By the early 21st Century, nostalgia was a growth industry. Old TV series and films were being re-released on DVD, old sweets were making a come-back; nothing was ever ‘dated’, but everything was ‘traditional’, ‘old school’ or ‘retro’. This obsession with the past was seen as profoundly unhealthy, as it seemed like a retreat from the real world.
Nostalgia expels us from the present while simultaneously encouraging us to draw closer to an idealised past that is simple, pure, beautiful, moral, joyous; a past utterly at odds with a present that is complex, monstrous, tainted, miserable and corrupt. Nostalgia takes our fears and doubts about the world around us and uses them to construct a heavily-censored and largely invented past that can seem so vibrant and clear in our memories that it starts to seem more real than the real world. We are a culture of madeleine munchers. The American poet and critic Susan Stewart once voiced her distaste for nostalgia in these terms:
“The nostalgic dreams of a moment before knowledge and self-consciousness that itself lives on only in the self-consciousness of the nostalgic narrative. Nostalgia is therepetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition.”
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