Screening American Nostalgia: Essays on Pop Culture Constructions of Past Times

Description

This book examines American screen culture and its power to create and sustain values. Looking specifically at the ways in which nostalgia colors the visions of American life, essays explore contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by the screen. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America that arguably never existed. Current socio-cultural challenges are played out onscreen and placed within the historical milieu through a nostalgic lens which is tempered by contemporary conservatism. Essays reveal not only the visual catalog of recognizable motifs but also how these are used to temper the uncertainty of contemporary crises. Media covered spans from 1939's Gone with the Wind, to Stranger Things, The Americans, Twin Peaks, the Fallout franchise and more. Cover Acknowledgments Table of Contents Introduction “No more than a dream remembered” Western Nostalgia and the Cautionary Tale in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance “Never start a fight, always finish it” Stranger Things in Strange Times “­Super-secret spies, living next door” In the Engine Room of the Hyperreal Twin Peaks: The Return and the Gothic of Nostalgic Television Regulating Sex, Surveilling Sex Day Zero The Once and Future Thing What Happened to the “Good Old Days”? About the Contributors Index