5 - A Return to the 1950s: The Dangers in Utopia

Summary

The nostalgia film seems to privilege a 1950s past. And although many of the films already discussed have included images and genres from the 1930s and 1940s as well as the 1950s, it is this latter period that is referenced with more insistent regularity. Of these films, however, only American Graffiti and Badlands have come close to being set in that decade. In this chapter I will consider films that not only recycle past forms and styles from the 1950s, but do so by setting their stories specifically in that period. These films, which were produced in the late 1970s and 1980s, return to the past from a changed historical perspective and so display an attitude significantly different from those already considered. Here the meaning of the 1950s is changed. In Grease, for example, the past is embraced with new fervor, whereas in Last Exit to Brooklyn it is indicted as never before.

Jameson has already noted the privileged status of the 1950s in postmodern works, but he has not considered the variations among these 1950s representations, nor how they have altered over time. Before we address these issues, we must consider why Americans found the return to the 1950s so fascinating. Jameson supplies an answer to this question by observing that 1950s-inspired postmodern works (such as American Graffiti)

set out to recapture … the hence-forth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era; and one tends to feel that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire – not merely the stability and prosperity of a Pax Americana but also the first naïve innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs.