Nostalgia is big business. The Netflix series One Day has underlined that point, jumping to the top of TV streaming charts in the past month. The story about an on-off relationship unfolding to a Britpop-infused soundtrack gives viewers of a certain age a dose of poignant escapism.
Full disclosure: I got totally swept up in it, and I am still thinking about those last episodes a fortnight later. But, if my brain is divided into emotional and rational parts, the latter is now asking: Was I just played by Netflix?
Drama is all about toying with our emotions but there’s something particularly calculating in the business model of big screen producers. From the 1980s retro-themed hit series Stranger Things to popular reboots of Barbie and Wonka, a cash-for-nostalgia dynamic is well established.
Should this trouble us? American author and critic Grafton Tanner believes so, arguing that nostalgia is being weaponised by powerful interest groups in an bid “to suppress the emotions that threaten the systems of oppression under capitalism”.
Suppress the wha’? I hear you say.
Tanner develops the idea in his book Foreverism. Nostalgia can be understood as “an emotion experienced when something normally absent in our lives becomes momentarily present”, he says. Foreverism is the exploitation of this emotion – or more precisely an attempt to eliminate nostalgia in its purest form – for........