I recently came across a collection of old home movies in an obscure corner of the internet.
There are thousands in the collection, comprising a digital museum of other people's memories.
They depict mostly family scenes in domestic B-roll from the middle decades of the 20th
century, providing a rare and candid glimpse of everyday life in a different time.
They mostly show moments of togetherness, families together in living rooms, on front
lawns, on sidewalks, at amusement parks, in the family car.
Some show their age, like this one, a family gathered around the TV set, watching the moon
landings.
Others are more timeless, their age only betrayed by the dust and scratches dancing over the
frame.
Of all the home movies in the collection, one stands out to me in particular.
It's a 15 minute travelogue, documenting one family's road trip around America in 1957.
A title card at the beginning dubs the film Saga of the Happy Wanderers, a phrase painted
on the family's camper.
There isn't much information about the footage or the family it depicts.
The film is silent, which leaves the context a question mark, and the character is mostly
anonymous.
A little girl and her mother appear most often.
Here they stand by their camper at the beginning of the trip.
The girl waves at the camera, she does that a lot.
They go to the Hoover Dam in the Grand Canyon.
They watch Native Americans perform a dance for a crowd.
They stop at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, where the girl runs and plays
in the hills of sand.
A boy's there too, he jumps from the top of a sand dune, and the girl follows.
They make many stops along the way.
They go to a zoo somewhere and look at the animals.
They stand on the banks of the Mississippi River.
There they are together in someone's backyard on a sunny afternoon.
A title card tells us her name's Connie, and that it's her 7th birthday party.
She blows out the candles and they all eat cake.
I wonder where Connie is now, and where she's been in all the time since.
She'd be all grown up today, in her late 60s.
I wonder if she remembers any of these moments, or if these memories have mostly slipped away,
I wrote it by time, deteriorated and forgotten like an old role of film.
Even though these aren't my memories, I still feel nostalgic when I see them.
It's vicarious nostalgia, if that's even possible.
I wasn't there.
I wasn't even alive.
In my head, there's this vague concept of before, a time when everything seemed simpler
than today.
Old home movies are a perfect symbol for such times.
It's weird, this nostalgia for other people's memories, but there's a universality to these
home movies, as if the warm tones of old grainy footage compose the language of longing and
memory, harking back to a past I don't remember, and didn't experience, but still feel drawn
to.
These home movies, along with other cultural artifacts like vinyl records or the potent
combination of neon and synth, represent collective memories, shared ideas of the past, beyond
our personal experiences, another time, another place, before.
This of course ignores all the negative aspects of the past, favoring instead a romanticized
dream, granting bygone time a manufactured appeal.
It's a cynical sentiment that the future can only be worse, and that the best is always
behind us, receding away as we speed into the abyss of the future.
The past has a potential energy to it.
The idea of existing in pre-nostalgic times, before everything that's happened since.
Past futures in retrospect seem bright and sunny and attractive when compared with today,
but the grand shame is that we can only see this by looking back, it's invisible when
right in front of us.
In the 17th century, Nostalgia was a disease, severe homesickness first diagnosed in Swiss
mercenaries fighting in France.
They longed for their familiar mountain homeland, and sending them back was the only effective
cure.
Since then, Nostalgia has evolved from a longing for place, to a longing for time, somewhere
we can't go.
There is no cure for Nostalgia as it exists today, there's only a treatment, escapism.
Revelling in all that we have of the past, the trinkets and souvenirs, home movies, television
shows, and the shared experience of growing up in the unique atmospheres of our respective
childhood decades.
We surrounded ourselves with the past as a cushion of sorts, incubating us in a womb
that shields from the harshness of reality.
As a result, time doesn't go away anymore, instead it's just put on the shelf, where
it persists in syndication, a perpetual ambiance to modern life, a coping mechanism in the
face of rapid change.
Cultural nostalgia, as we may call it, isn't new, but our current relationship to it is.
The internet has provided unhindered access to an exhaustive archive of cultural memory,
eliminating the scarcity of the past in a pre-digital age and replacing it with sheer
abundance.
The 2000s were the first truly digital decade, and the first decade that saw widespread use
of the public internet.
So alongside the spike in innovation and globalization, the knots were also characterized
by intoxication with what came before, simultaneously shoving us into the future and tugging us
back into the past.
This isn't bad or good, because nostalgia isn't necessarily or strictly derivative.
It can also be productive and creative, evident through some recent original series with
nostalgic undertones.
Still, this begs the question and consideration of how our own time will be defined and remembered.
The archival power of the internet has given rise to a movement of temporal and cultural
preservation.
Now that we have the power to capture time in a bottle and re-examine it whenever we'd
like, we don't really have to let it go.
It'll be interesting to see how the first digital generations relate to nostalgia in
the past, given its abundance in today's culture.
With the modern world changing so fast, we find ourselves hurtling into the uncertainty
of the future at an ever-accelerating rate.
We're thrust into a tomorrow where we're unwilling immigrants from yesterday, pining
for the comfort and familiarity of a homeland we can never revisit.
Nostalgia and moderation may be a healthy indulgence, a comforting lie we tell ourselves
and willingly buy into in order to adapt to an increasingly globalized, ever-changing
world.
It's an inevitable product of our time.
When we outgrow the shell of childhood innocence, it must face the harshness of the world, in
times of despair and uncertainty, when we're overwhelmed with feelings of hopelessness.
Nostalgia provides a valuable escape.
Its natural thrust takes solace in the past, and its perceived simplicity and relative
innocence, and in its certainty.
It's become essential to this digital day and age, and in the shadow of a 24-hour news
cycle, that we find a viable means of coping.
That has been, among other things, through nostalgic escapism.
So it isn't good or bad, it can heal when called upon to heal, and it can deceive when
too much trust is placed in its warm embrace.
Many of us feel that if we could relive a memory dear to us, we would cherish it more.
If we could transport ourselves back and live it again, we'd relish its warmth and its brevity.
We breathe it in before it yet again disappears, as time always does, without much warning
and without much care.
The funny thing is, nostalgia requires separation, a distance in time, and an acceptance that
what's gone is unretrievable, otherwise the spell doesn't work.
All we can do is examine our memories, a souvenir, a song, a home movie, a comforting glimpse
of the way we were through a window, separate, distant, and with a longing that can never
be cured, and remind ourselves that we're an infinite product of where we've been,
that memories are real, even if they no longer exist.
They happened, and disappeared, and we kept something from them.
Some token of their passage through time.
And only in that way can we revisit what can't be retrieved.
Where the tape runs out, and it goes back on the shelf.
