Screening American Nostalgia: Essays on Pop Culture Constructions of Past Times

218 Pages·2021·18.63 MB·English

by  Susan Flynn (editor), Antonia Mackay (editor)

Screening American Nostalgia

Screening American Nostalgia
Essays on Pop Culture
Constructions of Past Times
Edited by Susan Flynn and
Antonia Mackay
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
Also of Interest: The Body Onscreen in the Digital
Age: Essays on Voyeurism, Violence and Power,
edited by Susan Flynn (McFarland, 2021)
This book has undergone peer review.
ISBN (print) 978–1 -4766–8 074–3
ISBN (ebook) 978–1 -4766–4 246–8
Library of Congress and British Library
cataloguing data are available
Library of Congress Control Number 2021031376
© 2021 Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover image © jillbatt / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo
Printed in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the support of our colleagues and
friends at Oxford Brookes University and at the Institute
of Technology Carlow and the care and attention to detail
which all of the authors in this book brought to their work
during the particularly challenging times of 2020. Aca-
demics around the world are under immense pressure,
financially, psychologically, emotionally, and in a host
of other ways. We dedicate this book to those academics
working remotely and online, those who are keeping edu-
cation going, teaching, researching and writing during a
pandemic—heroes of education.
v

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments v
Introduction: Nostalgia, an Enduring Lens
Susan Flynn and Antonia Mackay 1
“No more than a dream remembered”: Gone with the Wind,
Nostalgia and the Old South Plantation Imaginary
David Anderson 13
Western Nostalgia and the Cautionary Tale in John Ford’s
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Scott Pearce 30
“Never start a fight, always finish it”: Police Corruption and Public
Outrage in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling
Brennan Thomas 50
Stranger Things in Strange Times: Nostalgia, Surveillance
and Temporality
Antonia Mackay 66
”S uper-secret spies, living next door”: Family and Soft Power
in The Americans
Barbara Miceli 80
In the Engine Room of the Hyperreal: Nostalgia as Commodity
Culture
Leander Reeves 98
Twin Peaks: The Return and the Gothic of Nostalgic Television
Joel Hawkes 114
vii
Table of Contents
Regulating Sex, Surveilling Sex: Pornographic Nostalgia
in The Deuce
Kelly Coyne 133
Day Zero: Photographs at the Epicenter of History
Jennifer Good 147
The Once and Future Thing: Consumption, Nostalgia
and Future SF Film Dystopias
Pete Boss 162
What Happened to the “Good Old Days”? Nostalgic Refraction
in the Fallout Franchise
Jessica Ruth Austin 185
About the Contributors 205
Index 207
viii
Introduction
Nostalgia, an Enduring Lens
Susan Flynn and
Antonia Mackay
When Proust opined that remembrance of things past is not neces-
sarily remembrance of things as they were, he could hardly have imagined
the burgeoning of a nostalgia industry which feeds popular culture, politics
and policy. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America which
arguably never existed. Current sociocultural challenges are played out
onscreen and placed within the historical milieu via a nostalgic lens which
is tempered by contemporary conservatism.
Identification between audiences and the popular historical con-
sciousness has long been facilitated by the historical verisimilitude which
film and TV offer; the entertainment industries are uniquely placed to con-
jure up the memories and sensations of times past, and of laying out the
commonality between current experiences and past ones. The r e-creation
of the look and feel of the past, and the idealized views of an earlier, more
innocent time have clear links with popular ideologies and politics. Repub-
lican politics under Ronald Reagan coincided with a flourishing of nos-
talgia dramas that played on a recurring set of motifs such as generational
discord and the foregrounding of suburbia as a site of critical cultural
action. Recent resurgence in nostalgic narratives can be seen, similarly,
to engage in the development of the historical consciousness. By exam-
ining the h yper-presence of nostalgic narratives alongside the ideation of
U.S. value systems, practices and policies, this collection of essays aims to
explore contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by
the screen.
Since 2015, there have been no less than ten top ranking television
shows set in the 1980s (GLOW, The Americans, Stranger Things, Pose, and Red
Oaks to name a few), and over fifteen movies (Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,
1