“Nostalgia: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.”

-Mirriam Webster

I recently saw Spielberg’s “Ready Player One”, a straight-forward hero’s-journey type film that relies heavily on the use of CGI and indulges in shameless orgies of nostalgia. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the film, it was actually quite fun, especially through all the pop culture references that reminded us of our favourite childhood memories. And yet, all those DeLoreans and King Kongs and Overlook Hotels are only there to mask the fact that the movie simply isn’t good. All this got me thinking about the waves of nostalgia we’ve gotten in recent years, how it actually isn’t the first time that something like that happens and what does all of this can tell us about our society.

We’ve seen a trend in recent years in filmmaking, especially in Hollywood filmmaking, in which many new releases appeal to the nostalgic feelings of its audience towards a bygone era. The economic reasoning behind this is simple enough: why risk a million-dollar investment on an untested product when you can simply take an existing product with proven popularity and adapt it to today’s generations? The success of movies like “It” (2017) and series like “Stranger Things” (2016) and “Lost in Space” (2018) are a testament to this. This also applies to the XXI century reboots of “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, “James Bond” and many other beloved franchises. But underneath this layer of economic interest lie several competing ideologies that unexpectedly, yet predictably once we take into account several socio-economic factors, have risen in recent memory.

What do liberal political correctness ideology and Trump-esque reactionary populism have in common? That’s right, they both appeal to nostalgia to gain support from the public. Let me explain myself. As an example, let’s look at last years “The Last Jedi”. As controversial as a Star Wars film can get, many fans criticized it for superimposing political correctness over the true aura of the franchise. We can see this in the plot relevance of characters such as Rose or admiral Holdo, while other classic important characters like Chewbaca, C3PO, R2D2 and admiral Akbar were relegated to the background. But beyond the negative reception by a large portion of the fandom, we can see how Disney and Hollywood take a piece of our collective memory, renews it and uses it to spread the very actual liberal ideals (as they’ve already been doing for decades).

Another example of this is “Stranger Things”, Netflix’s hit science fiction/fantasy/horror series set in the 80s that’s part “E.T.”, part “The Goonies”, part “Stand by Me”, part “Alien”, part “Firestarter”… you get the idea. Now, first of all I really like “Stranger Things”, I even liked the controversial seventh episode of season 2. However, there’s no denying that the series is looking at the 1980s through the lens of the 21st century, and that means that inevitably modern values and ideals are being injected to a time period that didn’t have them, and that we can’t expect for it to have them. Let’s look at the character of Steve Harrington: he starts out as the popular jock, kind of dimwitted bully archetype character, but by the end of the second season he had undergone a total character transformation that won over thousands of fans. And yet, virtually every character that remotely fell into that archetype in the 80s was there only to torment the main characters. True, one can argue that because this is a longer format there’s more room for a character to grow, but to see such subversion in mainstream media is something more in tune with the current century than it is to the period in which it is set, and something very in line with today’s ideal of “everyone has a voice, everyone is capable of change.”

This also applies to the polar opposite in the socio-political spectrum, the also current populist movements in recent history that champion a return to the past and traditional values. Just look at Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again!”, appealing to the return of some past period of irrecoverable condition, like Webster would say. But to keep it film-related, one can argue that a similar strategy was used to rise the hype of the new Star Wars trilogy (South Park parodied and exposed this very well in its 20th season, as Mr. Garrison’s run for the presidency is compared to J. J. Abrams’ motto of making Star Wars great again. And to tell the truth, staying on the political side for a bit, extreme populist have been doing this since forever, just think about Hitler’s promises of taking the third reich to the glory of old germania.

These waves of nostalgia in popular culture may seem like something recent, but such invasions of treasured memories into mass media have been a thing more than once. In the 80s there was huge nostalgia for the 1950s, just take Marty McFly going back in time to that particular time period in “Back to the Future” or the aforementioned “Stand by Me”, a movie set in the late 50s released in 1986. Later, in the 90s, we can see a longing for the 60s, like in the original “It” miniseries, or the 70s, with the most obvious example being the hilarious sitcom “That 70s Show”. Two of these examples are particularly interesting, namely “It” and “Stand by Me”, because they were pieces of pop culture that reveled in nostalgia for a bygone era, and today that same longing is repeated towards them, with last year’s great “It: Chapter One” and the several references and reshuffles that exist of “Stand by Me”, like “Stranger Things” or 2012’s “Mud”, even “Rick and Morty” did a parody on it. We spin in endless cycles of nostalgia, most probably in 30 years we’ll be nostalgizing over today’s media.

Human beings have always lived in the past, that’s both their blessing and their curse. The phrase “every past time was better” illustrates this pretty well, in spite of the reality being quite the opposite. Today in pop culture there are tons and tons of remakes, reboots, reimaginings, spin-offs or new adaptations of pre-existing material that we somehow hold dearly to our heart; we are weak towards that which takes us to a past in which we think we were happier, and the culture industry exploits that. And yes, economically it makes sense. The problem is that we keep paying to watch familiar material, instead of going for something new, where we haven’t invested neither our time nor our attention. But beyond that little, almost invetiable fact, it is interesting and actually important to analyze this and how this reflects on the ideologies that underlie modern society. In one end of the spectrum are the liberal crowd who pretend to spread their values through the use of popular nostalgia pieces, and on the other end there’s reactionary populism that uses nostalgia to gain strength and propagate the idea that the best way forward is backwards.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to talk about this topic, I’ve barely scratched the surface, I’d love to know your thoughts on this. If you liked this post you can be of big help if you share it with friends and family, and if you want to stay up to date with the content of this blog please follow. Until next time!