Strange Frequencies
There’s a throwaway detail in an early shot of the first episode of Stranger Things: Mike’s dad is trying to improve the TV’s reception of an episode of Knight Rider. Moving the rabbit ears to get a better signal. It’s a hint about the show’s concern with frequencies and energies, the interaction of the tangible and the intangible.
I was fascinated back then with those interactions. The way I could put a cartridge in my Atari 2600, turn it on, and see a world that didn’t physically exist appear on the television. It felt to me then like the cartridges were portals to these other worlds, possessed of a kind of magic.
I admitted to a friend recently in an email that I sometimes have these fantasies about living a different kind of life, one less defined by social media and technology. She replied that she had similar thoughts. “None of the virtual. Only the physical,” she said. And definitely it is hard for me to find value most of the time in virtual interactions these days, in selecting dialogue choices to interact with NPCs in video games, when I’m so keenly aware that the real connections I’m looking for in my life are lacking.
But there are real things that are neither virtual nor physical, too. Nowadays, I’m more often concerned with the intangible places inside of us than those that exist in the code of most video games.

Like my favorite show, The Americans, Stranger Things is set in the early 1980s. But where The Americans is concerned with adults, and is clearheaded about what that period was actually like, Stranger Things is largely concerned with children, and it deliberately filters the 80s through visual and sonic sensibilities of the era–the sorts of stylistic signifiers that become clearer to us as we gain some distance from them–to give us the 80s by way of the 80s. As a result, The Americans is a show that, despite being set in the 80s, speaks to me about my life now, while Stranger Things interacts with a completely different part of me. Watching it feels a bit like a quest for something I lost on the suburban streets of my own complex and haunted early childhood.
For the Dungeons & Dragons-playing boys of Stranger Things, objects can have power. The tangible can be a potent connection to the intangible places that exist within their shared imagination.

And I haven’t lost my childhood sense that there are energies humming around us, and that objects can be possessed of a kind of magic.


I think of the things that I kept from my recent trip to New York less as souvenirs and more as talismans, as if they retain some of the energy of the place and time in which I got them. Things like this card from my hotel, which has the room number in which I stayed written on the back by the woman who was working at the front desk when I checked in…

…and this postcard from the restaurant where Masha and I had dinner after I gave my talk.

In Stranger Things’ third episode, Winona Ryder’s Joyce speaks to her son Will who has disappeared but is still in some way present. He is able to communicate with her through electricity, by illuminating Christmas lights.

And sometimes I think that there are places inside of me that have fallen into disrepair because I’ve had nobody to show them to for so long. And I think that maybe I need something tangible–eyes to look into, a hand to hold–to turn the power to those places back on. But I also need that intangible sense of connection, and the feeling that I’m being let in to explore the places inside of another person, too.
When Joyce asks Will where he is, he uses electricity to spell out…

…that he is “right here.” Stranger Things is very self-consciously a Spielbergian, 80s, suburban-kids-on-bikes story, and here it recalls the ultimate Spielbergian, 80s, suburban-kids-on-bikes story, E.T. At the end of that film, when E.T. has to leave, he points to Elliott’s head and tells him, “I’ll be right here.”
Stranger Things suggests that there are things out there on strange frequencies. Things like the sometimes intangible presence of love.
Notes
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