Hey everyone! For lack of substantial (read: recent) reviewable media, I’m going to backtrack slightly to examine something interesting I noticed when I saw the movie This Is the End (but this is not a review). It all involves one moment in particular that stuck out for me at the very end (MAJOR spoiler alert), up in Heaven.
I don’t know why – well, I suppose it’s pretty obvious that the Backstreet Boys had a lot to do with it – but something about the setting as a whole reminded me of growing up in the early 00’s, and specifically before the September 11th attacks. Something about those gleaming towers in the background reminded me of images I associated with my childhood. At some level, the message blaring at me from across the screen was, “Pre-9/11 America was Heaven.” (Since, they were literally in Heaven.) Intentional or not, let’s take off from there, with a discussion of golden age thinking. A short disclaimer based on rereading what I’ve written: I’m doing things differently this time – instead of trying to make a point, I’m trying to present two alternatives. The reason for this is I’m not settled on this issue myself and because what comes below does come off a bit pedagogical, but that’s unintentional. I also apologize in advance for the length; there were a lot of points involved that I wanted to unpack.
In my college class “Hollywood in American Culture” (thanks once again to Professor Doherty), one of the broader themes we dealt with was the depiction of the American past in film. The American past is often used instructively, to speak for current issues under the guise of the past. That is, when ’70s TV show Happy Days or movie Summer of ’42 depicted earlier times, they used those earlier periods to have a dialogue about contemporary phenomena: feminism, sexual liberation, race relations, doubts about the role of authority and the government, and countless others. To take a present-day example, Mad Men‘s clear mission is exactly that: to use 1960s New York to examine the social changes Americans were dealing with then, because we’re still coming to terms with or fighting about them now.
Sometimes a work takes the direct opposite route however, passively reflecting how today we perceive the nature of our past – in a word, historiography. A subset of that other end of the spectrum is nostalgia, which I’m unsure whether to trace as the motive in making these films and TV shows, or see it as an effect of watching them. A recent movie that dealt with that is Midnight in Paris, which gave this post its name with the term “golden age syndrome.” The “golden age syndrome” (or fallacy) for those who don’t know is “the belief that the present is basically worthless, because all great things occurred in some previous golden age.” (Source) In the movie, the lead (played by Owen Wilson) learned that there’s no time like the present, and that to hang onto the past is to ignore that not everything now is bad but indeed is in many ways better than back then (in the movie meaning 1920s Paris).
We live in difficult and confusing times – so confusing that depending on who you are, where in the world you live, or some other factors, it’s either more or less confusing for you! Without getting into that too much, I’d like to make a few observations from a purely pop culture perspective. For starters, in the last couple years we’ve seen the return of boy bands in acts like One Direction, and even our old pop idols like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears have returned to the spotlight. We’ve seen movies lately set in the ’90s like Perks of Being a Wallflower, and pre-9/11 movies like Remember Me. Even recent Disney movies like Tangled have borrowed from formulas of the Disney Renaissance and the first Shrek film. On top of that, my generation is enthusiastically fond of ’90s memorabilia, like our favorite old toys and cartoons. I had better examples I’ve forgotten since starting this article, but the rabbit hole does go deeper, and it’s not unreasonable to expect sooner or later the New Tens will have their own Happy Days, except it will be set in the ’90s or early ’00s (see previous link).
I’m not deriding any of these developments, mind you, or dismissing any of it as simply the product of nostalgia. And it is fun to look back; I’ll admit I LOVE media from the ’70s and early ’80s. But there’s always a question lingering in the background when viewing something made or set in yesteryear: is this story set in this time with the intention to deal with contemporary issues? Is it just the harmless fun of a creative choice? Or are we at the point where reminiscence crosses from harmless daydreaming, to pining for a supposed lost golden age? That’s always a problem with retro media and nostalgia generally: it’s hard to tell where the line is between a setting being used for stylistic appeal or the like, and where it becomes about longing to go back to times since passed. Whether it crosses that line is often context-dependent or varies with how the audience receives it. And it’s easy to become convinced in a fictionalized setting that everything was better, or simpler, or happier back then, or something along those lines. But we’re not in those times anymore and we never will be again. Even if we could go back, we’re different people now, and what’s changed isn’t the times really – it’s us
Even that’s assuming the depicted past really was something we’d call “the good old days.” But life doesn’t work like that either; that’s why people often refer to rose-tinted glasses. As mentioned above, when looking back fondly, we magnify the good but forget or minimize the bad. I don’t mean to get soapbox-y about it, but in every day and age up to and including our own, there’s stuff that’s better relative to other periods AND stuff that sucks. Plus, pining for the past tends to detract from our ability to confront and deal with the present. That’s what makes it nostalgia: our conveniently selective memory. And so in all of these sorts of shows and such, there’s a danger of falling into that trap of truly believing those were “the good ole days,” and in a sense feeding too much into the suspension of our own disbelief. Thus, the conventional wisdom is that golden age thinking is unhealthy: not necessarily because of its focus on the past so much as from its coming at the expense of the present (the same basic thrust behind this point is expressed in a different context here).
I suspect many analyses like this one would conclude with the above. But like I hinted above, I believe there’s another possibility to explore; I can’t let the conversation end there, with golden age thinking being purely unhealthy. After all, I would argue one of the powerful driving forces behind such golden age thinking is more of a sense that something is missing today or wrong with today, rather than a pure, no-holds-barred love of some past time. That is, I feel that one of the primary reasons people develop strong nostalgic impulses is because of tough times now, and since in hindsight we know those past times turned out alright, we say with a sigh that people had it good then or that we’d been born in the wrong time. And of course, hindsight is 20/20 and a lot of it isn’t necessarily tough-times stuff so much as the natural longing that comes from growing up and watching your childhood fade into the past, and all I considered above applies. But This is the End’s particular ending got to me in a very strange way regarding these particular tough times (I leave that up to interpretation of course; it’s all in the eye of the beholder, as they say).
This is the End is a strikingly moral-driven movie, in the sense that although it seems a post-apocalypse parody with celebrity humor is all there is to see, the driving force behind it all is an under-the-surface speculation about the nature of morality. It could be that using the Rapture was just a MacGuffin to change the pace from zombie or environment-related disasters, but intentional or not, it prompts questions about what it is to be good, who gets to decide that, and all sorts of other things I’m considering devoting a separate post to on a later date. There may be (and probably is) plenty of room for disagreement about what their answer is or whether they’re right, but given the tone of the movie and especially the wrap-up in Heaven, I got the sense that hanging over it all is a message that we’ve lost our way in the years since the Backstreet Boys’ heyday (and again, I’ll expand on this from another angle in a future post). That scene seemed to say it all, and maybe it’s all in my head, but it appeared to put that “lost age” on a pedestal, in stark contrast with the struggles and uncertainty of today (again, your mileage may vary – I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m putting a titanic effort into keeping this argument politically neutral…how am I doing?).
And maybe that’s not a bad thing for which to yearn. In some ways, we have lost our way, and the Heaven scene seemed to supply the answer: the solution to all this confusion and trouble isn’t to go back to those times, or even a return to how we were in those times, at least not in such few words. In a rare union of nostalgic sentiment and instructive retrospection, it seemed to say what we lost along the way can be gotten back again, because it’s not the ’90s or the ’00s that we lost, or the Backstreet Boys or even Heaven that we need. And all of that is the case because what we’re looking back at with rose-tinted glasses in that scene isn’t any of those things. Rather, it’s a sentiment the movie as a whole calls for us to rediscover:
(For those who couldn’t be bothered or otherwise couldn’t watch the video, “Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes!”)
The Heaven scene was a way of looking at our past from a practical perspective, viewing this certain part of our past as a medicine for today rather than as merely taking solace in yesterday. Just as Star Wars picked up Americans from their malaise in the ’70s by reminding them of the power of the downtrodden when they’re united, perhaps This is the End is supposed to remind us that we all have the capacity to do good, which we can all do by simply being decent to each other.
But I may be totally off the mark with all of this. And that’s why this is not the conclusive point of the article – none of it is. I leave it to you, the readers, to decide. The persuasive and analytical part of my article is over, and now I leave the floor to you: can golden age thinking be not only okay or good, but useful? Or is it delusional and wasteful? Is the instructive use of the past exclusive from nostalgic yearning? Did anything I say above make any sense or am I blowing smoke? It’s not up for me to say. Like I said, even I’m divided on where I stand as to everything I’ve just explained. Now go forth and be thoughtful. I’ll see you guys again on October 29th. Ciao!
Hopped on Pop 
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