Gee, for someone who’s spent the past few years lecturing others on the hazards of living on Memory Lane—by way of curated collections of memorabilia, or the unconscionable expropriation of superheroes from children, or whatever your nostalgic opiate—I quite recently became starkly aware of my own crippling sentimental yearning for obsolete pleasures. But I’ve also identified the precise agent of disorientation that’s led many of us down this dead-end path… and, with it, a way out. First, some backstory.
I’ve had occasion this autumn to enjoy ample time back on the East Coast, both a season and region I can never get enough of. I spent a weekend in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with a group of high-school friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen in a quarter century. I visited my beautiful sister in Washington, D.C., where we took in a Nats game so I could get a firsthand look at the team my Dodgers were set to trounce in the playoffs. I attended my closest cousin’s wedding (Bo to my Luke), and served as best man at my oldest friend’s—both in New Jersey. I marched in Greta Thunberg’s #ClimateStrike rally at Battery Park, and took meetings with representatives from the Bronx and Manhattan borough presidents’ offices about bringing both districts into the County Climate Coalition.
(I also got chased out of Penn Station by a mutant rat, so it was about as complete a New York adventure as I could’ve hoped for.)
Wonderful and often productive as those experiences were, though—the subway run-in with Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles notwithstanding—my favorite moments were the ones where nothing so noteworthy occurred. The pints at my favorite pubs. The old faces I stopped to chat with “on the Avenue,” as we say back home. The solitary strolls through the park amidst the holy silence of snowfall.
More than any of that, though—the ballgames, the gatherings formal and informal, the walks down the street or into the woods—I did what I always do, regardless of site or circumstance: entertained quixotic fantasies about moving back.
This has become, over the past half-decade, a personal pathological affliction, as my long-suffering friends and family can lamentably attest. I mean, I left New York for Los Angeles eighteen years ago. Eighteen years! That’s years—not months. Christ, Carlin, at what point does the former cease to feel like home in favor of the latter?
I can’t say what prompted my recent epiphany, but for the first time in all my exhausting exhaustive ruminating on the matter, this simple, self-evident truth occurred to me: I’ve never really left New York.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
All the time, people leave one place for another—schools, offices, homes—and for the most part they don’t go back. Why would they? You move on to the next thing, make the best of it, and, over time, involuntarily forget about wherever it was you left behind. Such is why we earnestly promise to stay in touch with former colleagues and classmates yet never do. Far from an expression of apathy, though, losing touch is merely an unconscious acknowledgment that most people in our lives, even those we consider friends, are of a very particular place and time; losing touch is, I would argue, the emotional mechanism that makes the often-difficult necessity of moving on possible.
Only my wife and I still have immediate family in New York, so we find ourselves back there multiple times a year, commonly for weeks at a stretch. And during those sojourns I am reminded anew of the comforts of home, the taste of the food, the distinct colors of the different seasons, the whirl and rush of humanity teeming in the streets. It sounds like a crazy thing to say about the busiest, noisiest city in the world, but I enjoy an inner peace when I’m there that I know nowhere else.
Arguably this is intensified at the holidays, when the Ghost of Christmas Past asserts its constant companionship. On Manhattan College Parkway, I see my long-dead father brushing a crust of snow off the windshield of our Plymouth Duster. I recall the frigid winter night whereby no fewer than fourteen of us crammed into my friend Bill’s 1988 Chevy Celebrity after a high-school house party in Yonkers; we could hear the undercarriage scraping the asphalt as one by one he dropped us off at our apartments around the Bronx. (How we didn’t get pulled over is anyone’s guess.) Walking the streets, I’ll scan the windows of the criminally expensive luxury condos that went up during the 1980s building boom, and I’m reminded of when, still half-completed, they were left to rot and ruin after the housing-market crash, during which time they became the personal postapocalyptic playgrounds of my grade-school gang.
Such memories are so tactile, in fact, that I’ll sometimes pop into the corner stationery stores where I used to buy my candy and comics and expect them to look just as they did, to still carry the same issues on the magazine rack that were there in 1985. And each and every time it is a rude awakening to realize, once again, this is not the case—nor has it been for a long, long year. Like a mosquito in amber, I am eternally preserved in the moment I left New York; I am no longer a resident of that city, nor have I allowed myself to be one of Los Angeles. Instead, I reside in a place that exists only in my own mind—a willfully self-imposed reclusive condition that is incrementally eroding my sanity.
STRANGE DAYS
A few days after my most recent trip to New York, I was stocking up on supplies at Target when I suddenly stopped short at this endcap:
Care Bears. Pound Puppies. Lite-Brite. Speak & Spell. Nineteen-eighties novelties displayed in “retro” packaging engineered to capitalize on the very nostalgic sentimentality to which we are most susceptible at Christmas—the same sentimentality the seizes me every time I stop by Cappy’s candy shop on West 235th Street and hope to see the comics of my youth on the wire-frame spinner. Such is the modus operandi of the nostalgia–industrial complex (NIC), a billion-dollar enterprise that sells the one-click solution to the overwhelmingly intractable complexities of twenty-first-century existence by way of the reassuring analog simplicities of the twentieth. Want it tomorrow? Order within 4 hrs 30 mins and choose One-Day Shipping at checkout.
To that end, I have often cited our cultural obsession with superhero fiction as being a retreat from reality (Alan Moore said it best: “It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics”), but I’m now starting to wonder if we, collectively, have any sense of objective reality left from which to withdraw. You sure as hell wouldn’t think so from the impeachment inquiry, a stupefying case study in Choose Your Own Reality.
Propaganda used to mean getting people to believe stuff. Now it means getting them to question what they believe or whether there’s any truth at all. . . .
. . . Not just our belief in particular stories in the news, but our trust in the people who are telling the stories, the platforms, and fact-based reality itself.
Douglas Rushkoff, “Operation Mindfuck 2.0,” Team Human (Weekly Column), Medium, April 24, 2019
Such perceptual abstraction isn’t limited to our pundits and politicians, but is in fact reflected in and reinforced by our cherished superhero fiction itself—from this year’s Avengers: Endgame, the highest-grossing film of all time, to the ongoing Arrowverse crossover “Crisis on Infinite Earths”—which traffics in the premise that reality is subjective, that for each of us there’s a parallel universe individually customized to our preferred mode of living, conveniently obviating the need for environmental stewardship, social cooperation, and empathetic coexistence.
The Matrix (1999), that sci-fi swan song of the last millennium, offered a binary choice between the real world and a single simulated reality: red pill or blue pill; the truth of reality or the ignorance of illusion—what’s it gonna be? Each option had its pros and cons, each offered a path forward; neither, however, questioned the absolutes of objective truth or linearity. No, The Matrix was in fact preoccupied with notions of consequence and causality; the value at stake in that film was, correspondingly, agency.
By contrast, the “multiverse” construct of DC and Marvel, those scrappy red-headed bastards of the publishing biz turned insidious corporate arms of the NIC, does away altogether with the faux-absolutes of objective truth and linearity. The very concept of parallel universes that operate independently from one another is an echo, in a way, of the nationalistic ideological agenda permeating so much of our (geo)politics at present: that there are very fine people on both sides, and why shouldn’t we all get to live in our own little walled-off bubbles—them in their shithole countries, us in red, white and blue America? Parallel dimensions are a convenient contrivance by which we reconcile our competing—often contradictory—worldviews and, more to the point, justify the incontrovertible validity of our own. Viewpoints are fixed, facts selectively cited and interpreted to support them—a reversal of figure and ground.
FIGURE AND GROUND
Here’s how, like the simulated reality of The Matrix, our popular fictions have been manipulated—by way of near-indiscernible slight of hand—to subversively subjugate us to the socioeconomic ideology of consumerism:
Human inventions often end up at cross purposes with their original intentions—or even at cross purposes with humans, ourselves. Once an idea or an institution gains enough influence, it changes the basic landscape. Instead of the invention serving people in some way, people spend their time and resources serving it. The original subject becomes the new object.
Or, as we may more effectively put it, the figure becomes the ground.
The idea of figure and ground was first posited by a Danish psychologist in the early 1900s. He used a simple carboard cutout to test whether people see the central image or whatever is around it. . . .
What fascinates people to this day is the way the perception of figure or ground can change in different circumstances and cultures. When shown a picture of a cow in a pasture, most westerners will see a picture of a cow. Most easterners, on the other hand, will see a picture of a pasture. . . .
Neither perception is better or worse, so much as incomplete. If the athlete sees herself as the only one that matters, she misses the value of her team—the ground in which she functions. If a company’s “human resources” officer sees the individual employee as nothing more than a gear in the firm, he misses the value and autonomy of the particular person, the figure.
When we lose track of figure and ground, we forget who is doing what for whom, and why. We risk treating other people as objects. Worse, we embed these values in our organizations or encode them into our technologies. By learning to recognize reversals of figure and ground, we can liberate ourselves from the systems to which we have become enslaved.
Figure/ground reversals are easy to spot once you know where to look, and maybe how to look.
Take money: it was originally invented to store value and enable transactions. Money was the medium for the marketplace’s primary function of value exchange. Money was the ground, and the marketplace was the figure. Today, the dynamic is reversed: the acquisition of money itself has become the central goal, and the marketplace just a means of realizing that goal. Money has become the figure, and the marketplace full of people has become the ground. . . .
Or consider the way the human ideal of education was supplanted by its utilitarian opposite. Public schools were originally conceived as a way of improving the quality of life for workers. Teaching people to read and write had nothing to do with making them better coal miners or farmers; the goal was to expose the less privileged classes to the great works of art, literature, and religion. . . .
But once we see competitive advantage and employment opportunity as the primary purposes of education rather than its ancillary benefits, something strange begins to happen. Entire curriculums are rewritten to teach the skills that students will need in the workplace. . . .
Instead of compensating for the utilitarian quality of workers’ lives, education becomes an extension of it. Where learning was the purpose—the figure—in the original model of public education, now it is the ground, or merely the means through which workers are prepared for their jobs.
Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 50–53
Figure/ground obfuscation is precisely how the NIC commodifies sentimentality. Whereas comic books and action figures used to actively expand the imagination of children, now they purposefully limit it in adults, conditioning us to fill our heads and our homes with (status quo–affirming) superheroic adventures and playthings originally intended for the eight-year-old boys of the 1970s and ‘80s.
The NIC trains us to be loyal “superfans” of multimedia mega-franchises, a designation that requires we spend copious time and money watching every endless new cinematic/televisional offering (increasingly available only through exclusive subscription-based streaming platforms), play the tie-in videogames, and purch the licensed merch—all while advertising for the franchise free of charge via our branded apparel and social-media accounts. The pop-cultural fantasies of our youth—the ground on which we developed our relationships and imaginations by playacting as superheroes or Jedi or Ghostbusters with our friends—have become the literal figures now, from the “collectibles” for which we willingly pay top dollar to the aging actors pulled out of mothballs to reprise their onetime roles as Darth Sidious and Sarah Connor and Alexander Knox, packaged and sold to us as if the ephemeral experience of childhood could ever really be recreated or relived.
And how about those movies and shows themselves? Once upon a time, our popular fictions helped us make sense of reality; now they merely sponsor the dispiriting notion that reality is amorphous, fungible, meaningless—purely a matter of personal preference or perspective. Consider the way the topical social allegories of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek have been usurped by the self-referential hyperlinking of Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek. As for the events of the last several Terminator and Halloween movies? Retconned! Or banished to an “alternate timeline,” if you prefer. Cause and consequence, after all, are so last millennium.
Back then, stories used to light a path forward; now they dismiss the very notion of linearity itself. To wit: Thought-provoking (and emotionally affecting) time-travel adventures like Back to the Future, The Terminator, and Quantum Leap have been succeeded by the headache-inducing multiple-reality branching (and empty Easter-egg hunting) of Endgame, Days of Future Past, and Legends of Tomorrow. The former utilized time travel merely as a storytelling device to study the human existential condition; the latter, inversely, elevate the conceit to the entire point of the narrative exercise itself, presenting a storyless wimmelbilderbuch in which the well-trained superfan is challenged to make meaning of it simply by spotting all the in-universe cross-references. If fantasy once helped us more clearly perceive reality, now it serves to undermine our very faith in empirical reality itself, thereby disabusing us of the notion—and the responsibility—of personal agency. Figure and ground reversed once again.
WELCOME BACK?
Habituated by our cultural narratives to accept we live in a world in which there is no future (as our dystopian fictions instruct), nor an objective here and now (with its alternate realities and alternative facts), all we have for certain anymore is the past—the exploits of Luke Skywalker and Captain Picard and Peter Venkman that inspired our own youthful imaginations and adventures. And courtesy the nostalgia–industrial complex, those heroes are no longer consigned to the ether of memory: They’re all returning to a big or small screen near you—each with their own SDCC exclusive action figure! See, by exploiting our childhood associations with those characters, the NIC promises to restore our innocence, when all it really does is infantilize us—keeps us imprisoned in yesteryear (and paying for the privilege)—by reversing figure and ground.
And, upon consideration, maybe I’ve been guilty of this, too. Maybe my life’s own figures—my father on the overpass, the fourteen of us idiotic teens sausage-pressed into that sedan, my preadolescent pals freely roaming the streets of the Bronx—have become the ground, and the ground—New York—the figure. I don’t know. Regardless, I can’t even blame the nostalgia industry for my mess; I did this to myself. Maybe next year I’ll try to be a little less obstinate, less capital-R Romantic, and instead a bit more sober of perspective, more present.
And maybe, in the spirit of renewed hopefulness, we’ll reject Top Gun: Maverick, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Halloween Kills in 2020 the way we mercifully passed this year on Terminator: Dark Fate, Charlie’s Angels, and Men in Black: International. Washington Post culture critic Alyssa Rosenberg recently reevaluated her own figure/ground perception of her favorite fantasy series when she stated that “the ninth movie in the so-called Skywalker Saga, ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,’ is so bad that it has made me wonder what I was thinking all these years. Did I actually love ‘Star Wars,’ or did I love something about being young and feeling connected to other people through pop culture instead?”
Amen. And just think of the paths forward we might illuminate if we took a cue from Ms. Rosenberg’s act of critical introspection and outlook adjustment. Hell, with that kind of courage, we might even get a new president—one who respects facts, science, and truthfulness. We might all, in the new year to come, find our way home to reality.
Because wouldn’t it be something if we opted out of our “shared cinematic universes”—our comforting fantasies, our private parallel dimensions—in favor of consciously reconnecting with our actual shared universe? That would be a reboot truly worth getting excited about.
Seems to me that while you still respect Rushkoff’s writings you are not as “hyped” about post-narrativity and post-narrative works as you used to be?
Quite the opposite, my dear fellow! Just as we need more prescriptive fiction to help show the way in an increasingly complicated world, so too could we benefit from more postnarrative fiction to help properly condition us to the state of uncertainty we experience as a consequence of those tangled complexities — to make ambiguity a catalyst for possibility rather than anxiety. But let’s be clear about something: Lost, Game of Thrones, Westworld, and the comic-book “universes” of DC and Marvel are not true postnarrative works — they’re just conspicuous exemplars of bad writing. If anything, those ethically and creatively bankrupt narratives help train us “to fear and reject the possibility that reality is a participatory activity, open to our intervention” (Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human, [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 162). They’re all instances of “faux-postnarrativity,” as Rushkoff himself asserts (without naming names):
Basically, beware of anything fueled by or predicated on “spoilers.” There’s arguably a single “spoiler” in the entire original Star Wars trilogy, and it’s the revelation of Luke’s true parentage. And far from merely a “gotcha” moment, it turns the climax of Empire, forces the viewer to completely reconsider the context of A New Hope, and advances the grander narrative arc into the events of Return of the Jedi.
Same goes for Back to the Future, Blade Runner, the first two Terminators, the original Halloween, the Godfather trilogy — what, exactly, are the “spoilers” in any of those movies? Knowing who killed Laura Palmer doesn’t diminish the experience of watching Twin Peaks in the least, a plot revelation that was arguably beside the point of the narrative itself. Is Alien an improved cinematic experience for knowing the origins of the xenomorph or the space jockey? Are the mysteries of 2001: A Space Odyssey enhanced by the explanations offered in 2010: The Year We Make Contact? Or is there value in allowing the audience to fill in some of the blanks, to imagine the actions taken “between the panels,” and to meet the storytellers halfway?
So, to my view, these sprawling fictional “universes” — of Star Wars, Marvel, Game of Thrones, what have you — offer the worst of both worlds: There’s no prescriptive lesson in any of them, nor do they train us “to let go of conventional story expectations so that we can learn to watch for something else — for the behavior of the humans in the scenes, for the activity that emerges out of boredom, and for the relationship of the characters to their world” (Rushkoff, Team Human, 161). They’re just marketing campaigns masquerading as epic narratives, littering a given installment with narrative questions, the answers to which can only be found by reading the tie-in comics, unlocking the hidden secrets encoded into the videogames, and, natch, catching the next installment — coming soon to a theater near you (tickets on sale now through Fandango). “Any art that asks its viewers to slow down or, worse, pause and reflect is hurting a market that depends on automatic and accelerating behaviors” (ibid., 162).
No, true postnarrativity challenges our mores (such as heroism and consumerism), whereas all this endless mega-franchise fodder fortifies and commodifies them. And its precisely because this cynical mode of “storytelling” is gaining such cultural influence, manipulating us to spend our time and resources serving it rather than the other way around, that I wrote this piece to illustrate how the NIC is changing the landscape, to borrow Rushkoff’s phrasing, and what we can do about it.
Anyway, Dave, I should take this opportunity to thank you so very kindly for your active engagement on this blog, and I wish you, sir, a Happy Holiday and only the best of health and prosperity in 2020.
Interestingly enough, as you write about nostalgia-pushing by Hollywood in response to perceived demand, is that George Lucas channeled his own nostalgia for Westerns, Samurai films, War movies, Republic Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Middle Earth novels, into something that had its own unique message for audiences, on the dangers of empire and of becoming the very things we fight against in our struggle for freedom. Lucas was undoubtedly influenced not only by the evils of Nazism and the fascism from which it flowed, but also by the McCarthy communist hunts of the 1950s and the war in Vietnam that was based on a stack of lies for which millions ultimately died.
Nostalgia is not an inherently bad thing—when we channel it into creative works that allow us to find our own voices and connect dots of thought within our own minds that we couldn’t previously link until we saw them connected by someone else.
In the reply I just posted to your previous comment, Michael, I talked about how what I respond to in New York City are its layers of history — I can sense them even when I can’t immediately see them — whereas Los Angeles (to my view) is merely this sad, flat grid of aging mini-malls and dreary dingbat-style apartment complexes. It’s aesthetically and historically lacking, the former arguably being an expression of the latter.
Much like an old city, we can sense the depth in a rich narrative even if we can’t immediately or precisely identify the shoulders on which its stands. As I’ve written about here on the blog, what was so revolutionary — so imagination-seizing — about Star Wars was the way by which Lucas synthesized his many varied interests, from drag racing to sci-fi serials to Asian cinema to comparative mythology to World War II–era history, and then funneled that through his unique worldview to create a work of fiction of extraordinary depth and breadth. The sequel trilogy, by contrast, draws influence from one source only: Lucas himself. And when that happens, our popular culture is reduced to merely a single layer.
In the creation of The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson has cited the direct aesthetic and narrative influence of Battlestar Galactica (2004), a remake of a short-lived television series from 1978 that was such a flagrant rip-off of the original Star Wars that Fox sued Universal for no less then thirty-four identifiable instances of plagiarism. Consider it: The Last Jedi is a sequel inspired by a remake of a rip-off of the original Star Wars! And we sense that creative bankruptcy — that cultural cannibalism — when we watch it.
So imagine my surprise when I went to see Johnson’s latest offering, Knives Out, from an original screenplay he authored, and found it to be a sharp (no pun intended), supremely entertaining take on those old locked-room mysteries of yore! In developing the project, Johnson is said to have taken inspiration from a diverse creative provenance including literature (Agatha Christie), television (Columbo), cinema (Deathtrap), music (Radiohead), and even Choose Your Own Adventure! He let his nostalgia (or, at very least, fondness) for those formative influences guide his creative process but not lead it, and in doing so created an old-school whodunit that manages to be sociopolitically topical without resorting to postmodern irony of the kind of misguided genre subversion that got him into trouble on The Last Jedi. With Knives Out, he delivered a piece of popular entertainment that owes a debt to the work of Christie, et al., but comes off as inspired rather than derivative. I hope its success serves as a powerful lesson to him.
Brilliant and on point for our present “multiple reality” world. I relate to the pull of nostalgia for the past, loved how you put the commercialization of our yearnings: “Such is the modus operandi of the nostalgia–industrial complex (NIC), a billion-dollar enterprise that sells the one-click solution to the overwhelmingly intractable complexities of twenty-first-century existence by way of the reassuring analog simplicities of the twentieth. Want it tomorrow? Order within 4 hrs 30 mins and choose One-Day Shipping at checkout.” I’ve come to realize that my childhood world only exists now in my memory and imagination. The essences of that time-place are not now accessible, regardless of how many icons or derivatives one may acquire from the NIC. Ah, sweet nostalgia and the imagined comforts of that lost world. It is time to reboot our minds for “consciously reconnecting with our actual shared universe.” My New Year’s wish is that it brings us a new president and guides us to actual reality. Thanks so much, all the best in the coming year.
Oh, thank you, Lennie, for taking the time to read and respond to this admittedly dense essay!
The nostalgia–industrial complex operates by reducing our childhoods — those formative memories, experiences, and relationships entirely unique to each of us and yet utterly universal for all — to something we can order on Amazon or download from iTunes. And certainly with my generation, they’ve been very successful at doing just that (through the reversal of figure and ground). Perhaps I’m lucky: I don’t need more Star Wars and Ghostbusters movies to help reconnect me to those bygone experiences; I revisit them in my own fiction — or, more to the point, they revisit me. They often emerge from the cellar of my subconscious in the most delightful and unexpected ways; that was certainly true this past summer, when I drafted my paean to preadolescent friendship, Spex, and found myself drawing on the feelings and adventures of my 12-year-old self for inspiration. Those days, I’ve come to recognize, are never far behind, they just cannot be accessed by way of the latest “legacy” sequel or action-figure replica. They can’t be sold to me; they’re already and always exclusively mine. They live in my heart — whether my heart is in New York, Los Angeles, or elsewhere… a truth I need to be better about remembering in the year ahead.
On that note, a new president is well within our power to manifest, Lennie, but we all need to be active participants in our shared reality — the agents of the very change we wish to see! That’s harder than ever in a world in which our pundits tell us outcomes are preordained, and our messianic narratives assure us we are powerless, but the story I’m most excited about writing is the one called “2020.” Let’s all create it together.
Here’s to you, Lennie, for a Happy Holiday and healthy, prosperous New Year!
I think historically that whenever reality is shite, popular culture becomes more fantastical, moves further away from daily experience. Look at all the musicals and dance movies from the late 30s and early 40s–talk about escapism! All these movable timelines are a way for us to fantasize about being able to change any event, any consequence because we feel powerless in real life. Also, I was about to take umbrage at that “eight year old boy” comment, but I realized that you are absolutely right–I was never the intended audience for a lot of the things I loved as a kid. Merry Christmas, and remember–home is where the heart is:-)
Agreed, Suzanne — there is absolutely a place for escapism! And there’s nothing wrong with taking (healthy) pleasure in shit you loved as a kid. Probably my first two favorite live-action TV shows — I’m talking about before I could even read — were the Adam West Batman series and The Dukes of Hazzard. Batman and Robin (that version, anyway) and Bo and Luke were my first heroes. (And, accordingly, Julie Newmar and Daisy Duke were probably the first two loves of my life, long before I had any sense of romantic/sexual attraction.) I barely own any DVDs anymore — I sold all of that stuff as part of my conversion to minimalism — but I still have the box sets of Batman ’66 and The Dukes. And I still watch them on (not altogether infrequent) occasion! One of my favorite “guilty pleasures” (though I hate the term) is watching The Dukes, even though the stories are infantile (and the Confederate flag on the roof of the car makes me cringe). But I still enjoy the stunts, the breezy chemistry of the cast, and I often laugh out loud at some its pure, delightful stupidity. When I need to forget about my troubles, and feel in touch with my inner seven-year-old, nothing does the trick like the good ol’ boys. I like those shows not because they are deep or thoughtful or meaningful but precisely because they are shallow and stupid and meaningless. There’s nothing wrong with that (in moderation).
But I also don’t pretend they’re great literature; I don’t lend that series more cultural weight than it rightly deserves. It was a children’s show from the early ’80s that was stupid then, is stupid now, but wasn’t/isn’t with a few charms that I can still bring myself to enjoy. I escape into Hazzard County on judicious occasion… but I don’t retreat into it. I don’t and wouldn’t want to live there. But I think a lot of people have very much chosen to live in the fictional universes of Star Wars or Marvel or DC Comics — such sprawling make-believe landscapes are, after all, happier, more organized, more just places than our actual universe — and what I hoped to do with this post is shed light on how the nostalgia–industrial complex exploits our sentimental longings to turn us all into card-carrying brand loyalists. Same as a luxury automaker, the NIC sells us a lifestyle — one based in the pleasures of the past. Through subversive tactics (like FOMO and “spoilers” and, most prominently, figure/ground reversal), it enslaves us to multimedia mega-franchises, those insidious rabbit holes of nostalgia, and keeps us chasing after our elusive lost innocence through product purchases. And just as home is where the heart is, as you astutely advise, so too is the metaphysical place our memories and youthful experiences dwell; none of that shit can be ordered on Amazon. And wouldn’t it be great if we stopped buying stuff that’s already exclusively ours to keep forever?
Happy New Year, Suzanne! Thanks for being such an engaged friend of this blog! For those unaware, Suzanne has an excellent new sci-fi novel out called The Dome from BookLand Press. I’ve read it, I love it, and I encourage everyone to experience it for themselves!
So many of the ideas from this post are reflected in my new book, “TRIED & (Still) TRUE,” Sean. (In fact, I pretty much quoted you at one point. I’ll send you a Dunks card as royalty.) It’s so easy, if we’re not careful, to stop making new memories and to cease living the day we’re given today, trading these for, as I put it in my new book:
“[We] haunt old memories like a petulant poltergeist, looking on like Scrooge at phantoms of [our] own creation who are not aware of—nor interested in—[our] lingering presence there.”
Well, Erik, it should please you to know that I plagiarized you in my new novella, Spex, because in it I explicitly reference the notion of “then-me” to which you first introduced me during our discussion in the comments of my “Different Stages” post from 2017. So, it looks like we’ll be exchanging Dunkin’ cards!
Let me say a few things about TRIED & (Still) TRUE: It’s an absolutely wonderful book (here’s my Goodreads review) that I encourage everyone to read! “The Nostalgist’s Guide” attempted to talk about the propensity we have to live in our own private bubbles, and how the nostalgia–industrial complex facilitates that by reversing figure and ground. There’s no denying, however, that digital technology has played a key role in equipping us — conditioning us, even — to dwell within our own customizable realities, but I did not have the space (in an already nearly 3,000-word post!) to explore that. Erik, however, did.
In his book’s second chapter, “glass,” Erik illustrates how movies are no longer watched in family rooms, but on phones — a once-communal experience has become a private and solitary one. And whereas on family car trips we were once exposed to our parents’ taste in music — since they controlled the radio — nowadays “each passenger is safely nestled away under hoods and hats and against pillows, donning headphones connected to personal devices and apps that pump only — and exactly — what we want to listen to.”
This is a crucial point to understand: At a time when a sense of empathetic coexistence is more crucial than ever, our cultural narratives reassure each of us we can have our own little comforting universes unto ourselves, and our digital technologies are providing them — “everybody separate in their own little techno-cocoons.”
With respect to Rushkoff‘s concerns, there are reasons to be optimistic about the decade ahead, but as I always counsel those who come to me for climate-change comfort, optimism isn’t a passive activity. Hope requires action. I believe — and I swear I’m not just saying this out of friendship to Erik — that TRIED & (Still) TRUE can help inspire a renewed mindset of optimism and agency. And, man, if optimism, agency, and empathy aren’t need now more than ever. Read the first chapter here.
It almost sounds like I owe Rushkoff a Dunks card; but I swear, I didn’t plagiarize! I hadn’t ever read his work except through you, here. It does, however, sound like we two are of a mind on some issues.
Thanks for organically letting readers know about the new book here, Sean. I want to add that I’m not anti-tech. In fact, it’s tech that brought you and I together. But it’s how we relate to tech. As hard as it is, we need to learn how to use tech—rather than letting the tech use us.
That is 100% Rushkoff’s point, as well, Erik: that it’s time to reprogram our tech to start serving us, to reclaim it as the prosocial tool it was intended to be — one in which imperfect individuality isn’t suppressed by “corrective” algorithms.
Phew. My brain is tired, Sean. Ha ha. It was easier in the olden days, I think, when truth was truth, and for the most part there was one reality. There were problems and disagreements, criminals and liars, of course, but most of us could agree that facts were facts. (Versus alternative facts). Life feels a little sci-fi these day with these overlapping universes. It’s mind-boggling.
I didn’t grow up with superheroes, and to be honest, can’t really relate to them. Tolkien’s Middle Earth perhaps comes close, but I was already a teenager when I first cracked the books (and they were books, not film) at the time. Perhaps that’s also why I find most (not all) current movies terribly unsatisfying. Nothing blows my mind anymore. I’m jaded. I’d rather go camping.
I can relate to your nostalgia for the places of your youth. I think our relationship with “place” is much more symbiotic than we believe. Places shape us, who we are and who we will become, especially those places of our childhoods where they were inextricably tied to our growth as humans. Especially if we didn’t move around much. We carry that connection inside us wherever we end up. Nothing wrong with that as long as it doesn’t stunt our growth, close off opportunities, and prevent us from deepening our knowledge about ourselves and others.
I have no idea if this is where your were going with your post, but this is where I ended up. Lol.
Like you, Diana, I am rarely blown away by movies and don’t go to them often. My own imagination has always been my favorite director/producer.
On account of all the traveling to New York I conducted this past autumn, I spent Christmas in L.A., where I found myself with the kind of time on my hands not typically afforded to me during the workaday reality of the rest of the year or the whirlwind “speed-dating” vacations of being home for the holidays, so I watched some movies. And something occurred for the first time in a long, long while…
I saw four movies in a row — an unbroken streak thus far — that I thought were outstanding: Brittany Runs a Marathon, Marriage Story, Knives Out, and Vice. The first two were about real people dealing with real issues, and the other two supremely entertaining offerings that either satirized and/or subverted many of the stale conventions of cinematic storytelling (the former the whodunit, the latter the biopic). And they were a welcome reminder to me — especially in light of the terrible reaction to (if still boffo box office of) Return of the Skywalker — that there is a hunger for both emotionally honest and creatively audacious storytelling.
I remember when I was a film student seeing an interview with Lawrence Kasdan (director of The Big Chill and The Accidental Tourist and screenwriter of The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark) in which he was asked to offer his most important piece of advice to aspiring filmmakers. “Tell honest stories.” For years, I had no idea what that meant. I do now.
A friend of mine is reading Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, which he described as “interesting, albeit a bit tedious.” I told him interesting-but-tedious is exactly my brand!
Well, thanks for giving this post a go, Diana, because it’s admittedly a doozy! As for “where I was going with it”… a lot of places. Maybe too many. (Such is the privilege of keeping one’s own blog.) It was in part a personal thought-piece on my experiences this past autumn, and the inner war I’ve grown weary of waging with myself. But it was mostly a nuanced examination and synthesis of a number of ideas I’ve spent the past few years studying on this blog: that if our popular fictions and fantasies once helped us more clearly perceive reality, now they serve to undermine our very faith in empirical reality itself, training us instead to find meaning in the licensed merchandising of multimedia mega-franchises. It’s about the commodification of our own nostalgic sentimentality for times gone by. And as I illustrated here, I am as susceptible to such sentimentality as the next person. And what I try to tell those my age who get caught up in the world-building minutiae of Star Wars and Marvel is that those stories were intended to inspire our impressionable imaginations, not retard our emotional/intellectual development. As Edward Norton recently observed, “Moviegoers are so used to getting fed the equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup that they can’t taste anymore.” When we live exclusively on a diet of cinematic and literary junk food, that becomes the (low) bar to which we hold our own creative works. It’s a (culturally unfortunate) feedback loop.
Anyway, Diana: Wherever this post was going — this intellectual stream-of-consciousness — thanks for following! I wish you health, happiness, and bountiful creativity in this new year!
The lovely Wendy Weir of Greater Than Gravity (seriously: subscribe to that wonderful blog if you haven’t already!) tried without success to leave a comment on this post (dang WordPress!), so she sent it to me via direct correspondence, which I am reproducing here verbatim:
So many points to consider upon reading, Sean. It’s the “did I love Star Wars (or whatever benchmark one holds) or did I love how/where/who and with whom I was during that time?” that has me thinking most. There’s a reason why “you can’t go home again” was originally asserted. Yeah, we literally go home, but nothing short of time travel can actually take us to the how/where/who and with whom we were then at that moment. Trying to capture and relive anything reminds me of the scene in Groundhog Day where Phil Connors tries SO HARD to make it right, and fails miserably. I have never really appreciated version 2s or reboots in general, and now I get why not. Nostalgia and a fondness for times past is healthy, but never leaving isn’t. Let’s go 2020 — may good things be coming our way!
The scene from Groundhog Day you cite, Wendy, is one of the most quietly poignant in the movie: He’s trying so desperately and earnestly to recreate the genuine alchemy of a fleeting moment… to no success. It was a confluence of unplanned conditions that caused Phil and Rita to fall side by side into the snow that first time, and though he could restage the circumstances, he couldn’t recapture the magic. That’s such a fitting metaphor for what we do when we try to feel eight years old again by going back to see the latest Star Wars offering: It’s everything as we remember it… minus any of the magic. Isn’t it preferable, then, to simply be grateful to have had the experience of being young and wide-eyed once — to celebrate it as one does at a graduation — before moving on to new frontiers and ventures? Such is precisely what you and I were discussing on your latest blog post, “How Lovely Are Thy Branches”: times change, and traditional practices should be flexible enough to change with them when necessary. The past is a great place to visit on occasion, but we shouldn’t want to live there.
Speaking of the here and now, here’s wishing you and your beautiful family a happy and healthy 2020, full of love and good humor and fun! You’ve been a loyal friend of this blog for many years, and I appreciate that friendship. I can think of no better note on which to start a new year than to express gratitude for those presently in one’s life, in whatever capacity that may be. Happy New Year, Schwinn Girl!
Nostalgia is a wicked mental trap. My somewhat unorthodox view is that it’s a result of poor memory and a lack of gratitude.
If something was good about your past, be grateful for it. But changes happen, and you can never have that moment back again. Pretending otherwise is counterproductive and not particularly adult behavior.
I never liked Peter Pan. Growing up is expected. It’s a lot better to look at the good you can have. So, for instance, just to pick a possibility out of the air–if you were to move back to New York, expecting to get back some golden moment haloed in the past, it’s a bad idea. Be grateful you had that time, but the clock doesn’t run backward. OTOH, if you were to return to NY with plans for the future, some kind of reasoned steps to make things better in your life, that’s another thing entirely. Way better chances of success. Exact same action in both cases, but different outcomes.
And nostalgia is the spoiler, like it has been in popular culture. Star Wars and Star Trek are done. Get over it and move on. Find more stories. For pity’s sake, they’re being published on Amazon in such numbers, some of them have to be good simply due to statistical averages.
Uh, quick editing note. All the “you”s were general, not specific to you personally, Sean, as was the thrust of all my remarks. I’m just tired of nostalgia, not the views expressed here. : )
That came through 100%, Cathleen, though I appreciate the clarification! All comments — even critical ones (not that yours was) — are welcome here… and doubly so if they express a healthy skepticism for nostalgia!
It’s funny, Cathleen, because I’ve written about our nostalgic culture for several years now (in “The Great Escape” and “Maybe It’s Time” and “Oh, Snap!”), and I’m still a little surprised by how overreactive or perhaps needlessly alarmist so many of my peers continue to think I’m being. And then last month, a few things happened: I tweeted a Spinal Tap quote that someone (uncritically but incorrectly) characterized as “nostalgic,” and my previous blog post, “It’s Alive! Return of the Universal Classic Monsters,” was enthusiastically (not in any way pejoratively) described by someone as “nostalgic,” whereas I simply viewed it as almost a retrospective documentary of a particular cinematic era, same as you might consider the film noir movement of the ’40s or the spaghetti Westerns of the ’60s. It was intended to be academic, not nostalgic.
And that’s when it occurred to me: Many of my friends and colleagues define nostalgia differently than I do. To them, it’s as simple as looking back fondly at some bygone era or pleasure, no different from flipping through a photo album. To me, though, nostalgia is a (malignant) yearning for times past, often at the expense of the present and the future. It’s the willful and purposeful fetishizing of a bygone era — a choice to remember it as the halcyon “good old days.” And what this post attempts to do is shed light on how our susceptibility to sentimentality has been exploited and commodified — how corporations have turned us all into willing Peter Pans by reversing figure and ground. I want people to understand the tactics being consciously and deliberately deployed to manipulate us, to get us to buy products we don’t need and see movies we don’t much like, so we might finally restore some proper perspective to our lives.
Now, whether or not that message gets across, I don’t know… but I thank you for being receptive to it, Cathleen, and for bringing your own voice to the conversation. I wish you a happy, healthy, creative, and productive 2020! Thanks for all your support, friend.
Sean
Well, I would say that nostalgia definitely includes a yearning for some past time, but that the yearning doesn’t have to be toxic. You can flip through a photo album without trying to regain the past. The important thing to remember is it’s a psychological fact that (other than traumatic events) the good things tend to stick in the memory and bad things recede. (BA degree talking here.) When it comes to 70s music, those who remember that era fondly usually recall tracks like “Stairway to Heaven” or “Carry On Wayward Sun.” Songs like “Seasons in the Sun” and “Muskrat Love” mercifully recede from awareness.
The point is, the 70s had its share of dud hits, just like every other era. And even if it didn’t, there’s no way we can get that time back anyway. I don’t read stuff about how great the 60s were. I only remember the tag end (which was actually in the early 70s), but from my perspective, they were a disaster. Unbridled adult self-indulgence can build a nightmare world for a child.
I’m glad you’ve also found worthwhile stuff to look forward to in THIS decade, and I wish you a terrific roaring 20s! : )
And now I have Seasons in the Sun stuck in my head
But you’re right. People look at the original Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy and Star Trek TOS and forget My Mother, the Car and Mr. Ed
People remember M*A*S*H*, but not afterMASH
Indeed, Dell — just as our own memories are naturally and necessarily selective, so is the cultural consciousness. As you and I were just discussing in a recent conversation about 1990s nostalgia, everyone remembers The X-Files, but Baywatch Nights… not so much. This is probably for the better!
I would further argue that even Star Trek and The X-Files would be better off if they lived only in the private bog of our memory than the public library of “the cloud.” In the latter, they remain eternally perfect, whereas when we watch them now, their flaws become all-too-apparent. When I consider all the Saturday-morning cartoons I grew up on — that I adored — and haven’t seen since, I realize that any attempt to revisit them (many of which have mercifully never been made available on home media) would only tarnish my memory of both them and that time in my life. In a Digital Age of on-demand access to everything, the challenge that now faces us is learning — choosing — to let some things go forever…
Well said, Cathleen! A few years ago, I wrote a post on horror filmmaker John Carpenter in which I reflected on his legacy — both the classic movies he produced as well as the duds that nearly sank his career (like the recently cited Memoirs of an Invisible Man), and how we’ve mostly chosen to forgive his misfires in favor of celebrating his masterpieces. And I used the opportunity to talk about my own father: that the ample controversies he created in life have been pardoned by those who knew him (myself included) so we might instead memorialize his many acts of kindness and good humor — that’s the stuff we talk about when we remember him at Christmas (and on other occasions). And I think that goes to your point about how good things tend to stick in the memory and bad things recede.
I sometimes wonder, in a way, if that emotional filtration process has been disrupted in a world of digital preservation? Photographs and video are powerful, tactile links to the past — note the way the photo collections in our iPhones are called Memories — but is it possible the modern miracle of immaculate technological recall has detrimentally interfered with our ability to move on? I’ve wondered aloud on this blog why my peers have refused to let go of childish things — why we still read comics and watch Star Wars — when our parents and grandparents in no way fetishized their childhood heroes and fantasies as either a nostalgic diversion or aspirational paradigm. And I can’t help but think it’s because we are the first generation to have on-demand access to the movies we grew up on — that precisely because we can revisit Luke Skywalker and Captain Picard and Peter Venkman anytime we choose, we’ve never had to let them go. And I don’t know that that’s a good thing. In a post I wrote this past June, I equated it to hanging around your old high school long after graduation. I think it’s better to let our subconscious — our memory — decide what to retain and what to expunge; digital media, on the other hand, allows us to hang on to everything always, and, accordingly, I think our circuits are now on overload. Our memories are selective for a reason, and we have disrupted that natural process via modern technology. And now, of course, corporations are exploiting that for monetary gain, which was the thesis of this piece.
All that said, however, I do think the 2020s are going to be a decade of radical systemic change, and I for one am looking forward to making many new memories in the decade to come! Here’s to your own peace and prosperity, Cathleen, as we roar into the ’20s!
>that precisely because we can revisit Luke Skywalker and Captain Picard and Peter Venkman anytime we choose, we’ve never had to let them go.
To bolster your argument: Comic books used to be ephemera. Disposable. Many comics, such as Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, would repeat a story-line,a couple of years later, knowing it was new to the current crop of readers (http://www.superdickery.com/jimmy-as-a-gorilla/ )
Then comics became collectable, ensuring that people would keep them. And some of those collectors would even re-read them. Furthermore, comics nowadays are frequently collected into trade book “graphic novels”. So frequently that many comic book writers actually write w/ the trade in mind. And even the old stuff, the golden and silver age stuff, is still around and re-released in book form (called “Showcase” or “Essential”). Once in a while Marvel or DC will actually reprint an old issue (such as a #1), clearly stating that it is a reprint. Understandable, as this is a way to monetize old material
Now, I don’t propose eliminating all the old stuff. It has historical value, and some of it can be fun to read! But the fact that I can buy, right now, a comic book story that I read over four decades ago when I was a child may in some way contribute to our inability to let go
Exactly! I’m glad you raised this point, Dell, because I’d considered doing so myself in the last reply before deciding it was one lawyerly exhibit too many and I’d sufficiently made my case without it. But it does merit further discourse for the very reasons you cite above.
Many of the earliest comic books were themselves collected reprints of strips that had originally run in daily newspapers, before innovative young artists started figuring out how to utilize the (arguably accidental) new medium to its optimal creative/aesthetic potential. Comics were indeed disposable, same as newspapers and magazines: They were read and then tossed away. (There’s a reason, after all, they were printed on nonarchival pulp-paper stock: They were never intended to last.)
Now, I am all for cultural preservation — museums, halls of records, libraries (Los Angeles boasts a magnificent public-library system that my wife and I borrow from and donate to all the time) — and I absolutely think all comics should be archived and accessible same as any other work of literature or music or cinema; neither medium nor artistic merit (a subjective criterion if ever there was one) should be a disqualifying factor. From a purely scholarly standpoint, it’s important those works are made available to all, in perpetuity.
Here’s a personal example: The 1990s Tales from the Crypt television series I grew up with has been influential on my own horror fiction, but I’d never had the chance to read the original EC comic books that inspired so many of the artists I admired, from Stephen King to John Carpenter, so it was great to be able to finally experience them via a collected “EC Archives” edition. Those comics not only influenced a generation of “masters of horror,” but offered an alternative artistic representation of their era to the wholesome family-values propaganda of Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver — to say nothing of the role they played in the sociopolitical controversies incited by Seduction of the Innocent. As an academic exercise, reading those old comics was invaluable; and as a recreational diversion, it was admittedly kinda fun!
That said, however, the prestige “graphic novel” format has not been without its (unintended?) consequences, particularly as it pertains to superhero fiction. I somewhat recently read the massive omnibus collections of both Knightfall (reviewed here) and The Death and Return of Superman (reviewed here), the first time I’ve revisited these sagas since high school. Here’s an excerpt from my review of the latter that goes to the heart of why I think these hardcover omnibuses can be problematic:
You know what I mean? There’s preserving this material, and then there’s canonizing it, and I think the graphic-novel format has allowed for a great many subpar superhero works to be elevated to the ranks of Classic Literature. (For the record, I do think there are superhero stories that rise to that level, Watchmen and the original Dark Knight Returns among them, but not Knightfall and Death of Superman, no matter how much we may have loved them at thirteen.)
Furthermore, once an issue or storyline is reprinted or digitized or otherwise made readily available in perpetuity, once it becomes permanently part of the cultural record, the events of every story ever written have to be narratively accounted for somehow — nothing (and, consequently and conversely, everything) is fungible — which is how we wound up with the very construct of “shared fictional universes”:
And I think once continuity (which, as Morrison illustrates, started as nothing more than a calculated editorial strategy to justify every contradictory creative decision ever made across decades of continuous publication) became the very point of superhero stories — learning the rules and making meaning of these shared universes — a kind of religion coalesced around superheroes that started as a fringe cult (fanboy subculture) and eventually went mainstream. And just as the Holy Bible itself is a poorly edited anthology of science-fiction stories (not to disparage or offend anyone’s beliefs), full of continuity discrepancies and irreconcilable accounts of the same events, so too are the analects of DC and Marvel. Whereas the individual stories were once the figure — offering us a closed entertainment experience with an optionally takeaway moral or lesson — and the broader continuity in which they existed were the ground (certain aspects of Batman or Spider-Man’s mythologies, for instance, need not be recapitulated in every issue because they are understood to be firmly established and accepted), now the reverse is true: a given narrative is only as good as its fidelity and connectivity to the grander shared (and inviolable) continuity. Such is the reason why Sony bailed on pursuing further Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies in favor of integrating the character into the MCU: Nobody gave a shit about Spider-Man’s exploits if they didn’t function within the same space occupied by other Marvel heroes and affect (directly and/or indirectly) what they were doing; it’s the universe and its expansive ensemble of inhabitants that are important, not any single hero or adventure.
In short — as if it weren’t already too late for that! — I think the conservation of comics through the graphic-novel format is one of the key reasons for the continued (and expanding) cultural lionization of superheroes. (Correspondingly, consider how streaming services have allowed all television shows, no matter how unremarkable or short-lived, to benefit from equal on-demand availability, and how that has contributed to the same obsessive fascination with continuity control we see in comics. Case in point: Look at how excited fanboys got over the appearance of Ashley Scott’s iteration of the Huntress in the recent Crisis crossover. Now, I watched Birds of Prey when it aired in 2002, and it was an objectively shitty show best left forgotten. But by acknowledging it — by strapping Scott back into that leather duster almost two decades after anyone’s spared a thought for that creative misfire of a series — they endow it with a canonical legitimacy that titillates the fan base, sure, but serves no point other than to celebrate continuity strictly for continuity’s sake. It’s all just a meaningless Easter-egg hunt designed to incite spirited conversation — i.e., free promotion — on social media. Far from merely a willing patron of these mega-franchises, the superfan is an indentured servant to them.)
As they always do, Dell, your contributions to this blog have forced me to think through the issue with more nuance than I would’ve otherwise been compelled to do, so thank you, my friend. Great conversation.
>the good things tend to stick in the memory and bad things recede.
I should note, though, that for people w/ depression issues, such as myself, the opposite is frequently true
Indeed, Dell: Depression is a beastly disorder that adversely affects the efficacy of our emotional/psychological self-regulation mechanisms. As someone who came of age in an atmosphere of largely repressed, proudly recalcitrant, old-school Irish Catholics who scoffed at the very notion of psychotherapy — as if it were a pseudoscience and/or the need for it a mark of personal weakness — I now, in my adult life, encourage everyone to attend to their mental health same as they would their physical wellbeing or dental hygiene: diligently, regularly, and under professional supervision.
Oddly enough, much of that candy-store nostalgia I indulge in stems from never having had the opportunity to partake in those sweet indulgences. My exposure to candy was almost exclusively through what was available at the time in convenient stores and supermarkets, and I never had much interest in much of what was available, or never had opportunity as a child to sample.
Imagine my reaction, a lover of history, to places in Cleveland such as B.A. Sweeties and Rocket Fizz (on Brookpark Road and Euclid Avenue, respectively), where there are all manner of “retro” treats the histories of which go back many decades. Partaking of such nostalgic goodness isn’t only a trip back to a past once lived. For some of us, it’s a trip back in time to eras we never got to experience first hand, the illusion of participating in past decades our parents or grandparents actually lived.
Likewise, visiting old buildings such as neighborhood cinemas and drive-in theaters (both disappearing into the annals of history before our very eyes), museums, replicas of wooden sailing ships, and so on, allow us to live vicariously—even if only briefly—through the eyes of our ancestors.
The past is nothing to be avoided, or let go of, when it has something to teach us about today and the future we make for our own children. The problem is that in today’s corporate-dominated world, it’s marketed too often as a form of mindless escapism, bereft of what made it so loved to begin with, the hollow shell of what we once found so comforting. There are no lessons to be learned from abominations such as Jar Jar Abrams’ and Alex Klutzman’s bastardization of Star Trek, bastardizations based on the theft of other people’s intellectual properties. Likewise, there is no deeper meaning in Disney’s Star Wars, having been rendered by Abrams, Ruin Johnson, and their corporate overseers Bob Iger and Kathleen Kennedy. The cautionary tale told by George Lucas with his original Star Wars about the evils of the Nazi-American empires and the dangers of becoming the things his generations and that of his parents fought, is gone, replaced by cynical marketing gimmicks from no-talent hacks who think endless lens flares and bigger versions of what we liked before are enough to coast by on.
The point I’m making is that the past is only something to “let go of” when we fail to learn any lessons from it. But when we open our minds and hearts to those lessons, we can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and move forward with the memory of people, places, and things gone by as we chart our own course through life and leave legacies for those coming after us.
That is beautifully said, Michael — every word of it. An essay unto itself.
You know, part of the reason I bitch nonstop about Los Angeles (though I have, in keeping with the spirit of this post, been appreciably better about that so far in 2020), is because so much of it seems like merely a plywood façade — no different, in its way, from the Potemkin edifices of a studio backlot. I often snidely refer to this city as the Land of Sunshine and Strip Malls, because the automobile-clogged, pedestrian-bare streets are lined on either side with sad-looking shopping plazas, their mid-eighties pink-and-turquoise paint schemes etiolated from decades of unrelenting solar exposure, and Brady Bunch–era apartment complexes with their faux stone veneers, wilting palm trees leaning drunkenly along the curb (wilting because our palm trees aren’t indigenous and are largely in their death throes). That’s what every fuckin’ street in this “city” looks like. (And because we have no seasons here, the streets look exactly the same regardless of whether it’s Independence Day, Halloween, Christmas, or St. Paddy’s.) Speaking of Saint Patrick’s Day, I’m reminded of a passage from one of my favorite novels, Tana French’s Faithful Place (2010):
And while I did not grow up in a city nearly as ancient as Dublin, New York has pre–American Revolution history baked into its streets, and you feel that when you snake your way through them. I certainly felt it when I’d walk home from school, past the cottage where Edgar Allan Poe lived in the 1840s (and preserved in the park where Kane and Finger later created Batman). I felt it when my friends and I would explore the Cloisters, or venture into the labyrinthine subbasements of the city’s prewar buildings, or ascend to the towering, wind-whipped belfry of Riverside Church. I felt it merely walking the streets — many of the same locations featured in Joker, in fact. (I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I know you recently published a comprehensive review on your blog.) I’d study the pictures my favorite comic-book artists would draw of Batman and Robin swinging through the cityscape of Gotham — and then look out my bedroom window and see the exact same view.
And L.A. has none of that, a fact that frustrates and often depresses me. All it has (with extremely limited exception) is the “sick illusions” that French invokes, the “cheap arrogant veneer” that will be long gone in a hundred years’ time. My point is, I am someone who places tremendous value in historical preservation, be it through our architecture or our narratives or whatever mode keeps us connected to what has come before. I actually can’t think of a more appropriate occasion, on this seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, to make a case for remembering. More than merely remembering, in fact — never forgetting; the former can be a passive action, whereas the latter is almost invariably active.
But memory can be a dreamlike hall of mirrors in which we easily become disoriented, and often we find ourselves clinging to the comforting North Star of nostalgia. And nostalgia can be benign enough — to a point. If overindulged, however, it can become an opiate used to anesthetize ourselves from the overwhelming complexities of modern existence. And what the corporations have figured out is how to offer not merely passing nostalgic diversions, but immersive alternate universes — be it the sprawling continuities of Star Wars or Star Trek or Marvel or DC — that exploit our fondness for bygone times (something Lucas certainly invoked in his Star Wars) without challenging them (something Lucas also did but that is entirely absent from the Disney fan fiction). And the stratagem they (unconsciously?) employ to do this — to get us hooked on their nostalgic opiate — is known as figure-ground reversal.
When we learn to recognize instances of figure-ground reversal in our own lives, we’re better able to differentiate trivial nostalgic indulgence from meaningful appreciation of our cultural and historical legacies, thereby better positioning ourselves to “avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and move forward with the memory of people, places, and things gone by as we chart our own course through life and leave legacies for those coming after us.” We live in a cultural and historical continuum, after all, each new development an outgrowth of what has come before — so context is essential to progress! But our current purveyors of pop culture would prefer we lived in a time capsule, an endless orgiastic loop. And like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, I’d love nothing more than to see us break the spell… which starts with changing our own behavior.
Grateful, as always, Michael, for your feedback, input, and insight. Much obliged, sir.