Knight posted:

<walks up to whiteboard with "FRIENDS" written on it, crosses out the "S">
"It's only a matter of time, we just have to wait to see who will star."

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

This and it's a prequel that's JUST Ross and Chandler

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

This and it's a prequel that's JUST Ross and Chandler

Justin Tyme posted:

twister is a great movie so theres no way the sequel wont be loving stupid and filled with bad over the top unbelievable cg

Gresh posted:

its going to be incredibly stupid with the most stock placeholder characters possible

Twister is one of those movies that for better or worse just kinda worked despite itself and that can't be replicated, especially in today's Hollywood

loquacius posted:

what were all the flashback jokes per character

it was, like flock-of-seagulls-hair Chandler, fat Monica, I think pre-nose-job Rachel? Flashback Ross's joke was just like "he's still Ross lmao"

Dang It Bhabhi! posted:

yea he’s super racist if you watch his movies this is apparent.

DaysBefore posted:

DaysBefore posted:

i say swears online posted:

chandler's tshirt is kinda sick ngl

Nichael posted:

It's weird how there were nostalgic flashbacks in the 1990s and 2000s for the 80s, but people don't really do the same nostalgia bit for the 2000s, or 2010s.

loquacius posted:

did they just skip over the 90s nostalgia straight from 80s to 2000s or what

I distinctly remember spending a lot of the 2010s thinking "the nostalgia probably should have moved on to the 90s by now, why is it still the 80s"

loquacius posted:

I guess we do have a Frasier reboot now

loquacius posted:

did they just skip over the 90s nostalgia straight from 80s to 2000s or what

I distinctly remember spending a lot of the 2010s thinking "the nostalgia probably should have moved on to the 90s by now, why is it still the 80s"

the milk machine posted:

a large part of what people consider "the 80s" is really the early to mid 90s

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

There's a kid I work with who started collecting and displaying Tech Deck finger skateboards at his desks and that's pure strain 2000s nostalgia lol

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

The 90s was dominated by nostalgia for the 60s and 70s and the the 80s was dominated by nostalgia for the 50s, so it only follows that as we move forward these things are all gonna blend together as we start becoming nostalgic for the times we were nostalgic. Side note, this is how Frank Zappa predicted the world would end, with ever tightening loops of nostalgia for the previous moment.

loquacius posted:

did they just skip over the 90s nostalgia straight from 80s to 2000s or what

I distinctly remember spending a lot of the 2010s thinking "the nostalgia probably should have moved on to the 90s by now, why is it still the 80s"

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

The 90s was dominated by nostalgia for the 60s and 70s and the the 80s was dominated by nostalgia for the 50s, so it only follows that as we move forward these things are all gonna blend together as we start becoming nostalgic for the times we were nostalgic. Side note, this is how Frank Zappa predicted the world would end, with ever tightening loops of nostalgia for the previous moment.

indigi posted:

Frank crappa

indigi posted:

Frank crappa

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

The 90s was dominated by nostalgia for the 60s and 70s and the the 80s was dominated by nostalgia for the 50s, so it only follows that as we move forward these things are all gonna blend together as we start becoming nostalgic for the times we were nostalgic. Side note, this is how Frank Zappa predicted the world would end, with ever tightening loops of nostalgia for the previous moment.

In Training posted:

I don't care about nostalgia. I live for the future.

quote:

Contextless Nostalgia

It's been stated time and time again that we're becoming increasingly obsessed with nostalgia, cripplingly so. Whether or not it's true, again, is not so important. The why, however, remains.

Nostalgia, in the classic sense, is a wistful remembrance, a pained recalling of a time where things were better. It's a belief, however erroneous, that the past contains more happiness than the present. A fitting example of nostalgic art is Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, a film so nostalgic it feels documental, produced for the former rebels/present yuppies of Gen X as a glimmering look at their past, a reassurance that they were indeed once cool. Saccharine or not (depends on who you ask), the film certainly comports to this traditional definition.

Today's televisual/cinematic nostalgia, if one can really call it that, has a distinctly different flavor. Instead of being a monument to the past, a shared generational experience, nostalgia has been co-opted as an aesthetic, a mood. Stranger Things, a show decidedly millennial in both content and attitude, is a perfect example of this. The outfits, the lingo, the references, and the sets all feel nostalgic, but a look at the show's viewership demographics quickly reveal this feeling doesn't fit nostalgia's true definition. 18-39 year-olds aren't old enough to have memories from the early 80s.

The television producer's argument that Stranger Things and other period dramas give a younger audience access to the past (which is new to them) while also capturing an older demographic who experienced the events on the show first hand doesn't hold water, especially when you consider that the Duffer Brothers are only 34-years-old. The nostalgia they're capturing isn't genuine. It's a fractal cobbling of present day ideals and past aesthetics–not nostalgia, but mutation, a rehashing and reliving of history with no frame of reference. It's time travel to a non-existent past.

One look around–bell bottom jeans, Mad Men, 90s-inspired music videos, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin songs playing on truck commercials–and it's impossible not to see this frantic pawing as the defining mark of our culture. It's not the end of history; it's a fraught and dizzying attempt to reimagine it and a cultural impetus to live in the mangled architecture of this imagined past.

Nostalgia for Stakes

To return to Eco for a moment, the Ur-Fascist is also marked by the fact that he's "deprived of a clear social identity." Eco goes on to say that fascism takes this lack of identity and fills the void with nationalism. While this is certainly true, from average Trump supporters all the way down to Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers, Eco never identifies the cause of this deprivation.³ The contextless nostalgia of our present offers an entrée into diagnosis–Bowers and others like him, while certainly insane, aren't so far removed from society as to be immune to its mores.

This new form of nostalgia, this amalgam of distorted realities, functions as both an escape hatch from our present existential void–a void of unmeaning, a loss of stakes–and one of its root causes. This new, fundamentally false, cultural memory is a product of our present zeitgeist. It's born of an influx of information and static confusion, one created by a society so materially comfortable that it's primarily concerned with artistic and aesthetic trends, with manufacturing meaning. The loss of stakes, however, can be traced back to the 1970s.

Following the Vietnam War and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the U.S. found itself in a peculiar position. After nearly 40 years of perpetual war, we lacked an enemy to align ourselves against. A malaise set in, one that would typify the 1970s. Then, in 1983, Ronald Reagan offered the American people a respite from having to define themselves by anything other than what they are not. He declared the Soviet Union an "evil empire," rekindling Cold War rhetoric which had long since burnt out. Announcing this a few years after signing a non-proliferation treaty with the Soviets probably felt strange to anyone paying attention, but it didn't matter. We had an enemy again.

But was the Soviet Union truly our enemy or one recreated by spiritual necessity? Manufactured animosity and organic threats converged at a single point. For Reagan's part, all he did was stir up past resentments, but his demagoguery wasn't feeding some Weimar-esque yearning for a return to greatness, but a nostalgia for dire consequences. Because the method and end result are similar—a monolith enemy is created onto which a society can project its fears—this distinction can feel unimportant. But, this marked a significant change.

America's enemies were no longer an existential threat. They were created as convenient scapegoats for economic and political turmoil. The recession of 1973, the OPEC oil embargo, and the 1979 energy crisis, while not unserious, paled in comparison to the socio-economic climates that spawned the original iterations of fascism. The U.S. economy was down, sure, but there was no question as to where the seat of global power resided. Still, at the quotidian level, lines at the pump and the rapid decrease in factory jobs were panic-inducing. If we take this moment to be the birth of American fascism, the moment in which we became "constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of [our enemies],"⁴ then it represents a reversal of what happened in the Weimar Republic. Instead of a fascism born out of economic powerlessness and spiritual fervor, ours is the result of a spiritual drought created by material excess.

Convergence

On an individual level, it's hard to even differentiate Robert Bowers from the likes of Steven Paddock. Sure, Bowers is racist and anti-Semitic, but this is just a variation on the theme of the deranged lone gunman. If one steps back and looks at the furor in the stands at Donald Trump's rallies or at the violence in Charlottesville last year, however, it becomes impossible to miss this creeping trend, conservatism fading in the rearview as our society pushes ever rightward. But why?

If an individual suicide is an escape from life, an assertion that death is preferable to the anguish of everyday existence, then fascism, the societal suicide, must be an escape of the same order. At this point, it's clear that our sprint towards authoritarianism comes from our society's collective yearning for stakes, for meaning. There's no great existential threat, so we look to our leaders to manufacture one. But fascism is European. Its great figures have been dead for nearly a century. It's foreign, an anachronism. It doesn't make sense until one considers our present infatuation with nostalgia. Not nostalgia as feeling but as concept, as aesthetic. American neo-fascism is the point at which nostalgia for stakes and loss of context converge. Today's fascist is one who rifles through an ephemeral past, one he never really experienced, searching for an enemy that he's not only ill-equipped to assess, but that doesn't exist in any meaningful sense.

For those who feel disenfranchised by the end of history (or late capitalism or neoliberalism, whichever buzzword one assigns it), the options are limited. For reasonable people, it's a choice between participating in society or being forced to its margins. The neo-fascist avoids both options entirely, shirking nihilism and resignation. Instead, he dives head first into the shallow pool of contextless nostalgia, attempting to plumb the depths of history without realizing he's splashing around in a puddle. It's a frenetic and palsied search for a transgressive idea with which to define his world and by extension, himself. Robert Bowers is insane, yes. But the massacre he committed is simply a fringe response to a mainstream problem.

skooma512 posted:

But the 80s bleeding over into the 90s is the opposite of a tightening loop? Depending on what we're talking about it's arguable things like 80s fashion and entertainment kept going into the 90s, it's not like at midnight on a year ending in 9 everyone immediately starts releasing new and different poo poo.

As an aside does anyone else feel like the 00s and 10s are much less distinctive stylistically than the 50s-90s? Maybe it's because we're not getting fed depictions of them through media yet so only real ones know and we're not all just remembering the same simulacras of those decades on TV, but I don't feel wistful for media or fashion or even really music from those decades. And yes I did read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher.