgia as serious objects of study, even when the shows themselves seem unsure of their own politics. Sit with either series again this winter, ideally with the lights low and the algorithm off. Send a pitch for a related piece through the usual channels, or leave a comment about which decade your own borrowing comes from.