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Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost

There is a difference between preservation and foreverizing, and a difference between foreverizing and restoration, that should be noted. All three are less punitive strategies to alleviate the nostalgic subject’s bittersweet longing for the past, but they are no less tenacious in their mission to loosen nostalgia’s grip — and they usually end up reinforcing the very longing they try to cure.

Preservation, Restoration, Foreverizing

Preservation starts with the impulse to save things. Decontextualize an object and place it behind glass, seal it in amber, lower the temperature to a degree freezing enough to halt all organic activity, enclose it in a vault, collect it with others and arrange them to be visible and admired, then charge admission. The process has its origins in the nineteenth century’s “economy of desire”: the spectacularization of objects, the commodification of the winsome, when the quaint and very small became fetishized.1 The dizzying spiral of keepsakes, souvenirs, curio cabinets — these private objects turned living spaces into museums, where “domestic daydreaming and armchair nostalgia” could be indulged.2

The problem is that which is preserved must “die,” so to speak, to be protected. It must be frozen in rigor mortis; it cannot exist in its context without risking patination. Neither can it truly live. “A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all,” Mark Fisher told us.3 This presents a problem: one longs to be able to interact with the preserved thing, to live with it, but it must be protected from time, must exist so close but so far away. Restoration, on the other hand, involves cleaning up something old to make it look new, or better than new. But the restoration can only last so long before it will need restoring once again.

Let me provide an example from popular music to illustrate the differences between preservation, restoration, and foreverizing: the long-running American rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Formed in the 1960s, Lynyrd Skynyrd has enjoyed success thanks in part to its willingness to foreverize itself against aging and death, as well as the fan labor to keep the spirit of the band alive through time. To preserve Lynyrd Skynyrd’s music is to keep the band’s physical media safe from aging, perhaps by framing one of their vinyl records and hanging it on a wall. Prized Lynyrd Skynyrd memorabilia can also be preserved by placing it behind glass or in a museum. Some of the band’s original tapes are stored in an air-conditioned room in a house belonging to Tom Markham, regarded as the first to record the band in the late 1960s.4 These are all preservation tactics; the point is to freeze pieces of the band in time. To restore Lynyrd Skynyrd’s music is to remix and remaster it to meet modern-day audio standards. As a result, the music sounds cleaner and clearer, maybe even louder and better, than it originally did. It’s a more interactive approach than preservation and gives the feeling that one is encountering them for the first time again. But to foreverize Lynyrd Skynyrd is to add new members to the band when older members leave or pass away, something they’ve been doing in earnest since their reformation in the late 1980s following the deadly 1977 plane crash that killed three of their members. Lynyrd Skynyrd could also foreverize themselves by allowing contemporary producers to remix their hits for marketing purposes. The 2022 TOTEM remix of “Free Bird” is a perfect example of foreverizing. TOTEM describes itself as a “boutique music library” that produces cinematic music for theatrical marketing.5 Its remix of “Free Bird” is designed to penetrate new marketing channels and generate new sources of income, ultimately aiding in the franchising of the band. The remix sounds like Hans Zimmer covering Skynyrd: pounding drums, huge strings, and a plummeting moment of silence before the guitar-led outro kicks in. Across its 3:00 runtime, you can almost see the trailer to a blockbuster action film flash before your eyes.

One is reminded of the Ship of Theseus story when encountering a foreverized product. If all the original parts of a ship are replaced with new ones, is it still the same ship? Is Lynyrd Skynyrd still Lynyrd Skynyrd with the members of their classic lineup replaced? By continually adding new members, the band never has to stop touring and recording music unless they want to. They could just as easily replenish themselves over and over again with new talent, essentially ensuring their continued longevity in the future. The tactic resembles other forms of foreverizing in popular music: holograms of famous deceased artists that perform their hits live; writing camps sponsored by music investment firms, where songwriters are invited to compose prospective hits by interpolating older songs, the rights of which are owned by the firms; and artists continuing to tour after their supposed “farewell” tours.

Foreverism maintains that the old can’t be merely preserved or re-released; it must be revived, given new stories, de-aged to provide the illusion of vitality, updated, rebooted. The impulse to foreverize content might be driven by nostalgia initially, but in practice, by keeping things forever present, it can eliminate the conditions of yearning. After all, can we really pin the blame for so many ludicrous reboots on the public’s nostalgia for them?

It might seem like a nostalgic demand for older content is the reason for all the rebooting, like the numerous revivals of The Munsters, an American sitcom about a family of monsters that ran from 1964 to 1966. Much to my surprise, the 2022 Rob Zombie–directed reboot of The Munsters was not the first time the series was rebooted. Several film adaptations were released through the second half of the twentieth century: Munster, Go Home! in 1966, The Mini-Munsters in 1973, The Munsters’ Revenge in 1981, Here Come the Munsters in 1995, and The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas in 1996. The Munsters Today premiered in 1988 and ran for three seasons until 1991. And in 2012, a reboot series called Mockingbird Lane was scrapped after the pilot aired. In short, like so many other franchises, rebooting The Munsters isn’t a twenty-first century development.

But was nostalgia for The Munsters the reason for its many reboots? Perhaps, but who can say with certainty? When reboots are announced, there is the usual accusation of nostalgia. But they aren’t necessarily a reaction to our nostalgia for them; instead, they aim to prevent stories from disappearing into the past by providing fans access to their intellectual properties.

Although The Munsters franchise has tried to keep its characters forever present since 1964, no company has succeeded at foreverizing its own content more than Disney, which owns both the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and Star Wars. For many decades, Disney’s strategy was to preserve, and sometimes restore, its classics, but now its mission is foreverizing. The shift can be seen in Disney’s decision to retire the Disney Vault, a strategy whereby Disney released some of its titles on home video for a limited time before placing them back into the vault. Consumers flocked to buy restored classics when Disney took them out of the vault, never knowing with certainty if or when they’d be made available again. Otherwise, consumers would have to search the secondhand market for their favorite vaulted film. With the 2019 launch of Disney+, the company’s streaming platform, the Disney Vault was officially retired. All of its classic titles, from Bambi to Beauty and the Beast, would be available to stream on the platform.

The Disney Vault framed some of Disney’s most famous works as scarce objects. When they were placed in the vault, they were inaccessible to the public. This very likely inspired nostalgia in viewers wishing to own a classic title on physical media. In other words, vaultification made possible the conditions for nostalgia, while Disney+ allows those films to be accessed at any time, effectively preventing viewers from longing for them. By replacing scarcity with accessibility, Disney is suggesting that it isn’t a matter of if you’re going to watch an animated classic, but when.

Accessibility is only one of Disney’s foreverizing strategies. The company also produces new content based on their works, not only making them more available than they were during vaultification, but also rebooting them with new stories, characters, and settings. Take Star Wars as an example. Every new Star Wars reboot triggers an avalanche of thinkpieces reflecting on, praising, or criticizing the nostalgia of the franchise. But like The Munsters reboots, are the Star Wars installments made to profit off viewers’ nostalgia or to prevent fans from ever missing Star Wars again?

If you were alive between the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy, then you might have longed for newer Star Wars movies. So what happened? Star Wars fans got three new movies, several anthology films, and even more live-action series to satisfy a possible nostalgic craving, and there are so many more in development. Think about it: how can anyone be nostalgic...