[COLUMN] Twisted Metal is Not Just High-Octane Nostalgia, It's About Nostalgia | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the second season of Twisted Metal, which is both now streaming in its entirety on Peacock and is surprisingly good.

Peacock’s Twisted Metal is steeped in nostalgia.

Obviously, a large part of this nostalgia is for the source material, the classic PlayStation vehicular carnage video game. However, the series is nostalgic in a much broader sense. Twisted Metal understands that the appeal of many of these adaptations and revivals of classic properties lies not in the source material itself, but in the sense-memory that it evokes. Twisted Metal is not nostalgic for the video game, per se. It is nostalgic for the experience of playing the video game.

Twisted Metal locates its nostalgia at the turn of the millennium, laser-focusing on a demographic who would have come of age in the 1990s and who now have enough disposable income to afford a Peacock subscription. The show obviously draws heavily from the lore and continuity of the video game, with the second season adding characters like Axel (Michael James Shaw), Vermin (Lisa Gilroy) and Mister Grimm (Richard de Klerk). But it also aims to evoke the broader cultural moment.

The opening moments of the second season flash back to the childhood of the villainous goth Raven (Halle Tator). Raven and her friend Kelly (Morgan Douglas) pull a witchcraft-themed practical joke on their friend Destiny (Amariah Faulkner). It’s a clear allusion to the 1996 teen movie The Craft, which received its own already-forgotten legacyquel in 2020, heightened by the fact that Raven was played in the first season by Craft star Neve Campbell, but has been (sort of) replaced by Patty Guggenheim.

The show is saturated with similar 1990s pop culture. Even within that season premiere, the show’s protagonist, John Doe (Anthony Mackie), falls in love with the Baby-Sitters Club books while under house arrest in his childhood home, to the point that his pursuit of the missing eighty-ninth book (Kristy and the Dirty Diapers, published September 1995) becomes an arc paid off in the finale. The episode’s big climactic action beat is set to DMX’s Ruff Ryders’ Anthem, released May 1998.

In Twisted Metal, the implication is that the world effectively ended in 2002, collapsing into murder and mayhem. This arrested development is not necessarily confined to the rational world; a glimpse of Mister Grimm’s tombstone reveals that the undead “husband, father, daredevil” died in 2001. This makes sense. The members of the cast old enough to remember the time before the apocalypse are all essentially ’90s kids, sifting through the detritus of a dead world.

The show is packed with songs from that era: What is Love? by Haddaway, Dragula by Rob Zombie, B.O.B. by Outkast, How Bizarre by OMC, I’ll Stand by You by the Pretenders and even All is Love by Björk. Many of the characters frame their life experiences through pop culture. When the cast are taken to a staged school dance, Sweet Tooth (Samoa Joe, Will Arnett) proclaims, “I’ve always wanted to do a prom episode, but never got the chance!” He cites the film She’s All That and episodes of My So-Called Life as exemplars of the form.

The show offers a trip back in time to a more innocent era. It is no coincidence that, when the mysterious Calypso (Anthony Carrigan) organizes his lethal vehicular tournament, he recreates a high school dynamic for the contenders, who bunk in the Jaffe Campbell School, form cliques and even go to prom together. Twisted Metal works hard to recreate the experience of being a teenager playing Twisted Metal on an old console back in the late 1990s, emotionally as well as literally.

This journey back to childhood is literalized for John Doe. He begins the second season returning to a childhood home that he cannot remember and he ends that season by escaping to the remote cabin where his family would vacation when he was a child. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles still adorn the bedsheets. The VHS copies of The Color Purple, Crimson Tide and Robin Hood sit on the TV. Ticket stubs for Muppets from Space and Stuart Little are pinned to his bedroom mirror.

On its own, this approach is interesting. So much modern pop culture is saturated in nostalgia, including remakes, revivals and legacyquels to beloved properties that almost inevitably provoke some sort of extreme reaction from fans who loved the property as children. This reaction is often an emotional thing, and feels situated in the unarticulated understanding that watching a piece of media that one consumed as a child cannot magically make one a child again.

“The Golden Age of science-fiction is twelve,” quipped Peter Graham in 1957. Film critic Alonso Duralde is fond of asking, “Is it great, or were you eight?" Many of these revivals draw audiences in on the promise of taking them back to a simpler and more innocent time, one free of the burdens and responsibilities (and even awareness) of adulthood. That is an impossible task, but Twisted Metal understands that people crave a feeling, not simply recycled and recognizable franchise iconography.

However, the real power of Twisted Metal lies not only in its understanding of what this nostalgia actually is, but also the reason that people are drawn to it. The show uses its nostalgia very well – there is undoubtedly a surge of endorphins as the finale kicks into a montage set to Dreams by the Cranberries – but it also uses it with purpose. This puts it ahead of so many modern properties driven by recognizable intellectual property, which reduce complex symbols to tawdry baubles.

The world of Twisted Metal is a nightmarish hellscape populated by undead motorcyclists, killer clowns and human beings grafted into machinery. It is a world where the powerful exploit the weak. Calypso offers a way out for those who enter his tournament, but this is a false promise. The house always wins. “It’s a game and it’s rigged,” John opines. In this world, why wouldn’t the characters find themselves chasing the memory of a time when they felt emotionally safe and secure?

Throughout the season, John’s lover Quiet (Stephanie Beatriz) fights to tear this broken system down, believing that, if she wins Calypso’s competition, she can fix the world. It doesn’t work out that way, which forces John and Quiet to retreat to John’s childhood vacation cabin. “We lost,” Quiet confesses. “I lost.” John replies, “You were just trying to make things better.” Quiet sighs, “Maybe in this world, that’s just not possible. So, it’s time we did something… for us. It’s our turn.”

In this context, it is quite easy to understand the allure of nostalgia. The modern generation is confronted with rampant income inequality, the encroaching threat of fascism, less job security than previous generations, the impossibility of home ownership, the existential threat of climate change and a variety of other nightmares. It’s no wonder that this generation seeks to retreat to the perceived tranquility and prosperity of “the end of history” and “the unipolar moment.”

While Twisted Metal never takes itself too seriously or too earnestly, the series is overtly engaged with contemporary America. In particular, Calypso is framed as some primal expression rugged American individualism pushed to its most extreme form. A flashback in the season finale reveals that Calypso literally pulled himself from a deep dark well in Virginia in 1585, the year that the British first tried to settle the region. He is the nation’s dark and twisted soul.

“When I first came to America, I found a land of opportunity, where your greatest wish could come true,” Calypso boasts. “If only you were willing to fight for it.” Throughout the show, Calypso preaches a gospel of individualism.  “You are the captain of your own destiny,” he tells John. “You are accountable to you and you alone. Are you really willing to sacrifice that? Because, John, other people can bring you down, make you act against your own self-interest.”

Throughout Twisted Metal, Calypso manipulates the players into turning against one another. In a charmingly on-the-nose gag, it is revealed that Calypso originally pitched Twisted Metal as a “reality TV competition … setting 16 combatants into a high-stakes demolition derby” to NBC in “the early 2000s.” Although the executives liken his pitch to Battle Bots, it cannot help but more directly evoke The Apprentice, the 16-contestent reality television show that re-established Donald Trump.

In this context, Twisted Metal understands that the retreat into nostalgia – the yearning to reclaim some idealized (and possibly even imagined) past – exists a response to the overwhelming stress of the modern world and the seeming impossibility of any meaningful change to a fundamentally broken system in which the wealthy are seemingly never held to account. As things fall apart, the childhood bedroom and high school memories become increasingly appealing.

However, as much as Twisted Metal demonstrates the allure of this retreat into nostalgia, it also acknowledges the futility of it. In the season finale, “NUY3ARZ”, John and Quiet try to create a life for themselves away from the mayhem and carnage outside, in an idyllic cabin powered by solar energy. (“Sounds like gas from the future,” John remarks.) For a while, this works. They form a family with their surrogate daughter, Mayhem (Saylor Bell Curda).

They cannot live in this bubble forever. Eventually reality intrudes. Tellingly, this happens when Calypso hijacks all broadcasting devices to literally pump himself into their home to announce that they are now wanted fugitives. It is a very overt literalization of how inescapable the present is through social media, in particular how inescapable certain social and political figures are, where everything is connected at every moment and so nobody is ever truly able to disconnect.

The perfect life that John and Quiet have created comes crashing down around them, as they are forced to go on the run again. Nostalgia is appealing, but it is not a protective bubble and it offers little real security. Twisted Metal understands the siren call of resignation and retreat into some approximation of childhood innocence to shut out the insanity of the larger world, but it also understands that this impulse cannot survive contact with reality.