Let us look at nostalgia itself, because nostalgia is what we’re taking aim at here. The pain of homecoming. Let us take a more medical or therapeutic approach. If we view being a Nostalgiac as a bad thing, what is the treatment for it? What is the plan of action for rehabilitation?
Read MoreThe things we make — the things you can just go down to the store and buy if you don’t have them — are made to fulfill a certain set of needs, solve a certain set of problems, and — ultimately — generate a certain set of changes on the mind. A lot of these changes are unconsidered.
Read MoreStar Wars was always going to be one of the cultural artifacts we touch upon in the “nostalgia trap” series. It’s an active cultural institution, and one that it looked like you could set your watch by fairly recently – the future of Star Wars on film is, of course, up in the air after Solo, which was a perfectly fine movie released just a month after an Avengers movie, and thus did poorly. But Lucasfilm has only ever done Nostalgia pieces. Getting angry at Star Wars for nostalgia is like getting angry at Star Trek for being utopian.
Read MoreThere are layers of meaning that we are supposed to have received surrounding this tail end of the calendar year. We are supposed to accept them, and they are supposed to govern our emotional responses to this last week or so.
Read MoreThe past thirty years has been quite a ride: in the 1990s, one of the biggest phenomena on television was the X-Files, which wrestled with the hidden weirdness of the 20th century (mostly in the form of aliens.) At the core of the UFO mythos was a nominally apolitical distrust of authority – the government was hiding something from us. They were hiding the truth. Of course, much of this distrust was coupled with (the publicly disavowed) white supremacist ideology. This gave us what could be called the Interbellum Consensus, sitting as it does between the Cold War and the War on Terror: the UFOlogical Weird and the Militiaman Hauntological.
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