By 2004, a lot of Americans were feeling, well, pretty lousy.

And you can't blame them.

Within a few years of George W. Bush taking office, the excitement and promise that people were feeling when the new millennium began

had given way to a depressing new day-to-day existence.

There were constant terrorist threats, multiple wars, and a general feeling that nothing

was going as planned.

The present had become a bummer, and so movie makers and moviegoers began racing back to the

past.

That's not entirely surprising.

After all, nostalgia is one of our oldest industries.

I mean, it's literally nothing new.

Yet the pop culture revivalism of the 2000s was more than just a diversion.

It was part of a full-on retreat.

Audiences were so eager to forget their current reality

that they happily tried to relive any decade,

even the ones they'd missed the first time around.

They traveled to the 1950s and 1960s

through music biopics like Ray,

Walk the Line, I'm Not There,

and Walk Hard, the Dewey Cox story.

That was freaking transcendental, Paul McCartney.

Don't you read John Lennon?

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