Romanticizing the Past

I found my favorite photograph in eighth grade. I was browsing through Google pictures of New York City, and the black and white photo (above) caught my attention: it’s part of a collection published in a 1965 issue of LIFE Magazine, featuring a bunch of people skateboarding through New York City (in 1965).  In this particular shot, you see three young boys (I don’t think the oldest one is more than thirteen or fourteen) in trousers and bomber jackets, cruising on crude skateboards down a narrow street. Two of the boys have their arms thrown out at odd angles, trying to balance on the boards. The boy on the far left has his mouth slightly ajar, maybe caught by surprise with the possibility of falling. Meanwhile, background figures stare in indiscernible directions, their faces blurred so we don’t really know what they’re looking at. The street is lined with cars. A truck approaches slowly (or maybe it’s at a stop?) from the back.

I fell in love with this picture. I printed it out on a piece of cardstock and framed it with a frame that was a little too big for the size of my cardstock. It hung in my room throughout the rest of eighth grade and all throughout high school—and now, here at college, it’s a prominent piece of my shelf decor. The picture makes me happy: I like old photographs, and I like the carefreeness projected by the boys in the picture. I like the tiny skateboards that they’re on. When I was younger, I sometimes wished I could jump into that picture and join that glossy-looking, black-and-white world.

I used to daydream about living in the fifties or sixties in general. I imagined sprawling on the lawns of those brand new suburbs, drinking milkshakes on stools at neon diners. I wanted to drive in those shiny little Corvettes, or hear The Supremes sing live. I wanted someone to sweep me off my feet like they did in black-and-white movies.

But my education of this era was largely based on Audrey Hepburn films, the "Leave it to Beaver" show, and my father’s vast collection of fifties and sixties music. I romanticized this period as a whirlwind, glossy, beautiful time to be alive. And it was a great time to be alive in some instances (The Beatles, moon landings, the like), but it was also full of political tension, racially-motivated violence, and more blatant inequality than we experience today. Only when I was a little older did it strike me that, in order to live the way I wanted to live during these decades, I would probably have to be an upper-middle class White man.

Often, we tend to romanticize the past. In fashion, for example, past trends are always recycled and revamped. In the past few years, mainstream fashion trends have included a nostalgic nineties phase, a grungy Y2K aesthetic, and even a neon-spandex 80s vibe. Today’s movies and TV shows are always revisiting regency-era settings; biopics love to exploit the lives of 20th-century celebrities. There are even vintage YouTubers who incorporate aspects of mid-century culture into their present-day lives, or even try to live their lives as if they’re living during the mid-century.

And it can be fun, but this romanticized version of the past is largely narrated by a White American patriarchy. We don’t get to hear from minority voices of the time; we don’t get the full story. And because we don’t get to hear the full story, we also don’t see the underbelly of a supposedly-wonderful vintage past. The Roaring Twenties, for instance, is often thought of as a time of glamor, new freedoms, and women’s liberation. And while this is true to an extent, it was also a time of labor unrest, a growing KKK, and strong anti-immigrant sentiment. And the 1960s, stereotypically romanticized for its “free love” movement, was also the time of the Civil Rights movement and the unrest of the Vietnam War.

In terms of pop culture or cinema, “Gone With the Wind” is perhaps the movie that is most well-known for its romanticization of a problematic subject matter. Over the years, it has become well-known for romanticizing slavery and painting the antebellum South as sort of a “lost paradise”—a picture that is very far from the truth.

More recently, the Netflix hit show “Bridgerton” came under scrutiny for its awkward depiction of racial tensions in regency-era England. (The show attempted to comment on present-day racial situations through the eyes of characters living in a basically-colorblind alternate historical universe, but this made for some clumsy and uncomfortable storytelling.)

We have had a history of glossing over the past, choosing to overlook the darker, grittier, harder-to-address parts of it. Popular depictions of historical eras (movies, pop culture, photographs) often highlight certain aspects of the era while disregarding others. But it’s important to have context when looking at history. To learn from history, we have to take in all of it. As a kid, I only saw the shiny aspect of vintage things—stylish cars, movie stars in glamorous dresses, quaint milkshake diners. I romanticized these things. They made me want to live in this safe-seeming, glossy world. But the thing is, this world never existed.

Our present, real world is not only shaped by parts of history, it is shaped by all of it. It’s a bit of a fine line to balance—appreciating the good parts, but also acknowledging and addressing the problematic parts. But only by viewing history as a whole will we be able to learn in the present and thus contribute to a better future.