Well, it’s Friday afternoon blogging time again and I’m going to ramble. I’m sitting here pondering a conundrum — does nostalgia have anything to do with history? Or is it a product of the imagination?
What is nostalgia? A desire to return in thought or fact to an earlier time? The wistful longing for something in the past that is imagined in an idealised form? The bittersweet yearning for a time that is perceived as more perfect than today? The memory of past times purged of the bad bits?
A dictionary tells me that the word is made up of two Greek roots ( nostos ‘returning home’, and algos ‘pain’), to refer to ‘the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native land, and fears never to see it again’.
Nostalgia constructs a narrative of a utopian ideal. Each generation longs for the time of its youth and imagines it as a golden age. The negative aspects of those times are forgotten and the positives are sanctified and magnified. Consider the baby boomers’ nostalgia for the 1960s.
I am convinced that the 80s was a period of remarkable creativity that gave form to many positive aspects of the lives we lead today. But I’m not feeling nostalgic about it. Who is nostalgic for the 1980s? Those for whom it was a more innocent time, who were young and experiencing life’s richness for the first time? But not those of us who are trying to live down our own 80s, to atone for the bad things we did.
Some of the key collective memories of the decade are sensational ones that contrast with the gloom of the 70s, with its inflation, strikes and unemployment. I have discerned from people who were young and ‘in the know’ during the 80s certain mythologies of hedonism, transgression, excess, extravagance, decadence, promiscuity, glamour, narcissism, yuppiedom and underground designers. I have to confess that much of this seems superficial to me, as though people were living on the surface.
I wonder if nostalgia has more to do with the present than with the past. Could it be a critique of the inadequacy of the uncertain present? Is 80s nostalgia a retreat from the crises of the current decade? Are we seeing today a post 9/11 yearning for a period of perceived innocence, stability, peace and certainty? An age when Australia was asserting itself internationally, when a sense of national identity was taking shape, when the nation’s leaders were proud to proclaim a multicultural society? A longing for a return to a time when pub rock ruled, nightclubs flourished and pleasure seemed less fettered. An age before global warming, suicide terrorist attacks, the world wide web, mobile phones, facebook and blogs. Is this fantasy of a less complicated time just a critique of the mundane yet scary present?
I have been reading a fantastic piece by Professor Andrew Higson, writing about English ‘heritage films’ of the 80s, those Edwardian or 1920s period dramas such as A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Heat and Dust, Maurice, Another Country see his chapter ‘Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’, in the book Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed Lester D Friedman). He argues that nostalgia is implicitly a narrative of loss that yearns to return to a comfortable, closed past. ‘The past in all its perfection’, as he describes it.
He discusses how the 80s cinema audience might have found refuge in these films from ‘the radical and often problematic transformations of the 1980s’ (p107). I can see parallels between this and how people today find refuge in the 80s.
In Germany they have a word to describe the yearning for life in pre-1990s communist East Germany. ‘Ostalgie’ is a contraction of the German words for ‘nostalgia’ and ‘east’. It is often used to describe the popularity of kitsch objects from the German Democratic Republic days, but according to Anthony Enns, it also applies to recent German films. Enns sees the phenomenon not so much as a rose-coloured view of life under an oppressive regime but as a critique of the failure of the unified German state to live up to expectations of bringing socio-economic parity between east and west. Again, nostalgia is often more about the present than about the past.
People’s comments on this blog (and at dinner parties) reveal something of what they hold dear from the 80s. It is amazing how when you mention the 80s, people cite products, toys, clothes, songs, albums, movies, books, rather than people or events. I think we are seeing a new type of nostalgic experience that celebrates the popular culture of the recent past through its objects and commodities. A way of enjoying the styles and pleasures of the past by souveniring past commodities, but without a sense of melancholy that nostalgia implies, without the ‘algos’.
Our 1980s exhibition will push the nostalgia buttons in an upbeat and positive way but it needs to be realistic and hard-edged, showing empathy with the decade of the 1980s but without flattering it; questioning it but not disparaging it, not resorting to the wistful fantasy that implies that life was better back then and something has been lost.
