[COLUMN] Looking Back at the Nostalgia of 2017 | by Darren Mooney

Note: This week, I wrote a column and did a video about how Hollywood is obsessed with 2019. However, over the Christmas break, by accident, I found myself revisiting some of the films and shows of 2017: The Last Jedi, Blade Runner 2049, Alien: Covenant, Twin Peaks: The Return. It got me thinking about how 2017 was a strange moment in this culture of nostalgia.

It is, perhaps, reductive and obvious to point out that modern pop culture is dominated by nostalgia. So much of modern film and television consists of reboots, relaunches, revivals and returns of existing intellectual property and brands. The two biggest films of last year were Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, two long-gestating sequels designed to cash in on audience’s affectionate memories of their source material.

However, there is also an impulse to argue that this nostalgic obsession is novel, that it represents a change from some earlier or purer time. It is, in that sense, possible to feel nostalgic for an imagined time when nostalgia was not such a potent force. However, there have always been sequels, remakes and spin-offs of established properties. There was no golden age when everything was new and exciting, when intellectual property was not subject to necromancy based on market demand.

However, it does feel like the trend has accelerated in recent decades. In 1990, there was a single sequel in the global box office top ten. Last year, accepting Wicked as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz rather than a complete reimagining, every film in the global box office top ten was a sequel or prequel. Those looking for new-to-film franchises would have to leave the end-of-year top fifteen to find It Ends With Us. This is not news to anybody who has been watching film or television.

In the past few years, it feels like that nostalgia has curdled into something deeply cynical and bleak. Deadpool & Wolverine opens with Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) literally exhuming the corpse of Logan (Hugh Jackman), defiling the end of Logan. Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie á Deux often feels like a contemptuous howl of rage at the audience and the system that demanded it. Venom: The Last Dance longs for the sweet release of death and oblivion.

So it’s interesting to travel back just eight years and see how pop culture’s relationship to these sorts of extensions and continuations of established properties have shifted. In hindsight, 2017 feels like a golden era for popular culture. It felt like the last time that many of these sorts of big budget projects were allowed to take big swings and grapple with big ideas. Taken as a whole, the franchise films of 2017 seemed to engage with the question of what this culture of nostalgia actually meant.

Of course, even back then, there were signs of things to come. Warner Bros. paved the road to the grim digital necromancy of The Flash with Joss Whedon’s Justice League, which cynically pandered to fan nostalgia by including music cues like John Williams’ Superman theme or Danny Elfman’s Batman theme to cover up its complete lack of any artistic integrity. Disney’s live action Beauty and the Beast was a shot-for-shot remake that favored textual fidelity over creative vision.

However, even some of these works of creative compromise were engaged in interesting conversations about the relationship between artists and intellectual property. Metatextually, it’s difficult to read Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant as anything but a literalization of the director’s tug-of-war with the studio after the release of Prometheus. It is quite literally the tale of a frustrated artist, with android David (Michael Fassbender) lamenting that his kind are no longer allowed to create.

“What do you believe in?” Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup) demands of the synthetic being. David simply replies, “Creation.” However, like any modern generative artificial intelligence, David cannot truly create anything new. He can simply combine and recombine existing material. His ultimate creation is the xenomorph from the Alien franchise, a monster so familiar to audiences that Ridley Scott himself described it as “cooked, with an orange in his mouth.” David is not a creator. He is a remix artist.

This was indicative of a larger self-awareness in many of these sorts of late sequels over the course of the year. Many of these films and shows were actively engaged with the question of why the audience wanted this nostalgia, why so much media was focused on looking backwards, on conjuring some imagined or illusory past into being and what that meant in a broader cultural sense. It does feel like there was something percolating in the zeitgeist.

Some of these throwbacks were cynical rejections of the romantic fantasy of some idealized past. Andy Muschietti’s IT was an obvious throwback to 1980s kids’ films like Stand by Me, but a version of that template where there is something obviously evil and monstrous lurking literally just beneath the retro veneer in the sewers of the small town of Derry. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 has Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) confront and reject his father, played by ’80s icon Kurt Russell.

In Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch and Mark Frost made it clear to viewers that they could not, in fact, return. Frustrating many viewers by refusing to wallow in nostalgia for a quarter-century old television series, Lynch and Frost instead emphasized how the town and its inhabitants had drifted apart. The past could not be recaptured or reconstructed, even as the show understood the emotional impulses driving such a desire in an increasingly disconnected, hostile and chaotic world.

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 invited audiences to return to a future that had been imagined three-and-a-half decades prior, a future so rooted in the past that it included Atari and the Soviet Union. It was a future built from memories. In that world, the replicant K (Ryan Gosling) is guided by implanted memories that he comes to believe are true, but which are ultimately revealed to be the memories of Doctor Ana Stelline (Carla Juri).

Stelline explains the logic and appeal of this imagined past that she bestows upon people like K. “I think it's only kind,” she states. “Replicants live such hard lives, made to do what we'd rather not.  I can't help your future, but I can give you good memories to think back on and smile.” In both The Return and Blade Runner 2049, there is an understanding that these memories are an escape from the grim realities of late capitalism. They also serve to make K feel special and unique.

It's a nuanced understanding of nostalgia, one that is sympathetic but realistic. It acknowledges the limitations of the impulse, but also its potential. This dynamic is also at play in movies like Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi or James Mangold’s Logan. In both movies, an older hero is sought out by a young heroine who has been inspired by heroic tales of their past exploits. The world is falling to pieces, and the only person who can save it is Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) or Logan.

In both movies, these older heroes acknowledge that the past is not as simple as the popular memory of it. Luke talks about how the past is “romanticized, deified”, how he “became a legend.” Logan dismisses comic book adaptations of his adventures as “ice-cream for bedwetters.” Luke and Logan are both complicated and multifaceted people, rather than mythic archetypes. The Last Jedi and Logan ask the audience to contemplate their relationship to Luke and Logan.

It is not that The Last Jedi or Logan are anti-nostalgia. After all, both stories end with Luke and Logan making one last mythic stand as the heroes that they are expected to be. However, these films also understand the importance of moving on from these myths, that the power of nostalgia is inspirational and that it needs to include some forward momentum. “We are what they grow beyond,” Yoda (Frank Oz) tells Luke at one key point in The Last Jedi. There is real hope there.

To be honest, it’s not difficult to get a sense of what these movies and shows were grappling with in the culture. There was a broader nostalgia permeating wider society. 2017 was the first year of the first Trump term and, while many of these films and shows would have been in the works long before the election results, they speak to a general mood. These interrogations of nostalgia exist in conversation with the same impulses that responded to the promise to “make America great again.”

After all, so much of contemporary politics is also built around the desire to return to some idealized and fantastical past, whether economically or culturally. The current moment is highly volatile and politically unstable. It’s easy to understand why audiences would respond to the siren call of some earlier period when things were simpler or easier. It doesn’t matter than such an era never existed and that any attempt to conjure it into being will inevitably disappoint. The fantasy is important.

This might also explain the shift in tone in these nostalgic throwbacks between 2017 and 2025. After all, the general mood in 2017 was one of anger and activism. There was a clear belief that things could be better. There was political organization. There was campaigning. There was still some belief in a future. In contrast, the political tone of 2025 is one of “pervasive inevitability” and “anticipatory obedience” to whatever is coming.

Why bother fighting it? Why waste the energy interrogating it? Why burden one’s self even thinking about it? It’s best not to ask what nostalgia means or what purpose it serves or why audiences yearn for it. It makes more sense to simply disinter the body, to accept the paycheck for sequel and rage impotently, and to simply wait for the grim inevitability of death. It is an interesting shift in how pop culture engages with its own myths of the past.

Still, one thing is certain: nostalgia is not what it used to be.