Individual Paper
6. Using the Arts, Media and Culture: Contestations and Collaborations
Nostalgia is a hypogrammatic drive that propels the aesthetic expression of contemporary films and musics. The regurgitation of Star Wars lore through its Disney trilogy and also its expansion in several spinoffs, the continuation of Indiana Jones in Indy’s latest journey to obtain Archimedes’ dial from the hands of the Nazis, the finale of Jon Watts’ Spiderman trilogy, the many live actions of classic Disney cartoons, and even Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical feature The Fabelmans are examples the presence of nostalgia in cinema. In music, Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia and Bruno Mars’ 24k Magic are instances of nostalgic pieces. The boom of nostalgia, then, becomes a problem. Postulations coming from the Western academic sphere—much like the geographical point of several examples of cultural products mentioned above—criticize the inauthentic (Fredric Jameson’s pastiche) and pessimistic natures (Mark Fisher’s lost future) of those kinds of cultural products. The linearity of the Western conception of temporality is disrupted (and/or haunted) by such regression. I attempt to bring this nostalgic phenomenon and recontextualize it under the Indonesian context of cinema and music. The revivals of Pengabdi Setan, Keluarga Cemara, and Si Doel become examples of nostalgia-laden Indonesian films, whilst the renaissance of Indonesian disco through Diskoria is the front-runner of this condition in Indonesian music. I argue that the hauntological outlook for nostalgia in Indonesia is different compared to Western thought and art form. This condition is not only factored in different paradigms towards temporality but also in the spatiality of how Indonesians consume cinema and music.
Alexei Wahyudiputra
Airlangga Institute of Indian Ocean Crossroads, Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia