Caleb McLaughlin, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard and Gaten Matarazzo in Netflix’s “Stranger Things.” (Netflix) Every week, I answer a question from the Monday edition of the Act Four chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter; this week, I’m doing it on Friday because of the election. You can read the transcript of our Nov. 7 conversation here, and submit questions for the Nov. 14 chat here. This week, a reader pondered a different sort of nostalgia from the one that defined our presidential campaign: I’d be interested in trying to analyze how much of people’s current obsession with the 1980s is about wishing things were like they were back then vs. trying to figure out how we got here. How often do those focus points cancel each other out or go hand in hand? I think there has been an increase in the latter and a decrease in the former. In general, I think when people talk about the 1980s they used to talk a lot more affectionately about kitsch and now it’s more critical and about ideology. Of course, the 1980s had its own nostalgic obsession with the 1950s, and when we look back at one decade, we see how our view of the earlier one has also changed. To give the first part of what might be a slightly unsatisfactory answer, I think one significant motivating factor in the current wave of 1980s nostalgia is the fact that people who were children in the 1980s have reached their 30s and 40s, and have the money and time to spend on things that remind them of their formative youthful experiences or that reinterpret or reframe those experiences. I don’t know to what extent, say, “Stranger Things” is about wanting to go back to the 1980s and to what extent it’s about wishing you could see “E.T.” for the first time. That said, obviously not all current pop culture set in the ’80s is merely about late Gen-X or early millennial nostalgia. “The Americans,” for example, is powerful because it reframes an event that was generally assumed to be triumphant for the United States — the end of the Cold War — in a much less cheerful light, highlighting how close both the United States and the Soviet Union could have come to disaster. Given the pace of television production, there’s no way FX or the creators of “The Americans” could have anticipated just how relevant the show would be in an era of declining Russian-American relations. At a moment when the past doesn’t really seem past, it becomes harder to dismiss an era as the sum of big hair and bigger shoulders. | 