In the past year alone, we’ve had the Barbie movie, a Hunger Games prequel, and the return of 2000s groups like S Club 7 and Girls Aloud. What’s behind the never-ending nostalgia?
Over the past decade, there have been so many remakes, reboots, and revamps that when Mattel informed audiences of their plans to produce 17 more films (including a Barney movie) following the success of Barbie, it came to nobody’s surprise. 2023 alone has been stuffed to the brim with nostalgia, with a The Last of Us TV adaption, Scream 6, a Mean Girls musical film (Walmart also released a back-to-school ad with the cast of Mean Girls for its Black Friday sale), the first Big Brother season in five years, the Wonka prequel, the Hunger Games prequel, and the Five Nights At Freddy’s movie, as well as the re-grouping of popular UK bands such as S Club 7 and Girls Aloud. It’s not just old ‘content’ being re-visited; digicams have made a comeback, Y2K is in full swing, and ‘Gen X’ soft club seems to be the new It Girl aesthetic for the new year. As the decade progresses, we’re nearing a snake-eating-its-own-tail level of nostalgia.
It should be noted that this was also the year of the historical WAG/SAG-AFTRA strike, which fought (and is still fighting for) creative freedoms and originality within Hollywood. A key contention for both the writers and the actors on strike was that the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) was determined to to use AI for things such as scriptwriting, scanning extra’s faces and duplicating them into productions without consent to lessen production costs. Hollywood’s refusal to understand the worries of its workers signifies a larger problem with the state of not only our media but also our culture – one that is hellbent on a refusal to self-examine or critique. It’s the Calm app using AI to recreate Jimmy Stewart’s voice to send people into a lull, 26 years after the actor died. Even in our sleep, we’re not free from corporate nostalgia and its reluctance to let the dead rest, whether it’s a cultural trend or a beloved icon.
In 2001, cultural theorist Svetlana Boym described modern-day nostalgia as “a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return and the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values”. In 2023, Boym’s examination of our cultural fascination with nostalgia remains as relevant today as it was almost 22 years ago when her book The Future of Nostalgia was published. Stunted adulthood, age regression, feeding your inner child – whatever you choose to call it – we have entered an age where the main currency is a cultural yearning for the past and a refusal to confront our present.
@444.ailyn dreamed to be a teennn ib / creds @₊˚ Ｍ ａ ｈ⚡️ #fyp #zyxcba #2014vibes ♬ original sound - 𝒶𝒾𝓁𝓎𝓃 🎀.
Unlike the Reagan-backed nostalgia for the 50s during the 1980s or our most recent love affair with 80s nostalgia in the 2010s (which spurred perhaps the worst decade of Blockbuster flicks, encompassing the Star Wars sequel series, two Ghostbusters reboots and Jurassic World ), the nostalgia cycle of the 2020s appears to be shorter than it ever has been in recent memory. Long gone are the days when you’d wait till your thirties to be nostalgic for your teenage years. For some Gen Z, the period between 2014 and 2016 is already far away enough in our cultural memory to be considered nostalgic. Post-2016, we’ve had enough cultural shifts to last us a millennium, occurring at an unprecedented speed which leaves us unable to sit with what’s changed and how we feel about it. Between Brexit, Trump’s election and the rise in neo-fascism across the Western world along with a life-altering pandemic, the need to turn back time isn’t surprising. In his book Ghosts of My Life, writer and academic Mark Fisher notes that there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present, because the idea of a future existing seems nonsensical. This is especially true for Gen Z, who have grown up knowing civilisation could collapse as soon as 2050 due to climate change.
Professor Leander Reeves, a historian from Oxford Brookes University who studies hyperreality, tells Dazed that nostalgia is simply our cultural muscle memory. “The end of the 20th century felt like a hopeful end to the decade where we shed our old thinking and traditions. In the UK specifically, we had the rise of New Labour, and at the time, it seemed like change,” says Dr Reeves. “Compare this to how vulnerable and unstable things seem to be now with rising prices as well as climate and global disasters. Young people must be angry and feeling robbed of what could have been, so nostalgia creeps in.” So what do you do instead of focusing on a future that’s not promised? You go back to the days of old.
“Young people must be angry and feeling robbed of what could have been, so nostalgia creeps in” — Professor Leander Reees
This can be seen when looking at the re-cap video essay genre on YouTube, a resurgence of childhood TV and movies from the 2000s and early 2010s, where shows such as Victorious and Vampire Diaries are revisited, reexamined and ultimately given a new seal of approval for consumption. It’s not just the audiences revisiting their youth but creators and actors from those shows, such as former Even Steven’s child star Christy Carlson Romano, who owns PodCo, a podcasting company that houses podcasts from the likes of the cast of Ned’s Declassified and Wizards of Waverley Place.
It should be noted that the trend of nostalgic re-watches and podcasts has emerged around the same time that former child stars such as Jennette McCurdy, Alyson Stoner, Alexa Nikolas, Demi Lovato and many others have gone public with claims of unsafe work environments, lack of safety, and possible sexual harassment on set. Earlier this year, fans harassed Dylan and Cole Sprouse to join in on a 2023 gag from their 2008 show Suite Life on Deck, where the Martin twins set a restaurant date for 15 years into the future. This comes after Cole recently informed fans that his experience with child stardom with his brother was traumatic, allegedly due to their mother using them as cash cows.
One would think that engaging in media that has had such a lasting, harmful impact on its stars would be antithetical to Gen Z’s popular reputation as forward-thinking and compassion-led. There’s an assumption that unlike millennials, often painted with a cringe-worthy brush of wanting to go back to the 90s and living in fear of #adulting, Gen Z wouldn’t fall into the same behaviours. However, if the future is what we fear, then the past must be revisited at any cost, even if it can feel morally duplicitous.
This can also be seen in the idolisation of young Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes and Britney Spears. While these women are adults today, fancams and edits of their notorious pap shots from the 00s, with Timbaland’s greatest hits blaring in the background, end up freezing them in time. Spears and Bynes, in particular, are often portrayed as an example of “wow, they were so hot and then life happened”, but the commodification of their traumas, much like those of the current batch of Disney and Nickelodeon stars now coming of age, remains a way for people to celebrate a connected sense of loss of the pop culture of our youth. The rose-tinted glasses of the 2000s and the constant nostalgia-baiting trick you into thinking life 20 years ago was much better than your life now. Pining after a half-remembered memory instead of seizing the day – however corny that sounds – placates you into forgetting how much we could be creating or experiencing in the now. You could be making memories as a 20-something, but instead choose to lament over no longer being 14.
“Nostalgia is bittersweet in nature – there’s the sweet warmness of the memories and then the bitter suck punch of waking up to reality,” New York-based writer and founder of the Substack blog Cafe Hysteria, Madison Huizinga, tells Dazed. “It’s an intoxicating feeling, and we linger in it because it doesn’t ask much of us instead of passively consuming the past”.
At its root, nostalgia is the suffering felt when one desires to return to their place of origin or to a familiar moment of their life. It’s the pang in our chest when we watch an old movie or smell a scent that hasn’t been around us in years. It is also what’s been used to pacify and, in turn, monetise consumers’ genuine feelings of discomfort and anger at the state of the world. What does it mean to grow up in a world that has not only robbed you of stability but routinely uses media to stunt your transition from adolescence to adulthood and asks you to depoliticise yourself in order to engage with it?
Take Barbie, the feminist flick of 2023, which used 2010s pop feminist nostalgia to spearhead a social media campaign where women and girls posted old pictures of themselves and reminisced about the anxieties of growing up as girls, while simultaneously yearning for the innocence of it all. Much like the film itself, the trend is contradictory, unsure of its footing and how political it needs to be to discuss the lived realities of young girls while profiting off of their insecurities at the same time, with the Barbie Glow Jelly Face Mask to age youthfully and Barbie Bikini Serum so you can glow like Barbie when you shave (“Barbie™ gets bumpy down there too,” reads the product description).
“People are cherry-picking what they want to be nostalgic for. You see this often with pro-Americana nostalgia in conservative communities where there’s this longing for the mid-century, but there are elements they leave behind” – Madison Huizinga
The regenerated hype around The Hunger Games that arrived when its prequel was released in November of this year asks something similar of us, where we should all be reminiscing about the mass culture of the 2010s, but conveniently forgetting the messier and more politically tense sides of it. The book series is staunchly political, with its themes borrowed from the Iraq war and America’s colonial history, where children are harmed and punished for a crime they did not commit. In the same year as the original film’s release, Trayvon Martin was tragically murdered, but when we’re asked to engage in 2012 nostalgia, events like that are pushed aside. The Hunger Games prequel has been marketed through a nostalgic lens that defangs both the film and its audience by detaching the series from historical realities and instead focusing on how good J Law and Josh Hutcherson fancams make us feel, rather than the uncomfortable truth at hand.
As Huizinga argues, “part of it is that people are cherry-picking what they want to be nostalgic for. You see this often with pro-Americana nostalgia in conservative communities where there’s this longing for the mid-century, but there are elements they leave behind. Tradwives do this a lot by using the aesthetics of stay-at-home moms or wives, but then their clothes will be made by Shein, or they’ll be using social media to become influencers.”
What will the nostalgia cycle look like in five to ten years’ time? It’s hard to say: the process been so accelerated that perhaps we’ll be referencing 2020 pandemic-core (if we’re not already) or making memes on how great we had it in 2023, while ignoring the tragedy of the Palestinian genocide. The internet acts as a Magic 8 ball, choosing its next trends at random. For now, I’d say that I hope we’re able to revisit history and culture without falling into the trap of thinking we must devote ourselves to the all-mighty power of nostalgia. Artists like Troye Sivan, PinkPantheress and Amaarae show us what’s possible when borrowing from aesthetics of the noughties and 2010s and using them to inform their unique soundscapes, rather than producing pale imitations of music from these eras. The beauty of creativity is that there’s so much we’ve yet to discover or make – and who knows, maybe an entirely new music or film genre, art form or writing style will be cultivated in the next few years. But this is unlikely to happen if we continue falling into YouTube rabbit holes about our favourite childhood TV shows.