The muse of the nostalgic loop

Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta spent almost all of Grease apart and yet the inevitable is to imagine them together.

Can you imagine a 23-minute loop of the first few seconds of

's most famous musical number ?

As if in an exasperating vicious circle, Danny (John Travolta) sings over and over again the start of the catchy song

after seeing the geek Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) transformed into a beast thanks to a perfect jacket and black vinyl pants.

Eyes wide, Travolta's gesture hangs on the first “It's electrifying”.

The video essay

(2015), by German artist Max Grau, puts more than just the viewer's nervous system to the test by dwelling obsessively on an iconic moment from popular culture.

Grau offers an interesting and fun reflection on the nostalgia industry, the internet and the psychology of the

.

The artist arranges his piece on a computer screen, with his thoughts in the form of subtitles, leaving the white edges of the screen unhidden, thus underlining the documentary quality of the Grease video.

In the final stretch, surely with the intention of not twitching the viewer more than necessary, graphic illustrations and even some musical variation appear.

The video, which is seven years old, was released when the digital mutation that has changed the world was already underway and whose endless obsession with metalanguage remains to be seen where it leads us.

The death of Olivia Newton-John brought Grease back to the present day, a film that contributed to the massive consumption of American retro aesthetics.

It didn't matter if it had lived or not, half the world began to feel like its own what it had never known thanks to this high school musical premiered in 1978 that started in September, at the end of summer, at the beginning of the last year of high school .

Since its premiere,

became a millionaire phenomenon that marked the careers of its two protagonists.

Travolta ended up having a horizon beyond slicked-back hair, but Newton-John's stardom, at least on film, didn't go beyond the 1980s.

The cancer that the singer had suffered since the early nineties did not help.

Grau's essay is funny because it mixes the thoughts of his Marxist mother —who saw

when she was 15 years old and even then it seemed an insult to her intelligence, “a reactionary film with a ridiculous plot”— with the author's guilt for having enjoyed with such a capitalist propaganda device.

Grau dwells on John Waters, Susan Sontag's idea of

, the Jefferson Airplane, animal prints and, in general, his obsession with

, as a generational drift that glorifies nostalgia as the memory grafted into the brains of the

replicants

.

The disappearance of Newton-John is that of an early icon of an era surrendered to an artificial and very profitable longing that, spurred on by the instant access to information that the internet allows, has led to the machinery of nostalgia capitalism.

A machinery ready to feed back into a loop.

You can follow ICON on

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber