We Have to Go Back
Time Loop Plots and the TV Nostalgia Trap: Part I
“I would just like to go back to that age and do it over again and not make so many fucking mistakes”—Christina Ricci.1
In the opening episode of The Resort (Peacock, 2022), Yucatan tourist Emma (Cristin Milioti) is hungover, bus-sick, and participating in one of those interminable package excursions you never quite seem to remember signing up for. Willing herself into the moment, she accelerates her quad-bike into a corner and promptly goes straight off it and over the side of the jungle trail. Bloodied and woozy at the base of her fall, she reaches into the leaf mould beside her and pulls out an old, weather-beaten Motorola Razr flip phone. Later, as her oblivious husband Noah (William Jackson Harper) snoozes in their hotel room, she sneaks out and into town, where a mobile phone shop miraculously still stocks the old Motorola range. Once she transfers the SIM card from her jungle find into her new purchase, she finds herself transfixed by the ghostly digital relics of a life left on hold at the end of 2007—the text messages and holiday snaps of a missing, college-aged American tourist named Sam (Skyler Gisondo). The phone becomes a kind of portal, a “time machine,” into the memories and sensations of an earlier, less complicated phase of life.2
Like its higher profile streaming TV counterpart, Yellowjackets (Showtime, 2021–), The Resort uses the uncanny charge produced by obsolescent media technologies to explore the human distances—emotional, cultural, psychological—that we now seem increasingly convinced separate our hyper-mediatised present-day selves from who we imagine we once were. By digitally recreating the Razr’s signature text messaging font, The Resort’s creators wanted to play on their millennial viewers’ nostalgic media memories and hook them in by blending them with those of the characters on screen:
When you think about what messages you received in that font from maybe your first crush, your best friend, or whatever, during those teenage years it’s just kind of subconsciously burned into our brains. This tells the story of our lives, essentially.3
Via the endlessly unfolding recessions of the pop-culture nostalgia cycle, the pre-crash ’00s are now taking their inevitable form as “a distant yet desirable past,” their fashions, mores, and technologies repurposed as beguiling places of narrative refuge from the supposedly more complex dilemmas and predicaments of the present day.4
By setting the older of the show’s two major timelines in 2007, The Resort also implicitly positions its action on the edge of another psycho-temporal chasm—the age of the iPhone or smartphone, whose immersive surfaces and densely networked connectivities “disembody” and “de-realize” our perceptions of the world even as they appear to put us intimately “in touch” with it.5 Venturing into Cancún to find the phone shop, Emma holds her iPhone 13 rigidly in front of her face, navigating via a Maps overlay rather than finding clues in the contours of the place itself. Earlier, we had glimpsed her perched alone on the edge of the pool her first evening at the resort, mutely asking her phone via a pop-quiz interface whether she should leave her relationship. Pointedly, the show juxtaposes this zombified and digitally enmeshed version of Emma with a flashback to her 2007 self, spontaneously striking up a conversation “IRL” at a Huntington Beach bonfire with the man who would become her husband. This earlier self—this sense of easy connection with and embodied being in the world—is what Emma has lost and partly what, we are given to understand, she is trying to recover via an engagement with the mysteries and media technologies of the past.6
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Yellowjackets is also (to an extent) a show about lives lived in the absence of present-day communicative technologies. As Angela Watercutter points out in a piece on the show in Wired, the initial events inYellowjackets unfold in a fundamentally pre-internet world (or at least, in a world devoid of the internet as we know it now), and this is undeniably a part of its appeal to contemporary audiences. “American teens in 1996 barely had AOL,” she writes, “and none of them had smartphones. They listened to Snow’s ‘Informer’ because that’s what was on the radio and watched While You Were Sleeping on VHS because there was no Netflix.”7
The streaming platforms that host The Resort and Yellowjackets appeal to the periods they are set in by releasing new episodes weekly rather than giving viewers access to the full series all at once. By resisting the new temporal, bingewatch-encouraging norms of streaming television, the transmission strategies of both series hark back to the rhythms and viewer experiences of traditional scheduled television, before the TiVo and streaming revolutions. In doing so, they create the illusion that each new episode (like a “live” programme on ’90s pre-digital TV) is a “temporal object”—an unmissable viewing “occasion.” Yet, as Watercutter notes of Yellowjackets, the current global reach and profile of this apparently “lo-fi” story would have been impossible to achieve in a non-digitally networked world. In their desire for immersion in the show’s synthetic past, online fan communities such as r/yellowjackets have produced a depth, volume, and global synchronisation of peer-to-peer commentary and analysis that simply had no parallel in 1996. The modes of collective viewership and intensive fan interpretation that agglomerate around a show like Yellowjackets resemble the “exchange of knowledge” and “collective construction of meaning” that media theorist Pierre Lévy (writing around the time that the initial events in Yellowjackets take place) predicted that the globalised internet could produce, but which then existed in only their most emergent forms.8
In collective interviews and media appearances, the cast and crew of Yellowjackets are often anxious to make it clear that, although large portions of the show are set in 1996, the show is in no way governed by the dominant affects, ethos, and mores of the 1990s. Interviews describe a zero-tolerance attitude towards “body-shaming” on set and the use of “intimacy coordinators” to ensure that certain “upsetting” scenes were filmed with the fully realised consent and buy-in of all concerned.9 No matter what their ages and national origins are, when discussing the show, cast members are generally able to speak fluently in the therapeutic languages of contemporary Hollywood progressivism. When asked by Vulture if there was anything about the 1990s that she missed, a clearly irritated Juliette Lewis snapped, “I don’t miss anything. I like living in the present. I’m not looking back.” Melanie Lynskey cited the progressively aligned virtues of the riot grrl scene.10 Christina Ricci’s apparent slip into more basic ’90s nostalgia, however, was less about the ’90s themselves than a desire for retrospective self-development—the fantasy of the fully optimised self that would emerge from not having made all the “fucking mistakes” of youth.11
Viewer attitudes to the show’s simulation of the ’90s are, arguably, more ambivalent. For some younger viewers, especially, there may be something emergently transgressive about the ’90s themselves. The Millennial and Generation Z embrace of mainstream ’90s cultural artefacts like Friends has formerly relied on the comforting, uncontroversial, “everybody's favourite blanket” quality of this kind of show. “Cancelled culture,” however, is that which finds itself no longer in alignment with respectable “network values”—a contested category that increasing portions of ’90s and ’00s culture now seem to occupy. This form of cultural cancellation results from what Louise Perry (following C. S. Lewis) calls the “chronological snobbery” of the present moment, according to which the moral dimensions of seemingly all cultural artefacts from the recent past must be continually (and suspiciously) reappraised, scrutinised to see how they measure up to the latest forms and expressions of “progress.”12
As more and more pieces of formerly anodyne mainstream culture are newly coded as “problematic” according to the accelerating logic of the “progress model,” why wouldn’t they pick up an appealingly transgressive charge, becoming available for reappropriation by emergent subcultural formations seeking to distinguish themselves from dominant modes of affective culture? From this perspective, the politics of cultural nostalgia do not involve simply taking “refuge” in a more “innocent” or less technologically mediated time. Instead, the past is positioned in an implied positive orientation to a negatively charged present. Nostalgia becomes a potential tool of reaction, critique, or silent repudiation, a way of crystallising what Christopher Lasch called “the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable” in a diminished or circumscribed present.13 For other viewers, it may provide a means of making sense of the odd, retrospective uncanniness that now seems to surround much recent popular culture.
Due to cultural recycling, the visual aesthetics of a film like Sliding Doors (1998), for instance, remain strangely contemporary while the whole texture of narrative and social interaction within it simultaneously presents as somehow "off" and antiquated. Despite its visual and narrative trickery, its embryonic exploration of the idea of “real time,” the plot of Sliding Doors is still fundamentally pre-digital and pre-mobile phone, generated (as it is) by a series of missed connections stemming from the insufficiency of landlines. Viewed from the perspective of the 2020s, a film like this cannot help but evoke feelings of absence—something like the simultaneously painful and delicious ache of nostalgia. Yet, what is obviously absent in the contemporary-seeming yet ultimately dated world of the film is not missed exactly, but simply registered. Instantaneous, peer-to-peer communication via mobile phone and social media resolves upon reflection into a fundamental element of the lifeworld that demarcates that period from this.14 These acts of viewer recognition are fundamentally ambivalent. Our responses to the rapid changes in culture, psyche, and affect wrought by our new networked digital technologies lack, as yet, an agreed-upon shared language for articulating them. They operate instead on the level of what Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling"—an often private, unvoiced, but still potent sense that something major has changed. Viewing media from the 1990s and before, we experience the uncanny presence of a "pre-internet" age that didn't regard itself as such when these films were originally made.
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It is possible, however, that the forms of psychological recognition that currently seem to bridge the cultures of the 2020s and the 1990s—what Watercutter calls our “deeply wistful appreciation of those flannel-clad days before social media and smartphones took over teens’ lives”—are more basic and more narcissistic.15 As Chuck Klosterman observes in The Nineties, the “flannel-clad,” grunge-inflected culture that Yellowjackets pays homage to was (like the present moment) itself a period of abrupt cultural turnover. Grunge represented a moment when “an underground mentality forced to the surface” and, like some sort of catastrophic cultural lava flow, remodelled the global youth-cultural landscape in very short order.16 Assisted by the concentrated mimetic powers of the music video, local rock scenes and subcultures (like Shoegaze and Grebo in the United Kingdom) were swiftly assimilated (or swept into irrelevance) as bands sought to imitate the new sounds, new fashions, and new affects and sensibilities emanating out of the American Pacific Northwest. The modes of thought and being in the world (affectlessness; ironic detachment; forms of “ironic” consumerism and cultural recycling) associated with grunge and the globalised “hipsterism” that supplanted it were passed on swiftly to the broader culture in a way that went well beyond the simple restructuring of individual musical taste.17
Over the past ten years, we have seen formerly marginal subcultural affects, belief systems, and forms of politesse—from those of the alt-right to the “successor ideology”—move from the circumscribed digital “underground” of Tumblr, imageboards, and forums to the centres of global culture in ways reminiscent of the grunge and hipster remodellings of the 1990s.18 The ’90s nostalgia associated with Yellowjackets fandom may represent, then, a sense of contemporary resonance and recognition as well as a nostalgic desire for “escape” from an overly complex present. The “selves” who curate period fandoms “perform” and “construct” their identities using a series of repurposed cultural “fragments.”19 The new configurations of "period revival" that emerge may bear little resemblance to the period as it was actually lived and experienced. Under the regime of real-time digital nostalgia, seemingly random fragments of the past are isolated and venerated in a way that would seem deeply weird to those who were actually there. We can see this in the way that 1990s mall photography or '80s and '90s-era footage of vox-pop interviews with "ordinary people" in the street are periodically seized upon online as documents of "authentic," pre-digital selves or lost lifeways. What was previously mundane, unremarkable (or, indeed, subject to its own forms of contemporary cultural critique) is now available for radical re-evaluation as a lost "ideal for living."20
Hanging prominently in the penthouse lair of The Resort’s mysterious resort owner, Alex, is a print of Caravaggio’s “Narcissus” (c. 1597-99), in which the youth gazes captivated at his own reflection, unable to tear himself away from the image. In its reappropriation by new forms of fandom, the recent past resolves into something similar. It becomes a series of mirrored screens and surfaces in which we see multiple versions of ourselves across time represented and reflected back for retrospective consumption and evaluation. This endless proliferation of mediatised selves and memories brings with it the illusion of temporal travel and transference, in mind and feeling, if not in body. It also, arguably, involves a temptation to retouch—to remake (or rethink) the more “problematic” aspects of the past in line with our current ideological commitments, to colonise it with our current thoughts. We are given to a form of retrospective emotional presentism, pretending to ourselves and others that how we feel now was also how we felt then.
Far from fixing our identities, however, the digitalised hall of mirrors that online existence presents us with can leave us feeling fatally uncentred and unstuck. We begin to perceive ourselves as wholly contingent beings, mere “versions” of our own personalities awaiting further rounds of optimisation. In the 2017 LCD Soundsystem song, “Tonite,” the narrator laments the effects of this new emotional regime on the culture of music fandom, as the demand for “correctness” according to present standards via retrospective emotional curation impacts on the scene’s own perceptions and memories of itself. Not only will future versions of ourselves inevitably curate any “embarrassing photos” out of existence, but later “versions” still of those “versions” will then “come laughing at everything we thought was important”—potentially curating the scene itself (and all memory of it) out of existence.21 We gaze at a series of liquid (and ultimately liquidateable) interfaces that shimmer and flicker iridescently across time while we wait for the next system update that could sweep them all away in an instant.
Quoted in Rebecca Keegan, “How ‘Yellowjackets’ Stars Survived Hollywood,” Hollywood Reporter (3 August 2022).
In the show’s rather underwhelming final episode, a miraculously preserved Sam performs the mirror version of this action when he is flummoxed by Noah’s current-model iPhone when trying to use it to call his parents.
Resort co-showrunner Allison Miller, quoted in Nicole Gallucci, “‘The Resort’ Showrunner Shares The Importance of Old Tech in the Series,” Decider (1 August 2022). See also writer Andy Siara’s comments on the allure of old SIM cards, quoted in Matt Grobar, “‘The Resort’ Season Finale,” Deadline (1 September 2022).
Merryanna Salem, “How ‘The Resort’ Uses An Old Motorola Razr To Craft Its Perfectly Bonkers Mystery,” Junkee (2 August 2022). See also Grafton Tanner, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2020).
Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, translated by Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), p. 23.
Of course, it is not the iPhone itself that has caused Emma to withdraw from the world (the narrative fills us in soon enough on the life events that have led her to this point). Her phone addiction, however, provides a serviceable metaphor for her lack of connection with the world around her as the show opens.
Angela Watercutter, “Yellowjackets Is the Internet's Favorite Anti-Internet Show,” Wired (16 January 2022).
Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, translated by Robert Bononno (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1999), p. 63.
See, for instance, Roxana Hadadi, “Yellowjackets’ Courtney Eaton on Lottie’s Heel Turn, Cast Theories, and Her Favorite Needle Drop,” Vulture (9 January 2022); and EJ Dickson, “Melanie Lynskey Is Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take It Anymore. Maybe,” Rolling Stone (15 January 2022).
Quoted in Jen Chaney, “The Nine Women of Yellowjackets On Faking a Plane Crash, Line-Reading Orgasms, and the Enneagram,” Vulture (26 November 2021).
Keegan, “How ‘Yellowjackets’ Stars Survived Hollywood.”
Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), pp. 16-19.
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 82.
For further reflections on the “pre-internet” as a theme retrospectively discernible in late ’90s and early ’00s film and culture, see “Lost in Translation and Romance,” The Lack Podcast (26 March 2021) and episode 77 of the ex.haust podcast (8 February 2022).
Watercutter, “Yellowjackets Is the Internet’s Favorite Anti-Internet Show.”
Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book (New York: Penguin, 2022), p. 38.
Jace Clayton, “Vampires of Lima,” in What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation, edited by Mark Greif, Kathless Ross, and Dayna Tortorici (New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010), p. 27.
See, for instance, Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2017); and Katherine Dee, “Tumblr Transformed American Politics,” American Conservative (11 August 2021).
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).
For just one example among many, see Jaime Brockway, “Take a Walk Down Memory Lane With '90s Mall Staples,” Good Housekeeping (12 November 2020).
LCD Soundsystem, American Dream. DFA Records, 2017.
A very interesting analysis. thank you.