The specificity of nostalgia

Stranger Things opened the floodgates for delivering us 1980s nostalgia, and as with any kind of nostalgia, the idea is to get the details just right -- a toy you really played with, a poster you really had on the wall, a wardrobe choice you really made.

I was just surprised to see the makers of Summer of '84 focus so specifically on getting the details right for one particular viewer: me.

Overall their film is only a mild success for me, though that success is definitely bolstered by a turn at the end I was not expecting. I mean, I think it's bolstered by that -- I'm still chewing it over.

But in terms of trying to make me relate to the film, well, including my actual name in the film was certainly a step in the right direction.

I'll get to that in a minute.

Let's start with the differences. I wasn't as old as these kids were in the summer of 1984, as they are supposed to be 15 and I was only ten going on 11. I also didn't have a serial killer in my neighborhood, or at least not that I knew of.

The first thing that had me nodding along was the lead character's shelf of Hardy Boy detective books in his bedroom. I had a shelf exactly like that, with the blue spines all lined up together in a bit of aesthetic beauty we never would have noticed at the time, but now seems gloriously emblematic of that era.

Then there's all the standard stuff that Stranger Things introduced, like kids on bikes with flashlights and walkie talkies. I did at least two of those things. For some reason, my friends and I never had walkie talkies.

But a couple other things really got me.

One was that the main kid had a paper route, and there are some scenes of him collecting money from the neighbors on his route. I did that. I was a terrible paper boy, and I think I mostly walked my route rather than doing it on a bike like this guy did, but I had those weird exchanges with neighbors who couldn't pay me when I came to the door, asking me to come back later, as well as the occasional snide remark about why the Sunday morning paper didn't arrive until 9:30 a.m.

Then there was the fact that around 1984, I was messing with neighbors in a way similar to the kids in this movie. I had a weird and inexplicable period in which I vandalized my neighbors' mail and mailboxes, ultimately leading to police intervention, my dad taking me around to apologize to everyone, and me getting grounded and denied the right to go trick-or-treating that year. The lead kid's dad takes him on a kind of neighborhood apology tour in this movie as well.

But the thing that really got me is that the kid had my name.

Not my exact name, but close enough.

I wouldn't have noticed it at all except that his parents get addressed as "Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong" late in the movie. Those are my parents' names.

My first name is Derek, and it so happens that this kid's first name is Davey. Both of us D. Armstrongs.

You could say it's just a coincidence and ... well, you'd be right.