| Contemporary convergent media has proven to be nothing short of obsessed with nostalgic mediated pasts. Examples of this trend include the current rash of remakes in film, the video game industry's reliance on vintage game downloads, and television's nostalgic flow carried through programming and advertising. Just being preoccupied with the past is not inherently problematic, as any history can teach us about the present and future. However, this is not the specific type of nostalgic subjectivity engendered by contemporary media. Instead of encouraging an engagement with the past that functions as an adaptive mirror with which we can compare and contrast our contemporary situation, the past is presented as an individualized version that transfixes us as uncritical citizens of our own culture. Melancholic attachments to beloved lost media objects are encouraged; ones that refuse to properly mourn and release the object of their attention. This contemporary phenomenon is explored from a cross-media perspective, examining divergent but interrelated topics. These include the creation of a collector's mentality and playlist past through the increased availability of a digital-archive apparatus, the behavioral repetition of nostalgia in explicitly and implicitly nostalgic video games, the epistemology of the film remake in the age of the re-imagined "classic," and the commodity flow of nostalgia through all areas of televisual content.;The cultural implications of a cross-media eternal return to nostalgia is an arresting of individuals in an uncritical mindset that has increasingly defined who we are as people and societies by what media we consumed as children. Whether it is wearing a t-shirt with a favorite Karate Kid reference or rearranging a DVD shelf full of television box sets, the unblinking eye towards the past knows no progress, or at the very least does not employ the past as a comparative tableau to adaptively engage with the present or future. It is not that one still loves any of the specific texts mentioned in this dissertation, from Back to the Future to The Legend of Zelda. Instead, it is that media doggedly encourages a devotion of libidinal energy towards one's own specific and myopic playlist past that feigns a shared cultural base but really points to an insular and postmodern surface understanding of history. |
