Even before the latest Star Wars: The Force Awakens debuted in India over the weekend, it is already well on its way to becoming one of the biggest blockbusters in movie history ever. From the perspective of the producers, Star Wars presents an infallible proposition. The brand is revered and while the slightest blemish might send a significant part of the Internet into turbulence, film-makers know that all will be forgiven by the announcement of yet another sequel. It isn’t the light sabres, the intergalactic shuttle chases or Yoda’s wisdom that draws everyone from Nobel astrophysicists to science-fiction devotees to the cinemas. Rather, it’s that primitive sentiment called nostalgia.
Jacob Koshy Nostalgia is the domain of Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust and fuel for much literature but Hollywood has, over the decades, perfected the art of making money off nostalgia.
Whether it is the umpteenth rampage of Godzilla through America or mutations of mutations of his lizard-cousins at Jurassic Park, the savvy producers —without probably even reading up — are instinctively tapping the pile of research, from psychology, consumer marketing and neuroscience, which is increasingly taking the scrutiny to the labs.
Numbed by nostalgia There is empirical evidence, according to a series of experiments that appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research , that nostalgia makes people lax with money (explaining why grown men buy appropriately labelled fluorescent plastic tubes knowing fully well that they aren’t light sabres). Also, consumers asked to think about the past were willing to pay more for a set of products than consumers asked to think about new memories or future scenarios. Another study showed that people were more likely to give more money (but not time) to others after recalling, reflecting, or writing about a past life event. Though generally associated with pessimism and forlornness, Constantine Sedikides and his colleagues report, in Current Directions in Psychological Science , even more evidence that nostalgia may actually be a healthy emotion and promotes higher self-esteem as well as an increase in the feeling of being loved and protected by others.
Film critics and Star Wars experts say that though the latest in the series is a competent and impressive addition to the franchise, it is unabashedly a nostalgia trip. Peter Suderman at Vox, in his criticism of Hollywood’s nostalgia mill, and especially of The Force Awakens , says, “George Lucas (the director of Star Wars ) drew upon his personal nostalgia to create something that, in its particular combination of references and allusions, felt thrillingly, excitingly new. J.J. Abrams (maker of The Force Awakens ), by contrast, drew upon Star Wars fans’ collective nostalgia to produce a film that is expressly designed to feel like something we’ve all seen before.”
What does all this say about the typical Star Wars fan? Men — The Guardian quotes statistics from ticket-site Movo Media, which finds that 70 per cent of The Force Awakens tickets in the United States are being bought by men between the ages of 18 and 49 —who can’t but help buy a ticket to relive their adolescence. To get a better sense of why this is so and why consumer research finds the association between profligacy and nostalgia, we need to peer under the brain’s hood and see how it makes memories.
Remembrance of things past While there may be different regions in the brain that govern how we remember words and retain visuals and smells, experiences and memories aren’t stacked like books on shelves. Rather what we experience leaves so-called “neural traces and patterns” that are spread across different regions of the brain. Watching a movie —itself a concert of visual and auditory sensations — involves a large network of widely dispersed neurons. Stimuli cause neurons to react — or fire — and for a substantial memory to take root, they need to be repeatedly stimulated (explaining the blunt and ambiguous effectiveness of rote learning). Akin to thumbprints, a richly layered experience, such as a Star Wars movie in the theatre, leaves its own unique imprint across all the different mini-libraries and storehouses of the brain.
A part of the brain called the hippocampus is usually associated with how we ‘remember’ not only facts about the world but also the order in which we place them and form coherent narratives about our experiences. The amygdale, on the other hand, are small almond-shaped clusters of neurons that have been under the scanner for its role in how we register and process emotions. Both of these regions influence each other and help us record the emotional experience of watching Star Wars not only as a rush of excitement but also as data entry of the kind of person we were, our station in life during that time and our general sense of identity as a person.
The amygdale can frequently prefer certain stimuli over the other as they have direct connections to the brain’s visual-processing regions and often receive signals from them before the hippocampus does. Intensely pleasurable and even painful experiences that we experience leave a strong trace, it is speculated, because the amygdale etch them harder onto the neural traces that the hippocampus shapes.
Frequently, and almost against our will, the several, unique elements that the early Star Wars presented — of grandiose special effects — leave a deep emotional trace, so much so that even the mere mention of the words “Star Wars” brings alive the entire concert of neural patterns that was formed when we first watched the movie in all its novel magnificence.
Importance of early imprints It hugely matters when these experiences were formed. However well-made Star Wars may be, it’s unlikely to influence a 50-year-old watching the movie for the first time as much as it does a 14-year-old. And brain physiology now tells us why our teens are literally an “impressionable age”. The female amygdale mature by the age of 4 and only a small increase of its grey matter volume can be seen during adolescence, whereas the volume of the male amygdale increases by 53 per cent between 4 and 18 years of age with peak development between 9 and 14.
It could be that the special effects and the physics of space travel apart, the average Star Wars viewer is essentially indulging in a trip that has less to do with galaxies and more with the years that his brain has travelled since adolescence. The adolescent who watched the movie years ago no longer exists and his hippocampus tells him that the new movie may not be as appealing. However, the force of the amygdale was awakened years ago and it can’t be tamed. Ta-da, and we have a box office winner.
jacob.koshy@thehindu.co.in
