The Holiday in His Eye by William Rothman;

Author:William Rothman; [Rothman;, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438486079
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2021-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Watching home movies my father shot a lifetime ago makes me feel nostalgic—even those taken before I was born—because it was my father who took them, enabling them to be a link to my memories of him. But Hollywood movies, past or present, are different. No matter how strongly I may identify with their characters—whatever exactly that means—their experiences are not my experiences. Hollywood movies do not address their viewers personally. The events in the world projected on the screen, however analogous they may be to incidents in my own life, are not my past. Our outsideness to the film’s world, our powerlessness to intervene in the events unfolding before our eyes, makes those events, as I’ve said, akin to the past, not the present. But insofar as the events projected on the screen are unfolding before our eyes, they aren’t really anyone’s past. They’re our present. Then how can we be nostalgic when we’re watching these events?

To be nostalgic is to look back at the past from a position in the present, with a bittersweet awareness of the barrier-that-is-no-real-barrier that keeps past and present apart, keeps the past from becoming the present again, makes the past unreachable except in memory. But the medium of film makes the impossible not only possible, but necessary. The projected world fuses past and present, in effect, overcoming or transcending their separation. When I’m watching a movie, I can’t feel nostalgia for the events in the film’s world for two reasons. First, these events are unfolding before my eyes and are thus, temporally, akin to the present, not the past, to me. Second, my outsideness to the film’s world, my powerlessness to alter events in that world, makes those events, temporally, akin to the past to me—but it is not my past, and nostalgia is always personal.

When we’re watching a movie of any period, it thus can’t be nostalgia as such that we feel. But because it is through no fault of our own that we are outside the film’s world, just as it is no fault of our own that we are outside the world of the past, we can watch movies, as we can think of the past when we’re feeling nostalgic, freed from shame, guilt, and rancor. Movies can engender a pleasure analogous or comparable to nostalgia—a wistful longing, a bittersweet awareness that something we wish were possible—to be free of responsibility for our lives in the world—is in reality impossible. We cannot escape from our lives by seeking asylum within the world of a film, just as we cannot escape our responsibilities in the one existing world by living in the past.

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