From pop culture to politics, nostalgia is everywhere

Nostalgia is complicated business these days.

The past is viewed by politicians and screenwriters as something like modeling clay, raw material to be exploited in the manufacture of fantasies. When GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump yaks about “making America great again,” you wonder which version of “greatness” he’s referring to.

Bernie Sanders, an independent running for the Democratic presidential nomination, proudly declares himself a democratic socialist. His rhetoric recalls left-wing populism from earlier eras: Rein in the banks, bust up the monopolies, tax Wall Street, boost the minimum wage, Medicare for all.

Both of them do what politicians do. They cherry-pick versions of the past to stimulate hope for (or fear of) the future.

But the past is a fickle mistress. Now that virtually the entire history of pop culture is available through YouTube, Netflix, Hulu and iTunes — not to mention cable channels such as TCM — we’re in a place where the past is the present. Everything is now. Nothing is grounded. Our cultural touchstones have become fluid and ephemeral.

Yet, from reboots to genre revivals, nostalgia remains a powerful force in pop culture. So does an associated phenomenon called anemoia, which is essentially nostalgia for a past you’ve never experienced.

Nostalgia and anemoia have been Broadway’s bread and butter for decades. Arguably 80 percent of Broadway theater celebrates the past.

A revival of the iconic drama “Death of a Salesman,” which comes along every decade or so, can still pack ’em in. “The Gin Game,” a play from the 1970s, is now a hit revival that taps into the audience’s longstanding affection for its two venerable stars, James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson, and our shared memories of their earlier performances.

Musicals generally fall into two categories: revivals or shows based on movies. “Les Miserables,” now in its second Broadway revival, invokes nostalgia for — well, for the original 1987 production. “Phantom of the Opera” has been running so long that it evokes nostalgia for itself.

This is why there’s such maniacal enthusiasm for “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical about one of the Founding Fathers performed by a young, multi-ethnic cast. By all outward appearances, it’s audacious and original, eschewing any existing template.

But true originality is rare. The producers of any reboot, whether on stage or screen, look for a new way to dress up a familiar property to convince audiences they’re seeing something “new.”

Writer/producer Matthew Weiner, whose production designers meticulously re-created the swinging ’60s in AMC’s “Mad Men,” may collaborate on a post-Daniel Craig reboot of the James Bond films. The catch: The movie would be set in the ’60s, the decade in which the seemingly eternal spy movie franchise was born. (James Bond was actually created by author Ian Fleming in the 1950s.)

Speaking of eternal franchises, CBS has announced a new “Star Trek” TV series will air on CBS All Access in 2017, the first time the property has had a weekly incarnation since 2005.

In 2010, the producers of the British series “Sherlock” re-imagined Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliant detective as a resident of the 21st century. Now Holmes and Watson, played by the same actors, will put away their smartphones and computers and return in January in a new film, “The Abominable Bride,” set in the 1890s, the time period of the original stories and novels.

FX is now into the second season of “Fargo,” a series created by Noah Hawley, who uses the Coen brothers’ 1996 film of the same title as his point of departure. The series captures the tone of the movie without bearing a direct relationship to its plot. The first season, set in 2006, felt contemporary. The current season, set in 1979, awakens dormant memories of cars, clothes and hair styles. The recent past is Hawley’s playground.

Movies and TV, of course, have a long history of ignoring historical reality.

“The Andy Griffith Show,” which ran for eight seasons beginning in 1960 and was set in the mythical North Carolina town of Mayberry, showed people driving modern cars but speaking on 1920s candlestick telephones. And Mayberry was a Southern town without a single African-American, aside from the occasional extra. The show seemed utterly disconnected from the real 1960s.

The old singing-cowboy movies of the 1930s and ’40s starring the likes of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers depicted an old West that included gun-toting cowpokes on horseback as well as telephones, cars and radio shows.

A more recent Western, HBO’s “Deadwood,” was nominally set in the 1870s. The buildings and costumes and muddy sets looked right, but the unrelenting R-rated dialogue and plotlines about competing business interests made it feel more like “The Sopranos” than “Gunsmoke.”

“Deadwood” was definitely its own animal, but like many series and movies, it tapped into our cultural memory of both a real and an imaginary past. Historical movies usually have less to do with the era they depict than the era in which they are made.

Compare the aesthetics of lush Technicolor Roman epics of the 1950s — “Quo Vadis,” “Ben-Hur” — to their sexualized mud-and-gore-stained descendants: Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” and HBO’s “Rome.” In the ’50s, movies about ancient Rome were like visits to a theme park with the added benefit of spiritual uplift. In the 21st century they invite you into a secular carnival of sadism.

Both “Gladiator” and “Rome,” though, recalled the heyday of widescreen epics decades earlier and invited a built-in audience of people old enough to remember those spectacles.

In an age when nostalgia has become the common currency of politics, pop entertainment and advertising, it might be good to remember that the word originally had nothing to do with warm and fuzzy memories sparked by old high-school yearbooks or reruns of Warner Bros. cartoons.

No, nostalgia was a form of mental illness. In 1688, Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, coined the word to describe the pain someone feels far from his native land and the fear that he may never return. Homesickness, in other words.

Nostalgia was so potentially debilitating (in Hofer’s view) that it could sap the life right out of you. Later it became known as the “Swiss disease” and supposedly affected Swiss mercenaries fighting far from home.

Psychologists long ago discounted nostalgia as mental illness, but George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” embraced the concept. In the book, which has been filmed twice and adapted for the stage, protagonist Winston Smith’s visits to a curio shop filled with antiques provide respite from a gray totalitarian environment, and the artifacts trigger a sense of a past he can’t remember.

In Smith’s universe, everything is now. “Facts” are erased or invented. Smith’s job requires him to destroy records inconsistent with the current propaganda narrative. The antique shop turns out to be a trap to lure citizens committing “thoughtcrime” who needed to be “cured.”

A little more than a decade after “1984” was published, Rod Serling dramatized nostalgia as a fatal malady in a classic episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Serling and his stable of science-fiction writers often toyed with the psychological power of nostalgia, but never better than in “A Stop at Willoughby,” first broadcast in 1960.

In Serling’s script, a bullied New York advertising executive commutes home on the train. Each night he dozes off and awakes at a train stop in Willoughby, a serene 1888 town with a gazebo, folks riding Victorian bicycles, ladies strolling with parasols, boys going fishing. But the bucolic charms of Willoughby deceive, and lure the ad man to his death.

The message seems clear: Nostalgia is irresistible. But proceed with caution.

In the real world, nostalgia won’t lead many of us to destruction. For most of us, it’s the equivalent of eating box after box of Cracker Jacks. But when Broadway stages are filled with vintage musicals and musty dramas, when TV screens are filled with series based on older series, when movies are based on films from a generation ago, you must wonder if an artist with a creative idea or a new kind of storytelling could even find a place at the table — and whether audiences would embrace anything other than the familiar.

Maybe, maybe not. But there’s a reason we, as entertainment consumers, seem so happy to dwell in the past: Like sex, nostalgia sells.

This story was originally published November 15, 2015 at 3:00 AM with the headline "From pop culture to politics, nostalgia is everywhere."