How to Write about Nostalgia

An essay on 'Y2K,' 'Didi,' & nostalgia. Ultra.

Can a house be haunted, not with ghosts, but with nostalgia? Is nostalgia itself a form of haunting?

These are a couple of the questions I’m pondering while trying to write my next book, Midwest Emo. The book is set in The American Football House, a fairly standard building in Urbana, IL that appeared on the cover of American Football (LP1) and has since captivated the minds of people around the world and even physically lured many of them to its location for a selfie.

One of the more direct questions I’m asking everyone I interview for the book is “Is the American Football House haunted?” I usually caveat it by saying something like, “not like, with ghosts. But in a positive way? Or with nostalgia?”

Almost everyone has said yes, with their own respective caveats. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, it’s 100% scientifically confirmable that something about that house has a hold over people. It gets into their psyche and impacts their behavior.

For people who were involved in the ‘90s DIY scene I’m writing about, nostalgia tends to play a big role in the haunting they describe. The house reminds them of music from high school or college, of sweaty punk bands playing in basements and living rooms.

I do believe that nostalgia is its own form of haunting. If nostalgia were a house its façade would be pleasant and untouched and the inside would be burnt to a crisp. Nostalgia traps us in the past, making us think a bygone era was better than it really was. At first we feel happy, remembering. Then nostalgia makes us sad that things aren’t how they used to be, or didn’t turn out the way we thought they might have, back then. It’s right there in the Greek etymology. Nostos = “return home.” Algos = “pain.”

While working on a longform project like Midwest Emo (set in “my home,” “the paign”), almost every piece of art I consume has an impact on what I’m attempting to create. I try to read and watch media that’s directly related to my own work, but that usually feels like research. It’s better when I discover influential works unintentionally. Which is what happened recently when I watched Y2K and Didi, two movies that are heavily nostalgic for a time period in which I was an adolescent.

I saw Y2K first. The only thing I knew going in was that Kyle Mooney directed it and the internet classified it as “horror/comedy.” Good enough for me. Brigsby Bear was one of my favorite movies when I saw it in the distant past of 2017. My defense of Kyle Mooney’s first film solidified when my brother, eight years my senior, claimed to hate it. I can’t remember why but I think he called it a “weird ass movie.” At least that’s how I recall it. I’m sensitive to the word “weird” because that’s what people used to call me growing up, and still do, even though it doesn’t bother me now. I couldn’t tell you much about Brigsby Bear without looking up details but I can confidently say that it was a reflection of how I felt like an outsider, and it had a feel good ending of ultimate triumph. Even my own present-day claims of enjoying the movie are plagued by the unreliability of nostalgia.

Plus, I’ve always liked Kyle Mooney’s Good Neighbor sketches, and SNL hadn’t seemed to eradicate the best quirks of his humor the way it has so many other cast members, historically. So I went into Y2K with high expectations but no idea what it was about.

I should have predicted from the title but I wasn’t prepared when I sat down in the theater with a popcorn, sour patch and coke icee like I did so many teenage nights, to be blasted in the eyes and ears with overwhelming nostalgia.

The film begins with an AIM conversation, tracking familiar clicks and typing on an outdated computer. Y2K hammers its time period with blatant references like this, primed to make people my age laugh simply by seeing the way things used to be represented on screen. The gimmick worked for my theater’s audience. A character burning songs like ”Praise You” and “Tubthumbing” onto a CD, labeling it with a sharpie and playing it through a Walkman attached to a shitty car’s tape deck isn’t a joke in the traditional sense. It’s funny because that’s how life was, and isn’t anymore. Nostalgia makes us laugh, sometimes, to reckon with its pain.

These time-specific references go on for 15 or 20 minutes while the film sets up the main characters: Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison), high school boys who bring a single condom to a New Year’s Eve party in hopes that one of them will lose their virginity. The exact references escape me, but often Mooney’s use of time-specific stuff felt like nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It was overly overt. There wasn’t enough substance, and there weren’t enough jokes, to back it up. Still, the old ass millennial crowd was loving it.

I loved it too when I was totally blindsided by the film’s inciting incident. Up until that point, during the lengthy lead up, it felt like Y2K was going to be Kyle Mooney’s Superbad: the tale of two teenage boys getting drunk and trying to get laid at a party full of more popular kids. Anyone who saw the trailer or read anything about the movie ahead of time already knew the actual premise, but my enjoyment was greatly increased by not knowing it, even though when I was in college a film professor showed us The Sixth Sense along with some study about how people actually enjoyed that M. Night Shyamalan joint more when they already knew the twist ending. Therefore, the professor reasoned, spoilers don’t matter. This is another point I’ve defended in many frivolous arguments over the years, which I still believe but now have unfortunate evidence to the contrary.

The Act 1 “twist” of Y2K is that when the clock strikes midnight our protagonist Eli, a young Ron Livingston in Office Space-type, sullenly watches his crush Laura (Rachel Zegler) make out with his bully Chris (The Kid LAROI). Then, the electronics malfunction. The digital clock on the oven flashes. Someone upstairs screams. A character states the premise in shocked disbelief: “Y2K is actually happening!”

Then the real movie begins. All of the computers band together into the singularity, with a unified mission to either kill humans or bring them to a facility to implant chips into their brains and harvest their energy. It gets gruesome fast, and takes a sharp turn from Superbad to This Is The End.

In Y2K, nostalgia is not the antagonist. Technology is. The film’s lengthy opening nostalgic sequence sets up a harsh contrast to the brutal unforgiving nature of the killer computers. I can’t say definitively whether Kyle Mooney intended to make some sort of point about how social media and technological advances since 2000 have destroyed us in many ways, but that’s something that I thought about after leaving the theater. An alternative interpretation could be that the pleasantness of the nostalgia at the beginning of the movie was a lie. That things weren’t as simple and great then as they seemed. Or it could have just been a fun goofy movie about machines killing humans.

I liked the movie because, as an old ass millennial, it was the first time I’d seen the era I grew up in captured so playfully and accurately in a film. I don’t know if the 2000s-2010s aren’t represented in period pieces the way more distant decades have been (I don’t have stats to back this up, it just feels like I’ve seen the 50/,60s, 70s, 80s & 90s way more). because they’re too recent or no one knows whether to call them the 2000s or the aughts.

Someone who I went to Y2K with said they didn’t like the movie, and that Didi did a better job of capturing that same time period. Thanks to advancements in technology since 2000, I watched Didi a few weeks later on an airplane’s seatback screen.

Didi is a completely different type of movie, but it’s similar to Y2K in a lot of ways. For one, they’re both movies. Also, both of their directors attended USC. They had theatrical release dates in 2024. Their plots revolve around adolescent characters coming of age in the early 2000s. They cleverly incorporate antiquated forms of technology that at the time were cutting edge, like AIM. Both of these movies blatantly attempt viewers of a certain age (aka my old ass age) feel nostalgic.

Directed by Sean Wang, a friend of a kinda-friend/former roommate of mine, Didi is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a particular time and place. The film is set eight years after Y2K, in a universe like this one in which “Y2K,” the technological disaster, doesn’t happen. So, there is YouTube. Didi, AKA Chris (Izaac Wang), uploads Jackass-style prank and skate videos with his friends.

Compared to Y2K, Didi is a much more grounded emotional drama with some comedic elements. Chris wants to hook up with his crush, but the central conflict revolves his strained relationship with his mother (Joan Chen). The technology isn’t a killer, it’s just the reality of the new age. Chris browses his crush’s MySpace page to see what music and movies she likes, then pretends to have the same interests when he sees her IRL. When his estranged friend takes him out of his Top 8, he knows it’s really over. The teenage feelings of heartbreak, angst, rebelliousness, and alienation are the same as they’d be in any generation. They’re simply expressed through burgeoning forms of social media, and exacerbated accordingly.

Every parent nowadays is as addicted to their phones as their teens are, but in 2008 the internet still mostly felt like a (not-quite-)safe haven for kids who grew up with it. Parents couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to have your friend pin you down while another friend texts your crush asking if they want to have buttsex. Although of course they experienced something similar, in a different way. Didi does a great job of emphasizing the generational disconnect in technology as it was in 2008, and how Chris’ actions online drive him further from his mother. There’s also a disconnect between how Chris acts online and how he behaves IRL.

The book I’m working on takes place primarily throughout the span of the 1990s. There was internet then, but not in the same way as now or even 2008. A lot of the people I’ve interviewed have mentioned how the lack of internet during that era made the scene what it was. To book bands, you had to call or mail letters. You had to tour neighboring towns to spread the word. Zines would show up at record shops, connecting scenes of different cities. As an old ass 33 year old millennial, I’m as nostalgic for the pre-internet time as I am the periods depicted in Y2K and Didi. Knowing what the internet is now, it’s also interesting to retroactively think about the good and bad ways in which the world was better or worse off without it. The nostalgia is the same, but hits different.

I don’t know if I discovered a definitive answer for ‘how to write about nostalgia?’ after watching these two movies, but I can definitively say that Didi incorporated nostalgic elements in a more effective manner. It’s better to depict a certain time period as it was, showing how the specific elements of that time, like burgeoning technology, had an impact on characters - rather than just showing nostalgic things for a cheap, forgettable laugh. It’s going to be a challenge to figure out how to both evoke nostalgia through the era of music I’m writing about AND make some sort of commentary about the haunting nature of nostalgia as a whole. The more I think about it, maybe Y2K did accomplish that pretty well.

I’m getting to the end of this piece of writing and realizing I don’t have a conclusion, or even a good reason for publishing it. I just thought Y2K and Didi were both enjoyable movies that incorporated aughts nostalgia in compelling ways. I want to study nostalgia as a concept more in-depth, so if anyone has any recommendations, please let me know.

Sorry as always for sending too many emails, but my new goal is to publish a random essay like this every Monday. I’m also starting a new section of my substack called ‘Music Discovery Diary,’ where I listen to a musical artist I’ve never heard of each day and write about it, then send you a summary and a playlist every week. Look out for that on Friday, and sorry again if you don’t want to read it.

I’ll try to make these essays better, too, but sometimes I like just consuming things and responding to them in a half-assedly critical way.

Happy New Year.

Love,

Will Hagle