The Return of the Repressed

Something from my childhood has returned to haunt me; something traumatic and terrible which I thought I had repressed for good. No it’s not an infantile nightmare, nor is it something my parents did to me. It’s more dreadful than that - something abhorrent and blasphemous; a travesty of all that is sane and natural. I thought I had banished this demon long years ago, but now it is back. Its name is H.R. Puffnstuff.

H.R. is an eight-foot technicolor newt with enormous eyes and a cavernous mouth who wanders around a mescaline forest of talking trees and dwarf albino policeman. If Hieronymous Bosch had designed Barney the Dinosaur the result may have been something like this. In fact H.R. (‘Who’s your friend when things get rough?’) Puffnstuff is one of the more successful creations of the notorious late 60’s children’s television svengalis Sid & Marty Kroftt. Perhaps by spending most of their production budget on acid, the Kroftts managed to create such memorable characters as H.R., Sigmund, of Sigmund and the Sea-monsters - a large, untidy wad of walking green tissue paper, and The Bugaloos, a sort of nubile, insectoid Partridge Family, whose arch enemy is a petulant, meglomaniac transvestite. H.R., Sigmund and the Bugaloos are all out on video now, along with the Krofft’s original hallucination for Hanna-Barberra, The Banana Splits - and the question is why?! Are they any good? Not unless your definition of inspired slapstick stretches to include a guy in a badly-made elephant suit rolling around on the floor honking while the camera zooms in and out ala early Deep Purple clips What these tv series are in fact, is nearly 30 years old. The ostentatiously psychedelic jacket of the Banana Splits video ought to clue you in. What we’re talking here, God help us, is Nostalgia!

: the same retro-obsession which has resulted in recent film versions of everything from The Brady Bunch to The Berverley Hillbillies. It’s a fait accompli that F-Troop and Mister Ed are just around the corner, and maybe even the zen classic My mother the Car!

Nostalgia has probably always been with us, but doesn’t it seem a little like western culture is dissolving in the stuff lately? What does it mean when Hollywood can’t think up new stupid ideas? For that matter how does nostalgia recruit its subject matter? Must it have any merit whatsoever? Must we have lived through it? How old does it need to be? Is there only one sort of nostalgia, or is it a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon? Has there ever been a nostalgia-free age, and are any areas of human endeavour nostalgia-free?

The examples above ought to prove that nostalgia has nothing to do with quality. Further, it doesn’t have to be for something you even enjoyed in the first place. An internet website on 80’s nostalgia includes such heart-warming subjects as Chernobyl radiation victims and the Berlin Wall, and I’ve heard people speak with unmistakable affection about polio epidemics, the bombing of Darwin, the Tasman Bridge disaster and even early-80’s music.

Must we have lived through it? Presumably no, or Woodstock ‘94 would not have been so successful with the same aged audience as the original rock festival 25 years before. Woodstock stands more for an idea; a symbol of a vanished golden-age, like Camelot. It’s an idea though which is still tied to the personal experience of the nostalgia-victim - even if only via big brother’s record collection. As a vehicle for vicarious nostalgia Big brother’s record collection is a potent cultural force. Kurt Cobain listens to big Brothers Kinks and Black Sabbath albums, writes and mumbles a hit single, and shortly the whole population of Australia’s secondary schools are dressed like farmhands from Oregon.

How universal is nostalgia; is it part of the ‘human condition’? It’s tempting to imagine that there might have been a time before nostalgia. Perhaps prior to the industrial revolution, before things started to change fast enough for people to notice. It’s hard to imagine the generation x of the 1390’s sitting around having an 1370’s evening. Hard, but not impossible. Even the timeless Yoruban people of Nigeria talk sentimentally about how things were in the old days, and the Hopi people of North America, whose language knows no past tense are known to reminisce about the way things still are.

If no period is safe from nostalgia, what about specific fields? Maybe nostalgia is basically a pop culture thing? This is a tempting idea, and seems especially attractive in an age when every track on the radio seems to be a collage of early 70’s song fragments. I do remember a short time when we all fooled ourselves that there was something new going down. We even called it ‘new wave’. Back then it was illegal to like anything more than 3 months old. Not many people seemed to notice that The Sex Pistols ripped off Chuck Berry riffs, and The Jam were busting their gut to imitate the early Who, that Radio Birdman and the Damned both sounded suspiciously like they’d just found their big brother’s Stooges albums. And here nostalgia, plagiarism and artistic influence start to become indistinct categories.

What about high culture? Is something so culturally irrelevant as classical music capable of supporting nostalgia? I’d be surprised if many Australians under the age of 200 get nostalgic about Haydn. Of course Haydn gets in the backdoor because whoever did the theme music to GP ripped off the first movement of his trumpet concerto. But GP was an ABC production, which means it will probably be aired continuously until 2015. This interferes with its nostalgic potential - people have to have a chance to forget something before they can remember it.

Nostalgia is here. We’re stuck with it; we always have been. It’s everywhere, it’s getting worse, and studies have shown that it causes birth defects in hamsters. If we can’t get away from it, maybe we can at least study; analyse and categorise it. Here are a couple of suggestions.

• Nested Nostalgia:

this comes about when something which was originally a piece of nostalgia becomes the subject of nostalgia itself. . It’s possible for nested nostalgia to telescope out of control. Someone in their 90’s flat sits down to watch an episode of Happy Days - a 70’s sitcom set in the 50’s. In this episode Ritchie discovers his dad’s record collection and puts on a 40’s recording of Paul Robeson singing ‘Old man River’ from the musical Showboat, which is set in the 19th century. At this point the neighbours burst in, yelling out that senator McCarthy says Robeson is a communist nigger.

• Future Nostalgia:

This comes about when we get nostalgic about things from the past which are set in our present or future. The enjoyment comes from observing these artifacts and noting how the predictions misfired. For instance Stingray and Thunderbirds producer Gerry Anderson’s belief that by the late 20th century humans would have found the technology to transform themselves into puppets, or Mr Star Trek Gene Rodenberry’s conviction that mini-skirts would survive as a fashion statement for 400 years, let alone past 1971. Star Trek is also a source of grammatical nostalgia - for the gender specific collective noun: ‘Where no man has gone before’ has of course become ‘Where no-one has gone before.’ Producers evidently thought the split infinitive ‘to boldly go’was less of an issue.

No period and no culture is immune to nostalgia, and it follows that neither is anyone. You thought this was just a detached and disinterested scholarly piece? No, I give you more credit than that. I presume you noticed I enjoy talking about this old rubbish, too. I even have my own particular favourite category of nostalgia: early 70’s Australian pop culture. I’ve always felt there was a kind of magic to that period. To me the first few years of the 70’s were a perpetual summer. Everyone could still afford petrol for their panel vans, and everyone was always at the beach. I lived through that time, but I was a kid, and I felt that I somehow just missed out on a golden age. I’d like to have been old enough to vote for Whitlam, instead of old enough not to vote for Fraser. I’d like to have gone to Sunbury rock festival, instead of seeing it on GTK.

.... and it always comes back to music, somehow. I remember being 9 years old and someone had the single of ‘Eagle Rock’ with them in the playground. They were showing it to everyone. We couldn’t hear the damn thing, but it seemed to have some sort of extraordinary aura about it, as if it were already a piece of history, even though it was brand new. I wonder if big brother noticed it was missing?

1997, Tim Gadd