The Eminent Domain of Movie Remakes

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I think it's a pretty cheap way to make a point; it's one thing to stand on the shoulders of someone else, but quite another to step on them, which is pretty much what they're doing when they supersede an older film with a message contrary to its own.

The point, however, is not that it's invalid, but that it often goes unnoticed and becomes a part of a set of cultural assumptions without having to pass through the often rigorous examination that would come with that kind of status. The point is to be aware of it, rather than let it fly beneath the radar and become part of the zeitgeist without having to sit in the dock.



No, it's not cheap at all, in and of itself. Nor is it necessarily about "making a point". It's re-interpretation, and that's a necessary component of any culture that wants to remain vital.

There seems to be a fairly hefty cliquishness to what you're saying. As if films are to be created and then worshipped and guarded eternally without the "threat" of being re-imagined in new contexts.

There's room for both.
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Why is it not cheap "in and of itself"? It divorces the art of the story from its meaning. Where they used to be one and the same, devoted to the same goal, now the bulk of the creative part from someone else's work has been used to sell a message it wasn't created for. Forget cheap (though it's certainly that), how about sloppy?

I don't see any way someone could say, with a straight face, that most of these things are "re-interpretation." It's re-interpretation to posit some interesting theory about the ambiguous ending of No Country For Old Men. It's not re-interpretation to take a film with a completely clear interpretation and change it. Perhaps you mean "reimagining," though in this context I think that's pretty generous, too. It's a bit like me "reimagining" your MP3 player in my possession instead of yours.

It's not films I'm trying to guard, but ideas. And more than that, the process by which we process them collectively. And when we have some cliche about nature or business or the military or whatever else repeated in a thousand films, some of which culturally replace films with an opposite message, I think it subverts that process. And I think that's a bad thing.



Now that's some bs considering our culture.
BS is also a sign of a healthy dynamic culture.

I know it pains some people to accept that there is an inherent subjectivity in value, but there is also another way of looking at the spectrum of qualia that does not require us to despise and ridicule.



Speaking of quality, how many of the examples listed in this essay do you think are good films? I see one, maybe two, tops. Let's consider the possibility that, when your fundamental goal is to make a point rather than make a good film, and that when you're willing to rip out the framework from another that was intended for a completely different message, that it might not make for very good cinema most of the time.



I'm pretty sure the side guilty of "social engineering" is the one that thinks it's cool to subvert meanings and use classic stories as a subtle delivery mechanism for controversial ideas.



Speaking of quality, how many of the examples listed in this essay do you think are good films? I see one, maybe two, tops. Let's consider the possibility that, when your fundamental goal is to make a point rather than make a good film, and that when you're willing to rip out the framework from another that was intended for a completely different message, that it might not make for very good cinema most of the time.
I like Flubber. It's cute.

I liked The Nutty Professor remake better than the original.

I also think Starship Troopers was pretty fun, and I didn't mind it mocked the source material.



I'm pretty sure the side guilty of "social engineering" is the one that thinks it's cool to subvert meanings and use classic stories as a subtle delivery mechanism for controversial ideas.
Yoda, why don't you yell at them to get off your lawn, while you're at it?




Oh, and I also think that the social engineering starts and stops where you proclaim your movies untouchable.

How about using a free marketplace of ideas here, Yoda?



I personally do not like to see a work of literature completely distorted from the original. This is a problem I have with the current Clash of the Titans/Wrath of the Titans films. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of great Greek tales - why completely mutilate them? Adaptation and perversion are two different things.

It is a fine line. Take Blade Runner, for instance. Blade Runner is one of my favorite films. Yes, it does diverge significantly from Do Androids Dream, but I think it still holds to the overall message - what is human? Total Recall, on the other hand, completely skidded off track from Dick's story, We Can Remember. Hopefully the remake will be better.

For me, I prefer an adapted story stay true to the source material. If the source material is "good enough" to warrant it being brought to the screen, and having tens or hundreds of millions invested in it, then you should respect that source material. At the very least you should respect the central core of it.

So many remakes on the way. Some I am excited about. I am hopeful that Refn will actually remake Logan's Run. Refn is a genius.


This was a really good essay, Chris.
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I anticipated the old-man charge:

There is, admittedly, an Andy Rooney-esque quality in complaining about cultural shifts. But these are not examples of the shifts themselves, they're examples of the things that reinforce them.
As for social engineering: I'm not proclaiming anything "untouchable." I'm saying that reappropriating them to make the opposite message is a) subversive and crappy as it relates to the free exchange of ideas and b) tends to make for mediocre movies, anyway, because they're using a form that wasn't designed for the thing they're trying to sell. The best films have function and form entwined, so it shouldn't be surprising that trying to chop out half the equation produces mixed results at best.

There's a big difference between defending the idea of remakes or reimaginings and defending the way they actually seem to happen in reality.



I totally disagree. Leaving aside opinions about the quality of remakes in general, I think it's a interesting approach to invert stories in that way.

And yes, I was aware of/inspired by your admission of perceived crotchetiness. Regardless of how you spin it, when it comes down to it, you are arguing in defense of "traditions" and status quo. You are ultimately arguing a matter of taste under a guise of tedious either/or arbitrariness tinged with moral outrage.

As I already said, there is room for these "inappropriate" versions. So let ideas guard themselves already, Mr. watchdog.



If you agree that the best stories intertwine form and function, then you'd have to believe that such a wresting away of half of that equation for a new function will lose a lot in translation. I can't account for whether or not people will find the result "interesting," I just don't think it's good. Not in general, and not generally in practice.

And while I am certainly in favor of what most would call traditional values (though I doubt you can call this sort of thing the "status quo" any more), defending them isn't my argument. It just happens that my argument and my "perceived crotchetiness" are in harmony on this point, which is why I chose to write about it. Hollywood's been cranking out films with messages I don't agree with for a long time, but I wouldn't bother writing something that just expressed disapproval with them. What I'm saying applies equally well to a hypothetical world where society used to be full of hippies and Hollywood is run by conservatives. I'm arguing an objective thing.

I'm not sure what "room" has to do with it. They exist, if that's what you mean. Regardless, there's no such thing as ideas guarding themselves; there are only people talking about them, or not. Noticing this sort of thing and calling it out, or not.



Funny how you can obscure your own position while advancing.

Yoda, if any part of your argument proposes that the mechanics of film-making should impede ideas or "messages" YOU dislike, then just say so. You'll still be wrong, of course.

The problem here seems to be your conflation of message and medium. Story can be proselytization, but it needn't be. Furthermore, correlation between methods you disapprove of and the perceived quality of the final result doesn't make the method "wrong".

What's disturbing here is the implication that a film shouldn't be made in any way that might include or lead to an idea or viewpoint you disagree with.



Funny how you can obscure your own position while advancing.
I don't see why that would be funny, given that I explicitly wrote the thing so that its core argument wouldn't be contingent on ideology. If the only thing I had to say on the matter was a series of grumblings about cultural shifts, I wouldn't have written the thing in the first place. I wasn't assigned the topic.

Yoda, if any part of your argument proposes that the mechanics of film-making should impede ideas or "messages" YOU dislike, then just say so. You'll still be wrong, of course.
I'm not sure I even understand the implication. Obviously, I have my own positions and I want to see some ideas advanced and others retreat. That's what having a position is. But my argument is not predicated on anyone sharing those positions.

My argument is not that we should "impede" (whatever that means in this context) argument, but that what's happening is already impeding argument. That the sheer accumulation of these cultural backgrounds changes the assumptions we bring to each discussion. They become common wisdom by default, and worse, they do it by borrowing someone else's creativity to make the delivery of the assumption more attractive. In the short-term that's probably particularly bad for traditional views, but in the long-term anything that obscures our presuppositions is bad for everyone.

The problem here seems to be your conflation of message and medium. Story can be proselytization, but it needn't be.
Well, first off, I didn't say it had to be; I said the best stories usually melded the two.

Second, it's a big leap to go from talking about the harmony of message and medium to talking about "proselytization." Having a message is not necessary preaching; there's plenty of daylight between the two.

Third, this misunderstands the point, anyway, because none of the examples I listed are films that simply pull the proselytization out of the original; they supplant it with their own. The types of remakes you're referencing here, that take the old form but don't need to proselytize, are the types I'm explicitly not criticizing.

Furthermore, correlation between methods you disapprove of and the perceived quality of the final result doesn't make the method "wrong".
This is technically true; there's no unavoidable link here that says swiping someone else's premise means your movie will be suck, or even be worse than the original. But I think there's a correlation, and I think the theory that describes the evidence does a good job of explaining why. The ideas in question are: 1) when you care more about making a point than making a good movie, the art suffers. And 2) that when you divorce a story from its message, there will inevitably be some degree of clumsy retrofitting. These both seem like pretty agreeable ideas, even if you disagree about the conclusions I draw from them, or the emphasis I place on them.

I am, of course, hardly the first person to note that remakes are usually inferior to the originals. I'm just talking about why.

What's disturbing here is the implication that a film shouldn't be made in any way that might include or lead to an idea or viewpoint you disagree with.
What's disturbing is that you think I was implying that. The problem isn't films that express other viewpoints--as I said, there are tons of those, and I've never felt the need to write about them just to grouse over their existence--the problem is the way we let them shape the debate behind the scenes. Frankly, you can chalk it up to people's false belief in compartmentalization almost as much as the filmmakers themselves.

At this point, I should probably issue a disclaimer: if this discussion is going to involve you insisting that my secret motive is simply to complain about the culture, then I'd just as soon move on. If you simply refuse to believe that I'm actually arguing about what I say I'm arguing about, then I'll just say: thanks for reading.



Just to be absolutely clear, this isn't about what the message itself is, or is changed to in a remake? You would be equally upset if a story with a message you oppose was remade with a message you agree with?



The answer to your first sentence is yes, but the answer to the second is no, because they're asking different things. Yes, this is about the method, not the messages themselves. That's the idea and argument I'm presenting. But no, I don't dislike them equally; that'd be impossible. Having any viewpoint at all means that even if I object to the method in all instances, when done in the name of some idea I disagree with I have one more reason to object to it.

So, naturally the topic is the part of this that people of disparate views can potentially agree on, be it in the interest of open dialogue or mere aesthetics. There is nothing to stop you, for example, from agreeing with all the messages of these remakes, but recognizing that the impetus is often creatively bankrupt and tends to produce inferior art.

There are actually a few larger ideas I've been thinking about, as well, about whether or not an actual reversal is really in the nature of the competing ideologies to begin with, but that's a lot trickier, and well outside the scope of the essay.