Nostalgia as a Product
Nostalgia can serve many purposes in art, challenging us, connecting us and helping to reforge the present. Nostalgia can also be a product.
Theories of Nostalgia
Nostalgia is one of the easier targets of cultural criticism. It is easy to criticise the use of nostalgia as lazy, seemingly because nostalgia is a reference to the past rather than a leap into the future.
I think there are several theories for why nostalgia persists. Firstly, everything is a remake, and what we call nostalgia might be an unkind mischaracterising of genuine creative transformation. Secondly, hauntology, where the forces of our society constrain our abilities to imagine new futures and force us to draw on the past. This isn’t true nostalgia, but proto-nostalgia, or nostalgia out of necessity. Thirdly, because each system creates the problems (or influences) which birth the next. This generation’s creatives will be inspired by today’s art, and this will reflect — inevitably — in tomorrow’s. Finally, people like nostalgia because it demands less from the user than a new idea would; we already have connections to the characters, places and themes which nostalgia draws upon, and to re-visit these things may be more favourable than to try to ignite that sentiment afresh.
