Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

Take a look at the highest grossing movies of 2023 worldwide and you'll find The Super Mario Bros. Movie – a screen adaptation of a 40-year-old video game – alongside films featuring Spider-Man, a 61-year-old comic-book character; Barbie, a 64-year-old plastic toy; and a live-action remake of Disney's The Little Mermaid cartoon – a relative youngster at 33.

I could add Transformers, Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones – all of which are high up the list – but the point is clear. Nostalgia is box-office gold. And it's not just cinema that's counting the cash. For instance, the UK's best-selling albums of the year so far include a 50th anniversary Fleetwood Mac compilation and a career retrospective from 76-year-old Elton John, who headlined Glastonbury this year, in front of what is said to be the festival's biggest-ever crowd.

We seem to be drowning in the past, or happily bathing in it, depending on your perspective. Whether it's vinyl music or vintage moccasins, we can't get enough. Appropriately enough, nostalgia isn't new. The Victorians, for example, were suckers for Gothic architecture and stories about medieval chivalry. Similar fashions come and go, but every generation gets nostalgic for their youth as they age, while younger people have a natural curiosity about society before they were born.

But something odd is happening. Nostalgia cycles are shortening, with four-year-old movies getting big-money reboots (Batman relaunched with a new star and director in 2016, just four years after the previous trilogy concluded) and albums receiving vinyl reissues for their fifth anniversary (Cardi B's 2018 Invasion of Privacy was repressed in August 2023). At the same time, boundaries between eras are breaking down, with past times being not so much revived as remixed. Something new has happened: we have supercharged nostalgia with technology.

The rule of thumb used to be that nostalgia moves in 20-year cycles. The hits of the day fall out of fashion and anyone who still enjoys them is uncool and might have to justify them as a ‘guilty pleasure'. But eventually they come back as timeworn classics – a process that seems to take around 20 years.

It's no coincidence that today's middle-aged tastemakers were teens and young adults 20 years ago. The magazine editors, fashion directors and studio bosses, like all of us, have a rose-tinted view of the music, films, and fashion of their youth. Naturally, they want to revisit them.

The 1970s offer plenty of examples of the 20-year cycle. M*A*S*H (1970) and Grease (1978) took cinema audiences back to the Korean War (1950-53) and late 1950s high school, respectively. On television, the very title of the sitcom Happy Days (1974-84) made the show's position on its 1950s/60s setting clear. Meanwhile, our friend Elton John was in his pomp, topping charts from Italy to New Zealand with 1972's Crocodile Rock – a throwback to “when rock was young” – and, the song implies, so were we.

The 1980s brought Vietnam War films 20 years on. And the sitcom The Wonder Years, which jumped back exactly 20 years. A time of war and civil rights unrest doesn't sound like a time of ‘wonder', but if you were 12, like the series' protagonist Kevin, then maybe it was. In 1998, That '70s Show dusted off the nostalgia sitcom blueprint. No prizes for guessing what era was revived there.

Nostalgia literally means homesickness. The Greek nostos means home or homecoming and algos means pain. The word was coined by a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, in 1688 to describe a malady afflicting Swiss soldiers. Nobody today thinks of nostalgia as a medical condition, but we do experience it as bittersweet. It's both painful to be reminded of a past that has gone forever and heart-warming to relive a favourite time.

Wallowing in nostalgia hasn't always been easy. There was a time when a film that left the cinema could only be seen again if it happened to be shown on television. If you wanted to re-watch a TV show from your youth, then you would have to hope a channel would someday repeat it.

Let's jump back to the 1970s again. On London's King's Road in 1974 was a boutique called SEX, run by artist Malcolm McLaren and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. It had a jukebox so well stocked with rare old records that people visited just to listen. When a young John Lydon auditioned for McLaren's group, The Sex Pistols, he sang along to the jukebox. Lydon became Johnny Rotten and the British punk revolution was born.

The jukebox's nostalgia value came from the fact that hearing those songs elsewhere was nearly impossible. They were long-gone from the shops and rarely played on the radio. Only dedicated collectors and the few who bought them when first released even knew what they sounded like. By 2003, the cycle had made a full turn and a record label called Only Lovers Left Alive got nostalgic about the 1970s jukebox, releasing a compilation of its best tracks. By then, however, the record collectors who would previously have snapped up such a record had found a better place to hunt – online.

Cultural critic Simon Reynolds argues in his book Retromania that an obsession with the past leads to stagnation. Innovation in music, he says, petered out in the 2000s. That coincided with the rise of a string of technologies that acted as personal nostalgia machines.

Apple's iPod, launched in 2001, could be your own personal radio station, but stocking an iPod still meant owning the songs – or downloading them illegally. The arrival of Spotify five years later turned music into an endless stream that listeners could dip into wherever they pleased. Fancy a deep dive into 1970s funk? It's all there. Want to relive classic 1980s rave tunes? No problem.

TV and movies got the same treatment when Netflix launched the first of a swathe of streaming video services. Meanwhile, YouTube became a home for everything, from film and TV shows to old adverts and home videos. The 20-year cycle began to break down as everyone disappeared into their personal pasts.

Social media accelerated the process. Rather than middle-aged gatekeepers promoting nostalgia for their youth, suddenly anyone could share their obsessions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Some pay tribute to 2016's make-up trends. Others are reminiscing about Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. They erase the bad memories of a spreading virus and instead recall baking bread, binge-watching Tiger King and the relative peace that came from never having to be anywhere. There were fewer decisions to make.

A desire for simplicity perhaps lies behind the nostalgia for vinyl records. Fans enjoy the constraint of listening to an album from start to finish, rather than skipping through a playlist, and they like the physical process of putting a record on a turntable and admiring the artwork on the record sleeve. On the other hand, sometimes modern life is too easy. There are people who have gone back to photography with film, rejecting snap-and-forget smartphone cameras.

One hallmark of the digital-media age was the mashup. A natural evolution of the sampling era of the 1980s, mashups relied on easy access to computers and music downloads to allow people to combine entire songs from different times. The process was often done without the approval of the rights holders. In 2004, for example, when producer Danger Mouse combined The Beatles' White Album with rapper Jay-Z's Black Album to create The Grey Album, he was quickly shut down by EMI, the Beatles' record label.

Other people were creatively re-editing films. One popular trend was to create movie trailers that put classic films in a jarring new context. A trailer for The Shining as a romantic comedy was one highlight, as was the Mary Poppins trailer that presented the film as a menacing horror, Scary Mary.

Two decades later, with so much culture available to explore, nostalgia itself is being remixed. For example, the Gen Z drama series Euphoria dresses its cast in a mix of styles, combining “cutting-edge independent designers”, vintage pieces and what Vogue magazine describes as “early Noughties nostalgia”.

While most real-life teens lack the budget for the designer wardrobes of Euphoria's characters, the show reflects Gen Z's easy access to a diverse range of clothes. Digital platforms like Depop and Vinted, where people can sell clothes that they no longer wear, make it easy for others to pick up cheap vintage items. It's a democratisation of what once belonged to those committed enough to scour second-hand shops.

Democratised nostalgia might also be disintegrated nostalgia. If we all have our own mix of music, TV, film and fashion, then we lose the shared experience. For some, like critic Simon Reynolds, the problem is worse: we are so drenched in nostalgia that culture has forgotten how to look forward. Of course, to argue that culture was better in the past is itself a nostalgic view. Even to bemoan nostalgia is to be trapped by it.

In any case, the plethora of remakes, reboots and reissues suggests that there is still a market for nostalgia that reaches beyond our personal media bubbles. Perhaps we need it because it helps connect us with other generations. We share our past with others and we experience theirs. It's a shared story.

When Elton John headlined Glastonbury, he wasn't playing just for his contemporaries, although undoubtedly some were there. In the crowd were middle-aged people who heard him when they were children, and young people who have only ever known him as a figure of the past. Some have his albums on vinyl. Others were photographing him on their film cameras – then waiting to get the prints developed to see if they got a good shot.

All of them shared the electric buzz of a live performance. The thrill of something happening now, just once, right in front of us. Shows like that bring us together and have done for generations. One day, we'll look back and remember.