And if it is messed with, dropped on a laboratory floor by clumsy and over-eager hands, sometimes that virus is able to escape into the world and wreck havoc upon the unsuspecting. It’s easy - and has never been easier - to retreat into comforting glamor and manner that’s been preserved in a kind of dishonest amber like a beautiful butterfly trapped in sap that contains a deadly and unknown virus should it be tampered with by the too-curious. As much as we’d like to think that we, the mod-dressed moderns, invented this kind of backward-looking appropriation and cultural fanboyism, the truth is that humans have done this for centuries - one need only look at Renaissance Europe, which looked at the Romans and the Greeks as a kind of forgotten heyday unable to be recaptured in Borgia Italy or something - but it has gotten easier with the advents of photography, high-quality sound recording and, of course, cinema. For alienated adolescents and plenty of awkward adults, disaffected and unsatisfied with modern life, the past has provided a perpetually alluring form of escapism.
