Walkman time machine

ABSTRACT

In the recent boom of 1980s-set television period dramas, the Walkman appears again and again as a symbol of the decade. This article argues that the Walkman (or personal stereo) is not just a one-way ticket into the past but can unsettle the temporality of the television serials in which it appears. It functions as a time machine – figuratively and occasionally even literally – by creating allegorical connections between past and present. Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014–2017), The Americans (FX, 2013–2018), and Deutschland 83 (Sundance TV, 2015–2020) recreate for viewers the initial experience of the Walkman as a wondrously new piece of personal, mobile technology. Oblique comparisons to the smartphone sidestep didacticism, instead creating a defamiliarized perspective on current technology that has otherwise become a source of both boredom and anxiety. The Walkman further provides a structural metaphor for the ‘complex’ temporality of shows like Halt and Catch Fire: the back-and-forth spooling/unspooling mechanism of cassette tape access suggests that backward and forward movement in time are inherently intertwined. The Walkman’s recurring appearances in these serial television narratives allow the shows to ponder how we arrived at our technological present and what might have gone differently.

KEYWORDS:

• Walkman
• television
• seriality
• period drama
• temporality

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my colleagues Mark Sandberg and Harry Burson for their generous feedback and to the anonymous reviewers who helped me contextualize all those ’80s references.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2024.2349493

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Sony debuted the Discman, later renamed the CD Walkman, in 1984, only five years after the original cassette Walkman. The Recording Industry Association of America, however, reports that sales of cassettes in the United States outpaced those of CDs throughout the ’80s up to the early ’90s. See: ‘U.S. Sales Database’ (2022).

2. For simplicity’s sake, I have listed the dates for the entire Deutschland series, in which each follow-up season is titled slightly differently: Deutschland 86 (2018) and Deutschland 89 (2020). I have also attributed the show to Sundance TV, its American distributer and eventual co-producer, rather than its German producers UFA Fiction and RTL Television.

3. See: ‘Coming Soon’ (2018).

4. Notably, the subsequent fourth season of Stranger Things demonstrates a more serious and immersive function of the Walkman: tethering the character Max Mayfield to the real world via her favorite song, Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’, in order to save her from possession by a supernatural villain. The song, if not the Walkman itself, received a significant spike in popularity. See: Battan (2022).

5. Mackenzie Davis, who portrays Cameron, also retroactively provides an extratextual connection to the Blade Runner world through her role as an actual ‘replicant’ in the more recent sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017).

6. It should be noted that Cameron is also white. In contrast to the Walkman, the boombox – another significant piece of ’80s cassette-playing technology – is often associated in film with Black or Latinx youth, particularly in an urban setting. For analysis of the link between the boombox, Black youth culture, and gentrification in films of the ’80s, see: Palmer (2022).

7. The exception, again, is the racial category of whiteness they share.

8. See, for example, this aggregated list of Pokémon Go incidents: Axelson (2019).

9. Notably, I did not find evidence of this concern over intimacy extending toward a fear of humans becoming less human and more machine-like through their reliance on technological devices, which was a historical concern with the Walkman that has largely carried over to the smartphone. Speculation about its absence is beyond the scope of this project but might warrant further study.

10. Bluetooth headphones have, of course, been around much longer and enjoyed popularity in the early 2000s, when they were associated not with cool young people but with workaholic businesspeople. They have only recently become the norm – since Halt and Catch Fire’s first season aired in 2014, in fact. This may be an unintended reminder that a show’s view of technology is dated to the time of its production.

11. I am making presumptions about the intended audience of the show here, but it follows from the fact that the creators are a West German/American couple and that it was received much more favorably in countries such as the UK and US than within Germany itself. See, for example: Oltermann (2016).

12. For ease of reading, I am quoting the English-language subtitles rather than the original German dialogue.

13. The follow-up seasons of the show, particularly Deutschland 86 (season 2), take Martin clear across Africa, from Angola to South Africa to Libya. This early moment with the seller, who is listed on IMDB only as ‘Senegalese’, prefigures this journey.

14. This suggests that the newness of this technology is not limited to an inexperienced East German like Martin. Linda, however, falls outside of the youth demographic at which the Walkman would have been aimed. In contrast to Cameron from Halt and Catch Fire, Linda is coded as an unhip ‘old maid’ cat lady.

15. For more information on these particular Walkman features, see: Tuhus-Dubrow, 24. For a rare study on the practice of splitting earbuds (here, how children share them with one another), see: Bickford (2014).

16. Gordon’s intended use of the Walkman as a means for grounding himself in the present bears similarities to the season four example from Stranger Things, but in a less supernatural context (see footnote 4).

17. The famous line in the book actually opens with the imperative, ‘Listen’, linking the written word even more closely to the kind of auditory experience that is the focus of this article. See: Vonnegut (1991 [1969], 23).

18. On Landgraf’s original statements in 2015, see, for example: Littleton (2015) After numerous articles in the intervening years about how scripted television had not yet reached its peak, a slew of reports declaring the death of peak TV have been published since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. See the article and linked Variety VIP+ and Luminate report: Aquilina (2024).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Wells Jacobson

Lisa Wells Jacobson is a Marion L. Brittain postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her scholarship asks how contemporary television serials write history, particularly in the context of the late Cold War. Her work has appeared in Film Quarterly and The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms.