Last week, I attended a screening of two short films by queer Algonquin College film school graduates. One of the movies was set in the nineties, a time before this director was born.
When she was asked about the choice of period, she mentioned how she liked the tactility of that pre-smartphone era. Similarly, a gen alpha family member wanted a boombox. They’re hardly alone in that generation to place this aura around the nineties.
In much the same way, I as a millennial have been fascinated with the eighties – from movies to portable electronics of the period to the Soviet Union. It’s a thing for elder millennials and gen x’ers to retrospectively gawk at that decade a bit more than the others. This phenomenon is cyclical: for boomers, they’re a little obsessed with the second world war and/or the fifties.
I believe there’s some value in nostalgia; it can point to the things we’re dissatisfied with in today’s world.
For myself, I bemoan the loss of being able to access a person for customer service and affordable housing. I miss being able to consume home media without a subscription. I don’t like that vacuums to ovens to televisions require connecting to an unreliable server that will eventually stop working altogether. I don’t like the loss of options for affordable intercity travel or the evaporation of third spaces.
At the same time, I wouldn’t want to go back. A lot of things weren’t great at the time: the -phobias and the -isms, the normalization of physical violence, how you pretty much needed a navigator if you wanted to drive out-of-town, the relative inaccessibility of new music and lesser known foreign films, needing to travel to the bank to do any banking, etc.
Now bearing witness to a younger generation covet a period I lived through, I want to put asterisks around this period’s aura for them, but they know.
My world at home is one that blends these time periods. I use Etsy and Marketplace to find sixty-year old typewriters. I have an SNES and the latest XBox. I have an AM/FM radio and Spotify. I no longer have CDs or DVDs, though I have expanded my book collection. I just picked up a new Casio.
Nostalgia isn’t a bad word. It’s just one that requires a few asterisks.