Mediated Nostalgia

Overview

"Mediated nostalgia" is a term used to describe the role of media in invoking, shaping, and exploiting nostalgia, as well as perpetuating specific tropes about or related to nostalgia, such as particular narratives about the individual or collective past. Though nostalgia originally referred to a pathologized homesickness, the term has come to mean a yearning less for a place and more for the past, whether experienced, reported, or imagined. Originally negative, it is now more often bittersweet, frequently positive, and implicated in social and cultural identities.

The relationship between nostalgia and media is not new. Though the meaning of nostalgia has shifted, as discussed below, when it was first coined in diagnosing mercenaries away from home, the singing of Swiss songs and the "Ranz des Vaches" (a melody played by Alpine herdsmen) was forbidden, because they could trigger the painful feelings of nostalgia that drove so many soldiers to desert or even take their own lives. The role of music in invoking nostalgia may be why generations of doctors sought for a physical explanation in the structures of the ear. We know now that scent is the sense with the most direct connection to nostalgia, via the limbic system, which includes the olfactory bulb; specific smells can trigger memories of times and places more reliably and rapidly than other sensory triggers. Because this is one of the senses least accessible by media, music and other sounds are more commonly employed to evoke specific times, places, and moods.

Ryan Lizardi's 2016 book Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media is concerned primarily with the rise of nostalgia as a determinant of content or marketing in mass media in the twenty-first century. Nostalgia and reconstructions of the past, however, impacted American mass media for at least the entirety of the twentieth century. While the baby boomers contributed to an avalanche of nostalgic media, the generations before them were responsible for several notable examples: One of the main attractions at Walt Disney World, for instance, is Main Street USA, based on Walt Disney's hometown at the turn of the century. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the revival of barbershop quartet music—a late nineteenth century form of popular music—resulted in a thorough reinvention and its continued popularity as a musical time machine.

Further Insights

The word "nostalgia" was coined by Johannes Hofer in the seventeenth century to characterize the depression experienced by Swiss mercenaries far from home; Hofer combined the Greek words nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain. Hofer's diagnosis was a breakthrough—before his determination, military physicians' best guess was that the mercenaries had suffered some sort of damage from the frequent sounding of cowbells in Switzerland. (The English word "homesickness" is derived from nostalgia, and was first used during the voyages of Captain Cook.) Soldiers—who for centuries were the people most likely to travel far from home on a regular basis and with the intention of returning—have reported feeling this homesickness since at least the Trojan War, and similar feelings are attested in ancient sources such as Jewish writings during the period of Babylonian exile. Originally considered a treatable condition, nostalgia has shifted in meaning; rarely is it described as a negative experience (at worst, bittersweet), and frequently it refers to "homesickness" not for a place, but a time. The most successful remedy for nostalgia as it was considered during the Enlightenment was to return home; when one is nostalgic not for Switzerland but for the 1970s or the early days of the Internet, there is no analogous treatment. It is likely not coincidence that the medical diagnosis of nostalgia was derogated in the nineteenth century and, outside of military medicine, almost completely vanished by the turn of the twentieth century, concurrent with the rise of modern psychology and the emphasis of the Freudians on childhood experiences as a determinant for adult personality.

Psychologist Krystine Batcho developed the Nostalgia Inventory in 1995. Like other diagnostic tools, it asks respondents to indicate their feeling or experience on a simple scale (1 to 9 from "not at all" to "very much"), in this case rating how much they miss various elements of their younger life: family, heroes, not having to worry, places, music, a specific loved one, friends, "things you did," toys, "the way people were," "feelings you had," TV shows and movies, school, "having someone to depend on," holidays, "the way society was," pets, "not knowing sad or evil things," church or temple, and one's childhood home. The elements here are a mix of the personal and the public, the intangible and the tangible: It is easy to imagine two very different experiences of nostalgia of equal strength, one centered on childhood friends, long-lost pets, and a life free of the everyday concerns of adulthood; the other centered on real or imagined changes to social norms and popular entertainment.

Twenty-first century entertainment has leaned heavily on nostalgia in the form of sequels, reboots, recreations, and new adaptations of media franchises, even more than in previous decades. Of the twenty highest-grossing movies in the twenty-first century, for example, four were sequels or prequels to twentieth century movies; five more were adaptations of comic book characters popular decades earlier; and three of the remaining were installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a fantasy series published in the middle of the twentieth century. In television, reboots and other rehashes became a prominent part of network programming. A new "reimagining" of the late 1970s series Battlestar Galactica was critically acclaimed. Dramas from the 1970s and 1980s like Hawaii Five-O, Macgyver, Magnum P.I., Cagney and Lacey, and Lost in Space were revived. Shows long off the air returned for new seasons after gaps of over a decade, including The X-Files, Will and Grace, Murphy Brown, and Roseanne. Roseanne had been off the air for 21 years after an initial nine-season run; the premiere of the new season earned ABC's highest ratings for a scripted program in over a decade, leading almost immediately to the development of numerous other returns. Twin Peaks, which had been off the air for more than 25 years, living on as a cult sensation, was brought back for a new season on Showtime.

As streaming services became prevalent over the 2010s, television's main competition was older episodes of television. When Hulu acquired the medical drama ER, for example, it immediately became the streaming service's highest-rated show, with hundreds of people binge-watching the entire fifteen seasons in the first thirty days, a feat requiring eight hours of viewing a day. The availability of entire series of older shows makes nostalgic product available to audiences in a new form: not as "reruns," which were doled out at a rate of an episode or two a day, but binge-watching, with the entire run of a show available for marathon viewings.

The food and beverage industry leaned on nostalgia in the twenty-first century, and not just in its advertising (where Coca-Cola, for instance, has long relied on it). There were several high-profile revivals, including banana-flavored Twinkies (the original flavor, before World War II rationing forced a change to vanilla), "throwback" versions of Pepsi and Mountain Dew (made with sugar instead of corn syrup, with old-fashioned logos), the returns of Jolt Cola and New York Seltzer from the 1980s and Surge soda from the 1990s, and General Mills' Halloween releases of Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy cereals, two of the "Monster Cereals" that had been discontinued in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The Monster cereals even released a special limited edition of the cereals, using "retro edition" packaging and sold exclusively at Target.

Issues

Feelings of nostalgia are not limited to times and places the individual has personally experienced. Nostalgia can be experienced vicariously for a time outside of one's own memory, and vicarious nostalgia plays a significant role in cultural myth-making. The arrival of the baby boom generation in American politics and public discourse brought nostalgia onto the stage to a degree not previously seen. While every generation had expressed nostalgia for previous times, changes in American culture provided more outlets for boomer nostalgia: movies and television shows like American Graffiti, Grease, and Happy Days that celebrated a heightened version of the white experience of the boomers' youth; perpetual reruns of television shows from the 1950s and early 60s that recycled rosy-tinted views of the American family like Leave it to Beaver and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; movies like Blazing Saddles, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid paid homage to the film genres and tropes the filmmakers had grown up with, while mid-century classics like Scarface and Invasion of the Body Snatchers were remade outright; a grandeur assigned to the so-called Camelot era of the 1960s and the student protests of that decade, often at the cost of downplaying the role of African Americans in the civil rights movement that had begun a decade earlier; and a framing of American public life that implicitly or explicitly compared current events to those of the 1960s and 70s. The Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Woodstock, which mythmaking had decided were the fundamental experiences of the baby boom generation, loomed over events of the 1980s and 1990s, continuing to inspire big-budget feature films. The claim repeated by boomers, explicitly and implicitly, was that the 1960s had permanently changed American culture; in keeping nostalgia for the era alive for as long as they did, they may have enacted a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The boomers encouraged the relationship between nostalgia and media, but did not make the introduction. In the boomers' own childhood, The Twilight Zone (a television show that would be resurrected in the 1980s, following boomer Steven Spielberg's Twilight Zone: The Movie) repeatedly dwelled on issues of nostalgia for childhood (as in "Kick the Can" or "Walking Distance") or an earlier era (the 1930s in "The Trouble With Templeton," the late nineteenth century in "A Stop at Willoughby"). Several of these episodes are routinely numbered among the show's best by critics and fans, particularly "Willoughby," in which Gart Williams finds a train that brings him to the nineteenth century town. Williams is the classic "man in the grey flannel suit," an advertising executive; Willoughby is a respite from the hectic and consumerist world of 1960. The episode ends with the report of Williams' death from jumping off the train, leaving it ambiguous whether Willoughby was imagined or if the death of his 1960 body was necessary to keep him somehow spiritually in the past, but whatever the answer, the effects of nostalgia here are not as innocent as the time on which it fixates.

So too for the effects of nostalgia in public discourse. Discussions since the 1970s or so of "family values" or invoking the "breakdown of the nuclear family" rest on invoking an image of the American family as it was represented in 1950s television: Dad works, Mom stays home, the kids are well-behaved, and there are no real financial worries. The family likely lives in a suburb, which experienced a boom in response to the housing shortage experienced when soldiers returned home from World War II. There are many problems implicit in this image, of course: This is a time before the gains of feminism, a time in which the "average American family" is assumed to be white and heterosexual, and a time when the wages of the lower and middle classes were more commensurate to the prosperity of the country as a whole, before income inequality and wage stagnation made a single-income family household an impossibility for most American families. Furthermore, the image itself is only an image: Not many Americans lived like the families on TV. Key to any discussion of boomer nostalgia or invocations of the 1950s of an American Golden Age is the fact that 1950s Americans themselves believed they were in a period of decline, not triumph; the economic anxiety after World War II, the Cold War and the spread of communism in other countries, and perceptions that "the working man" was working harder than ever before at the expense of his home life, all contributed to a widely held conviction that American life was getting worse.

Many political campaigns likewise invoke the "good old days" when selling a candidate or idea. In the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections, a return to some idealized past was central to Donald Trump's presidential campaigns. Nostalgia is a hallmark of many populist movements around the globe, including the campaign in Britain to leave the European Union, a movement known as Brexit.

Invocations of the past to make a point in or about the present often require constructing that past. Parents of every generation are warned either that things are more dangerous for their children now or that they coddle their children too much; either warning requires constructing a narrative about the childhood experience of the past, one that contrasts with a narrative about the childhood of the present. In 2018, The Simpsons responded to Hari Kondabalu and Michael Melamedoff's 2017 documentary The Problem With Apu, which discussed the impact of Apu's characterization on the South Asian American community, with a short speech by Lisa. In coded references, Lisa referred to Apu as a character who "was applauded and inoffensive, [but] is now politically incorrect." The Simpsons' defense here is founded on a claim about the past: that stereotypical depictions of Indian immigrants voiced by White Americans were not offensive for the first twenty or so years of the show and only became offensive in the 2010s, a claim that is ahistorical. This is a common stratagem: attempting to discredit a practice, a belief, or an objection on the grounds that it is novel, that it is not something that can be found in the past, and that therefore it is suspect. These claims require constructing the past in the same way nostalgia does: by emphasizing what is flattering and useful, and downplaying what is not.

Bibliography

Baldwin, M., & Landau, M. J. (2014). Exploring nostalgia's influence on psychological growth. Self & Identity, 13(2), 162–177. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=93797531&site=ehost-live

Bevan, A. (2013). Nostalgia for pre-digital media in Mad Men. Television & New Media, 14(6), 546–559. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=90495316&site=ehost-live

Bolin, G. (2016). Passion and nostalgia in generational media experiences. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(3), 250–264. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=115789746&site=ehost-live

Cheung, W., Sedikides, C., & Wildschut, T. (2017). Nostalgia proneness and reduced prejudice. Personality & Individual Differences, 109, 89–97. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=121222305&site=ehost-live

Compton, J., Daradanova, M., Mindt, T., Moellinger, T., & Edy, J. (2004). Ghosts of the future: Collective nostalgia and the Kennedys. Conference Papers—Midwestern Political Science Association, n.pag. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=16055395&site=ehost-live

Elçi, E. (2022, August 23). The politics of nostalgia and populism. Political Violence at a Glance, politicalviolenceataglance.org/2022/08/23/politics-of-nostalgia-and-populism/

Lizardi, R. (2016). Mediated nostalgia: Individual memory and contemporary mass media. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Newman, D.B. et.al. (2020 Feb.) Nostalgia and well-being in daily life: An ecological validity perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118 (2), 325-47, doi.apa.org/doi/10.1037/pspp0000236

Niemeyer, K., & Siebert, O. (2023). Nostalgia, media, and technologies of the future. Current Opinion in Psychology, 50. DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101561

Phillipov, M. (2016). Escaping to the country: Media, nostalgia, and the new food industries. Popular Communication, 14(2), 111–122. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=114820368&site=ehost-live

van Tilburg, W. A., Sedikides, C., & Wildschut, T. (2015). The mnemonic muse: Nostalgia fosters creativity through openness to experience. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 59, 1–7. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=102592522&site=ehost-live