I recently came across a collection of
old home movies in an obscure corner of the internet.
There are thousands in the collection,
comprising a digital museum
of other people's memories.
They depict mostly family scenes and domestic b-roll
from the middle decades of the 20th century,
providing a rare and candid glimpse of
everyday life in a different time.
They mostly show moments of togetherness—
families together in living rooms,
on front lawns, on sidewalks, at amusement
parks, in the family car.
Some show their age, like this one, a family
gathered around the TV set
watching the moon landings.
Others are more timeless;
their age only betrayed by the dust and scratches dancing over the frame.
Of all the home movies in the collection,
one stands out to me in particular.
It's a 15 minute travelogue
documenting one family's road trip
around America in 1957.
A title card at the beginning dubs the film
"Saga of the Happy Wanderers",
a phrase painted on the family's camper. there isn't much
There isn't much information about the footage
or the family it depicts.
The film is silent which leaves the context a question mark
and the characters mostly anonymous.
A little girl and her mother appear most often.
Here they stand by their camper
at the beginning of the trip.
The girl waves at the camera (she does that a lot).
They go to the Hoover Dam, and the Grand Canyon;
they watch Native Americans
perform a dance for a crowd.
They stop at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico
where the girl runs and plays in the hills of sand.
A boy is there too.
He jumps from the top of a sand dune, and the girl follows.
They make many stops along the way.
They go to a zoo somewhere and
look at the animals.
They stand on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Here they are together in someone's backyard on a sunny afternoon.
A title card tells us her name's Connie,
and it's her seventh birthday party.
She blows out the candles
and they all eat cake.
I wonder where Connie is now,
and where she's been in all the time since.
She'd be all grown up today, in her late sixties.
I wonder if she remembers any of these moments
or if these memories have mostly slipped away,
eroded by time, deteriorated and forgotten
like an old roll of film.
Even though these aren't my memories,
I still feel nostalgic when I see them.
It's vicarious nostalgia, if that's even possible.
I wasn't there. I wasn't even alive.
In my head there's this vague concept of "before",
a time when everything seemed simpler than today.
Old home movies are a perfect symbol for such times.
It's weird, this nostalgia for
other people's memories.
but there's a universality to these home movies
as if the warm tones of old grainy footage
compose the language of longing and memory
harking back to a past I don't remember
and didn't experience
but still feel drawn to.
These home movies, along with other cultural artifacts like
vinyl records or the potent combination of neon and synth,
represent collective memories,
shared ideas of the past
beyond our personal experiences,
another time, another place, before.
This of course ignores all the negative aspects of the past,
favoring instead a romanticized dream,
granting bygone time
a manufactured appeal.
It's a cynical sentiment that the future can only be worse
and that the best is always behind us,
receding away as we speed into the abyss of the future.
The past has a potential energy to it;
the idea of existing in pre-nostalgic times,
before everything that's happened since.
Past futures, in retrospect,
seem bright and sunny and attractive
when compared with today,
but the grand shame is that we can only see this
by looking back,
it's invisible when right in front of us.
In the 17th century nostalgia was a disease;
severe homesickness first diagnosed
in Swiss mercenaries fighting in France.
They longed for their familiar mountain homeland,
and sending them back was the only effective cure.
Since then,
nostalgia has evolved from a longing for place
to a longing for time,
somewhere we can't go.
There is no cure for nostalgia as it exists today.
There is only a treatment: escapism,
reveling in all that we have of the past,
the trinkets and souvenirs,
home movies, televisions shows,
and the shared experience of growing up
in the unique atmospheres
of our respective childhood decades.
We've surrounded ourselves with the past as a cushion of sorts;
incubating us in a womb that shields
from the harshness of reality.
As a result time doesn't go away anymore
instead it's just put on the shelf,
where it persists in syndication
a perpetual ambience to modern life,
a coping mechanism in the face of rapid change
Cultural nostalgia, as we may call it,
isn't new, but our current relationship to it is.
The internet has provided unhindered access to an exhaustive
archive of cultural memory
eliminating the scarcity of the past in a pre-digital age
and replacing it with sheer abundance.
The 2000s were the first truly digital decade
and the first decade that saw widespread use
of the public internet.
"It's amazing, all of this is now on the internet."
internet so alongside the spike in
innovation and globalization,
the naughts were also characterized by intoxication what came before,
simultaneously shoving us into the future,
and tugging us back into the past.
This isn't bad or good
because nostalgia isn't necessarily or strictly derivative;
it can also be productive and creative,
evident through some recent original series with nostalgic undertones.
Still, this begs the question and consideration
of how our own time will be defined and remembered.
The archival power of the internet
has given rise to a movement of
temporal and cultural preservation.
Now that we have the power to capture time in a bottle
and re-examine it whenever we'd like,
we don't really have to let it go.
It'll be interesting to see how
the first digital generations relate to
nostalgia and the past
given its abundance in today's culture
With the modern world changing so fast
we find ourselves hurtling into the
uncertainty of the future
at an ever-accelerating rate.
We're thrust into a tomorrow
where we're unwilling immigrants from yesterday
pining for the comfort and familiarity
of a homeland we can never revisit.
Nostalgia in moderation may be a healthy indulgence;
a comforting lie we tell ourselves and willingly buy into
in order to adapt to increasingly
globalized, ever-changing world.
It's an inevitable product of our time.
When we outgrow the shell of childhood innocence
and must face the harshness of the world,
in times of despair and uncertainty
when we're overwhelmed with feelings of hopelessness,
nostalgia provides a valuable escape.
It's natural for us to take solace in the past,
and it's perceived simplicity
and relative innocence.
and in its certainty.
It's become essential to this digital day and age,
and in the shadow of a 24-hour news cycle,
that we find a viable means of coping,
and that has been, among other things,
through nostalgic escapism.
So it isn't good or bad it.
It can heal when called upon to heal,
and it an deceive when too much trust is placed in its warm embrace.
Many of us feel that
if we could re-live a memory dear to us,
we would cherish it more.
If we could transport ourselves back and live it again,
we'd relish its warmth
and its brevity,
we'd breathe it in
before it yet again disappears
as time always does,
without much warning,
and without much care.
The funny thing is
nostalgia requires separation,
a distance in time,
and an acceptance that what's gone is unretrievable,
otherwise the spell doesn't work.
All we can do is examine our memories;
a souvenir, a song, a home movie;
a comforting glimpse of the way we were through a window
separate,
distant,
and with a longing that can never be cured,
and remind ourselves that
we're an infinite product of where we've been,
that memories are real
even if they no longer exist,
they happened and disappeared
and we kept something from them,
some token of their passage through time,
and only in that way can we revisit
what can't be retrieved.
before the tape runs out,
and it goes back on the shelf.