In Defence of the Remake

Architect: You see, about a hundred years ago, the global entertainment industry ran completely out of ideas … so we built a time machine to snatch people out of the past … back when everyone was still watching good TV shows and movies … We figured if we kept you isolated and we watched everything you did … we might be able to come up with some kind of new entertainment programming … based on your actions and conversations.

Sam: You mean, like, a reality show?

Architect: No, but that’s a really good idea! I can’t believe we didn’t think of that. You should be a writer – or maybe just a studio executive.

The Strangerhood S1 E16, ‘The Montage Exposition’ (2006)

Remakes: yay or nay?

A picture significantly relevant to the post beyond the fact that it includes part of a cinema? No. A pretty one? Yes. That will do.

I ask because there seems to be an awful lot of them about at the moment, not least at the hand of the talented folks at Disney, who have already produced live-action reimaginings of Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty (under the moniker of villain Maleficent), Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Pete’s Dragon and probably more I can’t think of, and are set to continue their rampage across the dear-held animated stories of your childhood by subjecting a host of others to the same treatment, among them Mary Poppins, Aladdin, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mulan, Peter Pan, The Sword in the Stone, Dumbo, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Pinocchio, One Hundred and One Dalmatians (which will re-emerge as Cruella De Vil), The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh (now featuring a grown-up Christopher Robin), and even that ten-minute scene from Fantasia¹ set to Leopold Stokowski’s adaptation of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Modest Mussorgsky’s tone poem ‘A Night on Bald Mountain’.² And who can blame them? Remaking beloved classics is a peculiarly effective method of persuading the cinemagoing public to part with our cash, at least if the profits made by the aforementioned examples are anything to go by: The Jungle Book, for example, having grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide during its cinema run, remains the thirty-sixth highest-grossing film of all time; Alice in Wonderland managed over $1 billion, making it the highest-grossing film of the year outside North America and the fifth highest-grossing film ever at the time; and Beauty and the Beast did the best of the lot by grossing $1.263 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing live-action musical of all time and still the tenth highest-grossing ever film of any genre.³ (That’s plenty enough uses of the word ‘gross’ for one paragraph, methinks.)

Should we despair at such data? Should we mourn what appears to be a loss of innovative thinking in the film industry, the first few slick steps of a slippery slope towards the state of creative desolation described by the Architect in the penultimate episode of The Strangerhood (as quoted above)?⁴ Should it give us cause to lament that many of the most successful films of the past few years have not only been unoriginal in the contents of their storylines, but explicitly, ostentatiously, deliberately so – that they have not only imitated earlier work, but made doing so the whole point and appeal of their existence?

Part of me harbours an inclination to answer in the affirmative. The possibility that films presenting original stories should be squeezed out of mainstream cinema, replaced by a torrent of remakes, sequels, and sequels of remakes, is certainly a depressing one.⁵ Originality in fiction is a good thing. Originality is what makes a story spark our imaginations into spirited activity when they are worn down by the dull predictability of everyday real life. Originality is what makes us see the world through different eyes to those through which we have been accustomed to see it. Originality is where the magic of new and astonishing possibilities is wrought.

But all that said, somewhere in this mind and heart and soul of mine there’s still a keen little Classicist knocking about, and said keen little Classicist is swift to chime in that in the classical world, ‘remakes’ (as it were) were arguably even more ubiquitous than they were today.

The place is Ancient Greece, the time is the sixth century BCE, and the event is the invention of the theatrical play. Exactly what happened remains poorly evinced and hotly contested, but what ultimately emerged was a type of performance in which actors playing characters interacted with one another, which was pretty innovative for the time. The earliest playwright whose work is extant today is Aeschylus, who wrote tragedies. And every single play he wrote told a story his audience would already have known. In actual fact, every single play every tragedian wrote told a story his audience would already have known. That was what tragedy was. It selected a chunk of the pre-established mythology known to the Greek people and rendered it in dramatic form. Different playwrights would frequently cover the same material: we have extant versions of the story of Electra by both Sophocles and Euripides, for example. Ancient Greek tragedians, then, produced nothing but remakes and indeed remakes of remakes.

Was this unoriginal? Did it betray a lack of imagination or a slavery to people-pleasing? Can it be sniffed at as creatively lacking? I mean, I’m not actually a great fan of tragedy (one of the key reasons why I was a bad Classicist, the other being the fact that I’m not actually a great fan of Homer), but it’s pretty hard to slate it for a lack of innovation given that this represented the very birth of the western theatrical tradition.

 

A Greek theatre in Sicily, if the tags given this picture on my favourite online stock-photo repository are anything to go by.

The thing is, the tragedians were original – not in their subject material but in what they did with it. Take the story of Electra, as I mentioned briefly above. Sophocles and Euripides both have their versions, of course, and the same events are covered by Aeschylus in his Libation Bearers, which, happily for our purposes, is also extant. The basic outline of the myth is that Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, plots with her estranged brother Orestes to murder their mother and her new husband Aegisthus as an act of vengeance for her murder of their father (which was in turn an act of vengeance for his murder of his other daughter Iphigeneia, as a sacrifice to appease Artemis who had cursed the Greek fleet with unfavourable winds as an act of vengeance for – well, you get the picture, there was a lot of vengeance going on). The three tragedians tell the story in significantly different ways, however. Aeschylus launches into the lengthy recognition scene between Electra and Orestes virtually as soon as the latter shows up, and only has him perpetrate a deception about his real identity when Clytemnestra comes on the scene, whereas Sophocles’ and Euripides’ versions of Orestes are both deceitful about their real identity from the start, even in front of Electra. Sophocles has the matricidal pair finish off Clytemnestra first, and cuts off the action before Aegisthus’ death has even been announced, whereas Aeschylus and Euripides both have the two kill Aegisthus and then Clytemnestra, before an ending which makes explicit that they have rendered themselves guilty and deserving of punishment. And Euripides, as is his habit, just goes a bit weird, really, and introduces an extra plot point of Electra having got married and moved to the country before dealing with any of the standard plot points.⁶

Of course, such differences as these are of a largely mechanical nature, and I have no wish to bore you (or myself) by going on to expound an exhaustive procession of minor plot details that differ from one tragedian to another. As important as differences of plot are, so are the differences of tone and feel and message – much more difficult to pin down or agree upon – that accompany them. Innovation can be displayed both in the substance of the story and the manner of its telling. Euripides’ tragedies are often remarked upon for being remarkably un-tragic compared to the earlier Aeschylus’ grave and weighty dramas, for instances.

Moreover, innovation can be displayed both by forging in an altogether different direction to one’s predecessors, and by tracing but subverting their version of things. There is, happily for the flow of this post, a particularly fine example of such subversion in Euripides’ Electra, in the form of an undisguised parody of the recognition scene in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers: Euripides’ Electra laughs off as ridiculous the notion that a lock of hair, a footprint, and a scrap of cloth should betray any indication that their owner might be her long-lost brother, while these very tokens were the precise ones by whose evidence Aeschylus’ versions of the siblings recognised each other.

Compare Disney’s remakes today. Some, like Beauty and the Beast, have adhered very closely to the predecessors they imitate, almost shot-for-shot in places; others, like Maleficent, have made a point of problematising the story as it was originally told and subverting the notions it presented. Some, like Cinderella, have retained a similar emotional tone to their predecessors, and others, like Tim Burton’s characteristically dark and disturbing rendering of Alice in Wonderland, have told a similar story with a significantly different feel. New plot points and characters are added; old ones are elaborated upon, or changed, or removed. We see Disney scorning as silly the traditional notion of love at first sight, for example, as clearly as Euripides scorned as silly the traditional Aeschylean recognition scene – a fascinating reflection on the values of our own moment in time as compared to those of earlier ones. These new takes on old stories we love do catch us by surprise, do give us fresh perspectives, do open up enthralling new possibilities.

Is this unoriginal?

This isn’t Ancient Greece, of course – dramatic storytelling has moved on a smidgen since the tragedians’ day, and I hasten to affirm that I’m all for there being more on at the local multiplex than simply remakes and more remakes. Still, I’m also all for there being, as a constituent part of a good variety of films, some remakes. Nothing is completely original anyway – all films (and indeed all fictions) have their influences and generic ancestors – so why should a remake automatically be artistically inferior to a film that uses an original story? It should be assessed for what it does, not what it doesn’t do, and if it does what it does well, then it, like any artistic achievement, should be applauded. In actual fact, a good remake may in some ways be more innovative than an original-story film that nonetheless saturates itself with tired clichés and predictable storytelling. If nothing else, a remake’s innovations often stand out all the clearer by virtue of sheer contrast with the original.

So bring on the deluge, Disney: I’ll be fascinated to see how you engage with your own canon in upcoming releases, how you alter it, how you elaborate upon it, how you uphold or subvert it, and what that says about the kind of story our society is currently telling. And if you manage to spark off the odd blog post idea in the process, well, so much the better.

Footnotes

¹ Comprehensive details of the live-action remakes of pure-animated classics (so not including Mary Poppins or Pete’s Dragon) that we know of currently are provided by Noelle Devoe at Seventeen, http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/g2936/list-of-disney-live-action-remakes/. I notice she missed the Chronicles of Prydain franchise we’ve been promised as a relaunch of 1985 animated classic The Black Cauldron, http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/g2936/list-of-disney-live-action-remakes/, although that’s probably because it is in its very early stages, so maybe best not to get one’s hopes up: it’s just that The Black Cauldron was one of my real childhood favourites, and Disney films were about all I watched as a kid.

² Namely this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLCuL-K39eQ.

³ Stats gathered from Wikipedia, notably its list of the highest-grossing films of all time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films.

⁴ It’s a series of short videos filmed on the Sims 2 and dubbed, and one of the staple sources of hilarious quotations that my siblings and I chuck at each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0WwO9pv72s&list=PL0E148580E52F7216. “Oh man, I hope that wasn’t me that just died...”

⁵ If, for some mad reason, you’d like to read more of my opinions on this subject, might I point you to a post called ‘Cinema’s Suicide’ that you’ll find under ‘2016’ then ‘January’ in the box on the right.

⁶ Just stick the relevant titles into the Perseus search engine if you want to check this jazz for yourself: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. Or your favoured whole-Internet search engine will probably work equally well.