The future of nostalgia in the TV series Westworld

Abstract

This research paper examines how nostalgia is evoked and critiqued in HBO’s TV series Westworld(2016-present) in order to question whether the idea of the United States of America can survive in the future. While there has been an interest in the phenomenon of pastness, a term denoted to objects as being of or from the past (Holtorf 2017, p. 1), there has been a recent contemporary boom in nostalgia. Katharina Niemeyer (2014) statesthis boom in nostalgiais evident in the number of products, series, and political slogans that reference, market, sell,and profit from nostalgia. Nostalgia, however, is not just a fashion or trend, but rather it tends to express or allude to something much more interesting, as it deals with relations to time and space (Niemeyer, 2014, p.3). Since nostalgia has a particular relationship to how the future, past, and present are imagined and reconstructed, I propose that Linda Hutcheon in Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern (2000, p. 199) gives the most articulated definition: “what you feel is when two temporal moments, come together for you and often carry considerable emotional weight” ...