Free Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen Page B

action-adventure B movies and serials from the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s.
    In the 1970s I was too young to perceive this sudden total national immersion in nostalgia as unprecedented and meaningful, so I’ve wondered since if it only looks like that in retrospect. I was therefore delighted, as I was almost finished with this book, to discover a somewhat shocked contemporaneous account of the phenomenon. It’s a remarkable Rosetta Stone.
    Robert Brustein, the dean of the Yale School of Drama at the time, published a magazine essay in 1975 called “Retread Culture.” Back then, by today’s standards, revivals and remakes and multiple sequels were still extremely rare. The first modern superhero movie ( Superman, 1978) hadn’t yet been made. But Brustein was struck by the strangeness of “the current nostalgia boom,” the “revivals of old stage hits,” “retrospectives of films from the thirties and forties by auteur directors, authentic looking reconstructions of period styles in new films,” “revived musical forms,” and so on. “Much of contemporary American entertainment,” he wrote, “is not so much being created as re-created,” each “recycled commodity” presented in the place of something actually new.
    And he connected this change in popular culture to changes in political and social sentiment, as some kind of reaction to “a deep American discontent with the present time.” This was still five years before Reagan was elected president.
The culture is partially reflecting America’s current conservative mood. A nation which always looked forward is now in the process of looking backward, with considerable longing for the real or imagined comforts of the past. Where audiences once were eager for what was novel and innovative, they now seem more comfortable with the familiar, as if they wished to escape from contemporary difficulties into the more reassuring territory of the habitual and the known.
    He saw too that what made the nostalgia different than earlier blips of cultural revivalism was “its multiplicity and universality,” turning out reproduction antiques in every part of the culture.
Why, it is even becoming difficult to identify a distinctive look for our age which is not a compound of past fashions. The cut of our trousers, the shape of our dresses, the style of our furs, coiffures, cosmetics and jewelry, our very advertising techniques and printing models, are all derived from earlier periods—a mishmash of the frontier West, Art Deco, and the flapper era.
    Brustein mentioned E. L. Doctorow’s fine novel Ragtime, a big bestseller at the time that was also esteemed by the elite, about to win the very first National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Historical fiction hadn’t been considered literary fiction for quite a while, but suddenly it was respectable again.
    Seeming to be strikingly modern wasn’t exactly the same as looking like something from the future, but the two had frequently overlapped during the twentieth century, especially in design and art—in the 1930s, for instance, the concrete slabs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Raymond Loewy’s streamlined locomotives were both. That overlap of the new and the futuristic maxed out in 1964 and 1965, the World’s Fair years, the years the newly coined phrases Jet Age and Space Age achieved their peak usage. The hot women’s fashion line of 1964 consisted of short Lycra-and-plastic dresses printed with giant bright stripes and dots. In fashion, Simon Reynolds suggests that 1965 was “the absolute pinnacle of Newness and Nowness.” In the later 1960s, “almost overnight, everything stopped looking futuristic” in fashion and instead became riffs on the exotically foreign or—because in the ’60s the past was an especially foreign country—the bygone “Victoriana, Edwardiana, twenties and thirties influences.” All at once, the past started to seem charming to many more people, while purely