By Lisa Jacobson
My recent article, “Walkman time machine,” opens with a genre-bending Netflix series that transports viewers to a reimagined version of the past by way of a quintessential piece of ’80s technology: the Sony Walkman. No, I am not referring to Stranger Things (2016-present), to which I will return below, but to the twisty German science fiction thriller Dark (2017-2020). The Walkman that appears next to the corpse of a child toward the end of Dark’s first episode is an early clue in the time-travel mystery. That particular Walkman—dirt-smudged but uncannily new, gears still turning—has traversed a portal from the mid-1980s into the present, along with the murdered child to whom it once belonged. It is quite literally a time-traveling machine.
For the most part, the forms of time travel referenced in my article’s title are less literal. I analyze examples from 1980s-set period dramas from the past decade that employ the Walkman as a lens through which to obliquely critique present-day technology. In scenes from Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014-2017) and The Americans (FX, 2013-2018), the Walkman’s personal, immersive, and mobile qualities prefigure the smartphone; in contrast to the smartphone, the Walkman’s limited functionality as non-networked technology offers an appealing sense of privacy and security. Shows like Deutschland 83 (Sundance TV and RTL, 2015-2020) further enable viewers to experience the Walkman as if for the first time, recreating both the wonder and potential danger of the device’s immersive capabilities. In these televisual examples, the Walkman affords the shows’ creators a critical perspective on current technology from which to consider how it might have been developed differently.
The example of Stranger Things, mentioned above, remains at the margins of the article due to the timing of the show’s Walkman-centric fourth season. By analyzing the Stranger Things case study in more detail here, I aim to expand the temporal focus of my article into a spatial dimension. In the article, I propose the simultaneous spooling/unspooling of the Walkman’s cassette tape mechanism as a temporal metaphor for historical fiction. Backward and forward movements through time are inherently intertwined. Here, I read the Walkman’s role in navigating parallel dimensions in Stranger Things as a reminder of the spatial as well as temporal interconnectedness of the front and back of the cassette’s magnetic tape. The lightweight Walkman is often associated with mobility and portability; in Stranger Things, it facilitates travel across dimensions while also grounding a character in time and space. For viewers, too, the Walkman enables Stranger Things to engage a multiplicity of times and places—including alternate worlds—inside and outside the diegesis. The Walkman affords a particular kind of travel through time and space that always holds the possibility of a return to the familiar.
Complex temporal and spatial configurations are built into the premise of Stranger Things. To start with, the show is steeped in reverence for the ’80s, not necessarily as the decade was experienced at the time but as it has been rendered in media, then and since. As Rashna Wadia Richards (2021) puts it, Stranger Things “is far more interested in resurrecting the movies of the ’80s (and beyond) than the actual decade itself” (38). Within the show, time is presented in a not strictly linear manner. Stranger Things makes ample use of flashbacks and time jumps. As the product of Cold War experimentation with mind control, the character Eleven has superhuman abilities that include traversing time (and space) at will, taking the show’s viewers with her. Each season expands the intricate underlying mythology by revisiting key moments in the history of the characters and their fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.
These temporal aspects are hardly atypical within the contemporary television landscape; indeed, non-linear storytelling is common among what Jason Mittell (2015) has dubbed “complex TV.” The specific relationship between time and space in Stranger Things, however, is decidedly more distinct. The first season introduces the show’s foundational concept of the Upside Down: a parallel dimension that is spatially intertwined with the version of Hawkins that resembles our own world. The children’s middle school science teacher, Mr. Clarke, explains this interconnectedness with a simple drawing on a paper plate, folding and eventually puncturing the paper to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of world-crossing that the show will explore in the following seasons.
The fourth season introduces the show’s ultimate villain, Vecna, who is the primary inhabitant of the Upside Down. He has the ability to traverse the spatial boundaries of this alternate dimension, crossing into the “real” world of Hawkins in order to gruesomely murder teenagers by putting them into a dream-like trance (a clear nod to the iconic ’80s Nightmare on Elm Street horror film franchise). Here is where the Walkman comes in: as the season unfolds, the teenage protagonists stumble upon a trick to evade Vecna’s cross-dimensional grasp, using the Walkman to tether the intended victim to their own world.
The opening episode of the season establishes the connection between the would-be victim, Max Mayfield, and her Walkman. Long before Vecna seeks her out, Max, a second-season addition to the main cast, is seen plugged into her device. Max’s use of the Walkman is tied to her mourning process after the horrific death of her stepbrother in the previous season. The camera follows her through the halls of Hawkins High School as she numbly surveys her surroundings, Walkman at her hip and headphones over her ears. She is cocooned in an “existential bubble” (as Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro [2012] have theorized in relation to the iPhone), sonically separated from her surroundings. To borrow from Japanese musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa (1984), one of the first to theoretically analyze the Walkman, I would describe her walk as highlighting the “autonomy-of-the-walking-self” (166, original italics). Hosokawa links this form of autonomy to the individualism and mobility embodied by the Walkman, specifically in the context of moving through the shared public space of a city. Ambivalence is key to Hosokawa’s characterization, which I likewise see reflected in Max’s portrayal: the Walkman cuts her off from others while at the same time enabling her to act autonomously.
The performance of individual listening also deliberately communicates Max’s desire not to interact with others. Hosokawa describes this as a theatrical gesture on the part of the Walkman-wearer, in which a passerby “could know whether the walkman [sic] user was listening to something, but not what he was listening to” (177, original italics). The Walkman flaunts the existence—but not the specific details—of a secret. In Max’s case, her closed-off, autonomous listening makes her grief visible but not shareable. With the notable exception of the audience, who listens along with her and follows her walk via camerawork and editing, everyone in Max’s world is intentionally kept outside of her sonic bubble and, by extension, her internal emotional state.
The Walkman’s access to an individual’s interiority is what the teens later exploit in order to keep Max grounded in time and space. When evil Vecna beckons, Max’s friends come up with a clever tactic to recall her into their own dimension via her Walkman. They frantically cue up her favorite song and slip the headphones over her ears. Again, only Max and the viewers at home are privy to the music coming from her Walkman. The internal-external dynamics of the Walkman keep Max’s friends (her would-be saviors) in the dark, able only to gawk helplessly as she rises into the air in a trance-like state. Viewers, in contrast, join Max in the entirety of her dimension-spanning conflict with Vecna. This sequence can thus be read as an extreme visualization of the Walkman listener’s flaunted secret, as per Hosokawa. The individual autonomy of listening enabled by the Walkman is what saves Max while also keeping her apart from her peers.
Whereas Hosokawa was interested in the Walkman’s mobility, the device’s function in this sequence from Stranger Things is to tether Max spatially and temporally. The music being forced into her ears accompanies her cross-dimensional travel, but it does so in order to ground her (literally and figuratively) in a particular time and place—namely, the one her physical body occupies. Hosokawa proposes the Walkman as a kind of prosthesis, melding with and even intruding into the body through the music it plays (176). In Max’s case, the intended function of the Walkman-as-prosthesis is to return her to her body and, further, to ground that body in the present of her own world. This is hinted at visually in aerial shots of Max rising into the air, in which the cables of the Walkman’s headphones give the appearance of physically tethering her to the ground.
The show adds an additional temporal aspect to Max’s universe-spanning journey: as Max listens to her favorite song, viewers are treated to flashbacks of emotional moments from previous seasons of the show when Max felt particularly connected to her friends. Per televisual conventions, viewers can assume that this is what Max is seeing and what ultimately recalls her to her own dimension. Memory becomes a version of time-travel as well as space-travel, returning Max to the here-and-now of her own world in the present by way of a past shared with her friends and the audience. On an extradiegetic level, the musical memory montage might also activate viewers’ nostalgia for earlier seasons of the show. It functions almost like a clip show (a much-maligned strategy by which television series have traditionally evoked nostalgia while cutting costs). Viewers are invited to marvel at how much the child protagonists have grown and consider the more adult themes the show has since taken on. Might we return to those simpler times via a happy ending (for Max, at least), or are we doomed to go into the final season with a major character death? The season’s fourth episode ends in a cliffhanger resolved early in the fifth: the Walkman has successfully been employed to save Max. The season finale is not as merciful, leaving room for ambiguity about Max’s fate and undermining the Walkman’s ability to save her once again.
There is, of course, also an extradiegetic function to the song that Max is listening to, Kate Bush’s “Running up that Hill (A Deal with God).” Like in other examples I discuss in my article, the ’80s song selection can serve as a nostalgic throwback for some viewers while also inaugurating younger viewers into the fold. As it turned out, the song—and Kate Bush herself—experienced a massive resurgence in popularity due to Stranger Things (see, for example, Carrie Batan’s 2022 New Yorker article). What was old is made new again via a streaming television show’s depiction of the retro technology of the Walkman.
The complex exercise in space-time travel in relation to the Walkman in Stranger Things brings me back to a particular glitch of the device that I discuss in more detail in my article. In a special issue of the journal Twentieth-Century Music focused on the medium of tape, Joanna Demers (2017) explains a glitch that some Walkman devices exhibited: material from one side of the magnetic tape within the cassette would “bleed over” to the other side. She elaborates, “The result was unearthly, a mere shadow of music played in reverse (since forward play on Side A means a retreat on Side B, and vice versa), smoky and ill-defined, but nonetheless recognizable to someone who spent enough time with the tape” (115). The technological glitch enabled ghostly echoes across both space (the two sides of the tape) and time (the different moments in time recorded on each side, along with the playback time of the listener).
While I focus on the temporal interconnectedness of the simultaneously spooled and unspooled tape in my article, the spatial relationship seems particularly relevant to the parallel dimensions of Stranger Things. At the conclusion of the fourth season, the connection between the two worlds expands from portals only some can create and traverse to a scar-like rupture that threatens to collapse the dimensions into each other. The implications for the storyworld of Stranger Things remain unclear and will undoubtedly be explored in the forthcoming final season. In the case of the Walkman, I argue, the bleeding across time and space is paradoxically inextricable from its tethering function. The device enables travel and grounding, both for the characters within the show and for viewers, who are invited to toggle between the reimagined past(s) of the show and their own present(s). The Walkman becomes an emblem of how far we have come technologically and, at the same time, how little has changed. It serves as a gateway into the other times and worlds of Stranger Things that are both distant and familiar. As a device from our shared past, the Walkman retains the possibility of nostalgic homecoming from journeys into the alternate worlds of this science fiction series. Where will its space-time travel take us next?
Read Lisa Jacobson’s article “Walkman Time Machine” in New Review of Film and Television Studies Issue 22.2.
Lisa Wells Jacobson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she teaches multimodal communication. Her scholarship asks how contemporary television serials write history, particularly in the context of the late Cold War. Her work has recently appeared in Film Quarterly and The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms.
References:
Battan, Carrie. “‘Running Up That Hill’ with Kate Bush, Again.” The New Yorker, June 13, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/running-up-that-hill-with-kate-bush-again.
Casetti, Francesco, and Sara Sampietro. 2012. “With Eyes, with Hands: The Relocation of Cinema into the iPhone.” In Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media, edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, 19–32. New York: Columbia University Press.
Demers, Joanna. 2017. “Cassette Tape Revival as Creative Anachronism.” Twentieth-Century Music 14 (1, February): 109–117. doi:10.1017/S1478572217000093.
Hosokawa, Shuhei. 1984. “The Walkman Effect.” Popular Music 4: 165–180. doi:10. 1017/S0261143000006218.
Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press.
Richards, Rashna Wadia. 2021. Cinematic TV: Serial Drama Goes to the Movies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.