| abstract
| - One of the reasons for Hollywood History is the average scriptwriter or executive having a very cursory understanding of the era in which they're setting the story. Usually, they just want to take advantage of the basic 'theme' of that period, and figure that most viewers won't be able to tell the difference, anyway. The other, equally onerous culprit for simplifying history is nostalgia, especially where dealing with recent history. For example, you almost never will find a movie or show set in The Sixties that does not paint the time as an idealistic period. In that period, we're told, every person below the age of 25 was a free-thinker and activist, kids cared about the future and were willing to fight for it, everybody had orgies all the time, and revolution was just around the corner ... or that's how nostalgia would have it seem. It gets worse with The Fifties. Since many writers grew up in the Fifties, it's rarely shown as anything but wholesome and brilliant, with Nothing but Hits blaring out of every radio and every teenager playing rock'n'roll. Despite the continuing mistreatment of black people, the lead in paint, gasoline and food cans, and the (supposed) threat of nuclear war, the Fifties is often considered something of a golden age. The worst parts of earlier decades are similarly not brought up or even totally ignored. The reverse is also often true; later decades such as the The Seventies and The Eighties -- which, not entirely coincidentally, many of these writers were no longer growing up in, being adults -- will be painted in a very negative light, with all innocence lost and the dream most definitely being over. The negative aspects of these decades will be stressed, and any positive things quietly ignored. This is so all-pervading that it affects even younger writers who weren't even alive during the decade in question, as a kind of "proto-nostalgia". This could have something to do with the way pop-cultural output is treated; between the 20- and 30- years ago mark is when the clothes go from hideously dated to retro chic, the TV shows from ubiquitous reruns to material that has to be sought out, the cars from clapped-out clunkers to seldom-seen, cherished classics and the music from stuff the "new music" stations play on the commercial-free Sunday afternoons to bona-fide oldies. Similarly, the cultural output that is remembered and stands the test of time tends to be the good stuff (or at least, the stuff that the majority of people enjoyed), with the rubbish being quickly left behind or forgotten; as such, we tend to remember The Sixties as being a time of great music because the stronger music of the decade keeps getting played and covered and included on soundtracks, whereas the rubbish music (or at least, the music that no one listened to) has been quietly forgotten. Of course, there are plenty of (often younger) writers who happen to like the present fine, thank you very much, and can be quite keen on skewering this trope by pointing out exactly what they think was wrong about the past (often with a none-too-subtle 'screw you' directed at the perpetrators of this kind of mindset in the process). This is not surprising, as all the writers mentioned above did the same thing when they were young. Suffice to say that these young, hip writers so eager to take the past down a peg will in twenty years' time be as irrationally nostalgic for the 2010s as George Lucas is for the late Fifties. This trope is not nearly as awesome today as it was in past centuries. For example, to Stendhal (1783-1842), everything went downhill after the fall of Napoleon; Gibbon thought the world went to hell after the death of Marcus Aurelius, in 180 AD. Hesiod insisted things had been going wrong at least since the invention of iron, making the trope Older Than Feudalism. See also Ye Goode Olde Days and Nostalgia Filter. Examples of Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be include:
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