First, let me clear the air: “nostalgia” smacks of grandparents, the Greatest Generation and noir films. The word seems practically encoded into the aesthetic of jazz, the memory of cigarettes in swanky nightclubs and starlets. It may sound therefore considerably more than a bit cinematic. (“Oh, I’m languishing over here in black and white!”). I hope to argue here, however, that there is still a place for this kind of nostalgia. As long as we Americans constantly parody and ironize indiscriminately the culture, received ideas and norms that precede us, this may seem a dim possibility. And yet, somehow even our efforts to parody reveal a certain attempt to remember, to reconstitute (however disfigured) the cultural parameters of a by gone era. Let us take Indiana Jones, for example. The whole original trilogy was premised on absorbing, synthesizing and distilling the great adventure detective novel/films of the forties and fifties. Even the script of the title tells us that what is at stake is the recapitulation of the already ossified noir genre. We as viewers enjoy seeing (with a certain amount of self-awareness) precisely this. Of course, nostalgia of this filmic sort creates stereotypes, turning caricatures into rigid types.
Take for example the longstanding American loving for shooting Nazis in films, a tradition which is itself fading as the new Jones films replaces these perennial villains with Soviets. All that this change (from Nazis to Commies) reveals, however, is that slow transition between historical zones of nostalgia. For movie watchers growing old in the early 2000’s the Cold War looms far greater than even the deeply grooved cultural memory of the Second World War. One villain (as reproduced in the fuzziness of nostalgia) is replaced by another as the essential experience or access to such experience changes. It has always struck me the way people talk about World War I vets dying, as if the whole of that now distant conflict were encoded in the limited personal experience of one of its trench soldiers. If I might suggest the second basic premise of this short post, it is that this tendency (to project upon a person the entire burden of cultural memory) is the effect of nostalgia, as it is encoded into cultural output.
This hypothesis need not be tailored exclusively to a modern era, conditioned as it is by a massive film industry (the makers of Aristotelian art: that which is not, but could be). Our contemporary sense of nostalgia is perhaps, with some qualification, a work definition of mythological nationalism. Greek living subsequent to the Trojan War defined and created themselves in the image of Homer’s poem. A cultural nostalgia (and the borders between Greek/Barbarian that it implies) are fundamental to the reproduction of a national document like the Illiad or the Odyssey. Without oversimplifying the complexities of the question, I would like to suggest that similar tendencies are operational in the contemporary American reception of film. The only sizable qualification we would suggest is the one already made by De Toqueville in the 19th C, and that is that memory in a democratic age is shorter than in the canonic, hierarchical pre-history of an aristocratic state. Functionally, this means that while the Illiad was constitutive of Greek identity for thousands of years, similarly powerful (at least in the sense of wide distribution) products of cultural nostalgia, like Indiana Jones, wash out of cultural memory sooner and with greater ease. The proof of such a suggestion can be seen in the way Americans talk about their favorite films, or even better, the constellation of films and types of films which they continue to watch even after the historical moment in which the film was created has ceased to exist. In the newest Indiana Jones, we already inherit a self-aware reproduction of earlier films, which were themselves nostalgic parodies or recreations. Or take, for example, the polemic over the old and new versions of Willy Wonka. I was present for a screening of the old Gene Wilder classic to several friends who had, for whatever reason, only ever seen the newer Johnny Depp version. The resulting exchange over the films’ merit was strikingly interesting. For those who had seen Gene Wilder first, even if already in a moment of the film’s cult like nostalgia (aka the late 80’s and early 90’s), they were fanatically committed to the older, seemingly more authentic original. At the same time, those whose only experience was Johnny Depp seemed to cling to that original and with some amount of difficulty admitted the merits of the dated 1971 classic, with its visible green screen effects and cheesy candy mushrooms. Is the difference between these two reactions as superficial as two different eras with distinct perspectival sets of cinematic values, or is it, as I have unfortunately only begun inadequately to express, the countervailing tension of zones of received nostalgia (genre, historical cues, “dated”-ness), as it recreates itself in contemporary consciousness.
