Paper 3: Researching Popular Culture

Paper 3: Researching Popular Culture

Writing Task Paper Length:

6-8 Pages In Retromania, Simon Reynolds refers to the 2000s as “The ‘Re’ Decade.” Citing pop culture’s recent obsession with revivals, reissues, remakes, and reenactments, Reynolds’s critique of pop culture’s “addiction to its own past” itself is filled with a nostalgia for what he sees as the bygone days of newness and originality in music, theater, film, and television. Ironically, Tom Shales made similar observations in his 1986 article also titled “The Re Decade” for Esquire magazine, noting that the 80s were a decade of replays, reruns, and recycling of popular culture. Discussing the popularity of Back to the Future, “a phrase which almost sums the Eighties up,” Shales notes that “We are not amazed at the thought of time travel because we do it every day.” In the 1980s, Andrew Gordon observed that “The majority of recent time-travel films do not, in fact, concern the future at all but deal instead with an escape into an idealized past in a desperate attempt to alter the present and future.” Reflecting “a growing dissatisfaction with a present that is sensed as dehumanized, diseased, out of control, and perhaps doomed,” time-travel films of the 1980s expressed an “unspoken feeling” that “Somewhere along the line… something went drastically wrong; if we could only return to the appropriate crossroads in the past and correct things, we could mend history and return to a revised, glorious present or future, the time line we truly deserve.” Echoing the repetitive nature of Reynolds’s and Shales’s observations in the 1980s and 2000s, “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), the campaign slogan for then presidential-hopeful and now-president Donald Trump, was itself a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s own presidential campaign slogan in the 1980s. The slogan’s (and the candidate’s) appeal seemingly centers around “a growing dissatisfaction with the present” and a desire to return to or restore a prior historical moment, when America was “great.” While Reagan’s nostalgia was fixated on the 1950s, Trump’s nostalgia is less precisely defined; but rather than leading to political failure, the vagueness of Trump’s “make America great again,” has (arguably) allowed for the nostalgia of his supporters to reign free.

From the nostalgia for a pre-Reconstruction America evidenced by the defense of Confederate monuments throughout the United States to a pre-Civil, Women’s, and LGBTQ Rights 1950s, as well as a desire to fulfill the economic “potential” of deregulation and decreased taxation on the wealthiest Americans that marked the economic policies of the 1980s, the appeal of Trump’s MAGA may be derived precisely from the ability for his supporters to imbue Trump and his administration with their own nostalgia and inform the seemingly contradictory and varied ideologies of his base. In the present, we are witnessing a nostalgic consumerism that has exerted a significant impact on popular culture and the marketplace. The nostalgia of now adult Gen-Xers and elder millenials, whose childhood toys—Transformers, G.I. Joes, Ninja Turtles, and even Legos—have been turned into movies and television shows, reflect a larger phenomenon of nostalgic consumerism as adults who now have the capital to do so are able to revisit and (re)acquire the beloved objects of their childhoods. In some instances, the availability of capital also enables Gen-Xers to live out unfulfilled fantasies and finally sate their childhood desires: what was inaccessible in the past is now accessible in the present. From Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing (nostalgia for the Clinton administration of the 1990s) to the resurrection of Gilmore Girls, Will & Grace, and Murphy Brown in recent years, nostalgia for beloved television shows or presidential administrations of the (recent) past cannot be separated from the impulse to restore these shows to the airwaves and the Internet. For this assignment, you will identify a particular instantiation of nostalgia in contemporary popular culture. For our purposes, you may think of “popular culture” as inclusive not only of television, film, music, games, comics, and so on, but also popular or mainstream political culture and society; the nostalgia of traditional “popular culture” is reflective of the surge in nostalgia in people, showcased by studies in social psychology indicating that nostalgia is prevalent in the contemporary era. Some questions to guide your thinking and research: What type of nostalgia informs your chosen topic or text? What precisely is your topic or text nostalgic for? What CURRENT social, political, economic, or cultural condition is your topic or text responding to? How does this nostalgia function and what is its purpose?