David Amrock

By the end of 1985, Pepsi had completely replaced the sugar in its recipe with high-fructose corn syrup¹ and was, at nearly 100 years old, being advertised as “the choice of a new generation.” Its expensive TV commercials were trained on 80s pop culture, featuring Michael Jackson, and Michael J. Fox on the heels of 1985’s Back to the Future.

The 80s are well known in American popular culture today. The image of 80s-ness, of loud fashions, synthesizers, and neon colors, has become self-propelling through the replay of the media of the time. My generation—the millennials—is supposed to be especially fond of replaying the media of childhood, such that we, along with media outlets, have given a new meaning to the word nostalgia in our re-regarding of the 80s.

Back to the Future represents 1955, thirty years prior, as a bygone time, an innocent time of pastels and soda shops. People in this time are stunned to silence by a heavy metal guitar solo. People are also portrayed as quite complacent about racial segregation, and therein lies a paradox in the regarding of the decades. In portraying racial segregation as yesterday’s folly, Back to the Future posits today as a time of moral improvement. By presenting 1955 as a time when innocence and politeness thrived in public life, it posits today as a time of lost innocence and impropriety. That paradox is wrought by the push and pull of liberal progressivism and reactionary conservatism that was looming over American life in the 1980s and that still looms over our present.

As much as Back to the Future may have influenced popular culture in the years since its release, it was also, at its release, a product of dominant assumptions about the past—namely the self-effecting assumption that then was different from now. That the 80s were a time different from the 50s. That at some point the 50s ended, and we left them behind as we walked forward into the future.

Contra the “arc of history,” some of us are learning in the present moment that social morals are reversible, and that the notion that history’s lessons have been learned is itself a useful mechanism for legitimizing an immoral status quo.

Time does have a way of marching on. Past actions can’t be undone or redone, only acted on in turn. The artifacts of the past, the movies and the fashions, can’t be remade the same, only imitated or sampled, because the materials, the tools, and the social situation will have changed.

But still yesterday’s works propel the past into the present. Time marches on, but no phase of history is out of human reach today. Confederate statues, no matter how recently erected, stand like timeless monuments to their racist subjects. The civil war, slavery, are themselves rendered as a bygone time, to the extent that they are rendered at all. I remember being surprised to learn that they had the electric telegraph in the Civil War.

The nuclear scare of the 50s, with instructional films telling children to hide under their desks, the 1961 Twilight Zone episode showing neighbors fighting over a bomb shelter—even these seem quaint, rendered in the primitive media of the time. And yet nuclear waste lays buried and toxic today; and nuclear arms lay waiting, like landmines across Southeast Asia, like countless Pepsi cans and plastic bottles around the world, in the ground and the ocean. That past is prologue seems an understatement. In the artifacts and the works of yesterday, time is not so much moved through as accumulated.

Naming things limits them.² Regarding the decades is equivalent to creating them, solidifying things that were once transient. To define a time past or present is to redefine it as being totally constituted in whatever stands out. A refrain I have started seeing in the forewarnings of the Trump period: totalitarian society does not feel different; people still live their lives. To paraphrase one comment, there’s no ominous background music.

The forewarning is necessary because in the media through which we memorialize it, totalitarianism does have ominous background music. The rewatching of TV, which has always followed a code of politeness and of a particular kind of avoidance of the political, has influenced our view of the past, corroborating the charge of reactionaries that things used to be more peaceful, more civil, more comfortable for everybody, American life as a Donna Reed episode.

In the 21st century, while climate change is dreaded as a future development, and memorialized as 80s history, while the event and its coverup march on in the present, new decades have been less discretely regarded, one imagines because they can’t readily be named. “The 2000s” and “the 2010s” aren’t catchy labels. We may have to wait until the roaring 20s of the new century to see whether we will start to regard the decades again.

Meanwhile the moral questions of the 20th century—of totalitarianism, political violence, the repression of minorities, mass destruction—already answered in decades prior, are raised again and again, always as if for the first time.