Nostalgia for the 1980s is everywhere, most potently in the Duffer brothers’ epic series, Stranger Things.
I understand and share the enthusiasm for the series. It is a Valentine to nerdy outsiders and fans of 1980s music and films. But if you happened to live through the 1980s in Ireland, it’s hard to feel much nostalgia for them.
Some aspects of the 1980s as portrayed in Stranger Things ring true. Children and teenagers really did roam around all day without much adult supervision. Depictions of this simpler, less scrutinised existence have an intense attraction for younger people today.
The Greeks even had a word for it: anemoia, which is nostalgia for an era that you have never experienced. In Stranger Things, brutal bullying exists but the characters go home from school and leave it behind – instead of receiving 300 notifications on social media overnight about how it is playing out.
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Stranger Things mines an era where music could be formulaic and forgettable, but also produced incredible bangers. Any series featuring Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill or Peter Gabriel’s take on David Bowie’s Heroes is fine by me.
[ Stranger Things finale: Imperfect but poignant ending leaves a bittersweet acheOpens in new window ]
It is good, too, to see Winona Ryder play Joyce Byers, a resilient, courageous mother. Ryder’s career entered a lengthy downturn after a shoplifting incident in 2001. At the time, it was treated as an act of privileged entitlement, rather than of distress, which was perhaps not unrelated to the routine sexual harassment in her industry that she experienced as a young actor.
But the hairstyles? Who could be nostalgic for the hairstyles? Recently, my slack-jawed reaction to a young friend’s mullet led him to declare loftily that it was not a mullet, but a wolf cut. (Surely, no self-respecting wolf would be seen dead in that hairstyle?)
While the 1980s may suddenly be cool again, my memories of the decade in Ireland are painted in 40 shades of drab, interspersed with a kind of quiet terror. Rampant unemployment and emigration added to the general greyness of the decade.
The cold war forms a backdrop to Stranger Things, but it completely fails to capture the extent to which people feared nuclear annihilation. This current generation has lived under the shadow of climate change and narcissistic, erratic world leaders with a penchant for extrajudicial kidnappings of dictators. In the 1980s, the prospect of mutually assured destruction (MAD) meant many teenagers believed that nuclear conflagration was imminent. A vibrant Irish grassroots movement emerged, opposing the construction of nuclear power stations in Carnsore Point.
The meltdown of part of a nuclear reactor in Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and the persistent fears about Windscale/Sellafield just across the Irish Sea, influenced this campaign. But so did worry about Doomsday nuclear weapons.
The Trump administration issued a $1 billion loan in November to help finance the restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant so it can provide power for Microsoft’s AI data centres. In the words of a Karen Carpenter hit, but without the nostalgic sweetness, it is indeed yesterday once more.
The Aids crisis is also absent from Stranger Things. But the casual homophobia of the 1980s is captured in the first series, when Troy Walsh (Peyton Wich), a sadistic bully, mocks Dustin Henderson’s (Gaten Matarazzo) search for his missing friend, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp.) Troy mockingly tells Dustin that Will is not missing, but dead. “It’s what my dad says. He was probably killed by some other queer.”
People have argued that a small town like the fictional Hawkins would have been relatively untouched by the Aids crisis but in 1985, Ryan White was the most famous 13-year-old student in the US. He was barred from attending middle school in Kokomo, Indiana, the same state in which Stranger Things is set. As a haemophiliac, he had been infected by a contaminated blood product, a story also tragically familiar in Ireland.
The official Irish response to the HIV/Aids crisis was painfully slow. As the 1980s progressed, it had one unexpected consequence. Schools began to recognise the need for systematic sex education. Unfortunately, sex education became associated – particularly in young women’s minds – with pregnancy being one of the worst things that could happen to you.
Controversial referendums led to polarisation, neatly summed up in the title of Tom Hesketh’s book, The Second Partitioning of Ireland.
Sixty seven per cent voted in favour of the Eighth Amendment in the 1983 abortion referendum, but this was not reflected in the media coverage. There was palpable contempt for pro-lifers in many quarters.
On a personal level, good things happened in the 1980s. I met the man I eventually married. Like the fictional friends in Stranger Things, ultimately, an era is remembered for its connections and relationships.
But while I enjoy the series – happily noting everything from references to Stand By Me to fond evocations of the art form known as mixtapes – I suspect many of us still find it hard to feel nostalgia for the 1980s in Ireland.
