The Oxford Dictionary describes nostalgia: “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. It is often described as a complex emotional state when you feel a mix of pleasure and slight sadness.” I wondered whether this is what I felt when searching for old television shows. Was it curiosity about whether I would feel the same way as when I watched the show originally? A dissatisfaction with the present? A little bit of both, including the overwhelming acedia that’s descended upon me.
Recently, I began to watch (for the first time) the tv show, Californication, which ran for seven seasons from 2007 to 2014. It features David Duchovny as Hank Moody, a New York writer, living in Los Angeles, caught in a series of life events made up of sex, alcohol, writer’s block, and loathing for L.A. Sex is treated more humorously than erotically, as it should—Hank’s promiscuity is absurd. He’s a man who stands in his own way, if he only knew what that way even is.
Another show with a similar ethos (minus the sex addiction) is a brilliantly-written and executed, Enlightened (2011-2013). It stars Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a woman who’s always on the edge of another nervous breakdown but amusingly and naively trying to get her life in order by a way of New Age/Buddhist retreats, mantras, and crazy oscillations between enlightenment and anger.
Although opposite, the characters of Hank Moody and Amy Jellicoe are wanderers in the California desert. They want something more out of life, but are stuck in their own mess. The energy and the thrust forward is flaccid, and although both are aware of their failures and inabilities to do something, they can’t escape the meaninglessness they most likely created for themselves. But what if that meaninglessness is something culture created and they’ve merely become the vessels of it?
As I experienced these shows today, I realized there’s a palpable chronological break that extends into individual and collective consciousness. There is something naive about Hank Moody and Amy Jellicoe because of their unawareness of realities that’ve been revealed and concealed to all of us in the last six years. Covid represents not just “a wrinkle in time,” but a brutal, penetrative break. It served as an awakening but did it serve as enlightenment?
Hardly. It brought death and poisonous ideologies that dominate the culture. The only lens we should look through at life is a political one. How boring! For the most part, almost any commentary on culture, film, or books has a political and ideological angle. The culture with the capital C has rejected metaphysics, and now people are ideologies in a vat. Hank Moody and Amy Jellicoe may be lost but at least they admit it. (A recent example of that is Jon Hamm as Andrew Cooper in Apple TV’s Your Friends and Neighbors). There’s a connected sense of embodiment in both that’s vastly different from our detached, technological culture.
Is it nostalgia that I’m feeling? That condition seems inevitable no matter what time or mental state we’re in. We’ll always look back on some aspect of the past that was better, and it probably was. But the forces of joylessness always existed. Culture dictates this joylessness, yet there’s always a push back against the denial of the spirit and the body. The denial’s captured and released in the form of bureaucracy that operates not only on the political level but also in most forms of social media. Discourse, creativity, and thoughts in general have been compartmentalized and bureaucratized. When you enter the glass cube of social media, you must abide by the rules of immovable, unchangeable, ideological thought. If you dare think outside of the glass cube, you’ll be quickly corrected by those that are complicit in the perpetuation of bureaucracy.
For the most part, we can elect to leave these spaces but the Culture and the ethos of the time has an impact on our lives. The question is have we reached the level of exhaustion that’ll lead us to exit the glass cube, or at least, elect to spend the revolving apocalypse in a different way?