There is a widespread critical and popular aversion to remakes of classic—and even not-so-classic—films. They will almost certainly be inferior pieces of work, and if the original is a canonized masterpiece, the remake might even taint its aura. Can the film lover ever see his cherished classic again without thinking of its horrible new Doppelgänger? A telling website reaction to the news that Harrison Ford and his new love Calista Flockhart were planning a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany’s begs:
all i can say is don’t do it! If Ford and Calista want a film to exhibit their undying love . . . well, don’t do it in a remake. Find a director that understands love on camera like Paul Thomas Anderson or Patrice Leconte and develop a new project with them. Be original, not Memorex. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of the few perfect films in this world or any other. Leave it be, please.
Such an impassioned plea is more likely to turn up on the internet than in the film critics’ columns of the newspapers; but here too there is often a deep antipathy to the very notion of a remake—not just to individual bad examples. The dislike of them is of course fuelled by plenty of uninspired or downright awful remakes, and by the recognition that Hollywood is generally more willing to reprocess ready-made ‘content’ than to produce a film by an auteur like David Lynch, who is forced to seek funding in France. Even more than retreads of previous Hollywood movies, remakes of foreign films are a staple of contemporary us film production, thus transmuting cultural difference into the ‘natural’ idiom of the American mainstream. Recent examples are Vanilla Sky and The Ring. This type of copying has the advantage of an original that is less of an obstruction, since it is not so familiar to us audiences. In either case, the studios (now a rather nostalgic name for the film branches of multimedia conglomerates) would rather fall back on something that has proved to be successful than take anything remotely resembling a risk. One might also point to the phenomenon of the intermedia remake: film versions of tv series (Mission Impossible, Charlie’s Angels, The Fugitive), and tv cartoons (The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo).
If it has reached a new degree of intensity in the past ten years, the tradition of remakes is as old as the culture industry itself. For the classical studio system this was a logical way to exploit its copyrights and its large staff in an industrial manner—often remaking quite recent films. In the mid-fifties The Philadelphia Story (1940) was turned into the Cole Porter musical High Society.At around the same time, Hitchcock remade his English The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) in Technicolor with James Stewart and, sadly, Doris Day. Howard Hawks remade his own Ball of Fire (1941) as A Song is Born (1948), another Technicolor musical. Going back to the French pioneers of the film industry, the Lumière Brothers, one finds that even the mythical ‘first film’ was a remake. There are three versions of the film of workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons—the first made in the late summer of 1894, apparently as a trial run, on paper; a second, shot on film, in March 1895 and shown in the legendary first film screening in Paris on March 22nd; the third, which was for a long time believed to be ‘the first film’, was shot in the summer of 1895, with the workers wearing more festive clothes. Perhaps this was supposed to give a more positive image of the Lumière factory. But repetition was already a pillar of the culture industry before the arrival of cinema, in the mass literature of newspaper serials, or feuilletons.footnote1 The same model was also transferred to film: screen serials thrived from the silent days to the 1940s. Each week, one could see part of a continuing story about a hero such as Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy, with a cliffhanger at the end.
In recent decades, sequels and series have been the dominant modes of repetition in film. Aside from the remake, probably no other kind of film has as bad a reputation as the sequel, for which Another 48 Hours, Die Harder and the ironic The Naked Gun 2 1/2 and Naked Gun 33 1/3 are telling titles. Many sequels are indeed a facile cashing-in on recent box-office success—rather than on an older or overseas hit, as in the case of the remake. A sequel usually continues the story of the preceding film, which often means that the same tale is told again with minor differences. One sequel can lead to another and they may come to be described as a series, although some attempts at definition propose a clear distinction between the two—arguing, for instance, that a film series presents separate stories with the same characters, while sequels continue a story where it left off. But do not the various Die Hard or Scream films amount to a series, each part presenting a more or less distinct plot, although each new film is also building on the earlier ones, as sequels do? On the other hand, the James Bond films clearly are not sequels; they form a series with many variations on a basic narrative scheme, without the suggestion of continuity or historical succession between the parts.
In his reflections on the vicissitudes of historical time Guy Debord noted that modern temporality, measured in abstract units, is dominated by the alternation of labour and ‘free time’, thus reproducing something like ‘the old cyclical rhythm’ of pre-modern societies. History is perverted from within, thus creating the ‘pseudo-cyclical time’ of spectacle.footnote2 In the writings of an author like Mircea Eliade, the ‘old cyclical time’ became the object of a reactionary-romantic idealization. Eliade exulted in the fact that traditional societies knew how to keep history—which is a series of catastrophes—at bay by the ritualistic repetition of mythical archetypes. Eliade complained that today’s quasi-mythic experiences, such as ‘killing time’ by reading or watching a film, are impoverished descendants of his cherished ancient myths. Debord also regarded the time of spectacle as a perverted and impoverished version of the cyclical temporality of myth, but his dialectical analysis is rather less one-dimensional than Eliade’s nostalgic projection.footnote3 Debord notes that a conflict was installed within cyclical time—the ‘childhood of time’—as rulers tried to impose their genealogies and aims on society. The ‘masters of time’ thus managed to give a sense of direction to their culture’s agricultural cycles, creating a new temporal mode within the world of cyclical returns that continued to be dominant.footnote4 Later, more advanced masters of time would go further in this direction, until capitalist modernity unleashed the forces of history to the full. But it is precisely then that a reversal occurs, as an apparently triumphant linear history is transformed into pseudo-cyclical returns. This is still within the framework of the historical direction created by the capitalist juggernaut, but these pseudo-cyclical returns tend to create a ‘false consciousness of time’—spectacle, or parcelled and industrialized myth. Just as myth once established a reign of returns, of Wiederkehr, so now our media culture does the same, but in a much more planned manner. Not only the alternation of work and spare time but the media products, so important within the latter, are ruled by repetition. William Burroughs contended that the mass media play a similar role, in this respect, to the ceremonial Mayan calendar, a complicated construction with which a priestly elite ‘in effect controlled what the populace did, thought and felt on any given day’—creating a pre-ordained cyclical empire-time run by temporal masters.footnote5
Eliade’s mythical archetypes were located in a distant, sacred era, before the time of man. By contrast, the semi-cyclical returns of modern series and sequels are ruled by models which lay claim to no origin of any kind. They are de-historicized myths, apparently timeless programmes. The characters of soap operas seem to inhabit a world that consists of the eternal returns of a limited number of plots, as do the protagonists of film series like Die Hard and James Bond. All Bond films seem to follow a certain archetypal plot, of which one version may be a better approximation than another, but not a more original one (although there is, of course, nostalgia for the time—in the sixties—when the Bond formula seemed fresh). What differentiates remakes from such serial repetition is the fact that the remake has a specific historical source: the ‘original’ film. This can be regarded as a historicization of the mythical, archetypal model. Because films that are remade exist in historical—not some primeval, mythic—time, their repetition raises protests from those who revere the original. Whether they offer any of the healing rejuvenation of time which Eliade ascribed to the older myths’ repetition is obviously questionable. Of course, the repetitions and returns of mass culture clearly entail a Lustgewinn for the viewer: although similarity must be alleviated by variation, enjoyment comes at least as much from the reproduction of what is familiar as from its modulation by what is new. But the one-sided exploitation of repetition in its most facile forms, to streamline production and minimize financial risks, deadens rather than recharges time—even if the consumers feel momentarily rejuvenated.