Hollywood plays it safe with nostalgia-baiting
• The past creeps into the future of movies in a string of recycled hits
If you look at the box office figures coming out of the US, you would be forgiven for thinking that you have been transported in a DeLorean car back in time to a place where the nostalgic comforts of every decade from the 1970s to early 2000s are still very much alive and well on the big screen.
First, there is Baz Luhrmann’s typically shiny style-over-substance biopic
Elvis, followed by the 1980s gung ho US patriotism of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun sequel, with the reanimated dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg’s 90s classic
Jurassic World making their next appearance in Jurassic World Dominion. There’s also Disney animation Lightyear for the original Toy Story generation, who are now old enough to give their own kids plenty of nostalgic adventures to keep the whole family happy.
For decades, nostalgiabaiting has been an increasingly pivotal weapon in mass entertainment’s arsenal. George Lucas gave audiences their 1950s nostalgia fix in his 1973 classic American Graffiti before going on to completely change the world of the big screen with the Star Wars franchise later in the decade, which drew heavily on a nostalgic reimagining of the classic ’50s westerns and sci-fi movies he had grown up with.
In the 1980s, the Back to the Future films of Robert Zemeckis successfully dealt in heavy dollops of ’50s nostalgia by time-travelling their hero to the simpler days when boys and girls were supposedly more innocent and rock ‘n roll ruled the airwaves.
Since then, the Hollywood machine has increasingly resorted to nostalgic appeal in a string of films that have recycled beloved hits from different decades for new audiences. In the early 2000s, it was the turn of the 1970s to be the vehicle for nostalgic reboots of beloved classics such as Shaft, Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels.
A decade later and we have had to endure a slew of misremembered, context-free celebrations of the excesses and absurdities of the ’80s in films such as Hot Tub Time Machine
and the recent Netflix smash hit Stranger Things.
Now, with the return of 1990s obsessions such as Princess Diana, Sex and the City and Friends to screens both big and small, the nostalgia phenomenon — which Mad Men’s Don Draper once described as a “carousel ... [that] let’s us travel the way a child travels — around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved” — shows no signs of abating.
Nostalgia has become the norm and the safest bet for an industry unwilling to take too many new chances, especially in the wake of the devastating effects of the Covid 19 pandemic on its profits.
With recent announcements of blockbuster films about Barbie; the return of Bette Midler in a sequel to her 1990s witchy comedy Hocus Pocus;
the swirling rumours of a Johnny Depp/Disney makeup in the form of yet another bigger, more expensive Pirates of the Caribbean outing; and the release later in 2022 of the first in James Cameron’s series of Avatar sequels, the past is very much the future of the movies.
You can easily argue that the rise of the Marvel Comics Universe has also relied heavily on nostalgia in its appeal to diehard comic fans as the best means of delivering a form of entertainment, which appeals to their love of the comic book as a serialised form with a complex interweaving series of characters and situations, that has led the franchise to the peak of box office history.
The word “nostalgia” has its origins in Greek and derives from the words nostos (home) and algia (pain) and nothing has the psychological power of the blockbuster to play to homesickness as a means of reminding audiences of the days when life was simpler and everything was so much better — and you were a Barbie girl and I was a Barbie boy, living in a Barbie world.
Recent photos from the set of the upcoming Barbie film show stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling prancing around in deliriously over-the-top luminous pink ’80s outfits, sporting bleach-blond hair and heavy orange tans and making you worry about the future of humanity and entertainment.
However, that the film is directed by Greta Gerwig, who has proved herself one of the more sensitive and smart feminist filmmakers around, offers some hope that the film may be more than its garish costumes and makeup might have you believe.
If, as some early commentators have promised, Barbie will be a profeminist subversion of the doll’s questionable history through the decades, then it will be a rare case of a nostalgic/retro film that does more than simply hit the easy marks of longing for better days. We’ll have to wait and see but, for now, if you are an entertainment “whenwe” who longs for an era when life was less complicated and the lines between good and evil, right and wrong and heroes and villains were less grey, Hollywood has you covered for a good, long time yet. If you prefer your films to offer some sort of reflection of the now, then sadly your available cinema release options are increasingly few and far between, a situation that may make you long for better days when there were wider options that catered to a broader spectrum of tastes.
NOSTALGIA HAS BECOME THE SAFEST BET FOR AN INDUSTRY UNWILLING TO TAKE TOO MANY CHANCES