Nostalgia, A Cautionary Tale
by Emma Davey
I have an excellent memory. If I close my eyes, I can drop myself into a favorite kindergarten field trip or the way I would always eat Grandma’s-brand vanilla sandwich cookies before dance class. I remember the first time I saw Shrek, the first time I visited New York, and the leopard print outfit I wore during my seventh birthday party. That acute degree of recall means I spend more time than I care to admit ruminating on the past, my thoughts constantly rubber-banding between house things were and how they are now
Recently, I went to my friend Rachel’s apartment to make due on a long-overdue promise to watch one of our mutual favorite films from childhood, A Little Princess. Rachel had saved several VHS tapes with sentimental value. We weren’t just watching A Little Princess; we were watching the film as we originally viewed it: warped color, grainy focus, everything slightly smeared and fuzzy. The tape clicked into place in the VHS player, and the trailers started. Prior to that evening, I couldn’t tell you the names of the movies from the trailers, but my brain instantly lit up like a telephone switchboard, those images somehow safely lodged in some distant groove: the pandas from The Great Panda Adventure, the whales from Free Willy II, the gorilla from Born to Be Wild (what was it with the 1990s and animal movies?). None of these films stood the test of time, but memory is a fickle mistress.
As the trailers played on and the film started, the world felt safe again, cocooned in the glow of the TV. I was five years old and when the film wrapped up, I’d abscond to my room to play with Barbies and listen to Britney Spears. For dinner that night, I’d have cheesy buttered noodles and chopped-up rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods, falling asleep while reading a Junie B. Jones chapter book. The past felt tangibly present, and for a moment (maybe even more than just a moment), I wished it were my actual reality.
It’s been said that zillennials, the micro-generation generally defined as those born in the mid to late 1990s, have a particular affinity for nostalgia, coming of age during the denouement of physical media. In our adolescence, the internet went from being something you did at home to a sticky shadow infiltrating everything, making it easy to document our lives in real-time. Social media and the Wayback Machine provided near-instantaneous access to the lingering detritus of the internet, allowing people to relive the past almost as soon as the past happened. Studios stopped releasing VHS tapes in 2006, the year I turned ten, one year after YouTube launched and irrevocably changed the Internet landscape. I entered high school without an iPhone. By the time I graduated, I couldn’t fathom having any other kind.
This rapid shift enables us to access nearly anything at any time. The world of digital and streaming eliminates friction from the viewing experience altogether and, with it, some of the attendant pleasures and pains of physical media. No need to rewind a tape or fear that you’ll wear it out. No squeak from a clamshell VHS cover. No heartbreak from finite copies available at Blockbuster or in the TV cabinet. By contrast, the light from an HD TV feels stale. My boyfriend works from a desktop computer, frequently using hard drives. When they’re plugged in, they whir and crackle every few hours with a static-y fizz, and I start to feel like a zillennial Proust and the madeleine.
Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 film, I Saw the TV Glow, as the name suggests, pays homage to a more tactile era of media consumption. Imbued with neon colors like a 1990s arcade floor, it is a sight for sore eyes in today’s muddled gray cinema landscape, filled with barely legible, barely audible Marvel superheroes and exhaustive IP reboots and retreads. As the latest spate of TV reboots like Malcolm in the Middle and Harry Potter prove, the industry would rather indulge our more juvenile sensibilities and bank on the familiar money-makers rather than champion new voices.
The film starts in 1996, where a boy named Owen meets Maddy, an older classmate, and a fellow introvert, and she introduces him to a show called The Pink Opaque, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque kids show on an analogue of Nickelodeon. Both Owen and Maddy have difficult home lives but find solace and strength in the show. Owen’s father prohibits him from watching it live, but Maddy smuggles him tapes at school. After Maddy disappears and Owen’s mother dies, he retreats further into himself and the world of The Pink Opaque, watching and rewatching those tapes well into adulthood. His life is stationary, stuck in his childhood home and working at a local movie theater. The temporary refuge of the show has stagnated into a permanent escape, one that Owen does little to resist. As Maddy says earlier in the film, “Sometimes The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life.”
Eight years after Maddy’s disappearance, she returns with a message for Owen: The Pink Opaque wasn’t just a TV show but an actual plane of reality in which she’s been living for the past few years. And what’s more, she and Owen are actually the series’ protagonists. She implores Owen to return with her to that reality. In order to do so, he needs to recreate the events of the series’ final episode. This entails burying himself alive, after which he’ll reemerge in The Pink Opaque. He ultimately refuses.
I Saw the TV Glow serves as an allegory for being transgender, depicting what director Jane Schoenbrun referred to as “the egg crack” moment of coming to terms with your gender identity. When Owen rebuffs Maddy’s invitation to embrace his true self, nostalgia and pop culture obsession become a crutch, a panacea. Twenty years pass in the world of the movie, and Owen revisits the show again, only to now find it cheesy and poorly-made, with none of the snappy dialogue or dense mythology. Has he changed, or has the show?
In one horrifying scene, Owen shoves his head into the TV set, unsure whether to trust his own memories or Maddy’s exhortations. It’s an act of frustration and self-harm, but perhaps also a desperate ploy to shortcut the path Maddy has laid out for him, physically bringing himself closer to the show. I understood the impulse. Watching A Little Princess, I too wanted to plunge my body into the TV’s soft light. Not a violent crash—I imagined first dipping a toe and then a foot into the warm and gooey center of the screen. Maybe what was waiting for me on the other side was a different path, one that would lead me back to a simpler time.
I Saw the TV Glow arrived simultaneously with the ten-year anniversary of my graduating high school and starting college, priming me for a nostalgic mindset. A book I read later that summer further subsumed me into its clutches. One’s Company, a 2022 novel by Ashley Hutson, also cautions against nostalgia as an intoxicating yet destructive force. The book follows Bonnie Lincoln. She’s nearing forty and still working the same dead-end job, and immobilized after a tragedy results in the loss of parental-like figures. Like Owen, her life consists of little else but religiously rewatching her favorite sitcom, Three’s Company. When she wins the lottery (an untold sum, but apparently the biggest payout in history), she uses the funds to fully recreate the world of the show and live out the rest of her life in its confines, removing herself entirely from society and going to extreme lengths to do so. Each year, Bonnie picks a new character to embody, adopting their style, hair, job, and idiosyncrasies. She sets out strict parameters for the project, determined to seamlessly transition into a new person, despite the logical hiccups of such an undertaking. For Bonnie and Owen, nostalgia becomes a form of obliteration. Bonnie sees her project as something much deeper than a fun hobby. It’s a total rebirth, a way to subvert the tragic hand she’s been dealt by collapsing the boundaries of fantasy and reality.
“The world was so haphazard and frightening, why not arrange it the way I wanted it?” she says at one point. Despite her best efforts, all the time and energy she’s sunk into being forever consumed by Three’s Company, she cannot force the world to realign to her liking.
I fell into the nostalgia trap even while working on this essay. I would seek out some random minutiae while attempting to better flesh out a thought and end up staring at the screen as the minutes ticked by, watching old TV show clips or visiting websites from over 20 years ago. It also doesn’t help that my TikTok feed often turns into a veritable nostalgia graveyard (with the way the algorithm works, I alone shoulder the blame). One frequent trend on the app is the slideshow documenting random objects, places, and styles from your childhood, like favorite toys, discontinued Bath and Body Works scents, or old photos of a Chuck E Cheese, typically set to the same synth-y instrumental song that has emerged as the app’s shorthand for woozy nostalgia.
The videos go for the emotional jugular when they display more obscure items or random ephemera that you might not have even thought to remember. The significant events and life moments linger; the sparkly outfit your favorite Barbie wore might not have until you see it years later. The metaphor of the frog in boiling water (the slow acclimation) reverses itself—a once-ubiquitous sensation fades away right under noses, and we don’t notice until it’s long gone. Now, when young people feel apprehensive about a future beset by climate change, war, a crumbling gerontocracy, and a lack of economic mobility, the past looks much more inviting.
But as I tore through One’s Company, as horrifying as I found Bonnie’s behavior, the thought certainly crossed my mind: if I won the lottery, would I recreate my childhood bedroom, or maybe the set of Gilmore Girls? If the TV screen opened up below my foot as I attempted to step in, would I give up my life now just to follow it through, doomed to a kind of nostalgic samsara? Tempting though these offers might be, life only moves in one direction. Living in your own soup of arrested development precludes the possibility that something better, or at least, just as good, could await.
Emma Davey is the managing editor of Greenpointers, a hyper-local news site based in Brooklyn. Her work can also be seen in BUST Magazine, Jacobin, and Full Stop.