Lecture explores contemporary nostalgia

Can you go home again?

Thomas Wolfe aside, it turns out that you can. But, says Ryan Lizardi, assistant professor of communication and humanities, it won’t be the same—despite what media marketers want you to think. Lizardi presented “The State of Contemporary Nostalgia: How Media Asks Us to Remember the Past” as part of the Provost’s Lecture Series.

“When you try to recreate the past, you can’t, and what you end up with is an idealized version of that past,” Lizardi said. “You go home and not one thing has changed, but you have changed; and that changes the way you look at everything when you go back home.”

Where does this need to look back come from? Lizardi says in Freudian psychology, nostalgia is considered an unhealthy ability to let go of the past. When we experience a loss—be it a person, a property, or an era in our life—we mourn and move forward.

“Freud views moving on as a healthy and natural form of looking at the past,” says Lizardi. “We’re sad about a loss, we work through it and we let go. We don’t continue to obsess over it for the rest of our lives. Doing that is what he refers to as ‘melancholia.’”

Contemporary media companies, Lizardi says, are always ready to repackage and resell existing material. And keeping consumers in a constant state of melancholia, making them always feel the need for their past and what went with it, supports that strategy.

“Melancholia is the attempt to recreate the past, demonstrating the loss of capacity to adapt and move on,” he says. “The media wants us to long for something we had when we were younger. We are being told that it is incredibly important to always be looking back.”

That’s why you see everything from repackaged, special edition DVD box sets to recreations of classic Fisher Price toys labeled as “Fisher Price Classics” on store shelves, and even entire television programming based around the need to revisit one’s past. It’s that same strategy, Lizardi says, that led to a second Spider-Man film franchise just five years since the first series ended. “We are perpetually told to come back to the same thing, to the personal things we were connected to ‘in the old days,’” he says.

The problem with that, according to literary critic and Marxist political theorist Frederic Jameson, is that living in a constant state of nostalgia prevents people from differentiating between past and present and learning from the past. For many, nostalgia is so ingrained that they often don’t see the negative parts of their past.

“We’re given a version of the past with rose-colored glasses, an idealized version,” Lizardi says. “And we are told to define our past through the media itself.”

That is why some confuse media representations of the past with the past itself. Some may look back at the TV series “Leave it to Beaver” and think of the 1950s as a perfect time, forgetting that the show depicts an idyllic America very different from the reality of the Eisenhower years. “Political groups do this too, saying ‘didn’t we really have something back then’ and using that idealized view of the past as a motivator,” Lizardi explains.

For media producers, keeping consumers in a constant state of nostalgia means less need for original material. Instead, many things that have already been created can just be resold again and again. Fans who buy a favorite film in its DVD form, Lizardi says, likely already paid for it before, as a VHS edition or even as a movie ticket.

“The lure of things like additional commentaries on these [special edition] film sets constructs a compulsive desire in us to recreate the past,” Lizardi says. “We don’t know why the director did what he did in particular scenes, but with that added commentary, we learn more about the film and in turn, feel as though we learned more about a part of our own past.”

Despite what the media may want us to believe, despite what we may even want to convince ourselves of, Lizardi says the past, the true past, will always remain where it always is. We can always look back, but we can never truly relive it. Anything else is really just a fabrication.

“We can’t get back our past,” he says. “Once it’s gone, it is gone.”