Nostalgia is a terrible drug

We've become obsessed with the past and fallen out of love with the present

Photo by Leyre on Unsplash

Christopher Nolan is the director of our era. He’s not necessarily the best. He’s not even necessarily that good. But he’s the director who most reflects our period and what it yearns for.

He’s a genuine auteur. He follows a singular vision of how to make a film, from the way it is lit, to the way the soundtrack is incorporated into the body of the story, to the almost indecipherable way that character speech is handled, to the crammed patchwork stitching of the narrative structure. Nolan directs like Nolan.

The difference between him and other auteurs is that his films do not play to tiny empty cinema screenings, but become global phenomena - the kind of things people travel hundreds of miles for so they can see it on IMAX in 70mm. His films are an event, a phenomenon. And the reason for that is not because he makes mainstream films - he doesn’t and never has. It’s because he is the auteur director whose instincts are most in tune with what audiences want right now. He just kinda fits.

Why is that? What is he doing that makes him such a perfect emblem for our time? I don’t think it’s about his themes, which are hazy, lightly held and rarely discussed. I think it is his technique. What do you hear when you catch an interview with Nolan? What are they discussing? The technique. Specifically, his preference for analogue: How to wield a massive IMAX camera. Why he won’t email scripts, but insists people read them in person. Why he opts for film. Why he has an aversion to digital effects.

This is why Nolan is so loved: because he is an analogue director in a digital age. He represents our anxieties and concerns. Our self-hate when we close the social media app on our phone and briefly see our image reflected back at us in the darkness of its screen, feeling emptied-out and wasted.

Nolan represents nostalgia for a previous world. One of tactility, physicality, time, craft and shared experience. Before AI, before the internet, before digital.

You can see this yearning for the pre-internet age all around us. Vinyl sales in the UK increased by 19.9% last year, hitting their highest level for three decades. CD sales - traditionally the poor cousin of vinyl - also crept up by 3.1%. Overall, physical releases of films are in decline, but Blu-Ray - the top end of the market - increased by three per cent. 2024 saw a 23% increase in live music attendance - either concerts or festivals. Theatre was experiencing a similar phenomenon, with a 3.16% increase in West End attendance last year. People want to hold a piece of media in their hands rather than rely on streaming. They want to attend an event live and be part of a shared moment, not stuck isolated in the algorithm’s digital cul-de-sac.

We sit atop a great engine of nostalgia. The Oasis reunion, Stranger Things, 90s fashion, retro games consoles, disposable cameras. Even lava lamps are coming back. Online, you see the words ‘look what they took from us’ above almost any post mentioning the past, whether it’s images of Blockbusters video rentals or 70s documentaries about Margate.

We all seem to be yearning for the past. We need greater texture in our lives, the feeling and affirmation of physical objects, the reassurance of collective experience, the bucolic urban idyll of a life before modems.

Nostalgia for the analogue age feels like a kind of resistance, an act of rebellion against the blandness of the modern world, with its banks of computer screens, none of which feel like anything. None of which have texture, none of which has a sense of smell, or place, or meaning.

I am one of these people. I buy vinyl and Blu-Rays and physical books, although I draw the line at 90s fashion which was a travesty then and remains so today. But we need to carefully disentangle meaningful choices about our consumption from the tyranny of our emotional narrative about a perfect past.

Nostalgia is a trap and it contains within it a terrible lie. I’m so desperately tired of watching my generation talk about the 90s in exactly the same way the previous generation talked about the 70s. Here’s a typical Instagram post about films released in 1999. It is the same as countless others, posted every day, whose undercurrent is that things right now are terrible but things back then were obviously much better - “back before the suits screwed it all up with corporate slop, back when movies were good”.

In reality, there were lots of suits in Hollywood in the 90s making terrible films. There are many great films being released now. But nostalgia convinces us that things were always better in the past and at their worst in the current moment.

The top ten box office films of 1999 contained some proper bangers, including The Matrix, Toy Story 2 and The Mummy. It also contained some execrable dirge. The top film of the year was Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, for heaven’s sake. This year’s top ten includes films which will probably go on to be classics, including Obsession, Project Hail Mary and The Odyssey itself. There is also, inevitably, some dirge, including The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Toy Story 5. Yes, the arc of the artistic universe is strange, and therefore contains a franchise which can represent an artistic peak in 1999 and a nadir in 2026.

Music plays a particularly weird role in nostalgia about the past. For some reason, you will never fully recover from the music of your formative years. Whatever came out between the age of 13 and 23 will forever hold a place in your heart above all others.

About a third of the music I buy comes from this period, but I am aware that there is no credible cultural reason to own so many albums by Shed Seven or Gene. If I really wanted to, I could construct an argument for this being an objective assessment of musical quality over a subjective expression of my youth. I could say that the Britpop era was the last gasp of music before the internet and that it therefore represented the final coherent moment in musical evolution, before everything stagnated into a generic morass without clear cultural signposts.

And it’s true that the velocity of musical development was much greater in the 20th Century than it has been in the 21st. Someone living through the 60s, 70s and 80s would have experienced great big jolting musical shocks every few years, from pop to punk to electronic, the Beatles to the Clash to the Pet Shop Boys. Someone living through the opening three decades of the 21st Century has not. It’s been a less exciting time to be into music.

But the same pattern remains. There is loads of great music coming out at the moment and loads of crap back then that we now forget. Those who grew up in the late 90s all remember Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Radiohead. But we forget Dodgy, Ocean Colour Scene, Space and Kula Shaker. That which was great comes to define an era. That which was average fades from memory, as if it never existed.

We like to tell ourselves that things were simpler back then, but it’s a lie. We all suffer from a temporal condition in which the past feels reassuringly solid and the present unprecedentedly chaotic.

The world of today would seem obviously insane for someone in the 90s. There is a war in Europe in which the most important military developments are conducted by drones. There is an AI technology which in the last few days alone has created viruses unknown in nature and used fake profiles to hack targets and then hide the evidence. There is a siloed information sphere online which has robbed us of a shared empirical reality.

But back in the 90s, people spoke in precisely the same way. Nowadays, we remember this period as a time of unparalleled prosperity and peace. The Berlin Wall had fallen, liberal democracy was triumphant, the dreary industrial relations of the 80s were over and the economy was doing gangbusters.

This is not how it felt at the time. At the time, we were embroiled in several wars and foreign interventions. Security analysts would gravely warn that the end of Communism had in fact dispersed and multiplied the threats against us - a warning which came true when September 11th opened the 21st Century. The dot-com bubble crashed the economy. Our cultural diet - from the X-Files to the Truman Show to the Matrix - was paranoid and ill at ease.

No matter what era you read about, the same process is taking place. People spoke warmly about the past and worried about the present. The 1950s now function as the reassuring golden age in America, a time when the country was at its peak and everyone had two cars. For Donald Trump, the 1950s are the ‘again’ in ‘make America great again’. They are the time he promises to return people to, one which - oh-what-a-coincidence - came before President Johnson’s race equality legislation. But when they were actually taking place, the 50s were a time of paranoia and anxiety. Most people expected a Third World War. Russia had developed a nuclear bomb. The Soviet economy was considered superior to the American market economy. The USSR had launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Joseph McCarthy was carrying out his witch hunts against liberals and leftists.

Similarly, each period of English history you study sees the major political actors hark back to the past. The Luddites of the early 19th Century demand a return to the paternalist protection measures of the previous era. The Levellers of the 17th Century demand the rights guaranteed to them by ancient English history. The best period was always the period beforehand. The current era is always one of unprecedented uncertainty and tumult.

The same is true in our personal lives. Things were not really better for us when we were 16. We had good days and bad days, moments of bliss and moments of despair. The emotions were heightened of course - that’s what it’s like to experience romantic feelings for the first time under a heavy dose of hormones. But the endless summers we remember were full of boredom and disappointment as well as heartbreak and euphoria. We edit out the parts that were uneventful and fixate on those which marked us.

The truth about the past is this: A day can only be perfect once it’s ended.

As you experience a day, it is full of uncertainty. Will it rain? Will that person call me? Will I be able to buy the thing I want? Do they fancy me? How will this party go? Will people like me? Do I look good in this? The tumult and atom-level chaos of our expectations and insecurities. Most days are a score draw. Some are a net loss. And every so often you get a day which was unimprovable. Everything fell into place. The needle drops. The opening bars kick in. Lou Reed starts singing. Oh what a perfect day. I’m glad I spent it with you.

But if you could travel back to that day, you would feel the same uncertainty you feel right now, about today. Will it work out? Will this be OK? What do I have to do before I go out? If you could travel back and experience it all over again, you would be surprised by how many moments of boredom or humdrum timekilling it involved. You have sliced these moments from your memory, in the same way that I have edited out the band Space from the 90s or a Trump supporter edits out Soviet technological triumph in the 50s.

Things in the past only take shape and assume their current form once they are over. Things in the present can therefore never live up to them. They can never provide the same degree of certainty, because they are still happening. So we live with this constant defect where we over-emphasise the innocence of what has gone and we underestimate the quality of what is happening.

Nostalgia is a terrible drug: it is a fiction which serves to undermine you at the point of experience and pile all the enthusiasm into whatever has already passed. If it is allowed to grow without restraint, it will suck all the joy from you, turning you into a passenger in your own life. If it is allowed to conquer a country, it will lead to viciousness and self-harm, Trump and Brexit.

For all that, we clearly need nostalgia. Obviously we do, because none of us seems able to operate without it. It gives us a sense of continuity with our past. It is what we use to create the idea of an authentic self with a coherent life story.

It need not trap us in the past. Properly managed and understood, it provides a foundation which allows us to manage the future. This is who I am. These are the people and events that made me. These are my desires and my principles, the qualities which inform the things I do next.

If it is properly harnessed it can help us navigate the present. It is partly nostalgia for instance, which lets me decide to prioritise physical media over streaming, the tactile over the digital. But we can make those sorts of decisions without falling into the myth that the past was always golden and the present always doomed. Nostalgia can help us select the bits of the past which we preserve, rather than simply isolating us from the future.

The same applies to countries. It’s no coincidence that English radicals have always harked back to the semi-mythical ancient liberties of their ancestors. It’s no coincidence that American reactionaries hark back to the supposed glory years of the post-war era. Nostalgia is what we use to give coherence to our national story, just as we do to our personal story.

How can this be healthy, rather than corrosive? The trick is two-fold. First, we have to make sure that the past the country harks back to provides a decent guide to how it should behave in the future. And second we have to prevent the guidance of the past becoming a prison - the locked-in thought that only that which is over can ever be good and that which is to come must surely be bad.

We can exploit nostalgia without being exploited by it. We can own our past without being owned by it.

Odds and Sods

Important announcement: We’ve now confirmed the theme for our Origin Story live show on September 1st. We’ll be doing The History of the Daily Telegraph: How a reassuringly traditional newspaper lost its fucking mind.

Over the course of the evening, we’ll take you from the Telegraph’s staid and respectable origins to the hysterical bedlam it has become today, and then delve into our favourite moments of shit-your-pants lunacy from recent issues, at least half of which will probably involve Allister Heath.

Tickets are available here. No-one will get out alive.

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

This week’s i paper column was on Kemi Badenoch, who I really do detest more and more with each passing day. Just an absolute political atrocity in human form. We also had a Patreon-only Q&A edition of Origin Story for our loyal backers.

The cultural highlight of the week was Spider-Man: Brand New Day. We did it in a double-bill with The Odyssey, which makes a surprising amount of sense - they have lots of the same actors, both tell the story of a man trying to get back home in some way, and have several scenes which echo one another, particularly around our closest friends and family not knowing who we are. It’s charming to see the oldest story and then the newest story, both dabbling in the same ideas.

Spider-Man is a much better film. It has a more coherent theme and is more disciplined in how it develops it, it is more beautiful to look at, it is more emotionally rewarding. I know, I know - you want to send me hate emails now and to cancel your subscription. But I am a professional journalist and it is my job to tell the truth, without fear or favour.

Seriously though, I mean it. It’s outstanding - certainly the best Marvel film since No Way Home. I sat there crying and laughing throughout, full of joy and nutrition. A euphoric, meaningful cinematic experience.

Right that’s me done you cunts - fuck off and have a lovely weekend.