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Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (Columbia University Press) by Gary Cross
The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso) by Owen Hatherley
Our first loves are not people, but things. The propensity to fetishise objects through childish wonder is celebrated in a vignette in John Banville’s latest novel, The Blue Guitar, whose narrator waxes nostalgic about cereal box toys: the plastic trinket had been “a sacred object, a talisman made magical simply – simply! – by being from elsewhere”. Toys feature prominently in Gary Cross’s Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism, which explores the adult yearning to retrieve that early sense of awe. Cross’s subjects range from the middle-aged women of the United Federation of Doll Clubs to suburban dads at vintage car shows; their pastimes outline a pop history of postwar Americana, from the mod con boom of the 1950s to the video-game nihilism of the Reagan era.
It is easy to scorn such hobbies as indicators of arrested maturity or escapist regression. Indeed, reading the author’s account of a Hot Wheels convention in Los Angeles, where nearly 3,000 adults each paid a $60 fee to see and trade in the miniature racers, one is tempted to do just that. But Cross portrays these enthusiasts in an affectionate and generous light, acknowledging the communal vibrancy of their subcultures. Reflecting on the hubbub of a classic car parade in Milwaukee, he observes that “behind all of the posturing and braggadocio, shop talk and sentimentality, competition, and class, age, and ethnic divisions was a culture that binds men and memories to their machines.”
Cross notes a generational shift in the way people consume nostalgia. Whereas the typical baby-boomer sought a return to the comforts of halcyon youth only after a substantial interim immersed in grown-up pursuits like working and starting a family, the Generation-Xer – who was young in the 1980s or ’90s – can indulge their infatuations alongside responsible adulthood without fear of social disapproval. Nostalgic latitude and real life play out not as discrete stages but in synthesis; it is either an eternal adolescence or a ludic utopia, depending on your take. The bearded patrons of Shoreditch’s much-maligned Cereal Killer café spring, inevitably, to mind.
So much for Generation X; what of their successors, the “millennials”? Might the cultural heterogeneity of the Web 2.0 era diminish the sense of a shared culture that is the very currency of the nostalgia industry? Perhaps, but the latter will still persist. It is bound up in something that transcends the vicissitudes of cultural production – an innate human impulse, poignantly futile, to try and stop time itself.
It is one thing to revisit one’s own past, quite another to appropriate someone else’s. Owen Hatherley’s The Ministry of Nostalgia considers the proliferation of midcentury-themed tat that has coincided with the austerity economics of the past few years, from the twee aesthetic of Cath Kidston accessories to the ubiquitous “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters, complemented in the entertainment sphere by throwback bands like Mumford & Sons and period TV shows like Call the Midwife. This phenomenon is riddled with contradictions: though enjoyed mainly by cosmopolitan liberals, some of its tropes are implicitly reactionary, idealising a vision of Britain in which class conflict and mass migration are airbrushed away.
Austerity chic’s connotation of national consensus – the warm glow of togetherness that is the basis of its emotional pull – is false. Many people at the time found those Ministry of Information notices deeply patronising. (Hatherley reminds us that the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster never made it into circulation, though others like it did.) The election of a leftwing Labour government in 1945 was the British public’s verdict on not only a government but an entire way of life, “a rejection of institutions that had treated them like scum”. People had only “carried on”, Hatherley writes, because they had no alternative. There is something complacently narcissistic about turning that into wallpaper.
The Ministry of Nostalgia argues that 21st-century Britain is engaged in a kind of collective denial, retreating into an imagined past where society is “solid, stoic, public-spirited, as opposed to the the depolititicised, hysterical and privatised reality of contemporary Britain”. Hatherley’s specialist area is architecture, and a good deal of this book centres on social housing as a cipher for the fortunes of postwar social democracy. “In Britain today,” he writes, “we are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same time as we’re privatising its remnants.”
Hatherley is thoughtful, engaging and occasionally acerbic; his caustic description of London’s Imperial War Museum as “a Bravo Two Zero version of a PFI hospital” is deliciously apt. The Ministry of Nostalgia is a trenchant appeal for a more authentic togetherness – a return to the collectivist ethos that informed much of what was best about British democracy, and has been under sustained attack since the 1980s.
