Stuck in a nostalgia loop… where is the culture of tomorrow?

Nostalgia is now major business. If an artist finds themselves out of step with the current moment, then it’s only a matter of time before they become a reference for the new, and those who supported them in their moment will seek to revisit with rose-tinted glasses. Many musicians find themselves starving artists on their initial outing, only to see an opportunity for financially stable touring decades later. Even in the most underground of acts, there is a viable financial reward in revisiting and reliving the past. The nostalgia circuit is set up to continue infinitely.

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The timeframe for nostalgia gets increasingly smaller too. Culture from a decade ago is already being reappropriated into new mass media products. Was your life better ten years ago? Well, here’s a slice of that peace and comfort that you crave so incessantly. Our relationship with culture often hinges on where we are in our personal lives and how we feel about the world around us, and the movers of the culture industry are happy to prey on this.

In television, we constantly see a stitching together of the familiar. Take Netflix’s super hit Stranger Things as an example, which cribs its themes and visualisation from various 1980s horror and fantasy sources. Stranger Things is a metatextual affair, unable to exist without these sources. When the show features a song from the era, such as Kate Bush’s 1985 hit Running Up That Hill, its popularity explodes and outperforms the wealth of new songs worming its way through the charts.

Some would put this down to the sheer popularity of the show itself, but it’s a bit deeper than that. For those not familiar with the culture of the 1980s, it’s a refreshing look into a point in time where more unique artistic points of view could still break through and progress the scope of ideas in the cultural mainstream. It’s a rare chance to experience an original, not an imitation. Those already familiar are reacquainted with an idealised vision of the past, where the new feels too derivative and numbing to have any effect. In either instance, a visit from the past inspires much more joy, interest, thought, and fanfare than the static looping of recent culture.

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In film, there is an argument that this post-modern cultural cycle took hold in the 1980s and cemented itself with the advent of Indiewood in the 1990s. Indiewood directors were the first bonafide film school generation (film only became a serious subject of academia in the 1970s with the expansion of arts and humanities programmes), where the rules and mechanics of film were already set out and available to learn.

The medium’s history, personal taste, and its influence over the filmmaker became a core part of how their work was conceived and constructed. Quentin Tarantino is an obvious example, scraping direct elements from 1970s exploitation, spaghetti westerns, martial arts flicks etc. and tying them together in an overarching post-ironic veneer. The influence of such filmmakers has replicated itself, to where it’s common for films to be an impression of an impression.

Top: Lady Snowblood,1973, Bottom: Kill Bill, 2003 (Image: Toho Co Ltd/Miramax)
Is this all just a symptom of the era? Culture and the wider world are intrinsically linked and feed into each other. The age of neoliberalism has enclosed in and contained the political and societal progress of the 20th century, and now we are making headway through the 21st century with little envisioning of what a future could look like. The lack of imagination and movement in other aspects has infected culture, and now we seem stuck in a purgatory of regurgitating the same old tired ideas.

There was never some cultural golden age, and certainly, cultural eras of the past had their own issues, but things still progressed, even slowly. We remain circling back around to the familiar ideas of previous years, with little indication that the bubble will burst and a rush of liberated creativity will take its place.

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Before, new rushes of ideas would incubate in the underground, in the dark shadows where they’re free to grow from the pressures of the commercial, where only after would they begin to bleed into mainstream culture. But the gap between the mainstream and subterranean only gets larger, lessening the chance of new forms and expressions from breaking through and embedding themselves into the wider world.

It’s hard to be optimistic. But Vladimir Lenin was correct in saying, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. Perhaps the chaos of unpredictability will save us from Groundhog Day.