The Carousel: Streaming as Time Machine

It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.

Sep 23, 2020

It’s not called the wheel; It’s called the Time Machine.

It’s said that popular culture retraces its steps every 20 years or so. Streaming platforms, in anticipation of renewed relevance, revive cult classic shows on our queues like clockwork. The resurrection of an iconic program can spawn the reawakening of the art, fashion, and music trends reflected in the piece, as well as fresh analyses with 20/20 (or 2020) vision.

In a time when streaming media reigns, it’s common to log hours on an entire season of a viral new release or — on long weekends, sick days, or for extended “… & chill” time — turn to classic shows for comfort. In our country’s current flux between dormancy and upheaval, many of us have found ourselves parked in front of the screen for even lengthier sessions. We swipe through Netflix for something reliable to ease the unease of limbo.

In the first season finale of Mad Men, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) pitches a wistful ad campaign for Kodak’s new slide projector:

… [I]n Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound”. It’s a twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards… takes us to a place where we ache to go again. … It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child does.

By the glow of the projector, Draper packs the slides — his own family photos of celebrations, baby bumps, camping trips, and fatherly piggyback rides — with the emotional power of childlike security and love. With post-pitch catharsis comes the harsh light of the conference room, exposing the present loneliness of adulthood. This monologue served as the culminating crescendo of the show’s boffo debut season. It also serves as a meta-theatrical commentary on the experience of Mad Men’s audience; We too are traveling in time, back to the mid-20th century.

There’s comfort in knowing what’s going to happen. More “precedented” recent history may have ushered in a docile populace — one credulous enough to lie back and trust in (long-standing, exploitative) systems and our public officials — but the world wasn’t on fire, fighting off plague, and woefully inured to the genocide of BIPOC. Our current political moment has laid bare a Medusa of colonial harm historical and current, while prior decades of programming found us blissfully less aware, possibly more easily distracted. We clung to the safety that wrapped us in adolescence.

Faced with dual diagnoses of news and Zoom fatigue, surge capacity depletion, and the magnitude of the world’s grief, I find myself scrolling through the carousel, seeking solace in the shows of my adolescence. Anything from the mid- to late-90s to the early aughts will do, but for me, the shows that hold up best do so because they go beyond their function as time capsules; their content brushes up against our current reality. Shows like these push back on the notion of society’s natural, progressive trajectory.

Like a slide projector or the amusement park’s carousel, when you retread old territory, you do so with experienced eyes. Carrie Bradshaw’s blaccent and sex negativity were never acceptable, but now that sex columnists and discourse on cultural appropriation are more common and digitized, her character flaws are stark. Nevertheless, these harmful behaviors persist today. Tony Soprano is openly racist and his tribalism stems in part from his incomplete understanding of the role of Italian people in American ethnic history. Unfortunately, his attitude hasn’t exactly crumbled with the Roman column home trend.

Witnessing Buffy’s Sunnydale tribulations doesn’t exempt me from dealing with 2020’s hellmouth — on the contrary, hindsight illuminates just how far we haven’t come (Come talk to me about Season 4’s “Pangs” — IYKYK). As we look to history and anticipate its repetition, I expect we’ll indulge in its cultural comforts, but I hope we move beyond this stage. There is a time for refueling to sustain the work to be done, but actual change comes from discomfort. Daunting as it is, if we want to get anywhere, we need to break the cycle: exit the carousel and face the unknown, the possibility of a new story.

Asking you from the harsh light of the conference room: