Nostalgia: The Point of No Return

Jordie Saenz

May 28, 2025

Out of the top twenty box-office films of 2024, only three were not sequels or set in a franchise film universe. Of these three, two were adaptations from books, and the other was an adaptation from a broadway musical. This trend is not isolated to the silver screen, it has invaded the home as well. Revivals of old television shows abound: Fuller House, Girl Meets World, And Just Like That… The headlong embrace of nostalgia has bled into nearly every facet of existence today. Fashion trends are increasingly craning their necks in a backward glance, as made clear by headlines like Cosmopolitan’s “23 Best 90’s Trends Making a Comeback in 2024,” as well as niche movements like cottagecore and grandma chic. Music is certainly not spared the yearning for times past, with artists like The 1975 and Mk.gee using vintage outboard effects processing in the production of their sound, returning listeners to the era of swirly, modulated guitars and 12-bit digital reverb. Even in live performances, seemingly something that ought to resist nostalgia, the yearning for the past is unavoidable. Taylor Swift’s recent Eras Tour featured a ten-act production that led the audience through each of her studio albums. Each “era” called for a costume change, as well as new lighting and stage props in order to fully capture the aesthetic and mood of each album (half of which were released less than a handful of years ago).

One may bemoan the lack of originality and the inability for artists to create something entirely new in fields that are categorized as “creative.” However, one cannot deny the power that nostalgia has over the masses as they show up in droves to purchase commodities and experiences that scratch the itch of nostalgia. What remains to be seen is why such an incessant itch is in need of endless scratching.

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym argues that “nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (Boym, xiv). Derek Hook, a practicing psychoanalyst, builds on this conception of nostalgia as a defense formation, claiming that “nostalgia’s recourse to an idealized past enables one to deal with a difficult future to strengthen and support identity.” With this in mind, it becomes apparent that the historical upheaval and difficult future we’re dealing with is precisely that we have reached the end of history and that there is no future. Francis Fukuyama provides great insight here, explaining that "if we are at a point where we cannot imagine . . . 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” (Fukuyama, 51). While Fukuyama is specifically dealing with neoliberal politics, one must consider that the aesthetics and politics of an age are inextricably connected, like a Möbius strip, seeming at first to be constructed of two distinct sides, but in actuality only having one.

Todd McGowan, in his work Enjoying What We Don’t Have, draws the connection between nostalgia and politics: “The entirety of the contemporary right-wing social and cultural agenda has its basis in the nostalgia for a time of plenitude” (McGowan, 42). A vivid example of this is Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” In contrast to forward-looking slogans employed by Obama like “Change” and “Hope,” signifiers that invoke a future pregnant with possibility, right-wing politics engages in a return to a former time of glory. This former time, however, is never an actual historical time that was lost, but a fetishized version of it. Louis-Paul Willis, in his examination of the proliferation of this fetishistic nostalgia in Stranger Things explains that “nostalgia is a fascination for a highly idealized and fetishized past, a past which of course is an ontological impossibility simply because it is constructed in retrospect” (Willis, 4). The show views the decade it aims to capture through rose-colored lenses, the love for the aesthetic turning a blind eye to the troubles of the time. Similarly to the way in which the failures and shortcomings of past eras are glossed over in the conservative call to return to former times, the 1980’s of Stranger Things blatantly omits the aspects in which the era was lacking. Zachary Griffith, in his reflections on the show, questions “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?” (Griffith, 106). Only by substituting the real, lived experience of the age with an imaginary, modified representation of an idealized version of the time period can the show seduce viewers into nostalgia.

The power of nostalgia relies on its promise to provide some sort of enjoyment in a restorable and retrievable past that would cover over the lack in the present. However, what the nostalgic disavows is that the past was also lacking any guarantee for full satisfaction. Moran Mandelbraum points out this fantasmatic aspect of nostalgia in Making Our Country Great Again: “Fantasy thus always attempts to frame the ideal society in which we wish to live; it sets the criteria by which the ‘good life’ can be attained, as it constantly strives to cover the lack, the incompleteness and indeed void of and within society” (Mandelbraum, 460). It is in this sense that Griffith claims “nostalgia follows an Edenic structure, with the past configured as a kind of prelapsarian paradise in contrast to a fallen present” (Griffith, 105). McGowan affirms this Edenic structure of nostalgia, positing that “prior to the act of eating the fruit from the Tree of

Knowledge of Good and Evil, humanity had a direct relation to its privileged object. One could enjoy in the Garden of Eden without restraint” (McGowan, 40).

There is, however, another snapshot in the Biblical narrative that sheds light on nostalgia. After the Israelites have been led out of the oppressive slavery of the Egyptians and are to enter their promised land, they complain and rage against their leaders. Rather than face their new, uncertain future, they demanded a return to Egypt:

Then all the congregation raised a loud cry, and the people wept that night. And all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! Why is the Lord bringing us into this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become a prey. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?” And they said to one another, “Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt.” (ESV, Numbers 14:1-4).

The nostalgia that drove the Israelites is not merely the desire to return to what was safe and familiar, but also a refusal to confront the anxiety of freedom and its accompanying responsibility. Instead of embracing their newfound freedom and the uncertainty of their future, they sought to reinstate their former bonds of servitude under the familiar authority of Egyptian rule. In their decision to “choose a leader and go back to Egypt” one sees clearly demonstrated McGowan’s point that “nostalgic projects necessarily rely on a strong authority figure who promises to reinvigorate the lost past rather than on the freedom of the subject” (McGowan, 43). Similarly we see a desire for strong authority figures today who will lead the people back to the (fetishized) former state of affairs. This also manifests in the rapid growth of the “manosphere,” in which traditional gender roles are being lauded by those who claim “alpha-male” status for themselves. In each case, there is always something that was previously enjoyed in a former era that needs to be reclaimed in the present.

This form of nostalgia is what Boym calls “restorative.” It deals with the pain (algia) of the home to which one desires to return (nostos) by attempting to reclaim the lost nostos; it is “restorative” in that it desires to restore the lost object. Boym shows how this plays out in the political field: “This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories” (Boym, 41). In Mandelbraum’s analysis he traces how this form of nostalgia gives rise to “the fantasmatic national-populist narrative,” which “always entails a plot in which enjoyment was lost, stolen and destroyed. These are the stories of national and civilizational golden-ages, heroic pasts or major defeats and catastrophes narrating ‘our’ lost grandeur. The promised jouissance is thus ‘always-already lost’ and is revived in the national utopia by the promise to recapture it” (Mandelbraum, 470). What this restorative nostalgia disavows is that loss itself is constitutive of subjectivity as such, and is unavoidable at all times future and past. McGowan traces the emergence of the subject to loss of the fantasized privileged object. However, this lost object is an object that never really existed. He argues that “the belief in the substantiality of the lost object fuels the prevalence of nostalgia as a mode of relating to our origins. We dream of recovering the object and restoring the complete enjoyment that we believe ourselves to have once had prior to the experience of loss” (McGowan, 39-40).

The other form of nostalgia that Boym identifies is “reflective.” In contrast to restorative nostalgia, the reflective form continually makes its homecoming (nostos) in the pain (algia) of what was lost. Reflective nostalgia “does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home,” but instead “cherishes shattered fragments of memory” (Boym, 65) This form of nostalgia is completely in line with what McGowan calls his “politics of the death drive,” which consists in “grasping . . . the nothingness of the object and thereby finding satisfaction in the drive itself” (McGowan, 31). Instead of identifying enjoyment in the restoration of the lost object, in the form of a return to former glory, McGowan identifies the real enjoyment in the loss itself, embracing that there was never any held glory to begin with. Rather than embracing a nostalgia that (mistakenly) experiences dissatisfaction at the lack of its object and seeks satisfaction in reacquiring what has been lost, a death-driven nostalgia would be reflective in that it maintains its distance from the lost object as lost, deriving satisfaction from lack. Instead of seeking to fill the void with a return to an imagined former glory, the void ought to maintain its voidness as the site for the drive to emerge. Restorative nostalgia seeks to fill this void with whatever it imagines it has lost. Reflective nostalgia knows its loss is one that can never be restored, which means that this void is an opening in which new objects, new ideas, and new futures can be born. Boym’s conclusion at the end of The Future of Nostalgia aligns perfectly with McGowan’s politics of the death drive when she affirms that “The dreams of imagined homelands cannot and should not come to life” (Boym, 354).

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References:

Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001)

Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992)

Griffith, Zachary, "The Reflective Age: Nostalgia at the End of History" (2022). Theses and Dissertations--English, 148

Hook, Derek, “Screened History: Nostalgia as Defensive Formation.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, vol. 18, no. 3, American Psychological Association (APA), Aug. 2012, pp. 225–39.

Mandelbaum, Moran, “‘Making Our Country Great Again’: The Politics of Subjectivity in an Age of National-Populism.” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique, vol. 33, no. 2, Springer Science and Business Media LLC, June 2020, pp. 451–76.

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (United States: University of Nebraska Press, 2020)

Willis, Louis-Paul, “Analog Desires: On Stranger Things and the Logics of Nostalgia.” Intermédialités: Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques, no. 39, Consortium Erudit, 2022.

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Jordie Saenz is a student in Humanities at the Global Center of Advanced Studies.