Today I saw a clip floating around from the movie Free Guy, a recent moderately-well-received cinematic pastiche of video game tropes, in which the hero wins the day through, essentially, the power of licensing – retrieving iconic virtual movie props to defeat a stronger opponent. While the discussion around it is, as expected, revolving around how creatively bankrupt this is (true) and how people should be allowed to enjoy it anyway (also true, but prepare to be judged for enjoying the stupidest horseshit Hollywood has to offer), it predictably fueled my trademark brand of melancholic anxiety about the trajectory of art in an increasingly cross-promoted world.
The thing that struck me on reflection, though, is the increasingly bizarre shape of nostalgia. Nostalgia for Star Wars is trite, but makes sense – it was part of most people’s childhoods and young-adulthoods in one form or another. Elements from the Marvel Cinematic Universe are included in the same scene in the same capacity – which is interesting because, while Marvel properties have of course been around a good long time, they were until recently of rather more niche interest and the Marvel Cinematic Universe has a distinct aesthetic from the nostalgic mulch it originally emerged from. This suggests that something doesn’t actually have to be very old at all to trigger a nostalgic response, and this interests me because of what it suggests about what nostalgia is and how it is deployed.
I have a fascination with nostalgia myself. I constantly feel myself pulled back towards a sense of limitless mystery and endless possibility remembered from childhood. This is, I realize, not necessarily the sensation that nostalgia holds for many other people: To me it’s a sense of exciting possibility, but to many it is a sense of warm certainty. These two outlooks are fundamentally divergent in how they view the world through nostalgia’s lens: One sees nostalgia as an open-ended question, a guide towards a future full of possibilities, and the other sees nostalgia as an answer, a declaration that the future must return to the past, seeking the sense of safety that only the ignorance of threat can supply. It will be easier to discuss these if I have some terms for them: Let’s call the mode of nostalgia that engages with possibilities suggested by the past “evocative nostalgia”, and the mode which seeks the sensations of existing in the past through invocation of its superficial elements as “invocative nostalgia”.
This is a divide that somehow was a blind spot for me until today: I might identify the experience of playing Dark Souls as pleasantly nostalgic, and agree with others about this, without realizing that we were, most likely, thinking about completely different sorts of nostalgia. When someone who craves invocative nostalgia speaks of the game as nostalgic, they most likely mean that it is similar in form to games they’ve played long ago, akin to the kind of inexplicable challenge offered by a poorly translated NES cart rented from Blockbuster with a bug that rendered its harder difficulties literally unbeatable (Dark Souls isn’t actually exceptionally difficult, but many enjoy talking about it as though it were), and this would be inherently good because it invokes that era, one of safety and certainty, regardless of whether these choices were interesting in the context of the game itself. Conversely, I might invoke nostalgia in describing it to mean that the game blurs the bounds of what is important and what isn’t, what’s possible and what isn’t, to create an experience not unlike playing a game when you’re a child, before you know what the limitations and expectations incumbent to a video game are. One refers to a form of safety and certainty created by invoking the context around the illusory safety and certainty of the past, the other a sense of infinite possibility and open expectation similar to those evoked by past experience.
Invocative nostalgia is the kind that marketers and executives tend to be interested in, because invoking it and monetizing it is trivially easy: All one must do is imitate the form to create the sensation of recognition, and all the love and security invested in it springs forth in the audience. Making money from evocative nostalgia is hard work: It requires asking and answering questions, creating mystery and possibility, subtly suggesting unseen possibilities around every corner.
It’s strange, though, how quickly things like the MCU seem to get grandfathered into being nostalgic now. It isn’t even that the films themselves are nostalgic – we still understand all of them to be relatively recent – but the invocation of their symbolism, stripped of all context and nuance, follows the form of invocative nostalgia. We are asked to engage with it as though we are children again, eternally children, claiming safety and security and reassurance simply by replicating the form of nostalgia indefinitely, trying to build a shell of papier-mâché around our fragile selves. I like some of the MCU movies, but the process of extracting symbolic value and injecting it into other properties is fundamentally somewhat distressing to me as an artist, as someone who cares about context and meaning.
There are many forms that nostalgia can take – is it, in the end, no more than a desire for a certainty that can only be attained from events that have already happened, only once the insidious threat of the present has been drained from them?