Nostalgia is a Weird Drug

I personally loathe nostalgia in a quite visceral way. I legitimately feel that a huge part of my job as a historian is a war on nostalgia, especially in the classroom and with public writing. It’s a completely reactionary set of emotions that create a hazy misty past. Some forms of nostalgia are incredibly harmful (hello Civil War memory for a century after the war!). Others are completely harmless but weird. And the recent revival of both the cassette tape and now the VHS tape are great examples of the latter. This article on the VHS revival really is nothing but nostalgia in action. No one is articulating anything good about them otherwise.

There are two reasons I think that there could be value here. First, a lot of stuff on VHS was never transferred to DVD or to streaming. Each time there is a new technology, a bunch of stuff without commercial potential gets left behind. This is bad to the film lover, but the people interviewed aren’t generally looking for 1980s films from the Philippines. A few are, it is mentioned in here and that’s great. As a historian for that matter, the number of archival collections filled with interesting looking video materials that cannot be watched because the archive doesn’t have access to the old technologies or the money to make sure that the materials don’t break upon watching is actually quite high. So I get this part of it very much.

The second is that browsing a video store for rentals was great. This I agree with. It was a lot more fun and interesting to just wander around and look at titles. Netflix algorithms definitely do not replace it. Instead they just offer you more of the same pablum you’ve just watched. But DVDs handle this just fine and while hardly an unbreakable technology themselves, there was a reason why people switched from VHS to DVD without much complaint.

But as a technology, video sucked. Tapes break! That’s basically it. They are a very unstable technology. They don’t look good. You can at least make the argument, overrated as it is, that a vinyl record sounds better than a CD or streaming. That’s true enough, if you are part of the 1% of music listeners who really cares about this AND you have the great speakers to see that through. So OK, I at least get that. But tapes? Nice hiss. And who doesn’t long for the days of a VHS tape breaking and you trying to loop the tape back through. Those were the good days…..