There are cities in the sky

I've been going to cheap movies with my friends on Tuesdays. A theater in my neighborhood shows films for seven bucks on Tuesday nights, which is great if you're into that sort of thing. I've been using it as an opportunity to get out of the house and stay up on pop culture. You pay more for popcorn than for the actual ticket. The seats recline and the room is cold.

Trailers roll for thirty minutes before the movie starts. They're all remakes, sequels, or re-imagined concepts that already exist. The remake of the Scary Movie franchise, the fifth Insidious movie, another Minions ad, a He-Man redux. New movies outnumbered by nostalgia bait. An era of pop culture in which we are constantly referencing the past, shelling out money for nostalgia, and pretending it's good. Even Backrooms, the movie I actually came to see, while not technically a remake, is an appeal to the nostalgic liminal spaces of the eighties and nineties: shopping malls, large office buildings, furniture stores. Places that have shrunk over the last several decades into virtual nonexistence.

Everything that is old is new again.

We cannot produce genuinely new cultural forms because we cannot imagine a future that isn't a variation of the present. Everyone aches to return to a past that felt like it had more possibility. The remake, the sequel, the expansion of a cinematic universe. All of these cultural products are a race toward a sunset — one that is slipping past the horizon faster than we can sprint towards it.

We are a generation that has lost hope in itself, in our ability to create a better world. Everything that previous generations created — from rock and roll to disco, from brutalism to art deco, capitalism to communism — is remembered as better than what is currently experienced. Even if that memory is inaccurate. Even if it's accurate. The better we were, the better we are. Nostalgia becomes an almost libidinal force that drives us to consume the past. We are numb subjects of a modern era incapable of belief in the new. The past is repackaged and given to us in the forms of television, fashion, and music. We are grateful to receive it.

One Battle After Another, which swept the Academy Awards in 2025, depicts a failed revolution — one that I might argue paints its revolutionaries in blackface (the subject of another essay) — in which the revolutionaries go into hiding after a series of bombings in the nineteen eighties. The film grants the viewer a sense of catharsis as it follows a series of sprees: liberating immigrants from a detention facility, blowing up power lines, robbing a bank. The film ends with Leonardo DiCaprio's daughter carrying out some sort of revolutionary mission. The audience is meant to feel hopeful.

This hope dies quickly under scrutiny. The film depicts revolutionary action predominantly as a relic of the nineteen eighties, encapsulated as a cultural relic. DiCaprio's daughter's actions are directed at saving past revolutionaries, her future actions are left to the viewer's imagination, the very imagination that permitted the catharsis of the first half. We can only conceive an exit from the present through the past. There are no real revolutionaries left, only their ghosts.

also on substack ↗