There’s No Nostalgia Like Hollywood Nostalgia

Thomas Leitch

doi:10.3390/h7040101

Abstract

This essay argues that the complexities of the nostalgic impulse in Hollywood cinema are inadequately described by Svetlana Boym’s particular description of Hollywood as “both induc[ing] nostalgia and offer[ing] a tranquilizer” and her highly influential general distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Instead, it contends that Hollywood departs in important ways from the models of both the restorative nostalgia established by the heritage cinema and Great Britain and the reflective nostalgia commonly found in American literature. Using a wide range of examples from American cinema, American literature, and American culture, it considers the reasons why nostalgia occupies a different place and seeks different kinds of expressions in American culture than it does in other national cultures, examines the leading Hollywood genres in which restorative nostalgia appears and the distinctive ways those genres inflect it, and concludes by urging a closer analysis of the more complex, multi-laminated nostalgia Hollywood films offer as an alternative to Boym’s highly influential categorical dichotomy.

Highlights

This essay argues that the complexities of the nostalgic impulse in Hollywood cinema are inadequately described by Svetlana Boym’s particular description of Hollywood as “both induc[ing]
To speak of American cultural nostalgia already implies, as Boym acknowledges, that different national cultures and their cinemas are shaped by very different kinds of nostalgia
The most frequently discussed of these nostalgic cinemas, the so-called heritage cinema of Great Britain, began in the 1980s with movies like Chariots of Fire (1981) and A Room with a View (1985) that expressed what Cairns Craig called “the crisis of identity which England passed through during the Thatcher years” through sustained images of “film as conspicuous consumption, the country houses, the paneled interiors, the clothes which have provided a good business for New York fashion houses selling English country style to rich Americans” (Craig 2001, p. 3)

Summary

Introduction

This essay argues that the complexities of the nostalgic impulse in Hollywood cinema are inadequately described by Svetlana Boym’s particular description of Hollywood as “both induc[ing].

Results

Conclusion