It turns out that, when I was writing about dead shopping
malls last week, and about vaporwave music before that, I actually wanted to
talk about nostalgia, so I shall. Nostalgia formed the critical base for both
subjects, and once I ended a thousand-word discussion on shopping malls by saying
I wasn’t sure what lessons to take from them, it wouldn’t be long before
someone said it would be nice to read a follow-up as my thoughts about them
develop.
That person was my sister Layla, of Richee & Layla at
His and Hers Reviews, and they made a podcast [link]
reviewing Steven Spielberg’s latest film, an adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel
“Ready Player One.” The film’s story is built around OASIS, a virtual reality
environment in which people learn, work and play. This world is constructed out
of all the popular culture artefacts you can imagine, and the quest taken in
the film is based on finding “Easter eggs” hidden by the world’s creator, inviting
people to “like” what he likes.
In the podcast, Layla said that “Ready Player One” will live
beyond its time in the cinema because the idea of nostalgia is so big. This is
not just historic nostalgia for the 1980s – “Back to the Future,” “The Shining,”
Atari computer games, “Doom” and so on – but also the vicarious nostalgia of
longing for the past, by living through the past of someone else. In “Ready
Player One,” characters are being told that something is nostalgic, and that
you must like it because it is nostalgic, “and if you are not nostalgic for it,
you are a fucking monster” - my sister also brought up the notion of “ruining your
childhood,” if the object of nostalgia is not how you personally remembered it.
Nostalgia used to be a diagnosable condition, like
depression: it was first outlined by Johannes Hofer in 1688, referring to the
state of Swiss mercenaries located in less mountainous areas, in France and
Italy, than where they came from, and was known as “the Swiss disease,” in the
same way that syphilis used to be the disease other countries called their enemies.
The word “nostalgia” came from Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain,” and was
originally translated into English as “homesickness.” Medical studies of
nostalgia had stopped in the 1870s, by which point soldiers in the American
Civil War were diagnosed with it. Psychological studies, however, are obviously
still ongoing.
The nostalgia I believe was awoken in me by listening to the
ghostly echoes of vaporwave, and in walking through an empty shopping mall, are
evoked by the same type of memories “Ready Player One” wants to create –
memories for when music, film, TV, and architecture were done that way, because
things were better then. I talked about the safe spaces that shopping malls
create, and vaporwave makes new connections by cutting up the music of the
1980s. However, these subjects are using that nostalgia to criticise the end of
the consumer society, which created the conditions in which vaporwave and dead
malls now exist. If the good times evoked by nostalgia for 1980s music and
shopping malls had been real, I would not have vaporwave, I would not have made
a video about a dead mall near where I live, and I would not be writing about it
here.
I had not known what lesson to take from looking at dead
shopping malls, but I realise that the nostalgia evoked by them, and by
vaporwave, is for something that may not have existed but more of a vision that
did not happen to me – I was six years old when 1990 came around, so the 1980s
remains an interest because it is on the edge of what I can remember. Like any
good postmodernist, I am looking for what references I can bring forward and cobble
together to give meaning to the present day, but when you are looking at what
happened within your own lifetime, you will always pick the good times first.
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