Nowadays I cry about 'real' life considerably less. In those terms, in matters solely relating to my own personal experiences, I can think of just one time I was reduced to tears in the past five years. And I was drunk, besides. It would seem that maybe I've totally closed myself off, or gone numb, or just finally grown up. Yet those tears do still come. Only now it is the slightest moment of sentimentality in an episode of The Simpsons that can have me blubbering for minutes on end. Some of the moments when tears have decided to flow have left me incredulous; seemingly mundane, unimpressive shows of hope, optimism and love.
Recently, the media experience that affected me in such a way was during my play-through of Kingdom Hearts 3. I was roughly a year late to the party, but still found myself moved by its sincere performance of the inner goodness of all, the possibility for everyone to be redeemed. Reflecting back, it's almost a sickly sweet idea. But, hey, it worked at the time.
As it turns out, brutal authenticity is the theme of this post.
For those who don't know, the Kingdom Hearts franchise consists of a video games, movies and complex depicting a crossover between the intellectual properties of Square Enix and Disney. Angsty emo teens partake in anime-esque battles alongside Donald Duck, Goofy and Mickey Mouse. It is exactly as absurd and surreal as it sounds. It is that precise absurdity that places the series as a premier space from which to unpack nostalgic sentimentality; this is a franchise most shrewdly and conspicuously designed for you to purchase your childhood back. You might go as far as to say that Kingdom Hearts is one of the preeminent commodities of postmodern capitalism, but people would probably call you boring if you did so.
Throughout the game, you play as Sora, or some other spiky-haired protagonist, chasing after an ill-described macguffin (In KH3, this is the 'power of waking', which apparently isn't just an alarm clock) through the worlds of different Disney movies. Your true goal, of course, is to make the casts of these films happy. It is a simple joy. Dance with Tangled's Rapunzel, take selfies with Toy Story's Buzz and Woody, inexplicably yeet yourself off a mountain because Elsa told you to and so on. The game empowers you to fulfil the happy endings of the movies you loved growing up.
A scene from Kingdom Hearts 2 depicting what I can only describe as 'Goth Mickey'.
Of course, no doubt part of it was down to the craft of the game itself. It is good. Really good. The music is heavenly and the fact that the ostensible third game in the series is actually something like the ninth does hold you somewhat emotionally hostage. But that aforementioned delight in optimism, the joy of experiencing a happy ending for a change (you will note that I am writing a blog post about a video game, and not the ongoing Labour Leadership Election), still stops somewhat short of an adequate explanation for me. I feel that it is in the delivery of this sentimentality as much as the message itself. Similar to the viewing of Disney movies themselves, playing Kingdom Hearts is a practice in infantile regression. In that the player willingly takes on the role of a childlike actor and experiences nostalgia not in the literal sense, but as a genre unto itself: we aren't so much feeling the pain of a past that we can never return to, so much as we are entering into that past for the first time.
And is this nostalgia genre not what we are endlessly barraged with, in multiplexes and on streaming services? Texts we know are nostalgic before we partake in them, concerning brands and experiences that we have no investment in. It seems that a key feature of nostalgia today is that the nostalgic text professes to exist, regardless of your own personal investment in it. Perhaps, Star Wars was the seminal moment for this genre. Perhaps this is some inherent form of human storytelling. Still, I think most of us can tell there is some difference between George Lucas' nostalgic pulp space opera and J.J. Abrams' Star Wars by way of Star Wars.
Whilst I'm not interested in blanket-disparaging escapist fantasy, there is a danger in this wider nostalgia-qua-genre, both in that it's a creative dead end of glorified reruns and in that nostalgic experiences like KH3 are perhaps too sweet, too optimistic, provide too much hope. These are naturally not inherently bad qualities, but in so far as that these sentiments are directed not towards our future lives, or our present conditions, but to our non-existent pasts, they keep our imaginations dull and limited: to hope is the infantile fantasy of Disney movies and video games.
I'm now posed with the exceedingly difficult question of how to end this blog post without adulating the inherent cynicism in these products, without talking down, even betraying, my own personal experiences. Sure, I could lie and say that I've only ever been moved by old social realism films, and that cheap sentimentality produced by unconquerable media corporations has no effect on me, but what would be the point? Instead, I think I'm just going to go and cook a meal with my friend, Remy. The rat chef. From Ratatouille.
