I love everything related to the Cold War. It’s an old obsession for me, going back to my teenage years. It extends to all types of media set during the war: books, video games, TV shows, and films. WarGames, Sputnik, The Conversation, James Bond, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy…you name it. Even dark comedic takes like The Death of Stalin. The Metro series of novels imagines a post-apocalyptic future in the tunnels under Moscow, and the games based on them are creepy and full of references to a great country that both no longer exists and, in some ways, still around. And when it comes covert Cold War political hijinks, the first Black Ops did the job splendidly, and will always be my favorite entry in the Call of Duty franchise.
Maybe the Cold War is always in my consciousness because it captures this human dichotomy: the potential for great harm, or great suffering, all in our hands.
When I was seventeen, I even wrote an entire concept album set in 1950s USSR, a melancholic story about two lovers kept apart by an authoritarian government. I don’t know if Give My Regards to Saint Petersburg will ever see the light of day, but I digress.
It’s not just stories that specifically deal with the Cold War that fascinate me, it’s just about everything from that time period. The ongoing arms race between the USA and USSR made an indelible mark on every aspect of culture, a mark which we still feel today. On both ideological sides of the Berlin Wall, there was a sense from the 1920s on that humanity was moving towards a shiny new future, one ruled by reason and science and technology and faith in human progress.
Even today, you can’t help but notice the styles that popped up during that time period, from the art deco and of the ’30s to the mid-century modern and Googie styles of the ’50s to the neon colors and digital of the ’80s. And while I love the whole mid-century Western aesthetic, especially when taken to its logical extremes by games like BioShock and BioShock 2, Fallout (especially Fallout 4), and Prey, I especially love the (retro)futuristic visions of Soviet art and architecture: propaganda posters and statues in the realist style, Soviet music, the striking cubic buildings in the brutalist style, and recently, an obsession with nostalgic “Sovietwave” compilations on YouTube, admittedly a modern invention which aims to evoke the imagery and feelings of life in the Soviet Union. I’m also pretty excited for Atomic Heart, a new open-world game releasing this year. It’s like this game was made for me. I mean, just look at this:
I sometimes find myself aimlessly floating across Google Maps, studying the features of Earth’s surface and picking out landmarks as I go. I often learn a lot about different parts of the world while I do so, places I’ve never been. Google Maps is my good friend. Yes, I’m in space and I can see the entire planet out my window, but as breathtaking as it is seeing the big blue ball every day, the space station orbits more than a dozen times a day and it’s pretty high up, so sadly I can’t see the surface in any amount of detail.
Often, I’ll find myself scrolling across the landscape of modern-day Russia and its former satellite states, from the big western cities, the grasslands and farmlands, to the most remote eastern corners of the continent, the mountains and taiga forests and frozen tundra. I marvel at the vast distances between settlements, and what it must have taken to connect them.
Sometimes I imagine what life must have been like, living in those brutalist Soviet cities deep in the frigid northern reaches of Eurasia. I once got really high and sucked into a YouTube documentary about Norilsk, the industrial hellhole of a Soviet-era nickel-mining city in the permafrost wilderness of northern Siberia. Norilsk looks much like any other Soviet-built city: wide avenues, multi-story bloc apartments, and monuments to Soviet icons everywhere. But also, the air is toxic and will kill you dead. It’s a perfect summation of the Soviet communist project, really.
But increasingly, because I’m a natural overthinker, I have to ask myself, “why the Cold War”? Why this long, sometimes peaceful, often tense period of twentieth-century history? Is it the imagery? The fashion? The music? The politics? The sense that there was always some evil, immensely powerful enemy lurking on the other side of the planet? That the threat of nuclear extinction was so fresh in humanity’s collective consciousness that people actually prepared for it, versus now when the thought of being nuclear holocausted into oblivion hardly crosses anyone’s mind anymore?
Maybe it’s all of these things, or none of them.
Recently I’ve taken to reading the works of the late Mark Fisher, another self-admitted overthinker. One common thread that can be found throughout his writing like an exposed ore vein is the idea of the slow cancellation of the future. This could be summed up by the fact that in modern society, the powers that be (who exercise undue influence over it) have essentially made it impossible to envision a world beyond the status quo, a world beyond the present; a world after capitalism. While his work is heavily steeped in philosophical tradition, Fisher often uses poignant pop culture examples to illustrate his points, from Star Wars and gangsta rap in Capitalist Realism, to Joy Division and The Shining in Ghosts of My Life.
This slow cancellation of the future, as Fisher describes, an idea he borrows from Franco Berardi and expands on, has led to countless cycles of generational nostalgia and popular resurgence of media from previous eras, usually the times between WWI and 9/11. It’s sequels, reboots, and reimaginings of our parents’ favorite things. It’s modern pop and even indie music borrowing heavily from the music of the ’60s, ’70s, and ‘80s.
It’s easy to chalk all of this up to Hollywood or the music industry or novel writers or whoever cracks the zeitgeist of our time simply running out of new ideas, but I think there’s a lot more to unpack here. I like Stranger Things as much as the next millennial, and even though I didn’t live through the kind of cinematic, idealized 1980s Midwestern America the show takes place in, it’s important to remember that no one really did. It’s a fabrication, a false memory. A saccharin, whitewashed vision of a past that never existed that still manages to tug at your heartstrings.
I have to ask myself, “why the Cold War”? Is it the imagery? The fashion? The music? The politics? The sense that there was always some evil, immensely powerful enemy lurking on the other side of the planet?
Anemoia is defined as “nostalgia for a time or place one has never known”. Its usage doesn’t seem to be widespread enough for the more reputable online dictionaries to have added it to their lexicons, but across the web, you can find people describing this phenomenon. It’s a feeling that maybe you were “born in the wrong generation”, that life used to be better in the past…somehow.
Simon Stålenhag made waves on the internet a few years back with a series of digital artwork he later collected under the name Tales From the Loop. His digital paintings often depict life in a semi-suburban, semi-rural Sweden during the late 1980s, much as he remembers it growing up, but with the added rustpunk twist of robots or giant cooling towers or floating trucks that use maglev machinery. The alternate twentieth century that Tales takes place in is one in which the Swedish government built the world’s largest particle accelerator in the 1960s outside Stockholm, which led to the development of all kinds of sci-fi technology.
Tales From the Loop is like my fascination with the Cold War in microcosm. In this world, the locals live in the literal shadow of a behemoth of modern technology. Some say it’s the best thing to ever happen, some say it’s the worst. I’m not saying Stålenhag meant for the Loop to be a stand-in for nuclear weapons, but it sure feels like that. You can find the shadow of the atom bomb in so many stories and artworks; nuclear technology is always there, a cutting-edge monolith with the power to either transform the world for the better, or destroy it entirely.
Maybe the Cold War is always in my consciousness because it captures this human dichotomy: the potential for great harm, or great suffering, all in our hands. As a humanist, I firmly believe and acknowledge that we as a species are entirely in control of our own destinies. Maybe one day we will finally, collectively come to that conclusion. Then, we can stop dwelling in lost futures, and start building a real one for our descendants — one even better than anything we could ever imagine.
Echo out.
