Nostalgia Negates Nuance
For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;
And the former things will not be remembered or come to mind.
The Last Dance came at a perfect time. We are all missing something in this COVID-cancelling reality we call 2020. For some, it’s watching, debating, and/or playing sports. For others, it’s going to concerts. Still, for others, it is going to the “movies” movies, or it’s grabbing brunch on a lazy Saturday and Sunday (if we are honest, sometimes Friday), or hopping on a plane and just going somewhere else.
If there’s anything corona has done to all of us, it has made us all feel stuck. Whether physically, spiritually, emotionally, interpersonally, etc. It’s kind of a bad thing, but also kind of a good thing.
I, like many people, yearn for the comfort of the familiar to endure adverse times. But usually that meant if I was out with a nasty cold or pesky flu, I’d watch the same shows or movies or play the same video games.
I still find myself doing this. Binging new series isn’t quite the norm for me; I find myself watching Firefly for the fortieth time, watching Star Wars for the sixtieth time, rewatching Community for the twentieth time. Whether it’s due to my deep and passionate like for what I like, or my slight ADD tendencies so I don’t “watch” watch what I’m watching, or, mostly likely, my tendency to revisit the past vicariously through what I was really into back then.
This I felt the moment the first episode of the 98 Bulls documentary ended. Cue “Sirius,” that insanely awesome guitar intro that is so synonymous with Chicago and the 90s and hearing that enthused announcer proclaim, “head guard, 6’6”, MICHAELLLLL JOOOOORDAN!” Picking up food in between episodes, I started my car and instantly pulled up Spotify and got that famous two minute song to blair from my rolled down windows. Because other people are feeling it too, right? Perhaps I’d even get some head nods from other people on Woodstock who, even through their facemasks, can vibe with this timeless moment of the mid 90s.
This is the power of well-placed nostalgia. But the problem is most efforts to draw up nostalgic responses or warm and fuzzy feelings have rung hollow. For years now.
But don’t tell Hollywood that. And don’t tell the scores of eager fans of whatever shelved but now suddenly relevant property studio execs can now make a buck off of.
IPs, new and actually original storytelling, at least on the screen, is now tightly relegated to the small screen. It’s where we got Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones (before it got bad), Dexter (before it got bad), The Walking Dead (before it got bad), Handmaid’s Tale, and the nostalgia soaked Stranger Things.
What’s interesting about Stranger Things, what sets it apart from the other shows mentioned above, and the popular nostalgia-baiting films on the big screen, is how it launches effective character development after the nostalgia-hooks. It doesn’t point to a moment which recalls Spielberg or Zemeckis or Abrams or Carpenter or some other 80s property and say, “see, look what we did, fans. Look!” It uses nostalgia to peek interest but not maintain it.
And although it references so many other properties in the space of a single episode, it actually develops its own story-telling rhythm by doing so.
Unlike another property which, the past December, betrayed all it stood for by merely going back to all that it stood for.
My heart doesn’t feel the same about it now.
I don’t think nostalgia is only relevant to mass media. I think it’s relevant to politics, as well. Otherwise why would the guy in the oval office use a mantra like “make America great again” and find appeal to so many disenfranchised and normally average, nice people to go along with such racist and ignorant rhetoric?
We do this in religion too. While many Christ following people my age are not that hot about recalling nostalgia of, say, the predatory televangelist era of the 70s and 80s or the fearsome rapturous Left Behind era of the 90s and early 00s, many folks, including myself, or looking back.
But way, way, way back. Pre Puritans, pre Pilgrims, pre Crusades, heck, for this guy, pre even Nicene Creed. Give me Origen, give me Athanasius, give me the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Give me authors who said give me the wisdom of the eternal while their peers sought the monetary and pedigree acclaim of that particular cultural moment.
It’s almost as if when a phenomenon in culture has been famous and “known” for too long people forget what it really meant. Reinvention is more rediscovering the original function of a wheel rather than finding a different and “better” wheel.
Silence and solitude is good, actually helps you be more productive? Huh. Thanks Jesus. Mindfulness? Buddha was all up on that long before a bunch of white Renaissance men compartmentalized western life into bite sized pieces and convinced us all that the only thing that mattered was what we thought.
But there’s a difference between resurfaced and timeless wisdom and beating a dead horse of unoriginal and safe storytelling. Some people want to escape into “fantasy” to forget the hardships of reality without realizing that stories which aren’t real sometimes speak more about the truth of the real than a true story ever could.
Parables anyone? Interpreting dreams? Revelations of the… future? Present? Past?
Safe stories are just that. Safe. And aren’t relatable. Notice how I didn’t say happy. The happiest stories, the truly joyful tales, often have the hardest and heaviest of trials and tribulations. It’s almost as if what one has to overcome to arrive at their destination is the only thing making the destination powerful. A good tale gives us fresh insight on how to handle suffering. Human struggling is universal for all of us but success is not, so that’s why happy endings that are also safe ring especially false. If we know at the start of a movie that everyone will make it out ok, that their scars will probably even heal after a few years, we tend to forget it. But if they lost things, lost dreams, lost family and friends? We will never, ever forget.
How we handle our mistakes tells others more about us than how we handle our victories. It’s not about the quantity of our successes but about the quality of our defeats that establishes our character. It is through personal failure and frustration that we find heaven and the grace of God, not through righteous or holy checklists.
Yet this is so, so, so counter to everything America stands for. And, by extension, cheap nostalgia as well. Sometimes the good guys don’t win. Sometimes the good guys aren’t all that good, especially after we remove our rose-rimmed glasses. Sometimes a good cause, sometimes playing by the rules, sometimes the route of honor and integrity and justice and wholeheartedness, makes us weaker and more vulnerable to the schemes of the “other guys.”
Sometimes God doesn’t seem to save people. Redeem people. Heal people. Deliver people.
All the time, though, God is with them. Loves them. Fearfully and wonderfully made them. His happy endings channel their scars as a means to tell and relive even better stories than if they never got the scars to begin with.
I’m writing a fantasy story. Somehow, I never got around to mention it on a blog where I’m past 100k words. Guardians of Caelumnar, Part 1 (it has a name, but it’s subject to change, and the plan is to write 4). It has been written, and then rewritten, and then rewritten again. And I’m writing the whole thing over again.
Again.
I’m drawing from all the stories I like so much more than love. Also, the Enneagram (as a basis for characters). Also, the Bible, but not in a heavy handed Chronicles of Narnia way. Not knocking Lewis at all here. I blame Christian culture, or, rather, cultural Christianity, for sabotaging Narnia into a basically born-again fantasy series.
One story that’s super duper not Christian that also has a huge emphasis on my narrative is Game of Thrones. The books are decent, but I really don’t like Martin’s voice. It’s so cheesy, but I think you have to be cheesy to be a successful fantasy writer.
Yet the realities of his world are actually quite biblical. Quite realistic too, minus the dragons and ice zombies. The good guy Stark family often get wrecked for being the good guys. The bad guy Lanniesters often excel for plunging the depths of depravity. This rings true, especially in our modern political landscape.
Further, that even though we reap what we sow, sometimes the reaper comes and takes what we were all diligently sowing. And that there’s no personal value statement on that. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes they just keep happening.
Although there’s a lot of Greek thinking we need to disinherit in the west, the one thing we should keep or perhaps revisit is their notion of the tragedy. Their dramatic plays were divided out as either comedies or tragedies. Comedies were… what you would expect. Intended to be either lighthearted or pleasant but most importantly created for the audience to escape from the present hardships.
But tragedies were more directly focused on their themes and insights, using personal and social tragedy as a way to draw them out more intentionally. Additionally, prior to the theater, the plays, the original “theatre,” were the western world’s first stab at a communal story divorced from “oral tradition.” Written and often directed by one person, these stories gave commentary on the current issues of the era at hand. But, even if it be through myth, the ancient world’s equivalent of modern fantasy, the stories still had something to say about “what’s going on,” as Marvin Gaye would say.
Which brings us, full circle, to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
It was the day before my 26th birthday. I went with my then roommate and close friend who I don’t keep in touch with, Mondo. The reviews were glowing. 85 on Metacritic? This guy was excited. Plus, the director’s previous movies were always interesting and mostly engaging.
Yet when I walked out of The Last Jedi, I didn’t know how I felt. That’s a secret so don’t tell anyone. I felt the same way about The Force Awakens (but definitely not Rise of Skywalker).
I knew that it didn’t do what I thought it would. I was genuinely surprised with many storytelling decisions. And it did seem to say something politically, which I was pleasantly shocked to reflect about from a movie about space wizards with laser swords.
But the internet broke. So many of my fellow diehards absolutely hated it. I was more surprised by this than by how they killed Snoke, which was rather surprising.
“That’s not my Luke.”
“It’s too political.”
“Why wouldn’t she just tell him the plan?”
“I didn’t like the jokes.”
These all seemed… hollow as far as grievances were concerned. That’s not your Luke? Indeed, it’s not. That’s what the cost of time and blown out of proportion legacy does to anybody, even the ultimate Hero of the Hero’s Journey. It’s too political? Because two characters talk about how people make money… out of war? Isn’t that just common wisdom?
She didn’t tell Poe the plan… because he just cost them over half of their fleet by acting rash when Leia told him to be restrained. This is the only gripe I kind of get, but if we dig even a little bit into Star Wars (or any story ever actually), anyone can spot plot holes. As far as the jokes… I thought it was funny. The opening bit was a little much, but we are, again, talking about a series that had Jar Jar Binks as a major selling point of their first “reboot” and some of the corniest lines ever, even occasionally between our beloved Harrison and Carrie and always from Mark.
Since this movie, since the fallout, since the lashing out of many man babies and the racial charged death threats and abuse lauded at Kelly Marie Tran (which caused her to delete social media), I have been perplexed not only by this fanbase but by the takeaways of higher ups in studios. Essentially, Johnson was given freedom to try and to something different with an established franchise. Because the money was already in the vault before they even announced episode 8, they felt confident that whatever this guy would come up would still generate revenue for stockholders while inviting something new into a series that, from the previous sequel’s movie standpoint, was overly reliant on cheap nostalgia while introducing intriguing newcomers (and being enslaved by the character arcs of the established veterans).
But I guess that’s not what people want at the movie theater and with their blockbusters. Loud and clear, the Star Wars fanbase spoke for the rest of fanbases that, apparently, we want safe, simple, and straightforward movies over divergent, unhinged, reckless attempts to take IPs to different places and to explore different themes. They can argue all they want that episode 8 just didn’t “subvert” expectations the way they wanted, but the manner they voiced complaint smelled a whole lot more like groupthink than actual, objective critique (especially when the critics, the non-diehards, almost unanimously loved the movie).
This is what happens when your emotions about expected outcomes are not met. This is why a lot of people either leave faith or only believe in a way which gives them high hopes for desired outcomes. When we are invested into a certain kind of future, when that future isn’t met, we grab our pitchforks and racism and dashed dreams and direct it at the supposed cause of that unmet outcome. Just look at the rise of alt-right groups when our current president ran his racially charged campaign. With story it’s a bit different in that thousands of people wagged and pointed their fingers at Mr. Rian Johnson, but we do the same with politics. Religion too. Musicians, employers, a pandemic.
We can wag our fingers at the DNC for not letting Bernie be the candidate, wag our fingers at the ongoing evangelical support of the chump I call 45 (I will continually wag because I have the scriptural high ground and because that guy doesn’t care at all about Christ), wag our fingers at God for not fostering the future which gives us what we want when we want it. Not giving us what we need too when we need it too, sometimes.
But the truth is that acceptance reaps contentment. Really fast disclaimer before continuing: I’m NOT saying we should accept abuse or poor treatment or to not grieve what needs to be grieved. What I am saying is that if those Last Jedi haters took their emotions out of it, if just for a second, I seriously doubt they’d have the same extreme reaction. Taking my own self under the knife, I too probably wouldn’t have had the same extreme reaction to Rise of Skywalker (I do side with the critics though on both movies, however).
If I, too, wasn’t so emotionally invested in living a rom-com fantasy of the girl next door, I wouldn’t be so wracked by relational misfires. If the evangelical community admitted fear of being culturally irrelevant rather than shouting from the rooftops and Twitter-sphere that they are firmly rooted in cultural and political tone deafness, we wouldn’t be losing so many of my twenty-something peers to religious apathy because they don’t want to be lumped into the “enemy.”
If we didn’t reach for and clasp so tightly to nostalgia, especially such awful versions of it, we actually might learn something and push toward something a little different. Star Wars could maybe make a comment about society and our values. Marvel movies might actually play up their themes (rather than hiding them so tightly between dozens of badly choreographed fight scenes). The Harry Potterless Harry Potter movies might actually lean into different kinds of character development rather than Voldemort 2.0.
Stories could say something rather than quip about nothing. Sequels might say something about 2020 rather than try to relive 1983. Prequels might shed light about the plight of 1983 and how it resonates even with 2020, rather than replicate, shot for shot, line by line, what came out in 1983.
Nostalgia negates nuance. Said better, bad nostalgia shatters thought-provoking nuance. Rise of Skywalker isn’t a good movie because it isn’t saying anything we haven’t heard of before, maybe even heard of better before. Seasons 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones quoting seasons 1-4 doesn’t make seasons 7 and 8 better, if anything, it makes 1-4 feel worse when before they were great.
Yet, good nostalgia, accurate story-telling without rose-rimmed glasses, is a beautiful kind of backstory. Throwing splashes of what came before, acknowledging, in a true way, that what happened before tends to happen again and again, is speaking to the reality of humanity and our tendency to repeat history.
I don’t mind Starkiller base, I really love BB-8 even if he’s a lot like R2-D2, I don’t even mind how Kylo Ren starts off so much like Darth Vader. But it is where he diverged from his grandfather, not when he literally did the exact same thing, that was interesting. In a different kind of parallel, Jesus is compelling when compared to Adam not because his path was similar but because of how it differed. You could compare Christ with so many different biblical characters, and yet He is somehow always the most interesting.
But the Bible uses nostalgia in a good way, especially with Jewish audiences, to communicate the deepest truths about life, about suffering, about God’s place in both. See how Israel wandered in the desert for forty years? I think it poetic Christ did the same for forty days. If they tore down that temple Jesus would rebuild it again in three days? Ancient “redditors” wouldn’t have a clue He was referring to Himself as a temple but would have their minds blown when they connected it.
Subtlety is paramount to effective storytelling. Loss as well. So when stories rely so heavily on winking to the audience using references to past media and making sure everyone makes it out in one piece, the fantasy stories feel especially untrue. Even Avengers: Endgame, hailing from a cinematic universe I have all sorts of gripes with, had a hell of a way to send off their central character that was particularly emotionally resonant.
I don’t want a happily ever-after if it’s cheap, I want a changed-for-the-better ever-after because it’s costly.
Michael Jordan may have been the good guy, but he said a lot of bad words. Made a lot of bad choices too. The Last Dance hasn’t launched into his gambling problems, his absurd, almost cruel hazing of other players. Not yet, anyway. But it has had him front and center belittle the Bulls GM, Jerry Krause, in a not so heroic manner.
But my six year old self can’t quite reconcile that to change my mind about His Airness. I still want to be like Mike. And I think where The Last Dance is succeeding is giving me a fuller picture of the real Mike. Where, on his quest to be a relatively upstanding guy in the limelight of literally every corner of 90s American culture, he made some mistakes. Had a tendency to be mean. Got reckless with money. And so on.
This was why I loved grumpy Luke Skywalker. It didn’t invalidate his journey from before; it made me deeply empathize with the sort of shame he felt for almost making such a seriously damaging mistake. Character development isn’t fixed; it’s evolving, and the way he evolved made sense from what we knew of him before and how he “disappeared” from everything. This is why I clenched my fist when Rey threw her lightsaber and Luke said “a Jedi should never throw their lightsaber away” or whatever clearly retconning line they wrote as he caught it.
Sports, movies, sermons, whatever it might be, we love good stories. The 2015-2016 NBA Finals were amazing because of what happened earlier in the season. The 2017-2018 NBA Finals were boring because of what happened earlier in the season before. Sequels, even in sports, are only as good as they are thematic. What did we learn during the 2017-2018 season other than when you put a bunch of all stars on one team and only one on the other, the team with more all stars wins.
Great. Very exciting.
Overall, nostalgia as it is trending will continue to kill creativity. At least at the box office. Keep churning out the live actions fairy tales, the passable superhero movies, the drag-racing turned high adrenaline heist movies. If we can’t say anything of value in two hours, at least let’s throw in a lot of explosions, self-parodying of genre, and shot for shot replicates of what we’ve already seen when we were five.
Right?
I’m trying to vote with my wallet and, when all this corona stuff blows over, pay money to artists who want to tell me something. Bad nostalgia doesn’t even tell the old thing well. How can it? It was told, fully and adequately, before. That’s how empty referencing is just to reference.
The New Testament doesn’t reference the Old only to get more Christian converts; it points to how God has always been at work by using the past to rhyme with the present. It tells about who God was before so we can trust in who He will be in the future. It is doing many things all at once because the truth is true in more than one way.
I hope, when I get back to fantasy writing, maybe put this kind of writing on hold, I reference or draw from other stories in good ways. With cleverness and not cheapness.
But mostly, I hope my story connects well with the universal story we all live everyday. About how we all live, we all suffer, and we all have a good God inviting us into His larger story to bring light into dark spaces, to bring wholeness where there was emptiness.
I hope it can be a best seller too. Just being honest.