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THE REFLECTIVE AGE: NOSTALGIA AT THE END OF HISTORY
________________________________________
DISSERTATION
________________________________________
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
College of Arts and Sciences
at the University of Kentucky
By
Zachary Griffith
Lexington, Kentucky
Director: Dr. Alan Nadel, William T. Bryan Chair in American Literature and Culture
Lexington, Kentucky
2022
Copyright © Zachary Griffith 2022
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5005-2560
ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION
THE REFLECTIVE AGE: NOSTALGIA AT THE END OF HISTORY
This project investigates the ways in which nostalgic American media of the last
decade reflects the sociopolitical conditions of the end of history. It begins with the
assertion that the end of history represents a confounded, contradictory moment in
which large-scale political change is relatively scarce, and belief in a progressive
future has largely been abandoned, while cultural change has also accelerated at a
pace never before seen––spurred on, in particular, by the constant return of dead
styles and dormant IP. In other words, it seems as if nothing is changing and
everything is changing simultaneously. The recent boom in nostalgic media, I contend,
is a symptom of this condition, so affected by the cultural forces that produced it that
the nostalgia we see today is unlike what has come before. Nostalgia in this period is
often premised on a process of hyperaestheticization, which substitutes mediated
visions of the past for history, subsequently encouraging a breakdown between text
and referent––the ‘80s, in this formulation, was defined more by John Hughes, neon,
and synthesizers than Reagan and austerity. These texts, in other words, often rely on
an elevation of mediated reference as a means of reconstructing the past, wherein
understanding of the past is merely a matter of recognizing its mediated artifacts. This
nostalgic paradigm also reflects the conditions of the end of history in its cruelly
optimistic compulsion to repeat, particularly in the form of reboots and revivals, in a
world where everything always already repeats. Nostalgia in this period promotes the
idea of reflecting on and reconnecting with the past, often as a means of recovering
what has been lost, but does so in superficial ways that ultimately result in
misrecognition and further alienation from history. Nostalgic media, in this way,
exacerbates the fraught, confounding conditions of the end of history. Ernest Cline’s
2011 novel
Ready Player One
and its 2020 sequel
Ready Player Two
, for instance,
reveal the ways in which the end of history’s abandonment of a progressive teleology
has encouraged the notion that the past is the only viable refuge from the horrors of
the present, while, at the same time, the period’s emphasis on mediated pasts leads
nostalgic subjects to not only misrecognize the past into which they wish to flee, but
also the circumstances that led to this point. The hyper-referentiality of the Netflix
series
Stranger Things
is a perfect example of the aesthetic logic of this paradigm,
with its hollowed allusions to media replacing a deeper engagement with the contours
of the historical period it purports to capture.
Twin Peaks: The Return
, the 2017
revival of the celebrated series, provides a profound critique of the ways in which
televisual reboots and revivals seek (and inevitably fail) to symbolically repair the
problems of the present by returning to, and revising, the crises of the past.
KEYWORDS: Nostalgia, American Culture, Film, Literature, Television
Zachary Griffith
(Name of Student)
11/18/22
Date
THE REFLECTIVE AGE: NOSTALGIA AT THE END OF HISTORY
By
Zachary Griffith
Alan Nadel
Director of Dissertation
Michael Genovese
Director of Graduate Studies
11/18/22
Date
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s difficult for me to find the words to fully express my gratitude to everyone
who has helped throughout this process, but I will try.
First, I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to my advisor, Alan Nadel, for
the countless hours he spent helping me shape these ideas into a coherent whole. There
has been no greater influence on my work, and my growth as a writer and thinker, than
Alan, and I am so grateful for his ceaseless commitment and generosity. I would also
like to thank the rest of my committee, Carol Mason, Michelle Sizemore, and Jim
Ridolfo, for their enthusiastic contributions, as readers and teachers, to this work and to
my development as a scholar.
I am also thankful for my PhD cohort, Katie McClain, Shannon Branfield, and
Jenn Murray, who not only read, commented on, and debated draft after draft, but whose
own work consistently pushed me to better my own. I would also like to acknowledge
my friends Daniel Floyd and Matt Spencer, who always found time to read drafts and
provide both generous and generative feedback.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this project would not exist without the love
and support of my mother, my grandmother, and my late father. I am who I am because
of you, and my successes are yours.
Lastly, I want to thank my wife, Cheyenne, for everything: for her robust and her
relentless belief in my abilities, for reading revision after revision (sometimes of the
same sentence), for her unwavering support even in the most challenging times, for her
patience, and for everything else that I can’t express in words.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................................................iii
INTRODUCTION. ............................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1. THE REFLECTIVE AGE: NOSTALGIA AT THE END OF
HISTORY..................................................................................................................... 7
CHAPTER 2. READY PLAYER ONE, NOSTALGIA, AND RECOGNITION................36
CHAPTER 3. STRANGER THINGS, NOSTALGIA, AND AESTHETICS.....................93
CHAPTER 4. TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, NOSTALGIA, AND REPETITION......134
CODA. BACK TO THE BEGINNING: NOSTALGIA AFTER THE END OF
HISTORY?................................................................................................................174
WORKS CITED.............................................................................................................. 179
VITA................................................................................................................................185
iv
INTRODUCTION
This project investigates how nostalgic American media of the last decade reflects
the sociopolitical conditions of the end of history. It begins with the assertion that the
end of history, first coined by Francis Fukuyama in 1989 to describe the triumph of
liberal democracy following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of
communism, has, in the years since, not only become the guiding logic of much of
mainstream American politics, but also heralded a confounded, contradictory moment in
which large-scale political change is relatively scarce, and belief in a progressive future
has largely been abandoned, while cultural change has also accelerated at a pace never
before seen––encouraged, in particular, by the constant return of dead styles and dormant
IP. In other words, the end of history promotes the feeling that simultaneously nothing is
changing and everything is changing. In the midst of this paradoxical sense of constant
flux and grinding stagnation produced by forty years of neoliberalism, spurred on by the
pervasive notion that there is no alternative to the present’s malaise, the past is
positioned as the only viable refuge.
The recent boom in nostalgic media is therefore a symptom, I contend, of the
conditions of the end of history, so affected by the cultural forces that produced it that
the nostalgia we see today is historically unique. Conventionally defined by a longing for
a lost time and/or space, nostalgia at the end of history takes on new dimensions,
particularly as a result of cultural, social, and technological developments of the last
1
twenty years. Instead of longing and loss, nostalgia in this period is often premised on a
process of hyperaestheticization, which substitutes mediated visions of the past for
history, subsequently encouraging a breakdown between text and referent and a loss of
historical situatedness. Nostalgic works, in other words, often rely on an elevation of
mediated reference as a means of reconstructing the past, wherein understanding the past
is merely a matter of recognizing its styles and artifacts. The longing produced in these
texts can therefore be abated through engagement with media: if you “miss” the ‘80s,
you can just throw on a John Hughes movie and be instantly transported. Historical
periods are thus flattened into aesthetic paradigms, absent the political and social
dimensions that actually shaped them. This brand of nostalgia also reflects the conditions
of the end of history in its compulsion to repeat, particularly in the form of reboots and
revivals, in a world where everything always already repeats. As Jean Baudrillard
remarked, despite the moniker, the post-historical world is actually a time of
endlessne
ss,
in which nothing ever really ends and old ideas and artifacts are constantly on the verge
of returning. The progressive novelty that characterized much of the twentieth century, in
other words, has given way to an era of rampant recycling.
The chapters of this project examine how narratives of the 2010s treat this shifting
nature of our relationship to the past, showing, again and again, that the stories we tell
about ourselves and our pasts illustrate the particular conditions of the end of history,
producing a disoriented culture, trapped in a perpetual present. Each of the texts I discuss
illustrates significant aspects of this nostalgic paradigm, from the hyperaestheticization
2
of the past and the subsequent elevation of reference and recognition in identity
formation to the fraught desire to revise and repeat in the face of decline. Together, they
describe a cultural moment that is defined by these forces, illuminating the particular
conditions of what I have termed “the reflective age.”
Chapter One describes the contours of the reflective age and end of history nostalgia,
arguing that the period’s emphasis on style, mediation, and repetition, instigated in part
by the neoliberal disavowal of social politics and abandonment of progressive teleology,
marks a distinct shift in the history of the nostalgia. End of history nostalgia, I argue, has
become divorced from its conceptual roots, replacing perpetual, unresolvable longing for
bygone experience with aesthetic infatuation that, as a result of technological
advancements such as streaming, can easily be satisfied. Further, the dissolution of
historical thinking that Fredric Jameson identified as a fundamental feature of late
capitalism has only increased in this period, with aesthetics commonly replacing social
and political reality as a synecdoche for an era. These shifts are due in part to the
post-historical abandonment of progressive teleology and futurity in favor of short-term
profits, incrementalism, marketization, and, in many cases, outright regression. The
chapter concludes with a reading of the Netflix miniseries
Maniac
, whose
temporally-chaotic setting highlights the conditions produced by the reflective age,
which, like a hall of mirrors, leaves one trapped within a disorienting series of reflections,
refractions, and misdirections.
Chapter Two analyzes Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel
Ready Player One
and its 2020
3
sequel
Ready Player Two,
arguing that the novels reveal how the end of history’s twin
pillars of stagnation and decay, coupled with the notion that there is no alternative to the
present system, have encouraged the notion that the past is the only viable refuge from
the horrors of the present. At the same time, the period’s emphasis on mediated pasts
leads nostalgic subjects not only to misrecognize the past into which they wish to flee
but also the circumstances that led to this point. Cline’s novels also illuminate the depths
of the post-historical elevation of culture over politics––seen in the novels’ emphasis on
nostalgia induced through references to mediated artifacts alone––as well as its effects
on identity formation resulting from the way that neoliberalism indexes identity to
patterns of consumption. Recognition, the novels illustrate, is often no longer a political
issue connected to one’s fundamental rights, but rather a matter of the social capital
accorded to the media that define one’s life. Politics, in other words, appear to be a dead
end, so social life becomes a matter of pure prestige, and being seen and heard, in this
context, is a function of the status of one’s taste. Together, I argue, these shifts create a
barrier to remedying the posthistorical stagnation and decay from which the nostalgiac
flees.
Chapter Three examines the Netflix series
Stranger Things
as the archetype of this
paradigm’s aesthetic logic, showing how it substitutes hollowed allusions to media for a
deeper engagement with the contours of the historical period it purports to capture. The
series, I argue, is functionally akin to an empty container into which audiences can
project whatever meanings they wish, as it regularly reduces historical elements to
4
markers of genre or trope that can produce a seemingly endless array of interpretations.
In this process of reconstructing the 1980s based on mediated reference, the series also
inadvertently reproduces many of the political problems of the period’s media, including
its regressive racial politics and distrust of government. As a result of these traits,
Stranger Things’
attempts to confront and conquer symbolically the horrors of the past
that it hides behind metaphor and trope ultimately fall short, as the show fails to conceive
of them as anything other than aesthetic form. A better future, the series suggests, is not
possible, and things will only ever get worse––a conclusion that is provoked by its
unwillingness to confront these problems directly.
Chapter Four reads
Twin Peaks: The Return
, the 2017 revival of the celebrated 1990
television series, as a commentary on televisual reboots/revivals and the repetitiveness
that has plagued American culture of the past decade. Politically, the end of history is
marked by stagnation, decay, and a preference for management over resolution;
culturally, it is defined by an apparent lack of novelty and the constant return of dead
styles amid seemingly unending shifts in trends––progressing, in other words, in the
circular fashion of a treadmill. The series, I argue, provides a profound critique of the
ways in which televisual reboots and revivals seek (and inevitably fail) to symbolically
repair the problems of the present by returning to, and revising, the crises of the past.
Agent Cooper’s failed quest to return to the timeline of the original series and save Laura
Palmer, in this light, symbolizes the way that nostalgia and nostalgic media function as
cruelly optimistic fantasies that bind individuals to forms that no longer work (and
5
arguably never did) as they seek refuge from, or endeavor to repair, the ravages of the
present.
Together, the chapters of this project illuminate multiple dimensions of the changing
nature of nostalgic media at the end of history, as well as the ways in which the period’s
sociocultural logic and political conditions have shifted how we interact with the past
and conceive of our present and future. With its unique combination of post-Cold War
triumphalism, neoliberal rationality (including, especially, its championing of the
cultural over the social and political), and economic and environmental stagnation and
decline, the end of history, this project illustrates, should no longer be understood as a
political punchline or a case of naive presentism, but rather as a coherent and totalizing
period in the history of American capitalism.
6
CHAPTER ONE
THE REFLECTIVE AGE: NOSTALGIA AT THE END OF HISTORY
In the title track of their 2013 album
Reflektor
, Arcade Fire singer Win Butler
describes being caught within what can be described as a surreal hall of mirrors, a place
characterized by disorientation and misdirection, situated within what he calls “the
reflective age.” He finds himself “trapped,” he tells us in the opening line, “in a prison, a
prism of light” and details a search for a way to enter an unknown but desired space
through a “connector” only to realize in the chorus that the path forward was simply a
“reflektor”: “I thought I found a way to enter / but it was just a reflektor / I thought I
found the connector / but it was just a reflektor.” Unable to make it out by the close of the
song, Butler (echoing Baudrillard) descends into a state of frenzy repeating “just a
reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.” The outro interpolates this line
with the phrase “thought you would bring me to the resurrector, turns out it was just a
reflektor.”
The conditions Butler describes serve as a cogent meditation on the nature of
American culture of the last decade, particularly its ever-increasing obsession with the
past. While in other parts of the song, its attention turns inward as Butler considers the
growing disconnect between himself and his wife (bandmate Régine Chassagne),
“Reflektor” nonetheless provides a useful heuristic for interrogating the particular
textures of what Simon Reynolds has termed “retromania,” and the song’s
characterization of the present as “the reflective age” provides the central framing for this
project.
7
The most noteworthy element of this period’s engagement with the past—and this
is especially true of the 2010s—is the nostalgia boom in media, which roughly coincided
with the premiere of the AMC series
Mad Men
in 2007 and has, particularly in recent
years, gone into overdrive with series like
Stranger Things
and a slew of remakes and
reboots accompanying the reincorporation of 80s and early 90s aesthetics into popular
style. What we’ve seen in this period is not simply a resurgence of nostalgic longing, of a
desire to go back to the good old days of one’s childhood or adolescence, of what we
might call experiential nostalgia—that is, nostalgia for one’s lived experience (or the
perception thereof)—but rather an explosion of what Ryan Lizardi has called mediated
nostalgia—nostalgia manifest both for and through media such as film, television, and
music. What this ultimately represents is a reordering of the distinction Paul Grainge
makes between nostalgic mood (the structure of feeling or affective and experiential
discourse) and nostalgic mode (the commodified style or practice manifest in cultural
productions) in which the nostalgic mode has come to dominate to such a degree that the
mood has become utterly subordinated to it—a matter of style over substance.
“Reflektor” is important here because it helps crystallize several key differences
in experiential nostalgia and mediated nostalgia as they exist today, and it serves to
illustrate the conditions that help define the period. Critically, analysis of nostalgia is
often linked to Walter Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus as the Angel of
History, the backward glancing spectator “at the threshold of past and future” (Boym 29),
blown forward by the winds of progress. For Benjamin, the drawing serves as a metaphor
for the modern hyperfixation on the past, and its blindness to the future. As Svetlana
Boym and others have pointed out, however, his reading is a distinctly modernist
8
interpretation of the forces of history and their cultural significance, and we should
always remember to historicize Benjamin’s insights. To this end, Zygmunt Bauman has
argued that, while the image remains powerful, the conditions of modernity that
Benjamin found within it no longer adequately reflect the present, and we might conjure
a very different reading of Klee’s work if we were to reexamine it today:
were we to look closely at Klee’s drawing almost a century after Benjamin put on
record his unfathomably profound and indeed incomparable insight…what might
strike the viewer most is the Angel changing direction—the Angel of History
caught in the midst of a U-turn: his face turning from the past to the future, his
wings being pushed backwards by the storm blowing this time from the imagined,
anticipated and feared in advance Hell of the future towards the Paradise of the
past. (
Retrotopia
2)
Bauman’s reading is insightful for several reasons, but most notably because it pinpoints
a crucial shift in the relationship between past, present, and future from the time of
Benjamin’s writing. In the years that have followed, Bauman explains, utopian
aspirations have been replaced by what he terms
retrotopia
: “visions located in the
lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-yet-unborn and so
inexistent future” (
Retrotopia
5). The major socio-political forces of the latter twentieth
century in the West, including especially the “privatization/individualization of the idea
of ‘progress’ and of the pursuit of life’s improvements” (5) have led to uncertain and
often frightening visions of the future, which served to delegitimize utopian thinking. Its
replacement, he contends, is a backward-glancing cultural narrative, which seeks a return
to prior states and structures in order to undo, often unconsciously, the damages of
9
neoliberalism. Bauman’s revision, more than anything, represents an important call to
reconsider the present’s relationship to the past, and rightly recognizes the power of
Benjamin’s Angel to do so. Because Bauman’s reinterpretation misses the significance of
media in today’s retrograde cultural landscape, however, his Angel remains imprecise.
In an age dominated by mediated nostalgia, by a retrograde media landscape, and
by visions of the past that are always already filtered by the authorizing frame of
television and film (in particular), the Angel of History in the twenty-first century isn’t
captured by the winds of progress, as Benjamin posited over a century ago that it would
be, nor is it, as Bauman contends, simply being blown from the horrors of the future
towards the paradise of the past. Instead, like Butler in “Reflektor,” it is caught in a hall
of mirrors: trapped in a prism that, no matter where it looks, refracts its gaze elsewhere.
Today, mediation imprisons the Angel of history so that, as it gazes forward, it is
redirected back. A filtered misdirection that refracts the real, rather than reproducing it,
replaces Benjamin’s unimpeded vision with an inverted and distorted mirror image. The
Angel in a hall of mirrors also finds itself unable to escape the image, as the view
produced by the mirror is a function of the angle of address—determined, in other words,
by the vantage of the present—and therefore its positionality determines what it is able to
see.
Likewise, the Angel cannot remove itself from the image; it is always present, and
its presence always filters, even obscures, what’s behind. Without a clear sense of
direction and relationality, the Angel in this hall of mirrors is disoriented, often unable to
tell front from back, past from future, caught in a perpetual present characterized by
disarray, and unable to cleanly determine the path forward which is, at every turn,
10
obscured by a series of misdirections. The images produced in this context cannot truly
be called reflection, but are rather a reflektion—a false promise, a mediated and therefore
aestheticized (re)production that distorts through its mechanism of production.
Disoriented, the Angel is caught in stasis, unable to move forward or backward
coherently. This is the popular cultural condition that prevailed in the 2010s.
How did such a predicament arise? As many have pointed out, one way to think
about the causes of the retrograde twenty-first century is to situate it within the
sociopolitical context of neoliberalism, which went into overdrive in the late twentieth
century, producing a radical shift in the way that we think about the future—or, at least,
rewrote the terms on which visions of the future attain cogency. Bauman, for instance,
has argued that the large-scale replacement of communal social progress with
privatization and an emphasis on individuality also led to frightening visions of the future,
which have left us unable to imagine that better times lie ahead:
privatization/individualization of the idea of ‘progress’ and of the pursuit of life’s
improvements…prompted the pendulums of the public mindset and mentality to
perform a u-turn: from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain
and ever-too-obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-investing them in the vaguely
remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness. With
such a U-turn happening the future is transformed from the natural habitat of
hopes and rightful expectations into the site of nightmares: horrors of losing your
job together with its attached social standing, of having your home together with
the rest of life’s goods and chattels ‘repossessed’, of helplessly watching your
children sliding down the well-being-cum-prestige slope and your own
11
laboriously learned and memorized skills stripped of whatever has been left of
their market value. The road to future turns looks uncannily as a trail of
corruption and degeneration. Perhaps the road back, to the past, won’t miss the
chance of turning into a trail of cleansing from the damages committed by futures,
whenever they turned into a present?” (5)
Mark Fisher, too, has written extensively about what he calls “capitalist realism: the
widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic
system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2),
which has subsequently produced an inability to imagine a better future, one that hasn’t
been ravaged by hypercapitalist consumption. This concept describes a phenomenon that
is the culmination of a series of developments in the latter half of the twentieth century,
synthesizing the response to the conditions that arose out of the shift to post-Fordist
economics in the late-1970s, austerity programs in the 1980s, the demise of the Soviet
Union in the early 1990s, and the wholesale triumph of neoliberal politics heralded by
each. Following these events, capitalist realism, by the mid-to-late-2000s, had established
itself as the predominant structure of feeling in much of the West. These forces, Fisher
later argues in
Ghosts of My Life
, ultimately coalesced to produce “the slow cancellation
of the future” (2), referring to the gradual loss of the modern progressive teleology that
constructs the future as not just temporally but functionally, formally, and qualitatively
different (and better) than the present. Along the same lines, Fredric Jameson once noted
that “where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image
[…] nothing can change any longer” (qtd. in Fisher,
Capitalist Realism
), and the result is
a paradoxical continuity of instability, a regularity of rapid change that in turn
12
destabilizes the boundary between present and future: a constantly changing present
renders the duration of “present” unclear and also makes the future unpredictable. Within
these confines, a turn to the past seems like the only remedy.
As Boym has pointed out, nostalgia regularly appears as a significant cultural
force in times of “accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (xiv), and these
circumstances have undeniably defined the conditions of life in America following
Reagan’s radical reorganization of the economy in the 80s and the technology boom of
the mid-90s, both of which continued into the twenty-first century. However, what Fisher,
Bauman, and Jameson point to is not purely the accelerated rhythms of life or historical
upheaval—though both are undeniably true—but rather those forces combining within
the context of a sociopolitical order that has fundamentally altered the way we conceive
of the past and the future. In its reluctance to imagine a better future and its turn toward
reproducing artifacts of the past, this cultural milieu reflects what Fisher identified as “the
suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the
future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation” (
Capitalist Realism
3).
1
Fisher was, of course, not the first to notice these trends. In particular, the idea
that the western world was reaching, or had reached, some kind of terminal state had
been discussed in some form or fashion for several decades by 2009—as Fisher himself
put it, “This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new” (6). This
notion finds its critical antecedent expressed most forcefully in Francis Fukuyama’s
concept of the end of history, first laid out in his 1989 article, “The End of History?”, and
elaborated upon in his Bestseller follow-up,
The End of History and The Last Man
in
1
In “The End of Temporality,” Jameson argued that this sense of the end is a symptom of “the
liquidation of futurity” that took place in the postwar period (704).
13
1992.
2
In the time since, Fukuyama’s thesis—that, following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, western liberal democracy had triumphed as the final development in human
government—which has been both widely derided and significantly misunderstood,
3
remains profoundly influential. This was not, however, always the case, as Perry
Anderson pointed out in 1992: “The most striking feature of the discussion which
followed the publication of Fukuyama’s essay was the virtual universality of the rejection
which it met. For once, most of the Right, Centre and Left were united in their reaction.
For different reasons, liberals, conservatives, social democrats, communists all expressed
incredulity or abhorrence of Fukuyama’s arguments” (284). The subsequent
popularization of the phrase “the end of history” was driven not by the fact that it
reflected what many were thinking, but by a remarkable prescience (or, as Louis Menand
calls it,
luck
). Fukuyama, as Menand explains, “got out about six months ahead of the
curve—his article appearing before the Velvet Revolution, in Czechoslovakia, and before
the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, in November, 1989. Fukuyama was betting on present
trends continuing.” In other words, his great success was in the realm of prediction rather
than description; he was not, at least initially, describing a widely held belief. The fall of
the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union that followed shortly thereafter
imbued Fukuyama’s work with a prophetic quality; it seemed as if events had conspired
to confirm his thesis. As Anderson put it, “There has rarely been a more striking
2
In critical theory, the notion of the “end” of things has an even longer history, which Derrida in
particular discusses at length in his critique of Fukuyama in
Specters of Marx.
Nonetheless, few,
if any, of these ideas have been incorporated as successfully into the public consciousness as
Fukuyama’s.
3
This is not to suggest that Fukyama’s theory is without reproach, or that all criticism leveled at
it was somehow unfounded; instead, I only wish to note, as the author himself frustratedly
pointed out in the book’s introduction and again in the afterword to the second edition in 2006,
that a great deal of the popular response to his claims mischaracterized them beyond recognition,
which is part of what led the idea of the end of history to become widely derided.
14
rebondissement
in the fortunes of an idea. Within a year, an arcane philosophical wisdom
had become an exoteric image of the age, as Fukuyama’s arguments sped around the
media of the globe” (281). These developments, in other words, catapulted “the end of
history” into public consciousness such that, with the publication of his book three years
later, Fukuyama was now responding to a cultural milieu he had helped shape. The
tentativeness of “The End of History?” (signaled in the article’s title taking the form of a
question) was thus replaced by an unmistakable triumphalism in
The End of History and
the Last Man
as Fukuyama’s thesis had come to reflect the dominant attitude in much of
the West. Fukuyama’s task in this new context was to provide proof for a vision of the
world that had already taken hold—as a blurb from Charles Krauthammer put it “Until
now, the triumph of the West was merely a fact. Fukuyama has given it a deep and highly
original meaning.”
Far from suggesting that the end of history meant that events would cease to occur,
as many of his critics suggested, Fukuyama, building on the work of Hegel (and, more
importantly, Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel
4
), instead proposed an end to
“history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process” (
The End of History
xii).
Contra Marx, Fukuyama contended that the historical dialectic ended not in communism
but in the already established liberal democratic order. In the absence of a viable
alternative, and on the basis that it was supposedly free from contradictions and
4
As Fukuyama himself explains: “we are interested not in Hegel per se but in Hegel-as-
interpreted-by-Kojeve, or perhaps a new, synthetic philosopher named Hegel-Kojeve. In
subsequent references to Hegel, we will actually be referring to Hegel-Kojeve, and we will be
more interested in the ideas themselves than in the philosophers who originally articulated them”
(
The End of History
143). This intellectual lineage, Perry Anderson points out, forms the basis of
one of the most common critiques of Fukuyama’s arguments––namely, that “his construction
rests on a basic misinterpretation of Hegel” (284). Anderson also notes that Kojeve is the first
thinker to conceive of Hegel’s philosophy as containing “a full conception of an end of history, as
not just the result of human development but also its halting place” (314).
15
“completely satisfying to its citizens” (139), Fukuyama argued that western liberal
democracy, supported by a free market capitalist economy, had emerged as the only
rational—and thus final—ordering of human society, “the endpoint of mankind’s
ideological evolution” (“The End of History?” 4). We could, he explained, improve our
implementation of the system but not the system itself. As Margaret Thatcher famously
put it, there was no alternative. Psychically, Fukuyama explained,
We who live in stable, long-standing liberal democracies face an unusual situation.
In our grandparents’ time, many reasonable people could foresee a radiant
socialist future in which private property and capitalism had been abolished, and
in which politics itself was somehow overcome. Today, by contrast, we have
trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that
isn’t essentially democratic and capitalist. Within that framework, of course,
many things could be improved: we could house the homeless, guarantee
opportunity for minorities and women, improve competitiveness, and create new
jobs…We can also imagine future worlds that are significantly worse than what
we know, in which national, racial, or religious intolerance makes a comeback, or
in which we are overwhelmed by war or environmental collapse. But we cannot
picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the previous one, and
at the same time better. Other,
less reflective ages
also thought of themselves as
the best, but we arrive at this conclusion exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of
alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy. (
The End of History
46; emphasis added)
16
“[I]f we are at a point where we cannot imagine” Fukuyama concluded, “a world
substantially different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in
which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then
we must also take into consideration that History itself might be at an end” (51).
Regardless of his success in proving that History ends with liberal democracy,
5
Fukuyama’s rendering of the end of history remains important in one key way: despite
the skepticism it drew from most critics, and the fact that recent events (in particular, the
lasting impact of religious fundamentalism, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of
right-wing populism globally, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine) have led Fukuyama
to revisit his own diagnosis,
6
the end of history nonetheless expressed an attitude that
would come to dominate the West’s cultural unconscious in the years that followed and
that still persists today. As Slavoj Žižek once remarked, “It is easy to make fun of
Fukuyama’s notion of the ‘End of History,’ but most people today
are
Fukuyamean,
accepting liberal-democratic capitalism as the finally found formula of the best possible
society” (88). Even in the face of the multitudinous crises before us in the twenty-first
century, end of history thinking gives shape to the way that much of the world, and
particularly the United States, conceive of their solutions—that is, there’s a remarkable
consensus about the stability and overall validity of present systems, even as these crises
can be directly tied to it. Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and the indefinite
continuation of the wars in the middle east across four presidencies are, in part,
symptoms of the same neoliberal consensus whose logic is underpinned by a belief in the
5
For a more thorough critique of Fukuyama’s arguments, see Perry Anderson’s
AZone of
Engagement
.
6
See, for example, Fukuyama’s 2018 book
Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of
Resentment
and his March 2022 article “Preparing For Defeat” in
American Purpose.
17
system’s indefinite, and unopposed, continuation––as Anderson puts it, “the limits of the
existing liberal state and market economy are held insurpassable, as systems effectively
beyond popular control” (331). Crises may thus occur (and recur) but there are no
structural, systemic solutions available. Subsequently, nothing ever really ends at the end
of history, and the shifts that do occur come largely in the form of short-term tweaks
(surges vs. drawdowns, tax rate hikes vs. cuts) rather than wholesale alteration.
Mainstream political (and, arguably, social) discourse in the United States is, in this way,
more often a debate between theories of management than between truly, structurally,
different visions. Absent the Soviet Union, and thus without a major competitor on the
global stage offering a radical alternative (which was one of the driving forces behind a
great deal of the social reforms of the twentieth century)—having, essentially, won—the
goal of U.S. policy at home and abroad is now maintenance of the status quo. It no longer
has to prove itself, and so it has largely stopped trying. What emerged instead is a
phenomenon Mike Davis has called a kind of “pathological presentism,” in which “all
calculations [are made] on the basis of short-term bottom-lines in order to allow the
super-rich to consume all the good things of the earth within their lifetimes.” Major
problems, consequently, rarely get solved, just managed differently. Even when, of late,
apparent threats to the neoliberal consensus emerge (such as Brexit in the UK, nascent
fascist movements in the United States and Europe, and Putin’s challenges to the postwar
status quo
7
––which was featured on the cover of
Time
magazine under the headline “The
7
Even these developments, despite their growing influence, have thus far largely failed to remake
the world as they would have liked, and the post-historical status quo, albeit under significant
strain, broadly remains intact. Fukuyama, for his part, has claimed that the election of Joe Biden
in 2020 signaled the ability for the system to self-correct, and that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
will result in a defeat that gives rise to “a ‘new birth of freedom,’ and get us out of our funk about
the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on,” he concludes, “thanks to
18
Return of History”
8
), their character is typically one of regression to an earlier system
instead of progression toward something new: devolution rather than evolution. “Few
periods,” as Jameson explained in 2003, “have proved as incapable of framing immediate
alternatives for themselves” (”The End of Temporality” 704). The end of history then is a
period marked by, at best, a kind of weak incrementalism and, at worst, a desire for
complete reversion. Today, the debate is rarely over whether we should go back but,
rather, over what time period we ought to revert to: in the 2020 election, for instance,
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” promised a return to a mythical past where, as
Wendy Brown put it,
families were happy, whole, and heterosexual, when women and minorities knew
their place, when neighborhoods were orderly, secure, and homogeneous, when
heroin was a black problem and terrorism was not inside the homeland, and when
a hegemonic Christianity and whiteness constituted the manifest identity, power,
and pride of the nation and the West (5)
while Biden sought to restore “the soul of the nation” via a return to the conditions of the
Obama administration four years prior (effectively a call for erasing the Trump
presidency much like, as we’ll see in Chapter four, Agent Cooper attempts to remedy the
present by erasing Laura Palmer’s death in
Twin Peaks
).
Several critics over the past three decades have noted that this sense of
repetitiveness has plagued the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As early as 1991,
a bunch of brave Ukrainians” (“Preparing For Defeat”). Rather than marking “the end of The End
of History,” in other words, Fukuyama claims that Putin’s invasion will instead result in a
reawakening of belief in liberal democracy, effectively resolidifying the conclusions of The End
of History (“Putin’s War on the Liberal Order”). Despite these challenges, and regardless of
whether Fukuyama’s predictions again come true, the ideology of the end of history, for now,
remains in effect.
8
A Notion Fukuyama directly challenged in a March 2022 article for
Financial Times
.
19
Baudrillard claimed that the posthistorical world is not cyclical so much as recyclable;
the West, he argued, is defined more than anything by its constant recycling of the
leftovers of the twentieth century’s major conflicts and ideologies, an endless procession
of the reiteration of prior forms. “All the archaic, anachronistic forms,” he explains, “are
there ready to re-emerge, intact and timeless, like the viruses deep in the body. History
has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable” (
The
Illusion of the End
27). Cyclical time, Baudrillard reminds us, conventionally denotes
some kind of progress––or, at least,
change––
even if it is just a matter of moving from
one repetitive structure to another. The end of history is, on the contrary, defined by its
resistance to change of this sort. Instead, as Bauman once argued, the posthistorical West
is, at least in terms of sociocultural composition, much more liquid, constantly reshaping
itself into pre-established molds (
Liquid Modernity
). Thus, while the larger political
shape remains static, and its deleterious effects gradually seep into the social world, the
public is left to recompose itself in response to a rapidly decaying sociopolitical
landscape. Without a goal on the horizon, and in a “historical situation whose contours it
does not know” (Berlant 225), the public turns to the forms of the past.
Paradoxically, as Baudrillard points out, this pattern of infinite recycling, where
everything that fades is subject to a return, marks the end of history as a time of
endlessness:
“[
T
]
here is no end any longer, there will no longer be any end
...history itself
has become interminable...Things are in a state which is literally definitive––neither
finished, nor infinite, nor definite, but de-finitive that is, deprived of its end.” (115, 120).
Posthistorical occurrences are often marked as much by this lack of finality as anything
else, and management of catastrophe, a form of
endless
deferral, is the predominant mode
20
of operation: wildfires are extinguished only to return in more devastating proportions; a
president loses an election, contests the results, and is immediately primed to run again; a
pandemic becomes endemic. The end of history resists punctual moments and narrative
closure. As Baudrillard explained, “It is as though history were rifling through its own
dustbins and looking for redemption in the rubbish” (26).
Revision is, of course, endemic to both nostalgia and the posthistorical world, and
nostalgia operates in cycles, with major upheavals in taste and style resolidifying every
twenty or twenty-five years before melting away again, just as sociopolitical forms are
continually (re)emerging and fading. Nostalgia prevails at the end of history precisely
because of this compatibility. At the same time, nostalgia also occupies a tense position:
large-scale political change is relatively scarce at the end of history, but it also often
seems as if things are changing at a greater pace than ever on the level of culture.
Nostalgia is part of this trend, as it emphasizes superficial notions of change in the form
of cultural shifts (sometimes produced by nostalgia waves themselves). Thus, nostalgia is
simultaneously a reaction to the perpetual onslaught of aesthetic change
and
an effort to
produce another aesthetic change through the inauguration of a new (old) regime––an
exhausting cycle produced by an increasingly exhausted cultural landscape. The
relationship between nostalgia and the end of history is thus more complex than it might
first appear: on one hand, the conditions of the end of history provide the catalyst for
expressions of nostalgic longing, dictating what is longed for; on the other hand,
nostalgia also (re)produces the political, social, and cultural values of the posthistorical
world. The end of history, in other words, revises conventional nostalgia, remaking the
concept in its own image, and subsequently redeploys nostalgia to serve its own ends.
21
Posthistorical nostalgia thus shapes, and is shaped by, an overwhelmingly
mediated culture that emphasizes particular expressions and objects of retrograde
fascination. As the following chapters will indicate, the nostalgia industry is a major
force in the posthistorical revisionist impulse. Driven by the need to reconfigure itself for
present tastes in order to be resold, nostalgia TV, in particular, subjects the past to a
process of rehabilitation, as its artifacts are revived and repaired––often a more deliberate
and direct procedure than the one I describe in
Stranger Things
(Chapter Three) because
the act of revision is carried out on the original rather than an homage.
Stranger Things,
and
Ready Player One
(the subject of Chapter Two) to an extent, repairs the past through
mystification and misdirection, recomposing and reframing its nostalgic attachments
under the rubric of aesthetics; revivals and reboots (the subject of Chapter Four), on the
other hand, rehabilitate the nostalgic objects themselves, and, in doing so, the historical
pasts they reflect.
What results, then, is a nostalgia that is unlike that which has come before.
“Nostalgia” as the term is popularly construed and deployed today has been divorced
from its conceptual roots, and is in some ways alienated from the meanings it held
throughout much of the twentieth century as well. As a number of scholars have shown,
although the term has a fairly long history, it has only recently taken on the character we
now associate with it. First coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688, the term is
derived from two Greek concepts: nostos, “return home,” and algia, “longing,”
representing “a longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed…a sentiment of
loss and displacement” (Boym xiv). For Hofer, “Nostalgia was said to produce
‘erroneous representations’ that caused the afflicted to lose touch with the present…the
22
nostalgic was possessed by a mania of longing” (Boym 3-4). In its early form, nostalgia
was viewed as a curable disease, akin to the common cold (Boym xiv), and seen as a root
cause of a number of symptoms such as insomnia, anorexia, melancholic madness or
abjectness (Armbruster 19). This particular conception grew in popularity throughout the
early parts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, as Linda Austin points out, the
term had virtually disappeared by the 1870s, having been invalidated by new research in
fields such as bacteriology and cellular pathology (1). As the twentieth century began,
and the pace of progress and geographic mobility increased, nostalgia shifted from a
curable medical illness to an incurable condition of the spirit or psyche (Hutcheon)—
what Boym refers to as “not merely an individual sickness but a symptom of our age, a
historical emotion” (xvi). The temporal/historical dimension we now associate with the
term also became an integral part of the definition at this time, with the ache for home of
Hofer’s original conception replaced by a longing for a bygone temporality. Nostalgia
began as a symptom of spatial displacement at a time when geographic mobility was
relatively uncommon and grew into a symptom of progress as the revolutions of
modernity, political and technological, changed the pace of life. Pickering and Keightley
note that this shift from spatial dislocation to temporal dislocation involved “the sense of
feeling oneself a stranger in a new period that compared negatively with an earlier time in
which one felt, or imagined, oneself at home” (922). In this process of de-medicalization,
“nostalgia also began to be seen not just as an individual emotion, but as a collective
longing for a happier, singular, more innocent age” (Reynolds xxv). Nostalgia, in this
conception of the term, arises largely “in compensation for a loss of faith in progress, and
23
for what is socially and culturally destroyed in the name of progress” (Pickering and
Keightley 920).
In the reflective age, longing is no longer the primary affect of nostalgia, replaced
instead with infatuation and a desire (re-)experience that, thanks to streaming, are much
easier to satisfy today than in the past––at least on the surface. Two factors have enabled
this shift. First, today the object and expression of the overwhelming majority of
nostalgia is media. Though films, television, and music may produce an association with
lived experience, that lived experience is always already framed by media through which
the association is coded and/or accessed. In this way, media gives shape to lived
experience. Expressions of nostalgia today, moreover, are more often for media itself
than for the personal experiences captured by it, a development seen most cogently in the
overwhelming volume of reboots, long-delayed sequels, and spinoffs that permeate the
current tv and film marketplace. Music and fashion, too, remain decidedly retrograde in
much of their aesthetic posturing. Charli XCX’s 2018 hit “1999,” whose chorus expresses
the singer’s wish to “go back to 1999,” is, for instance, sonically indistinguishable from
the turn of the century pop it reveres, and which forms the foundation of its longing. Its
video, significantly, is an entirely mimetic exercise that places the singer within
recreations of iconic music videos and films of the late 1990s, interspersed with images
of her seated on the floor in a black turtleneck and glasses holding a colorful iMac. This
construction locates her desire not simply to go back to her childhood but to do so framed
by popular aesthetics of the period. Despite its more traditional nostalgic exclamations (“I
just wanna go back / back to 1999 / take a ride through my old neighborhood”), the song
reflects the merging of memory and experiential desire with media, stating in the second
24
line of its chorus “I just wanna go back / to ‘hit me baby one more time.’” The song, as
well as the cultural moment it reflects, thus conflates traditional nostalgic longing and
mediated infatuation, resulting in a nostalgia that exceeds merely the combination of
longing and loss.
The 1980s—ironically, the primary object of nostalgic fixation in the 2010s—
represents an interesting example of the shifting nature of nostalgic media. The dominant
form of nostalgic narratives in the 80s in films such as
Stand by Me
,
A Christmas Story
,
and
Back to the Future
as well as shows such as
The Wonder Years
, is one in which the
backward-glancing is baked into the story itself, in the form of either a narrator reflecting
on past events or, in the case of the
Back to the Future series
, a character physically
traveling to the past from the present. There is, in other words, a recognition of the
mnemonic and transportational elements of traditional nostalgia at the core of these
narratives. In contrast, in 2010s shows like
Stranger Things
, the reflective or
transpositional authorizing frame has been removed, so that returning to the past, instead
of functioning as an individual’s experience or an act of memory, lacks any explicit
narrative motivation. The justification for turning to the past precedes the turn itself, and
nostalgia is always already prefabricated rather than personal.
The 2010s also saw a rise in what Linda Hutcheon has called “armchair
nostalgia”—or, what James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem has more aptly labeled
“borrowed nostalgia”—a kind of performative nostalgia manifest not in the individual’s
past experience but through an infatuation with the products and aesthetics of someone
else’s life. The recent ‘90s fashion revival among teens and young adults who lack
memories of the ‘90s testifies to such a trend. For Gen-Z listeners (born between 1997
25
and 2012), Charli XCX’s replication of Spice Girls and TLC music videos in “1999”
might produce this ersatz emotional resonance. Borrowed nostalgia is illustrated perhaps
most powerfully, however, by the clothing retailer Urban Outfitters whose brand targets
trendy teen and twentysomething consumers. For a period in the late 2010s, the company
sold facsimiles of early-2000s style mixed CDs, complete with simulated handwritten
permanent marker tracklists alongside random assortments of decorative used VHS tapes,
providing millennial customers the chance to buy an artifact from their past and digital
native zoomers the chance to “reexperience” a past they never really experienced in the
first place. If traditional nostalgia is conventionally animated by loss and a longing for
something that is no longer, borrowed nostalgia, on the other hand, represents a longing
to recover that which one never had, or even for that which may never have existed at all.
This particular expression of the separation of nostalgia from experience is yet another
instance of the divorcing of what we call
nostalgia
from its linguistic and conceptual
origins.
The second factor in the shifting discursive nature of nostalgia is the
overwhelming increase in accessibility made possible by streaming services. Today, one
can, at the click of a button, immerse themselves fully in the 1990s of their childhood,
spending a day (or week or month or even year) watching
Friends
and listening to
Hanson. The popularity of retro fashion and aesthetics allows people to spend their entire
lives surrounded by ephemera of the past. This paradigm, which Reynolds has called our
“playlist past,” doesn’t simply provide audiences with a brief memory of better days; it
seeks to fully embed them within it, constructing the past as a location of viable sustained,
easily accessible escape––as Chapter Two illustrates, an especially powerful notion in a
26
posthistorical world defined by a lack of alternatives. Today, nostalgia and the nostalgic
media that is its most prominent expression pivots on the possibility of a sustainable
escape from the now. It functions not as a temporary reverie but a viable way of
interacting with both the past and present, in a world now broadly conceived as a
mediated space. The playlist past, then, provides not only a reminder of something lost,
but the opportunity to regain it. The question remains, however, that if something can be
regained, is it lost? Historically, the basic premise of nostalgia is that it is a longing for
something that decidedly cannot be regained. But if the object of desire is media(ted) or
aesthetic(ized), both of which enable the lost object to be regained at the push of a button,
then is it still lost? And if one’s longing can be abated even partially by the recreation of
the original experience—if, in other words, the duration of longing is cut short—is it still
longing in the traditional sense?
Mediated nostalgia also inadvertently calls into question the absence at its core.
Since that which is absent is, today, also accessible, the idea of nostalgia seems
paradoxical. If conventional nostalgia relies on the notion that one can’t ever go home,
what should we make of a nostalgia based upon returning home (or its reasonable
facsimile)? In such cases, irrecoverable nostalgic loss is converted into an absence that is
at least partially resolvable. Yet, when nostalgia is centered on an irrecoverable time
period that is defined primarily by its media and aesthetics, the return home afforded by
media is ultimately incomplete: while the aesthetics and media that have come to
represent the period are easily retrieved, the time period itself remains wholly
irrecoverable. There emerges then a substitutional premise for nostalgic media and
aesthetics, as approximations that media suggests are close enough but which never really
27
can be, and so when one searches for connection to a lost past they are ultimately left
unfulfilled by this nostalgic paradigm. In the end, the promise of a connector ultimately
turns out to be a reflektor.
This development, too, raises the question: if nostalgia has been distanced from
longing and loss, what replaced them as the primary driver of nostalgia? Reflective age
nostalgia verges on a new paradigm, which replaces longing and loss with the pleasures
of the style of the era. The past then becomes the site of mediated aesthetic infatuation.
Above all else, one is drawn to the 80s not because of how it felt but how it looked and
sounded, such that the difference between past and present is stylistic rather than personal
or political. The 1980s in this model is defined more by neon and synthesizers than
Reagan and austerity; the social and political dimensions of the past are subsequently
flattened in favor of the depoliticized cultural––the same operation produced by the end
of history more broadly.
In some ways, this conception of nostalgia reflects what Jameson identified as a
central feature of postmodernism: that, within specific contexts, nostalgia functions as a
mode, a “formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past” (Fisher,
Capitalist Realism
11-12). In
Postmodernism
, Jameson characterizes what he calls the
“nostalgia film” as a symptom of the late capitalist breakdown of historicity that further
distances art from referent. Nostalgia, in this sense, is regressive, inauthentic, and
symptomatic of “a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own
present at the same time that [it] illuminate[s] the failure of this attempt, which seems to
reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past” (
Postmodernism
296). Jameson’s analysis of the original
Star Wars
trilogy illustrates this idea. The series,
28
he argues, reinvents the experience of the “Saturday afternoon series of the Buck Rogers
type—alien villains, true American heroes, heroines in distress, the death ray or the
doomsday box, and the cliff-hanger at the end whose miraculous solution was to be
witnessed next Saturday afternoon” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 8).
Crucially, however, Jameson’s reading of
Star Wars’
nostalgia is limited by its subject’s
indirect connection to a historical period, which inherently emphasizes style that is
narratively divorced from historical context. Moreover, while a certain nostalgia for 50s
sci-fi may be present at the core of
Star Wars
, one cannot argue that this is central to its
narrative purpose or popular reception; though present, nostalgia is far from being the
series’ operative force. What we’re seeing today is indeed much more explicit, borne in a
sense from a particular merging of traditional temporal nostalgia with the late capitalist
emphasis on aesthetics at the expense of historical clarity. This signifies the preeminence
of aesthetics in defining historical moments.
Stranger Things
, for example, reflects
nostalgia for both a form/aesthetic (adventure films, synthesizers, etc.) and a time (the
1980s), but with the form figured as
the defining feature of its depiction of the time
in a
way that was not present in
Buck Rogers
. Furthermore, what Jameson identified in these
nostalgia films as a novel and significant, yet nonetheless narrow trend has now come to
dominate the media landscape. Put simply, the tendencies Jameson identified remain in
circulation today, but have intensified and mutated in ways
Postmodernism
did not
anticipate.
Jameson is also broadly correct that this relationship to the past produces—or
reinforces—a loss of situatedness and historical context, a notion that is, once again,
reflective of the end of history more broadly. In fact, if nostalgia today is indeed
29
distanced from loss and longing, and those components have been replaced by a more
immediate infatuation with style, then what has also been lost (or at least minimized) in
this reformulation is the reflective nature of nostalgia as it has traditionally been
conceived. Conventionally, nostalgia has often been construed as producing constructive
revelations that increase awareness of place, provoking an attentiveness to the passage of
time and the nature of existence within an ever-changing landscape––a notion that Boym
labeled “reflective nostalgia.” For Boym, nostalgia can be subdivided into two categories:
the aforementioned, individualized,
reflective
mode, and a more collective
restorative
one. The latter, she argues “stresses [the etymological root] nostos [return home] and
attempts transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.” This type of nostalgia is largely
undertaken by the state through the erection of museums, memorials, and other memory-
institutions, and seeks to emphasize national memory “based on a single plot of national
identity.” On the other hand, she explains, reflective nostalgia “thrives in [the
etymological root] algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully,
ironically, desperately,” and is thus the realm of art and artists. Crucially, she writes,
“Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into
doubt” (xviii). Reflective nostalgia is decidedly intellectual in nature, and, as Boym
points out, can lead to profound ruminations on the constituent components of nostalgia
especially—loss, longing, and the passage of time. Nostalgia also traditionally relies on a
lack, the recognition of which serves to critique the present. Absent these components,
however, mediated nostalgia in the reflective age is structurally incapable of producing
such thought—and, indeed, such an endeavor is functionally antithetical to it.
9
Its
9
This is, of course, not to suggest that reflective nostalgia is totally absent today. As Katherina
Niemeyer has pointed out, there is a considerable amount of scholarship on this kind of
30
engagement is as superficial as the object itself. A Baudrillardian phenomenon, mediated
nostalgia is based on the aesthetics of the era constructed out of a curated selection of
artifacts of the pop culture of the time. Built on, and perpetuated by, a quasi-generic
formulation of the period, the objects of nostalgia may or may not correspond to an
original (whose existence is dubious to begin with). Thus, nostalgia forged in aesthetic
reproduction is further distanced from whatever real might have existed. For this reason,
nostalgia in the reflective age is ultimately alienating. “Reflektor” describes a search for a
“connector,” and historical reflection, broadly, and nostalgia, more specifically, have
both long been construed as a means of reconnection. There is a consistent emphasis in
culture and scholarly work on the power of glancing backward to produce a sense of
belonging, community, and continuity. This is particularly the case with the restorative
nostalgia produced by state institutions, but it is broadly present in any such act. Turning
to the past, in these formulations, provides a link between past and present. The value of
such a notion, however, pivots on the qualities of the object that represents “past” and on
the construction of “the past” therein. In other words, if the past one turns to in order to
connect is, in fact, not reflective of the historical, social, political, or material reality, or is
oriented in such a way that those elements are obscured, then where does that connection
constructive nostalgia, illustrating the ways in which art and artists working today use nostalgia to
produce insightful work. Likewise, Pickering and Keightley have argued that scholars who
position it solely as a lament for loss ignore the ways in which it produces positive contributions
to historical imagination, suggesting instead that “we should perhaps reconfigure [nostalgia] in
terms of a distinction between the desire to return to an earlier state or idealized past, and the
desire not to return but to recognize aspects of the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in
the future. Nostalgia can then be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past but
also as a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present”
(921). Nostalgia, in this configuration, functions not solely as uncritical yearning, but also as a
potential way of interacting with history in the move toward positive social change. However,
while unquestionably present, this more optimistic reading of the power of nostalgia does not
represent the dominant mode in American media today, and is thus significantly less
representative of the cultural moment.
31
lead? The result of this paradigm is a nostalgia that is regularly divorced from its critical
potential, one which leaves behind (or at least subordinates) the reflective frame that
encourages the nostalgiac to consider the passage of time and the changes that have
ensued, which, when highlighted by narrative structure, raises the critical question: why
was the past so much better? Without this reflective element, which in part serves to
anchor nostalgic fantasy in the realm of history, context, and, at least in a sense, the real,
we find ourselves adrift, unable to adequately situate past and present, and the pathways
between them remain obscured. In this way, nostalgia in the reflective age represents a
kind of false promise, one that is derived both from its emphasis on aesthetics and from
its simulacric nature: once again, what appears to be a connector turns out to be a
reflektor.
One might ask, in light of this, if reflection is actually missing, why we should
call it “the reflective age.” In fact, this relative absence of reflective nostalgia reveals one
of the central characteristics of the reflective age: the conventional traits of nostalgia
(reflection, longing, loss) don’t appear to be missing at all, as their absence is obscured
by misdirection. This project’s title is thus ironic because the end of history is
increasingly oriented towards the past and increasingly alienated from it. We are
inundated with reflections that appear clear but are only refractions, disorientating
reflections of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection.
The reflective age ultimately renders the present as a kind of temporal pastiche, in
which the uniqueness of a cultural moment is defined by its particular assemblage of the
tropes and styles of the past. Fisher, among others, has written extensively about the way
that global capitalism has produced a commercial marketplace in which there is little
32
room for genuine artistic innovation or for original visions of the future, and the
production of novelty is simply a matter of the endless repackaging of the past. Setting
aside the few notable works that have managed to transcend extant paradigms, Fisher is
nonetheless correct that the overwhelming majority of popular culture today, especially
media produced by the corporate structures that have come to dominate the publishing
landscape, is emphatically—and, increasingly, intentionally—a rehashing of what has
come before.
The 2018 Netflix miniseries
Maniac
serves as an instructive consideration of the
centrality of mediated nostalgia and retrograde media productions that together form the
basis of the pastiche that we call the present. The show, which follows two protagonists
as they participate in a pharmaceutical trial that promises to cure their trauma, is set in an
uncanny version of the present that is both like and very much unlike our own. Visually,
Maniac
’s New York is a semiotic hodgepodge made up of temporally-coded signifiers
replete with chronological contradictions
10
(various retro fashions, DOS-style personal
computers, contemporary vehicles and media references) that, in conjunction, produce an
indeterminant setting that resists coherent grounding in any particular historical moment.
There is, in other words, no historical past, present, or future onto which one can map the
events that unfold. The effect is to defamiliarize the present through a rewriting of the
terms on which it was constructed, substituting signifiers that have retained cultural
prominence for those that have lost it. What
Maniac
reveals in all of this is precisely the
same pastiche that is endemic to the reflective age: what we think of as
now
is defined in
large part through its particular combination of artifacts from the past—the present, in
10
Not unlike those sometimes seen in the works of David Lynch, particularly
Blue Velvet
, which
are discussed in more detail in Chapter Four.
33
other words, is simply a repackaging or reordering of what has come before. Crucially,
Maniac
also recognizes that
what has come before
is predominantly the realm of style
and aesthetics, of clothing, cars, technology, and interior design, of things rather than
ideas, movements, or events. What we identify as the present is then merely a pastiche of
past tropes, which are, themselves, heavily mediated artifacts primarily constructed and
made cogent through media. There is, in short, no past, present, or history, outside of
mediation.
Maniac
also reminds us that the temporal pastiche that defines the reflective age
is not singular or orderly (always confined to artifacts from a solitary period), but rather
made up of a disorienting multiplicity of referents. The effect is, once again, akin to a hall
of mirrors, where one’s gaze is always fragmented and filtered by a confounding series of
reflections that reproduce visions of other things, resulting in one’s attention being pulled
in a variety of contradictory directions. It’s no coincidence, then, that one of the series’
protagonists suffers from schizophrenia, which serves, in effect, as a reflection of the
chaotic and perpetually shifting senses of reality that result from a posthistorical world.
Both Owen and Annie begin the series struggling to regain a sense of connection within
an alienated world, one in which you can rent a friend through an app or be paid to have
an AdBuddy follow you around reading commercials at regular intervals.
The reflective age is, in sum, a moment defined by a retrograde cultural landscape
whose character and omnipresence combine to produce disorientation and an inability to
reckon with past, present, or future, driven especially by a nostalgia that leaves behind its
historical antecedents and critical functions in favor of an emphasis on aesthetics, style,
and the immediate pleasures of infatuation and repetition of the familiar. Visions of the
34
past in the reflective age are pervasive, but they are also unstable, disconnected, and
incoherent despite, paradoxically, often being positioned as a remedy for the same traits
in the present. The remaining chapters of this project describe, in more detail, the specific
contours of these conditions.
35
CHAPTER TWO
READY PLAYER ONE
, NOSTALGIA, AND RECOGNITION
This is the world out of which Ready Player One was conceived: a static state in
which a litany of imminently visible crises have emerged, but change has become scarce;
a world for which there is no coherent plan, and when problems arise the social and
political are seized by a reactive frenzy; a world that, as Adam Curtis has explained,
“doesn’t tell [us] visions about the future…doesn’t tell us what this is all for…has no
story of what’s coming tomorrow” (“Units of One”). In its bleak vision of an increasingly
stagnant future, gripped by retromania, whose temporal march forward is marked only by
a procession of unmitigated decline, Ernest Cline’s 2011 bestselling novel Ready Player
One stages a unique failure of imagination.
The novel follows Wade Watts, a teenager living in an Oklahoma City trailer park
in the 2040s, as he makes his way through a pop culture treasure hunt within The OASIS,
a massively-multiplayer online virtual reality video game where most of the world’s
population now spend their time. Five years before the start of the novel, the death of
OASIS creator James Halliday inaugurated a contest within the platform, with his estate
and sole control over Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS), the company that runs the
OASIS, as the prize. In the ensuing years, the competition, which revolves around
solving a series of riddles leading to a hidden Easter Egg, became a worldwide
phenomenon. In addition to millions of competitors worldwide, the game also attracted
the interest of IOI, a rival megacorporation intent on winning control of the OASIS in
order to further commercialize and monetize it. After becoming the first player to solve
36
one of Halliday’s puzzles, Wade emerges as the world’s best hope of keeping the OASIS
out of the hands of IOI. Thanks to his superior knowledge of 1980s pop culture, and with
the help of a small group of friends, Wade eventually succeeds in finding the egg,
winning the competition and taking sole control of the OASIS.
The dystopian future that forms the backdrop of the novel’s action is speculative,
but only insofar as the widespread effects of climate crisis, poverty, and geopolitical
turmoil that it invokes are worse than when the book was written; they are, however,
fundamentally the same conflicts we face today. This is to say that, despite being set
thirty years after it was written, there is nothing really new in the future of Cline’s novel.
Even the OASIS is merely an extrapolation of present technologies (instead of restricting
participation in the virtual world to visuals alone, as is the case with current tech like the
Oculus Rift, haptic sensors and motion-tracked treadmills have replaced controllers,
enabling a full range of movement and sensory perception). Indeed, though parts of the
world have migrated operations into the OASIS (public school, for instance, is now
entirely virtual, with students arriving each morning to simulated classrooms, in a
simulated building, on a simulated planet) essentially very little has actually changed.
Culturally, too, Cline’s world is inert. There is no new music, film, or television
to speak of, no new forms of digital culture or social media trends, no festivals, holidays,
political movements, or even religious cults. Here, in light of the increased visualization
of digital/social culture heralded by Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, Cline’s version of
the future, which was released into the world the year after Instagram’s founding and
several years before the other two, is simultaneously prophetic and stale. The OASIS is
an inherently visual platform, and one of its central functions is the literalization of
37
digital spaces—online schooling in virtual classrooms, the replacement of internet chat
rooms (already largely a relic of an earlier Internet age in 2011) with digital rooms filled
with pixel walls and furniture. As such, it scales the current trend towards visualization in
social media today into an all-encompassing fact of life. Digital “spaces” are no longer
metaphorical. Yet it also imagines a world in which the thirty years from its time of
publication to the time in which it’s set basically only produced two cultural events (the
OASISifcation of everything and the Egg Hunt-induced nostalgia boom), and both are
related to the same product. Interestingly, in a recent case of life imitating art, Facebook,
as part of their rebranding as Meta in October 2021, announced the creation of the
Metaverse, a virtual reality space within their platform that closely resembles the OASIS.
A trailer for the product showcased founder Mark Zuckerberg selecting an avatar and
walking viewers through a series of features, including playing poker with friends and
watching TikToks. Most notably, the ad positions Metaverse as a platform for business
meetings, inadvertently showcasing the limits of imagination inherent in the end of
history (nothing here is new, it’s simply the virtualization of what already exists) while
also marking how uninnovative Cline’s vision of the future really is. The world,
Ready
Player One
tells us, has basically descended into monoculture and mono-modality:
novelty arrives solely within the OASIS (and, even then, only really in the form of new
planets and games, which themselves receive only passing reference within the book).
This is not to say, however, that Cline’s world is devoid of culture; it is, in fact, obsessed
with cultural objects—it’s just that none of them are new. A child of the ‘80s and a pop
culture fanatic, Halliday’s competition took the form of a series of “Easter Egg” hunts
requiring extensive knowledge of video games, music, and movies from the time in
38
which its creator grew up. As Wade explains:
This led to a global fascination with 1980s pop culture. Fifty years after the
decade had ended, the movies, music, games, and fashions of the 1980s were all
the rage once again. By 2041, spiked hair and acid-washed jeans were back in
style, and covers of hit ‘80s pop songs by contemporary bands dominated the
music charts. People who had actually been teenagers in the 1980s, all now
approaching old age, had the strange experience of seeing the fads and fashions of
their youth embraced and studied by their grandkids. (8)
Cline thus stages a dystopian vision of the future in which the whole of the planet has
become fixated on ‘80s pop culture. The novel is filled to the brim with references to
popular movies, music, and games from the era, as Wade and other gunters (slang for
“egg hunters”) have laboriously studied
Anorak’s Almanac
, Halliday’s published journals
named after his OASIS avatar, in search of clues to help them solve the first puzzle. As
Wade explains, “The Almanac was over a thousand pages long, but it contained few
details about Halliday’s personal life or his day-to-day activities. Most of the entries were
his stream-of-consciousness observations on various classic videogames, science-fiction
and fantasy novels, movies, comic books, and ‘80s pop culture, mixed with humorous
diatribes denouncing everything from organized religion to diet soda” (7). Wade has not
only read the
Almanac
dozens of times, but has watched, played, or listened to each of
the thousands of artifacts mentioned in the text: “I read every novel by every single one
of Halliday’s favorite authors,” he explains,
And I didn’t stop there..
.
If it was one of Halliday’s favorites like
WarGames,
Ghostbusters, Real Genius
,
Better off Dead
, or
Revenge of the Nerds
, I rewatched
39
it until I knew every scene by heart…I watched every episode of
The Greatest
American Hero
,
Airwolf
,
The A-Team
,
Knight Rider
,
Misfits of Science
, and
The
Muppet Show
…He listened to everything. So I did too. Pop, rock, new wave,
punk, heavy metal. From the Police to Journey to R.E.M. to the Clash. I tackled it
all. (62-3)
Wade maintains an encyclopedic knowledge of these items, which he gleefully flaunts at
every opportunity, challenging friends and rivals (and readers) with bits of obscure trivia
(“Can you name the next three games in the [
Swordquest
] series?”). This proves
extremely valuable as he makes his way through the stages of the hunt after being the
first to complete the initial challenge five years after it began. In one part, Wade is placed
within a simulation of the 1983 film
War Games
and tasked with role-playing as its
protagonist, David Lightman. To win, he must recite, without error, every single line of
dialogue spoken by Matthew Broderick’s character as the film plays out around him. The
same trick is repeated toward the end of the novel, when he must re-enact every scene
from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail—
a task he relishesb: “Reenacting the film wasn’t
just easy—it was a total blast” (357).
Even outside of the contest itself, the novel is riddled with references to
preexisting media and consumer products (
Entertainment Weekly
’s review called it “the
literary-fiction equivalent of VH1’s
I Love the
80’s”). Take, for instance, its discussion of
the intellectual properties that have been ported into the OASIS:
GSS had also licensed preexisting virtual worlds from their competitors, so
content that had already been created for games like
Everquest
and
World of
Warcraft
was ported over to the OASIS, and copies of
Norrath
and
Azeroth
were
40
added to the growing catalog of OASIS planets. Other virtual worlds soon
followed suit, from the
Metaverse
to the
Matrix
. The
Firefly
universe was
anchored in a sector adjacent to the
Star Wars
galaxy, with a detailed re-creation
of the
Star Trek
universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport
back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds.
Middle Earth
.
Vulcan
.
Pern
.
Arrakis
.
Magrathea
.
Disc-World
,
Mid-World
,
Riverworld
,
Ringworld
. Worlds
upon worlds” (49; emphasis added).
For Cline, it wasn’t enough, apparently, to note that worlds from various movies and
games existed in the OASIS; they needed to be catalogued. This is how the novel works:
rather than describing things, Cline typically just says they look like, or
are
, something
from a movie, show, or game. Notably, the reader’s recognition of these artifacts is
usually unaddressed—either you know what Arrakis is or you don’t. Save for the
occasional brief identifier when the reference is particularly central to the plot (“I was
inside the first scene of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. Another of Halliday’s favorite
films, and perhaps the most beloved geek film of all time” [355]), the entirety of the
novel follows this pattern. Hardly a page goes by without at least one nod to a movie,
song, game, or consumer product from the 1980s. As Jonathan Alexander notes, even the
Twitch-esque streams that Wade and his friends operate “are filled with preexisting
content, favorite TV shows, anime, or movies, played on endless loops” (529-30):
“Art3mis,” Wade explains, “also ran her own vidfeed channel, Art3misvision, and I
always kept one of my monitors tuned to it. Right now, she was airing her usual Monday
evening fare: an episode of Square Pegs. After that would be ElectraWoman and
DynaGirl, followed by back-to-back episodes of Isis and Wonder Woman. Her
41
programming lineup hadn’t changed in ages. But it didn’t matter. She still got killer
ratings” (203). Seemingly everything in the novel is anchored to some ‘80s-specificity:
watches are
Swatches
, sunglasses are
Ray-Bans
, VCRs are
Betamaxes
. Media and
consumption are inescapable.
To those unfamiliar with Cline’s novel, or with Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film
adaptation, this might sound like the premise for a salient critique of twenty-first-century
American culture.
Ready Player One
’s merging of dystopia, simulated reality, and
hyperfixation on nostalgia for consumer products is primed to offer astute insights into
the same backward glancing nature of contemporary American life that this project seeks
to describe. And it does—albeit indirectly and inadvertently. This pursuit (such that it
exists) is undercut by the fact that Cline is not only
not
seeking to offer such a critique,
but his inclusion of these elements is actually a matter of pure homage and celebration. A
self-described “full-time geek” (Egan) who traveled between stops on the novel’s book
tour in a vintage DeLorean complete with a model
Back to the Future
flux capacitor,
Cline is as infatuated with ‘80s pop culture as his character Halliday. The novel’s
nostalgic fixation on the 1980s largely comes from the fact that its creator (born in 1972)
maintains a nostalgic fixation on the 1980s of his adolescence;
1
his characters reference
things because he likes them (and, crucially, because he wants his readers to like them
too). Further, while the novel’s ‘80s retromania may have been launched by the contest,
Cline repeatedly emphasizes the idea that Wade and his friends
really do love this stuff
1
Notably, the novel offers no explanation for why Halliday and the world in 2041 is
exclusively
obsessed with the media of the 1980s, why there seems to be so little reverence for classics from
even the 1990s. The only explanation is that, as the time of his adolescence, the 1980s are the
primary object of Cline’s nostalgia. As I pointed out in Chapter One, Spielberg’s adaptation
recognized the limitations of this approach, and extended references into the 2000s with figures
like Master Chief from the
Halo
franchise.
42
and aren’t just in it for the prize. For Cline, this is not the story of a decaying planet
whose abject citizens are locked into a dog-eat-dog contest driven by an unnatural
obsession with pop culture they never experienced; it’s a righteous struggle for the soul
of the internet between the true fanatics who appropriately revere ‘80s pop culture and
the “poseurs” who are just using the contest to win glory, wealth, or power. The abundant
references throughout the novel thus express unbridled enthusiasm rather than social
commentary; as Laura Hudson correctly pointed out, “Ready Player One [is] far too
joyously self-absorbed in its referential excesses to step back and examine what they
might mean” (“Serious Bill-Paying Skillage”).
To the extent that it does present some kind of critical agenda, the novel’s focus is
instead on the dangers of
excess
, tied directly to its virtual world. The novel’s penultimate
chapter concludes with the gamer equivalent of Ferris Bueller’s “you just might miss it”
quip: “as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can
find true happiness. Because reality is
real
” (364).
Ready Player One
, put simply, is more
concerned with people playing games by themselves at the expense of their social life
(despite otherwise championing the community-building that the OASIS provides) than it
is with the sociocultural textures of a dying empire (even as it readily invokes them). Its
message, exemplified in the aphorism above, is that, while escapism is necessary, people
should be careful not to come untethered from those around them. Notably, despite being
a form of escapism, nostalgia is not similarly problematized within the novel, and is
seemingly exempt from Cline’s warning—which makes sense given that nostalgic
escapism is arguably the novel’s
rasion d’être
. “Nostalgia,” Cline explained in an
interview with
Slate
in 2015, “is good. Nostalgia is like video games, or music, or movies.
43
It’s a form of escapism,” adding “I wasn’t trying to make a judgment call [in the book]”
(Brogan). This separation between form and content enables Cline to produce a dying
world captivated by bygone styles from half a century earlier (which hardly any of the
remaining population experienced the first time around) motivated by a winner-take-all
competition that promises its winner untold fame and fortune, while also using this
setting not as a source of lament, or even a warning of things to come, but simply as the
staging ground for an action-adventure novel whose ultimate moral is that you should log
off from time to time.
It’s worth emphasizing, in light of all of this, that the novel’s dystopian setting is
really just a checklist of tropes from a twenty-first-century apocalyptic imagination.
Climate, energy, technology, corporate power, capitalism, poverty, war, famine, disease:
all of these crises converge in
Ready Player One
’s vision of the future, but they also
remain largely outside of the plot itself, existing mainly as a backdrop for the novel’s
action. There is, for instance, no attention paid to the environmental impact of powering
something as massive as the OASIS. In a strange twist, the novel actually suggests that
the energy crisis helped
foster
the growth of the OASIS: “The ongoing energy crisis
contributed greatly to the OASIS’s runaway popularity. The skyrocketing cost of oil
made airline and automobile travel too expensive for the average citizen, and the OASIS
became the only getaway most people could afford” (59). Poverty is also only invoked to
offer a backstory for its protagonist who, by the midpoint of the novel, has earned enough
money from his progress in the competition to leave behind the Oklahoma City trailer
park in which he grew up. This is dystopia as blank form, a genre not only emptied of its
original critical function, but subsequently repurposed for unadulterated fun. As an author,
44
this is Cline’s M.O. James Hibberd correctly points out in a 2020 interview with Cline
published in
Entertainment Weekly
that, despite their settings,
Ready Player One
and
Cline’s 2015 follow-up
Armada
(in which the world, facing a hostile alien invasion, is
saved by a guy who’s really good at video games) are “far from bleak downers; both
serve as wish-fulfillment escapist page-turners centered around high-stakes pop culture-
stuffed treasure hunts, a world his fans are rather eager to reenter.” Constance Grady’s
summary of the novel in
Vox
illustrates this incongruity: “The premise [of the novel] is
appealingly
silly
and
insubstantial
: It’s 2045, and the
dystopian
world has become
unbearable
” (emphasis added). Cline himself echoes the same sentiment towards the end
of the
Slate
interview:
[Jacob Brogan:]
Ready Player One
offers a pretty bleak vision of the future. The
world is broken, and there’s almost no way to fix it, so all that’s left to do is get
really good at video games. Do you share the novel’s cynicism?
[Cline:] The human condition is by its very nature painful. Becoming aware that
you’re going to die some day informs the rest of your life. And it’s also what
gives your life meaning, urgency. Virtual reality would be the ultimate escape, a
copy of reality that’s the way you want it to be, which makes human beings dodge
to some degree, but it’s also dangerous, as the real world, where our real lives
happen, becomes less urgent.
But I wasn’t trying to write a cautionary tale with
Ready Player One
—I was just
trying to write a fun science-fiction action adventure story in the vein of the
45
stories I loved.
To read
Ready Player One
as its author apparently intended requires readers to divorce
the novel’s dystopian setting from its core meaning in a way that seems antithetical to the
very existence of dystopia. This raises the question: why invoke a dying world at all if
only to shrug at it and look elsewhere?
2
To ask readers not only to imagine a hopeless future, but actually to find pleasure
in it is, on its face, a strange request. It seems self-contradictory. And yet, a survey of
popular American media of the past two decades (at least) suggests that this kind of
dystopian entertainment is exceedingly common. From disaster movies and post-
apocalyptic fiction to the mid-2000s zombification of all kinds of media, imagining a
bleak future has become the standard. To imagine a dystopian future is then to do what
everyone else does. One might ask, nonetheless, why dystopia has become so
commonplace, and if there’s any broader relationship between the novel’s setting and its
narrative purpose that might clarify this trend. Here, the interview with
Slate
reveals
something interesting about the way that Cline conceives of the dystopian imagination.
After Brogan pushes back against the author’s retreat into intent—“But do you think that
dystopias…hurt our ability to imagine a better future?” —Cline responds “I think real life
hurts our ability to imagine a better future.” In this, Cline recognizes a connection
between social conditions and fictional dystopian futures, that the social shapes the
aesthetic more than the reverse. Dystopian fiction, in other words, is the product of a
world that encourages one to imagine a negative future. This is not a new formulation, of
2
It’s also worth asking how we’ve reached a point where dystopia, and in particular a dystopia
that very closely mirrors our present, can provide the setting for a “fun science-fiction action
adventure,” where it can be something other than a cautionary or critical project—where, beyond
this, such a book can not only exist but become a bestseller and spawn a film directed by Steven
Spielberg.
46
course; what is noteworthy, however, is that, in writing
Ready Player One
, Cline
responds to these conditions by constructing a world not of
escape
—one in which
characters triumph over these challenges to make the world anew—but of
escapism,
where the central motive is distraction. The characters in this novel are not trying to piece
together a new society from the rubble or trying to rebel against an oppressive
government––in other words, to effect systemic change; they’re just trying to find a way
to shut it all out and have fun.
Ready Player One
in effect turns its back on the problems
of the world, even as it regularly suggests their inevitability.
In this way, the novel is borne of and pivots upon an inability to imagine anything
better. At the conclusion of the
Slate
interview, Cline offers only the faintest glimmer of
hope (one that, perhaps unsurprisingly, takes the rhetorical form of an ‘80s action-
adventure movie): “Today, the cavalier attitude that a lot of people have about climate
change and overpopulation, deforestation and oceans dying off, all of that, is really scary.
But also, as human beings, that’s when we really shine and kick ass, when our backs are
to the wall and our whole species’ survival is in question.” It’s unclear what prior pseudo-
apocalyptic events Cline is referring to, but he’s not alone in adopting this deterministic,
bystander theory of change:
surely somebody will do something
. In light of these beliefs,
it’s also unsurprising that the novel repeatedly presses the claim that there is no clear
solution to any of the problems facing the world. The disbelief in the possibility of
fundamental change is why Wade and his cohort are so focused on saving the OASIS
from the evil corporation that wants to gain control of it and over-monetize their only
viable form of escape/-ism: without escapism, they have nothing, and fighting to ensure
that such a totalizing form of escapism isn’t necessary is evidently out of the question.
47
And, as Cline implies above, it doesn’t have the makings of a “fun” novel.
3
Repeatedly,
the novel emphasizes the related notion that we are surrounded by systems beyond our
control, and that all action outside the OASIS is just “rearranging deck chairs on the
Titanic” (201). The goal, really, is to ensure control over the management of the
inevitable decline. In this,
Ready Player One
anticipates Adam Curtis’s arguments, in his
2016 film
Hypernormalisation
, about the contemporary pattern of constructing alternate
realities in an effort to manage the
unmanageable
.
It would be very easy for Cline’s novel to push beyond mere management and end
with its heroes saving the world from its impending demise or, at the very least, offering
a path to salvation. Such an ending would not outwardly compromise the novel’s fidelity
to its genre, nor contradict its message. One might argue, in fact, that Wade shifting focus
outside the OASIS in this way would actually enhance the novel’s message about the
value of not abandoning the real world. This is not to say that Cline is obliged to follow
this path, but to point out that the lack of contradiction suggests another reason for the
novel’s focus to remain virtual. If not directly related to artistic cohesion, then perhaps
the reason is that Cline simply believes that solving these issues would be a bridge too far,
too much of a fantasy, even for a “fun sci-fi action-adventure novel.” Perhaps even a
novel where a bunch of teenagers outwits the second-most powerful corporations on the
planet, with access to unlimited resources, must have its limits. And yet, for a book so
thoroughly driven by homage, that depicts a fantasy whose dimensions are shaped by
these influences at every turn, it’s curious that its big ending doesn’t have the same
3
This notion seems to contradict the immense commercial success of young adult series like
The
Hunger Games
,
Divergent
, and
Harry Potter
, as well as a number of ‘80s movies (more on that
later), which suggest that changing the world actually
is
compatible with Cline’s goal of “fun
action adventure.”
48
weight. The novel’s final battle in the OASIS, between gunters loyal to Wade and IOI’s
slew of mercenaries, is appropriately grand in scale—bearing all the hallmarks of
famously epic scenes like the Battle of Helm’s Deep from
Lord of the Rings
—but, in
terms of real-world consequences, it barely registers: “the status quo established at the
beginning of the narrative,” Jason Alexander explains, “does not change: the world’s
primary communications networks will still be in the hands of a billionaire whom the rest
of the users will have to trust to keep them safe from more villainous billionaires. The
only difference is that a nerd now has control” (529). And even this is just a continuation
of the status quo, as, at least at GSS, a nerd was already in control. Wade replacing
Halliday ensures that nothing will change—and this is by design: Wade wins the contest
by proving that he knows Halliday’s favorite things better than anyone on the planet.
Poverty, starvation, the energy crisis, climate change, and every other horror of
contemporary life the novel invokes also remain completely unaffected. This is not
incidental, but actually essential to the world Cline has built: the persistence of these
conditions is necessary because Wade’s triumph is only given meaning by the continued
existence of the crises threatening the world; if the world were made better, the battle for
the OASIS would lose its significance––a fitting conclusion in a posthistorical world that,
as Baudrillard once pointed out, is more concerned with
preventing
things from
happening than producing new events (17).
The scope of the novel’s victory is therefore at odds with the ‘80s media it reveres,
most of which is significantly more ambitious: Luke, Han, and Leia save the galaxy from
authoritarianism, David Lightman prevents thermonuclear war, and Indiana Jones
prevents the Nazis from attaining immortality, while Wade only manages to secure the
49
future of video games (and only until everything else collapses). Here, the novel’s desire
for realism seems to have come into conflict with its fantasy, producing a contradiction
that it must try to reconcile: how do you save a world that can’t be saved?
The answer is found in the fact that they do save
a
world. Keeping the OASIS out
of the hands of the greedy megacorporation IOI, prevents a future in which the problems
of the real world leak into the virtual one. Early in the novel, Wade lays out the stakes
involved in preventing IOI from gaining control of the OASIS:
They would start charging a monthly fee for access to the simulation. They would
plaster advertisements on every visible surface. User anonymity and free speech
would become things of the past. The moment IOI took over, the OASIS would
cease to be the open-source virtual utopia I’d grown up in. It would become a
corporate-run dystopia, an overpriced theme park for wealthy elitists. (33)
IOI is presented in contrast to Halliday’s
benevolent
megacorporation, GSS—which, as
Wade explains in the sequel, has become an “unstoppable megacorporation with a global
monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications
platform” (29). Thus, as A.O. Scott points out in his review of the film,
Ready Player
One
(book and novel) relies on a dichotomy that doesn’t exist in reality:
Halliday is a sweet, shaggy nerd with a guileless Northern California drawl and a
deeply awkward manner, especially around women. Sorrento [the face of IOI] is
an autocratic bean counter, a would-be master of the universe who doesn't even
like video games. These characters are clichés, but they are also allegorical
figures. In the movie, they represent opposing principles, but in our world, they
are pretty much the same guy. A lot of the starry-eyed do-it-yourselfers tinkering
50
in their garages and giving life to their boyish dreams back in the '70s and '80s
turned out to be harboring superman fantasies of global domination all along.
They shared their wondrous creations and played the rest of us for suckers,
collecting our admiration, our attention and our data as profit and feudal tribute.
The only difference between the two corporations—which, for
Ready Player One
is the
crucial
one–is one of aesthetic preference. It’s OK for such figures to exist, the novel
suggests, as long as they like the right things.
By winning the contest, Wade preserves the continued functioning of the OASIS
as it is
, in effect saving the (virtual) world from the fate to which the real one has already
succumbed.
Ready Player One
is thus able to invoke the world-saving convention of the
media Cline loves, to preserve his fantasy of triumph, by displacing it into a different
context. Through the OASIS, then,
Ready Player One
constructs a substitute world that,
unlike the real one,
can
be saved.
In saving the OASIS,
Ready Player One
also evinces a nostalgia for a type of
story that is rarely told in the twenty-first century, about a world in which destruction can
be averted. Cline’s attempt to reproduce this narrative is thus an expression of nostalgic
fantasy for an outmoded media convention, a Jamesonian pastiche in which obsolete
cultural forms reemerge, hollowed of their original function and redeployed as style.
4
The question, however, still remains: if not its influences, what delimits the extent
of the novel’s triumphs and the changes they enact? Here we see contemporary social
reality structuring (arguably superseding) Cline’s homage. In its reluctance to imagine a
better future beyond its virtual world, as well as its retreat into ‘80s pop culture, the novel
4
See Jameson’s intro to
Postmodernism
and chapter nine, as well as “Postmodernism and
Consumer Society.”
51
expresses sentiments that arose as a result of the conditions of the end of history. In this
context,
Ready Player One
doesn’t imagine a better future because it can’t: because the
notion of a better future has lost its credibility; because we’re already living in a time that
was itself another time’s “better future” and, in many ways, have little to show for it
(whatever one thinks of the progress of the past few decades, it’s difficult to say that
we’ve so far lived up to what was imagined for the twenty-first century); because of,
ultimately, a sense that the future is already written and nothing else
is
possible. To
paraphrase Mark Fisher, it’s easier to imagine the complete virtualization of oligarchic
capitalism through the construction of a massive, worldwide video game than it is to
imagine anything better.
The novel is an expression of a feeling of powerlessness so pervasive that even
the prospect of becoming the wealthiest person on the planet with a controlling stake in
the world’s largest corporation is not enough to provide one with the ability to imagine a
viable alternative to the status quo: midway through the novel, Wade’s love interest
Art3mis asks “What would you do if you won…How would you spend all that money?”
After replying that he’d “move into a mansion. Buy a bunch of cool shit. Not be poor,”
she presses for more: “Wow. Big dreamer…And after you buy your mansion and your
‘cool shit,’ what will you do with the hundred and thirty billion you’ll have left over?”
“Not wanting her to think I was some shallow idiot,” Wade explains that he would
have a nuclear-powered interstellar spacecraft constructed in Earth’s orbit…I’d
stock it with a lifetime supply of food and water, a self-sustaining biosphere, and
a supercomputer loaded with every movie, book, song, videogame, and piece of
artwork that human civilization has ever created, along with a stand-alone copy of
52
the OASIS. Then I’d invite a few of my closest friends to come aboard, along
with a team of doctors and scientists, and we’d all get the hell out of Dodge.
Leave the solar system and start looking for an extrasolar Earthlike planet (97-8)
When Art3mis asks if Wade realizes that “nearly half the people on this planet are
starving” Wade replies that “the reason so many people are starving is because we’ve
wrecked the planet. The Earth is dying, you know? It’s time to leave” (98). Art3mis,
often positioned as the novel’s moral core, replies that she would use the money to “make
sure everyone on this planet has enough to eat. Once we tackle world hunger, then we can
figure out how to fix the environment and solve the energy crisis,” which elicits an eye
roll from Wade: “Right…And after you pull off that miracle, you can genetically
engineer a bunch of Smurfs and unicorns to frolic around this new perfect world you’ve
created…You really think it’s that simple…That you can just write a check for two
hundred and forty billion dollars and fix all the world’s problems?” (98). In this, Wade
expresses the belief that the only option is, essentially, giving up—the problems are
beyond solving. The novel initially poses this as a debate between a supposedly clear-
eyed cynicism and lofty idealism, and, at least here, it seems to suggest that neither is
totally correct. In the novel’s final scene, after they’ve defeated IOI and won the contest,
Wade and Art3mis return to the question:
“So what happens now?”
I smiled. “We’re going to use all of the moolah we just won to feed
everyone on the planet. We’re going to make the world a better place, right?”
She grinned. “Don’t you want to build a huge interstellar spaceship, load it
full of videogames, junk food, and comfy couches, and then get the hell out of
53
here?”
“I’m up for that, too,” I said. “If it means I get to spend the rest of my life
with you.” (371)
Cline ultimately avoids declaring one approach correct, dissolving the debate into a
romantic appeal. Wade, though, having now learned the meaning of love and friendship,
does seem to have developed a desire to think beyond himself, and recognizes the value
of striving for something even if the result isn’t guaranteed.
If the end of
Ready Player One
seems to leave the door open for the possibility of
a better future, Cline’s 2020 sequel quickly shuts it and, by the end, locks it and throws
away the key.
Ready Player Two
, taking place three years after the end of the first novel,
begins with Wade recounting the group’s activities in the time since. Following his
victory in Halliday’s egg hunt, Wade elected to share his wealth and control of GSS with
his three friends who helped him along the way. With their newfound prosperity, each
has taken on considerable philanthropic missions aimed at combating pet issues ranging
from world hunger to housing discrimination against the LGBTQ community. In true
neoliberal fashion (they are, after all, the most powerful people on the planet), they also
attempted to solve problems on the level of government itself:
We’d also started funneling cash to the struggling U.S. government and its
citizens, who had been surviving on foreign aid for decades. We paid off the
national debt and provided aerial-defense drones and tactical telebots to help
reestablish the rule of law in the rural areas where local infrastructure had
collapsed along with the power grid. Human law enforcement officers no longer
had to risk their own lives to uphold the law. Our police telebots were able to
54
carry out their mission to serve and protect without putting any human lives at
risk. Their programming and their operational fail-safes prevented them from
harming anyone in the line of duty. (61)
Unfortunately for the so-called High-Five,
5
their “noble efforts weren’t moving the
dial…For the time being we were holding chaos and collapse at bay, but humanity’s
perilous predicament just kept getting worse.” The reason, Wade explains, was “painfully
obvious”: “We’d already passed the point of no return. The world’s population was fast
approaching ten billion people, and Mother Earth was making it abundantly clear that she
could no longer sustain all of us—especially not after we’d spent the past two centuries
poisoning her oceans and atmosphere with wild industrial abandon. We had made our bed,
and now we were going to die in it” (61). In response, he has used his considerable
wealth to begin construction of the same “nuclear-powered interstellar spacecraft” he
fantasized about in the first book, with room for “up to two dozen human passengers” and
the goal of finding a new planet fit for human habitation (62). Even as he recognizes the
optics of this move, Wade rationalizes it as the only way to ensure a future for humanity,
and, thus, “the only responsible thing to do”: “with Earth teetering on the brink of
destruction, leaving our eggs in one basket was foolish” (65).
The return of Wade’s cynicism in the early stages of the second novel is partly
driven by the disintegration of his relationship with Art3mis (which was arguably the true
source of his newfound conviction anyway); however, despite having won her back by
the end of the novel, and having once again beaten back the forces that threaten the future
of the OASIS, the spaceship actually remains the group’s (and, seemingly Cline’s) only
5
One of the quintet’s original members was murdered by IOI during the Hunt, and so, while the
moniker remains, the High Five is now only four.
55
tangible solution to problems the world faces, albeit with a slight twist. Following the
discovery of technology that can create sentient AI clones by mapping human brains,
which is the catalyst of most of the novel’s action, the group decides in the end to send
copies of themselves and the OASIS into space to search for a habitable planet while they
remain on Earth. The AI copy of Wade’s consciousness, who narrates the final chapter, is
uncharacteristically hopeful despite recognizing that very little has actually changed:
Things aren’t perfect. The people who remain back on Earth are still facing plenty
of huge problems. But they also still have the OASIS as their collective means of
escape.
[…]
Even with all of the problems confronting our counterparts back on Earth,
it’s comforting to know that there are smart, resourceful people back there, doing
everything in their power to make life better for their fellow human beings—
while digital copies of many of those same people are out here in space, searching
to find humanity a new home. (587-8)
Here, Cline again slips into the same bystander theory of change that he expressed in the
Slate
interview—
something, somehow needs to change; hopefully someone will figure it
out because I can’t.
As in
Ready Player One
,
Ready Player Two
closes with an attempt at
an ‘80s movie morality lesson: “the only thing you can do is keep right on playing.
Because the game that is your life still isn’t over yet. And there’s no telling how far you
might be able to get, what you might discover, or who you might meet when you get
there” (589). Since Cline has stated that the final book in the trilogy will be a prequel,
this is how the saga ends. There are only two options for dealing with the horrors of the
56
modern world: escapism (distraction) and giving up (abandonment).
There is, here and throughout both novels, a paradox: a seemingly unshakable
belief in the power of the individual to overcome whatever is laid before them coupled
with the sense that we’ve reached the end of what can be achieved (or, at least, the limit
of what can be imagined). As Susan Aronstein and Jason Thompson have argued in their
examination of the novel’s appropriation of Arthurian legend,
Ready Player One’s
conclusion offers readers “the grail, the ultimate Easter egg, arguing that true
meaning…lies outside of the world of the game, in the meta-level of genuine human
exchange. [Cline] paints our modern world as a wasteland in need of an Arthur to restore
it, and no code, trick, or joke—no magic, no memory, and no Merlin—he argues, can do
that” (63). And yet, in
Ready Player Two
, no Arthur arrives. Wade may have found the
grail—twice—but salvation is not on the horizon.
6
In this, the scale of Wade’s success is
both massive and minuscule. He has taken on the second most powerful corporation in
the world, outsmarted literally everyone else on the planet, and defeated a supposedly all-
knowing all-powerful artificial intelligence, and yet none of it has had any broader impact
on the crises faced by humanity that the series, for some reason, cannot let go of. In truth,
at the novel’s close,
nothing has really happened
: a narrative that begins by invoking a
multitude of global catastrophes supposedly ends in triumph despite its champion having
made zero impact on any of them. Not only this, but Wade’s victories also ensure the
survival of one of the major obstacles to real change in the novel: the OASIS itself. The
novel makes clear that, more than anything else, Halliday’s invention encourages
6
Additionally, it’s hard to see how “genuine human exchange,” as Aronstein and Thompson put
it, will solve climate change or the energy crisis, so the novel’s supposed insights aren’t really up
to the task facing the world either.
57
escapism
(and thus passive acceptance) over
escape
(liberation), placating the masses
7
and leaving them in a state of inertia.
The series is thus an expression of the profound pessimism that has developed as
a result of the end of history. Wade synthesizes this view early in the first novel, soberly
summarizing the state of the world as he wishes someone else had done for him:
“Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in
the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but
now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You
were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only
gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some even
say it’s ‘collapsing.’” (17-18)
Because fundamental change is seemingly impossible, and because the system doesn’t
provide—and, in fact, regularly suppresses—any stories that give meaning to these
struggles, this powerful sense of hopelessness emerges. It’s no wonder that the novels can
only conceive of two approaches: distraction and abandonment. This is what happens
when the belief that a system is broken couples with the notion that there is no alternative
to it. All there is left to do is either look away or fantasize about escape. A few pages
after the description above, Wade explains that Halliday’s Easter Egg hunt provided him
with precisely this, a way to find meaning in the world through purposeful distraction:
“Suddenly, I’d found something worth doing. A dream worth chasing. For the last five
years, the Hunt had given me a goal and purpose. A quest to fulfill. A reason to get up in
the morning. Something to look forward to. The moment I began searching for the egg,
the future no longer seemed so bleak” (19). In the second novel, however, after the
7
Once again, for Cline, this is a
good
thing.
58
excitement of the Hunt has dissipated, Wade drifts back into hopelessness about the
future of humanity and begins construction on the aforementioned spaceship. The hunt
for the egg is thus revealed to be only a temporary respite from the insurmountable
despair facing the planet. Nothing good is permanent, and presentiment always returns.
This inevitable malaise is one of the ways in which the novel’s nostalgia interacts
meaningfully with its end-of-history-inflected dystopia. In a time when things only seem
to get worse, and the future appears to be written in stone, the past naturally becomes a
place of solace and comfort. Importantly, however, this is not actually the function of
nostalgia for the novel’s characters: Wade and his friends never really express any
nostalgic longing. Aside from generally lamenting the present decline and distracting
themselves from the present with the artifacts of another time, there are no “I was born in
the wrong generation” discussions in either novel, and none of the characters express a
particular desire to “go back” despite the 1980s, for all its (generally unacknowledged)
faults, appearing considerably better than the novel’s present. The reason for this is
simple: having never experienced the actual 1980s, their entire notion of the period
comes from media and consumer products, which, through the OASIS, they can already
experience firsthand in perfect simulacra. Wade’s best friend Aech, for instance, has
modeled her personal chat room after “a large suburban rec room, circa the late 1980s.
Old movie and comic book posters covered the wood-paneled walls. A vintage RCA
television stood in the center of the room, hooked up to a Betamax VCR, a LaserDisc
player, and several vintage videogame consoles. Bookshelves lined the far wall, filled
with role-playing game supplements and back issues of Dragon magazine” (37). What
Ready Player One
stages for its characters, is not a nostalgia for events, for a specific
59
time or a place filtered through a particular subjectivity, but an attachment to
things––
which are much more easily reproduced and acquired, and, furthermore, have a particular
aesthetic quality. There’s a reason the VCR is a Betamax from the 1980s rather than a
Toshiba from the early 2000s, though the two objects served the exact same purpose in
reality—although, in Aech’s virtual chat room, neither serve
any
purpose aside from
contributing to the room’s aesthetic. As in
Stranger Things
, we see here a hierarchy at
work, where the aesthetic of an object is its most essential quality: style for the sake of
style. It’s easy to see why, when the objects of their infatuation are immediately available,
these characters don’t long for the past that used to contain them. Insofar as one’s
nostalgia is tied to
things
rather than experiences
,
the OASIS has, in effect, made longing
obsolete. Baudrillard has argued that “Nostalgia…was beautiful for never being satisfied,
as was utopia for never being achieved” (
The Illusion of the End
120). The fantasy
Ready
Player One
stages, in which nostalgia
can
be satisfied, is a grotesque revision that
simultaneously deprives it of its beauty and its critical potential.
Ready Player Two
takes
this a step further, incorporating the creation of technology that enables one to relive
memories—theirs or someone else’s. This objectification and commodification of
memory, transposes intangible events into products that can be obtained and consumed.
The OASIS itself is also a space that is fundamentally shaped by the end of
history. It is a site where the cultural has utterly supplanted the political and the historical.
At one point in the first novel, Wade notes that real-world elections were pointless, but
that he always voted in OASIS elections [201]). In a reactionary move, Cline, through
Wade, also expresses disdain for the fundamentals of democracy, noting that “now that
everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected
60
were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical evangelists” (201). The OASIS
elections exist only in the form of pop cultural artifacts, wholly abstracted from the
context in which they were created. Halliday’s virtual reality simulation is thus the
epitome of what Slavoj Zižek has described as “a place deprived of its history; a
worldless
place” (10) that exists in the post-ideological world. If, as Jameson has argued,
the postmodern subject is one who has lost their sense of history, the OASIS is the
ultimate postmodern space, a post-historical playground. In Cline’s future, all conflict
plays out in the artificial world of culture, a literalization of contemporary “culture wars”
but further abstracted from political reality in favor of petty disputes over the
management of products and aesthetic properties. History, as a result, doesn’t really
happen anymore. In fact, not only is the OASIS a space where the transplanting of culture
for history and politics ensures that meaningful ever happens, stasis is actually its primary
function. The OASIS exists to provide stability in a world of decay.
The OASIS not only works to ensure that the world is trapped in a perpetual
present, but also to make the utopian(ized) past inhabitable again—an act that takes place
both within the world of the novel and for its readers. As a readerly experience,
Ready
Player One
promises to immerse its readers in a world of ‘80s nostalgia through a fantasy
of a future where (via simulation) inhabiting the past is physically (or, at least,
visually
)
possible. In one part of the novel, Wade visits a planet where Halliday had also sought
precisely this result:
In the early days of the OASIS, Halliday had created a small planet named
Middletown, named after his hometown in Ohio. The planet was the site of a
meticulous re-creation of his hometown as it was in the late 1980s. That saying
61
about how you can never go home again? Halliday had found a way. Middletown
was one of his pet projects, and he’d spent years coding and refining it. And it
was well known (to gunters, at least) that one of the most detailed and accurate
parts of the Middletown simulation was the re-creation of Halliday’s boyhood
home. (65)
For Halliday,
8
Middletown was the literalization of nostalgia: instead of returning to his
home in a memory, he converted that memory into physical space. The purpose of doing
so is unclear, since the town was only populated with invented citizens powered by
artificial intelligence instead of friends and family (most of whom are, presumably, dead),
and, though one wonders what the use of this kind of hollowed out nostalgic simulacrum
might be, it’s a question the novel doesn’t really interrogate.
9
Nonetheless, with
Middletown, the distance that forms the impossibility at the heart of nostalgia seemingly
became a little bit less—a tantalizing prospect for readers drawn in by the promise of a
romp through the increasingly-forgotten media that shaped their adolescence.
Halliday, we’re told, devoted a considerable amount of time to the task of creating
Middletown, working not only from memory but also maps, phone books, photographs
and other artifacts to piece together what his memory couldn’t render. The goal, Wade
explains, was “to make everything as authentic and accurate as possible” (102), which
raises an important question: authentic and accurate
to what
? The implication from
8
And, arguably, for Cline, whose hometown of Ashland, Ohio is located about three hours from
Middletown. This is yet another example of Halliday’s biography mirroring his creator’s.
9
Middletown is briefly referenced in
Ready Player Two
, when Wade reflects on the OASIS re-
creation of the Oklahoma City trailer park in which he grew up: “Those visits made me
understand why Halliday had re-created Middletown in such loving detail, when it had been the
setting of so many of his own unhappy childhood memories. He wanted to be able to revisit his
own past, to get back in touch with the person he used to be, before the world had changed him”
(42). While this explanation offers a little more insight, the affordances of visiting a virtual
recreation of one’s hometown over simply
remembering
it remain unclear.
62
Halliday’s use of these documents is that he was seeking to replicate historical reality by
going beyond the limitations of memory; yet, at the same time, nostalgic desire is also
shown to have superseded reality as “Halliday had coded the planet so that no matter
when you visited or where you were on the surface, it was always a perfect late-autumn
afternoon, circa 1986” (101). In this, the supposedly
realistic
recreation is characterized
by an impossible subversion of reality designed to
improve
physical reality so that it
better reflects the ideal. When Wade arrives in Middletown, he makes note of the AI
inhabitants of the town who seem, above all else, designed to evoke
‘80sness
, producing
another evasion of true authenticity in their hyperrealism: “[they were] all dressed in mid-
1980s attire. A woman with a giant ozone-depleting hairdo bobbed her head to an
oversize Walkman. A kid in a gray Members Only jacket leaned against the wall,
working on a Rubik’s Cube. A Mohawked punk rocker sat in a plastic chair, watching a
Riptide
rerun on a coin-operated television” (101). Though Wade doesn’t notice, the
town’s AI population, who seem to have been designed based on a list of “80s things,”
are remarkably unreal, a reflection not of the actual Middletown, Ohio of 1986 (not
everyone in the ‘80s, particularly in small towns, looked
this
‘80s), but more like a
cinematic invention where everything is designed to
signify
for an audience—when he
first arrives, Wade notes that it was “like stepping out of a time machine” and, having no
frame of reference for the 1980s
except
media, adds a few sentences later that it reminded
him of the (fictional) town from
Footloose
(101-2). In this way, Middletown is ultimately
an
idealized
version of Halliday’s hometown that sought authenticity only insofar as it
was necessary to evoke the time and place without contradiction, a means of facilitating
immersion.
63
Cline’s novel is predicated on the desire to provide this—the world of
Ready
Player One
, and its invention of the OASIS, in other words, exists for the purpose of
reanimating the past. This desire is instantiated, at least in part, by the end of history,
where the future is no longer desirable in itself and the past has morphed into a site of
fantasy. The future is invoked in this novel mainly as a means of creating the conditions
for the existence of a technology that enables one to inhabit a time that
is
desirable, one
that can, crucially, remake that time in its idealized, ultra-desirable form; in short, the
future exists in the novel as a mechanism for returning to the past.
If the novel is functionally a mechanism for returning to the past, then it’s worth
considering
how
it does so. Unlike a novel that is
actually
set in the 1980s either naturally
or through some sort of time travel, Cline’s series never truly leaves the 2040s. (But, of
course, nor does it ever actually arrive at the 2040s; both places are imaginary, one a
retrospective simulacrum, the other a prospective projection. The 80s are thus
everywhere and nowhere). Wade’s trip to Middletown in the first novel, for instance, is
purely simulated, and largely a fictional (re)construction. The sequel comes a bit closer in
a few scenes that place Wade in the shoes of other people as he experiences their
memories firsthand through the OASIS (similar to the “Flicksyncs” of
WarGames
and
Monty Python
from the first novel), but Wade is never
physically
there, and these
glimpses of the actual 1980s are brief and deeply personal, which doesn’t provide readers
much opportunity to fully immerse themselves in the period. The novels’ interaction with
the past is thus almost exclusively bound up in references to media and consumer
products.
In this, Cline’s novels evince an extreme form of the same hollowing of allusion
64
that I discuss in greater detail in Chapter Three. In
Stranger Things
, another highly-
referential nostalgic narrative, the main thrust of the relationship between text and
referent is presence alone—the text only needs to provide enough to suggest the reference.
Ready Player One
takes this to another level: in
Stranger Things
, these references are
often at least partially coded, in the form of trope, narrative structure, sound design, and
cinematography (kids riding bikes in the suburbs
evokes
the same in
E.T.
); in the novels,
on the other hand, Cline typically just
says the name of the thing
(“Like Marty McFly, I
woke up at exactly 10:28 A.M., to the song ‘Back in Time’ by Huey Lewis and the
News” [
Ready Player Two
39]). It’s the authorial equivalent of pointing at an animal in
the zoo, saying “hey, look, a tiger,” and then moving on to the next exhibit. Formally, this
also reflects Fredric Jameson’s claim that postmodernism enacts the abstraction of
modernist aesthetics (
Postmodernism
17). Here, the modernist emphasis on
allusion
becomes the postmodernist emphasis on
reference
, taken to its extreme. Meaning is
imparted here through gesture alone, contained in the technique itself rather than in what
it produces. The reference, in other words, is not a means to an end,
it is the end
. There is
nothing deeper lurking in the technique, and the result is a comparatively impoverished
experience. As Laura Hudson explained in her review of
Ready Player Two
,
There are no pleasures to be had here, only a reminder of things that once
produced pleasure
. A random page of dialogue from
The Princess Bride
does not
inspire a sense of romantic, swashbuckling adventure. Reciting the names of stars
in every John Hughes movie does not convey their adolescent joy and heartbreak.
And telling us that a climactic battle “was like Yoda versus Palpatine, Gandalf
versus Saruman, and Neo versus Agent Smith” does not make it feel like any of
65
those far more interesting things. (emphasis added)
Ready Player One
’s deployment of this hollow referentiality in service of nostalgia is a
perfect reflection of the decoupling of nostalgia from experience that I discussed
extensively in Chapter One. Not only is it alienated from personal experience, but it’s
also divorced entirely from any sort of meaningful context: a dangling signifier capable
only of evoking recognition. Emotion, in this form, arrives solely in the gratification one
might feel from getting the reference and, possibly, the jolt of endorphins that comes
from being reminded of something you once enjoyed. Pleasure has largely been
outsourced to the past.
This system of nostalgia by referential accumulation is not incidental; it is central
to the way that
Ready Player One
operates. It’s part of the novel’s essence, so deeply
ingrained that the first trailer for Spielberg’s adaptation (co-written by Cline), which, in
keeping with the spirit of its predecessor, prominently featured a cavalcade of
recognizable intellectual properties like Master Chief, Chucky, and the Iron Giant, was
mocked by viewers online as
Recognizing Things: The Movie
.
10
The text’s encyclopedic
approach to homage is without question its most prominent feature. This is borne, at least
in part, of the novel’s aforementioned lack of context for its references. On nearly every
page, the reader is confronted by a series of references that they either understand or
10
This is part of a growing trend in Hollywood as major studios seek to consolidate their brands
through synergistic content. The first trailer for the 2021
Space Jam
sequel, for instance, featured
a scene where a crowd of characters from Warner Brothers properties, ranging from
Batman
’s Mr.
Freeze and Bette Davis’s Baby Jane to the white walkers from
Game of Thrones
and Alex’s
droogs from
AClockwork Orange
, watch a basketball game together. This can also be seen to an
extent in the 2012 animated film
Wreck-It-Ralph
, and in many of the films from the Marvel
Cinematic Universe, particularly the
Avengers
movies. While studios seeking to use new releases
as tools for cross-promotion and brand loyalty is not exactly the same as Cline’s fanboy
exuberance, the formal techniques, and the emphasis on recognition as primary content,
fundamentally are.
66
don’t. As Grady puts it, “The primary aesthetic pleasure [of the novel] is one of
recognition: Yes, I know that reference, and yes, I agree that it sucks or rocks.”
This has led many reviewers and critics to identify exclusion as the novel’s
central purpose. Megan Amber Condis, for instance, has argued that “The references
serve as a gate-keeping mechanism: readers prove themselves to be a part of the gamer
in-group described in and valorized by the novel if they can demonstrate encyclopedic
knowledge of Halliday’s/Cline’s canon” (5). This reading, however, doesn’t accurately
capture the true character of the novel’s system of references. While it might be true that
readers who recognize Cline’s references will feel a sense of thrill or achievement (and
perhaps even belonging), it bears repeating that an overwhelming portion of the
references in the series are actually to exceedingly mainstream artifacts, many of which
are decidedly
not
classic geek/nerd/gamer texts, and for readers who lived through (or
arguably even
near
) the 1980s much of the novel will likely be very familiar, whether
they identify as part of Cline’s subculture or not. Thus, while classic gaming trivia may
not appeal to many readers—even self-identified gamers who were born in the late 1990s
and have no experience with Atari games like
Galaga
or
Contra
11
—it also isn’t the
primary mode of reference in the novel; instead, gaming is merely a subset of the larger
class of references in the novel: the 1980s of Cline’s adolescence. More than a novel for
gamers or geeks, this is a novel built around a reader (or, arguably, author) of a certain
age;
Ready Player One
’s ideal reader is one who, like Cline, came of age in or around the
1980s because simply living through this time grants most Americans automatic
familiarity with the overwhelming majority of the novel’s canon.
11
The potential exclusion of the late-millennial or Gen Z gamer provides further proof that
“gamer” is not an adequate description of the novel’s ideal reader.
67
Indeed, despite accusations of gate-keeping,
Ready Player Two
makes abundantly
clear that Cline
wants
his readers to be able to enjoy his novels, to take part in his
nostalgic fantasy, even without getting all of the references. As Samantha Nelson pointed
out in her review, Cline’s sequel “reads like a fusion between a Wikipedia page and a
video game walk-through: It makes copious references but absolutely ensures readers get
the joke by having characters share the source of a quote.” Moreover, in addition to the
references to games and other more conventionally white, masculine pop cultural artifacts
like those we saw in the first novel,
Ready Player Two
also spends considerable time
discussing those produced by women and people of color (seemingly as a corrective for
the criticism Cline faced in the aftermath of the first). Though he might prefer that
readers automatically get his references, and readers who do are more likely to take
pleasure in the work, the expansion of Cline’s canon suggests that his goal is actually the
opposite of traditional gate-keeping, in that the novels seek to gain validation
through
recognition. The more readers taking pleasure in the ‘80s nostalgia-fest, the better. The
fact that in both novels’ references are often deployed with a triviality that enables
unfamiliar readers to continue the story without substantial loss further emphasizes that
Cline’s goal is inclusive.
Cline seems to want, and surmises his readers want, above all else, to be
recognized.
It’s no coincidence that the two most important characters in the novel are
essentially avatars for different elements of their creator. Biographically, Halliday and
Cline share a lot: similar birth years, similar hometowns in the same state, similar
obsessions with the pop culture of their adolescence. They also share a desire to create a
world in which their tastes become dominant. At one point in the novel, Halliday’s
68
closest friend and GSS co-founder Ogden Morrow explains that “Jim always wanted
everyone to share his obsessions, to love the same things he loved. I think this contest is
his way of giving the entire world an incentive to do just that” (122).
Ready Player One
is
Cline’s attempt to do the same. Wade, too, as Nick Schager points out, serves as a kind of
stand-in for Cline:
Just as Wade uses his Parzival avatar to create a perfect version of himself, so
Cline does the same with Wade – since Wade’s boundless, super-radical-amazing
‘80s erudition is really Cline’s, and something the author can’t help but brag
about in detail. When Wade boasts about his virtual car (“my time-traveling,
Ghost Busting, Knight Riding, matter-penetrating DeLorean”) one can practically
hear Cline squealing with delight over the idea of owning such a fit-for-a-fourth-
grader’s-imagination mash-up vehicle.
In this light, the novels stage a world where its creator is represented by the two most
important people on the planet. It’s a power fantasy, of sorts, whose source is explicitly
cultural, derived from one’s mastery of a specific kind of pop culture knowledge. Readers
who identify with Wade, Halliday, and Cline—who, in other words,
recognize
themselves within the novel—can also partake in this fantasy. Because this is the
foundation of the novel, its popularity is therefore less a matter of aesthetic quality and
more a function of its ability to capture readers within this fantasy. It casts Cline as a
curator rather than creator, enacting through its gestural referentiality what Mark Fisher
labeled the “transformation of culture into museum pieces” (
Ghosts of My Life
4),
decontextualized artifacts made to be discussed but not experienced. Here, the author has
engaged in the same act as his character: just as Halliday, through his contest, constructs
69
a world obsessed with what he deems valuable, so too has Cline, through his novel,
created a narrative built around the valorization of his preferred media. The ultimate
effect is to create a platform for recognition, in which praise of the novel necessarily
involves praise for Cline’s taste and, therefore, as I will shortly show, his
identity
.
Recognition in the novel is not simply a matter of being seen within characters;
it’s actually the central function of the series, the element that provides unity to the entire
project. This effort mirrors a larger trend in the pop culture and politics of the period, as
the twenty-first century has seen an explosion of recognition claims, where the desire to
be “seen and heard,” typically divorced from ideologically-driven redistributive measures,
has become one of (if not
the
) central mandates of the response to many contemporary
social issues. As Nancy Fraser explained in 2000, “Claims for the recognition of
difference now drive many of the world’s social conflicts, from campaigns for national
sovereignty and subnational autonomy, to battles around multiculturalism, to the newly
energized movements for international human rights, which seek to promote both
universal respect for shared humanity and esteem for cultural distinctiveness. They have
also become predominant within social movements such as feminism, which had
previously foregrounded the redistribution of resources” (107). This tendency has only
intensified since Fraser first described it. Contemporary notions of identity politics,
which have in many circles become detached from its more materialist beginnings,
perhaps best exemplify the trend.
12
12
This is, of course, not to discount the work of activists and scholars working within various
social movements that have proliferated in recent years, from the Movement for Black Lives and
prison abolition to #metoo and reproductive justice, nor is it to suggest that identity and
materiality are incompatible. It is, on the contrary, to suggest that the mainstreaming of many of
these movements has generally also involved a movement away from material and/or
redistributive premises toward a more metaphysical emphasis on awareness and identity that has,
70
The current emphasis on identity and recognition—or, more specifically, their
incorporation into mainstream culture outside of the expressly political—has also
spawned a number of offshoots that warrant closer attention, especially in the way that
they are reflected in Cline’s novels. Most notably, as the discourse around identity
politics has become mainstream, many Americans now seek to be recognized based on
individual, often idiosyncratic, identities that coalesce around aesthetic taste more than
conventional social categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. This is, of course,
not to suggest that race, class, gender, and sexuality are absent from these formulations,
or that these categories are somehow discrete. My point here is simply that, in many
cases, taste occupies an elevated status in self-definition.
End of history neoliberalism, in other words, indexes identity to patterns of
consumption (gamer, Marvel fan, hip-hop head, K-Pop stan), and the self, as a result,
must then be recognized through the things that constitute it. In order for a Marvel fan to
feel validated, in other words, their favorite movies must be appreciated by the broader
public. Critique of the product then becomes a critique of the identity of those who like
it.
13
Mediated nostalgia, therefore, is just another expression of consumer choice that has
come to define the self. Identity, in this formulation, is a product of the products that one
enjoyed as a kid. Recognition of that childhood self becomes a matter of the recognition
thus far, yielded little in the way of substantial change despite increased visibility and (arguably)
public support. This is both a reflection of the difficulty of effecting serious social change on the
scale to which these movements aspire, which takes considerable time and effort in the face of
seemingly unending hurdles and setbacks, and of the anti-social logic of post-historical
neoliberalism, which displays a unique ability to subsume critique into itself in a way that
ultimately maintains the status quo. To put it cynically, DEI seminars at Fortune 500 companies
have proliferated, but so have police budgets.
13
This is the animating logic behind a number of recent entries in the culture war—most notably
gamergate, whose spirit has been linked to
Ready Player One
by several commentators (Condis;
Grady; Hudson).
71
or validation of the consumer’s choice, and re-experiencing the media that helped define
an adolescence becomes an act of self-recognition, and, perhaps more importantly, of
cultural validation. To be seen and heard, in this context, is to have memories of favorite
childhood tv shows seen and heard.
Ready Player One
exemplifies what happens when
the consumer preferences that formed an essential part of adolescent identity become
obsolete. Where identity has become tied to patterns of consumption and taste, increasing
obsolescence results in the subject’s feeling misrecognized. In posthistorical
neoliberalism, where conventional social structures have become increasingly atomized,
cultural irrelevance, when the products that define one’s identity are no longer widely
recognized (neither understood nor validated), is akin to social death––as Lauren Berlant
puts it, “Under capitalism, being in circulation denotes being in life” (42). As a project,
Ready Player One
is thus an attempt to fight against the death of one’s identity—to
ensure that it remains not only culturally relevant but, most of all, dominant; it is an
attempt to reassert the primacy of (a certain kind of) Gen-X
14
pop cultural heritage. As a
work of fiction,
Ready Player One
stages a utopian fantasy where this kind of social
death never occurs because the world has become enraptured by the increasingly
outmoded tastes and pop cultural objects of its creators’ adolescence. The novel imagines
a future where Gen-X pop culture, and the identities that are tied up in it, are not only still
relevant but actually reassert themselves as the dominant force.
This situation arises at the end of history because, in the absence of systemic
political alternatives, and with the attendant foreclosing of possibility, neoliberalism
suggests instead a marketized solution to social stratification: the way to gain recognition
14
To be clear, this is not exclusive to Generation-X, either. Millennial memes like “only 90s kids
remember” similarly showcase a self that is at least partially constituted through nostalgic
recognition.
72
is to vie for status in the realm of culture. Thus, whether recognition is the structuring
mechanism of History as Fukuyama contended, he was, nonetheless, correct to identify
recognition as a fundamental force in life at the end of history. Specifically, Fukuyama
claims that the innate desire for recognition, modified by the conditions of the end of
history, will produce a return to Hegel’s originary battles for pure prestige: “Liberal
economic principles,” he explains, “provide no support for traditional communities; quite
the contrary, they tend to atomize and separate people” (325), and thus the decline of
community life in the universalized liberal state at the end of history, coupled with the
lack of urgent sociopolitical action may lead to “bloody and pointless prestige battles”
(328). While he imagines these battles taking the form of literal combat between
individuals or groups, the posthistorical outsourcing of conflict to the realm of culture,
which Fukuyama didn’t quite foresee, has instead led to discursive battles over petty
cultural disputes with only prestige at stake. All of this arises out of what Fukuyama
terms
megalothymia
, a term he coined in
The End of History
for “the desire to be
recognized as superior to other people” (182), a state which, he contends, is fostered by
the conditions of the end of history. Though not explicitly antagonistic toward a
particular opponent,
Ready Player One
essentially serves this function for Cline and his
audience: in its insistence in the greatness of its canon, the novel itself becomes a claim
for prestige. Its status as a bestseller then serves to bestow the novel’s canon––and, more
importantly, the identities it represents––with the recognition they seek. Recognition of
the canon’s superiority imparts recognition of the subject’s superiority.
Ready Player Two
then plays out as a corrective, in which the freshly recognized
subject confers recognition to groups whose contributions might have been excluded
73
previously, but whom he deems worthy of validation too. Cline’s sequel, in other words,
is really a book about identity. As such, it reads like a response to criticism leveled at the
first novel, which, despite its bestseller status, also met with considerable resistance,
especially for the construction of its aforementioned canon. Condis effectively
summarizes the opposition the novel faced:
The pop culture “syllabus” embedded within
Ready Player One
[is] almost
exclusively white and male because it reflects and reproduces the historical and
material conditions that led to the creation of its featured texts…By lending its
authority only to certain texts (texts by and about those who inhabit historically
privileged positions within gamer culture) and by excluding, ignoring, or
ghettoizing texts by and about those who inhabit other positions,
Ready Player
One
reproduces the social system that produced it, a social system in which true,
archetypal geeks are modeled on their progenitors: white males. (10)
Ultimately, for many, the novel is premised less on providing the fun action-adventure
novel Cline intended, and instead imagines “a world of elitist gatekeeping…a world in
which a person’s value is determined by their knowledge of esoteric cultural trivia, where
those of lesser value must be defeated and wiped away, and where gaming is all that
matters. And, crucially, it is a world specifically for straight white men” (Grady). “The
main thing
Ready Player One
is doing,” Grady, discussing the backlash that the novel
faced around the time of the film’s release, concludes “is telling those ’80s-boy-culture-
obsessed gamers that they matter, that in fact they are the most important people in the
universe.”
74
Ready Player One
pivots on Cline’s tastes, which are those of an archetypal
straight white male geek of a certain age; the novel is, undoubtedly, a power fantasy built
especially
for those who embody that identity. In defense of its alleged homogeneity,
however, proponents of the novel might point out that the novel’s characters are
relatively diverse. The High Five is composed of a white man, a white woman, a black
lesbian, and two Japanese men, and, while none are as important as Wade—
unambiguously the novel’s hero, whose perspective alone focalizes the story—their
contributions are essential. These characters, moreover, can be viewed as making the
novel’s intention to welcome everyone into its fantasy, ignoring the fact that the novel’s
fantasy is not one in which everyone would want to participate since it is structured in a
manner that necessarily excludes (not everyone
likes
this stuff), despite the author’s
intention.
Ready Player One
’s treatment of Aech’s race and sexuality showcases both the
author’s “good” intentions and the failures that result from the ideology that shaped his
project. Throughout most of the novel, Aech, Wade’s best friend and fellow gunter, is
referred to using masculine pronouns in response to her avatar’s appearance (“a tall,
broad-shouldered Caucasian male with dark hair and brown eyes” [38]). Because the two
have never met in real life, not until the final third of the novel does Wade (and the reader)
learn that Aech is actually, in her words, “a fat black chick” (519). Aech explains her
decision to present as a white man in the OASIS:
Her real name, she said, was Helen Harris, and she was only a few months older
than I was. She’d grown up in Atlanta, raised by a single mother. Her father had
died in Afghanistan when she was still a baby. Her mother, Marie, worked from
75
home in an online data processing center. In Marie’s opinion, the OASIS was the
best thing that had ever happened to both women and people of color. From the
very start, Marie had used a white male avatar to conduct all of her online
business, because of the marked difference it made in how she was treated and the
opportunities she was given.
When Aech first logged into the OASIS, she followed her mother’s advice
and created a Caucasian male avatar. ‘H’ had been her mother’s nickname for her
since she was a baby, so she’d decided to use it as the name of her online persona.
(320)
Here, Cline acknowledges the privileges accorded to his own identity that are denied to
others. However, as Condis explains, while “One might think that Aech’s story could
open up space within the narrative of the novel to critique such a non-inclusive definition
of gamer culture…Cline [instead] forecloses this possibility by focusing more on how
Aech’s masquerade affects his narrator, Wade, than on how it affected her as she lived it”
(14). Indeed, the novel follows Wade’s reactions very closely as he moves from shock
and betrayal (“How could he—
she—
deceive me all these years?” [318]) to forgiveness
(“We’d connected on a purely mental level. I understood her, trusted her, and loved her
as a dear friend. None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as
inconsequential
as her gender, or skin color, or orientation” [emphasis added; 321]), but
outside of telling her life story,
Ready Player One
pays little attention to the seriousness
of the issues Aech’s reveal invokes, and these concerns don’t arise again until Cline
revisits them in the sequel. Further, Wade’s framing of Aech’s masquerade as
“inconsequential”—which “confuses the notion that Aech’s race, gender, and sexuality
76
don’t matter to [Wade] with the notion that they do not matter generally” (Condis 15)—
perfectly encapsulates the novel’s essential ideology: what matters are your tastes rather
than your place in any conventional social categories; (pop) culture, again, is everything.
With Aech, Cline’s point is the
erosion
of difference rather than the equal recognition of
it. By dismissing differences of race, gender, and sexuality as immaterial, the novel
attempts to pave the way for anyone who enjoys its canon to partake in its fantasy.
The issue, of course, is that the novel is still inherently hierarchical, built around
the notion that some cultural artifacts are superior to others, and, subsequently, that the
identities tied to the appreciation of these
worthy
artifacts are also superior. At the same
time, no matter what he says, Cline can’t make race immaterial, and he can’t truly create
an inclusive canon composed of media that overwhelmingly favors one group. In other
words, there is a fundamental contradiction between the novel’s desire for inclusion and
the entries in its canon.
Ready Player Two
is an attempt to resolve this conflict: if the first
novel is an effort to gain recognition for its author and for the readers who share his tastes,
its sequel seeks to distribute the same cultural capital to those who might have felt left out
based on identity differences.
In
Ready Player Two
, Cline’s efforts to remedy this incongruity take two primary
forms: recognition through empathy and recognition through media. The former arrives
mainly through revelations Wade experiences as a result of the OASIS Neural Interface
(ONI), a new technology introduced at the beginning of the novel that “allows an OASIS
user to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar’s virtual environment, via signals
transmitted directly into their cerebral cortex. The headset’s sensor array also monitors
and interprets its wearer’s brain activity, allowing them to control their OASIS avatar just
77
as they do their physical body—simply by thinking about it” (8-9). More importantly for
Wade’s (and the novel’s) emotional development, “the ONI allows you to relive
moments of other people’s lives. To see the world through their eyes, hear it through their
ears, smell it through their nose, taste it with their tongue, and feel it through their skin”
(9). As Aech explains, this has led to
a drastic increase in empathy and environmental conservation among daily ONI
users, along with an overwhelming drop in racist, sexist, and homophobic
ideologies. And that’s all around the world, across all age groups and social strata.
For the first time in human history, we have technology that gives us the ability to
live in someone else’s skin for a little while. And we’ve seen a huge drop in hate
crimes around the globe too. And crime rates in general. (108)
All it takes to solve these centuries-old social conflicts, the novel suggests, is the ability
to walk a mile in someone else’s virtual shoes; the ills of the world are not produced
politically, socially, or systemically, but are instead conceived of as
purely
individual
phenomena resulting from a deficit of empathy that can be corrected through access to
the right experiences. Accordingly, Wade explains, this has had a major impact on his
own emotional development:
Thanks to years of surfing the ONI-net [an online database of curated ONI files
that allow the user to experience events from a variety of identities and social
positions], I now knew what it felt like to be all kinds of different people, having
all different kinds of sex. I’d experienced sex with women while being another
woman, and sex with men as both a woman and a man. I’d done playback of
several different flavors of straight and gay and nonbinary sex, just out of pure
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curiosity, and I’d come away with the same pure realization that most ONI users
came away with: Passion was passion and love was love, regardless of who the
participants involved were, or what sort of body they were assigned at birth. (145)
This part of the novel reads like a direct response to Wade’s homophobia in the first book,
which comes out as anxiety over Art3mis’s real identity. The two have never met IRL,
but Wade has a “massive cyber-crush” on her nonetheless (35). Though he claims to be
certain that she’s female, and imagines her looking exactly like her avatar, he also
acknowledges multiple times that this might not be true, usually substituting her for
(seemingly) the most repulsive person he can imagine: “I reminded myself that the
person operating the avatar in front of me might not be a woman at all. This ‘girl,’ whom
I’d been cyber-crushing on for the past three years, might very well be an obese, hairy-
knuckled guy named Chuck” (88). This Chuck figure shows up as the embodiment of
Wade’s sexual anxiety each time he considers the issue. At one point, after telling her
that he doesn’t “want to find out that I’ve got a crush on some 300 lb. dude named Chuck
who lives in his mother’s basement in suburban Detroit,” he also falls into transphobia,
asking “Are you a woman? And by that I mean are you a human female who has never
had a sex-change operation?” (173). The ONI’s revelations about gender identity and
sexuality are, in this light, an especially pointed apology for moments like these.
The novel doesn’t shy away from the implications of the ONI on sexuality and
gender identity, either. These developments, Wade explains, also led to a new category:
øgender. “People who identified as øgender,” he says, “were individuals who chose to
experience sex exclusively through their ONI headsets, and who also didn’t limit
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themselves to experiencing it as a specific gender or sexual orientation” (145). This was
not a rare designation:
Coming out as øgender became incredibly common in the wake of the ONI’s
release. For the first time in human history, anyone eighteen years of age or older
could safely and easily experience sexual intercourse with any gender and as any
gender. This tended to alter their perception of gender identity and fluidity in
profound ways. It had certainly altered mine. And I was certain that it had done
the same thing for every other ONI user with even a mildly adventurous spirit.
Thanks to the OASIS Neural Interface, your gender and your sexuality were no
longer constrained by—or confined to—the physical body you happened to be
born into. (145)
We see deployed here the same kind of liberatory utopian premise that Cline lays out for
minorities in the first novel: the OASIS allows you to be whoever you want to be, all you
have to do is climb into the right skin: race, gender, sexuality, all of these things are
purely
performative, based in doing rather than being—aesthetics rather than content.
Difference, again, is immaterial, and utopia is construed as a place where everyone is,
essentially, free to be the same.
This is, of course,
not
the reading Cline seems to intend. The novel is
unambiguous in claiming the benefits of these developments, and the affordances of the
ONI for individual identity. To show this,
Ready Player Two
introduces a new character,
L0hengrin, who was “famous for changing her avatar’s gender, unexpectedly and without
warning—sometimes in mid-sentence. When she transformed into a male, she seemed to
prefer the likeness of a young James Spader, especially his look from the 1985 film Tuff
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Turf. Regardless of her avatar’s current gender, L0hengrin’s public profile specified that
her preferred gender pronouns were she and her” (131). After using his OASIS admin
powers to snoop through her school records, Wade discovers that L0hengrin had been
assigned male at birth. Thanks to the ONI, however, Wade was unperturbed by this news:
“Discovering this minor detail didn’t send me spiraling into a sexual-identity crisis, the
way it probably would have back when I was younger” (145).
The revelations that Wade attains from the ONI are not confined to fleeting
moments like these. They are, instead, built into the novel’s central quest. At the end of
each stage, Wade is thrust into the ONI-captured memories of Kira Morrow, the deceased
wife of Halliday’s former partner and the object of his unrequited love. These moments
chart the emotional history of Halliday’s relationship with Kira, which, when he
experienced them from her point-of-view, Halliday truly understood for the first time.
Wade’s journey is meant to provide the same revelations about the inner lives of women
that Halliday had gleaned, namely, that they have their own thoughts and feelings, and
aren’t simply objects of male attention. There’s a fundamental crudeness, both
philosophical and formal, to the process of empathy the novel lays out––as Samantha
Nelson puts it, Wade can’t help but point out Kira’s breasts each time he’s placed within
her body. The novel, Hudson notes, “revolves around the idea that after reliving the
recorded memories of women, supposedly clueless men experience a moment of
enlightenment and now realize that women are people. It never occurs to [Wade] that he
also could have come to the same conclusion about [Halliday's misogyny] by using the
greatest empathy machine of all, his brain, and running the...program that is listening to
other people and believing them about their experiences.” Only by (virtually) becoming
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someone else can these men understand the experiences of others. Further, the novel’s
need to point out that women are people is decidedly retro, out of place in the 2020
literary and cultural milieu and more befitting the ‘80s movies of Cline’s adolescence.
The author’s obsession with the nostalgic pop culture he grew up with has seemingly
produced a kind of arrested development, in which his understanding of these issues has
not advanced beyond the time they were first revealed to him.
Alongside its discussion of the validity of minority identities,
Ready Player Two
also introduces a reexamination of its canon and the history that underpins it. The novel
repeats its predecessor’s questing structure, with the “search for the seven shards”
replacing the “hunt for the golden eggs.” This time, however, rather than sending Wade
on a journey through his own favored media as before, Halliday’s second quest is built
around the media that Kira loved (which, not coincidentally, is quintessentially ‘80s). As
a result, the stages of the search are more focused on the media that would be relevant to
a stereotypical (white and straight) ‘80s girl. The novel spends considerable time
celebrating these texts, while also using them as an opportunity to critically explore how
they reflect the experiences of women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals.
Cline’s gestures toward inclusion, however, are always filtered through the same
flattened neoliberal consumption-recognition matrix: the works of minority artists, and
the minority identities (Cline believes) they represent, are recognized in the terms already
established by the first novel, that is, their contribution to the pop culture of Cline’s
adolescence. Instead of validating elements of uniquely black and queer culture, for
instance, the novel merely highlights (tenuously) the contributions members of these
groups have made to the pre-established ‘80s pop nostalgia canon; rather than attempting
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to recover artistic contributions that were stifled, in other words,
Ready Player Two
only
includes references to elements already included, which the previous novel overlooked,
such as Prince and, even more problematically, John Hughes movies. “Look,” the novel
seems to say, “there’s something for everyone here.” These diversification efforts are also
often coupled with dialogue recognizing the representational injustices of the ‘80s canon,
which are named and then quickly discarded—a permissive act, much like
Stranger
Things’
acknowledgment of unconscious racial bias that I analyze in Chapter Three. A
central aim of
Ready Player Two
is maintaining the integrity of Cline’s original canon
through incorporation by absorbing more artifacts (and identities) into the existing set-up
instead of reconceiving the project.
This effort plays out most extensively when the novel’s action moves to two
planets, Shermer and Afterworld, where the knowledge and experiences of Art3mis and
Aech are fully recognized for the first time. The former planet, Wade explains,
was home to a lovingly detailed, decades-in-the-making Oasis re-creation of
Shermer, Illinois, the fictional Chicago suburb where the filmmaker John Hughes
set many of the movies he wrote and/or directed over the course of his celebrated
career.
[…]
The simulated suburb had a scaled-down replica of Lake Michigan along
its northern and eastern borders, and a shrunken version of downtown Chicago
bordering it to the west and the south, so all the ‘80s Windy City landmarks
featured in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
could be incorporated in the simulation, too,
including the Sears Tower, the stock exchange, Wrigley Field, and the Art
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Institute of Chicago. And out beyond the lake and the Chicago city limits, there
was a ridiculously abbreviated version of the United States, so that the simulation
could incorporate cities and locations from Hughes’s scripted
Vacation
and
Home
Alone
films. (292-3)
On Shermer, “interactive re-creations of all of these movies were constantly playing all
around you. And the events depicted in those films played out over and over again
simultaneously, day after day and week after week, on an endless loop” (296), allowing
players to watch their favorite films from new angles or even disrupt the narratives.
Upon the group’s arrival, Wade’s description of the idyllic town is undercut by
critique from Aech and Art3mis:
The sun was rising above the lake to the east. A beautiful spring morning in an
upscale Midwestern suburb at the height of Reagan’s America. Period-appropriate
cars and trucks—1989 or earlier—filled the tree-lined streets
“Look at this lily-white hellscape,” Aech said, shaking her head as she
stared out her own window. “Is there a single person of color in this entire town?”
“Sure,” Art3mis replied. “But most of them hang out at a place called the
Kandy Bar over in Chicago. This place does have a serious diversity problem—
like the whole of ‘80s cinema…”
Aech nodded. “Well, maybe the next shard will be hidden in the kingdom
of Zamunda.” (302)
This kind of critique is also coded into the planet’s structure: after opening a map of the
town, Wade notes that “Shermer had a set of railroad tracks running diagonally through
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its middle, dividing the town into two more-or-less equal halves, which were labeled
RICH and POOR” (296).
Strangely, however, this critique is embedded in a planet designed as an homage
that, we are told, was constructed by “legions of fans” over the course of several decades
(292). In this, there is an odd tension between the obvious affection Cline and his
characters have for Hughes’s films, and the way that the novel frames them. If we take
Ready Player Two
seriously, we’re left wondering why those who love Hughes’s films
enough to dedicate years of their life re-constructing the town in the OASIS would so
pointedly undercut it. (This question can also be asked of Cline himself.) One way to
resolve this quandary is to consider the possibility that this kind of crude critical
ventriloquism is actually part of the homage. In this scenario, the presentation of the
politics of Hughes’s films is to be read as kitsch, a knowing acknowledgment of a
shortfall rendered in such a way that it not only fails to undermine the work, but actually
enhances it. What was, in its time, a sincere (if cynical) attempt to depict life in America
becomes instead a site of humor, a way to laugh at how silly we used to be (which, in
turn, subtly promotes the notion that we no longer
are
that way). This procedure also
effectively obscures the fact that the reactionary politics of Hughes’s films coincided with
the ideological project of a burgeoning right-wing movement that has only grown more
powerful in the years since. Therefore, by reframing Hughes’s politics as a joke, the
novel’s critique is effectively defanged at the moment it is uttered, with the fundamental
crudeness of “RICH” and “POOR” sides of the tracks serving as a mechanism that
enables ironic detachment for readers at the expense of a deeper reckoning with the
period. This framing, however, though not exactly inaccurate, is also somewhat of an
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oversimplification, insofar as Hughes’s films are often about imagined conflicts between
middle and upper-middle class rather than a simple dichotomy between rich and poor.
The novel’s criticism likewise mystifies a key premise of the filmmaker’s ideological
investments. Shermer’s geography thus invokes the kind of relationship between fan and
reference that is central to
Ready Player Two
’s revised approach to its nostalgic canon,
staging the struggle to find pleasure in a problematized past. If you can laugh off the
bad
parts, the novel suggests. you can still enjoy the
good
ones.
These critiques are voiced in the first ten pages of the Shermer section of the
novel and then largely abandoned, although midway through the section, the novel adopts
a critical pose one final time, as Art3mis debates whether Duckie from
Pretty in Pink
deserves sympathy based on the way that he treats women in the film (317). Otherwise,
the novel proceeds unabated as the group (led by Art3mis, who, as a girl, is naturally
the
expert on Hughes’s films) spends the next four chapters on Shermer, dressed as the
“Dork Squad” from
Sixteen Candles
, trying to solve the latest clue by rearranging events
on the planet to reflect the original casting of Robert Downey Jr. (inhabiting the planet as
his character from
Weird Science
) as Duckie in
Pretty in Pink
while restoring the film’s
ending to an earlier version that Hughes supposedly favored but was disliked by test
audiences
.
In other words, the novel retains an overt attachment to Hughes’s work, and
desires to languish in the nostalgia Shermer induces despite acknowledging the reasons it
shouldn’t. Importantly, however, though
Ready Player Two
takes steps to point out the
flaws in Hughes’s oeuvre, and to some extent indicts itself for loving these films anyway,
the novel fails to identify, much less reckon with, how they shaped its understanding of
the world. In other words, while much of the series is dedicated to surface-level reference,
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the ideological underpinnings that are shaped by its canon are largely omitted from the
moments of critique. The novel’s engagement with Hughes’s world(view), in other words,
runs deeper than it lets on, particularly in its narrow construction of the social world,
which borrows heavily from films like
Home Alone
and
National Lampoon’s Christmas
Vacation
. While in one section the novel appears to mock the vulgar “RICH” vs.
“POOR” framing these films sometimes employ, the series also earnestly reproduces this
simplification elsewhere in its insistent belief in the redemptive power of pop culture and
teenage rebellion; in its reductively positing race, gender, and sexuality as merely
superficial, performative differences, divorced from one’s true
inner
self;
15
in its casting
Wade’s victory over IOI as a win for the little guy, obscuring the fact that GSS, the most
powerful corporation on the planet, was already under the control of the supposed-little
15
This is not to suggest that the opposite is necessarily true, but to pinpoint, yet again, the retro
simplicity of the novel’s conception of these issues. In reality, there remains considerable debate
about the relationship between performance, identity, and the notion of an “true inner self,” most
of which is at odds with Cline’s work. In
Ready Player Two
, especially, identity is construed
purely as a matter of performance, with an emphasis on visual representation similar to the
changeable skins found in video games––you are what you look like, in other words. In this, the
novel expresses something akin to the belief in the liberatory power of fluidity found in 1990s
transhumanism (a fitting match for a novel that also wholeheartedly believes in the similarly retro
depiction of the liberatory power of the internet). In its forays into gender theory,
Ready Player
Two
also seems trapped in the 1980s and early ‘90s, bound, in particular, to the same
oversimplification of Judith Butler’s arguments about performativity that has proliferated in the
years since
Gender Trouble
, in which gender is construed as merely, and exclusively, a matter of
performance (setting aside the more nuanced questions of social construction, embodiment, and
notions of one’s inner self that Butler’s work tackles). Further, despite nodding to transgender
theory with the inclusion of “øgender” identity, the novel also displays an understanding of the
relationship between gender, sexuality, and identity that contradicts the arguments of numerous
trans theorists, such as Jay Prosser and Gayle Salamon, who suggest that one’s sense of identity is
not simply produced by performance. Simultaneously, the novel’s treatment of the changes
brought about by the ONI––“For the first time in human history, anyone eighteen years of age or
older could safely and easily experience sexual intercourse with any gender and as any gender”;
“People who identified as øgender were individuals who chose to experience sex exclusively
through their ONI headsets, and who also didn’t limit themselves to experiencing it as a specific
gender or sexual orientation” (145)––conflates gender with sexuality by defining gender identity
as a function of the gender one performs (or the digital skin one wears) when having sex and the
gender (or skin) of the person one has sex with. In this, and each of the examples above, Cline’s
novel remains mired in antiquated conceptions of the ideas it invokes.
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guy whose influence on the cultural field, now near total, had made zero difference to the
rapidly deteriorating state of the world (and, in fact, coincided with it). While
Ready
Player Two
works to problematize some of its predecessor’s tendencies, it primarily
voices superficial critiques of the texts it references, while the ideological and
philosophical dimensions of these works are reproduced with little alteration.
Ultimately, the novel tries to have its cake and eat it too: it recognizes the
complaints levied against its predecessor and then attempts to reconfigure the objects of
its attachment so it can partake in the same nostalgic fantasy anyway (while subsequently
obscuring its attachment to the more heinous elements of its canon). Rearrangement and
realignment in service of maintaining the integrity of the existing project, in other words,
substitutes for fundamental change. In this regard, the novel enacts the same “we see you
and we hear you” response model increasingly deployed by corporations and public
officials embroiled in scandal. Witnessing (itself a form of recognition) takes the place of
material action––a hallmark of the posthistorical moment.
Cline modifies this strategy on Afterworld, a planet built around the music of
Prince. “The Afterworld’s surface,” Wade explains, “is covered with a stylized re-
creation of downtown Minneapolis in the late 1980s, along with locations from Prince’s
other movies and music videos. You can walk into a simulation of every club gig and
concert he ever performed during his career” (371). This is a welcome change of scenery
for Aech, who “probably know[s] more about Prince and his artistic output than any other
human being in history” (370). As with Shermer, Afterworld is Cline’s attempt to dive
into nostalgic artifacts that he presumes would be more relevant to groups (black people,
women, the LGBTQ community) that might’ve felt excluded in the first novel, as well as
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an opportunity for the author to consider again the way that heteronormativity shaped his
original work. Aech voices this critique by chiding Wade for previously dismissing
Purple Rain
because of latent sexual confusion:
“And do you remember how many times you actually sat through the entire film
with me? Nada. Never.
Not once
. And we both know why, don’t we? It was
because Prince always made you feel a little sexually confused and uncomfortable,
didn’t he?”
The old Wade would have denied this. But like I said, the ONI had
broadened my horizons. Enough, at least, for me to recognize the truth about my
adolescent self.
“Ok, maybe that’s a
little
true,” I said, smiling. “Whenever I was watching
old episodes of Friday Night Videos and ‘When Doves Cry’ came on, I always
averted my eyes when he was getting up out of that bathtub. Every single time.”
(370)
However, though initially presented as an olive branch to readers of color and a challenge
to heteronormativity, Prince’s inclusion in the novel also becomes an opportunity for
Cline to reflect critically on homophobia. Before finding the Raspberry Beret and
defeating the final boss on Afterworld, Aech explains:
“Later in life, after he became a Jehovah’s Witness, Prince came out as anti-gay,”
she said. “He believed that God didn’t approve of homosexuality, so he couldn’t
either. Can you really believe that, Z?” She shook her head. “For decades he was
an icon and a role model to generations of sexually confused kids and adults. He
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spoke for us, through his lyrics: ‘
I’m not a woman, I’m not a man. I am something
that you’ll never understand
.’”
She started to get choked up and had to pause for a few seconds to collect
herself.
“Then, one day,” she went on, “Prince suddenly changes his mind, and
says, ‘No, no. I was wrong all along. You really should hate yourself for being
gay because God says it’s a sin for you to be the person He made you to be…’”
(428)
Cline’s treatment of Prince in this section relies on a problematic conflation of gender
and sexuality that again belies the author’s misunderstanding of the issues the novel
raises: the lyrics of “I Would Die 4 U,” referenced in the passage above, pertain to gender
identity rather than sexuality, while the rest of the section relates to sexuality (Wade’s
sexual confusion, Aech’s lesbianism). Though the two issues may be linked, they are also
discrete, and sections like these not only blur the lines between them, but do so from a
place of profound misunderstanding, steeped in a decidedly retrograde conception of
identity. Further, in light of the critique voiced by Aech, it’s somewhat curious that
Prince was even selected to begin with, as these biographical realities seem to undercut
the value of his inclusion in a way that wouldn’t necessarily be true for other figures,
particularly ones who actually identify as queer, and don’t come with the same anti-gay
baggage. If the purpose of including Prince was to reference an artist whose identity and
fandom weren’t sufficiently invoked in the first novel, to offer Others a chance to
celebrate their parts of the ‘80s, the homophobia discussion in effect undermines the
effort. Then again, there are few figures who tick boxes as Prince does, and fewer still
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who are recognizably part of the ‘80s canon. Recognizing an artist who fundamentally
isn’t part of the existing cultural formation of ‘80s pop culture would disrupt rather than
maintain its integrity, and such an act would be at odds with the fundamental purpose of
Ready Player Two
’s expansion. As on Shermer, Afterworld is Cline’s misshapen attempt
to celebrate and criticize all at once––this time, an effort made even more incoherent by
its bizarre insistence on using a single object to serve multiple, contradictory functions.
This effort illuminates another way to read the novel, which further clarifies the
role that its nostalgia plays at the end of history.
Ready Player Two
has been criticized for
lacking the charms of its predecessor, and it’s easy to see why when you consider the task
the book undertakes:
Ready Player Two
’s particular combination of homage and critique
reads like a misshapen attempt at simultaneous reiteration, apology, and penance. It seeks,
in other words, to apologize for the thing it wants to continue doing—sometimes right in
the middle of it. Cline still loves the movies and games of his adolescence, but he also
seems to believe those who argued that he shouldn’t. The novel is therefore riddled with
guilt, plagued by intrusive critical thoughts, such as, “We don’t have time for literary
criticism right now, Aech, valid though it may be! OK?” (466). It tries but fails to
reconcile this contradiction. Perhaps, then, Cline’s sequel is less an act of gate-keeping,
or chauvinism, than an act of melancholic desperation, an effort to try to make what used
to work
work again
. The novel is nostalgic, in this sense, not just for the ‘80s, but also for
the conditions of the first novel’s 2011 release, a prelapsarian paradise unimpeded by
criticism. Midway through
Ready Player Two
, one of its villains (ventriloquizing Cline’s
critics) asks “Don’t you kids ever get tired of picking through the wreckage of a past
generation’s nostalgia?...I mean, look around. The entire OASIS is like one giant
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graveyard, haunted by the undead pop-culture icons of a bygone era. A crazy old man’s
shrine to a bunch of pointless crap” (435). On the face of it, the novel’s answer is pretty
firmly
no
, but
Ready Player Two
is also haunted by the idea that maybe the answer
should be
yes
: nostalgia in Cline’s series
is
a kind of graveyard, a catalogue of dead
things, and
Ready Player Two
contributes mightily to the death of the artifacts it reveres
by focusing so closely on their limitations. Even
Ready Player One
, in jubilantly trying to
re-assert the relevance of its canon, tacitly acknowledges its demise. In a way, Cline won
the battle but lost the war:
Ready Player One
staved off death for just a little while, but,
as it always does in the real world, death returned. In the end, the series is all about death:
the reinvigoration of dead styles on a dying world with a dead-end future is inaugurated
by Halliday’s death, and, in its invention of AI copies of human consciousness, the series
ends with what Wade describes as the end of death: “We might be part of the last
generation ever to know the sting of human mortality. From this moment forth, death
would have no more dominion” (578). No longer, the book explains, will people
experience loss. Ironically, by defeating loss,
Ready Player Two
also effectively ends
nostalgia. The novel, in other words, ends by hoping for a future where it would never
need to exist. “I want to give the world the means to ensure that no one will ever have to
lose someone they love again,” Wade explains, “I think this will make life a lot less
painful for most people” (546). Styles die out more quickly than the average person, so,
for a life defined by them, nostalgia is all the more vital as a means of escaping the
inevitable. Nostalgia, the desire to recover that which has been lost by temporarily
reviving the dead, is ultimately about pain management, a way to manage death in a time
when there’s nothing else to turn to.
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CHAPTER THREE
STRANGER THINGS, NOSTALGIA, AND AESTHETICS
In the summer of 2019, the Netflix series Stranger Things partnered with Eggo for
a marketing campaign in the build-up to the release of its highly anticipated third season.
The show, which follows a group of teens and adults in small-town 1980s Indiana as they
struggle to keep at bay a succession of supernatural forces unleashed following the
opening of a portal to an alternate dimension, had become a surprise hit following its
2016 premiere, and quickly became the streaming service’s most recognizable original
production. Eggo waffles—a favorite of Eleven, one of the show’s teen protagonists—
had seen a surge in sales following the show’s premiere and gained iconic status within
its fandom, so a partnership capitalizing on the hype represented a logical next step. The
two franchises had previously collaborated on a trailer for the series’ second season,
which premiered during Super Bowl LI, in which a vintage “L’eggo my Eggo”
commercial was progressively interrupted and eventually overtaken by scenes from the
show’s upcoming season. The much more elaborate 2019 campaign featured a variety of
tie-ins including an Eggo-branded Stranger Things spoiler blocker for fans’ internet
browsers, recipes tied to each of the upcoming nine episodes, and instructions for making
costumes using Eggo boxes. Eggo also bought billboards in towns across the country
named Hawkins, the fictional town in which the series is set. These billboards featured
the Eggo logo with blood dripping from the E—a nod to Eleven’s frequent nosebleeds.
This marketing effort culminated in two larger releases. In June, Eggo claimed to
have unearthed a series of unreleased advertisements from 1985 featuring hidden teasers
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related to the show, which they subsequently posted across social media platforms.
Following this, the company also created limited edition boxes replicating the look of the
ones they sold in the ‘80s—identical save for the “Limited Edition 1985 Graphics” label
at the top. Initially, these retro Eggos were only available online through Amazon, but
saw a larger release in select stores across the United States following the series’ July 4th
debut.
The latter two examples, the ads and the box, provide an acute illustration of the
hyperaestheticized nostalgia for which Stranger Things is the archetype. The ads, for
instance, hinge upon a nostalgia for consumer products and advertising that is entirely
mediated and thus based upon the recreation of an aesthetic object; the nostalgic allure of
the ads, in other words, derives from their replication of the stylistics of ‘80s ads. Grainy
visuals and tape distortions blanket one video showing a “typical” middle-class suburban
breakfast table featuring milk, orange juice, and, of course, Eggos before cutting to a
screen that reads “One Eggo Can Change Everything.” These visual imperfections exist
even though the ad was produced digitally and published exclusively online, thus
bypassing the analog processes that created them in the ads being copied. The ads, in this
way, have a simulacric core: a detailed recreation of an object that never existed but is
meant to appear as though it did in order to replicate the same response one would have
toward the original, had it ever existed. The ad is, in other words, a thing that serves, at
best, as a vague reminder of the thing it is parodying, and therefore the nostalgia it seeks
to produce is further removed from its actual object.
The boxes also emphasize aesthetics as primary content: while the packaging is
retro-styled, the waffles inside—supposedly the product—remain unchanged. The only
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difference between the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos and regular 2019 Eggos is
the package itself, and thus, as it relates to the function or quality of the product, nothing
substantial is different. The aesthetic, therefore, is the substance. Consumers don’t buy
Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos for the Eggos, but for the Limited Edition 1985
Graphics. As with the ads, the sole draw of the product derives from its visual recreation
of something from the past. The irony, however, is that this recreation is inherently
imperfect because the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics label announces the boxes as a
recreation breaks the illusion of visual fidelity, signifying that it is, in fact, not the thing it
is meant to look like. The Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos are, therefore, a
reproduction whose status as reproduction is built into its appeal—it’s not the real thing,
but it sure looks like it.
This is Stranger Things in a nutshell. The series’ nostalgic appeal derives from its
seemingly faithful recreation and reassembly of a variety of tropes and aesthetic norms
common to ‘80s media, representing a hyper-recombinatorial approach to the past, in
which the past is configured merely as the particular confluence of genres, tropes, and
stylistics. Its nostalgia is thus primarily oriented towards cultural ephemera rather than
grounded in past experiences. Though there is potential overlap between lived experience
and those represented in cultural ephemera for viewers of a certain age, it is significant
that the lens the show provides for those viewers to reminisce about their lived
experiences is explicitly tropological and mediated—it is accessed, if at all, through
reference, genre, narrative structure, sound, and visual style. As in the Eggo ads, Stranger
Things aims to recreate a thing that never truly existed: 1980s childhood, but only as it
was depicted in films of the era, and only through a kind of parodic pastiche—childhood
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in a hundred references. To the extent that the show depicts seemingly generalizable
nostalgic experiences (e.g. children riding bikes in the suburbs), it regularly converts
those realities into mediated references (E.T., The Goonies), distancing the nostalgia
those moments induce from its mnemonic core, always already framed by media. Like
the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos, Stranger Things is all about recreation: a copy
whose entire function is to call attention to itself as copy. Yet, in doing so, it also
announces itself as decidedly not the thing it is aiming to recreate. For Stranger Things,
therefore, looking like it (sounding like it, feeling like it) is everything; as with the box,
the aesthetic is the substance.
In this regard, Stranger Things and the 1985 Limited Edition Graphic Eggo boxes
are the same product: hyper-aestheticized containers whose draw and value lie more in
the exterior than interior
1
, whose form supersedes its substance, and whose interior
qualities are artificially
2
elevated by the nature of the exterior. In addition to the stylistic
similarities, Stranger Things’ design shares an aesthetic paradigm with the Eggo boxes.
Stranger Things is not simply an Eggo box; rather, it is functionally akin to a 1985
Limited Edition Graphic Eggo box whose contents are (for the sake of analogy) unknown:
they could be plain, blueberry, chocolate chip, or perhaps some special Stranger Things
tie-in flavor—or, better yet, the box could be empty. An evocative exterior coupled with
1
To justify this rhetorical flourish by way of clarification: for Stranger Things, I use ‘exterior’
here as a synonym for ‘form,’ referring to its stylistics, including, most notably, its emphasis on
nostalgic parody and pastiche. Interior, in this case, refers to the series’ narrative content and
meaning. I recognize that such a distinction is, in some ways, problematic, and that the line
between content and form in narrative is not as stark as that between box and Eggo; however, I
believe that the value of the analogy overrides whatever clumsiness it may produce.
2
“Artificially” because, in both cases, the form—to the extent that it can be considered discrete
from content—creates the perception (or the environment for the perception) that the content is
more than it is. It infuses, in other words, a product with an air of novelty and complexity that
isn’t present in the content alone. This is in contrast to texts where the relationship between
content and form is more evenly symbiotic.
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an indeterminant interior allows—even encourages—the consumer to project into the box
whatever its graphics elicit for that individual, and the box is crucially never opened to
reveal its actual contents. What one imagines inside the box is overdetermined by what
one sees on the outside, and the limits of this act of imagination—or interpretation—are
only partially delimited, allowing for a wide range of possibilities. Stranger Things thus
produces a system of meaning-making through suggestion and accumulation; it is a
pastiche whose signification allows for a seemingly endless range of interpretations.
In the relatively short time since the release of its first season—despite what I
have argued above (or, as I will shortly show, because of it)—the series has become the
subject of surprisingly diverse readings by fans as well as critics both popular and
academic. A gloss of the interpretive frames into which viewers have placed the show
offers a glimpse into this myriad and often contradictory landscape: the series has been
seen as a distinctly and celebratory nostalgic vision of the 1980s and its media (McCarthy;
Genzlinger; Chaney;); a critique of the 1980s, Reaganism, and middle-class suburbia
(Butler; Smith; Burges; Nussbaum); an allegory or metaphor for the traumatic experience
of coming-of-age and entering into a world of adult conformity (Khan; Butler); a form of
digital gothic or an expression of longing for the analog in a digital world (Landrum;
Rust); an exploration of queerness past and present as well as a critique of straight
nostalgia (Burges and Middleton; Roach; Berns et al.; Briefel); an example of a distinctly
white nostalgia (Bering-Porter; Giovannone); and a critique of white nostalgia (Reich).
A list such as this would seem to illustrate that Stranger Things is a rich, complex,
and perhaps even profound series. While there is textual evidence supporting any of these
interpretations, taken together the readings reveal that the core function of the series is to
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reconstruct a version of the 1980s in which every major narrative incident or component,
by replication or divergence, cites some “source.” The show’s references, therefore,
weave together potential meanings so vast as to embrace numerous, self-contradictory
interpretations, for which the show offers no path to a final judgment or method for
achieving argumentative clarity. Stranger Things relies on ambiguity produced through
connotation, and, beyond overly familiar maxims such as “friendship is important,” and
“growing up is hard,” it provides no clear denotations. To the extent that we consider
meaning to be a text’s content, the series’ reliance on stereotype, trope, and genre, then,
provides both its form and its primary content. Put simply, it suggests a lot but says very
little, and each new suggestive connotation diminishes its capacity for saying anything.
The abundance of critical readings, overwhelmingly devoted to elucidating the
meaning encoded by the aesthetics, often mistake aesthetic posturing for thematic
substance. Aviva Briefel’s Post45 essay “Familiar Things: Snow Ball ’84 and Straight
Nostalgia” exemplifies this mistake in its reading of season two’s closing sequence,
which takes place at a school dance. On its face, the scenes that occur at “Snow
Ball ’84”—including, most notably, a dance between two of the series’ adolescent
protagonists, Mike and Eleven, which signals the culmination of a heterosexual coupling
the show had been building towards since early in the first season (and one of the central
narrative components of season three, which was released concurrently with Post45’s
special issue and is thus not incorporated into Briefel’s analysis)—depict a
conventionally nostalgic vision of adolescent romance that could be found in many films
produced before, during, or after the ‘80s. Briefel argues, however, that the scenes
pointedly “invoke the iconic and distinctly non-nostalgic prom scene from Brian De
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Palma's Carrie,
3
which subtly counteracts the forced identification of Snow Ball '84.”
Carrie and Stranger Things, she argues,
Both show characters grooming in front of mirrors in preparation for the big event,
deploy overhead establishing shots of the glittery gym and its painfully invested
teenagers, and rotate the camera around the dancing couples. At the center of both
sequences is a “pity” dance that serves as an initiation into heterosexual rituals:
Tommy's girlfriend, Sue, forces him to ask Carrie to the prom to compensate for
her own prior bullying of the outcast girl; in Stranger Things, Nancy invites
Dustin to dance after he has been rejected by several girls his age. In both cases,
the pitying character teaches the pitied one to dance through instructions to “just
listen to the music.”
Briefel seems to have fallen into Stranger Things’ referential trap. As the above evidence
inadvertently indicates, there is no obvious visual link to Carrie in the scene unless one
counts establishing shots and basic camera movement employed in practically every
school dance scene in recent film history.
4
The focus on Carrie, while ignoring more
obvious links to ‘80s films such as Footloose and Pretty in Pink, seems to derive
especially from the “pity” dance, which, although not unique to Carrie, is admittedly a
more selective reference point. However, such a reading relies heavily on a flimsy
correlation (that the dances are out of “pity”) that ignores key differences. In the scene,
3
It’s worth noting, too, that Carrie’s 1976 release puts it significantly outside of the 1980s that
the overwhelming majority of Stranger Things’ nostalgic objects are confined to. Further, it
would be, to my knowledge, the only one with no direct connection to the show’s conception of
the ‘80s either through directorial style (Spielberg’s 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or
sequelization (Star Wars: A New Hope, 1977). This slippage provides further evidence of the
malleability of the series’ referential core in critical appraisals.
4
For example: Footloose, Pretty in Pink, Grease, Back to the Future, She’s All That, Never Been
Kissed, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Napoleon Dynamite.
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Mike’s older sister Nancy—one of the show’s unambiguously “good” characters—
notices Dustin crying alone on the bleachers after his crush chose to couple up with his
friend Lucas, and his subsequent offer to dance was crudely rejected by another girl.
After convincing Dustin to join her on the dancefloor, Nancy offers advice: “Girls this
age are dumb,” she explains as Dustin, now smiling, holds her waist, “Give them a few
years, and they'll wise up. You're gonna drive them nuts.” Unlike Tommy, who, as
Briefel notes, was “forced” to dance with Carrie, Nancy dances with Dustin out of sincere
sympathy, and Dustin appears genuinely reassured. In contrast to Carrie, whose scenes of
relentlessly bullying prior to the dance give audiences every reason to be skeptical, there
is nothing sinister or foreboding in Nancy’s encouragement, and the show itself provides
no reason to doubt Dustin’s newfound resolve. In fact, Dustin’s trajectory over the third
season unambiguously validates Nancy’s mid-dance counsel and, in doing so, further
distances their dance from Mike and Carrie’s and thus from the critique of
heteronormativity Briefel reads into it. Stranger Things 3, which takes place a year after
Snow Ball ’84 and follows the gang as they once again try to stem the tide of the Upside
Down—this time while also grappling with the Soviet Union, which has set up its own
research facility deep below the town’s new shopping mall—concludes with the
revelation that Dustin’s mythical “girlfriend from camp” is, in fact, real, and climaxes
with the two performing a ham radio duet of the theme from The Neverending Story.
Heteronormativity may be inevitable in both texts, but in Stranger Things, its attainment
is a source of triumph.
Nonetheless, Briefel concludes, “With these allusions, the audience is invited to
recognize the oppressiveness of dominant nostalgia narratives and turn to the cinematic
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memory of a horror film in which heterosexuality is an undeniable source of terror”
(emphasis added). In other words, Briefel’s reading requires an intertextual relationship
in which the entirety of the scene’s “meaning” is revealed by the reference: although it
shows one thing, an intertextual reference proves that it is saying the opposite. Stranger
Things, in other words, merely has to look like something else in order to borrow its
message. The fact that the series elsewhere shows little to no interest in such a critique of
heteronormative nostalgia (and, indeed, often celebrates it) is seemingly unimportant
because of its reference—or, to more precisely lower the allusive bar, because of its
referential environment. Where everything is a reference, all potential meanings are
subordinated to its connection.
Briefel’s article, therefore, typifies an apparent desire throughout Stranger Things
scholarship to make the show transcend the confines of nostalgic pablum and to say
something, even if that means upending its own nostalgic premise. The series, in this light,
is functionally a husk that allows viewers to find within its panoply of ‘80s cultural
ephemera whatever they want to see. To be sure, Stranger Things is not unique in
generating contradictory and/or mutually exclusive critical readings. What is unique,
however, is that the source of this trend in Stranger Things criticism can be tied to a
couple of specific factors, both of which have larger cultural and critical implications.
The series converts nostalgia and the 1980s into aesthetics, participating in the
same system of reference that, as Joel Burges and Jason Middleton have argued,
distinguishes the 1980s as a historical period from the ‘80s as a phenomenological object.
Stranger Things is, in other words, not interested in investigating the 1980s as a historical
moment or in reflecting the period beyond its invocation of cultural ephemera. In this
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process of aestheticization, in the move from the 1980s to the ‘80s, cultural artifacts and
historical realities become de- or re-contextualized markers—kids ride bikes as in E.T.,
otherwise apolitical families have Reagan Bush ’84 signs in their yards—hollowed of
purpose and thus endlessly signifying. This vagueness produces a vision of the ‘80s that
is more indeterminant and thus more alienated from historical reality than traditional
nostalgic texts.
The series’ indeterminacy, however, is one of its central draws. Because its
intertextual accumulation provides limitless interpretive ground, the series’ nostalgic
charm and denotative vagueness facilitate prolific sites of viewer identification. Stranger
Things is, in this way, a kind of choose-your-own interpretive adventure. This is what
encouraged, for instance, Burges and Middleton to dedicate over half of their intro to the
Post45 special issue to critical reflections on their own experiences as adolescents in the
‘80s, framed by a passing reference in the series’ pilot to a particular issue of X-Men with
which both writers were familiar; it is what, in the same issue, enabled Elizabeth Reich to
read the Upside Down as “a metaphor for the extra-temporal, perpetually endangered,
and suffocating existence of black life in the US” while at the same time allowing David
Bering-Porter to identify the show’s tokenizing treatment of race and its neoliberal brand
of white nostalgia.
While divergent readings are not unique to Stranger Things, there is something
greater to reckon with here. As Amy Rust and others have noted, series creators Matt and
Ross Duffer and executive producer Shawn Levy have continually emphasized their
desire for total authenticity and fidelity, manifest in efforts to meticulously reproduce the
‘80s through set design and props. While one might argue that the inclusion of extra-
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dimensional demons in the series signals its divergence from objective reality, these
elements are, in fact, discrete from its historical setting—there is, in other words, no
sense that the series is diverging from its historical setting despite this, and so these overt
gestures of subjective imagination don’t infect its temporal verisimilitude. Obvious acts
of divergence from the real ultimately reinforce the realness of the elements that remain
unaffected. Further, the overwhelming emphasis on ‘80s media—where strange things
are actually quite common—also works to normalize the existence of the paranormal
within the real. This emphasis on authenticity obscures the brush strokes of historical
recreation in order to impart the notion that we are really seeing the ’80s and not simply
an interpretation of it—recalling Neil Postman’s claim that, in a post-photographic world,
“truth is in the seeing.”
This also marks a contrast with the reflective narrative mode employed by films
and television from an earlier nostalgic paradigm, such as The Wonder Years and A
Christmas Story, which I discussed in the introduction. In these examples, memory serves
as the authorizing mechanism for turning to the past, highlighting the subjective nature of
the historical reconstructions contained within. While texts like these gained popularity
because, for many viewers, they distilled some essential quality of the past they
reconstructed, it is nonetheless significant that, in contrast to Stranger Things, they made
clear efforts to delimit interpretation through this framing. This difference highlights
what is borne out elsewhere in the series: a focus not on depicting supposedly
generalizable individual experiences but on capturing the essence of the phenomenon
directly. The ‘80s, in other words, is not contained within the lives of the people who
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lived it but in the tropes and stylistics that governed them—or, more precisely, that
governed their depiction.
Despite Stranger Things’ deep investment in accuracy, however, its vision of
fidelity (i.e. the location of the ‘80s phenomenon that it posits) is overwhelmingly
superficial, made up of sound and vision, haircuts and products. It’s worth noting here
that the Duffer Brothers, for all their investment in ‘80s nostalgia, were actually born in
1984, a full year after season one is set. So, while Mike, Eleven, and the gang were
learning about love and going on shopping trips to the Starcourt Mall in Season 3’s 1985,
Matt and Ross Duffer were teething. Their experiences as 15-year-olds in 1998 were
surely quite different from those they’ve nostalgically created for their characters thirteen
years earlier, and so their sense of the authentic ‘80s is therefore almost entirely drawn
from film and television rather than memory and experience.
5
It’s no surprise, then, that
the series sees the ‘80s as a matter of styles and things, access to which can be granted
simply through reference and resemblance. The ‘80s for the Duffer Brothers—excepting
whatever memories of kindergarten they may have retained—was never really anything
other than a mediated object, pure aesthetic and affect. Stranger Things’ interest in other
forms of reproduction, attempts at capturing some kind of ‘80s zeitgeist or detailed
historical reality, are similarly always borne of and/or filtered through media and thus not
attempts at directly recreating a historical reality itself but the historical reality
supposedly captured within the media of the period. The result is a series that seeks to
reproduce in objective terms but does so through a necessarily subjective process. This is
true not only in the creators’ act of deciding what captures the ‘80s, but, as the diverse
5
This is not to suggest that no one can provide an accurate rendition of a past they did not
experience, but rather to illustrate, once again, how distanced the series’ nostalgia is from
experience, further pinpointing media rather than memory as the defining frame of reference.
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critical readings above indicate, also in the series’ process of making meaning through
vague intertextual reference that leaves interpretation fully at the feet of the viewer.
Though the series positions itself otherwise, Stranger Things’ recreation of the ‘80s is
thus a doubly subjective act.
Through its focus on the ‘80s as phenomenon, its emphasis on reconstruction
through hypermediated reference, and its evasion of denotative clarity, the series cedes
interpretive ground to its audience. By deemphasizing subjectivity in its representation
and turning to media as the foundation for its reconstruction, the series implicitly
configures the past as a purely subjective phenomenon. For Stranger Things, the ‘80s is
whatever you want it to be: Reagan, neon and synths, yuppies vs. geeks, The Breakfast
Club, bicycles, Duran Duran, stifling heteronormativity, triumphant heteronormativity,
unparalleled freedom and/or danger, and on and on. There is no there there, just a listicle
of events, traits, and tropes.
Stranger Things therefore presents an interesting study of the conflict between
nostalgia and history. Conventionally, nostalgia follows an Edenic structure, with the past
configured as a kind of prelapsarian paradise in contrast to a fallen present. As Philip
Roth pointed out in American Pastoral, one can map the same pre-and postlapsarian
model onto narratives of American history in the latter half of the twentieth century, with
the fall of the belief in an American paradise coming at the hands of ‘60s political unrest
that fundamentally altered how the nation is able to see itself. President Reagan’s
nostalgia for the ‘50s similarly positioned the ‘60s and beyond as a time after the fall, and
revisionist films like Back to the Future reflect the same perception through their desire
to repair the damage by returning to the moment just before. There is a sense that
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America as a notion never fully recovered, and that things have only gotten worse in the
years that followed—a status continually reinforced by 24/7 news coverage and a media
landscape that thrives on the spectacle and sensation of the horrors of modernity. As in
Eden, the fall comes with knowledge, and a recognition of oneself as fallen. In the 2010s,
when the American public is constantly reminded, by film, television series, and news, of
the sins of its past, conventional nostalgia poses a problem: how can viewers, especially
the more socially-minded millennials and zoomers who make up the plurality of Stranger
Things’ audience, maintain an awareness of the AIDS and crack epidemics while
simultaneously looking back longingly on the period in which they were most prominent?
How can they yearn for a time of laxer parental supervision without being reminded of
the horrifying reason that the practice has disappeared? The answer, for Stranger Things,
is that they can’t—at least not at the same time. The series’ aestheticization is its greatest
resource for preserving its nostalgia, providing an answer to the question “how does one
long for a time that is itself already fallen?”
6
This is most acutely exemplified by one of the series’ simplest and most frequent
images: kids riding bikes. Although markedly nodding to Spielbergian adventure films,
even without its mediated reference, shots of the Stranger Things kids pedaling through
6
It’s worth noting that Stranger Things ‘80s nostalgia is not the first instance of this longing for a
time after the fall. Within this paradigm, the ‘70s revival of the 1990s and early 2000s—which
began with Dazed and Confused, another temporally-minded film focused on positing a zeitgeist
of the era—are also set in this period. While these examples share with Stranger Things the
notion that the present has lost something essentially good that it has located in the past, and
similarly work through a process of selection that jettisons contradictions, ultimately narrowing
the period in order to fulfill its nostalgic vision, they lack Stranger Things’ more explicit
recognition that the past is also damaged. There are a few possible explanations for this. For one,
this is perhaps due to the tighter focus on specific movements, most notably rock n roll culture,
which thrive on a rejection of the status quo—and so there is an element of critique built into the
nostalgia itself. Additionally, the ‘90s and early 2000s represent a broadly pre-digital cultural
moment before the internet and social media-induced hyperawareness of the 2010s set in, so
many viewers were perhaps less attuned to the contradictions a nostalgic vision of the past elides.
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town have broad nostalgic resonance; for many viewers, moments like these call back to
specific lived experiences. At the same time, as with all nostalgic objects, these memories
are haunted by the notion that they contain a now-impossible experience. Unlike arcades
and acid wash jeans, however, changes in attitudes towards childhood autonomy are not
simply a matter of the passage of time, of fading styles and fads, but rather derive from
the emergence of historical realities: namely, the rise in reports of child abductions and
murders in the ‘70s and ‘80s and its intensified coverage on television news.
7
There is, in
this way, an additional, terrible, layer to the series’ evocations. Rather than trying to
ignore this unsavory resonance, Stranger Things acknowledges it. Season one of the
series revolves around the disappearance of Will Byers, one of the show’s protagonists,
who goes missing in the pilot while riding his bicycle home after a night of Dungeons &
Dragons at Mike’s house. The show redirects the historical fact of abduction that haunts
the incident onto the aesthetic supernatural, with the abduction coming not at the hands of
a child predator, but a demon ripped from the pages of a D&D handbook—a revision of
the substitution found in Stephen King’s It, but divorced from the novel’s more
deliberately metaphorical resonances.
8
The series thus offers a knowing nod to one of the
decade’s horrors while also mapping it onto genre, and the threat of child predation to the
show’s nostalgia is thus removed by means of aesthetic displacement. Child abduction at
the hands of the demogorgon is therefore a stand-in for the real that, in the end,
suppresses it.
7
While studies have since shown that this rise in reports and coverage in the news did not
correspond to a rise in actual cases, the moral panic that ensued was nonetheless a historical
reality that helped shape the cultural landscape.
8
This is most apparent in the contrast between the two predator stand-ins: Pennywise, who
appears in the form of a clown—an icon rich in signification—and the Demogorgon, a vaguely
humanoid form with a nightmarish visage that symbolically doesn’t resonate in any particular
direction.
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Season three takes the series’ aestheticized abstraction of historical conflict to
another level with its Red Dawnesque Soviet invasion plot, which introduces the idea that
the USSR is also conducting secret experiments involving the Upside Down deep beneath
Hawkins. The season opens on a shadowy lab filled with workers in hazmat suits using
some kind of ray gun to create one of the portals that link to the Upside Down while
uniformed military officials watch over from a glass-enclosed control room. After the
experiment goes awry, vaporizing several scientists and destroying most of the tech, a
brooding Soviet general inspects the wall where a portal failed to open fully. “We are
close,” the head scientist nervously protests “you can see our progress. We just need
more ti-.” His pleas are cut off as the general’s buzz-cutted henchman reaches out to
choke him, lifting him off his feet as the Soviet marching song “The Red Army is the
Strongest” begins to play. “You have one year,” the general tells a second scientist as the
first lifelessly falls to the floor.
Stranger Things 3 is thus inaugurated with the replication of a particular kind of
‘80s Cold War narrative, a cartoonish vision of unflinching Soviet bad guys determined
to do evil whatever the cost. This thread carries throughout the season, but is most visible
in Grigori, the aforementioned henchman who is later sent to kill Sheriff Hopper
following his discovery of the Soviet operation. The ensuing action casts Grigori as one-
part Terminator, one-part Ivan Drago, synthesizing the robotic, amoral determination of
each, and the series, once again, relies on preestablished trope for its resonance—one that
is, in this case, particularly divorced from its historical context. In the series, the Cold
War generally only loomed in the background through passing references until the third
season—brief gestures toward verisimilitude but little more. The turn to the USSR in the
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third season thus represented a largely untapped well of ‘80s phenomena for the series to
exploit in its perpetual quest for material to revisit. Stranger Things’ expanded treatment
of the hostilities is particularly interesting because, more than any of the series’ other
sociohistorical inspirations, the Cold War resonated in the 1980s in a very different way
than it does in the 2010s, and the series’ re-vision of the conflict is a product of that
distance.
For many Americans—and, seemingly, for the show as well—because the threat
of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Evil Empire never came to pass, its dissolution
marks the Cold War as a closed narrative event. We know, in other words, how it ends,
and the Red Menace no longer looms large.
9
Indeed, not only has the threat long been
dissipated, but in the age of terror attacks and forever wars, a war that never came to pass
might seem quaint by contrast, producing for many viewers—especially those who didn’t
live through it—a kind of anachronistic dramatic irony within the series. The reality, of
course, is that even though thermonuclear war never came to pass, events such as the
Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. involvement in Latin America,
Africa, and the Middle East—not to mention the array of domestic policies and practices
that emerged as direct or indirect consequences of the conflict—all certainly had, and
continue to have, a profound impact nationally and globally. In Stranger Things, however,
the Cold War threat is confined to the Soviet Union’s desire to acquire advanced
weaponry in its quest for the total annihilation of the United States. As such, Stranger
Things’ representation of Cold War anxieties neither addresses nor invokes these broader
9
Although the resurgence of Russia as a geopolitical boogeyman following the 2016 election,
and the subsequent conflation of the USSR (especially hammer and sickle imagery) with the
contemporary Russian state across various social media platforms, shows that earlier tensions still
remain in the minds of many Americans—particularly those who lived through it.
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legacies—and is, in fact, invested in the notion that the conflict was contained purely
within the geographic borders of the U.S. and the USSR—pivoting instead on a shallow
caricature drawn from action movies. Grigori is a perfect representation of this, a trope
derived from two characters initially constructed as vessels for specific cultural fears
subsequently redeployed in an era where those fears no longer have any cogency. In the
end, he’s nothing more than an ahistorical side-show oddity, a kitschy testament to how
silly it all was.
This is also reflected in the third season’s more extensive turn toward the
conventions of ‘80s action movies. Though the series had always featured action
sequences, in the first two seasons they veered more towards those found in horror and
science fiction, almost always pitting humans against monsters rather than against one
another. Hopper’s plotline in season three, which casts him as a hard-nosed detective
working to uncover the secret behind the Soviet presence in Hawkins, breaks this pattern
with the inclusion of numerous action tropes. One such scene features an especially over-
the-top interrogation, in which Hopper nearly dismembers the mayor with a cigar cutter
(“Are you insane?” the Mayor asks. “I don’t know,” Hopper replies, “let’s find out”). In
another sequence, Grigori and Hopper pursue one another with silenced pistols in a hall
of mirrors, a scene whose neon lighting coupled with Hopper’s pastel Hawaiian shirt
nods more to Miami Vice and Magnum P.I. than anything Spielberg ever produced. The
season’s penultimate scene is a fistfight to the death between Hopper and Grigori whose
blocking and cinematography recalls late-‘80s action staples like Die Hard and Lethal
Weapon. These scenes, and the generic shift they signify that accompanies the series’
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turn to the Cold War, are yet another instance of Stranger Things' reluctance to confront
history without invoking trope, genre, or style.
As with its treatment of missing children in season one, season three’s turn to
trope in its confrontation with historical reality is ultimately a surface-deep misdirection,
one that neutralizes a threat to the show’s nostalgia—who wants to go back to worrying
about nuclear war?—by means of aesthetic displacement. More importantly, however,
Stranger Things’ nostalgized Cold War illustrates precisely why this effort to nullify
challenges to one’s rosy view of the past is so problematic: the turn towards a temporally-
specific trope in the representation of a historical period produces a kind of feedback loop
wherein the redeployment of the trope reinforces the notion that it was, at least in some
way, accurate, which then lends a sense of authenticity to the trope and the reconstruction
it’s contained within. This kind of reductive shorthanding, directed towards something
that is conventionally viewed as settled history, serves to produce and/or perpetuate
ahistorical perceptions of the past.
Nostalgia often relies on these misconceptions. It requires the past to be better
than the present, so if the past really wasn’t better than the present, or if the notion has
lost cogency, the nostalgiac needs to remake it. Nostalgia is, of course, always about
remaking the past to varying degrees, but the degrees and methods haven’t always been
the same, and what we have seen with nostalgia for the 1980s and beyond in media like
Stranger Things is markedly different than what has traditionally come before, especially
in the realm of film and television. Historically, nostalgic revision was a process of
subtraction (intentionally or through selective forgetting), creating a coherent vision of
the past by subordinating, or outright removing, its conflicts. Classically-nostalgic films
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such as American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused as well as shows like Freaks and
Geeks (unlike examples such as The Wonder Years, Crooklyn, and Lady Bird that
emphasize primarily a time period rather than direct lived experience) do this by enacting
a narrowing of scope, focusing, for instance, on one group of high schoolers in a specific
place at a specific time, which enables them to avoid directly invoking the broader
conflicts of the period (insofar as the group in question can be seen as insulated from
them), even as those experiences coalesce to posit a generalizable zeitgeist for the era.
Recent “nostalgic” series such as Mad Men, Glow, and The Americans, as well as the
remake of IT, confront this process directly, drawing viewers in by invoking the pre-
established affective and stylistic allure of the era before deconstructing the premises that
underride them and drawing to the surface the conflicts they subordinate. Stranger Things,
however, engages in a newer phenomenon, one that began to emerge in the early-2000s
with shows like VH1’s I Love the ‘80s/’70s/’90s (2002-2005)
10
and the Vice City (2002)
and San Andreas (2004) entries in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, as well as a series of
retro and revivalist developments in music, seen in garage rock acts like The Strokes, The
White Stripes, and The Hives; and, at the end of the decade, in the arrival of ‘80s-
influenced genres like outrun, synthwave, and vaporwave. As Simon Reynolds has noted,
“The 2000s were dominated by the ‘re-’ prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-
enactments…The 2000s was also the decade of rampant recycling: bygone genres
revived and renovated, vintage sonic material reprocessed and recombined” (xi).
10
Although, as I have argued in the previous note, the ‘70s nostalgia that emerged in the 1990s
was qualitatively different than the ‘80s nostalgia of the 2010s, I would make an exception for
VH1’s I Love the 70s, which has more in common with the paradigm that followed. This is
probably due to the fact that the I Love The… series was fundamentally shaped by its first
installment, I Love the ‘80s, and its emphasis on style and pop phenomena was tailored to this
original subject. I Love the 70s was simply a matter of importing new content into the existing
frame.
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Artifacts like these reveled particularly in a spectacularized nostalgia that, although it
also engaged in subtraction, was animated more by an infatuation with style than a rosy
view of the past—or, better yet, its emphasis on style enabled its rosy re-vision
11
. In these
examples, nostalgia is manifested less in a sense of longing and more in mimesis, in
pointed efforts to directly reproduce temporally-coded aesthetics.
Broadly, this emphasis on aesthetics can also be seen in a number of areas within
contemporary popular culture, from pseudo-traditionalist niche movements like
cottagecore, tradwife, and bronze age mindset, to lofi and analogue styles popular in
music and as filters on Instagram. Most notably, there has emerged online, particularly
among zoomers on YouTube and TikTok, a particular interest in “aesthetic” (often
stylized as “A E S T H E T I C” and sometimes deployed as a general quality, like in a
video published on YouTube in October 2021 titled “How To Be Aesthetic at School
(2021-22) | Complete Guide & Tips”). Aesthetic, in this context, extends beyond the
mere relabeling of sartorial “style,” representing the conversion of all facets of life into a
generic formation (“vintage,” “hypebeast,” “baddie,” “artmom,” “kidcore”), marking
everything from clothing and hairstyles to accent, bodily comportment, and even social
media fonts as signifiers of selfhood that can and should be actively cultivated from a list
of curated options. It is, in other words, the intentional conversion of oneself into trope—
fitting, in some ways, for a life posted and viewed as much as lived. The logic of zoomer
aesthetic, crucially, extends backward, with numerous videos that assemble the styles and
11
While labeling anything from the GTA series “rosy” might at first seem like a stretch, the series
is clearly meant to present a vision of the past that is fun and alluring, and which pays little
serious attention to the negative realities its gameplay corresponds to. The ‘80s Miami and ‘90s
California of these games are merely a theme park for players to explore, not a space for serious
interaction. These games are instead, much like Stranger Things, attempts to parody the zeitgeist
of the era but only as it exists in pop mythology drawn from films, television, and music.
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things of the past into a coherent “type” for which there is no original. One TikTok (since
deleted) began with the caption “*rare aesthetic* Actually growing up in the 2000s”
followed by a montage of pop cultural artifacts from the period, including Avril Lavigne,
Nintendo Gamecube, The Cheetah Girls, the wall of a Blockbuster Video, an AIM
chatroom, and glittery lip gloss. In videos like these, the past and the subjects that
occupied them are both rendered tropologically, defined by a particular confluence of
aesthetic markers.
Ready Player One, which I discussed in greater detail in chapter two, similarly
conceives of the 1980s as a confluence of mediated objects disconnected from lived
experience, a time period (re-)constituted through pop culture reference. The quest at the
story’s core, and the herculean labors that follow, hinge upon the Wade’s absorption of
unexperienced 1980s popular culture. The novel thus represents the same kind of
nostalgia that we see in Stranger Things: alienated from personal experience and
abstracted from lived reality, subsequently flattened into an infatuation with aesthetics
and style. Notably, Steven Spielberg’s 2018 adaptation revises the novel’s focus on the
‘80s to include a wider collection of nerd culture references spanning from the 1970s to
the 2000s, substituting The Iron Giant, Master Chief, and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park
for more oblique references to Joust, Max Headroom, and Rush. What persists across
both film and novel, however, is the notion of a past remembered and reassembled
through reference and recognition; moreover, Spielberg’s substitutions reveal just how
hollow this nostalgia is, irreverently re-skinning objects for a broader target audience
with little narrative consequence—Spielberg notes in a Los Angeles Times article that
they were unable to secure the rights to Blade Runner for a sequence that takes place
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within the world of the Ridley Scott film, so, rather than cutting the scene, The Shining’s
Overlook Hotel was substituted instead (Rottenberg). In this nostalgic formulation,
differences between objects are of little consequence, so long as both are recognizable
and signify pastness.
Stranger Things is the apotheosis of these trends, merging a formal attachment to
style and genre more commonly found in non-narrative television, music, consumer
products, and social media with a sense of longing enabled by processes of substitution
and subordination most commonly found in narrative cinema. In this way, Stranger
Things is discrete from most of its predecessors as well as its contemporaries in television
and film; though borne of the same reverence for style, synthwave, a genre that provides
much of the series’ non-‘80s soundtrack including its theme, does not posit a vision of the
1980s in its attachment to the aesthetics of the era—there is, in other words, little sense
that this kind of retro-inflected musical movement has any bearing on one’s
understanding of the period from which its stylistics are derived. There’s a limit to its
mimesis. Though paradigmatically similar, the same cannot be said of Stranger Things.
The mélange that results from its particular merging of aesthetics, history, and nostalgia
produces a past that is more malleable and alienated, and whose acts of emphasis and
historical omission are, at the same time, less noticeable and more powerful: if the past is
no longer primarily about lived and historical realities, but about a style, and, if that
process involves the conversion of those lived and historical realities into tropes and
genre elements, then it can easily retain its affective allure. If what you love about the
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‘80s is turquoise, arcades, and Ferris Bueller, then why pay any mind to the War on
Drugs?
12
This system of abstracting the conflicts of the ‘80s is not limited to the
tropification of historical events. While the series broadly functions as an empty
container, the cinematic influences out of which it is constructed often impose meaning
onto the characters, narratives, and iconography that Stranger Things essentially lifts
wholesale. This model of replication without revision reproduces the implications of the
original, in effect serving to reify the notions they encode—not only as components of
the reality of the ‘80s, but as generalizable truths. Critics often point to nostalgic media’s
pattern of “imagining contemporary values…in the context of the past” (Bering-Porter).
While Stranger Things certainly participates in this process, its mode of pastiche is more
strikingly engaged in the opposite maneuver: laundering ideological constructs of the past
into the present. Most notably, from its pilot, which opens on a dark and ominous
building labeled “Hawkins National Laboratory / Department of Energy,” Stranger
Things has engaged in a pattern of uncritically borrowing political framing from the films
that influenced it. For instance, Stranger Things essentially lifts wholesale the central
conflict of E.T., pitting children against nefarious government agents determined to wrest
control over the supernatural entity at the narrative’s core. Eleven, the series’ E.T.
12
Here, the disconnect between mediated and experiential nostalgia is especially important.
While those who lived through the 1980s might retain positive memories of, or associations with,
the period and its media, and thus the primary version of the decade they hold in their minds may
not include unseemly historical realities, the two are not mutually exclusive: a soldier’s nostalgia
for the camaraderie of war, for instance, does not preclude the recognition of its damage. It is, in
short, the distinction between personal memory and history. On the other hand, mediated
constructions of the 1980s, particularly those produced largely for audiences without mnemonic
connection to it (or whose memory is already filtered due to age), produce visions of the period
that, in the absence of memory and lived experience, compete directly with historical narratives
for cultural supremacy.
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substitute, spends much of the first season on the run, having escaped from the
government facility where she had been held since infancy, subjected to various
experiments using her telekinetic abilities. Like Spielberg’s Elliot, Mike offers Eleven
shelter and attempts to teach her about American life—“This is my living room, it’s
mostly for watching TV”—while government agents attempt to locate and recapture her
by any means necessary. Unlike E.T., however, Stranger Things’ depiction of the federal
government doesn’t neatly fold into a larger opposition between the cynical adult world
and childhood innocence
13
—in fact, it doesn’t appear to have metaphorical value at all. In
this, despite its liberal gestures toward inclusion and feminism, the series offers a
strikingly conservative vision of the federal government as an overbearing, immoral, and
oppressively paternalistic institution. “[Stranger Things is] especially refreshing for
libertarians,” Matthew McCaffrey explained, writing in 2016 for the right-wing
conspiracy blog InfoWars, “[they] can finally enjoy a show where the main villain is
government itself: at last, the antagonist isn’t the market or even a corrupt politician, just
government. Maybe its best plot twist is that there’s nary an evil corporation to be seen.”
Insofar as one can derive a coherent set of claims or values from the series’ depiction of
this conflict, Stranger Things is essentially indistinguishable from the conservative
politics that dominated the decade, encapsulated by Reagan’s mantra “The government is
the problem.”
In some instances, the series’ conservatism surpasses the kind embedded in its
Speilbergian inspirations—showcasing, inadvertently, the unprogressive nature of these
13
Stranger Things’ cast of protagonists includes several adult allies who fight alongside the
children, destabilizing any age-based boundary. Further, the emphasis on childlike wonder,
imagination, and goodness emblematized in Elliot’s treatment of E.T., which forms one side of
the metaphorical opposition with the cynical adult world represented by the government, is also
notably absent in Stranger Things.
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nominally-liberal influences. This is most notable in its Reaganesque vision of competing
paternalisms. The show provides a contrast between federal and local government filtered
through Eleven’s two father figures, Dr. Brenner and Sheriff Hopper. Brenner, the face of
the shadowy government agency running mind-control experiments deep in the bowels of
the Hawkins National Laboratory, who had abducted Eleven shortly after her birth in an
effort to harness her telekinetic powers for use as a superweapon, is referred to as “Papa”
by Eleven throughout the series. Flashbacks show their relationship to be emotionally
neglectful, psychologically abusive, and physically exploitative. One scene early in the
first season shows Eleven seated before a caged, hissing cat as Brenner watches on from
a control room. Having previously crushed a soda can with her mind in another flashback,
the scene implies that Brenner expects her to now use her powers on a living creature.
After Eleven refuses, she’s dragged kicking and screaming by two orderlies to a small,
dark room and thrown inside. As the door closes, Eleven rises to her feet, and uses her
powers to knock one of the men against the wall and snap the neck of the other before
collapsing to the floor in despair. After Brenner approaches, we see a close-up of
Eleven’s face as his hands slowly move into frame and caress her head. He then carries
her body, weeping and limp with exhaustion, back to her room. This scenario is repeated
in the season one finale, where Brenner finds Eleven, once again collapsed from
exhaustion, having used her powers to fend off the Demogorgon. “Eleven, Eleven, can
you hear me?” he says as he cradles her head in his hands while the camera looms over
his shoulder, framing a close-up on Eleven’s face. She replies, weakly, “Papa?” and he
responds with a subtly sinister imitation of care “Yes, yes, it’s your papa.” Eleven
becomes unsettled once she notices her friends being forcefully restrained, with Mike
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yelling “Let her go you bastards!” As she begins to writhe, Brenner caresses her face:
“Shh shh, you’re sick. You’re sick, but I’m going to make you better. I’m going to take
you back home where I can make you well again, where we can make all of this better so
no one gets hurt.” Eleven, having now learned the true meaning of love and friendship,
rejects his overtures: “Bad…bad,” she says, turning to Mike and then calling his name.
The scene is interrupted by the reappearance of the Demogorgon, which attacks Brenner
and the agents, giving the kids cover to escape; it concludes with the monster tackling
Brenner, presumably killing him. Though he doesn’t play an active role in the series’ 2
nd
and 3
rd
seasons, Brenner does reappear in flashbacks and hallucinations, highlighting the
traumatic impact that he continues to have on Eleven’s psyche. In all of this, Stranger
Things repeatedly emphasizes the notion that Brenner, and the federal government for
which he is the series’ most prominent representative, is cold, manipulative, and
overbearing—an ill-suited father for a child or a nation, affirming Reagan’s critique of
what later came to be known as the “nanny-state.”
In contrast, the series offers a Reagan-inspired elevation of local government
through Sheriff Hopper, a caring and good-hearted man hardened by the trauma of his
daughter’s death. Following Eleven’s disappearance in the season one finale, Hopper
assumes a paternal surrogacy role for her in seasons two and three, first leaving boxes of
Eggos in the woods where she’s presumed to be in hiding, and later offering her shelter in
his cabin. In order to protect Eleven from the government agents who remain intent on
recapturing her, Hopper initially forbids her from leaving the cabin, which becomes a
source of tension throughout the second season. On Halloween, for instance, Eleven, in a
homemade ghost costume, asks to go trick-or-treating:
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Hopper: You want to go trick-or-treating? You know the rules.
Eleven: Yes, but—
Hopper: Yeah, so you know the answer.
Eleven: But they wouldn’t see me…
Hopper: I don’t care. I don’t care. Alright? You go out there, ghost or not, it’s a
risk. We don’t take risks, alright? They’re stupid. And?
Eleven: We’re not stupid.
Hopper: Exactly.
In this, the series creates a parallel between the confinement Eleven experienced at the
hands of the government and the one instituted by Hopper. While both are overbearing,
the show makes clear that Brenner’s captivity is abusive while Hopper is responding to
very real concerns about Eleven’s safety. Though frustrating for Eleven, Stranger Things
clearly views the latter as much more permissible, thereby elevating Hopper’s model of
paternalism and (if inadvertently) the local government he represents. Though at times
impulsive and over-protective, the series ultimately depicts Hopper as a model of
oversight and protection based on genuine desire for Eleven’s well-being. If he’s
overbearing, it’s not to exploit Eleven, as is the case with Brenner, but because he cares
too much.
Mapping this contrast onto the ‘80s conflict between federal and local
government also casts in a different light the series’ disdain for supervision. Throughout
Stranger Things, government agents are seen surveilling Hawkins through a variety of
tactics as part of their effort to recapture Eleven, ranging from tapped phones and
parabolic microphones to good old-fashioned costumed eavesdropping. The show’s scope,
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then, is a bit broader than just parental supervision. So, while, as I’ve argued above,
Stranger Things expresses a longing for the freedom associated with the lax parental
oversight of the ‘80s while simultaneously recognizing the reason for its demise, it also
seems to invite a broader consideration of watching in the context of an era where
surveillance is nearly omnipresent and privacy is an increasingly rare commodity. As
Jason Landrum explains, the series’ emphasis on surveillance is particularly resonant for
contemporary viewers: “Twenty-first-century audiences live with constant awareness of
being watched. We are watched by cameras everywhere. We know that nothing we do on
our computers is ever truly deleted…The nostalgia…of Stranger Things rests on the
fantasy of there being a time in the not-so-distant past when we could get lost” (156).
This fantasy is heightened by the relative quaintness of ‘80s surveillance in the series,
implemented through more targeted techniques like phone tapping rather than the
seemingly-pervasive ambient surveillance of smartphones and computers in the 2010s.
However, for all its interest in invoking the subject, and despite all of the narrative
potential held by such a comparison, Stranger Things is once again ultimately
uninterested in offering depth or clarity beyond the notion that the past was less bad than
the present. There is, of course, historical precedent for the sort of government overreach
that the series invokes, both in its nods to secret programs like MK Ultra and its broader
treatment of surveillance. However, the series, in keeping with the rest of its historical
engagements, does not treat the subject with any seriousness or complexity, ultimately
rendering it yet another trope that only exists within the series for its ability to heighten
the narrative conflict and signify pastness. Following from the contrast outlined above,
the series’ perspective on surveillance is quite simple: we were watched less in the past,
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which had some benefits and some drawbacks; federal government surveillance is
tyrannical and bad but local oversight is ultimately good as long as it is done for the right
reasons.
The series’ replication of ‘80s politics under the guise of trope also extends to its
sense of place, as Hawkins reproduces the heartland-centric, Morning-in-America vision
of the country that Reagan and numerous ‘80s films worked so hard to foster, imbuing
small towns with a special status not afforded to other locales. Here, the cultural narrative
suggests, is where real Americans live, where the nation’s true spirit resides, and where
“monsters are twice as horrifying when they attack those good solid people and shatter
what we falsely perceive as the innocence of small-town America” (Smokler). It’s a
familiar trope, one that can be found in different forms throughout films of the period,
from Back to the Future’s Hill Valley and John Hughes’ Shermer, Illinois to David
Lynch’s Lumberton and Twin Peaks.
14
This mediated configuration of the American small town has been central to The
Duffer Brothers’ project from the beginning, and, though they regularly draw parallels
between it and their hometown in interviews, the Duffers’ vision of Hawkins and small-
town America in the 1980s is, on the whole, less a mnemonic exercise and more a
cinematic (re)creation. From its initial sale to Netflix under the title Montauk—an
homage to the coastal New York of Jaws and the New England settings of King’s
novels—the series’ sense of place has always been tied, directly or indirectly, not to the
places where its creators grew up (as one might expect with a conventionally nostalgic
tale of childhood), but to those in the films they loved. Though the coastal setting was
14
The latter two examples are, of course, meta-commentary on precisely this formulation—a
notion I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 3.
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eventually abandoned due to the complications of shooting on Long Island in the winter,
the idyllic small-town setting remained as principal filming was moved to Atlanta,
Georgia—a location that, as Matt noted in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter,
much more closely resembled their own childhood in Durham, North Carolina (Fienberg).
Despite acknowledging this similarity, however, the Duffers ultimately chose to set their
fictional town in Indiana. The decision to bypass North Carolina, where the Duffers grew
up, and Georgia, where the series is filmed and which apparently resembles their
hometown, in favor of a third location that, in reality, has very little in common with
either is a microcosm of the shift away from memory and toward mediation that I
discussed in the introduction: Stranger Things’ nostalgia is oriented more towards the
imagined small towns its creators saw on television and in films than the one they
actually lived in.
And yet, there’s more to the series’ construction of Hawkins than just the
nostalgic hierarchy it implies. As with much of Stranger Things, what distinguishes
Hawkins from the fictional towns that inspired it is that, unlike its predecessors (which
are set at the time of their creation), Stranger Things takes place thirty years before the
time in which it was made. Thus, instead of attempting to reflect its own contemporary
reality, Hawkins is a recreation of a setting from a different time, and therefore the
product of a different cultural and historical context. While this is true for nearly all
works involved in historical recreation, the Duffers’ fictional town is particularly
interesting because it is not simply an attempt to recreate a historical environment, but
rather to recreate a historical environment that was itself already an act of creative
imagination—Hawkins, in other words, isn’t set in the 1980s as much as in the ‘80s of
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the movies it borrows from. As Lacey N. Smith has pointed out, though images like the
white picket fence, orderly supermarket shelves, and downtown movie marquee
“coalesce to form an imaginary ideal suburbia, it is a mediated imaginary, inspired more
by a proliferation of portrayed suburban environments across a variety of media than by
the material, inhabited suburbs of everyday life” (217). The small towns upon which
Hawkins was based, in other words, did not exist except in fiction. In a sense, this means
that Stranger Things’ “historical” setting is doubly fictional: not only based on examples
drawn from media, but from media examples that were themselves not drawn from reality.
With its quaint Main Street ripped from The Andy Griffith Show and its quiet, well-
manicured lawns, Hawkins actually represents a dying vision of Americana that was
already the subject of nostalgic yearning in the 1980s. The small-town and suburban
images that permeate the ‘80s media that the series draws upon were, even then, less a
historical fact (insofar as they represented some kind of norm of national experience) and
more a function of an ongoing ideological project that sought to revive cultural and
historical conditions, based in large part on television and cinema. The ideological project
that drove this construction of American life in the ‘80s was, in other words, more
interested in the representational value of these small towns than in the locations
themselves, and their revival was more conceptual than materially executed
15
(Smith 217).
As Alan Nadel has argued, this nostalgia for a cinematic or televisual reality is, in fact,
one of the defining features of Reagan’s presidency, and movies of the period are replete
with narratives and images seeking to naturalize filmic paradigms as historic ones. Thus,
in borrowing from these films, what Stranger Things presents as an accurate depiction of
15
Despite championing them in speeches, Reaganite austerity programs and trickle-down
economics only exacerbated the decline of towns like Hawkins across the nation.
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small-town life in the 1980s is instead merely a simulacrum of ‘80s fantasy, mistaking
cinematic wish fulfillment for historical reality. Hawkins, then, like numerous ‘80s films
before it, represents the attempted establishment of a fiction as history, an effort to make
something that wasn’t seem as though it was. Critically, in the case of Stranger Things,
this means that its nostalgic suburbia is doubly removed, further alienated from its
(increasingly obscured) origins and therefore less recognizable for what it is.
The elevation of small towns, Middle America, and suburbia was, more than
anything else, an effort to mark boundaries, to delineate what was and was not American.
In its wholesale replication of these spaces, Stranger Things doesn’t just work to
naturalize the ‘80s suburban fantasy as a historical reality, it also grants validity to the
ideas the fantasy was constructed to represent. In light of this, one must ask, what other
notions are naturalized in Hawkins’ reproduction of the trope of the ‘80s small town?
What does Hawkins reinscribe in its efforts to construct the “ordinary” ‘80s suburban
childhood? It’s worth emphasizing here that the series’ setting does not hinge upon a
single point of reference, but is instead a pastiche constructed through an assembly of
aesthetic ideas, “a representation of suburban-ness, meshed with small-town-ness, and
Midwest-ness, and other simulacra that coalesce under the guise of a coherent visual past
informed by the 1950s but colored by the aesthetics of 1980s pop culture” (Smith 220).
Though each of these components are, at least in some ways, discrete, they nonetheless
converge around a few shared traits: as Smith has pointed out, these concepts primarily
serve to “reinforce ideologies that sustain late capitalism and the suburban consumerism
built to foster it,” such as the nuclear family, patriarchal gender roles, and liberty through
mass consumption (217).
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Most of all, the influences that produced Hawkins pivot upon an exclusionary
brand of white nostalgia, a notion that is evident not simply in the overwhelming lack of
diversity in both Hawkins and the towns that influenced it, but also in the positions that
the few characters of color occupy within these spaces. Hawkins is defined as much by its
demographics as by its aesthetic markers (lawns, bicycles, mom-and-pop shops)—its
demographics, in this sense, function as yet another aesthetic marker, linking the series to
its mediated and ideological forbearers. As a location, Indiana is especially useful to the
series because it approximates the Americana triumvirate (midwest, small town, suburban)
that Stranger Things relies upon while also offering a historically very white population.
Like Hughes’ Shermer, Illinois, and King’s Castle Rock, Maine before it, Hawkins is
therefore a setting where an overwhelmingly white population can be convincingly
placed without its lack of diversity seeming like a contrivance (which would unsettle the
series’ liberal aspirations). Stranger Things’ vision of its idyllic small town is, in this way,
inseparable from its racial politics—and both are functions of its aesthetically-driven and
tropologically-dependent nostalgia. Whiteness, in other words, is part of what makes
Hawkins Hawkins.
This is reflected both in the town and in the series’ central cast. Its core group of
children and adults notably contains only one nonwhite member, which simultaneously
represents a seemingly-purposeful gesture towards diversity and a nod towards the token
minority cliché from classic ‘80s films such as The Goonies and Ghostbusters. Like many
of the tropes that Stranger Things relies upon, the inclusion of Lucas in the show’s group
of adolescent protagonists serves no broader narrative purpose, and, aside from his race,
Lucas is arguably the least distinct in the group. That Lucas is fairly one-dimensional is
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not unusual for the series, as most of the teen characters, at least initially, conform to a
particular type: Mike is the headstrong leader, Will is the sensitive one, Dustin is the late
bloomer, Nancy is the good girl, Steve is the bad boy, Jonathan is the outsider, Max is the
tomboy; in Lucas’ case, however, his “type” is not tied to personality traits, but to his
race. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that Lucas is also the least-developed character
over the course of the show. As the series progresses, the other teens each come to
transcend their initial type in one way or another: Steve goes from being the coolest guy
in class to working at an ice cream shop in the mall and hanging out with kids several
grades below him; Jonathan comes out of his shell and begins dating Nancy, who has
shed her “good girl” attitude and fixation on popularity, and the two begin transitioning
into the adult world as interns with the local newspaper; Dustin finally gets a girlfriend;
Will tries to overcome his trauma and assert himself. In the show’s three seasons, there is
no significant change in Lucas’ attitude, his standing within the group, his social
circumstances, or anything else that might constitute development for a teenage character.
His only growth arrives in the form of a relationship with season two newcomer Max
(who, in the space of one season, goes from an unsociable tomboy who loves
skateboarding and arcades to a girly-girl who teaches Eleven about the wonders of the
mall while “material girl” plays in the background). Because his type is, essentially,
“black,” and because the films that Stranger Things is so reliant upon don’t offer any
other types of blackness or minority status to which he could pivot, Lucas is seemingly
unable to progress beyond his initial role.
As Bering-Porter has noted, “Lucas replaces Data, the Asian character from The
Goonies, with a black character, but one who serves a similar purpose, unintentionally
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highlighting a certain display of whiteness and white culture that is often hidden in plain
sight.” His presence within the group also completes the parallel with The Losers Club
from It—which the Duffer Brothers lobbied to remake before turning their attention to
Stranger Things (Fienberg)—composed of five white boys, a black boy, and a white
girl.
16
In this way, Lucas’ presence is dictated by, and derives meaning from, its reference.
This is particularly evident in the first season, where Lucas’ blackness is only an allusion
that provides a superficial notion of diversity to an otherwise all-white production—or,
more cynically, deflects the series from charges of exclusion.
In the second season, the writers attempted to respond to allegations of tokenism
with a scene that more critically highlights Lucas’ role in the group. Mike and Lucas get
into an argument when they meet up before school on Halloween in homemade
Ghostbusters costumes. Mike takes offense at the fact that he and Lucas have
inadvertently chosen to roleplay as the same (white) character. Mike, their conversation
reveals, had assumed that Lucas would be Winston, the sole black Ghostbuster. The
ensuing exchange reveals Mike’s implicit racial bias, and calls into question the logic of
tokenism that Lucas, as a character, himself exemplifies:
Lucas: No one wants to be Winston, Man.
Mike: What’s wrong with Winston?
Lucas: What’s wrong with Winston? He joined the team super late, he’s not funny,
and he’s not even a scientist!
Mike: Yeah, but he’s still cool.
16
It’s worth noting, too, that the Losers Club is itself drawing on a longstanding cliché dating
back to the silent era with Our Gang. In this context, Lucas’ presence as token represents yet
another example of the series’ replication of a trope with a history that it shows no interest in
reckoning with.
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Lucas: If he’s cool, then you be Winston.
Mike: I can’t.
Lucas: Why not?
Mike: …because…
Lucas: Because you’re not black?
Mike: I didn’t say that.
Lucas: You thought it.
The conversation is replaced by embarrassment when they notice that the other students
are arriving without costumes. Although Lucas and Mike later reconcile, the topic of
racial prejudice never reappears. This episode, as Bering-Porter points out, reflects the
show’s ultimate failure to reckon with the issues it raises:
The inclusion of Lucas, first as a token, then more fully, serves as a weak gesture
towards diversity. The show's acknowledgment of its mistake is a familiar gesture,
rooted in sympathy that does little to change the conditions through which people
of color are othered…His more fulsome inclusion becomes a way of marketing
Stranger Things as "diverse" and revealing its own awareness of this gesture
towards diversity, allowing the audience to take a certain pleasure in the show's
white nostalgia.
As this passage suggests, the series’ engagement with this critique is limited to
acknowledgment alone—Lucas’ role in the show did not change, nor did the series
abandon the racial ideology that governs it.
Despite its acknowledgment of the inherent flaws in its earlier approach, Stranger
Things’ third season illustrates that the series cannot conceive of race beyond trope. Its
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elevation of Erica, Lucas’ younger sister, from a minor character in the first two seasons
to a major player in its third, creates a binary where blackness is either empty token or
stereotype. In seasons one and two, Erica’s role is confined to brief comedic appearances
as a feisty sibling, mocking the dorkiness of Lucas and his friends. “God you are such a
nerd,” she says to Lucas in his Ghostbusters costume, “No wonder you only hang out
with boys.” By the midpoint of the third season, however, Erica has become enmeshed in
the adventure, accompanying Dustin, Steve, and Robin in their accidental descent into the
secret Soviet bunker below the mall. Although heightened character development could
accompany this increase in screen time, Erica remains largely the same: a boisterous, no-
nonsense, sassy black girl, a pint-sized Madea primed for comic relief. In one episode,
the trio attempts to convince her to investigate a mysterious air duct that none of them
can fit into:
Erica: Yeah, I don’t know…
Dustin: You don’t know if you can fit?
Erica: Oh, I can fit. I just don’t know if I want to.
Robin: Are you claustrophobic?
Erica: I don’t have phobias.
Steve: Ok, well, what’s the problem?
Erica: The problem is I still haven’t heard what’s in this for Erica.
The scene then cuts to a shot of Steve sliding a comically large ice cream sundae across a
table. “More fudge please,” Erica replies as she slides the sundae back to him. “Go on,”
she urges with an exaggerated hand gesture. Later, after Erica reluctantly agrees to help
out, they find themselves trapped in an elevator. After Robin discovers a bottle
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containing a strange green substance, Erica attempts to smash it: “It could be useful,” she
explains, “We could survive down here a long time without food, but if the human body
doesn’t get water, it will die…If it comes down to me drinking that shit or dying of thirst,
I drink” she concludes with a cheeky grin.
The only revelations about Erica in the third season are that she’s good at math
and likes My Little Pony (unexpected, based on Dustin’s reaction, because she’s black
and has an attitude). Erica is coded as black in a way that Lucas—whose affect is
indistinguishable from his “ordinary” white friends’—and their parents aren’t. This is
apparent both in her characterization and in the series’ mise-en-scène. Unlike Lucas,
whose non-familial interactions are always with white people, Erica first appears in
season three accompanied by four unnamed and previously unseen black girls who have
no lines. When she reappears in the following two episodes, she’s again surrounded by
three black girls who, despite several minutes of screen time, still don’t speak. Who these
girls are and why this population of ten-year-old black girls equals the rest of the show’s
black population combined is apparently unimportant; all that matters is how these girls
frame Erica, the blackness they confer and the “diversity” they add to the show’s cast.
Race, in this light, is a matter of utility.
This form of diversity, as Bering-Porter correctly notes, identifies a central
impetus in the series: to maintain the power of its nostalgia by protecting it from critique.
For Stranger Things, the value of blackness lies in its ability to authorize contradictions,
as the inclusion of black characters and brief forays into critical discourse enables the
series to maintain its white nostalgia without outwardly appearing to do so. Just as
neoliberal capitalism suppresses challenges to its dominance by incorporating dilutions of
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them into itself, so too does Stranger Things absorb and then defang its contradictions in
order to maintain its nostalgia. Race functions like child predation and the threat of
nuclear annihilation: a threat to its nostalgia that must be acknowledged and then cast
aside. The parallels with ‘80s films then serve as a cover for the series’ replication of a
regressive racial politics.
Because the series conflates the 1980s with its depiction in the media of the
period, a hierarchy emerges, with cinematic precedent at the top. In this way, the white
Americana of Spielberg, King, and John Hughes is more central to the ‘80s than any
historical or mnemonic reality, and fidelity to these sources is more important than
whatever political sympathies the series may have. The exclusionary whiteness of the
American small-town, and the racial politics encoded within it, therefore comprise yet
another ‘80s trope that Stranger Things uncritically reinforces in its pursuit of accuracy.
This is the particular danger of Stranger Things’ brand of mediated nostalgia: the series is
so focused on style that it ultimately loses sight of the implications produced by the
aesthetic elements it borrows. While the series’ liberal gestures suggest that it may not
intend to say the unsavory things that its references imply, these notions nonetheless
come to fill the empty space created by its reluctance to offer anything substantial of its
own. Stranger Things’ nostalgic deference to the paradigms established by its influences
buries any potential for the series to offer critique in its own contradictions. Ultimately,
the series finds itself trapped within the confines of the past it reimagined.
As Noah Berlatsky has pointed out, Stranger Things is stuck in a loop: “It defeats
the monsters and creates a better future. Then it looks around…and has to wearily jump
to the past to try to get back to a better future all over again.” Victories are always
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conditional and short-lived: they save Will in the season one finale, and a month later he
coughs up a slug-like creature triggering a menacing vision of the Upside Down; Mike
and Eleven share a dance at Snow Ball ’84 after defeating the Mind Flayer, then the
camera slowly backs out of the gym, inverts itself, and reveals the Mind Flayer still alive
in the Upside Down. Stranger Things thereby imports the logic of closure more
commonly found in cinematic sequels, relying on an escalation of conflict and a
broadening of scope with each successive entry. Every season has a new monster, each
less specific than the next—demonic Eggo boxes, built to contain whatever horror one
wants to map onto them. The result is a narrative that, as it progresses, piling on newer
and greater horrors with each episode, suggests that all things will only get worse, that
decay may be slowed down but never stopped, and that the horrors will always return in
one form or another. Though its characters persist, the series doesn’t appear to believe
that a better future is actually possible; its nostalgic attachment to a particular bygone
childhood and its insistence upon the death that growing up brings seemingly won’t allow
it. But even if it wanted to repair the damages of the past and present, Stranger Things,
and the hypermediated nostalgia for which it is the archetype, is structurally incapable of
pursuing such a project, even symbolically, because its insistence on style means that
there’s nothing to point to as the thing to conquer, only form. Stranger Things fears
anything that lies beneath the surface, whether it’s the subterranean Upside Down or the
horrors of the modern world that it hides beneath metaphor and trope. Because the series
cannot conceive of the past as anything other than an aesthetic, there’s nothing material
for it to confront, only un- or re-articulated doom. This is the true death of its nostalgia: a
cycle intent on endlessly reproducing dead styles as the world burns in the distance.
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CHAPTER FOUR
TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN
, NOSTALGIA, AND REPETITION
“Our Very First Show, Again,” the first episode of the Netflix series
Fuller House
(2016-2020)––a reboot of the popular ABC sitcom
Full House
that aired from 1987 to
1995––begins by replaying the opening credits of the original series, featuring shots of
late 1980s San Francisco as the Tanner family crosses the Golden Gate Bridge in a
vintage convertible and frolics in the park while the original theme plays out its familiar
opening lament, “Whatever happened to predictability? / The newsman, the paperboy,
evening TV.” The new-old intro is truncated, however, when, in place of the actual
credits, the show cuts to an establishing shot of the famous house, beneath the inscription
“29 years later.” Inside the house, viewers are re-introduced to the core cast from the
original series, who, we learn, have gathered to help DJ, the eldest child in the original
Tanner family, following the death of her husband. (“Our Very First Show,” the
Full
House
pilot, takes place three months after the death of DJ’s mother as her father’s best
friend, Joey, and her maternal uncle, Jesse, move in to support the family.) As the
original cast (
re
)appears, one by one, we learn that Danny, Uncle Jesse, Aunt Becky, and
Uncle Joey are all departing later that day, to resume their (old) new lives in other cities,
leaving DJ alone for the first time since her husband’s death. (The first scene of the
series’ original pilot features Danny and the kids bidding farewell to his mother in a
similar context). The family, gathered around the dinner table, share brief bits of news
updating viewers on what has happened since the show went off the air: Danny and Aunt
Becky now have a morning show in Los Angeles (they co-hosted
Wake Up, San
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Francisco
in the original run); Jesse is a composer for
General Hospital
(a knowing nod
to the fact that John Stamos got his big break on the series); Joey (a struggling stand-up
in
Full House
) works as a comedian in Las Vegas; DJ is a veterinarian; Stephanie is a DJ
in London; Michelle, the cast announces and then breaks the fourth wall with a sarcastic
glare into the camera, has a successful fashion career in New York (the Olsen twins
declined to participate in the new series)––all, we are assured, are living the lives fans
would have imagined; they have not, it seems, sold their dreams. After the scene
concludes, the new-new-old opening credits begin, accompanied by a version of the
iconic theme, with slightly altered lyrics, now sung by popstar Carly Rae Jepsen:
“Everywhere You Look (
Full House
Theme)”
Whatever happened to predictability?
The milkman, the paperboy, the evening tv?
Clouds as mean as you've ever seen
Ain't a bird who knows your tune
Then a little voice inside you whispers
“Kid, don't sell your dreams so soon!”
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go
There's a heart, a hand to hold onto
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go
There's a face of somebody who needs you
Everywhere you look
When you're lost out there and you're all
alone
A light is waiting to carry you home
Everywhere you look
“Everywhere You Look (
Fuller House
Theme)”
Whatever happened to predictability?
The milkman, the paperboy, the evening tv?
Everybody eventually
Says that they're as lost as you
So everybody shout it together
“Hey, don't sell your dreams so soon!”
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go
There's a heart, a hand to hold onto
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go
There’s a face of somebody who needs you
Everywhere you look
When you’re lost out there and you’re all
alone
A light is waiting to carry you home
Everywhere you look
As the music plays, fans are treated to a medley of new, old, and new-old images,
beginning with a computer-generated picture frame on a computer-generated wood-
paneled wall showing the cast from the original first season, followed by a photo of the
cast from the original final season against the same false background. These images give
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way to a sprawling re-shot look at the Golden Gate Bridge, presented in high definition
from an angle that mirrors the helicopter shot early in the original credits. The intro then
segues, as each member of the cast is introduced, into sequences merging past and
present: the core returning cast (Candace Cameron Bure [DJ], Jodie Sweetin [Stephanie],
Andrea Barber [Kimmy]), are superimposed on montages of their characters from the
original introduction; new characters (children of the core returning characters) are
superimposed over their baby pictures; “special guest stars” (Stamos, Bob Saget [Danny],
Dave Coulier [Joey], et al.), appear in split-screen shots showing clips from the original
introduction alongside footage of them repeating the same actions (Stamos plays guitar
on a bench, Saget catches a football, etc.). After the credits, we find DJ and Stephanie in
their old bedroom, talking about the passage of time. “Isn’t this crazy? I wound up living
back in my old bedroom. I moved in here when I was five” DJ says. “Yeah,” Stephanie
replies, “then I moved in. Now here we are again. Circle of life.” The two reminisce
about an incident from the original pilot, in which, after being asked to share a bedroom,
they got into an argument that ended with Stephanie clinging to the top of the curtains, a
pose she attempts to reenact. That evening, at a going away party (which takes place in
the family living room), when Stephanie, DJing for the group, announces it’s “time to
take it back to the late ‘80s when this party got started––New Kids on the Block!” the
women all congregate to perform the choreography from the video for “You Got It (The
Right Stuff).” Later, Uncle Jesse sings the song “Forever” to Aunt Becky, with everyone
looking on––just as he did at their wedding in the original series. Eventually, the whole
group joins in. We meet Comet Jr. Jr., the granddaughter of the family’s original dog,
who gives birth to a litter of puppies near the end of the episode. We also see DJ’s best
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friend and family-pest Kimmy get a hug from Danny: “I’ve been waiting twenty years to
hug the king of huggers,” she says. In the final scene of the episode, Danny, Uncle Jesse,
Aunt Becky, and Uncle Joey offer to extend their stay in order to help the increasingly
overwhelmed DJ. Danny, previously planning to sell the house, announces that he has
changed his mind, saying DJ and her kids can stay as long as they like. Their new plans
are quickly scuttled, however, when Stephanie and Kimmy (like Jesse and Joey before
them) offer to move in instead. DJ agrees. Moments later, when the baby starts crying,
Joey says “I know how to handle this” and begins to sing the theme song from
The
Flintstones.
(In the original pilot, when Michelle starts crying, Joey says “I know how to
handle this” and sings the same song). As in the original pilot, the family gathers around
the crib and joins in, and the camera cuts to an overhead shot of the baby as they all circle
the crib. Also, as in the original, DJ and Stephanie perform the “a dabba-doo time” line in
duet, and Stephanie yells “Wilma!!!!” This all appears in split-screen, with the new
footage replicating the old, shot for shot and gesture for gesture. The audio is also
doubled, such that the slightly quieter original sing-along forms a haunting echo of the
new track. After they finish singing, hug, say farewells, and Danny, Uncle Jesse, Aunt
Becky, and Uncle Joey depart, the new-old Tanner family––DJ, Stephanie, Kimmy, and
their children––gather around the crib to sing once more the
Flintstones
theme. The
camera fades to black, shows a dedication to the deceased mothers of Saget, Coulier,
Stamos, and creator Jeff Franklin, and the credits roll.
The
Fuller House
pilot thus concludes having reestablished, through repetition,
the order of the original series: everything has been revived, recycled, reassembled,
reunited, and reinstated.
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The paradox of culture at the end of history is that nothing ever really
ends
anymore. Though characterized by (a certain kind of) stasis, the posthistorical world is
also marked by the constant ebb and flow of preexisting artifacts and styles, such that
when one fades out of fashion it is always replaced by another reiteration. What came to
an end at the end of history, in other words, was (a certain kind of) progress, a belief in a
progressive political teleology, rather than change itself. Change, at least on the level of
culture, has instead accelerated at an unprecedented rate. Old things are constantly
returning anew, such that in place of modernity’s implicit forward velocity, cultural
change has manifested its energy in the circular fashion of a treadmill. The end of history
is, in this way, a (pseudo-)cyclical temporality, and we find ourselves caught in its pattern
of infinite recursion. This chapter will, as a result, be especially attentive to the prefix
re-
,
particularly when it indicates cyclicality, recycling, a process of repetition, a return to
prior states, or accompanies instances of
doing again
.
In his 2010 retrospective,
Retromania
, Simon Reynolds called the 2000s the “re-
decade.” Though, at the time, Reynolds was right to recognize the increasingly
backward-glancing nature of post-millennium Anglo-American pop culture, the
following decade proved even more deserving of the moniker. Already, by the middle of
the 2010s, the various retro movements in music and fashion that, Reynolds correctly
pointed out, dominated the 2000s had given way to more straightforward acts of
recycling, rebooting, and revivalism. In other words, the popularity of artists like Adele,
The Strokes, and the White Stripes whose vaguely-vintage homages (the primary focus of
much of Reynolds’ analysis) provided the foundation for otherwise novel songwriting
138
was on the wane (with fewer and fewer retro acts popping up each year), replaced by
even more targeted efforts to reproduce what-used-to-be with even greater fidelity; the
artifacts of bygone eras served less as inspiration than as products, full stop. The
prevailing production process, in other words, was no longer to make new from old, but
instead to make the old new.
In one sense, this is nothing new, as remakes in film and television, alongside
covers and commemorative re-releases in music, had been major parts of the American
mediascape for most of the twentieth century. What is novel about this period, however,
is the sheer volume of mediated reproductions that emerged in the second decade of the
twenty-first century after a period of relative scarcity. Additionally, the present situation
is distinct from previous historical examples, particularly in film and television, due to
the widespread availability of the originals thanks to streaming. In the Classical
Hollywood era, for instance, remakes were being produced at a time when most people
had no access to the originals, and, even later on as television gained access to film
libraries, availability was determined by station programming rather than the consumer.
In music, re-releases were often little more than marketing gimmicks aimed at ensuring
that older releases made their way back onto the shelves of brick-and-mortar stores. The
rise of home cinema, video rental, and, even more significantly, streaming platforms like
Netflix and Spotify, saw control shift to the hands of consumers, who now found
themselves able to access originals in a way they never had before. These technological
developments meant that reproductions were now more redundant than ever, as their
earlier justification (lack of access). was no longer operative. This shift has therefore
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fundamentally altered the role that remakes and other reproductions play in the media
landscape of the twenty-first century.
This shift, from creating new-from-old to creating new-old or reproducing old
anew, became particularly noticeable in film and, especially, television. Accelerated by
the persistent quest for content amid the streaming wars, retro-inspired but nonetheless
novel IP like
Mad Men
and
Stranger Things
were eventually outnumbered by a slew of
revivals, reboots, and remakes. An article from 2018, for instance, offered a list of 121
movie remakes and reboots currently in development, from
Clueless
and
Blade
to
Das
Boot
(Brew and Harley). A similar list published in March 2021 identified 25 TV reboots
either premiering or beginning production that year alone, featuring several influential
titles like
Sex and the City
and
Beavis and Butt-Head
(Spencer). In another example of
doubled nostalgia for nostalgia,
Field of Dreams
was revived in 2021 when the New
York Yankees and Chicago White Sox played a regular season game on the titular field
in Dyersville, Iowa (the park itself is an homage to Comiskey Park, where the White Sox
played from 1910 until 1990), dressed in throwback uniforms just like those in the film.
As in the film, the two teams were led onto the field by Kevin Costner, who then gave a
speech repeating some of his famous lines (“Is this heaven?”) while a portion of the
film’s score played in the background. The ABC specials
Live in Front of a Studio
Audience
, which premiered in 2019, present another layer of abstracted televisual
repetition. In this series, single episodes of hit shows from the ‘70s and ‘80s, such as
All
in the Family
and
The Facts of Life,
are performed word-for-word and shot-for-shot on
perfectly recreated sets before a live audience by a new cast made up of familiar stars of
today, none of whom had any connection to the original shows (Woody Harrelson plays
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Archie Bunker, Jamie Foxx plays George Jefferson, etc.). It’s unclear, in an era where the
shows of the past are so easily accessible via streaming services, what the draw of this
series is supposed to be, particularly when much of the action falls into (inadvertent?)
irony––Kevin Hart, cast as a child pretending to be a superhero in the first scene of the
Diff’rent Strokes
episode, resonates very differently than when Gary Coleman, an actual
child, initially performed the part, which would seem to undercut the sincerity of the
original show and its nostalgic draw. Nonetheless, the show was a relative hit for ABC,
raking in top viewership numbers and winning multiple Primetime Emmys. Extreme
examples such as these aside, ‘80s and ‘90s TV, following the conventional 25-year
nostalgia cycle, was the largest source of material during this period. Since 2016, when
Fuller House––
arguably the first of its kind
1
––premiered,
Roseanne
(
The Connors), The
Wonder Years
,
Punky Brewster
,
Saved by the Bell
,
Doogie Howser M.D.
(
Doogie
Kameāloha, M.D.
),
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
(
Bel-Air
),
Mad About You
,
Will and
Grace
,
The X-Files,
and
Twin Peaks
have each re-appeared in one form or fashion. Thus,
by the end of the 2010s, though (as chapter two points out) more conventional homages
still proliferated throughout film, television, and music, in terms of sheer volume the
balance had overwhelmingly shifted toward reproduction––a trend that has continued into
the first few years of the 2020s and shows no signs of slowing down.
This onslaught is not just a response to the fact that nostalgia is trendy; there is, as
always, an economic imperative behind such a move. Premised on the extraction of profit
1
Girl Meets World
, a Disney Channel reboot of a
Boy Meets World––
a show whose original run
was similar to
Full House
’s–– premiered two years earlier in 2014, but was much less
nostalgically-driven, focusing less on the lives of the few holdover characters and more on their
offspring. Moreover, the show played out stylistically like a conventional Disney Channel sitcom
tailored for children and pre-teens. Unlike Fuller House, which, as the pilot attests, was explicitly
geared towards fans of the original show, the target audience for
Girl Meets World
seemed to be
the
children
of the fans of the original.
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from all it can touch, capitalism’s expansionist logic sees existing IP lying dormant (i.e.,
not producing anything new and thus not making as much money as it could) as an
untapped resource. This notion is underscored by the fact that these intellectual properties
typically have established communities of fans, which is especially important for
television, a medium that relies on creating sustaining connections between audiences
and characters and is therefore more likely to produce the kind of deep nostalgic
attachments that bring viewers back. It is no coincidence, in this light, that (as the list
above indicates) the overwhelming majority of televisual reboots and revivals are shows
that originally centered on the family or on teens whose age cohort is now well into
adulthood. These situations provide another layer of nostalgic resonance for returning
viewers, who find occasion not just to reconvene with their beloved characters, but also
discover new avenues of identification (viewers who watched
Full House
as children may
now find parallels with DJ’s adventures in parenting; they may also come to better
appreciate characters, like teachers and other authority figures, whose lives in the original
run seemed distant from their own). Nostalgia TV, in other words, promises returning
viewers the opportunity to again see their lives reflected on the small screen. The strength
of these attachments makes revived and rebooted IP a treasure trove for studios.
In part for these reasons, nostalgia TV is also relatively less risky to produce,
since new projects don’t carry the same guarantee of an audience (and, therefore, have a
greater potential for total failure). The profit margins for making something new, in other
words, are often tighter than they are for remaking something old. Not coincidentally, the
end of history exists in the context of a broader economic model that also seeks to
minimize cost and risk, setting aside, where possible, the question of quality and long-
142
term outcomes. As Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out, “It is the mind-boggling speed of
circulation, of recycling, ageing, dumping and replacement which brings profit today––
not the durability and lasting reliability of the product” (
Liquid Modernity
14). Or, to
paraphrase Donald Borenstein (@Boringstein) in response to a trailer for Disney and
Pixar’s
Lightyear
(a
Toy Story
spin-off framed as the movie that the Buzz Lightyear toy
from the original series was based on), the end of history is the “pulling all the copper
wire out of the house stage” of American empire. It is an era of rampant recycling and
refashioning, an era that is, increasingly, uninterested in (or unwilling––even unable––to
sanction) the kind of novelty that defined much of the twentieth century. This is the
perpetual condition of the end of history: an endless procession of the same things
happening again.
It is interesting, in this light, that reboots and revivals are almost always set in the
present. Rather than picking up where the originals left off, revivals like
Fuller House
,
Punky Brewster
,
The X-Files
, and
Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life
begin in the present
day, often devoting much of the first episode to filling in the gaps between the years of
production. Reboots like
Bel-Air
and
Saved by the Bell
likewise eschew the original’s
now-nostalgic settings in favor of the present, attempting to refashion the original’s
formula for contemporary tastes along the way (
The Fresh Prince
’s fish-out-of-water
comedy of manners becomes a drama about race and class difference;
Saved by the Bell
’s
cast adds poor and queer characters). The returns of both revivals and reboots are,
therefore, less explicitly nostalgic for the time period of which they are avatars. Instead,
they satisfy nostalgia for a product that contains a particular set of forms, styles, and
systems of relation that together reflect a particular time. The overall gesture of the
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reboot/revival, therefore, is to merge these forms, styles, and systems of the past into the
present. This effort is perfectly captured in the
Fuller House
Flintstones split-screen
scene, which expresses the essence of the impulse driving the revival/reboot. By
reenacting the past, with the original cast alongside itself, the scene emphasizes at once
both change and its lack––a cinematic
plus ça change
. The differences between the past
and its present reiteration, the scene suggests, are merely aesthetic. The effect of the
second repetition, with the new-old cast, is to elide differences full stop, with each
character reinterpreted as an earlier form: the daughter becomes her father, the aunt
becomes her uncle, the goofy female friend becomes the father’s goofy male friend: old
framed as new, new reframed as old. The effect is to erase difference (is the daughter-
turned-mother really the father?) and highlight sameness, to produce continuity where it
doesn’t necessarily exist.
The relationship between nostalgia and the end of history is more complex than it
might first appear: on one hand, the conditions of the end of history provide the catalyst
for expressions of nostalgic longing, dictating what is longed for; on the other hand,
nostalgia also (re)produces the political, social, and cultural values of the very same
posthistorical world it is a reaction to. “Everywhere You Look (
Fuller House
Theme)” is
a good example of this. The song is doubly nostalgic (nostalgic for a time that was itself
nostalgic), an expression of longing for how things used to be as well as an expression of
nostalgia for an earlier expression of nostalgia. The song’s opening two lines, lifted
directly from “Everywhere You Look (
Full House
Theme),” mourn the disappearance of
a way of life that had already, the original song tells us, been lost (“Whatever happened
to...”). Just as the original song implied that the original show offered a televisual
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antidote to the loss of traditional American family values, the revitalized song suggests
that the revived show will recapture the original show’s reactionary paradise of milkmen,
paperboys, and evening TV. The new song also suggests that the problems that plagued
society in the ‘80s and ‘90s remain unresolved today (it’s unclear if they were resolved
while the show was airing and then simply returned, or if they ever went away), leaving it
caught in a double bind: the song seeks to acknowledge its heritage by comparing the
problems of the past and the present, but to do so it must, like the original, also invoke
the idea that the series provides some kind of redress for the losses named by the song.
This is an example of the way that nostalgia internalizes the end of history’s
contradictions: it expresses a need to recycle the past in order to remedy the present even
though the same forms and objects were around when the problems began (and were
specifically premised on counteracting them). Put another way, it suggests that things will
improve if we simply re-do the same things over and over, even if the past three decades
have been, more or less, an exercise in just that to no avail.
The theme is also an expression of another problem: repeating the original’s
opening lament flattens the distinction between the two periods, while also, ironically,
undercutting the complaint about the loss of predictability––how long must the milkman,
paperboy, and evening TV be missing before their absence becomes predictable? When
does the new normal stop being new? The end of history, once again, presents a
complication here, with its paradox of endless change in the midst of grinding stagnation.
On one hand, the end of history is nothing if not predictable, and the neoliberal order that
was reshaping America when the original song was penned (the true source of much of
the sociocultural upheaval in the period) had been firmly in place for decades by the time
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Fuller House
arrived. In this light, very little has changed, and the predictability
complaint rings false. On the other hand, many of the same sociocultural upheavals that
occasioned nostalgic responses in the ‘80s and ‘90s have only accelerated in the time
since the show ended. In
this
light, the complaint has at least a logical foundation. Here,
again, is a state of confusion brought about by the end of history’s mystifying conflation
of the cultural and political, which the
Fuller House
theme perfectly reproduces.
It is in the context of this uniquely post-historical moment of seemingly end
less
nostalgic repetition, reboots, and revivals that season three of
Twin Peaks
was released.
Following a twenty-five year hiatus, the show, often referred to as
Twin Peaks: The
Return
, returned on Showtime as an 18-episode miniseries on May 21, 2017, continuing
the storyline of
Twin Peaks
twenty-five years after it began––just as Laura Palmer had
enigmatically promised in the original series, whispering “I’ll see you again in twenty-
five years.” Repetition (and especially doubling, as the title suggests), a thematic interest
for the series since its inception, plays an even more crucial role in
The Return
, forming
the backbone of its commentary on the nature of nostalgia and televisual reboots/revivals.
In doing so, the series not only sheds light on the nature of nostalgia at the end of history,
but also offers a salient critique of the fantasmatic attachments produced in this cultural
context.
The original series
,
which premiered on ABC on April 8
th
, 1990, followed FBI
Special Agent Dale Cooper’s investigation into the murder of a young girl in the
seemingly idyllic titular small town in the Pacific northwest. Along the way, audiences
were introduced to a slew of idiosyncratic characters, surreal imagery, and generic
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pastiche, as we learned that the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death went in directions
darker and more unexpected than we could have imagined. Following a labyrinthian
series of twists, including the revelation that Laura’s murder at the hands of her
incestuous father was actually part of a deeper struggle between supernatural forces of
good and evil that inhabited the town, the series concluded one season later, with Cooper,
having (at the urging of ABC executives) solved the show’s central mystery several
episodes earlier, trapped in the interdimensional Black Lodge, while a doppelgänger,
possessed by the evil spirit BOB, returned to Twin Peaks in his place. The show ended
with the doppelgänger smashing his head into a mirror, whose reflection shows the
grinning face of BOB, rather than Cooper’s, and laughing maniacally as blood drips
down his forehead. The enigmatic, cliffhanger conclusion of the show’s original run was
followed almost immediately by a cinematic prequel,
Fire Walk with Me
, which largely
avoided resolving the remaining mysteries established in the series, opting instead to
explore Laura’s final days and the events leading up to her death, often in gruesome
detail. Though critical assessment has warmed in the years since, when released the film
was almost universally panned, and interest in the series, once a must-see event and bona
fide cultural phenomenon, quickly faded.
The premiere of
The Return
opens with footage from the original series, in which
Laura says, “I’ll see you again in twenty-five years” before fading to black. In lieu of
conventional exposition,
The Return
reminds viewers of its catalyzing events through a
montage featuring a mist-covered forest canopy, an abandoned mill, the empty halls of a
late-80s high school, a girl running in slow motion with her hands covering her face, and
a slow zoom on Laura’s infamous homecoming photo in the school’s trophy cabinet that
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ends with a close-up. “Twin Peaks” appears across Laura’s face, and the opening credits
begin, featuring new (but familiar) images of a waterfall, red curtains, and a black and
white zig-zag floor, all accompanied by Angelo Badalamenti’s original score. Agent
Cooper, we learn in the next scene, is still trapped in the Black Lodge and, we see a few
scenes later, his doppelgänger has been living in his place for the last twenty-five years.
Though familiar, the new season, shot from a single 18-hour script and
subsequently edited into episodes (officially titled “Part One,” “Part Two,” etc.), takes
time to return
fully
to its original state (but, arguably, never really does). Like
The
Odyssey
, whose similarity to the series has been noted by several critics
2
and which Frost
has cited as an inspiration,
The Return
is not so much about the return’s completion as
about the process of return
ing
. Agent Cooper, Frost and Lynch’s Odysseus, spends most
of the series not only trying to return to Twin Peaks but also to his old self and, in another
sense, to return
The Return
to the conditions and conventions that characterized the
original series. This process lasts most of the first season and occupies the majority of his
narrative arc. In typical Lynch fashion, the process is also not straightforward: although
Cooper appears in the second scene of the first episode, he is still trapped in the Black
Lodge, which he doesn’t exit until the third episode; once out, Cooper erroneously
replaces Dougie, a lookalike “manufactured” by the original doppelgänger to allow him
to remain outside the Black Lodge longer than his initial twenty-five year mandate. As a
result of this confounded process, Cooper returns in a bewildered state, unaware of who
he is, unable to speak in complete sentences, and only capable of repeating back phrases
(particularly those that stir his recognition of his original life). In this stage, Cooper’s
activity is defined by repetition––he slowly
becomes
himself again by repeating the
2
See Nochimson, Boulegue.
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tropes and traits that defined him in the original run. This fulfills a central desire for fans
of the series, some of whom had been longing for the return of their beloved character for
two decades. Cooper spends the following thirteen episodes absently meandering through
Dougie’s life in Las Vegas, variously encountering abstracted elements of his original
persona such as coffee, pie, or law enforcement. Not until the sixteenth hour of
The
Return
does Cooper fully return to the character in the original series. After waking up
from a coma and remembering who he is (simultaneously adopting his old, familiar
mannerisms), Cooper books a flight to Twin Peaks to resume his quest to save Laura,
whose murder twenty-five years ago, he has become convinced, can be prevented. He
arrives at the Twin Peaks Sheriff Station just in time to reunite with the old crew, help
defeat his doppelgänger, and destroy BOB. Having reestablished the order of the original
series, Cooper’s Homeric return to Twin Peaks/
Twin Peaks
has succeeded. Like
Fuller
House
, everything has been revived, recycled, reassembled, reunited, and reinstated.
His triumphant return to Twin Peaks (and
Twin Peaks
) is relatively short-lived,
however, as within minutes of the show’s reconstitution Cooper again leaves Twin
Peaks/
Twin Peaks.
As though driven by the need to undo the damage done in the original
series, Cooper travels through a portal in the basement of the Great Northern Hotel which
eventually takes him back to February 23
rd
, 1989, the night Laura Palmer was murdered,
and the day before the series began. Cooper is digitally edited into now-black-and-white
scenes from
Fire Walk With Me
as he watches Laura in the woods with James hours
before her fateful encounter with Leo and Jacques. After they fight, James leaves, and she
returns to the woods, where Cooper reaches out to her. The scene cuts to a shot from the
original series showing Laura’s hair in close-up as her body, wrapped in plastic, has
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washed ashore. As before, the camera surveys the body, before cutting to a wide shot.
This time, instead of being discovered by Pete Martell as he heads out to fish, the body
fades away, leaving no trace. Now in color, Laura, in the woods, asks Cooper “Where are
we going?” and Cooper replies “home.”
The Return
then re-airs the opening scene of the
original pilot, showing Josie looking at herself in the mirror, and Pete greeting Catherine
before leaving to fish. As Pete walks outside, we can see that Laura’s body is no longer
there, and, unlike in the original, Pete carries on with his day. When we return to the
woods, Cooper is leading Laura through the darkness. At one point, however, he looks
back and sees that, like Eurydice, she has disappeared.
Twin Peaks
, which
The Return
had only just returned to, has vanished; the entire narrative has been rewritten.
In the finale, Cooper and Diane (Cooper’s formerly unseen secretary to whom he
dictates taped messages in the original series, now played by frequent Lynch collaborator
Laura Dern) drive into the desert, enter a portal of some kind, and find themselves on a
dark desert highway. They get a room at a motel, have sex, and in the morning Diane has
disappeared. Cooper finds a letter addressed to “Richard” from “Linda” that says “when
you read this I’ll be gone. Please don’t try to find me, I don’t recognize you anymore.
Whatever it was we had together is over.” Bemused, Cooper (Richard) heads to Odessa,
Texas, and enters Judy’s diner that, unlike Twin Peaks’ idyllic Double-R Diner, is dingy
and patronized by three aggressive men who are harassing their waitress. After
(uncharacteristically) beating the men, Cooper (Richard) gets the address of another
waitress who works at the coffee shop but isn’t there that day. When he knocks on her
door, a woman played by Sheryl Lee (the actress who plays Laura Palmer) opens it and
identifies herself as Carrie Page. When asked if she is Laura Palmer, she says, in a Texas
150
accent, “No, I’m not her.” After Cooper fails to stimulate her memory, she asks what’s
going on, and Cooper replies, “As strange as it sounds, I think you’re a girl named Laura
Palmer. I want to take you to your mother’s home––your home, at one time. It’s very
important.” He shows his FBI badge, and she agrees to leave with him, citing a need to
“get out of Dodge” anyway. They return, once more, to Twin Peaks, drive past the
Double-R (which she says she doesn’t recognize) and arrive at the Palmer house. When
they knock on the door, they’re greeted not by Laura’s mother, but by a woman who
identifies herself as Alice Tremond, played by the home’s actual owner (who had never
appeared in the series before), who says that she doesn’t know of anyone by the name of
Sarah Palmer, and that she bought the home from someone named Chalfont. (Mrs.
Tremond and Mrs. Chalfont are names given to an elderly woman to whom Laura used to
deliver meals, who appeared in both the original series and the film). Confused, Cooper
and Carrie turn from the house and walk back onto the street. Cooper, walking as if in a
daze, asks “What year is this?” Carrie looks at the house, and we hear the sound of Sarah
Palmer yelling “Laura” on the morning she disappeared, taken directly from the original
series. Carrie, who seems to have heard it too, starts shaking and then violently screams.
There is a loud electrical pop, then the lights in the house cut out, and the show cuts to
black. After thirty seconds, an image of Laura whispering in Cooper’s ear fades in and
the credits roll.
This is the end of Agent Cooper’s long-awaited return to Twin Peaks, the end of
Twin Peaks: The Return
, and, in more ways than one, the end of
Twin Peaks.
In his desire
to revitalize the past by preventing the demise of one of its artifacts, Cooper has
seemingly undone everything: the end of
Twin Peaks: The Return
thus marks the end of
151
Twin Peaks
the show as well as the obliteration of the universe the show depicted, both
literally (the show is over) and diegetically (everything that happened from the original
series until the finale has, apparently, been undone). Cooper’s attempt to revive Laura has
inadvertently created a rupture, distorting the past, and everything that followed, beyond
recognition: nothing is as it was, everything is now something else, all stability and
coherence have been lost. Revival, in this way, is configured as an act of destruction
rather than creation; the process of
doing over again
that is endemic to televisual reboots
and revivals is as much, the show seems to suggest, about erasing what came before as
making something new. And yet, as Carrie’s scream illustrates, traces of the past still
haunt these redacted versions anyway––the past can never truly be undone, only
repressed. (Carrie, one might argue, is a frame that masks Laura’s original trauma, a
cinematic staging of Freud’s return of the repressed). Ultimately,
The Return
tells us not
only that you
cannot
return home, but also that you cannot bring home back by revising
the conditions that led to its disappearance.
This discussion also illustrates how nostalgia serves as a sustaining fantasy of the
end of history. Nostalgia is symptomatic
and
generative of the end of history because it
both
reproduces
and
is an example of
the kind of fraying fantasies of American life that
permeate the period: security, stability, progress, and coherence, most of all. Nostalgia is
a fantasy of reproduction and impossible return, one whose impossibility is contradicted
by the return of styles and shows, which seem, in turn, to suggest the possibility of a
deeper return, one that lies beyond style and form. Structurally (and contradictorily)
nostalgia provides the potential for a dual fantasy: nostalgia, especially in the form of
reboots/remakes, invokes progress even as it actually more broadly signifies
152
return/recursion, and, in doing so, it enables one to produce a version of the past that
identifies (increasingly superficial/aesthetic) differences while typically not providing the
space for one to consider why they are different (because, as
Stranger Things
shows, in
the process of aestheticization, or of marking difference through mediated objects, those
things are mystified). In short, it allows one to believe that select things are improving––
or at least
changing.
At the same time, as
Ready Player One
illustrates, nostalgia also
provides a fantasy world through which one can escape an increasingly pessimistic reality;
nostalgia TV, in particular, promises to provide stability and the comfort of the familiar
in the face of the seemingly unending cultural change and sociopolitical decay. In the end,
nostalgia at the end of history promotes the fantasy of a progressive social world while at
the same time providing a fantasmatic escape from the reality of decay and decline.
This produces a fraught double bind, in which people are caught between two
contradictory fantasies that cannot be resolved, and find themselves helplessly attached to
ideas, attitudes, and ways of being that no longer work, but which they are nonetheless
compelled to repeat (often without even realizing it). The end of history inspires nostalgic
thinking in part because it produces a desire to escape the present despite simultaneously
refusing refuge in the future, while the same turn to nostalgic fantasy––particularly the
kinds of hyper-aestheticized, non-reflective ones that have overwhelmed the cultural
landscape of the past two decades––also impedes any efforts actually to improve the
conditions that drew one to it in the first place. As I pointed out in Chapter One, the end
of history is, above all, marked by stagnation and decay, the dissolution of progress; the
solution to such problems, though politically complicated, is certainly not to turn to
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fantasies of the past
3
(least of all, the past’s own fantasies), particularly when they are
founded in notions that have already failed to prevent the present state from emerging. To
put it another way: if the fall came before 1987, as the
Full House
theme suggests, what
sense does it make to return to 1987, as the reboot urges?
But making logical sense is not the point; the function of fantasy is not to
fix
reality
as it actually is, but to provide an outlet for unsatisfied desires by reconfiguring or
recalibrating one’s image of their life so that it satisfies what they find lacking in reality;
“[fantasy] supplements the functioning of ideology and keeps subjects relatively content
with an imaginary satisfaction” (McGowan 15).More specifically, as Lauren Berlant
explains, “Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux
about how they and the world ‘add up to something’” (3). Nostalgia, a response to a
pessimistic reality that ultimately obscures the real cycles of decay and stagnation that
produced it, feeds on the feeling that the world increasingly does not add up to anything
coherent, stable, and is not itself desirable (and, thus, desire must be fulfilled elsewhere).
Fictive narratives are powerful conduits for this process because, as Jameson (drawing on
Althusser) points out in
The Political Unconscious
, they resolve at the fantasy level
conflicts that do not allow resolution in the realities of everyday life. The function of
nostalgia and nostalgic media, in other words, is not to create logical consistency but to
provide space for the psychological fulfillment of certain desires, even as this fantasmatic
fulfillment has no bearing on the material world (and possibly impedes it).
3
In this, the neoconservative foundations of the posthistorical turn to nostalgia again rears its
head. As imagined by Leo Strauss (and later expounded by Fukuyama, among others), and
vocalized most forcefully by President Reagan, the neoconservative project relied on the creation
of an explicitly mythical American past around which a new polity could subsequently be
(re)fashioned.
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This predicament recalls Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, which describes a
relation where
something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might
involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a
political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit
that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of
optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when
the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that
brought you to it initially. (1)
Nostalgia at the end of history, in this light, is perhaps the ultimate example of the
phenomenon Berlant identified: a form of cruelly optimistic fantasy that “recalibrates
what we encounter so that we can imagine that something or someone can fulfill our
desire...project[ing] qualities onto [the past] so that we can love...and manipulate it for
having those qualities––which it might or might not have” (122), a process that ultimately
“blocks the satisfactions [it] offers” (51) but nonetheless binds the individual to the
promises it has come to represent, whose contours are a direct result of the social
conditions that led to its emergence. Nostalgia at the end of history is, in short, a cruelly
optimistic attachment to things that no longer work that is accompanied by a compulsion
to repeat them anyway.
This turn to cruel optimism is not simply for the sake of establishing a categorical
parallel; rather, it provides another way of considering the nature of nostalgic repetition at
the end of history. The cruelness of nostalgia today lies in its invitation to return and
repeat, to try to make what (seemingly) used to work
work again
, or to recapture what
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has been irrevocably lost, in order to, in one way or another, repair that which has
become broken (a process that is always doomed to fail). Conceptually, nostalgia is
premised on the notion of
nostos
, the (continual, insatiable)
return
home that one longs
for precisely because it is impossible. This is nostalgia’s cruel, unresolvable paradox: it is
occasioned by the same conditions that prevent its fulfillment. Yet, as I noted in the
introduction, this is a process that is complicated when irrecoverable pasts are
represented by recoverable, mediated objects. The ‘80s will never actually return, and
you can never be a kid again, but, thanks to Netflix, you
can
watch
Full House
again, and
even consume new versions of it. This only serves to strengthen the nostalgic bind by
giving viewers a way to indulge in a version of the fantasy that simultaneously makes its
larger aim seem more realizable––you no longer need to imagine returning home,
Fuller
House
gives you a portal to achieve it (in thirteen 22-minute increments per year).
Cooper’s failed homecoming demonstrates the confounded premise of the
reboot/revival’s repetitive, cruelly optimistic nostalgia. He’s determined to return out of
an optimistic belief that he can fix what has gone wrong; and yet, as the show
demonstrates, this belief is precisely what brings the ultimate downfall of
Twin Peaks,
seemingly (re-)writing the show out of existence. Before heading to the Great Northern
Hotel in Part 17, Cooper says to his friends in the sheriff’s office, “The past dictates the
future,” a notion that lays out the logic of what follows: if the present (the future of the
past) is in disarray, then it must be the result of events that occurred in the past; the
logical conclusion of this claim is that, in order to resolve the conflicts of the present, one
must return to the source of its undoing (the past). Cooper is bound to this logic early in
the season, when, in the process of leaving the Black Lodge, he’s led by a strange figure
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into what appears to be outer space. The figure urges him to jump. Clearly disconcerted
by the prospect of leaping into the unknown, Cooper turns back and continues his
attempted return. In this moment, we see Cooper’s deep attachment to what is familiar,
and his compulsion to move backward instead of forward. As a result, the scene reflects
the binding logic of posthistorical nostalgia’s cruel optimism: the future represents
uncertainty; the fantasy world of the past, on the other hand, represents the opposite.
Cooper’s tragic flaw is not his belief that he can change the past––he ultimately does––
but rather his unshakable attachment to retrograde problem solving. This is his ruin and
the ruin of
Twin Peaks
as a whole. Most concerning of all, this ruin brings no change to
the larger state of affairs. The world that Cooper (Richard) and Carrie occupy in the
finale––presumably, the one in which Laura’s murder has been erased from existence,
which, Cooper’s logic suggests, should improve the present––is pointedly shown to be no
better than the scenes of Twin Peaks and Las Vegas that we get prior to the finale (which
are both shown throughout to be in states of decay): the diner where Carrie works is
patronized by a group of abusive cowboys whose sexual harassment of their waitress
recalls Laura’s treatment by many of the men in the original timeline, and Cooper finds
Carrie in dire straits, cooped up in a house with a corpse with a bullet in his head sitting
in the living room. Nothing is really better, as far as we can tell; the misery has only been
rearranged and/or repressed. For every Laura we remove from history, the show seems to
suggest, there will always be a Carrie. Cooper’s bemused “what year is this?”––the final
line of the series––invokes the fatal flaw in his logic: if the past dictates the future, but
the future is not what his revised past was supposed to produce, then is this somehow not
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the future? It’s the wrong question, of course, but Cooper, still bound to his original
attachments, fails to see it.
The return of Laura’s repressed trauma in this final scene, encoded in her
mother’s call and Carrie’s scream, also calls into question the gender and racial dynamics
of nostalgic returns. As Franck Boulegue points out, “instead of building a new home for
Laura, Cooper is obsessed with taking her back to the one that was the source of all her
troubles” (16). While Twin Peaks was a place of safety and comfort for Cooper––a town
where, as he put it in the original series, “a yellow light still means 'slow down,' not
'speed up’”––Carrie’s haunting cry reminds us that it was nothing of the sort for Laura.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Laura, not only a murder victim, but also subjected to
repeated sexual assaults by lascivious men throughout the town, including her own father,
would have any interest in returning. For her, in other words, Twin Peaks was not the
quirky, charming town it was often represented as in the show and pop culture, and her
home, where her father repeatedly raped her, is a far cry from a nostalgic object. And yet,
as Cooper recognizes, Twin Peaks is, somewhat paradoxically, not Twin Peaks (or
Twin
Peaks
) without Laura. Whether dead or alive, her presence is an essential element of
Twin Peaks
, and so his homecoming is necessitated by hers. She is the homecoming
queen, after all. In all of this, there is a procedural parallel between
the Return
and the
inclusion efforts of recent televisual revivals and reboots, which seek to bring into the
fold groups who, in the original, were excluded or whose presence was minimize–– even
if the past they’re being brought into wasn’t desirable for them in the first place. Would
low-income people of color or members of the LGBTQ+ community really feel at home
in the wealthy, conservative, overwhelmingly white world of
Saved by the Bell
?
158
Furthermore, aside from enabling the show’s return, what is the point of dramatizing this
false reunion to begin with?
Before leaving Twin Peaks in Part 17, Cooper says, “We live inside a dream,” and
his face becomes superimposed on the scenes that follow (a sequence lasting nearly five
minutes). This moment can be read as a kind of metafictional break in the series, with
Cooper’s visage, observing the proceedings, announcing his recognition of the
fantasmatic nature of the events that both precede and follow. In this reading, Cooper is
not reaching back to save Laura Palmer, the girl who lived in Twin Peaks, but Laura
Palmer, the
character
who lived in
Twin Peaks
. In the second episode, for example,
Laura tells Cooper “I am dead, yet I live,” a status that reflects her reality as a mediated
object: the character is diegetically dead, but also repeatedly revived by scenes like these
each time viewers watch the show. Cooper is not rescuing her from actual death, in other
words, but from the narrative death depicted in
Fire Walk With Me
.
The Return
, as such,
dramatizes the revisionist act inherent in nostalgia TV. We can read the final section of
the finale, with Cooper (recast as Richard) trying to return Laura (reframed as Carrie) to
Twin Peaks, as an effort to reboot the show under a new premise.
This effort evokes an important distinction between the processes of the revival
and the reboot: revival brings back from the dead and attempts to restart where it left off;
reboot restarts anew. In this light, Cooper’s first attempt to save Laura is akin to a revival,
literally bringing her back from the dead by preventing the event in the first place. The
second attempt, in the finale, resembles a reboot, as Cooper and Laura are no longer the
same characters, but rather new ones recreated from the ashes of originals, containing
echoes of their previous forms but repackaged in a fundamentally altered state that
159
reflects its new moment of creation. In this “new” version, Cooper, rebooted as Richard,
maintains his original mission but is uncharacteristically brutal––a brutal man for a brutal
age, one might say––and becomes confused when his mandate, conceived in 1989,
becomes unresolvable; Laura, rebooted as Carrie, is middle-aged, works as a waitress in
another part of the country, and only recalls her past as Laura in the final seconds of the
series. Neither of these attempted restarts succeeds: Cooper’s revival of Laura loses sight
of the original as it tries to drag an artifact of the past into the present, removing it from
its proper context and undoing all that made it what it was. Cooper’s reboot falls apart
when the pair reach the Palmer house and find that it is inhabited not by Laura’s mother,
but by the home’s real-life owner. Having broken free of the “dream” of the televisual
reality he previously inhabited, and remade the televisual past, Cooper, as Richard, now
confronts the real world, which is uncanny, recognizable only through echoes with the
original “dream” (same house, different owner). He’s left stunned by how incompatible
the fantasy, both the original and the revision, is with reality. The turn to the televisual
past, and the effort to retroactively refit it, has ultimately unmoored them from reality,
and his final question (“What year is this?”) takes on another meaning, evoking the
confounded temporality produced when a fantasmatic attachment to the media of the past
is confronted by the real. Cooper’s attempted reboot only partially obscures, but in no
way resolves, the reality that it was created to overcome, and it subsequently fails to be
reconciled with the real world. Cooper, an artifact from the 1980s, created for a purpose
that has already reached its conclusion, is lost in the present (the “real” present, not the
fictional “dream” one), out of place and out of time. Dale Cooper, and the mediated
fantasy he represents, is unorientable in the present.
160
The reparative returns that dominate nostalgia TV are premised on a belief in the
power of repetition with a difference, but, as
The Return
illustrates here, these efforts,
optimistic though they may be, inadvertently trap participants in a cycle of repetition in
which nothing is ever fully resolved. Projects seeking this kind of procedure are
fundamentally driven by a reconstructive rather than reflective (to use Boym’s paradigm)
impulse, seeking to rebuild what was (with a few tweaks) instead of considering more
deeply what ends such repetition serves––in part because such reflection would
emphasize the fundamental incompatibility of the fantasy and the reality it purports to
represent. This raises an important question: of what use is it to revise a fantasmatic,
mediated past if it is so radically incompatible with reality? What, in other words, is the
purpose of trying to repair the past? Nostalgia TV, particularly revivals and reboots,
provides a fantasy version of both reality and history; however, as Part 18 demonstrates,
reality, history, and televisual fantasy, though they may resemble one another in
superficial ways, are ultimately irreconcilable.
This irreconcilability marks a stark contrast with most televisual revivals and
reboots. The split screen scenes that form the end of the
Fuller House
pilot, for instance,
suggest the opposite: the fantasies of the past are not only reconcilable with the present,
but they are also an essential element of it because the present is merely a repackaging of
the past. An attachment to the past that leads one to endlessly repeat it, the show suggests,
is not only a good thing, but it also borders on an immutable law.
Fuller House
invests
fully in fantasies of stability, coherence, safety, and continuity provided by doing the
same things over and over.
The Return
, on the other hand, reflects the despair that arises
from nostalgia-induced stasis, showcasing how ill-equipped a strategy of comforting
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repetition is for the crises at hand. That the series again ends on a borderline-
incomprehensible, resolution-defying cliffhanger (after returning from one 25 years
earlier) also presents a stark contrast with the process of closure and reopening brought
about by conventional revivals and reboots. As such,
The Return
’s evasion of closure
reminds us of its role in sustaining the kinds of nostalgic fantasies that these shows rely
on, which are also essential to the end of history writ large (in the way that the
posthistorical world relies on a false perception of ending and resolution).
To fully understand this, and what it illuminates about the end-of-history
repetition compulsion, it’s worth considering in more detail the context that shapes
Cooper’s odyssey. Whether you read the finale as an exercise in metafiction, a journey
into an alternative timeline created by meddling with the past, a turn to an alternative
dimension within the multiverse, or a signal of the end of a cycle in the Vedic cosmic
order, it’s clear that Cooper’s quest to return to Twin Peaks––and to return
Twin Peaks
to
what it once was––ultimately fails. I have already discussed several ways in which we
can read the failure itself, but more can be said about the context into which Cooper’s
journey is situated. As Boulegue and Martha Nochimson have each pointed out, Cooper’s
quest, in both its structure and its allusions to Greek myth, recalls the classical epic, in
which a hero, emerging into a world of disarray, endeavors to return it to its original
order. Cooper’s failure in the end is one obvious way in which
The Return
deviates from
the conventional epic formula, but what is most novel, and therefore most interesting, is
not so much
that
he fails as the conditions of his failure. Nochimson argues that
The classical epic reveals how all the pieces of the universe and culture,
seemingly in conflict, are actually part of a harmonious whole in which
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the epic hero is able to fulfill epic tasks. The opposite is true in Lynch’s
modern American epic. Misrule through discontinuity and fragments that
are incapable of fitting together is the rule on all levels of reality. (249)
The world of
Twin Peaks: The Return
, in other words, is shown to be necessarily
dissimilar to its classical counterpart, fundamentally, irreconcilably disordered rather than
temporarily disunified. This is not incidental, but an essential part of the story the series
is trying to tell, and
The Return
continually returns to scenes of sickness and decay:
foreclosed houses dot the landscape of the Nevada suburbs where Cooper first re-emerges;
a drug-addled mother squatting in one of the homes ignores her son, almost leading to his
death; the sociopathic son of one of the show’s original characters runs over a child at an
intersection and flees the scene; a kid finds a gun in his family’s van and shoots the
windows out of the Double-R; a woman caught in traffic shrieks that she is running late
while a young girl in the passenger seat vomits bile. As Emily VanDerWerff pointed out
in her review of the finale, “You never get the sense of a warm, goofy place that so
dominated the original series’ depiction of the town (and made its sinister undercurrents
all the harder to shake). Something broke here, long ago, and the connections between
these people have been severed” (“A Potentially Frustrating”).
Unlike
Fuller House
, which emphasizes how wonderful everyone’s lives are now,
most of
Twin Peaks’
returning favorites are either treading water or worse off than when
we last saw them: Shelly is a divorced single mother, still chasing the bad boy even as
she’s confronted by her daughter repeating the same mistakes; though Shelly insists he’s
“still cool,” James works the night shift as a security guard at a warehouse; Sheriff
Truman is taking a leave of absence to recover from illness; Sarah Palmer sits in her
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living room alone, drinking and chain smoking while watching looped images of a boxer
being knocked out and a pack of lionesses devouring a gazelle on TV; Ed is still trapped
in a loveless marriage with Nadine; Norma, poring over financial statements instead of
making her famous pies, has franchised the Double-R, and is increasingly concerned by
the drop in quality resulting from cost-cutting; Audrey is apparently locked in a mental
institution after suffering a breakdown following her rape by Cooper’s doppelgänger. The
Log Lady, frail, on oxygen, dies midway through the season. (Catherine E. Coulson, the
actor who played the Log Lady, died only four days after filming). The cast list is, in fact,
littered with deaths.
4
The past twenty-five years have not been kind to the population of
Twin Peaks; virtually everything is worse off than it was when we left it. The town, once
marked by its idyllic charm and oddball sensibilities, is a shell of its former self.
These developments stand in stark contrast to
Fuller House
, which begins with an
offscreen tragedy that the rest of the pilot attempts to remedy, an effort that is, even in the
show’s first half hour, stunningly successful. This effort also mirrors the role that the
series promises to play in its viewers lives, offering salvation from the traumatic events
and absences that have plagued their lives since the show ended. Though perhaps
unsurprising given the conventions of the sitcom genre, it’s nonetheless notable that such
crises are not given the space to fester in
Fuller House
because they are antithetical to the
4
In addition to Coulson, Miguel Ferrer, who played FBI Agent Albert Rosenfeld, died before
The
Return
premiered; David Bowie was too ill to reprise his role as Phillip Jeffries (his parts in the
new episodes were either reused from
Fire Walk With Me
or dubbed) and died a few months
before filming concluded; Harry Dean Stanton, like Coulson, was able to reprise his role from
Fire Walk with Me
, but passed away only weeks after the finale aired; Co-creator Mark Frost’s
father Warren, who played Doctor Hayward, appeared briefly in the Showtime series, but passed
away before the show aired in 2017; Don Sinclair Davis, who played Major Briggs, died in 2008;
Jack Nance, who played Pete Martell, died in 1996. Frank Silva, who played BOB, died in 1995.
The Return
is haunted by these absences, which cast a noticeably, unmistakably real, shadow on
the nostalgia of
Twin Peaks’
return.
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show’s nostalgic mandate. On the other hand, by leaving events unresolved,
The Return
again presents a distinction from typical narratives of revival, rejecting, along the way,
the fantasy of therapeutic televisual nostalgia. Its setting aligns the show with a distinctly
postmodern ethos, reflecting the fragmentation, discontinuity, and chaos that has become
a hallmark of postwar American fiction’s response to the emergent world order.
The series deviates from (or expands upon) more traditional postmodern framing,
however, in its responses to the specific conditions of the end of history; the series is, in
other words, better understood not as a post
modern
epic, but a post
historical
one. What
makes this epic posthistorical is not that it fails (a trait shared by many modern and
postmodern “epics”), or that it depicts the world as fragmented and dis- (or un-)ordered,
but that its failure arises from an attempted return both to a past and to a mediated state in
an effort to repair the present’s malaise. Unlike the epic hero, Cooper fails to return order
to the world, and, unlike the postmodern hero, he fails specifically because of his
optimistic attachment to reviving and revising the past. He actually saves Twin Peaks, in
a sense, by helping defeat BOB, but it is a victory that, because of this framing, he
doesn’t recognize as such.
Misrecognition, a hallmark of the reflective age, as previous chapters have
illustrated, is a central problem throughout
The Return,
especially when, as is the case
with Cooper’s failed quest, misrecognition derives from an attachment to a processes of
repetition or belief in a false version of reality
.
Like the original series (whose title
announces its thematic interest in doubling), instances of repetition, particularly ones that
are either false or unnatural, permeate the series. As I previously noted, the scenes of
Laura’s mother Sarah watching television in her living room reveal that her gaze is fixed
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on unnatural looping scenes of violence. These scenes, reflecting her traumatized psyche
(her daughter was murdered by her husband, following years of incestual rape) highlight
the unsuitability of television as a means of recovery because its looping of the same acts
over and over obstructs progression. Midway through the season, audiences are also
treated to a repeat of James’ performance of “Just You” from season two. In the original,
James performs the song in the living room of the Palmer home, accompanied by Maddy,
Laura’s identical cousin (an impossible copy), and Donna. The effects on the recording
make the performance uncanny: James is not only obviously lip-syncing the vocals, but
through post-processing his voice has been pitched into an unnatural falsetto, with each
syllable repeated by an echo. The trio’s performance (it’s unclear if Maddy and Donna
are the voices in the recording, but they’re also obviously lip-syncing on screen) is also
backed by drums and bass that are clearly not present in the room where the performance
is supposedly taking place. When James performs the song on the Roadhouse stage in
The Return
, all of the uncanny elements are repeated: he is still obviously lip-syncing and,
because he is much older, the artificially pitch-shifted falsetto seems even stranger. It is,
moreover, the same recording from the original series, and he is accompanied by two
unnamed backup singers who are not Maddy (murdered by Leland in season 2) or Donna
(Lara Flynn Boyle did not return for the new season), but whose voices are the same, as
are the unseen bass and drums. The scene, in other words, doubles the sense of unreality:
it repeats a scene from the original, which was built on an act of obvious imitation. The
repeat performance is even more estranged from reality than the initial one, which was
not original, since it was a recording. The scene, in other words, is a copy of a copy of a
copy with no stable point of origin (when was this originally “performed”? by whom?).
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In this scene,
The Return
once again evokes the disconnect between reality and televisual
fantasy, exemplified in the obvious disparity between what we see, what we hear, and
what we know. Television, in other words, makes impossibility seem possible––a notion
that mirrors the same end of history fantasy of nostalgic repetition exemplified in scenes
like the
Fuller House
split-screen, which attempts to naturalize a premise (endless
repetition and stasis) that is only possible through media.
Perhaps
The Return
’s doubled characters constitute its most significant examples
of repetition. In addition to Richard, Linda, Carrie, Cooper’s evil doppelgänger, and
Laura’s doppelgänger in the red room (also in the original series),
The Return
introduces
the concept of “tulpas,” or copies created through mystical means who, unlike
doppelgängers, are seemingly unaware of their inorganic status. These are examples of
what FBI Director Cole labeled “Blue Rose Cases,” so named, Agent Preston offers,
because “a blue rose does not occur in nature, it’s not a natural thing; [the tulpa] was not
natural, conjured.” Dougie Jones, who Cooper’s doppelgänger created in order to delay
his return to the Black Lodge, is one such example. We also learn toward the end of the
series that the Diane, who in the original series was the unseen recipient of Cooper’s tape
recordings) was actually a tulpa, also created by Cooper’s doppelgänger. When the two
are removed from the world, they are transported to the red room where MIKE informs
them “Someone manufactured you,” again emphasizing the constructed nature of these
copies, whose existence is defined by the very thing that their false appearance is meant
to obscure.
Repetition like this, the show stresses, is not natural, and can be manufactured to
support a fantasy that leads one to misrecognize reality. Dougie’s wife, Janey-E,
167
seemingly falls into this trap. Despite these sudden, inexplicable differences, Janey-E
willingly partakes in the fantasy of new-Dougie because it offers her financial stability
(Cooper-Dougie wins enough money gambling to cover the debts they owed), kindness,
and attractiveness. Though every available sign points to the reality that he is not the
same Dougie she knew before (he lost considerable weight seemingly overnight, has jet-
black hair, and can barely even speak in full sentences), she falls back in love with him
anyway. These deceptive doubles suggest how nostalgia entices people to fall in love
with simulations, copies, and fantasies. More specifically, they mirror the idealization
process essential to the reboot/revival, which produces fantasmatic “replicas” of the past
that are designed to fulfill desires unmet by the present or the past. Janey-E and Sonny
Jim’s lives have been so improved by Cooper-Dougie’s presence that Cooper initiates the
manufacture of a new Dougie tulpa, made in his image, to replace him once he awakes
from the coma and leaves for Twin Peaks. When we see Janey-E for the last time, she’s
embracing this new copy-of-a-copy Dougie, who has returned to Las Vegas to take the
place of the Cooper-Dougie they came to love, and who no longer resembles the original
Dougie in any way. What is staged as a joyous family reunion is, in truth, the
melancholic embrace of a copy of a copy of a copy.
Audrey Horne’s scenes in
The Return
provide a much darker reflection on
misrecognition and, particularly, on mediated fantasy’s capacity for obscuring a traumatic
reality. In the original series, Audrey was a vivacious, headstrong, precocious teenager
who, like many following Laura’s murder, sought to dig into the town’s hidden secrets.
The original series finale leaves Audrey, by that point a fan favorite, possibly dead after a
bomb explodes at the bank where she had handcuffed herself to a vault in protest of a
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forest development project. When she reappears in the twelfth episode of
The Return,
she
clearly is not the Audrey we remember, nor is she living the kind of life we might have
expected. Spread across five episodes, Audrey’s scenes revolve around an argument with
Charlie, who is supposedly her husband though the two have an odd rapport, about
Audrey’s desire to go to the Roadhouse to look for Billy, her lover, whom she claims has
gone missing. After quarreling with Charlie in his office, they eventually head to the
Roadhouse, where she has a breakdown during a musical sequence and is instantaneously
transported to a white room where she looks in a mirror and screams. With support from
Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier
, a companion to the new season published by Frost,
Audrey’s final scene has often been interpreted as indicating that she is in a mental
institution, engaged in an elaborate fantasy. Audrey’s scenes thus constitute an act of
misrecognition engineered to replace a painful reality with a fantasmatic one. Crucially,
the show does not allow the viewer to differentiate Audrey’s fantasy from her reality. If
we accept the premise that Audrey is in a mental institution, we are left with two
scenarios: we either saw what happened to Audrey or we saw her fantasy. The velocity of
the final cut from the Roadhouse to the white room suggests that Audrey did not actually
visit the Roadhouse. The scene suggests, instead, that Audrey is brought back to
“reality,” as in hypnosis, with the snap of the fingers. This notion is reinforced by
Audrey’s crisis of recognition, which extends not only to herself, but also to Charlie and
to her sense of place.
Like Cooper (as Dougie) before her, Audrey reconstitutes herself as the character
from the original series through repetition. Following her mental breakdown, Audrey’s
mediated fantasy has led her to misrecognize her life on nearly every level, and the lines
169
between diegetic and non-diegetic worlds, between fantasy and reality, have become
disordered––a process not dissimilar to the one induced by the influence of nostalgia TV.
Popular notions of “the past,” it is worth pointing out, are constructed through repetition
and recitation, through media (and of media), of events/traits/tropes. Emily VanDerWerff
argued, in her recap of episodes three and four, that
The Return
“is about the formation of
identity. Are we ourselves? Or are we a collection of outside influences that we trick
ourselves into thinking is a coherent person?” In light of the connection the show forges
between identity, the past, and mediation, we might expand this question: Was the past
we saw on TV actually the past? Or was it a collection of tropes and events, ossified in
media, that we tricked ourselves (or were tricked) into thinking was a coherent whole?
The Return
, for its part, seems to suggest that this is at least partially the case, and
Audrey’s apparent institutionalization parallels how reboots and revivals, and even
original series like
Stranger Things
, seek to rehabilitate the past through this
substitutional process.
The Return
’s treatment of nostalgia and fantasy marks an important departure
from Lynch’s earlier work. Though Lynch’s expressions of nostalgia never go
unproblematized,
5
Blue Velvet
and the original run of
Twin Peaks,
in particular,
nonetheless demonstrate the filmmaker’s belief in the virtue of idealized fantasy. The
5
See, for instance, the anecdote in
Lynch on Lynch
in which the director follows up a recollection
of his idyllic ‘50s childhood by noting “Little did we know we were laying the groundwork then
for a disastrous future. All the problems were there, but it was somehow glossed over. And then
the gloss broke, or rotted, and it all came oozing out” (5), and describes coming closer to a
seemingly-idyllic cherry tree only to find “pitch oozing out––some black, some yellow, and
million of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful
world, there are
always
red ants underneath” (10-11). This inseparability of light and dark, idyllic
and horrific, is mirrored in otherwise “nostalgic” works like
Blue Velvet
, which insists upon the
embeddedness of the two fantasies within the same world––light and dark always coincide, as
showing in the opening dive from the seemingly perfect suburban lawn which reveals a chaotic
hoard of bugs just below the surface.
170
robin that symbolizes optimism and the triumph of good over evil at the end of
Blue
Velvet
may be obviously fake, in other words, but there remains, the filmmaker
contended, value to be found in the aspirations it symbolizes. Here, and elsewhere, the
film acknowledges that its turn to ‘50s sentimentality is fantasy, a cinematic invention
and thus not reflective of the real, while at the same time pointing to the positive
elements contained within that sentimentality. Lynch’s film, in other words, does not
mistake its nostalgia for reality, nor does it attempt to mystify this substitution, but rather
highlights the beauty of the aspirations contained in the artifice (even if the nation wasn’t
actually as hopeful or kind as it presented itself, or if the hope and kindness were built on
false or otherwise corrupt foundations, hope and kindness, the film attests, are good
things). Lynch’s early work, in other words, views mediated nostalgia with optimism, as
a positive force so long as it is properly recognized as fantasy and, crucially, not falsely
separated from––or used to mask––the horrors of reality.
This is seemingly no longer the case in
The Return
. As I pointed out in discussing
the end of history decay that afflicts the town in 2016, Twin Peaks in the original series
and Twin Peaks in
The Return
are quite distinct, and the optimism contained in the
fantasmatic nostalgia of
Twin Peaks
has turned cruel in
The Return.
While the original
series seeks to highlight the aspirational within its mediated, artificial fantasy,
The Return
repeatedly suggests that such a maneuver is no longer useful at the end of history, where
the rot and decay brought about by neoliberalism has become so pervasive that fantasies
of The Good Life ring false, and where stable grounding in reality has been wholly
overtaken by the same kind of mediated, idealized fantasy that Lynch’s work previously
championed––such that aestheticized fantasies of the past are often no longer recognized
171
for what they are and are instead mistaken for representations of historical reality. So
often at the end of history, as we have seen in chapters two and three, in substituting
nostalgic fantasy for historical reality, the horrors of the past are separated from the
idealized reconstruction, and are subsequently either obscured or symbolically repaired.
Thus, the dialectic of the idealized and the horrific that Lynch’s philosophy previously
relied upon becomes inoperative, as the ideal fantasy has not only overtaken the horrific,
but also masquerades as reality, and the sense of artifice underscoring the fantasy has
been lost. Cooper’s failed attachment to the reparative power of repetition and revision,
in this light, indicts the original series and Lynch’s own optimistic attachment to
nostalgia.
“In the end,” as Timothy William Gallow points out, “[Cooper] finds himself
chasing a 25-year-old tragedy as the world becomes increasingly unrecognizable” (216).
His downfall, in other words, is that his attachment to the past and desire to repeat it has
led him to misrecognize reality––or, perhaps, to recognize that reality was never
recognizable to begin with––and he ultimately becomes unmoored from the world around
him. To borrow a metaphor from Franck Boulegue, the series is an exercise in squaring
the circle, an impossible attempt to re-form (reform) a past that has already taken shape.
If, as the series suggests, these cycles of nostalgic repetition, instigated by the conditions
of the end of history, invite us to mistake fantasy for reality, and to subsequently
misconstrue the relationships between past and present, then nostalgia TV poses a
considerable problem for the posthistorical subject. As chapter two points out,
recognition is a constitutive element in the kinds of nostalgia that emerged in the past
decade or so. As this chapter shows, however, these acts of recognition are, more often
172
than not, actually acts of misrecognition, borne of a process by which, Berlant explains,
“fantasy recalibrates what we encounter so that we can imagine that something or
someone can fulfill our desire” (122). Problems arise when this process is no longer
understood as fantasy (or as a process at all), and misrecognition is mistaken for
recognition. These repetitive acts of fantasmatic misrecognition, sociopolitically
instigated and reinforced by media, can only end in the death of referentiality,
relationality, and, ultimately, recognition itself. The result is a posthistorical subject who,
like Agent Cooper, is thrust into a world where they are fundamentally unorientable,
alienated from both the past they crave and the present they are fleeing, asking “What
year is this?”
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CODA
BACK TO THE BEGINNING: NOSTALGIA
AFTER
THE END OF HISTORY?
Most of this dissertation was written before the Supreme Court rulings of June 2022,
which, alongside ongoing events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion
of Ukraine, suggest that a major shift has taken place in the American (and global)
political landscape. The end of history, to put it bluntly, may be ending. (According to
some, it has already done so.
1
) Increasingly, therefore, the texts, narratives, and traits
described in this project represent an even more narrow periodization than initially laid
out, marking not just the nadir of post-historical American culture, but also the moments
just before its collapse. Upon reexamination, this period entails more than just a cruelly
optimistic binding to formulas of the past that no longer work; it also signifies, more
broadly, an attachment to a liberal fantasy of universal stasis in a time of an ascendant
right that no longer agrees to such a premise. These developments highlight the frailty of
the end of history’s fundamental premises: in addition to suggesting a teleological end,
the end of history also promotes a notion of universality––that, for better or worse, there
is broad popular and political agreement about the shape of history––which recent events
suggest was not accurate (see, for instance, the conflict between Fukuyama’s
Hegel-inflected teleology and that of evangelicals). What often appeared, in the 1990s
1
See, for instance, Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe’s 2021 book
The End of the
End of History
and Matthew Ellis’s 2021 dissertation
The Return of History
.
174
and 2000s especially, to be a general consensus among liberals and conservatives about
the core principles of western liberal democracy and its historical contours actually
obscured distrust and growing discontent on the right, which provided the impetus for a
coherent political project that slowly took aim at nearly all levels of government. What
was typically positioned as fringe populism (the Tea Party movement, for example)
eventually became the center. Thus, after slowly building structural power over several
decades, the new right is finally exercising its power at the state and judicial level at a
time when most of its opponents, still gripped by the neoliberal notion of the end of
politics, have outsourced much of theirs to the private sector. Instead of confronting this
issue directly, liberals in power often seem more invested in maintaining a rarely
functional notion of bipartisanship, as well as a policy of corporate appeasement,
2
than
in political counter-maneuvers that might upset the already dwindling status quo. Thus,
in a somewhat ironic turn, while Fukuyama’s end of history began, following the
collapse of the Soviet Union, as neoconservative triumphalism, its remaining proponents
now reside almost exclusively on the other side of the aisle, and liberal fidelity to a false
sense of closure has enabled, perhaps more than anything else, the end of the end.
American liberal politics, in other words, is now gripped by nostalgia for an order that is
in the process of disappearing.
2
See, for instance, the Biden administration’s quick walk-back of a portion of its (already
modest) student loan forgiveness program at the first sign of corporate legal challenge.
175
Thus, it appears that the same circumstances and beliefs that gave rise to nostalgia at
the end of history, particularly the liberal embrace of a politics of stasis even in the face
of crisis, have also produced the institutional vacuum upon which the right has seized.
As Wendy Brown argued in
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
, the antidemocratic political
formations that seem to herald the end of the end of history are not only a response to
decades of neoliberal decay, but are also fundamentally shaped by neoliberal logic,
conjoining “familiar elements of neoliberalism (licensing capital, leashing labor,
demonizing the social state and the political, attacking equality, promulgating freedom)
with their seeming opposites (nationalism, enforcement of traditional morality, populist
antielitism, and demands for state solutions to economic and social problems” (2). The
nostalgic traditionalism that forms the discursive foundations of right-wing politics today
is also symptomatic, as Brown illustrates, of the losses and displacement wrought by
forty years of neoliberal economics, against which historically dominant social
categories, such as whiteness and masculinity, now only provide limited cover (175).
The right’s oft-stated desire to return to the paradise of a mythical past, in this light, is
animated less by a desire to wholly supplant or remake neoliberal economics, and more
by a desire to restore these identitarian protections against its displacements.
Though painted with a more liberal brush, a similar anxiety about loss of status and
influence can be seen in
Ready Player One
and
Two
, thus strengthening the logic of
linking nostalgic thinking with posthistorical devastation. Cline’s novels are distinct,
however, in two ways: first, in their desire to elevate the cultural prestige of minority
176
identities (only, of course, on terms established by the re-throned cultural elites), which,
though problematic in its own way, is several steps removed from the right-wing pursuit
of Christian, white, masculine supremacy; second, in their posthistorical embrace of the
primacy of cultural over political power, which is a premise that the right, despite
regularly stoking the flames of the culture war, doesn’t seem to agree with. Cline’s novel
thus reflects the fundamental asymmetry of the liberal and conservative approaches to
the various
ends
wrought by the end of history:
Ready Player One
makes the ‘80s cool
again, the Supreme Court nullifies Roe v. Wade.
Further troubling, in this light, is the emphasis in media of the period on aesthetics
and other metaphysical responses
3
to the conditions of the end of history at a time when
the right is actually putting into practice their own horrifyingly-material solutions.
4
This
is particularly noticeable in discourse surrounding the period’s pseudo-apocalyptic
teleology.
Ready Player One
,
Stranger Things
, and
Twin Peaks: The Return
each deal, in
one way or another, with the loss of futurity endemic to the end of history, and, in doing
so, showcase the continual failures of mainstream liberal responses to it. As Chapter
Two explains,
Ready Player One
simply invokes this crisis only to shrug at it, and hope
that someone, somewhere, will conceive of a magical technocratic solution, while
Ready
Player Two
attempts to address inequality through canonical representation.
Stranger
3
See, for instance, Biden’s continual references to restoring the nation’s “soul” as a means of
countering right-wing material maneuvers.
4
While there will always be incongruity between media’s responses to problems and those of
actual political organizations, and though there are certainly a number of groups fighting against
the recent gains of the right in a very material way, these media trends nonetheless reflect larger
trends in the responses of those who are actually in power.
177
Things
, on the other hand, hides its concerns about the future behind metaphor and trope,
seemingly fearful of direct confrontation and identification. In
The Return
, we see the
failed pursuit of these metaphysical solutions to material problems, resulting only in a
pattern of rearticulation where the same structural issues persist, but are framed in a new
way. In each, the problems of the end of history are met with an inability even to imagine
coherent alternatives or solutions.
5
In short, these works of art reproduce the same logic guiding the political responses
that enable the right’s ascendancy. The texts I discussed in this project, therefore, not
only showcase the relationship between nostalgia and the end of history, they also reflect
the period’s demise. The nostalgia expressed in
Ready Player One
and
Stranger Things
,
in particular, more than just responds to the conditions of post-historical American
culture; it also constitutes a microcosm of the conditions that have led/will lead to the
period’s collapse.
5
Meanwhile, the right is actively working to stave off (their conception of) the end––or, at least,
to be the ones piloting the ship into oblivion, ensuring that their enemies are the first ones cast
off.
178
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184
VITA
ZACHARY GRIFFITH
EDUCATION
M.A. English – May 2014
Eastern Kentucky University
Thesis: “From This Point On…It’s All About Loss”: Traumatic and Symbolic Suspension in Don
DeLillo’s Falling Man
Committee Members: Dr. Lisa Day (chair), Dr. Jill Parrott, Dr. Erin Presley
B.A. English – May 2012
University of Kentucky
PUBLICATIONS
Griffith, Zachary. “Stranger Things, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics.”
Journal of Film and Video
vol.
74, no. 1, 2022
Bazile, Sophonie, Christine Woodward, and Zachary Griffith, eds.
Disclosure: AJournal of Social
Theory
vol. 27, no. 1, 2018.
Caswell, Michelle, Harrison Cole, and Zachary Griffith. “Images, Silences, and the Archival Record: An
Interview with Michelle Caswell.”
Disclosure: A Journal of Social Theory
vol. 27, no. 1,
2018.
.
Christen, Kimberly, Leslie Davis, Jacob Neely, and Zachary Griffith. “Traditional Knowledge and
Digital
Archives: An Interview with Kim Christen.”
Disclosure: A Journal of Social Theory
vol. 27, no.
1, 2018.
Floyd, Daniel and Zachary Griffith. “‘But I Don’t Like Writing:’ Twenty-First Century Media and
Academic Composition.”
The Atrium
vol. 6, no. 2, 2014.
Griffith, Zachary. “Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars: Imagining Ideologies into the Future.”
Text in
Context
vol. 1, no. 1, 2013: 32-36.
EXPERIENCE
University of Kentucky,
Fall 2016-Present
Teaching Assistant
185
Eastern Kentucky University,
Fall 2013—Spring 2016
Full Time Instructor
Noel Studio for Academic Creativity, Eastern Kentucky University,
Fall 2012–Spring 2014
Consultant Leader
SERVICE & ACTIVITIES
Co-Editor in Chief,
Disclosure: A Journal of Social Theory
, University of Kentucky
(Fall 2017—
Spring 2018)
Faculty Representative, English Graduate Student Organization, University of Kentucky
(Fall 2017––
Spring 2018)
Student Representative, Graduate Studies Committee, Department of English, Eastern
Kentucky
University (Fall 2013—Spring 2014)
HONORS & AWARDS
Summer Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2022
Semester Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2020
Summer Dissertation Research Fellowship, 2019
Graduate Student Essay Award, Department of English, Eastern Kentucky University, 2014
Graduate Student Essay Award, Kentucky Philological Association Conference, 2013
186
