Was It Yesterday?

Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television

Matthew Leggatt

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438483504
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Bringing together prominent transatlantic film and media scholars, Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in twenty-first century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history. Considering such films and television shows as La La Land, Westworld, Stranger Things, and American Hustle, the contributors demonstrate how audiences have spent more time over the last decade living in various pasts.

Part 1

What Is Nostalgia?

1

Clearing Up the Haze

Toward a Definition of the “Nostalgia Film” Genre

JASON SPERB

ONE MOMENT IN THE POST–WORLD WAR II drama The Master (2012) features US soldier Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) discussing a letter he received from a girl back home, one that caused him to have an intense emotional reaction. Asked by a psychologist to describe his feelings, “I believe I suffered what, in your profession, you call ‘nostalgia,’ ” Freddie says, laughing it off. This nods to the term’s (almost mythical) origin as a clinical term—a doctor’s diagnosis for Swiss soldiers experiencing a profound sense of homesickness way back in the seventeenth century (given its Swiss roots, Svetlana Boym notes that the word nostalgia “is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek” (“Nostalgia,” 7; see also Boym, Future). This sequence was an homage to a similar moment in John Huston’s documentary Let There Be Light (1946)—also about the trauma of US soldiers struggling to adjust to civilian life after experiencing the horrors of war—but there were important differences. The soldier in the documentary (an African American man) was provoked into a state of melancholic despair not by a letter but a photograph. Upon recalling this episode, the real-life soldier breaks down again in shameful tears.

Figure 1.1. Cub Photographer (Noah Matteo). Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013). Digital frame enlargement.

There was always something uniquely nostalgic about the photographic image. Like nostalgia itself, the frame isolates; it blocks off as much about the past as it reveals. The image suggests a moment frozen in time, both powerful and deceptive in what it shows. As Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton, and others have tried to capture, those images of years gone by permanently wall off from us the past as much as they may also allow us to glimpse its fragments—creating a decisive visualization of the gap between “then” and “now.” Writing or speaking, in contrast, creates a greater sense of immediacy, as the reader/listener is able to visualize in the present what is being described. This was part of the effect of Frampton’s Nostalgia (1971)—narration is present, image is past. Sarah Polley’s autobiographical film Stories We Tell (2012) operates similarly—the voice of her putative father (Michael Polley), as he reads his account of family events, creates an intimate sense of presence, while the Super 8 footage of those same past moments (both actual home movies and Polley’s uncanny re-creations) immediately and overwhelmingly conveys a sense of pastness.

It’s unsurprising that a collective preoccupation with nostalgia increased across the span of the twentieth century in direct proportion to the rapidly expanding presence of visual media, such as cinema and television. As Fred Davis noted long ago, popular culture only intensified nostalgia—the ubiquity of older media in recirculation and repackaging meant being in the audible and visible presence of the past. It is one thing to try to recall such times as a hazy abstraction and quite another to have it (in a way) physically present. As culture became increasingly confronted with its mediated past (fueled in part by the cheap conveniences of endlessly repackaging the same content through various aesthetic forms and technological platforms), it stands to reason that the centrality of nostalgia’s power would soon follow. In a thoroughly mediated, globalized, mobilized culture, the image becomes a substitute for home—as in a repository for (increasingly collective) memories of the past (Davis has noted how the general lack of geographic stability in our modern mobile society suggests that perhaps “media products may now serve memory where once houses, streets and persons did”; 129). And yet while few would question the centrality of nostalgia in media culture today, there remains little in the way of a working genre definition for that most often-used term: the “nostalgia film.” This chapter is an attempt at such a project—to quantify textually what we mean by “nostalgic” media texts and what’s at stake in highlighting it beyond either just reliving reassuring fantasies of days past or (coexisting with that) blocking out the ugly realities of history.

The “Nostalgia Film”?

Specific textual attempts to define what nostalgia might look and sound like have been—like nostalgia itself—powerful and persuasive, but also fragmentary and incomplete. For instance, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013) is obviously a deeply nostalgic film. In some ways, the movie evokes Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “nostalgia film,” a highly stylized vision of a father (played by Bruce Dern) and son (Will Forte) road trip that knowingly equates some notion of the past with its cinematic mediation (the vintage Paramount logo, black and white cinematography). But it is also, importantly, a story about nostalgia. Woody (Dern) returns to his hometown, encounters old friends and family, and even visits his eerily abandoned childhood home in an elusive quest to recapture some semblance of a lost past—most directly symbolized by his desire to be allowed to drive again, that great “frontier” myth of the open road and all its possibilities that defined his post–World War II generation. In this regard, Nebraska attempts to capture a nostalgic journey (narrative), as well as a nostalgic look (black and white 35mm film stock). There remains, too, the question of what possible nostalgic relationships the film itself will evoke in another thirty years—when someone looks back as longingly at 2013 as some now do at the hazily defined era of classical cinema the film’s pastiche visually simulates. Finally, the fact that the movie was shot on what will continue to be the increasingly quaint anachronism that is celluloid film suggests another layer of (technological) nostalgia. In sum, saying Nebraska is a “nostalgia film” presents as many questions as it does answers.

There are, as Rick Altman argued, different ways to conceptualize genre—through an exhaustive list that includes every possible film in the category, or as a more exclusive group of the best cinematic examples whose textual commonalities collectively define the genre in question. Or we can define it as a relatively stable category with fixed narrative and thematic and iconic elements (semantic), or as a more historically contingent one whose basic genre features are defined more by core ideological meanings that tend to be in dialogue with larger cultural contexts (syntactic). The task of analyzing the nostalgia text from a syntactic perspective has been more thoroughly explored than its textual mechanisms, as demonstrated by Davis’s Yearning for Yesterday, Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, or Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. Jameson’s use of the phrase “nostalgia film” is an important and usefully contested point of reference that has permeated countless discussions since. On its own, though, the phrase is vague—particularly as Jameson admits that the word nostalgia is unsatisfactory for his purposes. For a touchstone, the title of my chapter deliberately uses the phrase “nostalgia film” in a nod to this well-known term—at the risk of unintentionally implying that these ideas do not also apply to possibilities in TV and other mass media (advertising, video games, and so forth). For Jameson, the nostalgia film is a simplified, superficial pastiche of stylistic clichés, “conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image” (19), which for him evokes a collective, largely conservative, vision of an idealized past that is ultimately more approachable in opposition to its double: the messy, at times unknowable contradictions of history (for more on nostalgia, postmodernism, and late capitalism, see also Stewart).

Thus, a working demarcation for what might actually define nostalgia as a genre of media remains more abstract, despite there being a working assumption that such a concept already exists. As Christine Sprengler notes, “genre labels continue to suggest a degree of coherence and singularity markedly absent from the various ways in which nostalgia’s relationship with the cinema can be theorized” (67). From a strictly semantic standpoint, Marc Le Sueur’s often overlooked essay, “Theory Number Five: Anatomy of Nostalgia Films,” followed Davis’s work by attempting to give shape to the emerging centrality of nostalgia in popular culture by the 1970s. Le Sueur’s work focused primarily on nostalgia’s thematic consequences and visual elements, such as mise-en-scène. Pam Cook has explored how the language of cinema can evoke nostalgia through the stylistic use of freeze frames, slow/step motion, ellipses, repetition, and other visual means of stopping, preserving, and reversing the flow of time. Richard Dyer has shown how we might use nostalgic pastiche to engage with the history of genre. The concept is perhaps underdefined in part because we tend to think of nostalgia as an affect—a by-product of media consumption as often as an inherent textual feature.

Affective, Peripheral, Representational, and Narrative Nostalgias

Generally we can distinguish at least four broad types of mediated nostalgia, and the more elusive question of affect may be the best place to start. An “affective” nostalgia is a form that does not extend directly from any element planned in the text itself and can only be acquired over time. It is not a text necessarily set in the past or targeted toward a melancholic audience, but triggers in the present a yearning for yesterday by virtue of its relationship to some distant audience memory. Davis has written about “future nostalgia” or “planned revivification” (133)—how media products will be increasingly conceived with an eye toward their potential nostalgic value in subsequent cycles of consumption after their initial shelf life expires. In a sense, most products’ inevitable, often preplanned state of anachronism is a necessary first component to their lasting value. As an affective experience, for instance, reruns of Saved by the Bell (1989–1993) today can offer an intensely nostalgic journey for certain generations, despite the fact that there was (we can reasonably presume) no sense of appealing to nostalgia at the time of its production. This contrasts sharply with, say, Freaks and Geeks (1999)—a loosely similar concept about the ups and downs of high school–aged students, but one deliberately set two decades earlier to at least partially capture a nostalgic desire for that time. For my present purposes, I set aside such affective forms of nostalgia—endlessly fascinating and equally infinite to map (as audience reception studies has already shown)—and stay confined to more quantifiably textual components.

There are those types of nostalgia that straddle the fine line between purely affective and more explicitly textual forms. For lack of a better term, we can call this “peripheral nostalgia.” These texts are where nostalgia is clearly one possible source of appeal—two prominent forms are star vehicles (which can refer to well-known writers or high-profile directors, as well as established actors) and franchise properties (which would include sequels, prequels, and reboots, alongside broader nostalgic media brands such as Disney and Pixar). The latest Julia Roberts movie, James Bond epic, or TV show featuring Cedric the Entertainer undoubtedly appeals to those who—either passionately (fans) or more casually—look forward to the reassurances of medias past which those texts can potentially offer on top of other visceral and narrative pleasures. Here, the nostalgic value of a proven star or durable franchise is clearly evident, thereby negotiating the boundaries between knowingly incorporating that appeal into the text and yet still depending mostly on the affective engagement of the audience to more explicitly articulate that nostalgic value. I am tempted, moreover, to place Dyer’s work on genre imitation somewhere in this category of the peripheral. His definition of pastiche, wherein new movies call forth the longer history of preexisting genre conventions before them, offers up an engagement with (but not necessarily a dependence on) earlier media periods and forms—meaning, the knowledge of genre history is not essential to the text’s resonance (or lack thereof) with contemporary audiences. Of course, the actual degree to which such nostalgia is truly peripheral or possibly intended to the text’s appeal is a subjective point open to debate. My point is merely structural—some stories are not directly about nostalgia in any technological, visual, narrative, or thematic way. Peripheral nostalgia is an unspoken, if generally agreed on, element of the text’s appeal, which otherwise offers no direct engagement with such melancholic desires.

On that note, we can begin to more directly examine nostalgic modes by distinguishing “representational” forms from “narrative” ones. Representational refers to the ways in which—somewhat like Stories We Tell’s kitschy 1970s flashbacks—a text might seek to emulate a nostalgic time and place. We can break this down further to highlight “period nostalgia”—that is, movies, TV shows, and so on, set in the recent or historic past with the conscious intention of appealing to some kind of nostalgia associated with that time. Meanwhile, period pieces are not necessarily the same as those representationally nostalgic media that try to simulate earlier media forms. We can refer to this as “simulacric nostalgia”—as in, not just (or even necessarily) set in the past but meant to literally emulate a mediated look from the past. For instance, Nebraska is presumably set in the present day, despite its visual evocation of an earlier film aesthetic. Grand Budapest Hotel’s (2014) frame narrative, meanwhile, establishes multiple past time periods—and the film’s shifting aspect ratios (1.37:1, 1.85:1, and 2.35:1) match the common aspect ratios of the corresponding period. Le Sueur’s work is an important precedent in this regard, as he made the distinction between “surface realism” (mise-en-scène) and “deliberate archaism” (textual simulation of obsolete media) (192) as separate forms of what I am choosing instead to call representational nostalgia (I prefer the word simulacric not only because of its play on simulation but also its Baudrillardian evocation of an absence of history).

Such diverse cases of representational nostalgia must be distinguished from the more common form of narrative nostalgia. Such storylines can be set in either the past or the present (or perhaps most intriguingly, in the future—Pixar’s WALL-E [2007] offers a paradoxical nostalgia for our own immediate present seven hundred years into the future). Narrative nostalgias do not necessarily depend on any particular fan base, franchise connection, historic time period, or simulacric look—rather, they are simply stories explicitly about nostalgic impulses (just as, oppositely, movies that depend on representational nostalgia do not necessarily concern themselves with overtly nostalgic plots—such as Argo [2012], The Wolf of Wall Street [2013], and so on).

Some common nostalgic plots might involve one or more of the following.

1.Major life events, such as reunions, weddings, milestones, graduations, or deaths—wherein reflecting on the past and the inevitability of change becomes a central narrative and thematic point.

2.Road trips, vacations, or other forms of “home-coming”—where there is the assumption or hope that at the end of the journey, one will enter into a physical space that is either literally or symbolically associated with an earlier period in one’s life (a place often, but not always, associated with childhood).

3.Time travel—where the journey into the past becomes literal.

4.“Return” to nature—here, nature is defined by its opposition to competing notions of “society,” “modernity,” “civilization,” and other concepts that work in some way as a code for the complexities, temporalities, and challenges of everyday, modern life from which nostalgic impulses of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 What Is Nostalgia?
• Part 2 When Is Nostalgia?
• Part 3 The Politics of the Past
• Part 4 Not My Nostalgia
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover