Classifications of Nostalgia
1.)“Direct” Nostalgia
A forty-year old returns home after decades and visits the house where he grew up. He experiences a “direct”, nostalgic feeling that is generated by a lived memory. The sight, sounds, and events of living in the home will come back to life in his mind. After the threshold of this initial “portal” is crossed, what will his feelings ultimately be? As Janelle Wilson in Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning, writes: “Even when one returns to a place he or she longs for, neither the individual nor the place is the same as the nostalgic recollection. If one is nostalgic for a particular “time”, there is no way of going back”.
A more personal example involving media: In the 70’s, my father and I watched 30’s and 40’s movies re-run on TV every weeknight. He expressed nostalgia not only for anecdotal memories jogged by the specific film (i.e. “I remember where I was when ‘The Maltese Falcon’ came out’”), but also an ephemeral longing for the simplicity of the cinema and memories of how long afternoons were painlessly spent in “movie houses” with its triple features, newsreels and animated shorts.
My father, the writer George Gipe, died suddenly in 1986; he was only 52, and his greatest success up to that date was a movie with Steve Martin called “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”. The comedy was structured out of contemporary black-and-white footage of Martin, playing a private eye, edited into old film noir films of the 1940’s. Recently, I re-watched the film and became aware that I had grown up with a father that lived, worked and created in a nostalgic haze. “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”, stripped of the comedy, was essentially a fantasy about re- connecting with an unattainable past, an idea that had obsessed him. Exercising a creative and rather unique opportunity, he was able to engage the idols of his childhood and re-direct the fiction in a new narrative under his direction (all of which creates a interesting riff on Freud’s notion of “screen memory”).
Also, my father expressed an attendant dislike for the lack of clarity in the current world in relation to the morally clear world presented by the Warner Bros. movies. This touches on another important aspect – the dismissal of the chaotic present to the benefit of an ordered, simpler past flattened by nostalgia. As Svetlana Boym comments: “Nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology…”
2.) “Indirect” Nostalgia
A film like “The Maltese Falcon” made my father “directly” nostalgic – as he lived and watched it in the era it was produced. Now, in 2009, when I see the film “The Maltese Falcon” it’s a two-fold nostalgic experience; first, it makes me “directly” nostalgic for the moments I had with my father.
Secondly, the film also makes me “indirectly” nostalgic for the original, (seemingly) uncomplicated days of the film’s setting. Even though logic dictates that the 1940’s would have been a frightening era in which to live, my indirect nostalgia dictates and stimulates an artificial “yearning” for this time. In the 70’s I grew up in a highly mediated, Watergate-filled world of Vietnam, gas lines and the growing awareness of environmental peril. Seen against the flattened Past, the Present always seems hopelessly complicated (or, as critic Susan Stewart said: “nostalgia is a desire for comfort that blinds us to the urgent present"). My father’s generation of the 40’s fought and won an unambiguous war against fascism and invented the middle-class - wasn’t the 40’s a simpler, clearer time?
3.)“Mitigated” Nostalgia
In the 70’s, TV producer Garry Marshall capitalized on the craze generated by the film “American Graffiti” by developing a comedy series about the 1950’s called “Happy Days”. Marshall was able to use his “direct” nostalgia of having lived in the era to create a convincing mise-en-scene.
He was counting on “indirect” nostalgia to capture and engage a target demographic - in this case tweens born in the early-1960s with no direct memory of the 1950’s. I call this conscious employment “mitigated”; it is a staged gloss of history that exploits a culture-wide tendency to feel comfort when a narrative is transported back to “safe” memory territory. ”Happy Days” allowed my 70’s generation to experience the 50’s as a carefree time of sock hops and drag races.
Significantly, “American Graffiti” was the first film considered to be a specifically “nostalgia” film - this by Frederic Jameson who sites it in “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (a book that is not so much read as thrown on the ground and gnawed on). Jameson writes: “Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level”. This idea is elaborated on by Vera Dika in her “Recycled culture in contemporary art and film: the uses of nostalgia”: “Not only does “American Graffiti” return to the styles and songs of a trouble-free pre-1960’s era, one before political disruptions…it also embodies an apparently non-critical style of filmmaking…the historical disjunction between events presented in “American Graffiti” and the era in which the film was originally shown results in a friction that speaks to the effects of the 1960’s on a generation.”
Advertising and nostalgia
Nostalgia’s ability to cut across classes and unite a collective consciousness is what gives it power as a persuasive tool. In advertising, it is a common and easily employed device to engage the spectator. As Wilson remarks: “Nostalgia can be used as a cultural commodity derived from the experience of a particular age-cohort and transformed into a market segment”.
VW has used the 1960’s since the late-90’s to access boomers. Curiously, nostalgia been a trap for them: ”As baby boomers reminisce about the summer of Woodstock 40 years later, [marketers are] trying to devise a future for a brand in the largest automobile market in the world, at a time when many Americans associate VW more with the past than the present.” (NYT, Aug.21,2009)
In 1998, in their cover story “The Nostalgia Boom”, Business Week identified the fact that: “advertisers are only reflecting Americans' deeper longings to take control of their lives by reconnecting with their idealized past…Consumers can't seem to get enough of…airbrushed memories”. Now, in 2009, it seems the 1960’s as a “idealized” zone is getting a work-out. Nothing could be more literal in its implications than this Pepsi ad:
In the end, the article mentions a critical component: The use of nostalgia as a device to summon up feelings of comfort and stability. As the Business News writer asks (and answers) the question: “Why recreate history? [Corporations] are hoping that consumers will equate longevity with quality”.
In the end, perhaps there is more sinister in the use of nostalgia but sheer laziness: "There are tempting reasons to use nostalgic ads in today's market. For a start, with times being tough, brands can rarely afford to invest too much time or money in creating and building new characters or concepts. If there is already a well-loved, tried and tested campaign out there, then it can make sense to develop it. “(Brand republic.com, 2009)
From a marketing blog: “One of the key points the group discussed was the usage of nostalgia to grasp more viewers’ attention and interest in the commercial. Instead of simply showing the current 2009 Challenger in all of its glory, they added instances of several of the older models. This created a sense of a ongoing story, one that both youthful and aged viewers could relate to.”