[COLUMN] Blast from the Past is a Reminder that Nostalgia is Nothing New | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Hey there! Consider this a companion to the column we wrote about The Blair Witch Project a few weeks back. 1999 was arguably one of the greatest years in the history of the cinema. We’re tempted to run a series of retro articles looking at the movies of the year with 25 years of distance, coinciding with the anniversaries of their original release dates. If you’d be interested in more of these, please let us know.

Twenty-five years ago last week, Blast from the Past was released in cinemas.

Directed by Hugh Wilson, Blast from the Past is a fish-out-of-water rom-com about an unlikely romance between Adam (Brendan Fraser) and Eve (Alicia Silverstone) set in turn-of-the-millennium Los Angeles. The movie’s high concept is that Adam is a stranger in a strange land, a character who effectively escaped from the 1950s into the present day, creating a nostalgic comedy of manners about two very different sets of cultural values.

During the Cuban missile crisis, his father Calvin (Christopher Walken) ushered his pregnant mother Helen (Sissy Spacek) into the fallout shelter that he’d constructed beneath their family home. Calvin has built a perfect replica of suburban domesticity. Adam is born and grows up in the shelter. Raised on reruns of The Honeymooners, he has no contact or communication with the rapidly changing outside world.

Convinced that Los Angeles has been destroyed by nuclear war and contaminated by nuclear fallout, Calvin is happy to remain in the bunker forever. However, when the family patriarch falls ill and as the stores begin to run low, Adam is forced to venture into contemporary Los Angeles to gather supplies. He meets a cynical young woman named Eve, who serves as his guide through this most unusual urban environment. There’s an initial culture clash, but inevitably the pair fall in love.

Blast from the Past reflects something bubbling through 1990s pop culture, an obvious nostalgic fascination with 1950s America. This was arguably something that bled into the decade from the 1980s, following on from films like Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me, or Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. However, the trend became much more pronounced – and much more complicated – during the 1990s.

The decade was invoked by movies like Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, and Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential. Of course, there is some elasticity in defining the outer boundaries of the 1950s in popular memory. Although technically set in 1962, Joe Dante’s Matinee was built around the same affection for the era. Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Jack Nicholson’s The Two Jakes were set in late 1940s Los Angeles, a town just on the cusp of that decade.

The 1950s were more a state of mind than a fixed ten-year period. They were, as the kids would say, “a vibe.” They were a clear influence on the imagined worlds of the 1990s, like the noir­-inflected nightmarescape of Alex Proyas’ Dark City, the retrofuture of Gattaca, the eponymous sitcom in Gary Ross’ Pleasantville, or the idyllic manufactured community of Seahaven in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. The decade was a huge influence on the work of David Lynch, which often set his works in a world where “the 1950s never quite ended.”

It's interesting to wonder why the late 1980s and 1990s returned so frequently to the aesthetic of the 1950s. Part of it is undoubtedly just the inevitable “nostalgia cycle.” Many of the writers and directors of the 1990s had grown up during the 1950s, and so they were simply putting images that appealed to them on screen. It’s telling how many of these films – Stand by Me, Dead Poets Society, Matinee, Pleasantville – are about children or teenagers.

However, that is perhaps a reductive theory. After all, there are certainly strong similarities to be drawn between the two eras. The American economy was booming during the 1950s, and the country had just emerged victorious from an existential war against fascism. Four decades later, America was prosperous once again and it had triumphed over communism. As such, the setting had a certain resonance for an audience watching on the cusp of the new millennium.

However, this nostalgia is perhaps more complicated than simple historical synchronicity. It may also exist in conversation with other contemporary forces. The embrace of the 1950s could also be seen as a rejection of what followed, the chaos and the uncertainty of the 1960s. Of course, history is more complicated than pop narratives, but the common belief is that the 1950s was a period of relative tranquillity and prosperity before things became a lot messier and more complicated.

The 1990s saw a reckoning with the trauma of the 1960s, particularly the sense that the events of the decade had fractured American consciousness. Oliver Stone revisited the confusion and the contradictions of the Kennedy assassination in JFK. In Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump, Jenny (Robin Wright Penn) is traumatized by a trip through 1960s counterculture that ends with her dying of an unspecified illness heavily implied to be AIDS.

This was not an academic discussion. It informed presidential politics. The impeachment of Bill Clinton during the late 1990s was seen as a referendum on the legacy of the sexual and cultural liberation of the 1960s, “the latest act of the psychodrama” that had been playing out for over three decades. “In many ways, House consideration of impeaching Clinton was the 1960s coming home to roost,” wrote Cragg Hines at the time. As such, this wave of 1950s nostalgia exists in that context.

Blast from the Past is engaged by this idea. There is a strong sense throughout the movie that the older characters have grown disillusioned with modernity. When Calvin ventures up from his shelter into late 1990s Los Angeles, he gasps, “What’s happened to my backyard?” When he returns to Helen and Adam, he offers his assessment of the outside world, telling them, “Society – at least as we know it – has totally collapsed.”

It's no surprise that Calvin wants to retreat back to his hermetically sealed bunker. Late in the movie, he considers setting the lock once again. “I was wondering, Calvin, I mean, why set the locks at all?” asks Helen. “I mean, the radiation’s gone.” Calvin responds, “To keep what’s up there from getting down here. It’s not radiation I’m worried about.” In The Truman Show, Christof (Ed Harris) argues that Seaheaven is a paradise designed to protect Truman (Jim Carrey) from the outside world.

In Pleasantville, viewers of weekend-long marathons of the eponymous sitcom are invited to “flashback to kinder, gentler times”, contrasting with school lectures on job prospects, climate change and sexually transmitted diseases. As David (Tobey Maguire) watches this imagined paradise, he turns up the volume to drown out the argument that his mother (Jane Kaczmarek) is having with her ex-husband about custody of their kids. It’s easy to understand the appeal of this fantasy.

“In a complex and troubling world, who wouldn't want to simplify?” asked director Gary Ross. “Everybody does. Everybody wants to simplify and put up a picket fence.” It’s a feeling that obviously resonated with contemporary America. It still does. Modern pop culture is still swept up in waves of nostalgia for the 1980s or the 1990s. The political movement to “make America great again” is still anchored in nostalgia for the version of the 1950s presented in The Truman Show or Pleasantville.

This gets at an interesting aspect of this wave of 1990s nostalgia for the 1950s. A lot of these films were explicitly critical of the decade, acknowledging the finer details that are often erased in the appeals to some imagined past. In Matinee, Sandra (Lisa Jakub) gets in trouble for calling out segregation. In Pleasantville, in an admittedly well-intentioned-but-perhaps-clumsy metaphor, the shift from black-and-white to color leads the town to persecute its newly “colored” residents.

It's revealing that many of these invocations of 1950s nostalgia are mediated. These movies aren’t about the decade itself, but instead about how the decade is framed and presented. Pleasantville is about a 1950s sitcom. The Truman Show is about a community built for a reality television show. Quiz Show is about how the decade’s television game shows were fixed. Even in Blast from the Past, Adam’s values aren’t instilled by actually living in the 1950s, but by watching television reruns.

There is perhaps a wry joke in here. During the 1950s, television represented an existential threat to cinema. This wave of movies suggests that the fear hasn’t completely gone away; many of these films are about the way in which 1950s television warped the American psyche. “I thought we were gonna get television,” admits Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) in Quiz Show. “The truth is, television is gonna get us.” Even setting that particular anxiety aside, there’s a compelling nuance and ambiguity here.

It's interesting to revisit these films at a distance of several decades. They demonstrate that nostalgia is not a uniquely modern experience, that American pop culture has always had a complicated relationship to its own past. However, even watching something as light and goofy as Blast from the Past, there is a sense in which these older expressions of nostalgia were more measured and tempered than their modern equivalents.

There’s an understanding that these fantasies of an idealized past are ultimately fabrications and therefore cannot be conjured into reality. Truman ultimately leaves The Truman Show. David evolves from an ardent defender of the perceived innocence of Pleasantville to a passionate critic of its suffocating conformity. Quiz Show is about exposing the lies those gameshows sold. Even in Blast from the Past, Adam eventually brings Calvin and Helen out of the shelter into the modern world.

In a world where pop culture feels increasingly stagnant and where advances in technology make it easier than ever to render uncanny simulacra of childhood memories, it’s fascinating to see treatments of nostalgia that recognize its limitations. Then again, maybe nostalgia has reached some sort of event horizon, where it’s become possible to be nostalgic for older forms of nostalgia.