ABSTRACT
Around 1990, when I first started thinking about the strange relationship between the American 1950s and 1990s, I depended on the metaphor of “repression.” 1 I would talk about the cultural and political return of the repressed 1950s into the 1990s, producing uncanny effects of déjà-vu. Or I would joke about the possibility that Dennis Hopper's famous line from the 1990 film Flashback—” the nineties are going to make the sixties look like the fifties”—was backwards: the nineties are both so out of and into control, they might actually make the fifties look like the sixties. 2 But I soon realized that the connections between the fifties and the nineties that interest me are not those of depth or irony but rather those of surface and access. That what I think an increasing number of people have been experiencing as a “haunting” of the nineties by the fifties is not about the resurgence of memory but about flashes of recall and reruns. I decided that this realization was not being overdetermined by my interest in “the postmodern,” but rather that “the postmodern” had finally overdetermined our social capacity to realize things in the world. I also began to think about the 1950s fear that someone “Outside” was in control from some remote place, as opposed to the 1990s fear that No One is in control of the remote at all.
