I'm glad I went there / But to whom? To Granato!
I know every verse of this Eighties jingle for a Turin furniture shop by heart. Could I quote Dante, Ungaretti or Leopardi in the same way? No. I'm so ashamed, as Billy Crystal says to Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, when he admits that he sleeps with lots of women and then forgets them: and we know perfectly well that he isn't ashamed at all. As for the jingle, it was written by Romano Bertola, a copywriter and creator of some wonderfully improper jokes (‘My mummy has gone to heaven,’ said the sad child. ‘Give it a rest, kid! We all know your mother is a flight attendant, fucks, travels the world and has fun!’).
The fact remains that I spend far too much time on YouTube looking for old comics, old toys, old theme tunes, old commercials. Naturally, I'm not the only one: my wife, also brought up by the private TV channels of the period, knows the one for Mercatone dell’Arredamento in Fizzonasco by heart, and hunts down the Barbies she had — and those she DIDN'T have — as a little girl.
We confess, Your Honour: we're nostalgic.
And don't get me started on comics. A single panel from certain stories is enough for me to know where I was when I first read it. Above all, I know who I was. A happy child, with certain Disney stories. A loser of a teenager, but determined to do the job I do today, with certain Marvel extravaganzas from the Nineties (wonderful). As I read, though, I know that I'm no longer that person.
I'm different — and I summon all my optimism to keep from adding ‘unfortunately’.
Here comes algos, the pain you feel at nostos, at the return.
In part you rediscover who you are, in part you know you've lost it for ever. Because that furniture-shop jingle reminds me of myself at eight, at home. It reminds me of winter afternoons spent watching TV, playing, reading comics. With my parents all still alive, my grandparents all still there, a clear and safe world. A personal paradise lost, as we all have.
And this is what today's nostalgia is built on: an industry whose target is my generation. Lego remakes old sets or produces new builds aimed not at nine-year-olds, but at forty-nine-year-olds, like me. Models, reprints, remakes. Like the Masters Of The Universe one, which my friend Andrea and I saw at the cinema, without wives to disturb the sacredness of the moment. Spoiler: it's really bad, unable to find an epic sweep, too busy deflating every powerful moment with weak gags, being from 2026 when we wanted it to be from 1986. There it is again, the pain. My eyes read and watch, but behind them is a different self.
Above all, the world has changed and laughs at what, to me, is beautiful, true, formative, almost sacred. Worse: it's starting not to give a damn. I notice it when I show certain films to my students. The first Indiana Jones, the absolute masterpiece of the trilogy (there are ONLY three Indiana Jones films and we all know it)? They watch it without a flicker of emotion. Life of Brian, with Graham Chapman writing ROMANES EUNT DOMUS and a centurion correcting him until it becomes the more accurate ROMANI ITE DOMUM? They don't laugh.
Oh well, I think, perhaps your sense of humour is different from mine (or perhaps, I think resentfully, you don't have one at all).
Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, a titanic and anarchic Batman who... the wretches yawn. Am I boring them with my boomer references, or are they a bunch of bloody little shits? Is today's world hideous, or am I the one who's out of sync? Should I retreat into the past as if it were a ruined castle, determined to die in modernity's siege? Or accept change, selling off my past in the name of a mediocre, unimaginative present? And yet those stories are masterpieces.
And they're part of me.
There it is, perhaps, the solution.
Among those pages, in those frames of a grainy VHS, there I am. Those ideas, those stories, are still there, together with what I felt when I first encountered them. Perhaps I can return to that syrupy nostalgia and turn it into something else. My eye will no longer be the door to a refuge for dying stories, but the filter that renews them. From which something new and different will emerge, but with those very stories in its DNA. My Indiana Jones, my X-Men, my Mickey Mouse, my Monty Python will end up in other stories. Stories that won't bow to today, but will welcome it. And when someone reads them, perhaps they'll find something that won't be only mine, or theirs. Something that won't be tied to time and, with a little luck, will have something eternal about it. Even if they didn't find it at ‘Granato Mobili, Via Martiri 24, Nichelino, Torino.’
For years he was a comics scriptwriter for Topolino, author, among other works, of the series ‘La storia dell'arte di Topolino’
