Looking Backwards: Nostalgia Mode1 |
Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art.
CHARLES MAIER
Like so many other pleasures, nostalgia is suspect. In a culture in which the whole movement is forever forward, we not surprisingly take it for granted that to look backwards is a sin. Nostalgia is something in which the pleasure seeker ‘wallows’ and wallowing implies self-indulgence and moral weakness. To replay the past is to take shelter in a sentimental ‘comfort zone’, sentimental because we feel that nostalgia falsifies the past. Sentimentality is, after all, the manufacture of ersatz and insincere feeling, in which the interest is in the feeling itself rather than in its cause. Nostalgia, it is assumed, always creates a saccharine past. We glamorise retrospectively a past that was, when lived, painful. The longing nostalgia expresses becomes a kind of aesthetic masochism. Yet the idea of pain, as the opposite of pleasure, is integral to the definition of pleasure itself and the sadness or longing of nostalgia has a glamour or a sweetness of its own.
It was a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofe, who in 1688 coined the term nostalgia to describe the longing for home experienced by soldiers on active service in foreign lands. It therefore arose as a spatial, geographical category, expressing a sense of being in a different place from where one should be or would like to be; a form of homesickness.
It came to be associated with more general symptoms of psychological unease and pathology, with melancholy and depression, and later no longer used as a psychiatric diagnosis, migrated into other areas of cultural criticism and political conservatism. In the process it became irreversibly associated with the past, with looking backwards and therefore with history.
For the philosophers of the Enlightenment, history was a narrative of progress.2 Immanuel Kant described the Enlightenment as the movement from servitude to the freedom of independent thought. Reason and progress would usher in a new and utopian world. The challenge this presented might result, at least for a time, in longing for the older, simpler world, but the benefits of enlightenment and reason would eventually triumph.
The forward march of progress took on a political complexion with Karl Marx. He was as hostile to those who cling to the past as the philosophers who preceded him. For them, nostalgia had meant the wish for a return to the past of superstition, religious intolerance, monarchical despotism and the divine right of kings. For Marx, to look backwards also acted as a brake on the possibility of moving forward to the future of justice and equality for which Communists fought. He attacked utopian socialists and their ‘prefigurative’ communities based on an imagined medieval past, because they were, he argued, trying to ‘roll back the wheel of history’ and were in thrall to an illusion, since it was in any case impossible to repeat the past. The utopian socialists were critical of existing society and desired progressive change, yet they rejected the political struggle necessary as a means of achieving this. ‘They … dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated phalanstères, of establishing “Home Colonies”, of setting up a “Little Icaria” … castles in the air’, he wrote in The Communist Manifesto. They sentimentalised medieval society and lost themselves in dreams instead of fighting for the future.
Abandoned by psychiatrists, nostalgia continued to have pathological associations and came to be seen as a cultural illness, instead of a disease of individuals. To long for and to try to dwell in the past is to refuse to confront the present reality. It is to resist the inevitability of change. Nostalgia leads to stagnation, because it sets itself against progress. The only healthy existence is one that embraces the present, because the present leads forward.
Paradoxically, the left has shared the idea of history as progress with the staunchest supporters of capitalism and the status quo, both capitalist societies and the socialist societies of the twentieth century being equally committed to continual movement ‘forward’. By the twenty-first century, however, progress was interpreted in exclusively economic terms. The idea of ‘progress’, having lost all its progressive radicalism, amounts to no more than an acknowledgement that capitalism must continually expand in order to survive. There is no compelling alternative to global capitalism. At the same time there could be little further development of democracy, which was said to have reached its apogee. In reality, deprived of further growth, democracy was moving towards entropy, as the wider political values of the Enlightenment were gradually abandoned.
But to succumb to nostalgia is to reject progress. In particular, any yearning for ‘socialism’ or something approximating to it has itself become a form of nostalgia. In this world of economic determinism ‘backwardness’ is still to be overcome and nostalgia continues to be seen as a form of false consciousness. It is still a failure to embrace modernity with all its benefits of advanced dentistry, instant communication and ‘fast fashion’.
Nostalgia is an expression of the unsatisfactory nature of the contemporary, the present. For the left it is morally wrong because we should be struggling in the present for a better future: for the committed capitalist nostalgia is bad because it rejects the good present in favour of a bad past. Only at the political extremes, in the West, is a longing for the past endorsed; by the American Tea Party movement with its longing for a non-existent past free from the State, and by those sections of the Green movement that argue for a return to artisanal crafts and village communities.
It may seem strange that, with Western societies at least wholly integrated into modernity, their citizens should still be looking backward. But as if to offset the demands of modernity, cultural nostalgia has constructed a whole ideology of backwardness, whose critics denounce its negative and reactionary effects.
Socialist historians of the late twentieth century were especially hostile to nostalgia. As the progressive movements of the 1970s faltered and right-wing governments took power in both Britain and the United States, these historians argued that nostalgia was part of the conservative turn. As historians they particularly objected to what they saw as its misrepresentation of history. An imagined past had been constructed, they argued, which ‘tells us about the present through its falsification of the past’. Comfortable and reassuring images of the past, especially as purveyed by popular culture, contributed to an invented nationalistic tradition, a glorification of Britain or an American past that masked injustice and racism: collective false memory syndrome.
For one of its fiercest critics, David Lowenthal, ‘nostalgia today engulfs the whole past’. Nostalgia ‘tells it like it wasn’t’, he insists and he cites Christopher Lasch, who wrote that ‘the victim of nostalgia is worse than a reactionary; he is an incurable sentimentalist afraid of the future, he is also afraid to face the truth about the past’, and those suffering from nostalgia are temperamentally incapable of confronting the ‘rough and tumble, the complexity and turmoil of modern life’.3 In this radical tradition nostalgia expresses a deep dissatisfaction with contemporary society, but poses the wrong solution to that dissatisfaction.
Its critics have been especially hostile to the cultural and commercial dimensions of nostalgia. They condemn the ‘heritage industry’ as a major culprit in creating a false representation of the past. The audience watching Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton Abbey or Gosford Park or the visitors to a National Trust stately home are, they argue, lulled into a version of country house living 100 years ago that manages to be simultaneously nostalgic and reassuring. These days such entertainments foreground the lives of servants as much as their masters, while seducing visitors or audiences with all the details of period dress, interiors and customs, so that the pleasure for spectators lies in enjoyment of the quaint, coupled with a self-congratulatory sense that we have overcome this hierarchical past. Britain (and the United States) may actually be even more unequal than they were 100 years ago and are certainly more unequal than they were 50 years ago, but the below stairs past of a country house allows us to congratulate ourselves on the end of deference and to dwell on the inequalities of yesteryear, and at the same time reassuringly to avoid confronting the inequalities of the contemporary scene. Similarly, urban and suburban dwellers 100 years ago invested romantically in a reconstituted suburban idyll of thatched cottages and rural bliss, blind to the squalor of nineteenth-century agricultural workers in their hovels without sanitation or running water, starvation wages and tyrannical landowners.
Historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt saw another danger in these recreations. History was once about the lives of great men, he argued in the Observer newspaper, who were presented as an inspiration to the public, but ‘increasingly the public spurned the lives of great men to trace their personal lineages through local archives [and] … genealogy websites … the quest for identity and empathy has taken over: explanation has become less desirable; understanding has assumed centre-stage’. The ‘retreat into the warm, fuzzy embrace of the past’ risks becoming ‘history as entertainment, without the capacity to teach about the past or shed light on the present’. It risks becoming history as narcissism, the individual’s family background becoming merely a prop to a sense of identity in danger of being eroded by the rapidity and uncertainty of contemporary life.
Postmodernist theorists in the 1980s and 1990s identified a different form of cultural nostalgia. As part of their onslaught against the ‘elitism’ of ‘high culture’, cultural critics targeted the high priests of ‘high art’, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for their condemnation of mass culture in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. George Stauth and Bryan S. Turner, for example, asserted that this elitist critique was essentially nostalgic, based as it was on an assumption of ‘the availability of some general or absolute values from which a position of critique can be sustained’. In contemporary society, however, ‘the underlying communal reality of values has been shattered, there can be no clear position of values in order to establish a critique of mass culture’. For them, the virtue of postmodern cultural pluralism was that it exposed the ‘privileged claims of high culture to be the criterion of aesthetic supremacy’ as nothing more than backward-looking snobbery.
From this perspective it follows that when Adorno and Horkheimer attacked American mass culture they were merely expressing their grief at the loss of cultural power and authority, which had rested on their privileged position as ‘professional intellectuals’, a position attained only after years of ‘discipline and asceticism which can only be acquired … through withdrawal from everyday labour and everyday realities’. Mandarins in their ivory tower, these Jewish exiles, confronted with the horrors of California and Tin Pan Alley, were necessarily ‘anti modernists’ suffering a double nostalgia: for their lost artistic culture and also for their lost urban world of cafés and cities. They were typical of a ‘moribund intellectual elite, adrift from its traditional culture and institutional setting’.4 We should, however, note the implicit self-hatred in this critique, since Stauth and Turner, as salaried university teachers, were themselves part of a later lost generation of unanchored intellectuals.
Stauth and Turner also revived the psychological dimension of nostalgia. They portrayed the intellectual who defends ‘high culture’ against the vulgarity of mass taste as necessarily a melancholic, withdrawn from contemporary culture. In other words, Adorno and Horkheimer were not merely cultural elitists, they were mentally ill. To embrace modern culture in all its (mass) forms suggests, by contrast, that the ‘people’ are wholly in tune with the present and furthermore have ‘a positive view of consumption, as a real reward for the deprivations of production’. This extraordinary comment patronisingly reduces popular culture to a kind of bread and circuses for the toiling proletariat. (It should be noted that this critique of nostalgia is at odds with that of the historians. They were dismayed by populist heritage industry versions of history, although these are certainly popular with a mass audience.)
The very proliferation of cultural forms and new ways of disseminating cultural works and the enormous expansion of mass culture itself opens the way to increased nostalgia for lost cultural experiences. Andreas Huyssen pointed this out, when he wrote: ‘The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen.’5 What are tribute bands but an expression of nostalgia? Young adults reminisce nostalgically of the television programmes they watched as kids. The soap, Brookside, and the more upmarket 1990s soap, This Life, about post-Thatcherite thrusting and hedonistic young lawyers, are remembered with a sense of loss and lost possibility. So ubiquitous are cultural experiences that there is so much more to be nostalgic about. This leads to revivals or reworkings of formerly popular music and television; for example, Sherlock Holmes in modern dress, a new version of the classic, late-1940s film of Brighton Rock, updated to the 1960s, or the creation of new works that rely on nostalgia such as Life on Mars, a detective series that recreated the 1970s with all its accompanying smoking, sexism and police corruption.
It may be, as Linda Hutcheon6 has suggested, that nostalgia and irony are closely related. Irony is more likely to be viewed as an alternative to nostalgia, but Life on Mars certainly played on the ambivalence of the way in which the social crimes of the past – chain smoking, sexist contempt for women – could be enjoyed guiltlessly precisely because they were located in the past. Viewers could vicariously enjoy the thrill of these crimes against political correctness without the guilt of actually committing them. In this case irony took the longing out of nostalgia. Yet who is to say that that enjoyment did not for some viewers include a nostalgia for a past in which certain forms of behaviour were not so heavily policed. And perhaps subtly, almost unconsciously, the series condoned them: nostalgia as a way of having your cake and eating it.
The virtual world may seem to strip away the past, but, as Huyssen noted, it continually re-presents it to us. We live in a hyper-aestheticised society and so mass culture inevitably and necessarily presents it to us in visual forms. Anything from old pre-war railway posters to the 1960s’ fashions made glamorous in the American fictional series about the 1960s’ Madison Avenue advertising industry, Mad Men, incites audiences to this nostalgialite. Another dimension of nostalgia for the (almost) contemporary is the way in which technology, including many small items of daily use, rapidly becomes out of date and redundant. So users can feel nostalgic about cassette tapes, about vinyl records and about clunky old telephones, and it is predicted that soon email and iPods will be on the sick list.
The Surrealists were already on to this nearly 100 years ago. Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant was a literary tribute to the lost corners of cities, especially the Paris arcades with their dusty shops selling outmoded items nobody wanted. They were, he said, ‘the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions. Places that were incomprehensible yesterday and that tomorrow will never know.’7
The critics of nostalgia have not had it all their own way. Since the 1980s a rehabilitation of nostalgia has been made possible by a change of name. Nostalgia has become memory. Memory is innocent of the negative emotion and falsity surrounding nostalgia. We all have memories, individual and collective. Much of the academic work on memory also gains gravitas and respectability because it has focused on collective political memory of trauma: the Nazi legacy, the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disappearance of the German Democratic Republic and genocide in Rwanda. What is at stake here is mourning and the recognition of the injustices and indeed horrors that were perpetrated. If nostalgia is a failure to confront the present reality, then memory is the challenge to confront the past. Not to engage in the work of memory would be the abdication from this necessary task.
This is not to argue that there was a direct translation of nostalgia into memory. To recognise the importance of memory is, nonetheless, to make possible a reinterpretation of nostalgia. The exploration of memory acknowledges that there is a truth to be known and certainly some things are truer than others. Yet if memory is a film or a slide show inside one’s head, is it – like a film viewed a second or third time – always different?
Critics such as Fiske have been rightly insistent on the experience of culture as an interactive process between audience and object/ spectacle. Time also plays a role in this, for individual and collective audiences alike. The first encounter with a given work will be different from all subsequent ones. The passage of time changes the audience and perhaps even the work itself.
Experiences are stored in the formaldehyde of memory, but the embalming fluid changes that which it preserves. In fact, memories are not dead objects or mummified, so it may make more sense to think of memory as an element like water, which softens and dissolves. Water, undulating, blurs the edges of things, clarifies, distorts, cleans and muddies. Or is water more like the passage of time itself, or do time and memory melt together? How is it possible – is it possible – to separate out the passage of time from the memory itself?
Memory studies have emphasised the work of memory in coming to terms with mourning and loss. Nostalgia is an expression of loss and mourning too; of lost selves, lost objects of desire; lost landscapes, lost streets. What is wrong with the heritage industry recreations so detested by the critics of nostalgia is that they do not express a sense of the passage of time. The past is reduced to the quaint or at best the picturesque. In fact, the effect of the more serious attempts to recreate the past, such as the television series The Victorian Farm, does not play on or evoke nostalgia. The Victorian Farm was educational in showing how even as recently as the late nineteenth century, domestic, agricultural and industrial production processes required an enormous amount of physical toil. Hours of dirty and sometimes dangerous labour were needed to make something that today is acquired by purchasing it in a shop. The effect was to render contemporary living somehow transient and also disembodied as if dwellers in today’s technologically advanced world suffer from ‘the unbearable lightness of being’, with toil and the possession of objects stripped of solidity to become ephemeral and thus less meaningful. The light-headedness of the consumerist society may at times arouse nostalgia, but it can also be a form of forgetfulness.
Svetlana Boym has suggested that nostalgia could be ‘restorative’, but that ironic nostalgia restores nothing. She writes in particular of forms of nostalgia for no longer existing socialist culture in Russia and former Yugoslavia, describing, for example, the Nostalgija café in Belgrade. This café, she says,
restores nothing. There was never such a café in the former Yugoslavia. There is no longer such a country, so Yugoslav popular culture can turn into self-conscious style and a memory field trip. The place exudes the air of Central European café culture and the new dandyism of the younger generation that [simultaneously] enjoys Tito-style gadgets and Wired magazine. This is a new kind of space that plays with the past and the present. The bar gently mocks the dream of greater patria while appealing to shared frameworks of memory of the last Yugoslav generation. It makes no pretence of depth of commemoration and offers only a transient urban adventure with excellent pastries and other screen memories.8
(A screen memory is the Freudian concept of something remembered that occludes a deeper, unconscious memory.) On the other hand, ‘the past for the restorative nostalgic’, she writes, ‘is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot … the past has to remain eternally young’.9 This is perhaps the way in which a moment of the past can leap out into the present, can be relived or re-vivified in the way Proust suggested a concrete physical memory can ‘conquer time’ and restore the past into the present. The past is not just a memory; it can mean something in the present.
There is also, says Boym, reflective nostalgia: ‘The focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth, but on the meditation on history and passage of time.’ This is nostalgia as an acknowledgement of a simple, irrevocable, inexorable passage of time. It is a legitimate sadness. Nostalgia displaces onto lost objects, places and experiences the longing for what is really lost: time. It is not even a longing for lost youth so much as a protest against the irreversibility of time.
That is what Roland Barthes found unbearable about old photographs and about which he wrote in Camera Lucida. The images testified that ‘this really happened; this actually was’, but that it no longer is makes it unbearable. Barthes stares at the photograph of his mother. There she is; when that photograph was taken she was alive. Now she is dead; and it is the impossibility of crossing that gap between present and past that is experienced as unendurable.
In a brief essay, ‘On Transience’, Freud expressed a surprisingly upbeat view of that sense of the loss of the past. In a few short paragraphs he described going for a walk with a young poet and a young woman (believed to have been respectively Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas Salome, formerly Nietzsche’s lover and herself a psychoanalyst). The poet looked tragically round at all the beauty of the natural landscape through which they were walking and said that he could not enjoy what he saw because it was transient and would, like everything, disappear. This walk took place during the First World War, so Freud’s optimism seems all the more surprising. This tragic sense of transience, he said, was similar to the process of mourning. The process of grief is a gradual but necessary process of detachment from a loved being or object. If this proceeds in a normal fashion, in the course of time the detachment will have been achieved, after which the individual can find new joys and new forms of attachment. Clearly this is psychologically desirable (although not always possible) as a means of emotional survival in the face of the death of loved individuals, yet leaves unresolved the protest against the relentless march of time and the inevitability of death – or perhaps recommends a Lucretian detachment from it.
The emphasis of nostalgia’s critics on its comfortable and cosily deceitful certainties misunderstands nostalgia, which in truth is far from reassuring. It is a painful form of longing that can never be assuaged. It is not even just a longing for a lost past, or even longing for the lost object of desire to which Freudians believe we are all attached; it is surely as utopian as the Enlightenment. It is the loss of the road not taken, is the longing for the perfect moment that could not be sustained, a longing for that happy place without contradictions (which is what a utopia is) – is almost longing for longing itself.
Laura Miller experienced this longing and describes it in her book on what it meant to be a fan of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. As a child, she wished, ‘with every bit of myself, for two things. First, I want a place I’ve read about in a book to really exist, and second, I want to be able to go there. I want this so much I’m pretty sure the misery of not getting it will kill me.’10
Later, I shall return to Narnia and the relationship of nostalgia to the fan and fandom; in the meantime it seems to me that this longing for Narnia, the non-existent yet (in a sense utopian, but simultaneously dystopian) imaginatively real place, is closer to nostalgia than one would ever have thought. It follows that the disapproving historians were wrong to criticise historical nostalgia on the grounds that it misrepresented the past; for even if there were a ‘true’ representation, it would not help. It would not undo the fact that not only is the past another country, but it is that ‘undiscovered country to whose bourne no traveller returns’.
As a coda, I think of the ambivalent feelings aroused in old films set in the London of the 1940s and 1950s, for those old enough to remember the city as it then was. To watch one of those British post-war black and white films is to step into a Britain and a London that is unrecognisable. Like a dream, a ghostly post-war past unreels: the shabby, bomb site, weary streets of London in the 1940s and 1950s, a monochrome cityscape, in which both buildings and trudging armies of workers and housewives inhabit a world of crumbling walls, rain-swept alleyways, bomb sites and broken dreams.
The sub-noir frames open up the infinite regress of the corridor of memory into a world whose melancholy constitutes its promise. In the London of 60 years ago, it seems, you could cross invisible frontiers between the safe, middle-class worlds of, say, Kensington and Knightsbridge into uncertain territories where similar, but shabbier, Victorian terraces bled into something vaguer and more ambiguous. To wander about the streets must have been to penetrate what Iris Murdoch in her first novel, Under the Net, called the interstices of existence, the gaps in the net of existence, labyrinths, on the edge of which ‘the web of the urban tissue was astonishingly slack’,11 as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it when describing his wanderings in 1940s’ Manhattan. In the faded celluloid, images of lost London streets stretched endlessly away in all directions, magnifying the sense of nameless potential in a city whose recovery from war had scarcely begun to take the shape of the bombastic office blocks and towering council estates that would later appear. Things seemed more provisional. London was barely in recovery, supine like the mangy old lions that lay in torpid resignation behind the bars of their narrow cages at the zoo.
Yet it was just this negative capability that created a sense of potential. The very dreariness, the existence of ruined buildings, cracked pavements and spaces in between, invoked the expectation of finding some secret garden at the end of an alley, or a magical shop behind a forgotten courtyard. The very poverty of the urban surfaces, the unrestored façades and unplanned side streets exuded a sense of the enduringness of London – almost the more so because of the bomb damage.
Meanwhile, the strangers treading the pavements dressed drably enough in their class uniforms. Men wore hats in those days; bowler hats, homburg hats, trilby hats, the latter when worn with suede shoes suggesting something a little more daring, a refugee from the racecourse, an ex-RAF officer, a conman perhaps. Women in headscarves and shapeless coats shuffled along the street markets in worn-out shoes to buy vegetables from costermongers in flat caps and white scarves. The younger women were still wearing strict wartime suit jackets, often over printed frocks, with bare legs and socks set off precociously with platform or wedge shoes. It is easy to assume that all this had changed by the 1960s. Yet a 1967 film, The London Nobody Knows, showed older women, at least, still dressed in the same headscarves and coats, still trawling the street market stalls for second-hand clothes, so that this documentary constitutes a reminder that memories are always false memories. There was more to ‘the swinging sixties’ than Twiggy in a miniskirt and young blades tearing around on scooters; and film, rather than necessarily reinforcing the clichéd images of media memory, can also memorialise the persistence of the old in the midst of the new.
New youth fashions were found not in the ‘young trend’ or ‘Junior Miss’ sections of department stores with their acres of space and huge fitting rooms, but in the jazz clubs where styles that had somehow wafted from across the Channel were to be seen. Young women modelling themselves on Existentialists and the Left Bank wore Black Watch tartan trousers of the kind made fashionable by Juliette Gréco, existentialist chanteuse. Grandmothers’ black lisle stockings could be rejuvenated as an ‘arty’ mode. A black polo neck sweater, a ‘peasant’ dirndl skirt, an embroidered Magyar blouse (these harking back to a vaguely remembered period when the Soviet Union was still an ally, before the Cold War was declared) and a duffle coat completed the outfit.
Meanwhile, near the 100 Club in Oxford Street where Humphrey Lyttleton’s trad jazz band played, the Soho tarts stood on every corner still wearing the fashions of a decade earlier: platform shoes with ankle straps and suits with military shoulder pads, whether because they were too poor to afford new clothes or because it was an informal prostitutes’ uniform, to show off legs at a time when most women’s pins were muffled in voluminous ‘New Look’ skirts.
The streetwalkers offered a reminder that other worlds through the looking glass might be dangerous as well as alluring. But that was part of London’s strangeness, or perhaps it is the strangeness of any big city, that every pedestrian could be an incognito refugee from any of the hidden social worlds that lay beneath the uncompromising façades and dour panorama of the endless streets.
When the noise of traffic faded as the wandering pedestrian found him or herself in some backwater, some road or square that became uncanny simply by being uninhabited, the consciousness of hidden lives intensified, and perhaps this sense of hidden worlds was stronger in London when there were so few cafés or public spaces, when life was lived beyond closed doors, in private places. Because London seemed a secretive place, dress played an important role. It gave off signals of adherence to imagined worlds; it played an essential part in the panorama. But sometimes the signals themselves were so covert as to be invisible to all but the already initiated. The uniforms of those who were then beyond the pale – gay men, for example – had to be almost as hidden as the circles to which they gestured.
The lead singer of the 1960s’ band, The Kinks, Ray Davies, wrote in his autobiography of his wanderings round London’s West End in search of ‘real life’, searching for the hidden world that perhaps did not exist outside the adolescent imagination, or was perhaps really nothing more than the future adulthood that would inevitably arrive, when simply by growing older the youth would get to be given the key to the door, even if it was not the door he or she had hoped to open.
There is a frustration in watching those ancient post-war films – The Fallen Idol, Hue and Cry, or one of Robert Hamer’s masterpieces of cynicism, thwarted passion and lost hopes – at the impossibility of penetrating the screen, of actually being there, not just to remember – or imagine – but actually to experience what it was like. Tired of the excess of consumer society at the millennium, there is a longing to know again the poverty of that time, the visual austerity, above all the unfinished, untidy London of 60 years ago.
In the new millennium the future is fast fashion with styles in such quick succession that one can get caught in a hamster wheel of change spinning so fast that it seems to be stationary, while the reconstruction of the East End to host the Olympic Games threatens to destroy all those unfinished, disregarded, interstitial wildernesses, the spaces between, indeterminate spaces with no name.
In the light of this, the gaze backwards into the past is less a sentimental longing than the appalled stare of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history; the backward gaze of the subject being blasted forward by the winds of history: ‘This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’
Nostalgia then becomes the recognition that we have been whirled away far ahead of ourselves into a landscape of estrangement. At the same time, though, beware. The familiar past we recreate so lovingly in memory, when it was the real, lacked the certainty we retrospectively endow it with. If nostalgia were sentimental it would be a lie or at best a gross distortion of the past. But nostalgia is, as I discussed above, an act of mourning. Just as, eventually, the pain that accompanies the loss of a loved person at least partly fades into loving memory, so nostalgia dissolves the pain of the past in a memory of its beauty. But if one were to enter the celluloid dream and find oneself back in the grey streets of the 1950s, one would only long, of course, to get away.