Empty Reverie: When Nostalgia Feels Meaningless
or how pop culture keeps selling us the past without substance
The prevalence of nostalgia in pop culture cannot be overstated. Yet, somehow it feels as if we’ve reached a point where everything is nostalgic, to the point that it begs the question: are we unable to create original material anymore? And what original even means at this point?
From turning animated movies into live-action remakes to prequels and sequels to famous franchises that are more or less the same derivative stuff from the originals to material that is constantly set in the 80’s and now the 90’s, we as a society seem to be obsessed with the past, and desperate to reminisce in the “happier days” where we had a better aesthetic, better clothes, better music, better lives.
I am not saying this from the standpoint of being totally immune to this trend, I am not. I also enjoyed Stranger Things when it first came out with its nostalgic vibe for the early 80’s aesthetic and music and narrative of kids fighting evil, It-esque style. I also enjoyed the third trilogy of Star Wars when it hit the theaters and felt incredibly invested in Rey’s story. My point is: that these two things are now nearly a decade old. Trust me, no one is more shocked with how fast time has been going, than me. The Force Awakens being ten years old this year? Stranger Things turns nine this summer? Sounds impossible, and yet it is true.
And what that means is that pretty much everything since then has only been more and more nostalgic than before, suffused in this reverie of the past, to the point that in my mind I have only one thought: please, stop.
I have lost count of how many prequels/sequels I’ve read that simply should not have existed, that added no substance to what the original had already done. Capitalism plays a large factor in this, and going viral on TikTok for example will pretty much guarantee a sequel/prequel even if it was a standalone novel. I can think of several titles that were published because of this, from titles like It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover, to We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, and even The Testaments by Margareth Atwood (not because of TikTok itself but by the huge success of the tv show), which takes out the whole impact of the ending of the first book in favor of a sequel that is mediocre at best. The publishing industry has its own problems, such as the fact that there seem to be too many books coming out, like Kathleen Schmidt put it “book publishing is the only industry I can think of where, if something isn’t selling, more of it is done.”
Now if books are one side of the issue I feel like when we turn our attention to audio-visual media the problem becomes even more nightmarish. If we have prequels/sequels that are simply not supposed to exist in books; in movies, there seems to be even more of that in quantity, and there are just some things that should be left alone. I love Freaky Friday, and I am not at least one bit excited to see the sequel because there is no need for a sequel. I did not watch the new Beetlejuice yet, because I think it frankly won’t be as good as the first one.
If nostalgia was something that featured constantly in our collective imagination, at least in part of the cultural works we consumed, it feels like currently there is only nostalgia, where are the new stories? Why can’t we stop making and remaking, and rebooting the same things?
There is also obviously the factor that nothing we create is entirely new in our current era, in an article for Vox, Alissa Wilkinson1 quotes the author and critic A.O. Scott who says: “Every piece of art is made with reference — overt or not, conscious or not — to the traditions, practices, and possibilities of its genre, and so is in dialogue with other work,” meaning nothing exists truly in a vacuum, we all carry our set of references within our minds, that’s why several things we consume take us back to other things we’ve already seen, because there is a high likelihood that the people who made it have also seen it too. Scott continues saying “This isn’t to say that a reboot or imitation can’t be an original or critical work, (…) but in those cases it’s the assertion of an individual style, the imposition of a personal will, on the material that makes the difference.” So it is our worldview essentially that gives these styles and symbols and ideas from the past their new shape and meaning, give them something different for us to engage and debate with.
I feel like that is my main problem with nostalgia these days, it is that it feels immensely void of anything to say, of true substance or meaning. Take Nosferatu by Robert Eggers for instance. The movie is Dracula in its entirety, which wouldn’t be a problem if Eggers gave it his own spin, and added something to the narrative that would make it feel his own. But he didn’t. The movie has beautiful aesthetics and the cinematography is gorgeous, and that is about all the movie has for itself. The rest is just copy-paste, which is precisely the root of my discontent. I could forgive a movie based on a story (or another movie) if it had something to say. But I cannot forgive a movie that delivers absolutely no original voice or individual style, it just becomes dull and predictable, more of the same.
David Rowell2 says: “Today nostalgia is so immutable because so much about the Internet exists to remind us of life as it once was. (…) the Internet can lull us into a perpetual state of looking back and believing that what the culture offered us through the previous decades was more gratifying and more fun, and that life in the past was inherently a better and richer time.” Before reading Rowell’s piece I hadn’t necessarily associated the prevalence of the Internet as an intensifier of the feeling that the past was inherently better, but it makes total sense. We are constantly exposed to things that take us back in time, including memories generated by our social media platforms to show us what we were doing one, two, five, or ten years ago.
I even found myself reminiscing about the “good old days” when I was deleting my Instagram photos and I realized that the type of things we posted back in 2013-2014 were so different from what we post nowadays, and it made me miss how the “old” internet used to be, which the very next second made me feel unbelievably old. I suppose it is inevitable in a way, to long for the past, to think that some things were better the way they were before. It still feels strange, to be growing old and to have memories to look back onto that are ten, twelve, thirteen years old. I am 27 now, so quite literally thirteen years ago I didn’t have many memories of the ten years prior, or if I do they are more fuzzy and it’s hard to recollect, but I digress. This is a topic for another newsletter.
Emily St. James3 encapsulated my feelings when she wrote: “Nostalgia is a perpetual allure for those who would dream up a less complicated past, who would love to lose themselves in gauzy memories of beloved childhood entertainments. But the past was just as complicated as the present, filled with just as many real and human struggles and probably some nostalgia for a different past that came before. We forget that at our peril, but, then, so will our own children, looking back on the halcyon, uncomplicated days of 2016 in what now seems like the far-off future.” Ouch. Like I said, I never expected I would be the one to long for the “uncomplicated days of 2016” and yet here we are.
So this is where we find ourselves, constantly surrounded by things that show us what seems to be the better days, and if it’s hard to resist this impulse, in dwelling on this feeling, that is exactly what is being capitalized on when we realize that is precisely what the companies that produce these tv shows and movies feed on; this precise feeling. It is in part due to our individual responsibilities that this has happened. We have fed this beast.
I don’t write this post in any attempt to offer answers to this issue, in fact, the only solution I myself would like is if this current trend took a break and slowed down for a bit. Or stopped altogether. It might be wishful thinking, but at least that’s how I feel. If we could stop obsessing with the idealized version of the past we have somehow devised for ourselves, then maybe we could start looking towards the creative act with a more fresher approach, making bold decisions—including ones that might be risky from commercial perspectives. So much to hope for in the era of streaming.
But who knows?
Maybe the future will surprise us.
