Stranger Things Comes to an Exhausting End

In a recent article for The Atlantic, W. David Marx argued that culture as we know it today is a hoarder’s paradise, a hopelessly cluttered landscape of rubbish. “Everyday life has never contained more stuff—an endless reel of words, ideas, games, songs, videos, memes, outrageous statements, celebrity meltdowns, life hacks, extremely talented animals,” he writes. My 5-year-old’s favorite song is a version of “Golden,” the standout hit from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, meowed by fake cats. Her favorite TV show is Is It Cake?, a Netflix baking competition seemingly inspired by a viral TikTok trend that involved making trompe l’oeil cakes disguised as random objects. Everything in popular culture feels recycled or reanimated or patched together out of preexisting elements. The dominant art form of the 21st century is the remix.

Stranger Things got there first. When the show debuted nine years ago, at the tail end of Barack Obama’s presidency, what was most astonishing about it was how unabashedly it pillaged the Blockbuster Video archives, borrowing from Spielberg and Hughes and Cameron to produce a pop-cultural behemoth that managed to both gratify audience nostalgia and create fresh intellectual property. Matt and Ross Duffer, its genial creators, were able to sell Stranger Things as a sincere homage, a love letter to 1980s media born out of admiration, not a cynical cash grab in an era of supercuts and sequels. Thanks to them, even in its fifth and final season, the series still has a pure heart. In the background, though, are product-placement deals featuring more than 100 carefully selected brands, a curated Spotify “experience”, influencer tie-ins, and prime Demogorgon placement inside the new Netflix House at the King of Prussia mall, in Pennsylvania—the latter truly a potent postmodern symbol of art becoming consumption. “Who wouldn’t want an $80 cookie house modeled after Vecna’s death mansion?” Fast Company’s Jeff Beer wondered recently about the show’s branded partnership with Williams Sonoma.