Towards A Bodily Analysis of Postmodern Nostalgia: Dancer, Spy and Monster in Recent Cold War Nostalgia Films

Abstract

This thesis reads the recent Cold War nostalgia films and explores both the historicizing potential of nostalgia films and how they contribute to the memory studies of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War, though ironically proclaimed as ‘the end of history,’ makes it necessary to ask the philosophical question about our place in history as we have since entered into an increasingly complex social-political landscape. The emergent political discourse of Cold War nostalgia signals the difficulty of making sense of history in the current era. Given this historical background, we cannot ignore the simultaneity of the rise of nostalgic political discourse and the flourishing ‘nostalgia’ of the Cold War in the Hollywood mass cultural productions. But we also notice that these films are not truly nostalgic on a political-ideological level, but on an audio-visual one. In other words, as cinematic remediations, they are interested in and play with the way cultural memories of the Cold War were mediated. Paying careful attention to the rift between the cinematic form and the political discourse of Cold War nostalgia, this thesis reads the selected films and explore new ways of historicizing the Cold War by firstly clarifying the questions with regard to the relationship between cinematic nostalgia and history. The selected films heavily feature the cultural figures of dancer, spy and monster, pointing not only to the common memory of the Cold War but also to shared terms of historicizing strategies. Drawing on Deleuzian theories, I situate these films within the social field of desire and recuperate nostalgia films’ historicizing potential through a bodily approach. By historicizing the Cold War nostalgically, these films deny submission to the imposed political discourse and instead promote bodily negotiations of subjectivity and historical agency.