Pop culture celebrates the past in music, fashion, design, architecture, and entertainment, turning the moment into a monument to a present that never was
Everything is restored, from animated GIFs—an animation technology from the internet’s earliest days—to classic films and blockbusters, VHS aesthetics, and popular 1980s games such as Atari. Amid the junk and masterpieces, the question remains: what will we feel nostalgic for in the future if our present is pure “re”production of the past?
Women in their early twenties are hysterical about seeing Paul McCartney. In the car, the radio announces prizes for the best photograph inspired by a Beatles album cover. Another station plays a new—yet another—version of To Sir With Love (the theme song from the 1967 film), followed by a brand-new recording of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You. Originally a hit in 1967, it was recorded again by Diana Ross, Gloria Gaynor, and Julio Iglesias, and remixed in the 1990s by the Pet Shop Boys and who knows how many others… Immediately afterward comes that iconic soundtrack to 1980s despair, The Smiths, also re-recorded, by their eternal lead singer Morrissey.
Other bands reappear with raisin-like idols, sometimes tightened up with a few drops of Botox. Not always. In photographs, many seem to bear every mark of time, their beards and mustaches whitened by the passing decades. The consolation? Seeing photographs of our once-new idols as young boys and girls printed on collectors’ CD boxes. That Christmas box set that will let Dad remember all the soundtracks of his day and his little boy invent his own. Somewhere in there, you can bet, is “that one” nobody has ever heard or will remember. The only thing better is those cult releases on LP. Huge, and “far superior” to CDs. All you need is a turntable at home. If you haven’t got one, buy one, or find a retro MP3 player. Same difference. But if you really want to impress, find one that looks like a cassette player. The internet is full of them. Cut to film and television. A film about Tropicália features rare archival footage. “It’s almost a period documentary,” says director Marcelo Machado.
The kids’ dream purchase is an analog Lomo camera for Christmas. Those who can afford it, can. Those who can’t can slap a Polaroid-style filter on their Instagram. With luck, they can even wrap their phone in a cool cassette-tape case—only someone who never suffered through those contraptions tangling and snapping could be nostalgic for them—or a Leica case.
The Next Movie blog announces that no fewer than 50 remakes of successful Hollywood films are scheduled for 2013/2014. They include Carrie (1976), Robocop (1987), and Dirty Dancing (1987). Even Barbarella (1969) is coming back, with a replacement for diva Jane Fonda yet to be decided. And some classics too: Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954), The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), and A Star Is Born (immortalized by the 1954 version with Judy Garland, but filmed three times already—once before, in 1937, and again in 1976). For this last film, a veritable remake obsession, now to be directed by Clint Eastwood, Beyoncé was considered for the young woman who dreams of becoming a performer. She recently announced she would not do it. Some other bombshell will replace her with all due pomp. And there is also the continuation of the Star Wars series, scheduled to reach theaters in 2015.
A corner of the past
Television series and soap operas are being brought back in “new” versions by the dozen. From Hawaii Five-0 to Guerra dos Sexos, by way of Dallas, Chiquititas, and Carrossel, a tsunami of old images floods broadcast and cable schedules, at different times and in different places. And so Gabriela returns, all clove and cinnamon, and the remake of O Astro wins an Emmy. Led Zeppelin reunites once again, and the Beach Boys show they still have something left, buoyed by a surfing California that was never governed—twice—by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
What century are we in? The twenty-first: a corner of the past where Lambrettas, milkshakes, banana splits, tapered-leg chairs, and even curling irons are hits in the quest for nostalgia for a past never lived. There are shredded, battered jeans you buy today to look as though you have worn them since the 1960s, even though you were born in the very early 1990s. There are cars from an almost pre-mechanical age and even, believe it or not, colorful minibars. Amid VW Bugs that have become “Beetles,” Mini Coopers, Fiat 500s, and Chrysler PT Cruisers inspired by that famous 1930s model, retro design asserts itself and gains loyal followers.
Curator-archivists
It is hard to disagree with British critic Simon Reynolds when he argues in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past that, rather than being about themselves, the 2000s are about all the previous decades happening again, all at once. A new time begins: the present that never was. Everything is “re” (remakes, re-recordings, reissues, revivals), and everything is for sale. On credit, too. In ten interest-free installments, or more. Groovy, man! All of this accompanied by resurrected Formica kitchens, rockabilly hairstyles, and boutique hippies and punks of every race, gender, and nationality. Even the beach will not escape this invasion. There will be plenty of little bows, structured bustiers with miles of padding, one-piece swimsuits, and two-pieces to make your grandmother jealous. That, at least, is what the hippest designers want. From Marc Jacobs to Amir Slama, everyone is betting on goodbye-to-the-thong. Another gust of conservatism disguised as a fashion trend?
“The avant-garde has become the rear guard,” Reynolds says. “And in place of innovators, what we have now are curator-archivists.” After all, the past has never been so easy to access. It is a click away from our hands. On this subject, Kenneth Goldsmith, editor and curator of UbuWeb, one of the largest online collections of experimental art and contemporary culture, says that the ways culture is distributed and archived have become far more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself: consumption has been inverted, as we become more deeply involved in acts of acquisition than in what we acquire, preferring the bottles to the wine.
Staging the past
The problem is not preserving the past but turning the moment into an ahistorical monument and an object of easy consumption. “In the old days, commodities made promises, above all about the future. Today, an entire (predominant) class of commodities exists to invent a history, a lost time of intimacy and stability that everyone claims to remember but no one had,” wrote American critic T. J. Clark. In the essay The State of the Spectacle (2005), he also asks what this entire apparatus for manufacturing the past means “if not an attempt to expel the banality of the present from consciousness?” In an era when everyday life accelerates so dizzyingly, the only alternative seems to be to “create another present to take the place of the one expelled,” he says.
This is not merely about an emptiness in the present. In a 1980s bestseller, Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco showed that this kind of movement also paved the way for “a philosophy of immortality as duplication.” As though we could not live with the past and could only copy it, rather than preserve it through memory. It is impossible not to notice how much this encourages a thematic approach to institutions and shared spaces, consolidating the permanent staging of the past in architectural form.
Alan Bryman, professor of social research at Loughborough University in England, explains in The Disneyization of Society (2004) that this “retromaniacal” process has economic causes. At a stage of capitalism increasingly dominated by similar services, the economy begins to function as an “experience economy, in which consumers seek services that entertain them and are memorable. From the service providers’ perspective, they know that many consumers are growing tired of the standardized services and environments they encounter all the time. Theming helps distinguish one service, or context, from the others.”
The result is the spread of the spirit of Las Vegas into waters never before imagined. You can go to Paris and, besides visiting the Louvre, transport yourself as if by magic to Walt Disney’s enchanted kingdom without leaving the Old Continent. Just choose a hotel such as the Cheyenne and you will already be in the “legendary Wild West”—American, of course—even though you are in twenty-first-century Europe. If that does not appeal, choose the Santa Fe, which promises “starry nights in the New World among Spanish conquistadors and American Indians.” Unmissable.
What emerges is not necessarily a present haunted by the fake and the vintage, but a process of emptying out history, in which the past serves only to provide an entertaining cover for the present. Everything is restored, from animated GIFs—an animation technology from the internet’s earliest days—to classic films and blockbusters, VHS aesthetics, and popular 1980s games such as Atari. Amid the junk and masterpieces, the question remains: what will we feel nostalgic for in the future if our present is pure “re”production of the past?
Published in Revista seLecT, December 2012/January 2013, 32–37.