💠#235 - The Golden Age of Nostalgia
There's never been a better time to remember the good old days.
In critiquing this scene from the point of view of an ad exec, Patrick Laughlin highlights something that Don Draper does very well:
If you’re gonna pull on your heartstrings with nostalgia, you have to stay universal.
Feeling that ache for a moment from the past, and knowing how to trigger that ache in an audience brings something to a writer’s toolkit. For a look at the science, Krystine Batcho, PHD discusses the purpose behind the brain’s responses to nostalgia. Whether it’s historical nostalgia for a time the person doesn’t have a direct connection to, or direct personal nostalgia, there are ways that an emotional connection to looking back creates individual and social benefits.
Bilge Ebiri on how David Lynch used nostalgia not to idealize the past, but to wrap a pleasant false reality around the fear, rage, and confusion his work explored:
America needs David Lynch. Throughout his work, Lynch blends the textures of nostalgia with the transgressions of horror, and in so doing helps us transcend both.
The Pics and Portraits Videocast takes a look at the retrofuturism of Fallout as a tv show and a video game, and what it says about the world of a wasteland stuck in a period of post-WWII stagnation. AesirAesthetics runs with the notion of nostalgia in gaming and dissects the way The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time both simulates and stimulates nostalgia by allowing the player to journey through Hyrule as a child and an adult.
It’s good to remember that nostalgia is about how you remember something more than the reality of what is being remembered. David Moira and Michelle Jia interrogate the nostalgic claim that love songs aren’t popular anymore. John Jervis considers his own appreciate for midcentury modern interior design, and asks what about it is making it so popular again.
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Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link, Jason Koebler points out the surprising sudden virality of the CIA Field Handbook for Sabotaging Fascism.
What else is inneresting?
Jess Zimmerman on re-watching Children of Men and her changing relationship to dystopian fiction.
Catherine Shannon on how the women she knows think Tony Soprano is hot, and how looking deeper into the why reveals the fundamental flaws in the toxic ideals of the alpha-chad-manosphere.
Via The Onion, NBC denies using AI In New Series Detective Fireman Lawyer Chicago Los Angeles Show
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
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