Past is Prologue: Why Nostalgia Replays Our Culture
by Evelyn Homan
still from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
It’s obnoxious at this point to mention how derivative our entertainment industry feels lately. From Disney’s terrifying CGI “re-imaginings” of their classic animated movies, to sequels, to reunions of classic sitcom casts, to Taylor Swift re-recording all her old music, it’s almost impossible to escape from what can feel like a “Great Cultural Rehash” in entertainment lately.
Not that there haven’t been wonderful things being released— look at all the amazing original movies that have come out in the last decade fromWhiplash (2014) to Coda (2021), innovations in music ranging from hyperpop to post-emo, and myriad movements in the art world. This isn’t trying to be one of those articles that shits on the entertainment industry for feeling derivative of itself while completely ignoring how much good stuff has been, and continues to be, released.
But, there seems to be a sticking point in the most mainstream of pop culture — there are formulas working which bring in audiences’ eyeballs, and they are sequels, series, and remakes. And honestly, everyone is complicit in this formula working, from right-wing pundits who watch them in order to complain about some media being “wokified”, to people hate-watching, to the casual viewer. No matter what the viewer goes on to do with the media they’ve watched, the winners are the movie studios, because the money is going to line their pockets.
It’s a hard pill to swallow, but even complaining about “how many sequels there are in Hollywood these days” is still word-of-mouth that might push someone to go see it. We all partake in the entertainment nostalgia industrial complex, whether we do so knowingly or not.
The online discourse around nostalgia can feel like a binary: either nostalgia is totally fine, and that we deserve to find comfort in what used to bring us joy when we were younger and times seemed easier, or that nostalgia is the worst thing to ever happen.
As with anything, and what I suspect most people believe, there’s a balance here. I very much acknowledge that nostalgia can be downright dangerous — look at all the terrifying “good old days” posts that get shared around Facebook (I’m sure things were just so much better without those government-overreach seatbelts). But here, I want to examine nostalgia in our entertainment avenues specifically.
My primary field being bookish things, I think a particularly interesting cross-section of the nostalgia debate can be found in the deluge of Greek retellings that we’ve seen in the last few years. Fairytale retellings are nothing new — Disney’s made millions off retellings, for Chrissake — but they absolutely saw a boom as the rise of Young Adult literature took root in the 90s and, arguably the most prominently, in the early 2010s, when series such as Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles took root in the consciousness of many young minds, mine included — and, I’ll admit, it’s a series I still love and look back on fondly.
Greek myths, on the other hand, while they have influenced much Western art for centuries, arguably found a new life when Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series began hitting the Scholastic book fair shelves. The Lightning Thief came out in 2005 (the same year, I want to note, as Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad) , and I distinctly recall, as a fifth grader in 2012, having an impossible time getting to check out that book because it was all the rage.. I can’t confirm this, but I recall there being an increased availability of the 1962 D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths at Scholastic Book Fairs, potentially because my generation was hungering for more Greek mythology. Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles came out the same year as Kate O’Hearn’s first book of her Pegasus series — 2011 releases, both — but the former would hit a new level of acclaim a decade later during the rise of BookTok, while the other (to my knowledge) has faded into relative obscurity, a remnant of a publishing craze that was presumed to die out.
Not so. Although I have no definitive evidence other than a hunch that Gen Z’s love of Greek mythology is directly tied into the fact that many of us grew up with Percy Jackson and the ten hundred other series Riordan managed to connect to it, I don’t think it’s pure speculation to not at least see a minor causal link between the two. Especially as Song of Achilles rocketed up the charts, retellings of all stripes started to find new life. Miller published Circe in 2018, and SoA catapulted it into the collective reader consciousness. Feminist retellings of Greek myths (and all kinds of myths — I saw one that promises to be a retelling of the biblical Lilith, which I admittedly really want to get my hands on) are also nothing new — see my previous mention of Atwood — but it seems like nearly every other Greek-myth related book that comes out lately is some kind of retelling of the women on the margins of these masculine-centered myths.
I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to say that love for the Percy Jackson series, alongside the authors’ own merits, of course (being generous here because I disliked both of Miller’s works), pushes this genre forward towards near total market saturation.
In this case, at least new works are being created — somewhat. My argument against feminist retellings and why they’re not really feminist could be a whole article in and of itself. But what of the sequels to long-ago movies, the re-creation of musicals for movie audiences?
I distinctly remember when the movie Oz: The Great And Powerful (2013) was announced, my mom was disappointed that they were making what we assumed would be a sequel to The Wizard of Oz. I don’t think many people saw that movie, but if you happened to, you likely remember it was a so-so story about how the Wizard came to be, well, the Wizard. Up to this point, sequels existed but often seemed to have a reason to — the world was vast, and the characters compelling. In my own life, Oz stands out in my mind as a bit of a flop. Prequels didn’t hold the same kind of weight for most movies, unless they were Star Wars. Sequels started to belong solely to the worlds of superheroes, with the Avengers being a prime example.
So when did the nostalgia boom really start? As with anything, probably a long time ago. Frasier spun off of Cheers. Joey spun off of Friends, with much less success than the former. Something comfy to continue to sink into after a long day, the nostalgia of the original show holding strong, trying to create something new from something old. Disney started to capitalize on live-action retellings in the 2010s, although they were in the game long before that with multiple direct-to-video sequels to some of their greatest hits of the 90s. Indeed, 90s parodies like George of the Jungle (1997) harked back to the 1966 Tarzan TV show. The 2010s saw people yearning for eras bygone — “I was born in the wrong era” is a phrase that still makes the rounds on social media, and the pandemic only made it worse, when overnight the world that we had been living in was a world that we didn’t realize we would miss.
And what of the brands and trends that are elements of the entertainment industry? I’ll be honest, growing up with Hello Kitty and friends, I knew about their staying power but I never expected to see Hello Kitty everything in my 20s — Hello Kitty is bedrotting, Hello Kitty is doing drugs, Hello Kitty is covered in blood from her latest murder. It feels like something that I was fully suspecting would be left behind has overstayed its welcome.
Y2K as an aesthetic has also reemerged in the 2020s. Fashion, music, and the like have melded into almost indistinguishable ways in this decade. People long for the mod makeup of the 60s, the records and shag carpets of the 70s, the glitter and glamor of the 80s… the list goes on. Dua Lipa riffs on INXS. Fleetwood Mac and Mazzy Star blow up on TikTok and find a new wave of success with a new generation. Every generation of the last 50 years have their fashion trends and music catapulted into a new era.
There’s something fun about getting to experience all of these decades, their fashions, and music retroactively — let’s be real, it’s a lot more fun to enjoy 80s stuff in an era where Reagan is safely dead in the ground. But it also can feel like new generations are taking all the good stuff while ignoring the cultural context that made these fashions and music so important at the time. I get it, history isn’t always fun, and it’s not always something you want to think about while you dress up in your vintage clothes to feel pretty. It’s fun to feel nostalgic for a time that you didn’t get to live in — but it’s also important to remember what was happening during those times.
It’s easy to try to point fingers at any number of causes for this Great Cultural Rehash. Do we point to media companies, so willing to invest time and money into a sequel to a story that was just fine on its own? Do we point our fingers at the consumers, who, no matter what form they take, still consume the content? Do we point to the millennials, because they’re a punching bag for everything and everyone?
I’ll make the bold claim that there isn’t one cause. We’re in a world that seems to be made up of two sides — one side who wants the literal “good old days” because they didn’t have to walk out on the street and see a person of color, and another who wants the metaphorical good old days in the form of the media they enjoyed as a child, when things didn’t feel so terrible. I don’t think I need to point out which of these is the less terrible side of the coin, but both can be frustrating — albeit for extremely different reasons.
It’s not the coddling of the American mind to want to watch Sailor Moon because you enjoyed it as a kid and have a different appreciation for it now. It’s not even that bad if someone out there felt like they wanted to make some kind of continuation of the story, because they felt like there was more to explore, although they’d have a hell of a time legally with that. Nor is it wholly bad to want to dress up like a scene kid, or an 80s glamor goddess because looking like that makes you feel good. It can be nice to return to things you once found comfort or excitement in, or currently find those things in — I’ll be the first to admit when I heard that the first season of Gravity Falls was being uploaded to YouTube, I binge watched it immediately.
But on the other side of the coin, to say that as a consumer you’re dissatisfied with the state of media, with all its sequels and retellings, interpolations and reimaginings, is also alright. It’s human nature to crave something new and novel, and if you’re having difficulty wading through all of the rehashing to find it, of course you’ll feel frustrated. I feel frustrated about it too.
Nostalgia, at least in regards to entertainment, is something I don’t have the time or credentials to deem wholly good or wholly bad, or even wholly somewhere in the middle. If big budget sequels are making big studios money, then of course those will probably be overlooked compared to indie cinema without a big distributor to back it, or even a fanbase for that matter. But in the wake of all the sequels, prequels, rehashings, and the like, it’s also important to not dismiss all the wonderful original things that are still coming out. You don’t have to engage with media that doesn’t interest you, but that also doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion on general trends.
The world is burning, but we don’t really need to turn to nostalgia constantly in order to hide from it. I hope that as the media landscape continues to shift and develop, as it is wont to do, we’ll see encouragement of lesser-known artists, authors, and directors. Consumers who are able should try to put their money where their mouth is in terms of supporting the new and novel — and those who can’t, or don’t want to, don’t necessarily have to feel bad that the only thing keeping them sane is rewatching America’s Next Top Model for the millionth time. I think there’s a balance we can strike, where we can enjoy some of the past and some of the things it gave us, without sacrificing our understanding of full historical context or expecting our media to derive itself from it.