In psychology there’s this well accepted distinction between the logical brain and the emotional brain. The logical brain works like a computer (for lack of a better analogy; maybe quantum computer?), the emotional one works on the harder to define stuff.
The emotional brain runs on your basic emotions like laughter and being thrilled, but also on the more complex ones that nurture in a whole other way. It’s one of those more complex emotions that we deal with here.
Nostalgia really is an interesting emotion, because it’s a visceral trip down memory lane. It’s something that we can share in with others who are more or less our age. It links up to a whole array of other things like music, movies, food, drinks, friends, what we did to have fun, etc etc, but at the same time ------- how you really feel about something is hard to define. The closest might be this constant k (kierkegaard): ‘all that remains is a mood, a single color’.
To some degree that’s how it works with memory: ask me about a movie in three years and I may not be able to tell you much about the story-line, but I can more or less tell you how I felt about it at the time. Assuming that this movie hasn’t become one of my favorites.
That’s of course not even close to nostalgia, because for that you need to reach further back, to the years that ‘formed us’, to the time when there was still ‘good music’ by ‘real musicians’, movies ‘had story-lines’ and novels ‘turned your perception of the world upside-down’.
Which is also a bit besides the point. What isn’t besides the point is how it makes us feel now because how we feel at any given time will always be our sole frame of reference. If you have read any of my work, then you must have come across that notion of the narrative identity: it’s that whole idea of our personal histories as a narrative that we continuously rewrite over the years, until we have ended up with a story about ourselves that we can ‘live with’, but also one that makes us ‘feel good about ourselves’. And it’s exactly that last vault that nostalgia taps into.
These vaults of nostalgia are exactly what it seems. This is what I tap into. Series: The X-files. Music: Nirvana, Radiohead, The Hives. Movies that scared me shitless: IT, Predator. Movies that somehow captured how I felt at a certain time: Hackers, Donnie Darko, The Dreamers, Shrink. Comedy: Tom Green. Computer games: C&C, Commandos.
What does this really tell you, besides that I grew up in the 90s and basically what most kids were into back then. In a way you might also say that these are more like cultural markers than anything else, but there’s a subtlety here: those markers mean something else from person to person.
Nostalgia as a fictional device
Where nostalgia takes on a whole other dimension is where it’s being used as an intentional fictional device. And even if you know that it’s being used, the mechanism still works. Most notable works of fiction that have utilized this device are IT and The Body (better known as the movie Stand by me), the series Stranger Things, the novel The Prospector. The movie Donnie Darko, tapping into the 80s and that whole notion of teenage-angst.
Out of all of those, I would still say that IT makes the best case of nostalgia in fiction (the horror-element is just the sauce to make the story more palatable). The nostalgia works because it makes that distinction between past and present very clear.
Where it gets really interesting is where IT makes all these references to growing up in the 1950s, which is very unlike the 90s. I have no personal link with that kind of rock and roll, the struggles of that era or that unmitigated notion of the American Dream being just around the corner (if you just work hard enough). But the feeling of what it was like to be 12 years old ------- that’s universal, just like the extent of fooling around and all that stuff is universal as well.
I really believe in this device, because it makes a distinction between a ‘now’ and a ‘before’. I tried to play around with this to a modest extent in The Entity with characters of different ages. In The Island I made the literal time-jump between a past when a group of friends (The Gang) was 12 years old growing up on an island, and the present where they are in their thirties and return for a reunion. In The Bird Man I used it to describe the coming of age in the footnotes of that story (but also to figure out what happens when things are really bad). In the upcoming The Caves I used it again with characters of different ages (and to figure out how things had gotten to be so bad in the first place).
The only ‘problem’ here is that nostalgia aims backwards: before I turned 37 myself I never really had a notion of what it is actually like to be that age, but looking back I do understand what it was like to be 30, 27, 24, 19, 17, 12 and so forth. With that in mind, nostalgia might be more powerful the older you get.
And it’s all good, because nostalgia is the sort of positive emotion that makes you feel good about yourself. It gives you an idea that there’s some sort of narrative going on in your life, that it makes sense, that it’s just and all of those things.
What about the snow
The only real instance where it somehow reaches beyond let’s say the 90s, or the notion of what it was like to be 12 years of age is the time when there’s snow. If you live in a place where there’s snow every winter, you might not really get this ------- but where I live there’s no snow. Where I grew up there’s only a good bit of snow every 5-10 years for just a few days up to a few weeks.
That’s the kind of snow that’s really special, and it absolutely is of the sort that there’s nothing quite like it. There are mostly fond memories around it with family and friends, because you will have to make the most of it -------- especially since it’s rare and only there for a short time.
And that’s even though it literally gets in between everything. It literally disrupts. It changes sight and sound. It contracts time, because you will remember the last time that there was snow and things were so-and-so.
Then you might say: why not go some place where there ‘is’ snow, but that just isn’t the same. It just doesn’t have the same quality, because then it’s something that’s always there. And what’s more: it’s not a collective memory that you share with everyone around you.
Wrapping up
Maybe, when looking at it closer, it’s not actually nostalgia, because it’s recurring in exactly the same way every few years. What we usually consider nostalgia (90s, X-Files, Nirvana) is the stuff that has gone and it meant something to us at a certain time and place, and that’s the reason why it makes us feel a certain way when going back there and in some form remembering and reliving those days.
A key distinction might then be that nostalgia is something that you can return to on and off, and not something that only comes around every now and then. Nostalgia is something to look for, and for good reason it’s sometimes that childhood is referred to as that ‘vast vault of memories’.
Key points
- nostalgia is a sort of collective memory that brings us back to a certain time and place, and it makes us feel a certain way.
- nostalgia is a sort of memory that has gone through a sieve that has taken out all the bad pieces to bring us closer to a narrative about ourselves that we can live with.
- nostalgia is a powerful positive emotion that makes you feel good about yourself, it links back to simpler times, it gives you this notion that there’s some sort of narrative going on in your life and makes you feel that things somehow make sense.
Continue reading
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