Strange isn’t it? Many of us run after novelty and idolize youth; quickly grow tired of our celebrities and look for new ones; and, if we are old enough and (perhaps) fortunate enough, display pictures of our kids but not our parents, much less our ancestors. Everything is ever new.
Yet those of us who have reached the “fullness of life” also collect the past, albeit often in the form of its novelties—G.I. Joes, Barbies, and 1950s or 1970s kitchen knickknacks. Those who are younger, say in their thirties or even twenties, may already be collecting the toys and dolls of their youth. Some may be unwilling or just slow to empty their childhood bedrooms of their posters of rock stars or sports heroes, school trophies, and video games when they go off to college and beyond. And even if a lot of us didn’t like history in school and never read those historical markers along the road, we may watch cable TV channels devoted to the past—TV Land or even the History Channel (at least for the programs about the Wild West or World War II that may have fascinated us in our youth). We long for the past, no matter what our age. We moderns run away from the unmodern and embrace an accelerating pace of change, yet, at the same time, we crave what was once novel but what we long ago discarded. We are nostalgiacs.
Why is our novelty culture so fixed in our memory? Have we simply changed our minds and now turn what was once waste into want? Is the fast pace of our lives and culture just too great for us to cope with, obliging us to stop to catch our breath and maybe just to look back a little? Perhaps. But our longing to recapture the past isn’t that simple or that easy to understand. The fact that many middle-aged Americans might be interested in somehow recapturing their childhoods by collecting toys may not surprise us, but shouldn’t it? And the passion of collectors is often curious, even bizarre. In 2000, a founder of a software company, Brian Styles, had the time and money to collect seven hundred Lego sets and insure his lode for $60,000. Hot Wheels, a toy-car line popular in the late 1960s, has inspired a newsletter serving about three thousand adult subscribers and whose editor possessed nearly thirty thousand Hot Wheels. A few years ago, a rare pink VW Beach Bomb Hot Wheels toy was valued at more than $10,000. The crazy prices paid for injection-mold plastic knows no limit: Stephen A. Geppi, the CEO of Diamond Comic Distributors, paid $200,000 for the first handcrafted G.I. Joe.1
We can understand why a woman who, as a child, begged her mom for a Barbie doll as an adult might express a bit of wistfulness (along with whimsy) when she finds her ancient idol in her parents’ attic. But why are there at least one hundred thousand avid collectors of these dolls (by the estimate of Barbie’s maker, Mattel), whose average age is forty and who each spend nearly $1,000 per year to purchase twenty Barbies? And for the somewhat older “girl,” there are the Ginny dolls, popular in the 1950s but still being manufactured more than fifty years later for adult collectors. Some people of the same vintage are drawn to Ding Dong School collectibles, from the totally uncool 1950s TV show for preschool children that featured the frumpy educator Frances Horwich. In time, the girls of 2003 or 2004 will collect the distinctive doll of their era—probably Bratz.2
No doubt the things of childhood touch a special sentimental nerve. But why would anyone but the curators of a computer history museum want to collect, repair, and display Apple I computers? Yet engineers sometimes do, even if an Apple I that cost $666 when manufactured in 1976 fetched up to $20,000 by 2005 but could do far less than the cheapest computer available at Best Buy.3 The range of collecting is surely astonishing and amusing, and the media have often had fun ferreting out and reporting on the oddest: A recent article on collecting noted that among the “hot” items were muscle cars from the mid-1960s, televisions from the 1950s, metal-alloy Tootsie Toys, cast-iron miniature tractors and trucks, and Toni Dolls from the late 1940s and 1950s. What were “out” were cast-iron Britains soldiers, Crystal Oak furniture, and antique kitchenware and tools. Nostalgia, it seems, is ruled by the unfathomable dictates of fashion.4 Often the campy prevails; how else to explain the lasting attraction to pink and turquoise Melmac—a brand of cheap plastic dinnerware popular during the 1950s? Aimee Cecil, a Los Angeles entrepreneur, has been able to resurrect the kitschy hobby of painting by number. Cecil sold about five thousand sets in 2006 at $90 each, though they cost $2.50 in 1953 when the craze began.5 Often with the help of the Internet, others have made livings promoting collections of vintage napkin rings, aprons, toothpick holders, pencil boxes, and even sand pails. The eccentric and fashionable rich have indulged themselves. One paid $12,000 for a restored six-burner, double-oven Magic Chef range from the 1920s to give his kitchen that special retro look. Toasters have become collectibles, especially those from the 1920s and 1930s with unusual styling. Who could pass up the heart-shaped Universal Toaster of Landers, Frary & Clark?6
Much of this is the debris of a modern manufacturing economy that has an extraordinary capacity to produce endlessly changing lines of stuff, used briefly and sometimes not at all, before being discarded for new stuff. But many of us still want or even need to dig through the trash heaps to turn old novelty into new nostalgia. Some of this “junk” is collected simply because it is rare and thus valuable, often only because it was unsuccessful in the market back when. This is only one of the many curious properties of the nostalgia market.
At the same time, many items that seem to make the saved and savored pile help us recall the past, and these things may be in plentiful supply. Take, for example, old board games. The object of the nostalgia game is not to have the oldest or most original item but the game that brings back memories of a particular time and place. Beyond reasons of camp, why would anyone except a woman who was a “tween” in the mid-1960s want Twiggy—“a game that makes every girl like Twiggy, the Queen of Mod”—or The Samantha and Endora Game: Bewitched!? The same principle seems to apply to Gen-X collectors of Pac Man, Demon Attack, Space Invaders, and other Atari cartridge video games from the late 1970s.7 More difficult to explain is the African American collector of race kitsch. Since 1984, the Greater Washington, D.C., Black Memorabilia and Collectible Show has exhibited a vast array of vintage toys, figures, and pictures. Many of these mementos feature African American sports, entertainment, and other heroes, but not a few depict degrading images of black pickaninnies, chicken thieves, and “coon jiggers,” often in the form of dolls and toys originally given to white children. A very strange collection for middle-class, African American adults … or is it?8
A lot of this stuff appeals to relatively small groups of collectors, those people seeking a niche where they can specialize, stand out, tell a story, and perhaps have an opportunity to “catch them all,” as advertising for Pokémon toys once urged kids to do. But the passion often goes deeper; it might even be akin to religious fervor. Who hasn’t been astounded by Elvismania? Since his death in 1977, his widow and daughter have made a fortune from not just his songs (including now a satellite radio station devoted exclusively to the King) but also from his “relics.” In the early 1990s Elvis’s American Express credit card sold for $41,400, and Elvis-themed lipstick (Hound Dog orange and Love Me Tender pink) manufactured in the late 1950s found buyers at $350.9
Then there is Disneyana. A seat from the Dumbo ride in the Magic Kingdom cost an Orlando businessman $22,000 in 1993. Such madness naturally sparked the Disney Company that year to create the Walt Disney Collector’s Society to market reissued Disney memorabilia (pins, stuffed animals, animation cels, watches, figurines, toys, and much else). And private individuals with little if any financial stake in the Disney Company build their identities and spend their time around things Disney. Consider the Disney Tattoo Guy (covered in Disney characters) or the people who create websites around their favorite Disney theme-park rides. Werner Weiss’s yesterland.com features rides and attractions long gone from Disneyland, and Jeff Baham’s doombuggies.com is devoted to his obsession, the Haunted Mansion attraction at the Magic Kingdom. But Disney fetishism hardly ends there. If there are relic hunters of “sainted” Disney characters, there are also pilgrims to the Disney Jerusalem (or Mecca). Some fans visit Disneyland or Disney World twenty-five or more times a year, and Disney cultivates this market with special programs for this “elite.”10 What is particularly striking is just how specific and, well, “trivial” so many of these recalled memories are. It isn’t surprising that the board game Trivial Pursuit (introduced in 1981) and its many variations and imitators have done so well ever since. Nostalgiacs not only collect; they also master the details, knowledge that many of us might consider “useless” but that is curiously empowering to those who have it.11
Nostalgia for our own pasts is about more than possession (or being possessed). It is also summoned by the senses. An obvious example is the fixation on the music of youth in the thousands of “oldies” radio stations, the recent renewed interest in vinyl records (those LPs that disappeared from stores in 1991 for CDs), and the frequent stories of has-been rock bands renewing their depleted fortunes with “comeback” concert tours. Added to nostalgic sounds is the appeal of half-forgotten tastes (revivals of long-defunct candy bars, for example). Sights, sounds, smells, and tastes all evoke memory and the desire to renew the sensuousness and emotions that went with it.
Enterprises, both public and private, have sprung up to meet the demand for nostalgia. Amazing arrays of sites restore, collect, preserve, and romanticize lost crafts and lifeways. These include not only local and specialized heritage and history museums but restored railroads and annual festivals of small towns. Perhaps the most successful are highly commercialized places, most notably many of Disney’s theme-park attractions (beginning with Main Street USA). Nostalgia for the sounds, sights, and objects of the past has created a whole range of longings. And these have been excited and extended by all kinds of consumer industries—magazines, movies, comic-book stores, “retro” novelty shops, and old-time TV channels, not to mention numerous themed amusement parks, restaurants, and bars. The magic of consumer satisfaction makes nostalgia a major business. And like all entrepreneurial efforts to meet a demand, these impresarios of memory also create and channel that need, pricking the bud of desire, giving vent to its extravagant blooming, and shaping it in ways that increase sales.
VARIETIES OF NOSTALGIA
In retrospect, all of this is very strange. Fifty years ago, few behaved this way. Emotional feelings for the past were tied to communities, lost (and won) causes, and families. Nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be. Taking a longer perspective, nostalgia in any form was practically absent from our ancestors of two centuries ago. Until modern times, few people traveled farther than a day’s walk from their place of birth, and most lived much as did their parents or grandparents. Time was experienced mostly as a cycle of seasons and festivals, disrupted only by unwelcomed events like war or natural catastrophe. With little movement or change, there wasn’t much to be nostalgic about. Moreover, people’s memory of the past was vague; even “golden ages” were of uncertain duration and distance from the present. Our ancestors marked time by recurring festivals that magically captured “first” moments (origins of the cosmos or the birth of a religious founder, for example), most built around a “myth of eternal return.”
Modernity began to change all that—and the first sign of this was increased travel. Change of place rather than time created the first nostalgiacs. In 1688, the word “nostalgia” was coined by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, meaning literally “longing to return home.” This desire to get back to a faraway place and, with it, a long-lost time was rare and thus viewed as disruptive to authorities in the seventeenth century. No wonder. The first noted nostalgiacs were Swiss mercenaries in the French army who longed to return to their Alpine villages. Dr. Hofer believed that nostalgia exhausted the vital spirits and induced nausea, loss of appetite, cardiac arrest, and even suicide. He reported that those afflicted with nostalgia also heard voices and saw ghosts. Hofer thought that nostalgia was triggered when Swiss mercenaries ate “soups” and “village milk” from home or heard folk melodies, especially a “certain rustic cantilena” used by shepherds to drive herds to pasture in the Alps. Hofer advised the usual cures (opium and leeches) but also suggested a novel solution—leaves of absence from the army to visit home in the Alps. Later, nostalgia afflicted other European soldiers and sailors in the many wars of the eighteenth century that took them far from home. Apparently the British, who were more accustomed to travel and colonizing distant regions, were less affected. But when farm boys made into soldiers during the American Civil War were depressed with a longing to return home, officers like Theodore Calhoun tried to shame them with bullying and manly marches (but also, when possible, with furloughs).12
Early nostalgia was a “problem” for only the few who were displaced. That would begin to change toward the end of the eighteenth century, when time sped up for many more, as revolutions, both political and economic, created deep discontinuities in life. Thus the old aristocracy became nostalgic for the Old Regime after the French Revolution. Later, Confederate soldiers longed for the Old South after the Civil War. Today, there are even Russians who look back romantically to the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Most people couldn’t be nostalgic before the division between the “modern” and the traditional regime.13
Nostalgia also became more complex and subtle with technological and economic change. Progress brought new possibilities for travel to distant places and new meanings of time. By the 1830s and 1840s, railroads and electric telegraphs were annihilating space and time, leading to an unprecedented uprooting of European people. Nearly half a century earlier, steam-powered machines were already beginning to make possible an extraordinary array and rapid turnover of goods. Everything was moving faster, bringing new things and new times. With a permanent state of mobility and transience, place and time become ever more elusive. Progress induced a sense of homelessness and forgetfulness. Eighteenth-century physicians of the Enlightenment thought the ailment of nostalgia would gradually give way to the benefits of progress. But by 1800 nostalgia was no longer restricted to homesick soldiers. It affected the multitude of Europeans with a longing for lost places and pasts.
Modernity meant disdain for tradition and the old and, with this, the worship of novelty and the young. But progress also made people nostalgic for what had disappeared. The modern world inevitably led to a reaction, the desire “to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, revisit time like place, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition,” as the Russian writer Svetlana Boym notes.14 Modern people discovered inexorable change and tried to get the past back as a possession.
The romantic movement, emerging at the end of the eighteenth century, rejected the Enlightenment’s confidence in the rational future, ached for the disappearing world of the preindustrial village, and celebrated a longing for the past. One early manifestation was the creation by the rich of picturesque gardens with miniatures of ancient Greek temples, reflecting ponds, and grottos with statues of nymphs. In turn, romantic literati celebrated the worlds of peasants and artisans (think of the Queen’s Hamlet of Marie Antoinette’s in the gardens of Versailles). The object was to draw a contrast with the present world of machines and incessant change.
Nevertheless, both the Enlightenment progressive and the romantic nostalgic recognized that time was unrepeatable and irreversible. Gone were the old idea of cycles of change and the belief that the past returned naturally. Instead, people realized that the past was very different from the present. It had to be reconstructed, recreated through rituals, and symbolized in relics and mementos, sometimes displayed in museums or town squares but also hidden behind the walls of homes, sheltered from the transient world. Often history was encased and classified in the curio cabinet of the parlor. The past became a foreign country, as David Lowenthal notes, a place of “rooted legacies that enrich the paltry here and now with ancestral echoes. … Heritage aims to convert historical residues into witnesses that attest our own ancestral virtues,” a place one toured and preserved but always kept apart from the real world.15
As progress advanced in the nineteenth century, so did nostalgia for lost communities. Memory settled in many places—in museums and monuments as well as schools where students were indoctrinated with national history and literature. Nostalgia was hard to separate from heritage—national, regional, ethnic, and religious. And many nationalists and other promoters of group identity had an incentive to preserve the memory of the tribe’s origins, triumphs, and, often, humiliations. Public shrines and museums tried through words, symbols, and artifacts to replace lost sites of community—ancient neighborhoods, battlefields, or churches. This impulse has not only survived but flourished in recent years. Today, as we have finally abandoned the old faith in progress, nostalgia has become an even stronger theme in the cultural/political “wars” that divide us ethnically, religiously, culturally, and politically. It should not be surprising that 95 percent of existing museums date from after World War II, as people across the globe seek identities through the collected artifacts of the past. “Museum-mania” seems to be a direct reaction to the speeding up of life.16
But the longing for the past could also take a second, more private, especially familial form, evoked and realized through personal possessions. Sometimes these were handcrafted heirlooms or family portraits. Other times they were souvenirs brought back from a once-in-a-lifetime “pilgrimage” to a religious shrine but increasingly also to a World’s Fair or even a seaside resort. Such acts of nostalgia were more domestic and personal than the grand gestures of monument makers. They promised to retain the memory of family. Preserving and displaying heirlooms and portraits was a practice long associated with the aristocracy and their claims of ancient lineage and authority. But in the nineteenth-century middle-class homes of the newly affluent, which had no claims of descent from William the Conqueror or Charlemagne, collections of memory were much more intimate—less about ancestry and more about relationships, existing or personally recalled. In fact, new technology, especially the camera (1839), fostered these personal ties to distant or deceased parents and prematurely departed loved ones, especially children and infants. According to Walter Benjamin, the bourgeois home of Paris a hundred years ago was a “miniature theater” of photos, furniture, and mementos that privatized nostalgia.17
A third form of nostalgia is for past fashion or styles that represent a former era. Distinctive patterns of design and construction of objects have a long history in elite cultures, but access to these fashionable goods trickled down to an emerging middle class during industrialization and the early stages of urban consumer society. Fashion nostalgia was based not so much on a feared loss of community or family but on an identification with the past in and through its distinct materiality—art, clothing, jewelry, furnishings, architecture, and artificial landscapes, for example. All this produced distinct forms of memory making, embodying particular pasts in particular possessions. And many of these goods were originally products of a commercial culture. Without doubt, nostalgia for past fads and fashions is hardly new. There have repeatedly been revivals of the styles of the past: neoclassical architecture in the late eighteenth century and renewed interest in American colonial furnishings in the mid-nineteenth century, for example.
But there is a fourth form of nostalgia that emerged in the twentieth century that I call “consumed nostalgia.” Though sharing with fashion nostalgia an identification of the past with distinctly stylized goods, the consumed nostalgia of the second half of the twentieth century is about more than a revival of a style materializing a former era. It is a longing for the goods of the past that came from a personal experience of growing up in the stressful world of fast capitalism. Change was manifested in the increasingly rapid coming and going of things and experiences, especially manufactured commodities. By the twentieth century, these included, of course, cars and clothes but also entertainment, especially recorded music, movies, and, later, television. Modern fast capitalism meant fast consumption, a particularly intensive form of commodity culture, entailing the increasingly rapid pace of production and purchase, creating profit through the fast turnaround of investment. Even though this led to economic growth and increased comfort and variety, many people found fast capitalism disquieting. This stress resulted from a rather distinctly modern phenomenon—people found identity and meaning in specific goods but, as a result, felt that their selfhoods were threatened when those things disappeared. The nostalgic impulse came from a desire to get them back. Most important, this longing was often rooted in the formative years of consumers—childhood and youth.
So personal was this desire to recover a distinct childhood, that others, including family and friends, could not share in the loss of these consumed things and experiences and in the longing to recover them. Naturally, consumed nostalgia was difficult to pass down to the next generation. It was not based on the symbols and rituals of a longed-for community or family life. The recalled thing or experience, of course, might create bonds between often widely dispersed people who shared little but a common memory of consumption. But these communities of Model-T or Madonna fan clubs usually lack the duration, seriousness, and social breadth of groups memorialized in monuments or heirlooms—even though this “superficiality” usually spares adherents the exclusivity and ideological or tribal confrontation that divides participants in “culture wars” and, of course, real wars.
Consumed nostalgia shares much with more traditional forms of memory. In all four kinds of nostalgia—the communal, familial, fashion, and modern consumerist—the experiential quest is paramount. And nostalgia in the past like nostalgia today was rooted in objects. People have long needed material and sensuous markers to recall and get “in touch” with their social or family heritages. What makes consumed nostalgia different is not primarily its materiality or even its celebration of the time-fixed commodity (as in a past style or fashion) but its origins in fast capitalism and personal memories of the ephemeral commercial goods first experienced in childhood and youth.
One might assume that a “new country,” presumably founded on the quest for the new, novel, and adventurous, might be immune to nostalgia in any of its forms. And it is true that some early Americans rejected Europe’s “blind veneration of antiquity,” as Jefferson noted. This, however, did not liberate them from the “disease” of nostalgia as “homesickness” because so many Americans were so frequently uprooted.18 Americans certainly were not free from the monument or heirloom nostalgia of Europeans (just think about the extraordinary array of chiseled marble surrounding the site of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg or the clutter of inherited furnishings that once decorated late nineteenth-century American parlors). Moreover, the business in souvenirs memorializing a summer day with friends and family at Coney Island in 1900 flourished just as it did at European seaside resorts.
More importantly, Americans became leaders in this fourth form of nostalgia—without, of course, expunging earlier forms of collecting or passing on heirlooms, much less veneration for long-gone cultures or societies. Instead of grounding nostalgia in a canon of national literature and art as in Europe, American longings for the past often adhered to an ephemeral popular culture of youth that was closely associated with the precocious development of fast capitalism. As we will see, consumed nostalgia in the United States matures after about 1970.
PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON CONSUMED NOSTALGIA
Whatever its form, nostalgia has earned the deep scorn of most intellectuals and the less open disdain of museum staff. Perhaps, as Svetlana Boym notes, nostalgia can make us “more empathetic toward fellow humans,” all of whom experience loss in time (a reflective nostalgia). But Boym worries that when our longing for what is missing is replaced by a desire to belong to a group with links to the past, “we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding.” Thus we invent traditions to connect ourselves with a “past” that never was, and, more darkly, we fantasize conspiracies against our imagined heritage and home, be it a Judeo-Christian America or an Islamic utopia. As Susan Stewart writes, nostalgia lets us “authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and, at the same time … discredit the present” that we find to be impersonal, artificial, or otherwise unacceptable. For these critics, nostalgia may no longer be a physical disease, as it was for Dr. Hofer in the seventeenth century, but it certainly remains a cultural malady, creating social division or escapist illusion.19
Intellectuals, particularly, have mocked the commercialized form of nostalgia that is often identified with the United States as inferior to the “cultured” heritage of Europe. Yet we need not make the smug contrast between England’s Shakespeare and America’s Mickey Mouse. While the critique of nostalgia is important and insightful, is it fair and complete? Does it really make sense of when, how, and why most people remember? Even more, does it address the way that many, if not most of us, express our nostalgia today and why?
We should always recognize that the public understands and uses the past in ways very different from the historian and often the museum curator. While historians study archival and other records to reconstruct the past and answer questions posed by other historians, the “public more often turns to memory, personal connections, and family stories” when approaching the past. Instead of an explanation of events or an abstract memorial, most people want to “experience” history (as is proven by the thousands of Civil War reenactors that flock annually to Gettysburg and other battlefield sites). For heirlooms to “work,” there needs to be stories attached that touch the emotions.20
Even more to the point, we need to recognize how nostalgia has changed with fast capitalism and the modern fixation on personal experience in the formative years. Unlike the longing for the lost place and time that once was satisfied with public monuments or family heirlooms, many of us today recapture and relive the past in our own possessions, whose significance and attachments we seldom share with family members or the broad community. Instead of seeking a lost community or cause, we recover our personal childhoods in a vast array of objects and recorded sensations. This essentially negates Boym’s critique of nostalgia. Far from its leading us into a kind of intolerant tribalism or narrowly cast familialism, modern consumed nostalgia creates mostly an exuberant individualism. Critics miss how the new consumed nostalgia is liberating and, in fact, often fun. This is largely because consumed nostalgia is part of consumer culture, a phenomenon that makes things easy and pleasurable—albeit at a cultural and social price. We can even draw on the commercial culture that preceded us through viewing the movies or hearing the songs that were first popular in the childhoods of our parents or other ancestors. We can “regain” our childhood.
The most basic problem with these critics is their failure to understand just how unique this contemporary form of nostalgia is. It certainly has little in common with the experience of those poor Swiss soldiers or with those disaffected “Southern rebels” with their Confederate flags and stories of the “Lost Cause.” We might all suffer from homesickness and a longing for our lost pasts and places. Many of us pine for a return to a lost culture and social order and divide ourselves politically over this desire. We often fret over and create romantic illusions about long-gone bonds of family. But consumerism has given us a new way of thinking about and coping with the past. We may and probably should find things about this new form of nostalgia to regret and oppose, but we need first to understand what it is.
Let me offer five ways in which today’s consumed nostalgia is so distinct and so contradictory:
1. Today nostalgia binds together not community or families but scattered individuals around seemingly ephemeral things that are meaningful to them personally. How many of our holiday rituals today are really about religious or national ideas? Few of us celebrate ancestors, even our departed parents.21 Much contemporary nostalgia is built on briefly popular consumer goods that unify, however loosely, narrow age groups. Instead of places or events shaping these brief “generations,” goods link otherwise separated individuals. Nostalgia today is increasingly about microidentities. In fact, consumed nostalgia lets us “put on” multiplicities of identities across the movement through life. It has been fashionable for a long time to call this postmodern, but what I am describing goes beyond plural identities and denial of universal “narratives” and national identity. These “postmodern” nostalgias are even more fragmented and ephemeral, constructed as they are around things, often very silly ones, and the memories and sensualities that these things evoke. They create personal meanings, but they also isolate and divide us.
2. Today’s nostalgia is less about preserving an “unchanging golden era” than it is about capturing the fleeting and the particular in its “authenticity.” In everything from our snapshots to our strange attempts to reenact the Civil War experience, we try to make the “there and then” into the “here and now” in pristine specificity and accuracy. We preserve that unguarded “cute” moment of our former toddlers in snapshots, not iconic family-portrait photographs shot by professionals. Reenactors wear wool uniforms in July encampments at Gettysburg, and some insist on not wearing underwear to capture the authentic experience. These activities have replaced the rituals of building monuments, attending ceremonies, and hearing inspired speeches as the reenactors’ predecessors did a hundred years ago. We have substituted the “authentic” for the symbolic. Even more germane here: we no longer seek heirlooms (literally “a device for interweaving generations”) as a gesture of family or group continuity. Because of weakened family bonds and the transience of things, fewer of us hand down household treasures to children. And these remembrances are far less standardized—gone are the stylized family photographic portraits, Victorian china cabinets, and ancestors’ needlework. Something new has happened. Instead of symbols that link us across generations, we seek exact and personal remembrances of our own pasts or at least “authentic” representations of our families—informal snapshots and children’s artwork, for example. This quest for the authentic is how we moderns cope with the fleeting—not by denying change and death in dreams of a timeless age but by capturing “our moment” in our snapshots, songs, dolls, and cars. All this satisfies our longings for the personal connection, but it often is an authenticity impossible to share with others or to pass down to our children. And, I suspect, for many it is a poor substitute for the “eternal.”
3. All nostalgias consist of organizers and participants, but today the organizers increasingly are marketers (not officials), and participants are consumers (not members of organizations). Our nostalgiacs bow not to the state, educators, museum curators, or National Park officials. Today, the nostalgic enthusiast more often responds to appeals of Disney, TV Land, and the thousands of pitches made by eBay merchants; publishers of those hundreds of collector’s guides to Barbie Dolls, G.I. Joes, antique cars, and 1950s kitsch; and the DJs of oldie radio stations. This makes nostalgia less “political” and less confrontational than “heritage.” At the same time, Hollywood does not offer a contemplative or “reflective” nostalgia (as advocated by Boym) that draws us to think about the ambiguities of change; instead, it presents us with a tangible, engaging, and even sensuous possession or experience. The success of nostalgia marketing varies a lot, and all this can tell us much about the workings of consumed nostalgia. Some obsessions with the past survive for decades (Disney is an obvious example). Others fade (circuses and many “heritage” museums). And marketers of memory are very sensitive to and even encourage fashion in nostalgia. All this makes consumed nostalgia both relatively benign (in part because it is so superficial) and dynamic, always changing. But it may only point to rather than fulfill our longings for memory.170
4. Today’s nostalgia seems to help us cope with the extraordinary speed-up of time by letting us return to our childhoods. We no longer seem to need recurring rituals as did our ancestors in their rich traditions of harvest and other seasonal/religious festivals to fend off the terrors of time and the unshakeable truth that we all die alone, often unexpectedly. Instead of worshipping ancestors (or even seeking spiritual communion with the departed), we search for the “wonder years” of our own childhoods. We seem to find solace from the ephemerality of time in the nonephemerality of things, an experience that seems to hide the deeper reality so well understood by our ancestors—the brevity of life. We cope with the ever-accelerating pace of change that continually robs us of our identities by creating a flow of selves over the years. We are continually drawn to root these selves in our personal pasts, in what seems to us as “timeless” but, in fact, is ephemeral, that is, our childhoods.
Experienced time is not like a walk along a road. While the present is often routine (especially after we have passed through childhood and adolescence), the future comes at us from behind (often unexpectedly) as the past recedes in front of us.22 When this process is sped up as it is today, stress is added to the ennui of daily life. Nostalgia offers both an excitement missing in the everyday and provides a refuge from the fleeting in personal packets of childhood memory. Thus we lovingly recall getting our first electric train set, Barbie doll, or used car. In a world where many of the old glues of meaning and security have dissolved (family, work, and village/neighborhood, to name the obvious), these packed memories provide more than the symbolic and abstract representations of those lost relationships and experiences. They offer us the sensuous and material worlds of our particular childhoods, promising us personal meaning and emotional engagement, even if they isolate us from others.
5. Today’s nostalgia is rooted in special emotions linked to recovering memories distinctive to the objects of modern childhood and consumerism. This suggests more than a regression into the superficial and puerile but instead a quest for an experience lost to today’s adults. Emotions and sensuous feelings from the past are naturally evoked by encounters with “things.” In a different age these may have been religions icons, ceremonial clothing or music, or monuments. Today they are mostly consumer goods from our youth; these give us a huge variety of hooks to hang our personal emotional hats on. As the anthropologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi succinctly puts it, “Our addiction to materialism is in large part due to a paradoxical need to transform the precariousness of consciousness into the solidity of things.” Without stuff, there is little to talk about, respond to, or recall, at least for most of us who aren’t mystics or uncommonly introspective.
Today this stuff is mostly consumer goods and experience (like music and TV shows), and our nostalgia for them is associated with two stages of childhood—the emerging autonomy (and persistent memory) of primary-school-age childhood and the increasing consumer freedom and emotionally charged peer-group experience of adolescence. Broadly speaking, this is because over the past century our culture has favored youth over age, often making these years times of fond memory. That we might favor “first stuff,” the things of our early years, may come from the simple fact that these things were new then and that with age and more things we become jaded. More particularly, many Americans experience pure delight (what I call “wondrous innocence”) as six- or seven-year-olds in toys, dolls, and other fantasy goods given to them mostly by indulgent parents. The particular bond many have with the things (including cars, music, fashions, etc.) of their teens relates to the new choices and opportunities for self-expression through consumer goods that precedes adult responsibility.23 All this adds up to far more than regression into the childish. Nostalgia for childhood things invites us to return to our years of wondrous innocence, but, in doing so, we may be merely “putting on” rather than “turning into” the child. Consumed nostalgia does not necessarily consume us. Such goods often help us define ourselves. We can play at being the boy or girl from the often whimsical vantage of the adult. But for all of the sensuous delight and personal meaning that these recollected consumer moments may provide, they do not take us very far into recovering or understanding past relationships or even the world of childhood wonder or of teenage self-discovery and emerging autonomy.24
So consumed nostalgia is very special, and its effect on us may well be very ambiguous. I think that we cannot dismiss consumed nostalgia as tribal, fake, merely commercial, or childish. But does it and can it ultimately satisfy? Modern nostalgia is a richly complex and even contradictory phenomenon that both opens and closes possibilities of understanding the past. The selling of nostalgia has met demand, perhaps even accelerated it, in many and diverse ways, but that commercialization has also channeled and constricted the meaning of memory. Many modern Americans seem to find identity in the past and find friends in shared passions; they even resolve festering “wounds” by revisiting lost times and places. This may be one of the joys of the man who “finally” gets that muscle car he dreamed about as a teen. Though often escapist, modern people find playful ways of returning to what was once serious (to the child). Packaged memory can give new meanings to the past, providing nostalgiacs new perspectives on growing up in the 1950s or 1980s, sometimes freeing them from old resentments and distortions.
Yet the commercialization of nostalgia may also accentuate escape, distort memory, and, in general, short-circuit the goals and potential benefits of recollection. I am not advocating a return to the tribal or ideological nostalgia of the past, but rituals of recall may need to go beyond associating the past with bought things and experiences. This involves more than challenging commercialization and its effects. It may require that we reassess why we go back (and what “past” we favor) and how we might do it better to deepen our understanding of the present and reveal new possibilities for the future. We may need to rethink and refeel our way through how we cope with the avalanche of change that swamps us, how we reconnect with pasts that continually leave us wondering where we are and who we are. We may need to seek alternative ways of relating to the past, ways that lead us to question our romantic memories, that introduce us to surprises, and that call us to see our childhoods with adult eyes. We may want also to find ways of making memory less isolating, less about “me,” and perhaps more about a renewal of lost relationships and the creation of new ties across generations. Even more, perhaps we may need to reassess just what we should recall and where and when we need to forget. Like so many other commodities, consumed memory satisfies many of our longings, but it may reveal needs that bought things cannot meet and point us to what is still missing.
In this book, I will explore the fascinating, often curious and surprising phenomenon of consumed nostalgia. To understand all the richness of this topic and to make its telling engaging and persuasive, I will seek out the details, look for the unexpected, and in general approach it with a mind open to surprises and even the unexplainable.
I cannot consider all forms of modern nostalgia. Though they are interesting, I will not consider high school and family reunions or the now-common practice of using Internet-based social networks to contact old lovers and friends. Even though they may relate to childhood memories, these forms of nostalgia are only tangentially related to the world of consumption. Emphatically, I am not arguing that consumed nostalgia has displaced these other forms of memorializing. They all coexist today, though I would argue that consumed nostalgia has assumed a unique and growing influence.
Where possible, I will personally visit sites of commercialized nostalgia and, through interviews and observations, investigate their inner workings. My task is to seek a broad representation of players—organizers, participants, and, at times, outsiders. Adding depth to this reporting will be brief forays into the literatures of these nostalgias—old-car magazines and toy and period collectors’ guidebooks, for example. I will also draw on the history, sociology, and even psychology of nostalgia. I will explore when and why these particular nostalgias appeared. At times, to add to the richness of the phenomenon, I will let the nostalgiacs tell their own stories.
I have identified seven distinct types of nostalgia. I begin with a consideration of some of the objects of memory: first, with those that shaped early childhood—toys and dolls; then those goods that defined the transition to adulthood, especially the teenage car; and, finally, the goods of the family and domestic sphere that framed a wider memory of childhood and youth. I will follow with two chapters that define experiential memory in the modern era—popular music and television. I end with a consideration of sites of nostalgia, cultivated places of heritage and commercialized places of fantasy (theme parks).
I approach this topic as a kind of outside insider. I am a baby boomer (senior class) who collects nothing (besides DVDs of old movies, and those not very systematically) but who is fascinated by those who do. For years, I have enjoyed going to “memory sites,” including doo-wop concerts, heritage museums, and theme parks, but, like many readers, I have wondered why I and others enjoy them. Doubtless, the questions that I bring to this project will change as I met the unexpected, but I will address the following queries to understand this longing for a reconnection to the past: What sorts of pasts are desired, and which are not? What kinds of nostalgic offerings work, which do not, and for what people and why? How is this drive modern, and how it did take on the variety of forms and meanings with which we associate nostalgia today? How does the commercialization of nostalgia respond to needs but also short-circuit those needs?
So my task will be to hit the road (figuratively and sometimes literally) to observe and listen to today’s nostalgiacs in all their diversity. At the end of this journey, which I invite you to join, I will sum up and evaluate what we have seen. I hope then that we will all understand much better this strange world of modern nostalgia.