Consumed Nostalgia

Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism

Gary Cross

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231539609
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age of fast capitalism. This phenomenon has given rise to communities of nostalgia whose members remain loyal to the toys, television, and music of their youth. They return to the theme parks and pastimes of their upbringing, hoping to reclaim that feeling of childhood wonder or teenage freedom.

Consumed nostalgia took definite shape in the 1970s, spurred by an increase in the turnover of consumer goods, the commercialization of childhood, and the skillful marketing of nostalgia. Gary Cross immerses readers in this fascinating and often delightful history, unpacking the cultural dynamics that turn pop tunes into oldies and childhood toys into valuable commodities. He compares the limited appeal of heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg to the perpetually attractive power of a Disney theme park and reveals how consumed nostalgia shapes how we cope with accelerating change.

Today nostalgia can be owned, collected, and easily accessed, making it less elusive and often more fun than in the past, but its commercialization has sometimes limited memory and complicated the positive goals of recollection. By unmasking the fascinating, idiosyncratic character of modern nostalgia, Cross helps us better understand the rituals of recall in an age of fast capitalism.

1

Guys Toys and “Girls” Dolls

Nostalgia has long been about returning home to a place and time most people recall as happy, innocent, and full of promise. These returnings are sometimes also laced with melancholy and pathos; as Thomas Wolfe said, “you can’t go home again.”

No longer true. Today, we can get back home by collecting. Of course, it isn’t the same experience exactly, but it may be the same “thing,” and the thing collected, be it a toy, old car, or phonograph record, is now in our possession, and it won’t go away, like our actual childhood worlds have. Many of us no longer want or need shrines and monuments to mark our crossroads or to be the destinations of our pilgrimages. Instead memory is now evoked by things, mostly manufactured, often in great numbers, things that can be purchased and collected long after we first encountered them. Sometimes these things relate to people, or even ideas, but often they do not, or only vaguely. And, unlike most souvenirs, they are not generally associated with a place or visit but with a time of life. These are the things of our “wondrous innocence,” the very particular memories of a personal childhood and youth, and frequently memories of consumption. I begin this discussion with toys and dolls, not because everyone collects them but because they are often the objects of our earliest memories.

On the face of it, collecting the stuff of children’s play seems absurd, even pathetic. In place of the majestic monumentalism of ancient cathedrals, we have the miniature; instead of the grandeur and national symbolism of the Lincoln Memorial, we have ephemeral bits of plastic, tin, cloth, and stuffing that we remember but that mean little to others, isolating us in our little worlds. Why has something seemingly as important as memory been reduced to the miniature? Still, how can it be otherwise when today memory has become so personal, so private, and so possessive?

Nostalgia for childhood stuff is an important form of the curious psychology of collecting, but it is also a significant deviation from that wide-ranging culture. To summarize briefly a large and complex topic, the impulse to collect art, artifacts, and curios had its roots in the modern but contradictory worlds of discovery, individualism, and preservation dating from the fifteenth century. Coming into full flower in the bourgeois world of the nineteenth century, this early form of collecting parallels the emergence of romantic nostalgia.¹ Usually wealthy collectors claimed status as custodians of timeless beauty, ancient crafts, and rarities. Today’s collectors of Disneyana share the traditional quest for “completing” a series of related objects—Mickey Mouse figures, for example, rather than rare paintings or stamps. Their collections are attempts to tell themselves and others about themselves—their expertise, their taste, their stories. But the end goals of these two types of collecting are otherwise quite different. The object of bourgeois collecting was to define self through the aura of heritage (as in antique furniture and original art) and thereby to differentiate the refined collector from those lower on the pecking order. The goal of consumed nostalgia today is to collect personal remembrances and to find community with those who share those memories (sometimes even transcending social class). The pleasure comes not from an identification with the high culture of the past but from warm feelings about the stuff of one’s own childhood, no matter if it’s “childish” or even campy.²

The playthings that might affect us emotionally often do not affect others because these objects are part of that short time when we were children and others were not. These objects may separate us from our siblings, spouses, and friends even if they are only a year or two older or younger than we are. These things are small but consequently are personal and personally possessed. They represent a time that has only a very tenuous tie to our present—not to a lost golden age of culture but to a few seasons when we lived both in little worlds where our playthings made us feel big and in fantasies of adventure and caring that are long gone. These things and their magic have departed from our “dull” adult lives, and we want that wonder back. But, of course, the throngs who attend toy and doll shows may not be consciously aware of all this—and they have other things on their minds.

DOLL AND TOY STORIES

There is something curious about people in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond displaying and selling dolls. Many of the (mostly) women dealers that I talked with on an early Sunday afternoon in December 2010 at the Gaithersburg, Maryland, Eastern Doll Show were professional antique traders, some with years of experience in buying and selling objets d’art. The dolls, taken from their seemingly natural settings on the beds and in the arms of mostly little girls, are transformed by collectors, taking on the aura of antiques rather than playthings. Yet they were special because they evoked memories of childhood. This was an old show that once took up four buildings from the county fairgrounds but now is housed in just one, partially because of Internet shopping. Still, mostly middle-aged women came to see and sometimes possess the play figures of their own or someone else’s childhood.

Every seller seemed to have a niche. I met a long-retired second-grade teacher at a booth whose claim to fame was writing a book on Schoenhut toys and figures (an early-twentieth-century Philadelphia manufacturer of colorful wood play sets with jointed figures). A team of two women shared exhibition space, one mad about baby dolls, the other preferring costumed, adult-like figures. They joked that they “like to spend each other’s money” by being on the lookout for dolls that the other might want. Many seemed to take the advice offered in books on collecting: focus on a time, style, or type of doll; other collectors appeared to know only a little about the histories of their collections.

But this was not true of Elinor Champion, a sixty-four-year-old former officer of the United Federation of Doll Clubs, with whom I talked at length. While her organization has tried to bring together collectors across age and taste, she noted that many doll lovers have split into their own clubs—fans of Barbie or Madame Alexander character dolls, for example. She had a catholic perspective: she noted that “once you start collecting, it is hard to focus.” She admitted that “space is also an issue” and that “it’s harder to sell than to buy.”

Champion insisted that many doll collectors possessed skills and knowledge similar to connoisseurs of fine antique furniture or paintings. Members of her United Federation of Doll Clubs share information about doll history, the art of identification, and modes of restoration. Some collectors inherited the hobby from their mothers or mother-in-laws and then try to draw their own daughters into the tradition.³ Serious collectors of fine French and German dolls conduct research into the corporate records of doll makers in Europe as scholars and curators. “It’s just like going to the National Archives,” Champion noted. Collectors may start out trying to “regain their childhood,” but soon they get into art, history, and knowledge of the hobby. She made it sound almost professional.

But Champion also acknowledged that some collectors, especially younger ones, “actually play with their dolls.” This play takes many forms. A recent craze was collecting Bleuette dolls made from 1905 to 1960. They were first manufactured for a French girl’s magazine, La Semaine de Suzette, as a premium to subscribers; the magazine also published patterns for girls to use to make clothes for their Bleuettes. Today collectors find these patterns on the Internet and channel, as it were, those French girls of long ago as they make their own Bleuette doll clothes. Perhaps there is a snob’s appeal in reliving a French girl’s childhood; it happened far away and long ago, and this fact may make the fascination with the dolls seem less childish.

I persisted in my questioning, however, asking this doll expert to explain why women might play with dolls. Are these collectors regressing? Are they finding mothering substitutes for their children who have grown up or that they never had? She admitted that she found it “a little unnerving” and a “little creepy” when women dressed dolls in real baby clothes and treated them like newborns. “Something is missing” in the lives of these women, she concluded. Champion and other older collectors I met at this show still identified with the idea that they were private curators, preservers of a cultural legacy, and distanced themselves from the more recent trend of full-throttle identification with their inner child.

Champion expressed concern about the future of the hobby, especially in passing it on to the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old set. Young people don’t collect as much, she noted, explaining why the people at this show were predominately over fifty. Some buy online instead, but her thirty-seven-year-old daughter was too busy with family to share her mother’s passion. Some get into it as the “needs of mothering lessen.” Still, she wondered if the next generation will embrace the hobby. She saw a gap between the boomers and the Gen-Xers. In particular she noted how many younger women now pass over traditional American dolls for Japanese ball-jointed dolls. Enthusiasts purchase customized dolls from a pallet of choices in body, hair, eye color, and facial expression, all designed to be posed and to project a personality. The attraction is not aesthetic or historical, much less nurturing or even a nostalgic return to childhood. Instead, the Japanese ball-jointed dolls today invite a new generation of young women to “believe in the power of play,” as one doll company encouraged, rejecting the adult/child distinction. Some collectors of the ball-jointed dolls were not so much returning to a childhood memory but denying a departure from the play of children.

Moreover, the doll collectors at the Gaithersburg show were skeptical of other collectors in general. One woman called stamp and coin collecting a “cold hobby.” She was there to sell dolls and make a profit, but she claimed that she received a “nice warm glow” when a customer told her a story about rediscovering the happiness of childhood in the purchase of an old doll or associated the doll with growing up in the 1950s. The women I met at Gaithersburg insisted that they collected differently from men. One noted, “Boys played with fun things. Girls played with what they were going to do”: take care of babies, cook, or clean. Boys’ toys were more childish, she suggested (thinking of balls and fantasy action figures rather than erector sets and miniature trucks). More revealing was the attitude of the two-woman team of doll collectors mentioned above: guys, they insisted, were more interested in the value and the hunt, not the personal memories or the shared love of playthings. Male toy collectors are into it for the “big bucks,” Elinor Champion concluded. Listening to these female doll collectors, I wondered why they saw so little similarity with male toy collectors. It was almost as if the women were returning to the perspective of little girls with their dolls, mocking the play of boys with their toys.

How, then, did the predominantly male collector think about his toys? In the summer of 2011, I attended a “typical” toy show in suburban Pittsburgh, the Steel City Toy and Comics Show. As with the doll shows, this conclave for trade in memory seemed to be in decline, even though it appealed primarily to Gen-Xers rather than older collectors. If the toys of the majority of exhibitors were much more recent in origin than the playthings of the older female doll collectors in Maryland, their stories were similar.

Most exhibitors were in their thirties or forties, offering row after row of still-boxed Star Wars and other action figures ranging from the late 1970s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. There were a lot of action figures: Transformers and Marvel Comics figures but also Halo, Skeleton Warriors, and DC Universe. Several booths featured professional wrestling posters and action figures (popular in the 1970s on TV). Few exhibited anything costing much over twenty dollars. There was only a token display of plaything collectibles identified with females. An air of arrested male development and bonding permeated the scene. A group of five guys in orange t-shirts gathered around a Pittsburgh-area retro radio station’s DJ, promoting monster movies and a “Monster Bash Oktoberfest.” The DJ was about fifty and proudly admitted that his life was “music and monsters,” passions he acquired when he was a preteen. Those interests lasted until he was sixteen, when he went through a decade-long obsession with girls and cars, after which he returned to his original true loves. Like others at this show, he had given up his childhood passion only briefly.

This fascination with monsters seems also to apply to the curious interest in muscled but obviously fake professional wrestlers. I met an interracial family with two boys, the elder of which was holding an Incredible Hulk figure. Asking about it, I found to my surprise that this toy belonged to his black dad, who at the time was off looking for other treasures for his extensive collection of wrestling and action figures. His indulgent wife explained that her husband (born in 1977) collected 1980s toys because they reminded him of his happy childhood before his parents broke up. These toys were what “he could count on.” When he returned, he explained that he had been obsessed by WrestleMania since he was nine and that he had a basement room full of shelves of wrestling figures in classic poses (a photo of which his wife showed me from her phone). It seemed that he needed the miniatures to access the old emotional attachments of his childhood. Like many others at the fair, he was not a “loser” but a professional—an art teacher for young schoolchildren. His sons seemed to share his interest—as did other father-son pairs I saw throughout the show.

One forty-year-old dad with his eight-year-old son was at the show to collect Marvel comics. The dad recalled a weekly ritual with his father—going to the newsstand on Saturday evenings to buy a comic book—and went on to gather a large collection of comics, which recently he had had to sell during hard times. Now the forty-year-old dad was bonding with his son via the project of restoring his collection; the son also searched for action figures based on his dad’s beloved Marvel Comics. All this suggests a curious pattern: a generation-niched crowd of men who never really gave up their toys and who defined (however obliquely and inexplicably) their ties to their fathers and connected with their own sons through the ephemerality of popular cultural objects. At least, this bonding is what they strived for.

While some certainly had supportive (or indulgent) wives, male aficionados of action figures and comic books showed no more understanding of female collectors of memory objects than did the female doll collectors of male connoisseurs of toys. The art teacher with his basement full of action figures, when asked about women posing dolls, had nothing more to say than “I just don’t get it.” When I told an older dealer in toy car and military figures what the doll collectors thought of male toy collectors, he admitted that male dealers were motivated strongly by the cash nexus. But he denied that male collectors lacked an emotional attachment: men were passionate about highly realistic miniatures of military vehicles and fully equipped toy soldiers and less about the “personalities” of the figures. Asian companies specializing in detailed reproductions of Vietnam or Gulf War figures attracted middle-aged men who remembered the machines, uniforms, and equipment of their adventurous youths and, in turn, associated these items with their long-scattered buddies in the military. These figures were, he claimed, displacing G.I. Joe figures that some of these men may have actually played with as seven-year-olds in the early 1960s.

All this may suggest that some men relate to and remember other men through the common link to things. The figures are mannequins for the uniforms and equipment that enchant these men and that express the shared memory of youthful male bonding (rather than to childhood, interestingly enough). Ties to the past and its people, be it to young childhood or young manhood, are mediated through very specific objects, conveniently reduced to toy miniatures. Was this just a male version of the female fixation on effigies and their costumes? Maybe it’s a bit more complex than that. So let’s dig a little deeper, first looking briefly at the history of toys and dolls and then at do...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Introduction. our Nostalgic Novelty Culture
• 1. Guys Toys and “Girls” Dolls
• 2. Lovin’ That ’57 Chevy (or Whatever Was Your Favorite Car at Seventeen)
• 3. (Re-)Living That Golden Decade
• 4. Leaving It to Beaver and Retro TV
• 5. Give Me That Old-Time Radio
• 6. Dilemmas of Heritage in an Era of Consumed Nostalgia
• 7. Pilgrimages, Souvenirs, and Memory at Disney
• Conclusion. Where We’ve Been, Where We Might Go
• Notes
• Index