We want to go back to a time when we could drive our big cars and tease our hair – without thinking about the ozone or whatever
There has been much talk about our hunger for a “return to optimism”. Our world has been too real for too long, and we all just want a bit of shelter from the storm.
We look back in patronising nostalgia at Obama’s Hope poster in the same way we insist music hasn’t been real music since about 1986 (or since 1966, or since the Great American Songbook, or since Mozart, depending who you talk to).
Movie theatres are propped up by two monolith tent poles: DC’s umpteenth Superman and Marvel’s Fantastic Four reboot, both attempting a full factory reset of their flagship properties.
It offers a return to the originals – AKA, the “good old days”. But this isn’t so much a yearning for a new optimism as it is a resuscitation of an old one. The Fantastic Four is even set in a 1960s Jetsons-style alternate reality (the first comic was published in 1961).
