“The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” – Milan Kundera
Cinematic nostalgia covers any number of period pieces, homages, remakes, and sequels, and through these films emerges nostalgia in many forms. This nostalgia is innocent joy relived. But what if these films reach the biggest audiences? How can we understand nostalgia on this scale? The two top grossing films worldwide in 2015 are imbued with a yearning for a cinematic past, which becomes imbricated in a real, lived past. Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Jurassic World feeds off our desire to return to these worlds, and the feelings that come with them, that we are living in a past created for the present. But how can we understand these feelings? The success of these films is partly propelled by the collective urge of audiences to relive and rediscover past joys, which leads us to the crux of the problem: are these ‘nostalgic’ trips regressions, and if so, are we guilty of living and yearning to live in a past that is only available through cinema?
To understand the guilty aspects of longing for a cinematic past in this context, we must first determine what nostalgia is. At its core, nostalgia is a desire to return to the past. Nostalgia is given its power by the individual, whose personal experiences and associations are rooted in a time that cannot be revisited in a tangible way, but can be retained through ‘feeling’. This feeling can emerge through interactions with people, places, objects, and, for our purposes, media.
Cinema’s permanence means we can both revisit films from our youth, and re-experience the time of our youth. Watching Jumanji provides both a remembrance of my time watching it as a child, as well as a reminder of the world I lived in during the early 1990s. Through the film and this remembrance emerges my longing for the film as I experienced it as a child, but also for the world the film was situated in. On these two levels – the literal and ephemeral – we can understand the nostalgic impulse that Jurassic World and The Force Awakens enacts and exploits.
These film’s respective thematic, aural and visual tropes are not inherent and singular, in that there effect is compounded by more than their presence in that film alone. The theme song for either film is not given significance only because of scene it supports, but because of the cultivated memory of that music, and the feelings it recreates. It re-emerges after being part of the social consciousness for several decades. This extends to many aspects of these films, from characters to structure to story. These aspects have been mythologized, and this mythmaking is an important part of these films’ success. However, this success, whether critical or commercial, warranted or unwarranted, is not being questioned or undermined. Instead, I hope to read the urge to revisit past cinematic experiences through ‘new’ cinematic objects as a guilty pleasure.
Literary critic and theorist Frederic Jameson assesses the generations of the 1930s to 1950s that experienced Buck-Rogers type serials as being strongly attached to Star Wars (1977). Jameson contends that Star Wars is not a repeat of those serials, but rather reflects those experiences for its audience.
“Star Wars, far from being a pointless satire of such now dead forms, satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again: it is a complex object in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artifacts through once again.” (The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998)
The parallels between The Force Awakens and A New Hope are well documented. However, in addition to aping the structure, story, conflicts, set-pieces of the original, there is room to understand Awakens as a film that doubles as a nostalgia film, and a reflexive understanding of that moniker. Generationally, a younger audience experiences the film as part of a mythologized, unexperienced past, much like the young protagonists Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega). The mythologized, experienced past – seen through the eyes of returning characters Han Solo, Chewbacca, Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker, R2D2, C-3PO, and others – doubles as the experienced past of the audience, who aligns their own past with those characters. Everyone audience member approaches the film from a different vantage point, but ultimately, these elements that are repeated are done so after decades of reinforcement. We are not experiencing The Force Awakens on its one, but as piece of a larger cinematic world that has been sewn into the fabric of popular culture, which has been constantly repeated, rebranded and resold.
Jurassic World operates on a different level. It does not have the franchise grip of Star Wars, nor the household characters. Instead, we get the allure of the ‘Park’, and all the excitement it brings. Only this time, the park has expanded, and the dinosaurs we associated with in the past have evolved. The self-awareness of Jurassic World is plain to see: the film Jurassic World, much like the Park within it, is backed by corporate money, is evolving the way it entices new audiences – specifically with bigger dinosaurs – and it understands its own role in creating this destruction. The film feeds off the audiences desire to experience a world anew, but as the film concludes, and the Tyrannosaurs Rex from the original Jurassic Park (1992) emerges from metal gates to help kill its genetically modified successor the Indomius Rex, we see nostalgia prevail, and the story comes full circle. The corporate desire is derailed by the overwhelming audience desire to witness what has come before.
Jurassic World and The Force Awakens were not the only 2015 films to be fueled by decades-driven nostalgia. Mad Max: Fury Road replays its predecessors on a grander, higher-risk scale. Creed follows the lead of Rocky (1976) in crafting a distinct, specific story around the central premise of willpower and self-generated achievement. Terminator Genysis reflects the structure, story and imagistic qualities of The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Disney’s live-action remake of Cinderella (1950) enacts this logic on a more tangible scale, bringing to life the animated cinematic memories of our past.
The desire to watch these films for nostalgic reasons can be read as stagnation, but through understanding their role in a cinematic culture, I call them regressions. There is a yearning to watch them that is inevitably created by a desire to remain rooted in a cinematic past. These pleasures are, for all intents and purposes, ill. This is not to say there is insidiousness to experiencing the nostalgic joys of any number of remakes, reboots and sequels that have come out in the past year. Instead, we must assess how these enjoyments reveal a lack of progress. Blockbuster cinema was so rarely a method of serialization and renewed energy. Its energy was organic, even if it was itself rooted in past tropes and stylizations. The original Star Wars took from countless cinematic and cultural influences, but it was propelled by its audacity and willingness to push the boundary of blockbuster films towards that very mish mash of styles and approaches. This is not to read the aforementioned films as elementary. Mad Max: Fury Road revitalizes the action genre through its innovative editing, structure, and approach to story, and The Force Awakens poses interesting questions around the legitimacy of legacy. Whether these films are justifiably ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is inconsequential. It is the feeling of longing they create that becomes problematic. The feeling these blockbusters create for a knowing audience is contingent on their experiences, and we are guilty of rooting ourselves in the past.