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Memories may be beautiful, some movie director once crooned. And yet what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget. But if such tidy psychological mathematics balance the books on our dim recollections of God, country, and classic Detroit craftsmanship, why don't they ring even faintly true when it comes to pop culture?
Apparently, when your Fright Factory is stocked with enough Play-Doh, nothing's too excruciating to revive. The latest in an increasingly familiar line of dumpster-divertissement, "Retro Hell: Life In the '70s and '80s from Afros To Zotz seems engineered to tuck neatly alongside Alt.Culture, Thrift Score, and a host of other guides to the rerun ruins. Collated by the editors of Ben is Dead, Retro Hell features the walking-through-the-park-reminiscing of a Salvation Army's worth of hipsters (several of whom contribute to this site). But all too often, the effort's white-elephant stampede over the idiot meadows of youth tramples blindly over well-marked cliffs. At its best, the pet rock they polish is vintage glam. At its worst, the book's faux ironic distance comes off as a meager substitute for either genuine enthusiasm or outright contempt. Everything old is old again, and again, and again.
In their guilty lamentations of "frozen memories," the Retro Hell correspondents tend to forget that the hell of retro is only as frigid as you make it. When contributor Bruce Elliot poses a set of moral choices in the book's introduction - wisdom vs. information, adolescence against adulthood - culminating in the "future belonging to us ... or to retro," it's as if the closing speech of The Brothers Karamazov were only aging fiction, after all: "There is nothing nobler, stronger, healthier, and more helpful in life than a good remembrance, particularly a remembrance from our childhood."
Trapped in a mental Malachi crunch between retro hell and what Anne Burdick called neomania, today's aesthetes - the Ben is Dead cabal, the Alt.Cultists, and admittedly ourselves - smack into the half-inflated airbags of irony and skepticism. The predicament isn't new, and others have extricated themselves from such wrecks. In 1914, salvaging the least doctrinaire elements of both futurism and conservatism, Walter Lippmann saw not only that "the loss of the sense of the past has come to mean a definite emancipation" but also that "the past can be a way to freedom.... Wherever routine and convention become unbearable weights, the abundance of the past is a source of liberty."
If retro has felt more hellish than liberating of late, it's precisely because mining the past's abundance has become routine and conventional. Instead of just reiterating the manifest daftiny of Warren Beatty's sister, point instead to her super performance in Being There. That neglected 1982 Hal Ashby classic manages to convert goofy TV references such as Basketball Jones into sublime criticism. And as such, it's a model for anyone who hopes to deploy pop-cultural literacy without abetting fashion in smashing the true meaning of it.
It's not that kitsch can't be sublime. Rather, our categorizing impulses block our capacity for sheer transportation. Lovers of process, not progress, we "don't want to talk about anything else," as a Repo Man once proclaimed. "We're just dedicated to our favorite shows - Saturday Night Live, Monday Night Football, Dallas, The Jeffersons, Gilligan's Island, Flintstones."
Could it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line? Um, the second part. To revisit simple pleasures without becoming simpletons, retro must give way to repo. The difference is more than a couple of keystrokes, and is best expressed in terms of pop music, which is always transparent about its influences. A song like "Living Thing" merits a fresh airing not because it caps the joyless exercise that is Boogie Nights, nor because the ELO concept never fails to raise titters, but because Jeff Lynne was a first-rate craftsman whose creative misreadings of The Beatles led to some original and really just gorgeous music.
When life feels generic, it is often for the most literal reason: We were trained to filter everything in terms of genre. The turning point for retrohellions came with the release of the movie version of the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert soundtrack. By celebrating lost '70s hits through camp fashion, it forced songs like "Dancing Queen" to be seen, not heard, through the lens of style and genre. You no longer listened to an old song because you liked it, but because it made you titter knowingly. Watch a video or notice an actress, and one's overdeveloped associative reflex kicks right in. (The Verve? Leonard Cohen meets ELO. Gwyneth Paltrow? Ingrid Bergman mates Joe Camel.)
The first step from retro to repo is simple attitude adjustment: the will to strip oldies but goodies of historic trappings. Once your karma policeman stops handing out style tickets, a lot of previously untouchable material springs from the shadows. It's a lot easier to get pleasure out of a standard like "That's All" once you make peace with Phil Collins' downward spiral into Sussudiotics.
While the retroist submerges himself in a Mr. Bubble bath of nostalgia, the repoist finds ways to remember the reason for bathing at all. Remove the type from a logo or package to see its design anew. Mix down the anthemic chorus from an old hit to better hear its always subtler verse and bridge - Life During Wartime without parties and discos, Our House without middles of the street. What's left is not form divested of content, but content divested of misleading generic cues.
As for Retro Hell itself: Put the book under your mattress and let it age 10 years or so. When you finally dust it off, you can indulge in nostalgia for our nostalgic, metamannered late '90s. (Omigod! Remember Suck? Hey, one more jibe for all the old jibes!)
So long as we're looking backward, Bellamy-style, you may recall some variation on this brain-twister beloved of all algebra teachers: A hipster is moving from San Francisco to New York. Each day she roadtrips exactly half the distance remaining across the country. When will she arrive?
Now (hold that thought), the '90s looking-glass has already reflected trends through Reagan's first term, not excluding breakdancing and cocaine. If the arbitrary energy building behind millennialism can be harnessed for any good purpose, it should be to wipe our 21st-century slate clean - a collective New Year's resolution to get all retroism out of our system before Christ returns to accept his Lifetime Achievement VH1 Fashion Award.
Dividing by twos like our roadtripping hipster in an ever-accelerating drive toward 31 December 1999, we should whip through the late '80s in the next six months, arrive in Grunge and the Gulf by fall, then enter final approach to the dizzying asymptote of the Future Present. The final seconds of the century will be thus spent reviewing the moments immediately preceding, investing new but fatal meaning in the phrase, "that was so five seconds ago."
And then if - as the song goes - we had to do it all again, we not only couldn't, we also wouldn't.
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This article appeared originally in Suck.
