Fairyland and Nostalgia
04/06/2026
I was planning on waiting until I watched something tomorrow to make my next blog post but this film I just saw left me with some thoughts. Recently the video game world has been abuzz with discussion of the recent “indie” game Mixtape (2026). While much of the discussion has been focused around pointless arguments about the “wokeness” of the game and its supposed lack of interactivity, both meaningless arguments as far as I can tell, the main thing that has stuck with me is the way that media about the past seems to be stuck in this space of adoring what came from that past while ignoring the context of how those things were enjoyed in their time, such as a protagonist knowing too much about music for a person who was around before the modern internet. While for some this might just disconnect them emotionally from the media being engaged with, for me it reflects both an inability to see the past for how awful it was as well as an inability to create any real progress.
Fairyland (2023) is not a great film. The writing feels more like conversations someone would make up in the shower long after an interaction rather than something in the moment, and the constant close ups of the faces of the actors reflects more an attempt to make up for the bad script rather than a way to truly dive into the psyche of the characters. I do not really recommend watching this film. That being said I do think it presents something interesting about how we view nostalgia. For the first 30 minutes of this film I was hit with the same groan inducing presentations of nostalgia that litter media like Mixtape. For a brief synopsis in order to get everyone acquainted with the narrative. Alysia and her father Steven move to San Francisco after her mother dies in a horrific car accident, where she grows up while her father begins to fully embrace his previously closeted queer lifestyle. During the opening scenes of the film, Alysia is seen playing with the exact same Fisher Price house that my father who grew up in the 1970s had. When the time period jumps to what I assume is the early to mid 80s, there’s an extended scene in a record shop where she name-drops various bands of the time in a scene that could have had the same outcome regardless of her saying that she’s into OMD. These cringe worthy moments were almost enough to make me add them to the growing list of issues I was having with the film, until the film revealed its true nature: it’s an AIDs movie. Once the virus entered the lives of the main characters, the tone of the film completely shifted. There were no more references to nostalgia or media, instead the references that date the film are instead focused on the political and social issues of the time.
In a very basic way, this could just be representative of how as a child our memory is focused on the fun things, like music and toys, but I think in conjunction with the very didactic ending this view on nostalgia is something more powerful. By lulling the audience in with familiar filmic cues such as onscreen toys as set dressing, needle drops, or even the omnipresent film grain; the film is able to further emotionally affect the audience by taking this space of peace and nostalgia and filling it with reminders of the injustices committed by the governments who had the responsibility to help those who cruelly and tragically died. The film seems to be taking the stance that if we’re going to reflect on the past, we need to always be aware of all of the awful things that were occurring then. For every reminder of the simple life of living in a two bedroom condominium that Metric’s Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (2003) provides, effort also needs to be taken to remember how that period of time was filled with death and torture for not only those living in the Middle East, but those in other countries believed by racists to be from that area, and how the money that allowed you to listen to that music may have come directly from the death of innocent people. Alison Landsberg observed what she called “prosthetic memory” in her book of the same name, basing the term around the idea that the emotions we feel while watching a film result in us turning the memories of the characters into our own emotional memories (2004). Fairyland utilizes this method of appendaging prosthetic memory in order to take something that the viewer may hold dear and cause them to never be without the reminder of what happened, as the final shot of Alysia staring into the camera is directly telling the audience to never forget.
Now, that’s not to say that nostalgia is an evil thing or can’t be fun. If anything I would be a hypocrite for expressing that, what with my obsession of analyzing years of music and film. What I am trying to say is that this film makes the case that a focus on nostalgia can end up masking the mistakes of the past that need to be remembered in order to not be repeated, or at the very least to understand the privilege that comes from being able to appreciate those memories. People really just need to be more mindful of how the world around us has come to be. We’ll never be individually perfect at it, but that’s why we need to work together at it. Now go be an active engager of art and stop reading this pointless drivel.
Sources:
Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic memory: the transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture. New York: Columbia University Press.