When Nostalgia Goes Over Your Head

I don’t have any interest in the Pokemon Go game. I’m not saying that to look down at my nose at anyone who does. I’m also not saying it to broadcast how little I care because that kind of thing gets dangerously close to bragging that “I don’t even own a television.” The main reasons I don’t care are that I never got into computer or video games and I often forget I have a smartphone.

The other reason for my apathy, something that started me thinking, is that phenomena like these are partially rooted in nostalgia and sometimes I just don’t have it. I remember Pokemon (I guess it was a cartoon?) but I’m not of the right age group for to have any warm feelings toward it. So combine a disinterest in computer games and that I only have a vague knowledge of Pokemon and that means I won’t be playing it.

I think a lot of pop culture depends on nostalgia and if you were the wrong age to experience it the first time around or don’t remember it, you won't care about it today. I have a notorious blind spot for the movies of the ‘80s. A lot of people watched those movies on a loop as kids but I never did. I saw them once decades ago and didn’t revisit them so I have no remembrance of what happened in Karate Kid 2 or Mannequin or Ghostbusters. If I saw them again, they would honestly all be new to me. They weren’t important enough for my mind to retain. 

(Now ‘80s music is another story and I remember every lyric. This is because it was so much easier to hear a three-minute song over and over again, particularly when the radio was one of the only options and repeated everything constantly. The radio was an easy thing to listen to passively in the background, so it ingrained pop into my head, whereas I had to make an effort to seek out movies and often never bothered.)

There were also a few ‘80s movies I didn’t see until I was an adult, like The Princess Bride or Labyrinth or Hocus Pocus, and thus I have zero emotional attachment to them. If you start quoting one of them, I won’t really have a reaction. The only reason I know about the quotes at all is through osmosis from people quoting the movies all the time.

I love The Goldbergs but the ‘80s movies are often my least favorite part, just because I’m so unfamiliar with some of them. When they do homages, it flies over my head. I watched a few episodes of Fresh Off the Boat and like the characters but the ‘90s nostalgia doesn’t always connect with me. (I guess I technically came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s because my high school years straddled both decades but I am defiantly not a “’90s kid.” It’s ‘80s all the way.) I can’t hear a Tupac song and provide some kind of reaction. I’m like a robot learning about emotion.

Anyway, here is a list of ‘80s movies I’ve never seen: Pretty in Pink, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future 2, Back to the Future 3, Coming to America, License to Drive, Risky Business, Predator, Road House, Stand by Me, Tron, Beetlejuice, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Some Kind of Wonderful, Caddyshack. I can hear you now, gasping “How can you have never seen (insert beloved classic here)?!”