Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture

Gilad Padva

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137266330
• eBook ISBN: 9781137266347
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture is a fascinating study of queer nostalgia in films, animation and music videos as means of empowerment, re-evaluating and recreating lost gay youth, coming to terms with one's sexual otherness and homoerotic desires, and creatively challenging homophobia, chauvinism, ageism and racism.

1

Animated Nostalgia and Invented Authenticity in Arte’s Summer of the Sixties

“Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art,” claims Charles Maier (1995) in his essay “The End of Longing?” The intricate relationship between nostalgia and memory is also problematized by Todd Gitlin in the introduction to his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Gitlin suggests that all times of upheaval begin as surprises and end as clichés. Such is the fate of the great tidal swells of history – especially in a shorthand culture in which insatiable media grind the flux of the world into the day’s sound bites. Gitlin notes that in our attempts to produce signs that will help us to design the memory of an era, we grapple for ready-made coordinates. “And so, as time passes,” he contends, “oversimplifications become steadily less resistible. All the big pictures tend to turn monochromatic” (4). Likewise, innumerous T-shirts with a portrait of Che Guevara are sold over the world, usually worn by teenagers who do not know anything about this revolutionary commandant and his totalitarian heritage, and slogans like “make love, not war,” “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” and “revolution!,” reminiscent of the 1960s, are heavily clichéd and trivialized by pop stars and advertisers who apply to contemporary bourgeois youth, rebels without a cause. Controversial social fighters are converted into cool poster boys, ideological resistance is turned into photogenic discontent, high ideals become slogans and jingles, dogmatism turns into opportunism, and anarchism is converted into hedonism.

Svetlana Boym suggests that the 20th century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. “Optimistic belief in the future was discarded like an outmoded spaceship sometime in the 1960s. Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future,” she adds. “The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space” (xiv). Boym contends that there is, after all, something pleasantly outmoded about the very idea of longing. “We long to prolong our time, to make it free, to daydream, against all odds resisting external pressures and flickering computer screens,” she explains and distinguishes “nostalgic time” as “time-out-of-time of daydreaming and longing that jeopardizes one’s timetables and work ethic, even when one is working on nostalgia” (xix).

Gitlin’s critical assertion regarding the trivialization of upheavals and revolutions and Boym’s explanation of the prevalent attraction to nostalgia receive high visualization in an animated promotion created for the prestigious Franco-German TV channel Arte. In June 2010, this network produced a special project titled: Summer of the Sixties. This project incorporated programs on music, film, and design of the 1960s. In order to attract its viewers, Arte broadcasted a preview – an animated short film (2:52 min.) that redesigned the culture of that decade in a sophisticated correspondence with its youth culture, the student rebellion, the “flower children,” pop bands, the sexual revolution and promiscuity, drug culture, and the existential quest for a meaningful life and the pursuit of happiness.

All these themes were condensed into a three-minute music video directed by Philipp Mühlbauer in association with Benjamin Stephan, Christoph Haag, and Rupert Maurer of the Lafkon Studio in Augsburg, Germany. The animation is indeed monochromatic (as you’ll see, each segment is dominated by one or two colors). However, this televised program promotion, while recreating the past, creates it, interestingly, as a new past. The graphic construction of this journey along the 1960s is based on diverse iconographies: art nouveau, surrealism, psychedelic art, pop art, op-art and kinetic art, the hippie culture, record covers, music videos, advertisements, action films, spirituality and transcendental aspirations, youth films, iconic press photos, and genuine animation films like the Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine (see Padva, “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll”).

The Beatles’ animated film directed by George Dunning, in particular, reflects conflicts between conventional society, represented by classical music, and rebellious youth culture, represented by other musical types such as folk and pop (subsumed under the term ‘vernacular’). Significantly, the filmmakers created a narrative for a psychedelic hero’s journey from existing Beatles songs. In Yellow Submarine, the Blue Meanies imprison Pepperland by immobilizing all producers of music, whether ‘classical’ (the string quartet led by the elderly Lord Mayor) or ‘vernacular’ (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). The Beatles are able to free Pepperland by manipulating and ultimately uniting the musical codes – an idealistic message for the ‘real world’ to heed (see Letts, “Sky of Blue, Sea of Green”). The travel of the yellow submarine, in its mission to free the occupied Pepperland and to unite the musical codes, strongly reflects a special relationship of this film to the (mythical) past: the nostalgic perspective (see Barna, “There are places I’ll remember…”).

Nostalgic fond remembrance of psychedelic imageries and youthful fantasies has produced some of the most creative and dynamic mechanisms in art, mass culture, and popular communications. The plastic, visual, and decorative arts (just as much as cinema, television, theater, popular music, fashion, and literature), are obsessively attracted to previous decades. They correspond to past times, which are re-colored in vibrant hues, rearranged as emotional, relevant, and attractive souvenirs that constitute a “retro culture.” Elizabeth Guffey suggests that retro culture reconsiders the past in a humoristic and ironic, rather than optimistic perspective.

Retro, as a critical, impish style, is aware that the past is past, yet still present in the borrowings of current popular culture.

Where does this passion for the past originate? And is it necessarily about a straight past to remember? In analyzing Summer of the Sixties it is important to consider the significant importance of this animation for queer viewers, as there is no place for only one, holistic notion of the Sixties and its visualization. The zeitgeist of the decade was a convergence of diverse individuals, groups, and social and historical conditions. “We are told and read that the decade’s sexual liberation was heterosexual liberation,” notes Patricia Juliana Smith in her introduction to The Queer Sixties, and emphasizes the need “to fill a gap, not only in queer studies, but in new and different means of looking at the queer cultural and subcultural expression of the decade, which culminated in the closet door swinging open, dramatically and irrevocably” (xii).

Marketing nostalgia in the age of late capitalism

“At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place but actually,” Svetlana Boym notes, “it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams” (xv). Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright agree that nostalgia is a longing for a prior state, often perceived to be innocent, which will always remain unfulfilled because this state is irretrievable – indeed, it never existed. “Advertising,” they contend, “is adept at speaking to consumers in nostalgic terms. This can take the form of evoking earlier times, when life seemed less complicated, or it can be a reference to a time period when, for instance, the potential consumer was younger” (217). Particularly, in today’s advertising, this often takes the form of marketing products to consumers of the post-World War II baby boomer generation “by reviving the symbols of their youth, such as the signifiers of the 1960s” (ibid.).

Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, however, stress that nostalgia can 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. They suggest that this opens up a positive dimension in nostalgia, “one associated with desire for engagement with difference, with aspiration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking in modernity.” “Nostalgia,” they add, “can be both melancholic and utopian” (921). Boym, however, differentiates melancholia and nostalgia. She claims that unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, “nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory” (xvi). Fred Davis contends that personal nostalgia is associated with an individual’s own life; as people grow older, they tend to look back on their youth. Communal nostalgia, in contrast, occurs on the social level, as a result of the periodic changes caused, among others, by wars, invasions, movement in the economy or environmental disasters.

Historical acceleration, in particular, has created a new sense of time, involving what Todd Gitlin has called “a new velocity of experience, a new vertigo” (The Whole World Is Watching, 233), which is in part associated with the construction and reconstruction of events by the mass media. In this sense, nostalgia is a form of reaction to the velocity and vertigo of modern temporality. It rejects its relentlessly affirmative valuation of the temporary and transient. In the face of this valuation, a desire to imaginatively return to earlier times is then felt to correlate with an acute dissatisfaction with the present, and to involve an attempt to recapture a putative continuity and coherence unavailable in the fragmented modern or late modern environment (Smith; Lowenthal). According to Pickering and Keightley, this is one side of the story: “Nostalgia may also be seen as seeking a viable alternative to the acceleration of historical time,” they explain, “one that attempts a form of dialogue with the past and recognizes the value of continuities in counterpart to what is fleeting, transitory and contingent” (923).

Hereby, nostalgia can be conceptualized as conveying a knowing and reflexive relationship with the past, “as a yearning for a better but irretrievable past, or, in more skeptical accounts, as emblematic of an engrossing but ultimately fabricated approximation of the past” (Drake, 190). Uncertainty and insecurity in present circumstances, according to Pickering and Keightley, create fertile ground for a sentimental longing for the past, or for a past fondly reconstructed out of selectively idealized features, and the media help to fill this ground even as, in other dimensions of their output, they serve to undermine it. Moreover, “a representational cycle of negative present and positive past promotes meanings made by means of opposition, contradistinction and dichotomous contrast,” they note, “rather than in terms of the more ambiguous, unsettled and contested relations between past and present” (925).

In his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson associates the attraction for nostalgia with the increasingly blurred boundaries between high and popular culture. He considers the postmodern period as the age of simulacra, in which people tend to live in worlds of images, detached from reality, as if in an imagined bubble. In such a fragmented and segmented era, there is a yearning for some sort of unity, a clear, continuous linearity. Nostalgic films, nostalgic advertisements and nostalgic previews, like Arte’s Summer of the Sixties, succeed in joining the fragments, interweaving them into a unified, spectacular fantasy. This process corresponds to contemporary media framing of the past. Rather than remembering experiences, we are more likely to remember mediated experiences and as such, mediation of the past is a process by which the media can fix and limit social memory (Davis, 130). And where nostalgia primarily entails a relation between the modern human subject and the past, temporally mediated by cultural texts, “there is surprisingly little attempt to discuss the modes of representation and operation involved in the communication of nostalgia” (Pickering and Keightley, 930).

Animated coming-out as queer existentialism

In the animation Summer of the Sixties, after the gramophone needle touches the record and the hit song “I Get Around” begins, the protagonist starts walking in a circle. Initially, he is trapped in the mundane daily routine. Only after the refrain (“Round, round, I get around”) that opens this song (and it is quite uncommon in popular music to start a song with the refrain!), does the protagonist discard his elegant hat, loosen up and begin his journey. Indeed, in cinematography it is music that has repeatedly borne the burden of nostalgia, carrying out “a sort of conduit to connect listeners – and commentators – to an idealized past, offering them the promise of a retrieval of lost utopian coherence” (Flinn, 50). Notably, it is not merely about a nostalgic hit song. The protagonist goes into the world in order to find a meaning for his life. This heroic act is enabled, however, only after he has been freed from his Sisyphean circular path. In this manner, the protagonist’s emancipation is motivated by both nostalgic and existential impulses, a drive that can be understood in terms of “a desire to exceed contemporary experience, to get beyond the sense of social, economic, and subjective fragmentation or impotence” (49–50).

From an existentialist perspective, to define the self, one must act. Given that each individual is born into a particular situation, s/he is totally responsible for the choices s/he makes. S/He cannot help but be defined by the sum of this choices, which are only rendered through his/her actions. “Though it is not itself an essence, this power of self-determination pre-exists in him and challenges him daily with the freedom to choose how to define,” John S. Bak notes, “and therefore give meaning to, his authentic existence (acting true to one’s self and beliefs)” (229). The animated protagonist in Summer of the Sixties actively and deliberately breaks the limits of his bourgeois life in order to fulfill his quest for meaning. In his previous life, the protagonist was a conformist, anti-individualistic young man who lived la mauvaise foi, Sartrean bad faith, escaping the responsible freedom of the pour-soi and accepting social definition over individual epistemology. The animated protagonist’s glorification is based on his willingness to assert himself in spite of all the external social forces working to identify him. According to Bak, while the existent’s essence (literally his past experiences as he lives them, which constitute the sum of his existence) is heavily formulated by the nothingness imposed upon it by the Other, “it is ultimately the individual’s responsibility to preserve his integrity by making honest choices with respect to those external forces” (229).

The animated existent’s transformation is both conceptual and graphic: he does not only change his mind but also changes his clothing, his hairstyle (as a rebellious teenager he has long hair), his gestures, and movements. He explores his (possible) queerness, having mutual and communal experiences with members of both genders, jumping from one nipple to another (implying a bi-curious or pansexual orgy), from a darkroom to a sleazy dance bar, from homoerotic surfboys fantasies to omnisexual spiritualism and drug hallucinations. There are significant similarities between (straight) existentialism and coming-out. The existentialist, overwhelmed by the full implication of this imposing freedom and granted little means with which to access or explicate its precise nature on him, “the existentialist experiences moral anguish absurdity, alienation, and ultimately despair” (Bak, 229). Likewise, coming-out can bring about the revelation of a powerful unknowing as unknowing, not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend to be “but as a weighty and occupied and consequential epistemological space,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes in Epistemology of the Closet (77).

People before and during their coming-out often experience existential states of mind like moral anguish absurdity, alienation, and ultimately despair. Their coming to terms with their queerness and their coming-out to their friends and families are gradual processes of closure and disclosure, identification, and misidentification. Both existentialism and coming-out are struggles for authentic life, out of the mauvaise foi of false (self and social) recognition. C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What is Queer About Nostalgia?
• 1 Animated Nostalgia and Invented Authenticity in Arte’S Summer of the Sixties
• 2 Nostalgic Physique: Displaying Foucauldian Muscles and Celebrating the Male Body in Beefcake
• 3 Sexing the Past: Communal Exposure and Self-Examination in Gay Sex in the 70s
• 4 Claiming Lost Gay Youth, Embracing Femininostalgia: Todd Haynes’S Dottie Gets Spanked and Velvet Goldmine
• 5 Boys Want to Have Fun! Carnivalesque Adolescence and Nostalgic Resorts in Another Gay Movie and Another Gay Sequel
• 6 Reinventing Lesbian Youth in Su Friedrich’S Cinematic Autoqueerography Hide and Seek
• 7 Uses of Nostalgia in Musical Politicization of Homo/Phobic Myths in were the World Mine, the Big Gay Musical, and Zero Patience
• 8 Saint Gaga: Lady Gaga’S Nostalgic Yearning for Queer Mythology, Monsters, and Martyrs
• 9 Black Nostalgia: Poetry, Ethnicity, and Homoeroticism in Looking for Langston and Brother to Brother
• Afterword: Queering Nostalgia or Queer Nostalgia?
• Index