From the moment art was first created, life has imitated it. Artists and storytellers have all through the ages devoted their lives to creating things that should provide depictions of reality that ring true with our own perfect wishes for our lives. Indeed, none of us lead perfectly joyous existences, but through such depictions of perfection we can imagine it. Then there is nostalgia. Revisiting our past through things we have held onto from our childhood and youth allows us to think of all the defining moments in our lives, and this helps us look on the bright side of our lives in the present day. Film is one medium which can provide nostalgic feelings. However, film in the postmodern era has increasingly swayed away from the connection between the past and the present, and instead attempts to show reflections on the past with fragmentation and humour, making those of us who experienced the era discussed in the film almost feel embarrassed, rather than nostalgic.

In this essay I shall highlight and deconstruct the depictions of fragmented and parodic nostalgia in the films Almost Famous, Forrest Gump and Little Miss Sunshine.

The 2000 film Almost Famous, a semi-autobiographical film of writer-director Cameron Crowe’s own youth experiences, fills in all the nooks and crannies of the American rock music scene of the 1970s. William Miller is a fifteen-year-old budding journalist who successfully lies about his age so he can become a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine and break away from his overbearing mother, who looks contemptuously at any form of popular culture. In the film, the rock stars are shown for laughs as bickering and raving lunatics who most of the time cannot get on with their bandmates and are too high to play a good show anyway.

The opening title sequence in Almost Famous is a suitably nostalgic opening for a film designed to carry nostalgic significance for the youth of a bygone era. It evokes the early seventies rock scene by panning slowly over a collection of vinyl album covers, concert souvenirs, and eight-track tapes. And, perhaps by no coincidence, the production company behind Almost Famous is called Vinylfilms (Auner 2000). It is the perfect opening titles sequence for this film because it tells us, if we have not heard anything about the film prior to watching, that we are going to be taking a journey back in time to the seventies.

Almost Famous exposes, for both those of us never experienced the seventies and those who didn’t see the darkest side of seventies counter-culture, the negative aspects of the lives of rock stars – addiction, pressure, and the frustrations of, as William puts it, “a mid-level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom.” And since rock and roll is something embedded in our collective consciousness as deeply as television, literature and cinema, this depiction of the grittiness of rock-star life is equally relevant today.

The 1994 film Forrest Gump takes us on a journey over four tumultuous decades in American history, the 1950s through the 1980s, through the eyes of the titular character of Forrest Gump. Forrest is a dimwit from Greenbow, Alabama who, among other things, has fought in Vietnam, become a national football and ping-pong star and has crossed paths with John Lennon, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, while his true love Jenny eludes him. Now, while waiting at a bus stop for the bus that will take him to Jenny, Forrest tells his incredible story to anyone who will listen to him. As it turns out, Jenny’s life has taken a vastly different course, as we learn she has over the years protested the war and embraced alcohol, drugs and illicit sex.

As he guides us through the story, Forrest’s low IQ comes through the entire time in his misinterpretations of the events he is trying to describe, which does not make him a reliable narrator. For much of the film, Forrest’s impairments are exploited for laughs and he is oblivious to the prejudice others have towards him. Thus he only ever remains an onlooker and his narration places him right in the middle of the events of four decades of American history (Boyle 2001). However, his kind-hearted everyman qualities ultimately make him the spokesman for the Baby Boomers of America, who came of age during the era in which the whole of their country did.

The ways in which Forrest almost magically falls into one poignant historical event after another are the devices that make the film postmodern. Its treating history as a flexible story which welcomes Forrest’s appearances alongside so many influential historical figures is one of the film’s most distinctive elements, and it is, indeed, one of its points of postmodernism. If one theoretical use of postmodernism can be to show history as a narrative like any other, then a back-up point to a stronger one is that that narrative can always be messed with - people like Gump can be inserted into a story, and therefore they can be inserted into history, and others can just as easily be removed (Scott 2001, p. 3).

Agreeably it is hard to look past the fact that Forrest is the handicapped son of a single mother with an African-American man as his best friend, but while some misled critics have referred to Forrest Gump as conservative thanks to its supposed all-American themes, violence – however sanitized it may be – is an inevitable part of Forrest’s story. The film discusses interpersonal violence (notably bullying, homicide and, very subtly, child abuse) and struggle (Ku Klux Klan uprisings, antiwar protests, the Vietnam War), all of which are central to the film’s revisionist history as well as the coming-of-age aspect of the story (Boyle 2001).

During our upbringings, we all get poignant memories of our relationship with our family and the special gatherings we had with them, while such gatherings were still possible. The 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine rings true with our respective memories of those happy, sad, and sometimes plain tense times with our families.

Little Miss Sunshine follows the Hoovers, a normal working-class American family who embark on a cross-country trip to California so seven-year-old daughter Olive can compete in the Little Miss Sunshine child beauty pageant. There’s just one problem: other than Olive, they all have a few reservations with one other member of their family. Father Richard, a struggling motivational speaker, and mother Sheryl are almost broke and their marriage on the rocks. Sheryl’s brother Frank is a gay Proust scholar who has just unsuccessfully attempted suicide. Richard’s foul-mouthed and homophobic father Edwin has just been evicted from his nursing home for snorting cocaine, and Dwayne, Sheryl’s fifteen-year-old son from a previous marriage, is a depressed teen who has taken a vow of silence and hates everyone.

On the surface, Little Miss Sunshine does not seem like a movie that harks back to a bygone era, what with its setting in the present day. However, each Hoover family member, except for Olive, inwardly yearns for the more innocent and happy times in their past, something we all tend to do when our present odds seem insurmountable. Their cross-country trip elicits dormant emotions and re-opens old wounds for the Hoovers, and as we watch this dysfunctional family somewhat unknowingly forming a closer bond with each other by (reluctantly) baring their souls to each other, our own memories of the bonding car trips we have had with our families over the years come flooding back. Also, there is a semi-autobiographical side to the film, with it being based on screenwriter Michael Arndt’s own childhood family car trip experience.

Road movies are normally populated by characters whose ability to overcome their sociopathic ways eventually helps them to look on the bright side of life. Families are portrayed in this way less often. The yellow VW bus the Hoovers travel in is a good metaphor for their “dysfunctional family” status: the VW bus is reminiscent of vehicles of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the conservative American ideal of perfection had not yet taken hold, and the vehicle is already in such a dilapidated state that it seems to be breaking apart just as quickly as its contents. This indicates a light-hearted parody of “conventional” family relationships, yet the moments of pathos in the movie gives the viewer a way to identify with one character or just to emotionally connect with each character, despite how they are all presented as a bunch of losers (Luzón 2006). We are meant to empathize with the Hoovers but also to laugh at them, rather than with them. Ultimately they show us how much worse our families could be, and to make us more thankful that our families are nothing like them.

While Little Miss Sunshine possibly only does this if the viewer can identify with it, Almost Famous and Forrest Gump both illustrate how certain icons and events of the past came to be so important and influential in the first place. In Almost Famous, Stillwater’s (the fictional band in the film) lead guitarist Russell Hammond, after falling out with the other band members and getting stoned at a party, boards their tour-bus to muted silence. Soon after, Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” plays over the radio, with everyone singing along and remembering what brought them together to begin with –the music (Olsen 2000).

Forrest Gump does this in two ways. Firstly, it looks back on many historical events – some that united the world and others that divided the world – that have since between studied in school classrooms, all over the world, and attempts to pinpoint the reasons why memories of these events continue to get poignant, angry or sad reactions from the people who were alive at the time. It brings to the forefront the processes of re-construction, merging the past with the present, utilizing real-life footage and fiction, and this merger acknowledges how history and myth are stamped in the collective consciousness of a specific country (Cook 2004).
But what each of these three films have in common, with regards to their postmodern takes on nostalgia, is an underlying (and it is especially subtle in Little Miss Sunshine) and unflinching exposé on American subculture and how it is almost just as bad today as it was back then. Indeed, all three films feature a character who takes drugs, and these exposés – when spotted – actually make each film feel much less sentimental than they initially seem. Almost Famous and Forrest Gump, in their darker, more emotional moments, show the inescapable force of an American dystopia which sucks people in and destroys their lives, irrevocably shattering the American Dream.

Little Miss Sunshine shows this by depicting a nuclear family at war with each other, and the dangers stemming from American institutions like child beauty pageants – indeed, Olive’s naughty dance routine at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant is actually a statement against these breeding grounds for paedophiles. And as Jim Emerson writes, “Little Miss Sunshine shows us a world in which there’s a form, a brochure, a procedure, a job title, a diet, a step-by-step program, a career path, a prize, a retirement community, to quantify, sort, categorize and process every human emotion or desire. Nothing exists that cannot be compartmentalized or turned into a self-improvement mantra about “winners and losers.”” (Emerson 2006)

Almost Famous, at the time of its release in 2000, was in the middle of a slew of 1970s-set feature films. How these films recycled seventies pop culture is not only the latest example kitsch mish-mashes that have been present in cinema for decades. At the bottom of the dustbin of history there lies an unlimited goldmine of stories and images that are of relevance today. The most notable aspect of Almost Famous, however is the film’s rebellious sincerity, which strangely works well with its gritty texture of seventies subculture, because the film is essentially Cameron Crowe’s tribute to the people who helped him gather his fondest youth memories (Scott 2000).

In Forrest Gump, which is arguably the most groundbreaking of the three films under the spotlight here, we are guided by a man through his life story, in which he has often been thrust onto the sidelines of history unknowingly and by accident, when he is too simple to have completely understood any of it. This makes the film’s deconstruction of history warped, yet simultaneously it provides us with an historical viewpoint that is subversive in the way it alters and sometimes softens historical recollections for the innocent in us (which is really done simply for laughs), because Forrest’s mental condition has enabled him to retain his innocence. The film’s deconstruction and contemporizing of history most clear, however, in how star Tom Hanks was digitally placed into old footage of many of the historical events of which Forrest becomes a part.

Finally, Little Miss Sunshine is ultimately a fractured story of an even-more fractured family and how time heals their collective wounds, bringing them closer together (albeit in the face of tragedy) while it is still possible. While it vastly differs from Almost Famous and Forrest Gump in its time setting, Little Miss Sunshine ultimately becomes a twisted allegory and something of a cautionary tale for all families. We all recall long and uncomfortable car journeys with our families, and it does not matter if our relationship with them was anything like the relationships the Hoovers have with each other, because whether or not we want to admit, we all either grew up with someone who was, or once were ourselves, just like one of the Hoovers.

Cinema has always depicted and deliberately provoked feeling of nostalgia as a means to touch the hearts of even the most cynical audiences. But often throughout the decades, nostalgia cinema has become one of deliberate sentimentality. It is obvious the two go hand-in-hand, and since some of us dislike one or the other or perhaps even both, the challenging and often satirical exploits of postmodernism have to be thrown into the mix to give the film an edge of fragmented and parodic nostalgia. Almost Famous and Forrest Gump show the light and shade of the counterculture of the last four decades and never shy away from making those of us who experienced them almost feel ashamed to say that that is where they came from. Little Miss Sunshine, on the other hand, throws normal American family values out the window, giving us a story of a nuclear family who come to remind us of the people we grew up living with, reminding us that we must always move on from the past without forgetting it. Also, each of these films are only light on the surface. Collectively, these three films prove nostalgia that is fragmented and parodic is a refreshing and savage form of postmodern sentimentality we can all fall in love with.




BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Crowe, C. 2000, Almost famous, Columbia TriStar Pictures, Vinylfilms
· Zemeckis, R. 1994, Forrest Gump, Paramount Pictures
· Dayton, J. Faris, V. 2006, Little Miss Sunshine, Fox Searchlight Pictures
· Auner, J. 2000, Making old machines speak: images of technology in recent music, http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/Volume2-Issue2/auner/auner.pdf, SUNY Stony Brook
· Boyle, K. 2001, New man, old brutalisms? Reconstructing a violent history in Forrest Gump, University of Wolverhampton, UK, http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=dec2001&id=280&section=article
· Scott, S. D. 2001, Like a box of chocolates: Forrest Gump and postmodernism, p. 3, Literature Film Quarterly, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200101/ai_n8934162/pg_1
· Luzón, V. 2006, Little Miss Sunshine, Cinema, Culture and Society Portal, http://ccs.filmculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=71&Itemid=38
· Olsen, M. 2000, The uncool: Cameron Crowe discusses the making of “Almost Famous,” Film Comment magazine, September 2000 issue, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1069/is_5_36/ai_65643706/pg_2
· Cook, P. 2004, Screening the past: memory and nostalgia in cinema, find through Google Book Search
· Emerson, J. 2006, Little Miss Sunshine (review), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060803/REVIEWS/60724005/1023
· Scott, A. O. 2000, Ah the good old bad old 70’s, published in The New York Times, find through ProQuest