19 Thoughts on Nostalgia in the Pandemic Age
- In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic—not the period of time pre-March in which the virus was already spreading and our government was basically pretending it didn’t exist, but those first few weeks of hunkering down in fear of what was to come—a profoundly annoying tweet went around about the supposed potential we could all unlock within ourselves while staring down mass death:
- It says a lot that, in the months since, I attributed this tweet in my mind to some VC tech dipshit with money to burn and plenty of stupid advice to give. But no—it was Rosanne Cash! It’s funny how our minds will sometimes replace an unfortunate truth with a truth that we’re more comfortable with embracing. In reality, of course, there’s always only one truth.
- I highly doubt that Rosanne Cash meant it this way (why am I still giving her the benefit of the doubt, though?) but there is something infuriating and nefarious about suggesting that, while we’re all teetering on the edge of total and complete societal collapse, you need to unlock some new level of potential within yourself. (Sounds like VC tech bullshit speak, right? No wonder I attributed it to the type of eating-disorder-as-power-play dickhead that didn’t actually exist, but also actually does.) It’s okay to feel sad, it’s okay to not know what to do for a minute or two, it’s okay to take care of yourself. Not every single goddamn thing in the world should be a call to productivity, and perhaps if that very American belief wasn’t so instilled in all of us we’d be doing a better job of managing the pandemic in general.
- Just so we’re all clear: you don’t have to be creative right now. That said, I’ve become increasingly dismayed at the total lack of creativity from the Hollywood sector. I know this makes me sound like a rube—Gasp! Hollywood types aren’t the geniuses that popular culture makes them out to be!—but I’m going somewhere with this, just give me a second.
- Productions are finally ramping up again. Steven Soderbergh’s making a new movie, which is great news. Things are in the works, plans are being put in motion. A thing or two has actually been made during the pandemic that has been genuinely enjoyable and notable: Host, a Zoom-focused horror film situated during the time in which we’re living through right now, is roughly the length of a free Zoom call and it’s one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in the last few years, despite its conceit being executed successfully several years before with the cult classic Unfriended.
- Otherwise? The Goonies Are Back!! That’s roughly been the tone and timbre of so much pandemic content—Zoom reunions of casts from pop cultural artifacts, virtual table reads of classic film scripts, looking back just to look back in an attempt to look away from everything that’s going on around us. Nothing new, nothing particularly interesting, just familiarity as a supposed source of comfort.
- As I’ve mentioned in prior installments of this newsletter, it’s also hard to look forward to new things these days. There are films that have come out on Netflix or on VOD that I’d typically rush to watch in the movie theatre, or even rent at this very moment. The urge isn’t as persistent as it used to be, though. Part of this is for mental health’s sake; it’s hard to focus on something you really want to focus on when you feel like shit, and feeling like shit certainly is a familiar feeling these days. (I completely disassociated during the first two-thirds of seeing The Irishman in theaters because I was going through a professional catastrophe that was launching me into a deep depression, and it’ll be years before I get to give that film a fair and clearheaded shake again. I mean, seriously—just try to convince your loved ones to watch The Irishman again. It’s hard!)
- Part of it is practical, too: why rent a movie at a time in which financial precarity is more present than ever when there’s twelve seasons of The Real Housewives of Atlanta on a streaming service I already subscribe to?
- We’re on season eight of RHOA, by the way. Cynthia is driving me nuts.
- Nostalgia has been a driving force in popular culture over the last decade, to the point where it’s pervaded everything. Gritty reboots, reimagined remakes, unearthed franchises that previously lay dormant, representation-focused recastings—everything but new ideas, which have been but droplets of water occasionally hitting our creatively parched tongues.
- Music has not been immune to the 2010s’ nostalgic creep. In fact, music got a head start by almost an entire year: 2009’s “summer of chillwave,” in which a bevy of lo-fi electronic pop emerged from the bedrooms of countless creative types and accompanied by VHS-flickering images of distorted footage from our recent past.
- I’m a critic who chronicled chillwave during its existence and has written extensively about the micro-phenomenon since. While looking at chillwave through a variety of lenses, I’ve often surmised that its emergence was a direct effect of the collective generational depression that millennials were experiencing following the cavalcade of horrors that was the 2000s: 9/11, two wars, two recessions, the ability to witness and inflict violence through a computer screen, etc. Chillwave was, essentially, an entire age group’s temporary retreat from the pain of the present.
- I sometimes worry that, when ascribing these causations to chillwave’s existence, it has come across as my defending the relative inaction and disaffection that chillwave could represent to some. A retreat is a retreat is a retreat, and inaction when it comes to societal ills is the furthest thing from virtuousness. So much chillwave was low-quality and driven by careerism, too—other disaffected post-collegiate types witnessing something that worked and using the limited tools at their disposal to replicate the formula. Also, as I wrote about in this newsletter some time ago, a few of chillwave’s progenitors (specifically and not coincidentally, those with non-white ethnic backgrounds) have since made music directly commenting on sociopolitical concerns and, more broadly, the dissolution of norms that we’re constantly bearing witness to.
- The pandemic has made chillwavers of us all. I’ve been critical and dismissive at various points throughout this piece, but at this very moment I’d like to stress that I am proclaiming this fact with a measure of serious empathy. It’s impossible not to miss things right now. So much has been taken away from regular human life—not to mention a whole lot of regular human lives—and a lot of the things we used to know aren’t coming back for a while, if not ever. I sometimes find myself appreciating the pure presence of the sun in the sky because I know that it’s not going anywhere for a while.
- Of course, a lot of these things that people miss are also material, as well as things that were not widely available to a large group of people across the world due to various economic inequalities and structural violence inflected by often-patriarchal assemblages of power. To miss something is privilege, if only because so many have likely not ever had the chance of missing that thing at all. Acknowledging this requires a level of empathy that, barring total inhumanity and sociopathy, I think some (many) have a hard time reaching for because of how direct and surface-level the suffering may seem at the moment. Again, I try really hard not to blame anyone for it at this point, and if anything am always trying to reach within to understand a lack of understanding if it’s coming from a place that isn’t rooted in hatred and bigotry.
- Even the world of video games—an industry that more often than not prides itself on the latest, the next, the we-couldn’t-do-this-before-but-now-we-could—has become especially nostalgia-prone in the last five years or so. This is a sensation separate from retro fetishization, a mostly-but-not-always-harmless commonality that leads us to play Ms. Pac-Man to remember how much fun we had with it as a kid. Top-down remakes of older video games are becoming more prevalent alongside the typical remasters that we usually witness when it comes to updating next-gen libraries with previous-gen content. Just two years ago, there was a top-down remake of the 2005 classic Shadow of the Colossus, a game that (perhaps not coincidentally) has also popped up in track titles from chillwave forefather Panda Bear and featured as a plot point in the 9/11-trauma Adam Sandler vehicle Reign Over Me.
- Everyone plays video games now. What else is there to do? What are video games if not the ultimate escape? As someone who was playing a lot of video games pre-pandemic, this was nothing new to me. But as my own mental health has taken twists and turns, I’ve often retreated to the type of loot-grab games that I spoke about with Perfume Genius several weeks ago. I played two Diablo 3 seasons back to back, put in countless hours on Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 until my dreams were filled with unfortunate violence. Between June and a few weeks ago, I spent over 130 hours on maxing out my Borderlands 3 character, playing through the game mindlessly on escalating difficulty levels until the gameplay loop itself became a numbing agent on my mind.
- About that “a few weeks ago”: I realized I was in some sort of depressive cycle with Borderlands 3 that I desperately needed to break through. So I reached for Spider-Man. Spider-Man is a simple game that, like many AAA games, is comprised of elements from other AAA games: there’s some Assassin’s Creed and more generally Ubisoft-centric collect-a-thon open world elements, the incredible physics of swinging around the city also seem like a revamped version of the Infamous franchise, a few elements of the battle system remind me of the Middle-earth games, and so on.
- It’s also delightful. It throws you in the middle of Manhattan right from its opening minutes, and as I swung from building to building I found myself deeply missing the version of New York City that I was having digitally spoon-fed to me: teeming with unconcerned people at every corner, no local businesses on the verge of total closure, the only mask being worn on our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man’s head. Spider-Man feels comforting right now in a way that it probably wouldn’t have if I played it when it came out two years ago. I get nostalgic when I play it, and whether or not that’s a bad thing is the furthest from my mind when I’m in the moment—I’m just back in a place that feels familiar, and safe, and as long as I’m able to come back to the real world afterwards, I’m okay with how that feels, too.