nostalgia is a drug
Ruining Your Childhood
A few years before the release of the movie Detective Pikachu, I was working on a Twine game based in the fictional world I created from which the name of this website derives, called The Vaudeville Ghosts Ruin Your Childhood. The premise, in brief, was that a live-action remake of the original run of the Pokemon anime was being filmed; the joke was simultaneously a fairly obvious mockery of the still-ongoing-in-the-year-of-our-lord-2024 trend of everything getting remakes and remasters, and a jab at the somewhat pearl-clutching tendency people have to declare that any such remakes are a catastrophic event for true fans of the original. Both impulses, I think, stem ultimately from the same place--nostalgia--but the corporation seeks to exploit the nostalgia of its audiences, while the fan seeks to defend their nostalgia against the influences of modernity.
(I never finished the project, of course. I spent more time working on The Vaudeville Ghosts Crash Your Party, a story about a Halloween party which had a demon underneath it that fed on party energy, so it would destroy the town if the party didn't suck; that one stalled out at about 2/3 completion.)
It has been argued that nostalgia is fundamentally a conservative impulse. I can't fundamentally disagree--conservatism, after all, is at heart the desire to return to an (often imagined) idyllic past, and nostalgia is . . . also that. That's literally the definition. But, well, I'm also a history nerd, a big advocate of archival and media preservation, and someone who spends a lot of time writing reflections. So let's get into it, shall we?
What's Important
The Splatoon series has featured since its inception regular festivals called Splatfests, wherein the game asks a question and then prompts players to join a team in order to battle out which answer is the best one. Splatoon 3 recently held its final festival, and the question was "Which is the most important to you?", with the available teams being Past, Present, and Future.
This question bothered me on a conceptual level because, while I can see a perfectly reasonable argument for either the present or the future being more important (though in my particular mindset future is the clear correct answer), ranking the past as more important than the present and the future feels as if it can only be fundamentally reactionary. The past is important because it provides us with a lens that we can use to understand the present and plan for the future. Without that it is fundamentally empty.
I've long since lost the desire to get in arguments with strangers on the internet about things like this--why do that when you can just write an essay?--but a common line I encountered from those who chose Team Past was that they had a lot of memories they valued, or, in a word, nostalgia. I'm not unsympathetic; our memories do make up a significant portion of who we are, after all. But as fond as I am of my memories of big family dinners, of meeting the exchange students my grandparents had taken in for the season, to say that they are more important than the future feels naive at best.
But that is part of the trap of nostalgia. These fond memories are certain, safe. You can return to them at any time, and they'll always be there for you. There is a photograph of my mother on my desk, and she is always smiling, always sporting that silly nineties haircut, always there.
Skeletons
I don't often get the chance to talk about the excellent 2010 film Skeletons, and indeed I hadn't been planning on it when I was thinking of this post, but it's a perfect example. It's a story about two technicians working for a company that figuratively exhumes the skeletons from peoples' closets, by using some magical technology to delve into memories. One of the characters has picked up a habit of what they call in the film "glow chasing", where he delves into a nostalgic memory from his past, of his parents reading him a bedtime story. We soon see that this is a hollow experience: it loops, it doesn't change, and through the cinematography we can see that this is also a somewhat demeaning experience. It's a cheap trip--you get to experience the moment, but ultimately it holds the character back from actually living. To paraphrase one character: "It's great, but what's the point?" A core thesis of the film is that sometimes the past should be forgotten; not only that there are some secrets best left undisturbed, but that this nostalgic longing for things that no longer are is a trap that leaves people drifting through the world like ghosts.
Learning, Preservation, and You
There is, of course, much to be learned from the past, both on a societal scale and a personal one. One of the strengths of the almighty Algorithm lies in how thoroughly it strips away all context, leaving posts exposed only to this unholy moment and all of the negative, engagement-generating emotions this contextless context can bring to bear.
I am thinking here of a post from the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, wherein the writer, Bret Devereaux, talks about the illusion of political stability. The post is originally focusing on a misconception (that feudalism is a very stable political system) which derives, largely, from the fact that introductory and survey-level history on "the feudal period" must, by necessity, zoom out, and omit some details, but he adds this aside that is very telling:
This same ‘flattening’ effect can happen with much more recent history. One sees this in the assertion of some sort of recent, idyllic American past (often with wildly incorrect ideas about what average Americans could afford, based on TV shows that feature either affluent families or families inexplicably living in affluent circumstances and foolishly taking them as normal). And I always find myself wondering exactly when this was supposed to be? Not the 1940s, with the Second World War. But the 1950s, with the Korean War, conscription and – by modern standards – skyhigh defense spending? The 1960s, with the country torn by the battle to end Jim Crow and establish civil rights and Vietnam? Or was it the 1970s, the famous decade of ‘malaise?’ All, of course, under the pressing thread of nuclear annihilation; I never had to do an ‘aid raid drill’ at school, but my parents did. All of that is painted over with this vague sense of a time ‘before’ where things were ‘stable.’
Which neatly dovetails with my thesis here: not only does this give us an example of the dangers of nostalgia--of yearning for that idyllic past--but it also shows us how we can use the past. The more we zoom in, the more we realize that there have always been crises, and looming threats, and disasters, and the better we can understand that there were never any halcyon days to go back to. And once we understand that, we can begin to look to the past not as some golden age to aspire to, but as a series of experiments we can learn from. And we can better fortify against the pseudo-history that reactionaries like to peddle, when trying to exploit our nostalgia.
And this is true for our personal lives, as well: our fondest childhood memories, those pieces of media we loved so dearly--we do not owe them the pedestal on which we put them. We will be better served, and can better respect our pasts, by looking at them with eyes unclouded by the mists of nostalgia. We can be critical of them, and in so doing we can learn from them, and guard against the predations of those who would seek to use these memories against us.
Because I do believe it is important to learn from the past. I believe that those archivists out there who preserve media are doing important work; I believe that telling stories is vital. These are the tools we have for bringing the past with us into the present, and being able to use it to light our path for the future. And we can't do that if we let nostalgia fool us into thinking that everything back then was golden; we have to see the flaws, the friction, and see the past for what it is.