Mediating the “Upside Down”: the techno-historical acoustic in Netflix’s Stranger Things and The Black Tapes podcast

ABSTRACT

This paper demonstrates how sound restructures audience engagement with narrative visuals, thus nostalgia is being refocused through the appearance of sound technologies. I will examine specific examples of a reoccurring sound in recent media, what I term the techno-historical acoustic. It has four main characteristics: it is diegetic, comes from a technological source, works as a catalyst to memory, and provides a mediation within the diegesis between the “real world” and a mysterious alternative space. This is exemplified in Netflix’s Stranger Things and the podcast The Black Tapes. These shows revel in nostalgia, but also subvert audience expectations of a return to a past moment by mediating between the spaces of the real and unknown. Audience experience becomes grounded in listening – to technologically-produced sounds – to navigate these spaces. This refocuses the process of nostalgia so that safety and understanding are not found in returning to the past, but in older technologies. The diegetic use of sound transforms the idea of nostalgia as a longing for home into a longing for a more collective social experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Stranger Things
• The Black Tapes
• techno-historical acoustic
• nostalgia
• uncanny
• sound

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Professor Alison Landsberg at George Mason University, for her continued support of this project. Additionally, my thanks to Caroline Guthrie, Dominique DeLuca and, Emma Reynolds, who all provided valuable feedback on various versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Freud associates the repressed with the fear of castration and connects the act of seeing with that fear as well (1995, 132). While I acknowledge this grounding of the term, I am rethinking about the concept of the uncanny through sound, moving away from its strictly visual aspects.

2. Jeffrey Sconce provides a history of twentieth-century technology as supernatural in Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, writing, “Fantastic accounts of media presence in this case emphasised the extraordinary powers of the technology itself and suggested that its rational application would eventually lead to crossing ever more incredible boundaries of time and space” (2000, 10–11). He examines how twentieth-century media technology was often discussed and thought of as having the potential ability to connect to spaces beyond our understanding. The characters in Stranger Things, especially Will, are facing that notion – that these useful technologies are not just representative of a future but are imbued with supernatural powers. For Sconce, television is exemplary of this phenomenon. He suggests that, unlike the film-going experience, which, in the twentieth century, was mostly relegated to the theatre, the haunting presence of the television was located in the home. He writes, “The very premise of the ‘haunted TV’, on the other hand, allowed fear to linger with the viewer. The unique electronic presence bound to this new medium suggested that even after a program was over and the receiver was turned off, the television set itself still loomed at a gateway to oblivion simply by sitting inert and watchful in the living room” (2000, 166). Thus, the safety of the home is undercut by the technology’s ability to act as a conduit.

3. Podcast Limetown (Two-Up Productions, 2015–present), follows a similar format as a fictional mystery. These fictional podcasts trended after the very successful, non-fictional, investigative journalistic Serial (2014–present). Unlike Serial, and some of its copycats, these shows use the format not to tell true stories but to convey a fictional story which utilises the aural format. Shows like Homecoming (Gimlet Media, 2016–present), act more like a traditional radio-drama, meaning the audience feels like they are often listening in on personal conversations. The Black Tapes and Limetown, however, use their investigative style to present what is heard as evidence rather than solely part of the fictional narrative.

4. Chion provides examples such as Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) (1999, 24).

5. An article from the Vancouver Sun reveals some of the confusion about the show. It notes, “The characters and stories on The Black Tapes Podcast are fictional, but no one connected with the show is going to tell you that, because the intentional blurring of truth and fiction is part of what makes The Black Tapes so much fun … On a subReddit devoted to The Black Tapes, commentators try to figure out who the actors behind the voices are, while others debate whether the show is real or not” (Brown 2015).

6. It is worth noting that the producers of The Black Tapes also have another fictional horror docudrama style podcast called The Last Movie (2018–present), which shares some aspects with Berberian Sound Studio (2013). The podcast documents Nic Silver’s discovery of The Last Movie, a film which is supposedly so cursed, it is the last movie you see before you die. Silver introduces multiple episodes by giving shot-by-shot analysis of scenes from fictional films. It is a jarring experience as Silver describes, in great detail, the visual editing of horrific scenes that the audience can only imagine.

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Notes on contributors

Megan Fariello

Megan Fariello is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at George Mason University.