Anyone who watched The Batman can’t have escaped a sense of déjà vu. After all, this was the sixth iteration of the man in black. Of course, it isn’t the only ‘new’ movie to retread old ground. Go back to 2005, and a full 17 percent of Hollywood releases were remakes. It’s an old habit too—the fourth horror film ever made? That was a remake of the first.
Indeed, this tendency to look backwards can seem rife in popular culture. Rock constantly references what’s come before, as court cases for copyright infringement might suggest. Design, while trumpeting its Modernist credentials, forgets that Modernism broke through 70 years ago; a big thing in video games now is artfully pixelated reboots of games first played decades ago. Fashion inevitably is almost entirely predicated on echoes of what went before. We seem to have a fondness for revisiting our yesterdays as soon as possible-witness the rose— tinted commentary regarding ‘pre-pandemic times’, even though that was just two years ago. Retro is infectious. We’re drowning in nostalgia.
“There’s this idea that eventually we’d be
