Pop quiz, hot shot: when is nostalgia not nostalgia?
Answer: when it’s permeated movies, TV and music so deeply it’s become part of our 2017 norm. Think: the reboot of Stephen King’s It becoming the biggest horror hit ever, the myriad geeky references in Netflix’s Stranger Things 2, or Steven Spielberg’s new film, Ready Player One, where retro video games are practically a character in the plot.
The phenomenon has even hit the world of advertising: Pizza Hut recently used Zippy and Bungle from Rainbow in commercials, while He-Man and Skeletor were rejuvenated to star in the MoneySuperMarket campaign – dancing to (I’ve Had) the Time of My Life from Dirty Dancing, of course.
It feels like the entertainment industry has artfully synthesised the past to create something completely new – all the while appealing to our keen sense of cultural history.
But why are we so into looking back right now? “Much of today’s popular culture reflects a sentimental nostalgia for the final decades of the 20th century,” explains Michael Johnson, author of A 1990s Childhood and digital curator of nostalgia site doyouremember.co.uk. “It appears to be largely driven by the collective yearning of Generation X to return to the simpler pleasures of their childhood – a time before they felt enslaved to mobile devices and social media.”
Certainly, for many viewers, December’s big cinema release – Star Wars: the Last Jedi – was a reminder of childhoods pretending a cardboard tube was a lightsaber or that you could tame “the force” from your bedroom. It was a time before broadband, when things were more straightforward, despite similar economic and political upheavals.
“[It’s] reflecting a desire to go back to a period when there was a lot of uncertainty, but through that uncertainty there was a lot of creativity,” says pop culture expert Dr Dan Laughey of Leeds Beckett University. “It doesn’t feel quite like the contemporary, but it feels close to the contemporary.”
Ready Player One, adapted from the book by Ernest Cline and directed by Spielberg, is out this March and echoes this sentiment. Its hero, Wade Watts, lives in a high-rise trailer-park slum in the year 2044, travelling to a virtual world populated by DeLorean cars, Iron Giants and Rush lyrics in a bid to escape the dystopian horrors around him.
Written by a self-confessed nerd who spent his youth saturated in geek culture, the story mythologises the kinds of pursuits that have since become nostalgia fodder. “My friends were all geeks with similar interests and we spent a lot of time hanging in each other’s suburban basements,” Cline told sci-fi website Unbound Worlds. “A lot of us were unpopular at school or came from troubled homes and, looking back, I think we lived for anything that provided an escape from reality.”
Those who go on to succeed in the storytelling business are often the school outcasts, the unpopular kids. Years later, able to write a screenplay or program a computer, their work reflects the material that saved them in childhood. It let them pilot a spaceship, search for lost treasure with their best friends, or convince the popular girl they were worth a shot.
“Most of my friends were made through the camera,” Spielberg told the Guardian last year. “Rather than make friends, then go off down to the soda fountain or go to where the kids would hang out, I would just go home and write my scripts and cut my films.”
For those currently at the top of the decision-making tree, who are likely to be in their thirties and forties, the past 30 years provide all of their cultural touchstones. It’s no wonder that even the most esoteric products of those times are being mined, rebooted or disassembled for parts.
Today’s young audiences might have been born in this millennium, but they’ve had this mindset instilled into them early. Their favourite musicians sample 90s hits, and the clothes in their shops wouldn’t look out of place on a young Molly Ringwald. Above all, the proliferation of channels and streaming services means a never-ending broadcast life for even the most ephemeral content.
You can also blame the parents. “Despite never having actually experienced the 80s and 90s for themselves, many [young people] are enthused by the culture of their parents’ childhoods,” says Johnson. If you’ve grown up with your mum or dad telling you The Goonies or the Back To The Future trilogy are the greatest films ever made, you’re going to be interested in the decade that spawned them and other pop culture from that time.
“While this can partly be attributed to the unusually large proportion of critically acclaimed films and music produced in these decades, it may also be that the younger generations are simply picking up from the 80s and 90s a palpable sense of excitement, anticipation and hope that left its fingerprints all over the culture of the time and that is lacking today.”
And if you want to get postmodern, then consider theorists like Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. “[They] argue there was a particular end point around the mid-20th century where things start to become cyclical in a way that they weren’t previously,” says Laughey. “The cyclical nature of things has been going on for some time, but it doesn’t always work in a predictable way.” In other words, this is what we like now, but who knows what we’ll like in five or 10 years’ time.
Maybe though, it was just a golden age for entertainment then. “I think we were pretty awesome in the 80s,” Steven Spielberg told movie website Collider. “I was very happy to see there was enough without me that made the 80s a great time to grow up.”
If Spielberg and Cline are right, then the nostalgia train will just keep on going. Surely it’s time for someone to perfect Marty McFly’s self-lacing trainers or create a driverless DeLorean already?
Ready Player One is in cinemas on 30 March
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