Nostalgia Trap

This week Claudia and I watched American Beauty (dir. Sam Mendes, 1999), a film that had a major cultural impact upon its release but hits significantly different in 2021. From the awkward screen presence of Kevin Spacey to the endless permutations of middle class suburban ennui, we explore how American Beauty’s story and characters reflect the zeitgeist of a very specific political and economic moment, one that seems firmly lodged in the late 1990s. So why did we fall so hard for this movie? And does its critique of American society still make any sense? To listen to the whole episode, subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

Richard Kent Evans is the author of MOVE: An American Religion, a groundbreaking history of the MOVE organization, a black radical group whose founding members were killed alongside their children when the Philadelphia police, working alongside federal agents, attacked their headquarters in 1985. What was MOVE? What were its founding principles? And why were state authorities so intent on violently destroying it? As Evans explains in this conversation, the MOVE bombing, as the incident came to be known, was the culmination of a much longer story that touches on deep, lingering questions about religious freedom, race, and state terror.    

Eric Nusbaum is the author of Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between, which tells the story of a neighborhood’s struggle to maintain their community against the tidal wave of powerful forces aligned to seize it from them. In this conversation, Nusbaum explains how the construction of Dodger Stadium in the late 1950s somehow encompassed the entirety of Los Angeles’ political, economic, and cultural history, and offers an opportunity to reflect on the intersection of sports culture, housing rights, radical politics, and popular democracy.  

Tyler Scruggs returns for a talk about the movie adaptation of Nico Walker’s novel Cherry, which follows a young man’s nightmarish evolution from lovestruck college student to opiate-addicted Iraq War veteran and serial bank robber. With Spiderman’s Tom Holland in the central role, and Marvel dudes (the Russo brothers) directing, the film has a jarringly different tone and effect than the book, and Tyler helps us frame Cherry’s function as both pop political cinema and a glossy advertisement for Apple’s streaming service. Of course, all of this evolves into a conversation about making and consuming art in the ephemeral landscape of hyper-capitalist digital pop culture. For the whole episode go to patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

Joe Clark is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). In this conversation, he tells us how the newsreel developed in the 1930s and 1940s as both an aesthetic object and consumer product, as figures like Charles Lindbergh became focal points of an immense transformation in the relationship between current events, entertainment, and an audience increasingly positioned as passive consumers of history.  

This week Claudia joins us to consider the magical cinematic collaborations of John Carpenter and Kurt Russell. We discuss The Thing (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and Escape from L.A. (1996) alongside a host of other sci-fi/action films of the era. Beyond just gushing about our favorite scenes/lines/moments, we try to articulate what makes Carpenter’s films so insanely rewarding, and explore how his trajectory in Hollywood gives us an object lesson in the intersection of art, radical politics, and capitalism. For full episode go to patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

Alicia Puglionesi is a writer and historian whose book Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science tells the story of how researchers in the late 19th and early 20th century attempted to engage the outer limits of human consciousness, and how their efforts were written out of “legitimate” academic discourse. In this conversation, she explains how this lost history of psychic experimentation resonates in 21st century politics and culture.

Sam Adler-Bell is a writer and host of the excellent podcast Know Your Enemy. In this conversation, we discuss his recent piece in The Drift, “Doctor Do-Little: The Case Against Anthony Fauci,” which takes aim at the political practice and philosophies of a figure who has become, for better or worse, the public face of America’s pandemic response. Along the way, we examine Fauci’s role in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, his disastrous flip-flop on the efficacy of masks, and the wider implications of neoliberal “hero” discourse in the context of public health.  

Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us for a conversation about the Netflix true crime documentary series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. Our focus is on the elements of the Night Stalker story that the series largely avoids; specifically, the origins of Richard Ramirez’s serial killer psychology and its connections to the history of Los Angeles and the American security state. From settler colonialism and indigenous genocide to atomic fallout and the ghosts of Vietnam, we examine the American West as a landscape of imperial violence, capable of reproducing endless permutations of murderous pathologies. For full episode go to patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

It’s our 250th episode (!) and historian Megan Kate Nelson joins us for a very Nostalgia Trap conversation about the deep, unresolved contradictions coursing through American history. Her latest book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, reframes our vision of the Civil War, showing how westward expansion, abolitionism, and the extermination of indigenous peoples were folded into a nation-making project that determined the fate of a continent. Along the way we talk about epic battles in hot deserts, the desperate economy of water and whiskey, and why the Ken Burns version of the Civil War so urgently needs to be put to rest.