Watching Deadpool and Wolverine, and engaging with the discourse surrounding it after, (I notoriously skip trailers, spoilers, and all but the most superficial reviews and prefer walking into movies relatively open-minded), one of the recurring themes in those discussions is how much the movie trades on nostalgia.
And with the recent release of Deadpool & Wolverine, there’s a renewed look at how nostalgia is driving (or if not behind the wheel, definitely tucked in with the seatbelts on. To a degree, this is understandable, as Hollywood is fairly risk-averse (seriously, this is the reason why you’ll see 100 sequels or adaptations in a given year, and only rarely does an original property break through). Of course there is more than just track record that nostalgia trades in on. Witness how it was deployed in the recent Twin Peaks: The Return.
I think they’re right, in so far as nostalgia can act as a balm, so that often people want more of that thing that they liked, but this isn’t necessarily a point of critique. There’s nothing wrong with liking what you like, and asking for (and maybe even getting) more of that, when it is available.
Three Fandoms
I’m thinking the best way to illustrate this would be by looking at three (enduring) fandoms here: Star Trek, Pro-wrestling, and comic books, and how they relate to and engage with new material produced for them.
These fandoms aren’t exactly equivalent, but they’re more alike beneath the surface than is usually acknowledged. All three cater to niche fandoms, and have persisted long enough that most of the population had had the opportunity to engage with them at some point in their lives. The slipping in and out of the zeitgeist that comes with successive waves of popularity is a critical part of that, as nostalgic parents can introduce their children to the media (and by extent the fandoms) that they enjoyed when they were younger.
Both comic books and pro-wrestling live in this weird kinda Eternal Now, that can acknowledge (and play off) their history (often as a means of generating credibility or cache), but continually, inexorably, have to put out new product. Sometimes they’ll re-introduce old characters in a new way to play off that, either through legacy characters or children (or relatives) of past performers but the trends are largely the same.
Star Trek is different (for the most part) as it has to continually create new stuff that is kinda like the old stuff, but still new and distinct enough that the fans will enjoy it. Witness the titles it has put out during the streaming era, with the dichotomy between Discovery, Picard, The Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds, all coming out during roughly the same time period, and all engendering different reactions as they touch down on different points along that “nostalgia curve”.
Obviously, other properties play with the nostalgia curve at times too. Especially long running ones: Star Wars and Dr. Who come to mind; some gaming titles like Dungeons and Dragons, Magic:the Gathering, Pokemon, and Warhammer 40000 are getting old enough to test the waters as well.
So perhaps we should get to the point:
What is the Nostalgia Curve?
Maybe it’s best to think of the amount of nostalgia a given property evokes as existing along a gradient (maybe it can be a continuum, but we use that a lot. This time, we’re grading on the curve.) When something appears in a long-running piece of media, one with an inherent fandom, it can be a challenge to separate something from appearing for nostalgia purposes (i.e. marketing or whatever) and something existing just because it’s part of the setting)
Where you go “Hey look, it’s a wookie! they last showed up in Season 1 Episdoe 8 of the Acolyte! It’s been 20 years!” (says the viewer from the grimdark future of 2044).
(As unlikely as that scenario may be: Wookie’s Will Never Die; they’re the number one furry beast in my heart (behind Cookie Monster, and maybe Snuffleupagus. Wookies are top 5, is what I’m getting at.)
But back to the point I think I’m making is that the commodification of nostalgia, where whether or not a given movie or project even gets made depends on how much the perceived nostalgia factor is worth, is really the issue.
If the perceived value is enough, if you’re far enough along the nostalgia curve, then the movie can get made. And Hollywood being a place where money talks, it may be worth trying to create nostalgia for something that never existed in the first place. If you can create (or incept?) a “fake-thing-which-evokes-real-nostalgia” (actually name pending some focus groups), then you can commodify that in the same way that Deadpool did with Wolverine, and the “comic book accurate costume” that still isn’t 100%.
Nostalgic Memes
Nostalgia is representational (in a memetic way). Like earlier in the flick where Deadpool explicitly calls out the montage during a fourth wall break, and each scene in the montage is iconic within the comics, and instantly recognizable to a long-time fan, even though they never have occurred on screen at any point prior.
Every point of nostalgia is an assemblage (or container, or docker) for all the associations that accompany it. And these are all “shorthand” for everything else that is associated with those books. The time they were published, the creators (writers, artists, and editors), the events that they occurred during (“Age of Apocalypse” “Fall of the Mutants”, etc.).
Thus each and every nostalgic element packs in more and more, until a meta-textual movie like Deadpool & Wolverine can’t help but burst at the seams.
But in this case, it’s in a way that feels deserved. A recent IGN review of D&W lumped it in with the adaptation of Ready Player One, a film similarly stuffed to the brim with “Hey, I recognize that!” moments, and criticized it as being one of Steven Spielberg’s weakest films. Now, Senor Spielbergo may have forgotten more about making fantastic movies than most will ever know, so were the failures of RP1 Spielberg’s fault, or was he simply faithful to the source material?
(I’m asking as I found RP1 (The Book) execrable, and punted it at around the 20 page mark. I declined to watch the RP1 (The Movie.)
What we’re getting at here is that nostalgia is a hot commodity. It isn’t going away any time soon, and even though we all yearn for something fresh and new, and endlessly scrolling on our apps of choice to find it, we end up finding community and joy in our shared nostalgia for things we’re pretty sure we never saw, at least not the way we imagined them to be.
