nostalgic enough for you?
on tik tok-er eva evans' online show, "club rat"
I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia. So far, the post-pandemic 2020s have felt particularly nostalgic. From reboot after reboot to 90s/Y2K fashion imitations taking over the runways and trickling down into the masses (thank you, Miranda Priestly), our culture feels fully turned towards the past. Is this anything new? Trump’s whole 2016 campaign was fueled by nostalgia for the good ol’ days. His slogan “Make America Great Again” was not exactly subtle in its idea that America was great when straight white men were on top and everyone else was in the minority. If Trump’s rallying cry encouraged people to look to the past, then the pandemic forced us to stay there. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, “And so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.” Is Fitzgerald saying that nostalgia is merely apart of the human condition? Perhaps our post-pandemic, late-stage capitalist hellhole is only serving to amplify what humans are already wont to do: long for the glory of days past.
The other night I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to watch a web series I’d heard about from Tik Tok called “Club Rat.” Created by and starring Tik Tok-er Eva Evans, “Club Rat” is a series of short 5-10 minute episodes that follow a self-absorbed Lower East Side Tik Tok-er in the wake of a humiliating break-up video going viral. While it’s unclear how much of “Club Rat” is based in reality, Eva Evans is indeed a self-absorbed Lower East Side Tik Tok-er. From its title to its premise of an it-girl strutting around downtown Manhattan, “Club Rat” feels indicative of the nostalgia currently permeating our culture. Eva Evans is clearly an it-girl of Carrie Bradshaw ilk, and “Club Rat” is clearly meant to be a kind of translation of Sex and the City into 2023. Her wardrobe of Dior saddle bags and oversized button-downs worn as dresses (real ones will know the Carrie look), her self-absorption, the New York backdrop…it’s not exactly subtle. And while the show does feel true to the kind of “Dimes Sqare” it-girl it's depicting, it feels hollow. It doesn’t seem to contribute any new ideas aside from “What if Sex and the City and Girls had a baby?” and it’s neither funny enough nor as astute in it’s satirization of a privileged white girl traipsing around New York City as it’s predecessors. However, I don’t think that Eva Evan’s is at fault for the faults of her show. She looks fabulous and the show itself is gorgeously shot and serviceably acted. The problem has more to with nostalgia.
It is oft said that New York City is the fifth girl in Sex and the City. It feels as though in anything set in New York, the city makes up its own character—constantly changing, constantly affecting those that occupy it in mundane, mythical, and altogether baffling ways. New York itself is not a nostalgic city, but its inhabitants will always be nostalgic for the New York of yesterday. This is certainly true for “Club Rat.” I mean, it’s in the title. “Club Rat” calls upon the particular nostalgia for New York’s downtown club scene that has taken the Manhattan zeitgeist in recent years. Everyone is obsessed with the Lower East Side, with Chloë Sevigny, with the art and music scenes in the 80s, the club scene in the 90s. “Dimes Square,” the made-up neighborhood between Chinatown and the LES that “Club Rat” is set, is a perfect indication of the hollowness that this kind of nostalgia has turned into in our post-pandemic world. It’s a neighborhood perfectly curated to reflect the past but at a much higher cost. It’s a phony imitation of yesteryear.
The idea of the it-girl is one that has taken great prevalence in 2023. From New York Magazine’s “It-Girl” issue, in which they looked back on 50 years of the NYC it-girl, to Apple TV+’s docuseries on the four Supers—Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Cindy Crawford—undeniable it-girls of their time, the revival of interest in the it-girl has sparked a number of think-pieces on whether or not the it-girl still exists in 2023. The mythology of the it-girl is built around a certain level of mysteriousness, that social media has all but eradicated. Tik Tok has made every NYC girlie that gets a table at Casino or buys their clothes at James Veloria feel like Carrie Bradshaw, when in actuality, they’re merely copies of each other and imitations of the true it-girls that came before them. For a generation that prides itself on its individuality, if we’re all referencing the past, where is the actual individuality? Where are the new ideas?
As someone whose mind is constantly filled with references to the past, I find it hard to figure out what the line is between nostalgia and innovation. I’m someone who firmly believes that looking back on the zeitgeist of yesteryear is crucial to understanding how we got ourselves where we are now. But when does looking back get in the way of progressing forward? I’m constantly trying to figure out how to use my nostalgia for the past to produce something that builds upon it rather than mimics it. I appreciate Eva Evan’s for making a show like “Club Rat”—it’s the kind of show I’ve always dreamed of creating—but its lack of original thought makes me question whether or not any of my thoughts are innovative or progressive enough. Perhaps my issue with “Club Rat” lies in the fact that it makes me question my own originality. Perhaps my criticisms of our current culture are mere reflections of my own insecurities over being so susceptible to it all.
Going to try and write here more regularly. If you’re wondering where I’ve been, please refer to the link :)
X, Bryce