Nostalgia Trap

How much American bootstrap ideology are we obligated to deliver to students? This week Ryan Boyd and I take a look at some "practical advice" about "surviving college" from a couple of recent popular books on the subject, and we discover a disturbing strain of self-help/New Age/Protestant work ethic/grindset philosophy that, perhaps unsurprisingly, fails to acknowledge structural and material barriers (money, food, housing, etc) to student success. So what's a teacher to do? Sell the hustle or sell the trapdoor?

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This week on the livestream we continue our discussion with Justin Rogers-Cooper on the end of the neoliberal order in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the "wormhole" we're entering. Justin offers some context and insights from environmental historian Jason W. Moore's Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), and we listen to some groovy stuff from JPW's excellent new album Something Happening/Always Happening.

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Aaron and Carlee from the 90s movie podcast Hit Factory join us for a conversation about Oliver Stone's 1994 maximalist murder-fest Natural Born Killers. Is this a masterpiece of postmodern satire, or a mindlessly self-indulgent pastiche? As we discover together, this movie is trickier than its cartoonish surface, painting a disturbing vision of American violence and celebrity that, nearly thirty years later, still burns like acid.

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The world is filled with Pete Campbells – people whose wealthy families and social connections allow them to coast through life, easily opening doors that are locked tight for the rest of us. Doesn't that just burn you up? On this week's Gender Trap, Yasmin Nair and I talk about Episode 4 of Mad Men ("New Amsterdam"), in which we are forced to come to terms with the archetypal privileged son, and see him as but one part of a marvelous, odious machine that traps us all. Can we learn to love Pete Campbell?

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We're back on the livestream circuit with Justin Rogers-Cooper, talking about the fragile set of historical circumstances upon which the neoliberal era was built, and how those circumstances are rapidly deteriorating/disappearing into an era of pandemic, imperial war, energy depletion, and planetary emergency. Buckle up, motherfuckers: the age of neoliberalism is dying, and something new is being born.

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Amanda Klein is a professor of Film Studies at East Carolina University and the author of a number of works on American media and society. Her latest book, Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV's Transition to Reality Programming, is a detailed history of MTV's abrupt evolution from music-centered content to non-stop reality programs in the late 90s and early 2000s. In this conversation, Klein discusses how MTV executives chased the elusive millennial dollar in a rapidly changing media landscape, producing shows like The Hills, Jersey Shore, Buckwild, and many others, offering a young, largely white audience an opportunity to imagine themselves occupying a wide range of non-white identities. Which MTV did you watch?

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This week Justin and I consider the life and career of David Bowie, casting him as a master practitioner of pop magick, who harnessed the occult energies of art and celebrity to implant himself permanently in our cultural DNA. Nothing in Bowie's work expresses this more clearly than his final album, Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday and two days before his death from liver cancer in January 2016. In this conversation we talk about Bowie's life, art, and final act, as we reflect on how his particularly curatorial, affectionate, subversive, playful approach to music and stardom resonates in pop culture literally everywhere you look.

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In her incredible new book Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989, historian Penny Von Eschen identifies nostalgia as a corrosive, reactionary force in global politics and popular culture since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and explains how the lingering ghosts of the Cold War haunt our era. From George H.W. Bush hosting an official White House screening of The Hunt for Red October in 1990 to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Von Eschen traces how Cold War nostalgia distorts our vision of the past and forecloses on possibilities for a peaceful future.

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This week Ryan and I watch Wonder Boys (2000), starring Michael Douglas as a professor struggling to write a follow-up to his successful first novel while juggling personal relationships with students and faculty and ingesting massive amounts of drugs and alcohol. The movie depicts a romantic vision of campus life that seems miles away from our respective experiences in 21st century academia, while still reflecting a lot of the things that drew us to academic life in the first place. Is longing for the world of Wonder Boys just another nostalgia trap?

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Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel American Psycho, about a 1980s Wall Street serial killer, is one of the sickest acts of American satire I've read, and Mary Harron's 2000 movie adaptation starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman nails the book's tone while excising some of its most graphic violence. This week Yasmin and I ask: What is American Psycho really about? Is Bateman an aberration, or a perfect representation of American masculinity? What does it take to "fit in" a psychotic society?

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