The Guardian again
I just read a piece about Hemingway, celebrating his 75th birthday. The writer of the article complains about the lack of masculine virtues in the 70s, the fact that the 70s are an 'anti-heroic age'. The article is ripe with exactly the kind of nostalgia that we also find in Life on Mars; with 1974 posing as the lifeless, pale, tame and boring 2006... This is the last sentence:
"After all the lady novelists and all the ladylike male ones, after all the soft thinking and ten cent hedonism, coming upon Hemingway again is like encountering the comfortable masculine smell of wet tweed in a room full of after-shave."
ETA: The film Funny Bones, an old favourite of mine which is all about nostalgia, really, inquires, why do all the best things in life belong to the past? There's suicidalness involved here, too - the main character threatens to kill himself right from the beginning of the film (his despair makes more sense, and is more palpable, than Sam's, though.) His excursion into his and his parents' past is intended as a last ditch attempt to find meaning before his self-imposed ultimatum runs out. However, the film ends up gently de-mythologising the past, and allows its characters to find hope in the present, because the past, it turns out, was not a magically perfect place after all, and the present does not need to be desperate.
(BTW, isn't it interesting how both Sam's nostalgia and the Hemingway nostalgia reported by the 1974 Guardian writer are so *masculine* in focus?)
"After all the lady novelists and all the ladylike male ones, after all the soft thinking and ten cent hedonism, coming upon Hemingway again is like encountering the comfortable masculine smell of wet tweed in a room full of after-shave."
ETA: The film Funny Bones, an old favourite of mine which is all about nostalgia, really, inquires, why do all the best things in life belong to the past? There's suicidalness involved here, too - the main character threatens to kill himself right from the beginning of the film (his despair makes more sense, and is more palpable, than Sam's, though.) His excursion into his and his parents' past is intended as a last ditch attempt to find meaning before his self-imposed ultimatum runs out. However, the film ends up gently de-mythologising the past, and allows its characters to find hope in the present, because the past, it turns out, was not a magically perfect place after all, and the present does not need to be desperate.
(BTW, isn't it interesting how both Sam's nostalgia and the Hemingway nostalgia reported by the 1974 Guardian writer are so *masculine* in focus?)