Self-Theorizing Nostalgia

With grading and syllabi (for the moment) mostly behind me, I'm spending the next three weeks finishing revisions on Flickers of Film. At the core of revisions is fleshing out the primary idea of what kind of nostalgia is at work (beyond regurgitating Svetlana Boym's reflective and restorative modes, or simply following the Jameson/Hutcheon/Dyer debate over pastiche). The idea in progress is one I'm calling "self theorizing nostalgia" (with a knowing node to both Caldwell and the book's inherently autobiographical nature). Here's a possible thesis paragraph I came up with this afternoon:

 . . . This reflexivity—cinema’s self-referential homages to itself—in so many recent nostalgia movies should be read less as some kind of radical innovation in a new age of technological possibility and more as Hollywood’s further appropriation of the reflective potential which a more progressive (mostly unfulfilled) nostalgia might offer by questioning the necessity of the kind of forward-thinking innovation for its own sake which defines post-industrial late capitalism. This kind of self-theorizing nostalgia involves Hollywood media and their paratexts’ lovingly explicit foregrounding of its own pastiche past in reflexive but uncritical ways, celebrating the relationship between film’s past and cinema’s future through reassuring narratives that promote the imagined inevitability of aesthetic and technological change. Yet moments of this kind of self-aware nostalgia block off the possibility of resistant space for doubt, critique and alternatives regarding the messy economic realities of a digital transition which contains more troubling questions than answers beneath its self-referential surfaces. There remains room, of course, for a more fragmentary and individualized kind of a truly “reflective” nostalgia, one somewhat outside the “official” channels of contemporary Hollywood. But they remain dependent upon active and idiosyncratic impulses hardly outside the present cycles of consumption (indie movies, archives, rethinking the past self-theorizing of older films), while their ultimate value remains generally unclear, particularly in a postmodern culture that too often rewards the kind of ignorance and passivity that further feeds the market imperatives and de-historicizing logic of such self-theorizing impulses in the first place.