The Dangerous Trap of the Nostalgia Film
It’s not America we want to ‘make great’ again. It’s ourselves.
What do you think of when you hear the term “Period Film”? Jane Eyre and Little Women, right? Swords and horses and people in a constant state of mourning because Penicillin hasn’t been discovered yet. Fair enough, that’s all pretty good screenplay material; a lot of Period Films involve this level of pomp.
Historical Epics, Regency Romances, War Films, Westerns, they all come with their own grand set pieces and operatic tropes. But as we skip along this spectrum, at some point we run out of movies where the historical pageantry keeps us at a romantic distance and we find ourselves amidst films where the period setting actually draws us in even closer. It’s down around this end of the continuum, usually surrounded by movies set in the not-too-distant past, that we get to a sub-genre of the Period Film that we really ought to nail down at this point: the Nostalgia Film.
All Period movies take place in the past, but a Nostalgia Film takes place in someone’s past. That past is often the main character’s, as signified by the protagonist harkening back to the story we’re about to see via a Wonder Years-style voice-over narration. The character doesn’t even have to keep the narration going throughout the film, a lot of times they just set things up with a line or two toward the beginning about that one, unforgettable summer when “everybody called me Baby, and it didn’t occur to me to mind” (ahem, Dirty Dancing), or that fateful summer when, to my parents, “I had become the invisible boy” (cough, Stand by Me).
Indeed, summers feature prominently in Nostalgia Films and we’ll get to why in just a minute. And sure, the Stand by Me reference probably isn’t fair because that narration does keep up throughout that movie and the film absolutely does not suffer for it — but we all know VO is a seriously dangerous game. It’s a device that will get you labeled as a hack faster than probably any other cinematic construct.
Honestly, there’s only one director who can get away with opening his movie in medias res on some wild, completely out-of-context scene, just as we pause for a freeze-frame so the main character can introduce themself over VO. And that’s Martin freaking Scorsese, who only gets a pass because he’s been making top tier movies for fifty years without a single sign of a Coppola-esque creative implosion.
Anyway, all this is to say that bad nostalgia films are a minefield for bad narration, but good ones use it sparingly or well. And despite the demands of this sub-genre, there are still Nostalgia Films out there that imply the past without any narration at all, like the lush Italian drama Cinema Paradiso, which flashes back from the protagonist’s present day adult life to tell the story of his childhood, all without the aid of any voice assuring us, “I remember it all as if it were yesterday…”
And of course, some Nostalgia Films don’t even openly depict anybody “looking back” on the events of the film at all — sometimes the feeling of nostalgia is just there, woven into everything so obviously but so deftly that you can’t really explain it, you can just tell. When this is the case, it’s usually the nostalgia of the filmmaker that you’re picking up on. Just watch Dazed and Confused and try not to imagine Richard Linklater looking through saturated ’70s Fotomat prints from his favorite high school parties. Or better yet, watch any movie made by a Baby Boomer about the ’50s (American Graffiti, The Last Picture Show) and see if you aren’t completely distracted by the reverent preoccupation with ditty-bop shades and combing your hair into a pompadour and calling a mint a Sen-Sen, whatever the fuck that means. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
It’s that transparently personal artistic approach that outs a Period movie as a Nostalgia Film. Something undeniably autobiographical, even if only in feeling. But of course, the very word “nostalgia” denotes not just a fixation with the past, but also a poignant longing for it. With very few exceptions, that’s part of the deal here too, though it can vary by degrees.
The wistfulness buried in Adventureland, for example, is nothing if not adroitly discreet. For a movie so hard packed with heart, it’s incredibly grounded, featuring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart at their most mutedly sincere and necessarily awkward. [Ed. note: and Ryan Reynolds at his most Ryan Reynolds-y.] The film is actually so down-to-Earth, it’s probably only by the grace of it being independently produced that it was saved from some studio suit shoehorning in an above-mentioned voice-over. Watch this understated film, as funny at times as it often is, and it’s all too easy to imagine the VO intro that a douchey exec would have added in post. “…it was the summer of ’87. I was working at an amusement park and we were all wearing kickass ringer t-shirts that any modern-day hipster would kill for…”
At this point we should note that nostalgia has a probably well-deserved bad rap (again, we’ll get to that), so this entire description might come off as pejorative. Rest assured though, it’s really not. These films speak for themselves: they’re gorgeous. Dazed and Confused has become legitimately synonymous with the ’70s mood and aesthetic. Weigh American Graffiti against the Star Wars prequels and George Lucas at least breaks even. Watching Stand by Me when you’re old enough for it to make you cry has become a culturally sanctioned rite of passage. These movies aren’t hindered by their nostalgic POV, they’re bolstered by it. We probably couldn’t expect lesser filmmakers to mine their own pasts and emerge with such expertly hand-hewn art, but this process clearly brings out something unrepeatable in the hands of the auteur. Yes, I just implicitly called Rob Reiner an auteur. We’re not talking about the Bucket List here, but Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, and When Harry Met Sally was a hell of a hot streak.
Maybe it’s the inherently heartfelt nature of this process that makes the resulting movies so compelling. There’s definitely something unguarded about the vision of youth explored in these films that engenders feelings of warmth and affection in the bulk of movie viewers. But that’s not all there is to it. These movies also make us feel good for a far more obvious reason: nostalgia is a very seductive emotion. Research shows us how faulty the human memory is; add to that the beautiful and tragic notion that there is something magical fading into the distance behind us that we will never hold in our hands again, and it’s easy to start seeing the past through filters that are achingly lovely—and also way too flattering to be accurate.
Hence, the fact that Nostalgia Films never seem to recall the good old days when the protagonist was 35 years old, or that one incredible winter that he’ll never forget. These stories take place almost exclusively during the one season we become nostalgic for almost before it’s even over, and it’s no coincidence that the characters are always looking back through the window of being 12 to 22 years old. That’s the range during which the world seems to expand before us, but wonderfully, we haven’t usually been beaten down by it yet. In fact, according to Stand by Me, even if you have been beaten down by it — the world, and your abusive, alcoholic father — it still isn’t enough to crush the spirit of a hopeful and eager 12-year-old boy, let alone a grown man’s vision of himself as a 12-year-old boy. Recall how in the midst of their adventure, young Vern says to his friends, “This is a really good time.” This prompts the now adult narrator to reflect,
“Vern didn’t just mean being off-limits inside the junkyard, or fudging on our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad tracks to Harlow. He meant those things, but it seems to me now it was more, and we all knew it. Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were, and exactly where we were going. It was grand.”
Part of what makes Stand by Me a beautiful movie is that this is so accurate. It’s true that the world feels different during certain special, crystalline moments in early life. But it’s also true that this very specialness only becomes more gloriously, tragically bittersweet the further we get from it, and the more baggage-laden adult life we have to compare it to. Of course it seems to the narrator now that Vern meant so much more when he said this. Hindsight isn’t 20/20, it’s super soft focus.
It makes you wonder just how many forgiving coats of Vaseline have been smeared over Donald Trump’s backward-facing lens. You don’t have to come from one partisan stance or another to recognize that he ran on a campaign platform of nostalgia. Making America Great Again certainly implies that it was better before…at some point.
But when exactly? Was it during Trump’s own 12- to 22-year-old nostalgia window? He was born in 1947, so that would run from 1959 to 1969. And it’s true, the 1960’s did represent a great economic boom for the U.S. But the ’60s are also an era whose historic legacy is almost exclusively characterized by social upheaval, civil unrest, and a loud, unrelenting push towards progress. From Vietnam protests, to free love, to the Stonewall riots, the Black Panthers, the National Organization for Women, the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, on and on. While the underlying irony may be that America hadn’t seen another era of such unabated activism until, well, right now, the cultural trends of Trump’s own nostalgia window hardly seem to fit with his espoused values as a leader.
If we go back earlier into the ’50s and assume Trump is nostalgic for a period during which his “memories” are now largely informed by things his parents said about it later, we again find a pretty good economic period for the U.S., and this time with a more conservative social overtone. But wait, no, this is also the period that gives us Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Further hammering the coffin shut, the ’50s were also host to an effective tax rate of 50%-70% for wealthiest Americans, in addition to Trump’s own dad being investigated by a Senate subcommittee for profiteering from public contracts. Again, this doesn’t sound like his picture of greatness he’d want us to return to.
Speculatively, it seems entirely possible that Donald Trump himself doesn’t really have a nostalgia window. He’s rarely been specific about what period in America’s greatness he wishes to recapture in the first place. And more to the point, he’s had a guaranteed seat at his family’s multi-million dollar dynasty since birth—what smiling era from the past could anybody who’s always had it this good realistically long for? More likely, the MAGA campaign was simply meant to weaponize the nostalgia of his voting base. Maybe that’s not a very flattering thing to say about Trump and his campaign managers, but worse things have been said about The Big Chill.
This notion still nonetheless brings us to the dark side of all this — the reason that the venerable John Hodgman refers to nostalgia admittedly somewhat overzealously as “the most toxic impulse.” Artistically speaking, a movie can lose a lot of credibility when the filmmaker is totally oblivious about the rose tint they’re putting on the past. But more pertinently, the inclination to look longingly toward the past and insist the world was better is an investment that offers pretty terrible returns. Because after you’ve gazed into the distance a few times with that wry, poignant smile, it becomes clear that this mental paradigm gives nothing back. Wistful smiles turn to dour grimaces, all in the name of an injustice that’s best served by fiction because the stronger the emotion behind nostalgia, the greater the indication that it’s based, in fact, on a lie.
Because the world was definitely not better before. Are you kidding? There have always been rude people, violent crimes, overpriced concert tickets, economic hardships, crappy movies, evil politicians, disappointing meals, annoying songs that other people love, and people fighting against their oppression. If you didn’t notice these things before, maybe you were on a lucky streak and none of it hit you. You liked the annoying song. The “evil” politician wasn’t evil, he was your guy. You weren’t being oppressed, and you didn’t have much exposure to people who were. Or maybe the past you’re looking back to is just the period of your own personal Nostalgia Film, and the world wasn’t better, you were. At least you felt that way. Looking back on what life was like before it got more complicated is tricky business. It definitely makes for good screenplay material.
For a healthy dose of nostalgia (the good kind), stream Adventureland on Tribeca Shortlist now.
