Since the world has been hit by a global pandemic and pushed us all indoors, we have found ourselves turning to artists and their work to find solace. This has inevitably led to the scheduling of several reunions, and inspired conversations about the good ol’ times. These reunions serve like a time-machine. We as viewers have always compared our lives through cultural landmarks, blurring the lines between an autobiographical past and a historical which allows us to dive into a sea of nostalgia. We see it as an opportunity to savor our lives again and again with no nagging uncertainty about how it will turn out. However, this renewed engagement with the past has not snuck up on us overnight, but has been strategically engineered to pervade popular culture for some years now. 

In April 2020, “Masakali 2.0” — a remix of the popular Hindi film song “Masakali” from Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s 2009 film Delhi-6 — released online to brutal trolling and criticism. The remix, based on the original by A.R. Rahman, was so bad that it even pushed the otherwise recluse composer to come out and tweet his disapproval publicly. Among the several memes and jokes, one comment from a member of the industry was particularly scathing. National Award-winning director Hansal Mehta tweeted: “We are complicit in this bastardisation of old songs… It is an insult to the original creator by an ecosystem that thrives on shit. Stop consuming shit. People will stop producing shit.”

Mehta’s comment made me wonder about the ecosystem that he referred to, and the factors driving it. “Masakali 2.0” is produced by T-Series, India’s largest music record label, which (as of 2014) makes up 35 percent of the Indian music market. T-Series also owns and operates the most-viewed and most-subscribed channel on YouTube, with over 141 million subscribers and 104 billion views as of March 2020. “Masakali” is not their first remix. In 2019, the remix versions of “Aankh Marey” and “Dilbar” gained raging popularity. 

While best known as a music label, T-Series has also had some moderate success as a film production company. In the past couple of years, T-Series has co-produced several sequels or re-makes of films like Aashiqui 2, Bhoothnath Returns, Hate Story 2, Hate Story 3, Hate Story 4, Raaz Reboot, Tum Bin 2, Kabir Singh, Malaal, Patni Aur Woh and, most recently, Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhaan. When managing director Bhushan Kumar was asked about the reasons for T-Series’ rise of the remix, he responded that he believed in giving the people what they wanted. “I am a businessman. If something works and the audience is accepting of it, why will I discontinue it… I am not merely remixing but recreating the song while retaining the old melody and keeping the first few lines intact… Not just us, everyone is doing it because they work if done well and with care. You have to go with the taste of the listeners and the time. Today’s listeners want to listen to recreations.” 

It is no secret that Bollywood works on the formulaic. Whatever becomes successful is reduplicated, multiplied and diluted until the last drop every ingredient has been sapped out. This gimmick of a remix video to generate curiosity and attention for a film is an old tactic. There is no explanation for the remix than utter laziness, and an allergic distance from new material. T-Series is an industry in itself. However, the point of intrigue is that these remakes are not drawn from a period centuries ago, but the recent past, mostly the 90s. In the last couple of years, we’ve noticed that cultural produce from the 90s and the early 2000s — be it in the field of fashion, films, TV or music — is making a huge comeback. It is occupying the mainstream, and the term “90s nostalgia” has been trending across social media platforms. T-Series turning into a remix factory is one of the most exacting examples of a commodification of nostalgia.

Since Hollywood and Bollywood are the two mega entertainment centres in the world, this piece examines some common trends in nostalgia-induced consumption that have pervaded the cultural discourse.

The loudest cry that declared the rehabilitation of the 90s into our current conversations came early this year when fans began to raise online threats to cancel their Netflix subscriptions after the platform announced that their “most-loved” series Friends  would be dropped on January 1, 2020. Some publications even began to address the reactionary responses as “mourning,” In the last two years, we’ve seen more and more shows from the 90s flood the catalog of OTT platforms: That ’70s Show , Sex and the City, Seinfield, Full House and several others. In 2017, two of Netflix’s most successful shows, 13 Reasons Why and Stranger Things, were both based in a pre-internet time. Though neither show predominantly romanticizes the past, the narratives are driven by objects that that are integral to the 90s imagination, be it the audio cassettes or walkie-talkies. Both shows were produced initially as miniseries but turned into multi-season productions.

The intrusion of the 90s onto our mainstay did not restrict itself only to the return of old shows onto the OTT circuit, but also through the arrival of the same old habits/spirit in a new garment quite literally in the fashion market. By looking at the Instagram accounts of fashion influencers Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Justin Beiber or Behati Prinsloo Levine, you will notice the comeback of vintage glasses, satin slip dresses and grunge make-up. The 2016 collection of Calvin Klein’s #MyCalvins campaign, featuring Jenner and Bieber, were critiqued for being heavily inspired by the iconic images produced by the designer in the 90s. In 2019, Robin Givhan explains the reasons for the decade’s charm in her essay “Why Are We So Obsessed With 90s Fashion?,” writing “Grunge was comfortably imperfect. It looked worn and beaten, but it felt luxurious… The clothes felt of the moment and free of all the assumptions that had always been attached to luxury fashion. It wasn’t grown up. It was a paean to disaffected youth.”

As a commodity, this behaviour feigns the promotion of a modest lifestyle while it profits out of luxury. This disingenuousness also reveals itself in the production model of advertising. Givhan calls out the fabricated nature of this nostalgic import as “assembled.” She writes that while the grunge was inventive to the designers, models and creators of the era who participated in the rebellion against the flashy, over the top decking of the ’80s, the “difference is that [Kendall] Jenner wasn’t discovered serendipitously the way photographer Corinne Day launched [Kate] Moss. Jenner was assembled with the help of reality television, Instagram, the right parties and a famous last name. And while she’s staked her territory in fashion, she’s not so much a reflection of the moment but an exploiter of it.”

While Givhan’s criticism of Jenner’s complicated fame may seem harsh, what she says points to a vicarious recreation of an ethos than a mindful conscience. The dissipation of the idea, the feeling and sentimentality is meant to lure the purchasing power of a consumer who may have not have witnessed the same cultural moment in time yet finds it “relatable”  for the sentimental value it evokes and the excessive mediated exposure granted to it.

So, why are we still going back there? Givhan supplies two possibilities: “Maybe it’s because we are just exhausted from trying so hard to stand out because we can’t all be street-style stars.” And second, she says, “It was like going home, but to a place that made room for anger, fear and confusion.”

The sentiments that Givhan articulates aren’t only restricted to the fashion world, as they spread across disciplines and indicate a change in the cultural paradigm. Her first statement outlines the symptom that is a lack of development of the idioms for the contemporary, while the second defines the reasons that articulate a yearning to the past, a common sentiment that echoes nostalgia. 

The biggest factor that has engineered this reactionary nostalgia, which has prompted a recoiling back to home, is a political one. Both Bollywood and Hollywood — the two biggest entertainment industries in the world — are based in nations which are now run by hugely regressive governments. Through their exclusionary policies, undermining public institutions and increasing centralization of power, the governments have diminished the fundamentals of democracy. Along with their structural assaults, a crucial component of their hyper zealous nationalism has been the polarization of society — Us vs. Them. This has been shrewdly carried out through their nexus with the media. It is no secret that the perverse weaponization of the “fake news” by Donald Trump, which originated shortly before the 2016 presidential elections, has resulted in a complete discrediting of even reliable news, so much so that it as turned questions of truth, reality and ethics into a matter of uncertainty and subjectivity. The scenario in India is even worse, as the punitive censoring of media and arrests of dissenting journalists has exposed the ties between corporate media and the government. This means that the present is completely sealed off for questioning. As has been noted, a distinct characteristic of a fascist state is the advancement of the hyper-zealous nationalistic agenda through myth-making. It thrives on the distortion of history by repeating a “story” so many times that it begins to gain mythical relevance. Notice that the campaign slogans of political candidates were built on the promise of bringing back a glorious past. Both Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s “Acche Din” (“Better Days are Coming”) draw impetus from the voters’ dissatisfaction with the present circumstances, and thus a rescue from it. What such an invocation is meant to accomplish is not so much a wish for a utopia, but a diversion from the pressing matters of the present for political gains. In India, this has led to both public-private and entirely private enterprises churning out biographical and hagiographical sagas of the “nation’s heroes” (eg: the PM Modi biopic, the Bal Thakeray biopic, Kesari), films celebrating war and stealth (Uri: The Surgical Strike, Kargil: The Untold Story) and even films targeting the annihilation of the opposition (The Accidental Prime Minister). In the U.S., though, Hollywood has distanced itself from the jingoistic agenda forwarded by Trump, yet they have still crawled back to the complicities of the great grand narratives of the “golden era.” Films like Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, which implicate the enemy in the individual and not in the system, is an example of the same. This revisiting is not a renaissance, or even an archival of the past. At best, it is an ode, but an ode to an imagined past all the same. In the essay “Postmodernism is dead. What comes next?,” Alison Gibbons comments on our “ensuing disillusionment with the project of neo-liberal postmodernity and the recent political splintering into extreme Left and extreme Right” that has resulted in a hearkening of the return to the past. Our fears, thus, are arising out of circumstances both real and existential. 

There’s also another apparatus without due consideration of which our discussion of nostalgia critically would be incomplete. It is the phenomenon known as TikTok. A provocative way to begin gauging with the application’s significance is to ask what is the TikTok if not an appropriation of your present self on a past creation sans historical consciousness? 

TikTok’s popularity establishes the app as a popular, democratic medium designed to engage a user’s interpretation of a past work, through tools of editing, sound and video. Would it be an overstatement to claim that it signifies the completion of the shift from film to video as the preferred medium of the masses? Even if it that’s not the case yet, TikTok is seen as a measure of the times — it’s an illusion and disconcerting. TikTok as cultural, entertainment currency does not denote a desire to invent a new poetics, but a subsuming of hegemony. Technically, one has to modify means to fit inside the template of the application. It administers increasing collusion, an unflinching universality, and no attempts at deviation. Driven purely by affect, it is what Fredric Jameson said “constitutes the very dominant or hegemonic aesthetic of consumer society itself and significantly serves [its] commodity production.”

The principle driving the popularity of TikTok is the same one that demands a remaking of Tiger King, or the appending of one TV season after another — our problem with (the) ending (of) things. It reveals our inability to engage historically with our films, or even the gaps in our engagement with the past. Our desperate recoiling is not born out of a desire for a continuous engagement/relationship between the past and the present, but out of fear of waning meaningfulness, and a clutching to comfort. Aesthetically, revisiting the past with a lack of historicity leads to the production of confusing idioms. We are only rehashing that which is relatable, or reproducible. Post-pandemic, the consumer industry will turn towards consolidating the gains on the lines of the “new normal.” Ideally, the answers would be found in the path of a reformation conscience, one that is mindful of its needs and excesses. We will once again be thrown up with questions of universality versus the specific. But how do you devise a new poetics for the contemporary when you have never lived in the present? More than ever, it is crucial to contemplate what this nostalgia phenomenon means for the future of the arts and our discomfort with the new. Will there be a “new” in the new world?

Kanika Katyal (@missworldwydweb) is a writer based in Delhi.