A Film Canon

Like Donnie Darko, Daydream Nation imagines the 80s as the moment at which we first began to experience that dissolution of time that signals the approach of end time. It's further enough along that trajectory, though, to ensure that the time travel that drove Donnie Darko doesn't even make sense any more. Instead, Michael Goldbach suffuses his coming-of-age story, which focuses on a love triangle between two students and a teacher in a small Canadian town, with an overwhelming nostalgia for the present. As the title's reference to Sonic Youth might suggest, it's a replacement of flashback with feedback, an indication that past and present are now simply part of the same loop, bleeding into the cinematographic fuzz that covers most of the film's surface, and produces something like a visual Doppler Effect - layer upon layer of pastness that becomes exponentially and unbearably more present, until it's suddenly even more remote than the past itself. Virtually every shot is overlaid with pixellated, magnified and abstracted points of light, which offset the witty, acerbic dialogue, and complete the 80s cinematic project of turning the past into little more than an abstracted texture, an ambience that gathers around local, formal, specificities - or, in terms of the film's narrative, the serial killings that defined "that summer", and suffused the town with a murky, amorphous illbience, even as they produced sharp, local cusps. Less an atonal than a modal film, then, it's not a straightforward recreation of an 80s small town nostalgia piece, nor a straightforward deconstruction - although Goldbach does playfully suggest that nostalgia for small-town life both conceals the fact that small towns still exist, and that they need this very fabricated nostalgia to make their tedium bearable. Instead, by presenting the small town nostalgia piece as the cinematic version of 80s feedback, Goldbach suggests that it's only now that that feedback has circulated enough to become truly inhabitable, just as  Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation comes more into existence retrospectively, with each subsequent playing.