Because the original Star Wars movies mesmerize me even though I hate Star Wars, I am left wondering: why am I so transfixed by Star Wars? The basic answer is: because nostalgia. But what is nostalgia? Nostalgia is a kind of algae, or gel that grows on the surface of your inner pond. And if I’m being honest, this surface nostalgae probably makes our little world go around. As when a board of directors at a corporate media conglomerate decides to endlessly reproduce forty-year-old media titles in order to cash in on this strange euphoric feature of the oldest of mnemic traces.

The psychoanalyst refers to this as a screen memory—even before there were any screens. If your early memories had ever differed from those of your siblings or parents, the screen memory is the reason why. This peculiar memory is like a dramatic production, an aesthetic collage of bits and pieces of your childhood that form a diorama, one that is totally invented, but that presents itself as reality. I find the name “screen memory” amusing and rather prescient, because my own memory tends to be made out of screens mostly; so that now when I view certain movies from childhood (even those I had never seen before), I am transfixed and I find them radiant as if they had been bathed, or irradiated, by a ray of sun sent straight from the void. The original Star Wars movies, for example, glow with a psychedelic aura and I am tricked into thinking that they are incredible films, because so eminently rewatchable, and even that movies were better back then.

As you may have noticed, this euphoric idealization of the past has become an entire political program, and I am struck by the notion that utopia is a form of nostalgia for the future… as opposed to our dystopia that dreams of a non-existent past. But that is the basic feature of the screen memory after all, that it has been invented, totally fabricated after the fact and obviously does a pretty good job at repressing what remains unbearable. For childhood, no doubt, is full of all manner of mind-smoking intensities that we cannot even imagine, let alone think about, except in retrospect, in reverso, and in negative, by, for example, stepping in front of the emanations coming off of this old media—that themselves functioned as ancient defenses, refracting the incinerating rays of early childhood.

In the last analysis nostalgia is a probably a crass notion for a phenomena that is rather larger than its more sentimental manifestations. For it is not only screen memories and early-media that are charged with the radiant fantasies produced in the nuclear furnace of my childhood’s overheated imagination, but a whole panoply of diverse sense impressions, that I am always seeking to refind in daily life today, whose very reality had already been animated by unacknowledged desire.

But Star Wars aside, movies were obviously better back in the 70s and 80s, am I right?