Fans of Stranger Things have had fun picking through all of the Netflix hits retro references, from the copious E.T. homages to that John Carpenter-esque synth score. But the best nod to the past isnt the hairstyles, the marathon Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, or even the soundtrack full of New Order and Echo & The Bunnymen songs. No, the real stroke of nostalgic genius is the casting of Winona Ryder as distraught single mom Joyce Byers. From the moment the actress appears, the pulse of every 1980s kid starts to quicken.
For those of you who didnt grow up watching Heathers, Beetlejuice and Lucas on a loop on cable and VHS, it might be hard to understand why so many people have looked at Ryders turn in the Netflix show as the single best callback moment of 2016. Few would call her the best actress of her generation, though her skills are often (and severely) underrated. And though countless young men and women had a crush on her in the Eighties, she was never a sex symbol per se. She stood for something purer something that Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer seem to innately understand, even though the twin brothers were born in 1984.
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Put it this way: It makes perfect sense that the Ryder who starred in Beetlejuice would grow up to play the mother of a sweetly nerdy little kid like Will Byers. Director Tim Burton gets a lot of credit for turning pretty-boy heartthrob Johnny Depp into a goth weirdo in Edward Scissorhands. But the filmmaker actually got there with the actors costar two years earlier, styling Ryder as a surly, death-obsessed adolescent way back in 1988. Her hilariously mopey performance as Lydia Deetz was completely unlike the any of the bland, moussed-up high school princesses and princes that Hollywood leaned on to win teenage audiences 30 years ago. Just by frowning and cracking sardonic jokes, Ryder became a huge hero to young outsiders across America.
One of the big keys to the actress success back then was her authenticity. In interviews, Ryder talked about growing up in a family of hippie intellectuals, and being a fan of author J.D. Salinger and heartland punk heroes the Replacements. She carried that edginess and deep interior life into her most iconic performance, as the anarchic socialite Veronica Sawyer in the 1988 cult comedy Heathers. A self-hating preppie, Veronica sabotages her high schools social order with the help of a sociopathic bad boy named J.D. (played by Christian Slater, who himself has been trading off his Eighties screen persona lately in the hip, hit TV drama Mr. Robot). Ultimately, J.D. takes things too far, and the heroine has to cut herself loose both from her hateful, shallow clique and her nihilistic boyfriend. Again, Ryders character resonated with the generation of alterna-kids who felt alienated from the Reagan-eras conservative, materialistic values even the ones who didnt want to blow up their school.
As it turned out, there were a lot more Lydias and Veronicas lurking in the shadows of American culture than anyone had reckoned with. In the 1990s, the oddballs had their day: Nirvana topped the charts. The Simpsons became a sensation. Quentin Tarantino shook up the movies. Matthew Sweet wrote a beautiful pop song about my little movie star, titled Winona. In a righteous world, this shouldve been her take-over-the-world heyday.
Instead, the Clinton era was were rough for Ryder although she did make a few terrific movies. Shes strong in her segment of Jim Jarmuschs 1991 anthology film Night on Earth, playing a chain-smoking L.A. cabbie shuttling Gena Rowlands around, and wonderful in Gillian Armstrongs 1994 adaptation of Little Women (playing Jo, because of course). Some critics were unsure at the time about her publicly meek, privately steely take on an aristocratic wife in Martin Scorseses version of The Age of Innocence, but she won a Golden Globe and garnered an Oscar nomination; with each passing year, both that film and her work in it look better and better. Even at the end of the decade, as the lead in the mental illness memoir Girl, Interrupted, Ryder maintains her unique combination of intelligence and sensitivity while Angelina Jolie does her Snake Pit 2.0 act.
Aside from maybe Little Women though, none of these performances have endured the way that Ryders turns in Beetlejuice and Heathers have or have captured viewers imaginations the way even her brief role in the heartwarming 1986 teen romance Lucas did. It was as though Hollywood couldnt figure out to how to use an actual Generation X hero in the era when the slackers were ascendant. She couldve been working with Tarantino or Cameron Crowe. Instead she was stuck fumbling through period pictures like Bram Stokers Dracula and The Crucible or worse, playing a cartoon version of a Ninties twentysomething in the painfully phony Reality Bites (1994).
By the time the 2000s rolled around, the actress was becoming better known for incidents unrelated to her craft. She had a succession of high-profile boyfriends, starting with Johnny Depp (who tattooed WINONA FOREVER on his arm and then scratched out the NA when they broke up). She also suffered a major public humiliation when she was busted for shoplifting, allegedly under the influence of illegally obtained prescription drugs. That, coupled with the news a few years earlier that shed dropped out of The Godfather Part III due to exhaustion, seemed to kill all the momentum in her career.
And yet its not entirely fair to call Stranger Things a comeback, because Ryder never really stopped working. Shes mostly fallen back into the job of character actress, but even there shes had memorable moments on the margins: see 2010s Black Swan, where shes a star dancer on her way out of the spotlight [cough, cough]; and the 2015 HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, with Ryder cast as a Yonkers politician who turns on a former ally after she they take an unpopular stand. What both of those parts have in common with Stranger Things is a certain meta quality. To some extent, these movies are taking advantage of what we already know about Ryder, by casting her as a likable celebrity whos fallen on hard times.
None have it rougher than Joyce Byers, however, whose son disappears into another dimension, forcing her to deal with the dark mysteries of the universe and the incredulity of the local authorities. Her Stranger Things character is like every Eighties Ryder heroine rolled into one, then aged a few decades. Shes a scrappy underdog like her character in Lucas; a quirky free spirit like Lydia from Beetlejuice; and a smart, determined individualist like Heathers Veronica.
Thats why its genuienly a treat to see so much of Ryder in Stranger Things not because its a cleverly kitschy idea to put a once-famous 1980s actress in a show about the 1980s, but because shes the right former star. In her early years in movies, she represented an entire point-of-view, giving voice to teens who liked literature and loud alt-music, who wanted to make a difference in the world. And in this show, shes still advocating for the outsiders. Shes become the mom of every Clash-loving adolescents dreams. Shes the kind of mother a Winona Ryder character would want to have.
From musical cues to Spielberg movie references, Netflixs Stranger Things resurrects the Eighties. Watch here for an inside look into the hit series.