Nostalgia Covers the Cracks in Our Memories

There's a desire to relive the past that we all hold.  No matter how forward thinking you can regard yourself to be, inevitably there are experiences in life that we enjoy so much in the moment that long after they come to pass we look back on them with fondness.  This act comes with a feeling, an emotion that is quite odd and that is Nostalgia.  I say it is odd because it is in essence a filter we place over our memories.  Often it begins with clarity and they memory remains true to the experience, but with time the memory fades and becomes cracked and Nostalgia adds colour, fills in the cracks and smooths over the surface to create a new image, one that often ends up diverging from the experience itself.

With experiences that are lived in the moment and can never truly be relived, we are saved the heartache of reliving these moments only to find they don't match up to our recollection.  However when it comes to media and forms of expression that have been preserved, even physical places, we are given the opportunity to indulge in our Nostalgia.  In that moment we get to see what matches up to our memories.

The longer it has been since you last experienced these moments, the more likely it will be that your recollection diverges.  It is perhaps for this reason that we often pick the things we love the most and regularly indulge in the Nostalgia.  Whether that be music from decades past that we still listen to frequently, or old TV shows or Movies etc that we watch often, or Games we return to and replay to experience all over again.

Sometimes we forget so much of these experiences from the first time around that we get to experience them again as if it was for the first time all over again, but this is rare.  In all my years of indulging in Nostalgia it is more common for the memory and the reality to diverge.  Shows I watched and fell in love with as a child can seem incredibly boring to me now as an adult.  Special effects that seemed amazing as a kid, now become more apparent to be illusions.  Production quality does not degrade over time, the medium is preserved as it ever was, the only difference is that I am that much more aware of what is happening that the cuts and edits stand out, to the point where the illusion is spoiled.  Even the impressions actors made, the perceptions of their personalities can change.  Jokes that went over your head as a child in innocence now land and you see things in a new light - that can be good or bad.  It can be good if it lets you experience a different point of view, or it can be bad if it feels out of place.

When we talk about remakes and reboots, we often like to think that the versions of the things we loved when younger were perfect, when in reality they rarely are.  One benefit to seeing new productions is the enjoyment of seeing things updated and redone with a level of production and composition that the originals could never afford.  Often the remake or the reboot ends up being truer to the creators original vision as they finally get to make it the way they had pictured it.  Take any show that has been around for 10 seasons or more and compare the first and last seasons and often the change is immediate and apparent.

Nostalgia covers the cracks in our memories.  Sometimes you have to reminded of the reality before you can let go of your opposition to progression.  Sometimes we have to be reminded of how bad things actually were, in order to realise how good things have become and to have the desire for the things we loved to be experienced again by a new generation, in a new way, with a new vision.  Who knows, it might even raise awareness of the originals and allow a whole new generation to experience those and judge them for themselves.