Et tu, Millennials? The old nostalgia-industrial complex got its hooks into you, too, huh? I must ask: Have you not witnessed in firsthand horror what pining for the good old days has done to Generation X…?
To recap: We Xers have thus far spent the twenty-first century reliving all our childhood favorites—Star Wars, Super Friends, Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, Lethal Weapon, Halloween, Bill & Ted, Tron, Transformers, Terminator, Top Gun—a pathological exercise in self-infantilization that has catastrophically retarded both the culture as well as a generation of middle-aged adults who are at this point more passionately invested in Skywalkers and superheroes than are the juvenile audiences for whom those characters were originally intended.
Always keen to recognize—and replicate—a winning formula, a new permutation of forward-thinking backward-gazing has recently seized Hollywood: Sell nineties-era nostalgia to the generation that came of age in that decade! Over the past few years, we got a pair of Jurassic Park remakes-masquerading-as-sequels that didn’t inspire a single word of enthusiasm (certainly not a second viewing), but nonetheless earned over a billion dollars apiece, while our last conventional movie star, Dwayne Johnson, used his considerable clout (or more aptly muscle?) to resurrect both Jumanji and Baywatch. As for this year? Hope you’re excited for warmed-over helpings of The Lion King, Men in Black, Toy Story, Aladdin, and yet more Jumanji. And while we’re at it, let’s welcome back slacker duo Jay and Silent Bob, because surely their grunge-era stoner humor still holds up in middle-age—
—as well as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, back from buddy-cop purgatory for more Bad Boys badassery! You know damn well whatcha gonna do when they come for you: Buy a ticket!
For an indeterminate, but clearly not immeasurable, swath of moviegoers, there is no marketing campaign more alluring than one that taps into foggy childhood memories. . . .
. . . The great nostalgia-industrial complex will [continue] steamrollering us against our better judgment into multiplexes, hoping for a simulacrum of the first high we felt watching great characters years ago.
Tom Philip, “Summer ’19 Brought To You By Nostalgia-Bait Movies,” Opinion, New York Times, July 4, 2019
Not just multiplexes. (And how are those even still a thing?) On the small screen, VH1 revived game-changing nineties slasher franchise Scream this summer (how, for that matter, is VH1 still a thing?), and new iterations of decade-defining teen melodramas 90210 and Party of Five are on the way. Dope.
Even publishing is getting in on the action: Earlier this year, Millennial author Kiersten White reactivated Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first of a proposed (threatened?) series of YA spin-off novels featuring an all-new teenage heroine that picks up where the TV show left off, sans any of its wit, scares, romance, emotional complexity, or thematic depth—ya know, all the shit we loved about the program in the first place. (Buffy and Angel’s adventures, meanwhile, resume in a pair of recently launched ongoing comics from Boom! Studios.)
Perhaps the most direct and unsettling expression to date of the Millennials’ nostalgic yearning for the decade of their innocence is “1999,” a pop song by Charli XCX (age 26) and Troye Sivan (24):
The video opens with Charli calling for a Lyft on her iPhone, then hugging a pair of Beats by Dre headphones to her ears and slipping into a musical fantasy of late-nineties nostalgia-porn imagery (Titanic, Spice Girls, the iMac G3, American Beauty, The Sims, The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project), set to lyrics sure to expose the likes of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon for the shameless hacks we’ve always privately known they were:
I just wanna go back, back to 1999
Take a ride to my old neighborhood
I just wanna go back, sing, “hit me, baby, one more time”
Wanna go back, wanna go. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Never under pressure, oh
Those days it was so much better, oh
Feelin’ cool in my youth, relaxin’
No money, no problem
It was easy back then. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I know those days are over but a boy can fantasize
‘Bout JTT on MTV and when I close my eyes
And I’m right there, right there
And he’s right there, right there
And we’re right there, right there
Ah, ah, ah, I wanna go back. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I just wanna go back, yeah back to 1999
Charlotte Aitchison, Troye Sivan, Brett McLaughlin, Oscar Holter, Noonie Bao, “1999”
Yeah, take me back to ‘99
Fuck me running! I recall exactly three things about 1999: the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the delayed-onset disappointment of The Phantom Menace (it took fanboys a few weeks and half-a-dozen viewings to accept they hated it), and the apocalypse-is-nigh anxiety of the Y2K bug—none of which evoke any fond longings in me. But I guess there are those who feel otherwise, hence the reason “the nostalgia-bait model has reached a new height, with an incessant slew of movies lined up to cash in on the yearning of aging millennials to relive fuzzier times” (Philip, “Summer ’19 Brought To You By Nostalgia-Bait Movies,” New York Times).
So it would seem. And I wonder: Why does that happen, exactly? Why is it a pattern we seemed doomed to repeat—an entire generation getting stuck in a moment in time that emblemizes life at its most idyllic, most prelapsarian? Or, to borrow the 1990s teen-snark parlance of Buffy creator Joss Whedon:
Good question.
For many conservative Baby boomers, the happy days of the 1950s—the conditions for which were seeded by a largely socialist economic program called the New Deal, initiated by a Democratic president (but don’t tell them that)—were disrupted by the counterculture of the 1960s, when the hippies and feminists fucked up the American Dream for the rest of us. Sock hops and soda shoppes gave way to civil-rights marches and LSD trips. Oh, the days before we’d ever heard of such reprehensible rabble-rousers as Jane Fonda and Timothy Leary!
And then in rode Ronald Reagan, immaculate offspring of Marshal Will Kane and Jesus Christ, who—after the demoralizing cock-ups of Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, and solar panels on the White House—once again made the country safe for conspicuous consumption, economic deregulation, and unfettered profligacy. And it was in that glowing-neon cauldron of capitalist tipple the first memories of Generation X—talkin’ ’bout my generation!—were forged. We had it all: Nintendo. Walkmans. MTV. Video stores. Shopping malls. HBO. It was radical, man.
But it wasn’t the technology we had that makes the era so halcyon in retrospect; it was the tech we didn’t have: PCs. iPhones. E-mail. Text messaging. The 1980s were, in retrospect, the swan song of an analog world, before we collectively “ended up in an always-on digital landscape, constantly pinged by updates and enduring a state of perpetual interruption—what I call ‘present shock’—previously known only to 911 operators and air traffic controllers” (Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity [New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016], 6).
X is a generation caught between worlds—the analog one in which we came of age, and the digital one in which we now must live out our days—and we ache for the linear, one-thing-at-a-time simplicity of the pre–Digital Age. We don’t really belong in this brave new realm, and we know it: Our analog-era wiring has no application in a WiFi world, hence the reason all our fictions are the endless (and meaningless) recapitulations of the pop culture of our youth. And I’ve admittedly been tough on X for that, but can you entirely blame us for our feelings of temporal and cultural displacement? We’re the last generation in human history that will retain any memory of a non-digital existence, and—much as we wish otherwise—no one, alas, quite understands us like our old pals Laurie Strode, “Maverick” Mitchell, and Danielsan.
So, if it was the counterculture that froze the Boomers in the fifties, and the Digital Revolution that’s tethered the Xers to the eighties, what’s led to this burgeoning fetishization of the nineties by Millennials?
No surprise here: It was 9/11.
Many Millennials lost their parents on 9/11—I know a few—but all of them lost the innocence we took for granted before those towers disintegrated. After that, we got mired in endless, illegal wars; politics became vitriolically polarized (families that had previously never broached the subject could now no longer sit at the same dinner table); school shootings grew commonplace (not necessarily a direct consequence of 9/11, but an unfortunate incidental); social media brought a disorienting new dimension to an already treacherous phase of our psychological and emotional development; and climate change went from a far-off uncertainty—a problem for your grandchildren’s grandchildren—to an imminent catastrophic threat.
But if you were just the right age in the 1990s, there was no existential menace that couldn’t be neutralized by Bruce Willis and a team of wisecracking roughnecks, no injustice that couldn’t be redressed by photogenic lifeguards in Malibu, no adolescent faux pas that couldn’t be ameliorated with an emphatic As if! The candy-colored superheroics of girl power, as epitomized by Buffy and the Spice Girls, hadn’t yet been complicated by the sobering revelations and sociopolitical campaigns of #MeToo. As Charli XCX sings: “Never under pressure, oh/Those days it was so much better, oh.”
Mmm. Or as we said in the nineties: Hakuna matata.
No, sorry, Charli—circumstances haven’t changed, only your perception has. We lose innocence, yes, but in exchange we get perspicacity—an even if admittedly unwelcome trade. Speaking of nineties nostalgia, I’m reminded of a different lyric, this one from the actual era under consideration:
Yesterday’s got nothin’ for me
Axl Rose, West Arkeen, Del James, Billy McCloud, “Yesterdays”
Old pictures that I’ll always see
I ain’t got time to reminisce old novelties
On the matter of reminiscing old novelties, when I was a kid, I used to love the undercover-cop show 21 Jump Street (1987–1991), but other than cheering in delighted surprise at Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise’s cameo reprisals in the 2012 movie remake, I haven’t really revisited the series. Still, here’s how something from it stayed with me in an emotionally healthy way—how a childhood favorite made a lasting impression on my worldview nearly three decades since I let the program itself go.
In the days prior to digital channel guides, and before TV shows were listed by episode on Netflix menus or box-set packaging, we mostly never knew (or much cared) what the particular title of a series’ given episode was; it appeared on the script but seldom if ever onscreen. Not so with Jump Street, though: Each episode name was featured immediately after the opening-credits sequence.
Jump Street’s second season included an episode called “Orpheus 3.3,” in which Officer Hanson’s girlfriend is gunned down in a liquor-store stickup while Hanson (Depp) stands by helplessly. Upon reviewing the surveillance tape, he comes to realize there was a 3.3-second window between the perp turning his gun on the girlfriend and the moment he actually fired. Hanson soon becomes psychoneurotically consumed with all he might’ve done in that eternal instant to prevent his girlfriend’s murder.
I remember it being a powerful episode—though I have admittedly not seen it in thirty years, and my tastes have changed considerably in that time—but I was perplexed as to why it wasn’t simply titled “3.3 Seconds,” especially since the phrase is uttered repeatedly throughout. I had no idea what—or, more accurately, who—Orpheus was, and what it had to do with the story of Hanson’s descent into obsessive repentance. So, I went to the dictionary and found an entry more or less similar to this one:
Greek Legend. a poet and musician, a son of Calliope, who followed his dead wife, Eurydice, to the underworld. By charming Hades, he obtained permission to lead her away, provided he did not look back at her until they returned to earth. But at the last moment he looked, and she was lost to him forever.
Dictionary.com, s.v. “Orpheus”
I didn’t fully understand the meaning of that myth then, but I do now: We can get back neither the moments nor the people we’ve lost; they’re behind us in the ether of the past, and it’s better we simply trust that those we’ve loved are there—in our hearts if not our company—rather than break the spell by looking or reaching back into that misty dreamland.
Movies, in many respects, are better than memories, because they are sensory experiences—quite powerful ones when we are young and impressionable—that can be recalled precisely as they were: The formative adventures we shared with Indiana Jones and Ferris Bueller and Woody and Buzz can be relived on-demand, the characters we loved ageless and unchanging no matter how often we revisit them.
But even that loses its visceral effect after a while: The experience grows stale—predictable—and eventually stands to serve merely as an unpleasant reminder of how far removed from our innocence we really are. So, we pull poor Harrison Ford and Jamie Lee Curtis and Patrick Stewart and Linda Hamilton out of the toy box, dress ’em up the way they looked forty years ago, and cross our fingers that the serendipitous alchemy of an ephemeral moment is still somehow there for the recapturing. And if isn’t, we simply try again, hoping for a different result—hoping this time to feel what we felt when we first saw those movies at eight years old. Like Orpheus, we keep looking back—the key difference being we perennially refuse to accept those beloved characters, and the period of our own lives they personify, are forever lost to the march of time.
I mean, is that really how you want to spend your thirties, your forties, your fifties, Millennials? You wanna become a generation that builds tabernacular fourteen-acre monuments to the sci-fi fantasies of a previous century, or—even more insidiously—falls in line behind a self-anointed media messiah who promises to Make America Great Again? Because like any other addictive opiate, nostalgia leads nowhere good.
If we acknowledge that which our respective generations long for, and accept we can never again have it, we’ll be empowered to wrest free from the sway of the nostalgia-industrial complex, which simply repackages the past and sells it to us again and again and again—in the form of movies we’ve already seen, and effigial merchandising we sure as shit don’t need. Tempting though it may be, don’t be fooled, folks: Maverick can no more bring back the analog age for Gen X than Simba can restore the pre-9/11 naïveté of the Millennials.
The nostalgia trade is the ultimate shell game: It promises the impossible, inevitably fails to deliver, but nonetheless keeps us playing (read: paying) round after round after round. The past—surely this must be obvious by now—is a bad investment, but the future and all its open possibilities? That’s free for the taking. It’s all yours, my friends—on one simple condition: Don’t look back.
I agree with you completely. The continual retread of the same tired stories has me wondering when this generation will find its voice. But this isn’t a new phenomenon. Look at Shakespeare’s time—it was the same old stories recycled from the Romans and Greeks and one man’s poem became another man’s play. It took a lot of years, a moveable type printing press, and a couple of new genres before anything new happened. It’s just too easy to make money right now by remaking things that are tried and true than taking a chance on real imagination.
Remakes a certainly nothing new, and not in and of themselves a bad thing; I grew up on remakes such as The Thing, The Fly, Scarface, Father of the Bride, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wiz, Cape Fear, Kiss of Death, etc. — many of those now classics in their own right. Those movies were, in fact, my introductions to those stories, and I subsequently hunted down the originals to see how the different versions compared.
But what’s currently seized our culture isn’t merely a case of putting a fresh spin on a proven concept; this is about selling you a new version of an old experience. Halloween and Terminator and Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid all got conceptually remade at some point — new iterations for new audiences — but then Gen X filmmakers (David Gordon Green, Tim Miller, Jason Reitman, and Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, & Josh Heald, respectively) all went out and enlisted the original actors to return for so-called “legacy sequels,” so we could see what our favorite characters were up to all these years later. In doing so, these guys got to make their own fan-fiction versions of their childhood favorites — no different than J. J. Abrams’ take on Star Wars, or Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek: Picard — and we the audience got to experience the thrill of reuniting with beloved characters played by the original actors… even if in our heart of hearts we knew the magic was no longer there.
This phenomena isn’t about a lack of imagination so much as a lack of vision — an overwhelming desire to relive the glory days at the expense of the promise of the future. And as I wrote last month, to me that feels a lot like hanging out at your old school long after graduation: It’s uncomfortable, and sad, and a denial of one’s own maturation. And if the Millennials don’t learn the lessons of the Boomers and the Xers, that’s on them. I mean, Christ: Their favorite movie The Lion King is about Simba rejecting the philosophy of “hakuna matata” in favor of accepting the responsibilities of adulthood. That’s the choice they face now: Getting willfully stuck in the 20th century with their forebears, or learning to leave childish things behind. And this post is a heartfelt plea — from a deeply embarrassed Xer — for the latter.
Thanks, mydangblog.
Ah, so true, and yet,isn’t it great to just forget the present and live a little in the past? I, for one, wouldn’t mind going back to 1999
Welcome, Jina! Thank you for reading and commenting!
It’s precisely because I myself have felt the seductive draw of nostalgia — the susceptibility of yearning for more innocent times, like my own beloved summer of 1989 — that I am compelled to sound the alarm on how it has been commodified, marketed, packaged, and sold to us by Hollywood. And though I certainly appreciate “the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence,” retreating into the past, I’ve concluded, is not an escape from our intractable predicaments, but a denial of them. Like any addictive opiate, nostalgia should be indulged in judicious moderation only. I fear, though, what we have now is a culture that dreams not of a better future, but a better past. Accordingly, this blog has become increasingly focused on calling attention to that in the hope of breaking the cycle.
I welcome your voice to the conversation, Jina, and look forward to following your own blog.
Nostalgia, as his Uncle Joshua had said, ain’t what it used to be.
– Peter De Vries
“(London humor magazine) ‘Punch’ is not what it used to be,” we hear people grumble every day. “No,” replied a witty contributor; “but then Punch never has been what it used to be.” The memory, in short, is a sieve through which the pains, annoyances, and boredoms of the past slip easily away, while its pleasures are retained and glorified.
-“The Pall Mall Magazine” 1901
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/07/06/nostalgia-is-not/
I can always count on a relevant quote from you, Dave! Thank you.
It’s not that the past was ever better than the present, it’s that our perspective was narrower. The privilege of childhood (for many of us, I should stipulate, but not, alas, all) is that we don’t see that our parents are imperfect, or that there’s a dangerous world outside our homes and neighborhoods, or even that life is finite. We only see wonder in the world. Christ, it never occurred to me before twelve years old that my father was an alcoholic (despite all the signs being there), or that we didn’t have two thin dimes to rub together; I was simply busy enjoying the freedoms and friendships of preadolescence — with no idea those days were increasingly numbered.
What we grow nostalgic for, then, is not the culture of a particular era, be it the fifties or the eighties or the nineties, but rather the innocence of ignorance. That’s what we long for. And like a photo album, movies (which are cultural markers, and therefore time capsules) can put us in touch with our more innocent selves, and more innocent times. When indulged in judicious moderation, nostalgia isn’t necessarily a malignant exercise.
But what’s happening — what I am compelled to sound the alarm on — is that the nostalgia–industrial complex (meaning, primarily, Hollywood) has identified and commodified our sentimental yearnings, and is making a fortune selling it back to us. But it’s a scam; we’re being sold an empty product. And no amount of Star Wars or Top Gun or Lion King sequels will ever restore the innocence we’ve lost. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can start dreaming new dreams. That doesn’t sound like such a bad tradeoff to me.
Hope you’re well, my friend. Thanks for dropping by.
Nostalgia hit me like a truck!
Nostalgia has certainly trampled the culture, Ozana, so I know how you feel! Like any addictive opiate, nostalgic indulgence starts recreationally enough, but can soon become a crippling habit. And the nostalgia–industrial complex (read: Hollywood) is the dealer in this scenario. Speaking as a Gen Xer, my advice is fittingly recycled from the 1980s: Just say no.
Thanks for popping by the blog, Ozana; please come again.
Longtime friend of the blog Wendy Weir from Greater Than Gravity reached out to me privately to let me know that a WordPress user error had prevented her from leaving a comment on this post. She sent me the content of her intended message, which I’ve reproduced below verbatim, along with my response:
WENDY: You’ve captured it clearly–so well done! I have not turned to remakes nor have I returned to the originals often. So many shows/films you referenced here are magical gems better left in my memory bank. My high school girlfriends and I would get together Sunday nights to watch Jump Street–it was an event! Seeing Top Gun in the theater (and then again and again at the what was then new to us “Budget” theater screening second-run films) takes me back to my friends. I don’t want to relive those days through today’s lens; in my mind, they’re perfect as they were, and of that time. My pack of college friends and I still love and abundantly quote Sixteen Candles. One of the girls’ daughters recently watched it, and just didn’t get what we’d been mooning over for decades. *sigh*
SEAN: Thank you, Wendy, for sharing your own recollections of special times crystallized by shared pop-cultural experiences. With respect to your closing comment: My wife and I recently had our 13-year-old nephew stay with us in L.A. (whose mother — my sister-in-law — shares the same nostalgic fondness for Sixteen Candles as you do!) and we tried to sit him down in front of a few classic summer movies, be it The ‘Burbs or Weekend at Bernie’s, thinking they would be right up his alley. I’d say he lasted maybe thirty minutes before he quietly slipped out of the living room to be alone with his iPhone. It’s part of a trend I’ve observed amongst young people who were born into a digital world: It’s not that the movies from our own youth are “too old,” it’s that they’re too old-fashioned. The two-hour closed-ended feature film is just not something Gen-Z brains have been wired to receive or understand. They only respond to open-ended multimedia franchises and YouTube videos. Kids today just don’t “get” classic narrative structure — for better or for worse. (We’ll save that debate for another occasion.)
To respond to your preceding comment — “So many shows/films you referenced here are magical gems better left in my memory bank” — I’m reminded of an article I (think I) read in the now-defunct Premiere magazine probably fifteen years ago. It was a retrospective on all those 1980s T&A comedies we grew up on — Jocks, The Malibu Bikini Shop, Summer Job, Ski School — that typically aired in the middle of the night on HBO. Anyway, the writer noted that few (if any) of them have ever been rereleased on subsequent home-video formats (DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes); they’ve mostly just receded into history, unable to be reexperienced outside our own individual memories of them. The writer argued that this was a good thing; he said (and I’m paraphrasing him to the best extent of my own recollection) that by being exclusively consigned to the bygone era in which they were produced, those sex comedies cannot be reevaluated with middle-aged eyes (for they wouldn’t, let’s face it, withstand scrutiny), and therefore by serving only as cerebral reminders of our own innocence, they retain an innocence all their own. To that end, I don’t think Tom Cruise really wants us to revisit Top Gun, because I’m betting the movie is far better when replayed in our heads than on the screen. But Hollywood being Hollywood…
Thanks, Wendy, for commenting — and for going the extra mile to share your thoughts!
Hey, Sean. I’m finally looking back (OMG! I looked back!) through your posts I missed while away on vacation and since my whirlwind return.
I think this line sums things up well: “The experience (of looking back) grows stale—predictable—and eventually stands to serve merely as an unpleasant reminder of how far removed from our innocence we really are.”
As far as the commodification of nostalgia, there’s an interesting chicken-and-egg situation going on. Business 101 will tell you that the primary goals of any business are to make as much profit as possible and to keep stakeholders investing and happy. In this sense, why would filmmakers as business people stop doing something that is continuing to meet both of those basic aims? Are they causing a syndrome or merely capitalizing on it? And if the latter, again, aren’t they simply doing what businesses should do?
I saw The Lion King remake with my mom while we were away together on vacation—just the two of us, mind you, a first-ever treat. My mom just turned 75, and so her era is certainly not that of the original release of The Lion King. Yet the remake—while much the same as the first, right down to the soundtrack—had her in tears. Her mother (my grandmother) passed away earlier this year. I wondered if my mom’s tears were some kind of release related to “a time when mom was alive and healthy.” I asked her afterward about the tears. Without thinking, she exclaimed, “It was just so beautiful. I was crying before the opening sequence was over. When in history before now would people have gotten to see a realistic spectacle like that of ‘the world, for once, in perfect harmony’ with animals of all types moving toward a common goal? I hope heaven is like that.” Now the last part told me I was correct about her thinking about her mom’s passing—perhaps even her own mortality at 75. But she was also expressing a present feeling that I could tell paralleled the present world situation: the tension, mistrust and violence between the various ‘human animals’ of the planet at this current time. So I don’t think her viewing of it was nostalgia for the era of the original so much as much as nostalgia for a time when her family was whole blended with a present moment of wishing the world were a different sort of place currently.
In truth, I was thinking much the same thing as I watched. I wasn’t reliving the original. I was experiencing it through the lens of now as I could not have at the time of the original. I would think more than half the country couldn’t have missed the current parallel to what happens when a leader goes bad, serving one’s own interest over the interests of the whole, making bedfellows with enemies for personal gain—all the while hoping for the change of regime that would restore balance?
I got into a discussion with friends about the remake afterward. Some decried it as “horrible,” saying, “Why would you make something that’s exactly like the original? We’ve already seen the original!” Others replied, “All of these Disney live-action remakes aren’t for those of us who already saw them; they’re reintroducing younger audiences to these stories for the first time.” Though seemingly polar opposite views, these both felt valid to me.
Now all of this said, I agree with your premise here. In fact, in my new book, Tried & Still True (which I finished while on that vacation, BTW, and since which time I’ve started the next book already), I also talk at length about this as I unpack the tried-and-still-true saying “All good things must come to an end.” I’m just making a few counterpoints here for the sake of discussion. To reiterate those, it’s hard to blame the filmmakers for doing what businesses are supposed to do; and not all viewers watch a remake through the lens of nostalgia for their own youth.
What think ye?
Erik!
So nice to have you back, bud! I’d been thinking about you. I assumed you’d been on summer vacation, and was hoping you’d pop up here or on Myths of the Mirror or The Best Advice So Far sooner than later…
Is Hollywood causing our culture of nostalgia or simply capitalizing on it? I guess both. Which is why the onus is on us, the audience, to recognize the stratagems it deploys to keep us watching/buying (like FOMO and “spoilers” and “retconning”), and then decide for ourselves if we really want to see the latest Marvel or Batman or Star Wars or Lion King movie… or if we’ve merely been manipulated into thinking we want to see it. Hollywood is indeed a business — an extremely efficient one — that wants our attention, and, more to the point, wants our money; we can freely choose to buy what it’s selling, but I hope we’ll do so with full conscious awareness of its motives and tactics. So, should we decide that taking a chance on, say, the new Lion King is worth our time and money, let’s at least do so with eyes wide open.
Case in point: For all my complaining about remakes and sequels, I myself recently went to the theater (something I never do anymore) to see the fifth Rambo film. Now, as much as your mother loved The Lion King, that’s about how much I detested Last Blood. But regardless of how one feels about Lion King and/or Last Blood, those movies neither obviate nor diminish their franchise forebears; every viewer reaction — irreconcilable though many of them are — is equally legitimate. Like I said in “This Counts, That Does Not,” the only real metric by which to appraise the value a movie is whether or not it has meaning to you. I think it’s wonderful that your mother was able to take catharsis from the new Lion King!
Now, as for both the pros and cons of telling the “same old stories” (and there’s a case to be made for each)… that’s something I’ll be directly addressing in next week’s blog post. So, stay tuned…
So good to have your voice — your conversational counterpoints — back in the mix, Erik. I hope you won’t be a stranger for the remainder of the year! So eager to read about your summer adventures on your own blog, and hearty congratulations on finishing Tried & Still True! That’s no small accomplishment…
Sean
And when do I get to read your last book?
That’s the big question, isn’t it?!
As you know, I finished my first novel, Escape from Rikers Island, over a year ago, and have been shopping the manuscript to prospective agents and editors.
This past summer, I completed a brand-new novella called Spex, in which two 12-year-old boys circa 1988 come into possession of a pair of magically functional “X-ray specs” (remember those?!) and begin to see that their home lives aren’t necessarily the idyllic, well-adjusted bastions they’d always taken for granted. In the vein of Stranger Things, Spex belongs to the same literary subgenre — the supernatural coming-of-age adventure — as Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night, Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and, to a degree, Stephen King’s It (even though Spex isn’t hardcore horror, more “dark fantasy”) and The Body (despite that story having no magical element). I definitely consider it my Stand by Me, though — my paean to being a preadolescent boy, in all of its emotional and developmental complexity.
I need to do a minor rewrite on Spex, at which point I have a few contacts that might respond favorably to it. Either way, though, I’m hoping to get the publication train rolling in 2020, because I’m ready for these manuscripts to see the light of day!