Radio, Memory, and the Past in the Nostalgia Film

Abstract

Several prominent New Hollywood filmmakers experimented with limiting their soundtracks to ostensibly diegetic source music. In particular, two films associated with a trend of fifties nostalgia use the compiled pop scoring and the medium of radio to articulate complex sensibilities of the past. Both films experiment with the aesthetic flow of radio broadcasting, while adopting the image of the radio signal itself as a technological-aesthetic metaphor for melancholy temporal distance. In The Last Picture Show, radio conveys a sense of entrapment in the film’s world, and a sense of the fragility of the connections linking past and present. In American Graffiti, radio broadcast cultivates a precious, yet melancholy sense of communal identity. In this way, both films articulate a paradoxical attitude toward the past, a nostalgic desire to conjure what has been lost to time, which coexists with an awareness of the impossibility of this recovery outside of imagined experience.