It’s been roughly eleven years since the ‘Jonas Brothers 3D Concert Experience’ movie came out in theaters. I lived in a little town in Massachusetts at the time, and our primary movie theater was the one in the mall. One night, shortly after the movie was released, when my little sister, probably around five at the time, was in bed, my mom snuck me out of the house to go see the movie with her. As a nine-year-old, secret mall nights (beginning around 7, since staying up until 8 or 9 was a treat) with my mom were some of my most cherished moments—I distinctly remember the night she bought me a root beer float, which spilled, and then bought me another, which also spilled. This night, though, was probably a few months before my family went to my first concert, the Boston leg of the Jonas Brothers World Tour for their 2009 album ‘Lines, Vines, and Trying Times.’ My parents surprised my sister and me, who were avid fans. I’ve always been an informed kind of dedicated fan—when I become entrenched in a book series, band, or television show, I like to become an expert. In elementary school, I devoted myself to Harry Potter, and reread the series to absurd lengths. I knew every character’s middle name, every piece of trivia, and had sections of the books memorized. Musically, in elementary and middle school, it was the Jonas Brothers. I still have the tracklist of all of the Jonas Brothers CDs memorized, a residual trace of my devotion. We listened to their CDs in the car perpetually, beginning with ‘A Little Bit Longer,’ which I bought at Limited Too in 2008, shortly after I’d begun watching their music videos on YouTube. Flan and I had Jonas Brothers posters on our walls and every song memorized; we watched ‘Jonas’ and ‘Jonas LA’ on Disney Channel, and also had all of those songs memorized; and we and our elementary school best friends created our own music videos and dance routines to the songs.
I say all of this because I’m sitting on my bed, a twenty-one-year-old in quarantine who really ought to be studying for exams, and watching the ‘Jonas Brothers 3D Concert Experience.’ It’s such a heavy dose of ecstatic nostalgia—I know every word to these songs that I rarely listen to anymore. I’m grinning as I watch Nick do the onstage cartwheels and aerials he used to be famous for, and shaking my head at Joe’s neon shirt and Kevin’s heinous vest, and laughing that Nick was wearing a shirt and tie onstage (he was always my favorite). I’m the physical manifestation of the post I saw on Instagram today, that poked fun at girls in quarantine for running to the nostalgic emblems of their childhood. And I’m quite alright with it. When I looked up the year the movie came out, so as to try to calculate the brothers’ ages in 2009, I found it had received a 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a New York Times reporter scathingly determining that ‘“Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience” isn’t a movie so much as a devotional object, a kind of secular fetish designed to induce rapture.’ Thank goodness we have the New York Times reviews to intellectualize early 2000s Disney stars’ concert movies for us.
I’d like to resist that, though. Nostalgia is a poignant, melancholy device, but I don’t feel a need to intellectualize it. There’s something too visceral about nostalgia, about these songs that encompass a very particular portion of my life. I’d rather experience it than analyze it. So I’m sitting on my bed, listening to the Jonas Brothers, and, somehow, experiencing some portion of what I did in 2009. I’m a lot older now, and I feel like a very different person—but I still know every word, and that’s beautifully, marvelously, stunningly nostalgic.