"But I don't want to be like me.
I want to be like the people in the movie."
--Barbara Stanwyk as Stella Dallas
in Stella Dallas
nostalgia
"These state DAR members are in front of Rosalie, an 1820 mansion on the east bank of the Mississippi River. It was the home of a cotton merchant. The members wanted to know why they had to sit on my old couch when they had an even older red sofa inside. 'Ours is so much more beautiful,' one said."
--Kevin Clarke and Horst Wackerbarth, The Red Couch Book
"tradition"
identification Returning to the past to find...what? Comfort, simplicity, explanations? We re-tell stories, recreate rituals and dress up to "understand" our ancestors, but it can easily turn into fantasy and escape.

Freud talked about repetition as hysterical; he was talking about women. Film critic Stephen Heath has spoken of repetition in cinematic melodrama as "the return to the same in order to abolish the difficult time of desire, and the resurgence in that very moment of inescapable difference." Are such returns seen always as lacking some necessary mastery over time, movement, objects of desire, and thus seen always as already gendered? Nostalgia is constructed as a female activity.

Of course it can be dangerous to latch on to some nostalgic ideal of the past in order to escape the complications of the present and the demands of the future. But is it then necessary to close off this space entirely? Can we imagine some other, productive way of circling back? Can this fit in a forever-forward technological surge? Will vr time travel structure going-back as pure escape, fantastical entertainment without any politics? Will it make (or keep) nostalgia dangerous?