What I experienced watching this movie can best be described as nostalgia for nostalgia. As I sang along with the soundtrack, smirked at the cultural references and period-specific design choices, it was as though I was returning to my youth. Except it wasn't my youth. It was my father's youth. It was his youth that formed the basis of my own youth, as though he were reliving it vicariously through me, attempting a redo at whatever he felt went wrong.
And of course that's not too far off from what George Lucas was trying to do with the film. Even though the film has the tone of a period piece, a scarce decade separates the setting from the filming. Lucas does not seem to have been trying to recapture 1962; he was trying to remember it. Lucas was reliving that period through me as the viewer, much as my father did throughout my youth.
Which makes it nearly comical that Ron Howard went on from this sincere, if edited, version of the past to an altogether more disingenuous one in Happy Days--which one might also call nostalgia for nostalgia. The people who watched that show were not entirely those who lived through its setting. Many of them were, like me, those who had only heard the legends and claimed them as part of our own identity.
No comments:
Post a Comment