Screening Nostalgia

Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film

Christine Sprengler

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845458881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

"In this fascinating in-depth study of the impact of nostalgia on contemporary American cinema, Christine Sprengler unpicks the history of the concept and explores its significance in theory and practice. She offers a lucid analysis of the development of nostalgia in American society and culture, navigating a path through the key debates and aligning herself with recent attempts to recuperate its critical potential. This journey opens up the myriad permutations of nostalgia across visual and material culture and their interface with cinema, with the 1950s emerging as a privileged moment. Four case studies ( Sin City, Far From Heaven, The Aviator and The Good German ) analyse the ways in which aspects of visual design such as props, costume and colour contribute to the nostalgic aesthetic, allowing for both critical distance and emotion. Written with verve, style and impressive attention to detail, Screening Nostalgia is an invaluable addition to existing scholarship. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the ways in which we access the past through cinema." ·Pam Cook, Professor Emerita in Film, University of Southampton

Chapter 1

Setting the Stage: The History of Nostalgia

Although a basic sense of longing for something lost in time or space remains a central component of the nostalgic experience, the meaning of nostalgia has evolved over the last three centuries. Migration of the term into new social contexts and discourses have added further dimensions. According to Edward Casey, there are three distinct stages in nostalgia’s evolution. The first involved its exteriorization and the missing of specific physical sites. Whereas pathological symptoms affecting the body defined the phenomenon during this initial medical phase, in its second phase nostalgia became a disease of the mind. This involved the deliteralization of place and the emergence of a ‘cerebral longing for reunion with metaphysical origins’ (Casey 1987: 370). In its third phase, nostalgia became increasingly personal, a private psychological phenomenon affecting potentially every human subject.

To unpack these three stages I will chart nostalgia’s European development from the seventeenth through to the end of the nineteenth century. This will help us conceptualize and contextualize nostalgia’s emergence in its fourth and current phase and specifically its dominant form in twentieth and twenty-first century American popular culture. In doing so, this chapter will trace its uncharted American history through the first half of the twentieth century as well as address how popular and academic discourse since the 1950s have shaped its meaning and determined its value.

Conceptual and Geographical Expansions: Nostalgia in Europe, 1688–c.1900

Nostalgia was first coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in his 1688 dissertation, using the Greek words nostos (a return home) and algos (denoting a painful condition) to name the disease he observed in young Swiss soldiers serving abroad (1934: 381). For Hofer, the sound of the word called to mind ‘the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land’ (1934: 381). Though rooted in place and an ‘afflicted imagination’, it caused serious physical symptoms including ‘disturbed sleep either wakeful or continuous, decrease of strength, hunger, thirst senses diminished, and cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind’ (1934: 386). If those found suffering were left untreated (i.e., not sent home), death could result.

Since its publication, Hofer’s dissertation has been cited and celebrated as the inaugural text in virtually every history of nostalgia across the disciplines of medicine, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, literature, philosophy, marketing and visual culture. But it is not his discovery and description of the nostalgic condition that deserves acclaim. Rather it is his foresight to name a term that seemed to offer insight into the anxieties, preoccupations and desires of both his own and subsequent eras. After all, by his own admission, Hofer was not the first physician to research this particular battlefield ailment. He felt that ‘certain new phases’ of the disease required elaboration in the medical literature and made it his task to build upon what was ‘up to now … explained by many of the doctors’ (1934: 380). He synthesized their research and foregrounded those aspects that enabled the concept to be adapted to different geographical, cultural and temporal circumstances. In fact, the role afforded the imagination in mediating ‘small external objects’ and ‘images’ of the ‘Fatherland’ remains central to much current scholarship on nostalgia (1934: 381). Drawing on the increasing authority of medicine, Hofer diagnosed a condition rooted in antiquity with the potential to explain both personal and collective responses to the wars, political upheavals, social transformations and mass migrations of the eighteenth through to the twenty-first century.

Nostalgia’s capacity to be invoked to explain everything from Homer’s Odyssey to Homer Simpson¹ has provoked debate about its protean nature. Is it universal and eternal or culturally and historically specific? A few commentators, working primarily in the sciences and social sciences, regard nostalgia as a biological feature of life itself, a consequence of the ‘homing instinct’ (Martin 1954: 103), a ‘species of remembrance’ (Kaplan 1987: 469) and a ‘psycho-physiological condition’ that is ‘more fundamental than any particular culture’ (Ruml 1946: 7). Calls to limit its scope have been issued on the grounds that nostalgia is not equivalent to, but instead a type of, homesickness, written into existence in the pages of Hofer’s dissertation. Svetlana Boym and Lynne Huffer reject the claim that the journey writing of classical antiquity could be described as nostalgic because nostalgia, according to them, surfaces only when return home becomes impossible (Huffer 1998: 14; Boym 2001: 7). Implicit in this position—and stated explicitly in the work of Felski (1995) and Tester (1993)—is the belief that Hofer’s efforts were premature, for nostalgia belongs specifically and exclusively to Western modernity. In this formulation, the Swiss doctor’s term finds its best application not in military medicine, but as a concept to explain the social effects of industrialization and modernization in nineteenth-century Europe.

However, to claim that a kind of ‘nostalgia proper’ first emerged in response to modernity is to obscure the role played by the highly politicized medical discourses of the eighteenth century. Advancements in medicine at the turn of the eighteenth century, including the development of extensive nosological schemes, helped to legitimate nostalgia as a distinct and common disease. Françoise Boisseir de Sauvages divided nostalgia into simple, complicated and simulated varieties while Thomas Arnold classed it as one of sixteen different types of insanity (see Jackson 1986: 376–77). Such official recognition prompted interest in this new condition, launching efforts to identify specific symptoms, likely causes and a whole host of potential cures. Given the political implications of Hofer’s dissertation, it is hardly surprising that some students of nostalgia, especially those invested in particular ideas about Swiss nationhood, should attempt to refine his science to accord with the patriotic ideology of the day. J.J. Scheuchzer, a contemporary of Hofer, found rather distasteful the insinuation that the homesickness experienced by Swiss soldiers revealed a deficit of character. Appealing to the study of ‘iatromechanics’, he shifted the blame to the physiological effects experienced from the loss of Alpine air pressure on individuals forced beyond the borders of their homeland (see Starobinski 1966: 89). And yet, however palatable this revised diagnosis may have seemed or however much it protected soldiers from charges of cowardice, it did not compensate for the costs incurred by outbreaks of nostalgia on the battlefield. Low troop morale, malingering and desertion, incapacitating illnesses and suicide all threatened the success of military campaigns and, in turn, national wealth and prestige (Davis 1979: 3, n6).²

Scheuchzer’s iatromechanic account lent credence to the initial claim that nostalgia and its attendant military costs were a specifically Swiss phenomenon. But Switzerland was not alone in waging wars of expansion and aggression, and as word of this new disease reached other regions so too did the incidence of its suffering. Nostalgia’s geographical expansion throughout the eighteenth century brought about its conceptual expansion. Increasingly entwined with the developing consciousness of nation states, the term came to manifest cultural and political anxieties specific to the affairs of the various countries in whose armies it surfaced. In post-revolutionary France, nostalgia was seen as a sign of patriotism, evidence of the strong attachment and sense of duty that French soldiers felt toward their homeland (Roth 1991: 15). Loyalty to the Republic and Napoleonic Empire was no doubt particularly beneficial at such a crucial moment in France’s history. Nostalgia’s political potential was embraced and quickly spread under the influence of Romanticism with nearly every European nation coining a term to encapsulate what they insisted was unique to them and untranslatable into any other language. By articulating a feeling of longing for the homeland, nostalgia—or heimweh, mal de corazon or maladie du pays—served well, in many instances, ‘the homogenizing requirements of the modern nation state in the face of ethnic and cultural diversity’ (Robertson 1990: 49).

Nostalgia’s political usefulness was instrumental in triggering several key perceptual shifts. Ideology, not geography, now determined its force, which in turn precipitated a shift from viewing nostalgia as a pathology to thinking about nostalgia as an appropriate response to protracted absences from an idyllic and esteemed homeland. New discoveries in medicine also helped to distance the concept from earlier physically based complaints. Progress in the fields of pathological anatomy and bacteriology attributed nostalgia’s original symptoms to tuberculosis while the ineffectiveness of listed cures raised questions about its precise nature. Military reforms introducing better treatment, higher pay and less severe punishment seemed more effective in reducing the number of soldiers purportedly suffering from nostalgia than medically sanctioned remedies such as sending them home (Starobinski 1966: 99).

Nostalgia’s demise as a medical condition can also be explained by a growing interest in mental afflictions in the late eighteenth century which in turn gave rise to the increasing popularity of ‘respectable’ ailments. A pronounced affinity with the then quite fashionable melancholia made nostalgia itself seem more acceptable. Through this connection it lost its associations as a disease of the common soldier and entered the middle classes where it acquired a more philosophical profile. The bifurcation of nostalgia into a scientific and a social phenomenon further diminished its medical salience, a rupture consistent with the rise of Cartesian dualism. Boym explains that nostalgia appeared before art and science ‘severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body—internal and external well being—were treated together’ (Boym 2001: 8). This split confirmed what the architects of eighteenth-century European nation states suspected: nostalgia had greater viability as a sociopolitical phenomenon than as a physical disease.

During the nineteenth century, the key social transformations of industrial capitalism caused a shift in cultural emphasis from space to time as concepts of progress and history changed. Time itself became subject to fundamental reconceptualizations that affected how it was perceived, experienced and visualized in everyday and economic life. These changes impacted understandings of nostalgia in several important ways, not least of which was the need to accommodate the loss of an historical as well as a personal past. It now had to account for the perception that modern ideas of progress rendered this collective historical past irretrievable. Progress, no longer exclusively a concern of the arts and sciences, had become part of the ideology of industrial capitalism, a force which left little socially, economically or culturally unchanged (Boym 2001: 9). In these circumstances, nostalgia became a necessary coping mechanism with the capacity to make modernity inhabitable (Tester 1993: 70). It relieved the anxieties generated by progress, the swift loss of a way of life and traditional ways of interacting with the world.

Despite the ascendancy of time and mind in the experience of nostalgia, space and body continued to play a role. Urbanization, the movement of people from the country and close-knit community (Gemeinschaft) to the city’s impersonal ties (Gesellschaft), was a potent trigger for nostalgia. How life was lived in the past was defined by where it was lived; time and space could not be separated. Thus, whether in response to anxieties caused by change or a deep dissatisfaction with places occupied in the present, nostalgia retained its spatial dimension. It also retained its bodily dimension, but with a difference. Changed perceptions of time and the effects of progress had a significant impact on the idea of history, transforming it from something studied in the eighteenth century to something felt in the nineteenth century (Brandt 1978: 60). The loss of a collective past, something experienced by all inhabitants of modernity, provoked an affective response. In other words, the irretrievability of the past, while not causing acute physical illness, nevertheless generated deep feelings of loss and longing that could not be classified as purely cerebral.

Other changes happening within modernity because of industrialization, technological modernization and urbanization would also have a lasting impact on the concept of nostalgia, including the privatization of the family. In the late nineteenth century when the family assumed the ‘educational and particularizing function’ of the village, the village became interiorized (Starobinski 1966: 102). This development signalled the start of the ‘underground’ stage of nostalgia, its retreat ‘inward and downward into the human subject’ and the shift in responsibility from the community to the family as the source of longing and sentiment (Casey 1987: 370). With these seismic transformations in social and psychological organization came the replacement of the childhood home with childhood itself as the privileged object of nostalgia. As this happened, two new emerging features moved to the centre of the experience: the irretrievability of nostalgia’s object (something already suggested by the Romantic emphasis on the past) and the attachment of nostalgia to a specific stage of human psychological development. With the loss of the past, time displaced space. Whereas nostalgia qua homesickness posited an actual physical home which the sufferer could conceivably revisit, nostalgia for a specific time denies the possibility of return.

The second feature, owing much to the work of Freud, represents a remarkable development in nostalgia’s history, mainly because he did not, as such, name this nostalgia for childhood.³ Freud chose not to deal with nostalgia because, according to him, nostalgia had nothing to do with the unconscious or the return of the repressed. And yet, from a contemporary perspective, many key psychoanalytic concepts have a nostalgic structure. ‘Fixation’ and ‘regression’ share with nostalgia the attempt to return to a place of origin and the inability of recollection alone to facilitate this return.⁴ In the Oedipal trajectory, the male child’s longing for unity with its mother and to return to its first home (the womb) is a desire for an ideal and irretrievable past stage of childhood. Like nostalgia, this desire in the male for a prelapsarian state motivates behaviour in the present to regain what is lost; it prompts a search for a female other who is like the mother. This desire for an earlier stage of psychological development also reflects another key feature of the nostalgic experience: a desire to return to the time that immediately preceded significant change. Nostalgia has been theorized as a sentiment that attaches itself to periods on the verge of transformation and to the moments marked by the availability of choice (Wood 1974: 345). Although early stages of psychosexual development such as the Oedipal moment do not contain such options, they are, in retrospect, identifiable (from the perspective of the adult self) as distinct phases marked by significant changes in the way the subject relates to others and to his or her environment.

Freudian psychoanalysis was not the only discourse borne out of late-nineteenth-century modernity to be structured by a nostalgic logic. Sociology too enjoyed this distinction. As a discipline, sociology ‘crystallized’ between 1880 and the 1920s, a period characterized by ‘modern wilful nostalgia’ (Robertson 1990: 46). According to Shaw and Chase, sociological thought did not employ a process of ‘painstaking investigation of historical record’ when defining the past, but instead ‘posit[ed] a series of absences or negatives’. They explain: ‘If we now have Gemeinschaft, there must have been Gesellschaft; if our consciousness is fragmented, there must have been a time when it was integrated; if society is now bureaucratised and impersonal, it must previously have been personal and particular’ (Shaw and Chase 1989: 8). In short, the changes effected by modernization, industrialization and urbanization evoked a desire to reclaim the perceived opposite to what typified the present.

While nostalgia’s European history and its popularity in post-1970s mass media have received scholarly attention, a distinct gap remains in its history in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s. This is not to suggest that the presence of nostalgia in American public and private life has gone unremarked, nor that this period failed to manifest impulses that we would rightly want to label nostalgic. Scholars often use nostalgia as a theoretical fram...