Planet of the Remakes

by Sven Lütticken

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 recogni- tion 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 contem- porary 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 audi- ences. 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 inter- media remake: film versions of tv series (Mission Impossible, Charlie’s Angels, The Fugitive), and tv cartoons (The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo).

further reading: newleftreview