Nostalgia is everywhere in pop culture, forced or organic, jolting or comforting: the rewatch of Girls, the reunion of NSYNC, the resurgence of Kate Bush via 80s-baiting Stranger Things, the new Fatal Attraction, a refreshed Wednesday Addams, another Sex and the City. It can be a trap. It is, as Vulture’s Craig Jenkins put it in a review of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour movie, the flashiest and most lucrative nostalgia enterprise of the moment, a “retirement community, the place the mind goes when it’s tired of going places”. The retirement community is a bankable one, our streaming economy flush with reboots and revisions harkening to a fondness for the past.
It’s perhaps this omnipresence that gives nostalgia a bad rep. Reaching for the past – it’s easy, indulgent, unoriginal. Another retread, another rose-colored gesture to something past. Even at its best, trading on the human affinity for the familiar has the stink of cheapness, so often is nostalgia deployed to cover for a lack of anything else to say.
