Play It Again, Sam_ Retakes on Remakes - Andrew Horton.pdf - Filmoznawstwo - materiały - crassial

Preferred Citation: Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y. McDougal, editors Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on

Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1j49n6d3/

Play It Again, Sam

Retakes on Remakes

Edited by

Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford

Preferred Citation: Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y. McDougal, editors Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on

Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1j49n6d3/

― 1 ―

INTRODUCTION

Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal

I don't invent: I steal.

Jean-Luc Godard

This collection of original essays is dedicated to exploring the scope and nature of remakes in

film and in related media, in Hollywood as well as in the cinemas of other nations. We are

concerned with remakes as aesthetic or cinematic texts and as ideological expressions of

cultural discourse set in particular times, contexts, and societies. Although there has been

considerable recent work in film as an intertextual medium, [1] the remake has received

relatively little critical attention to date. [2]

Remakes themselves, however, continue to proliferate. Case in point: the 1994 summer

blockbuster Maverick . This film suggests some other genre and cultural boundaries we wish

to explore beyond the obvious level of new films made from old. In what sense is the film

Maverick a "remake" or "makeover" of the old James Garner television show that began in

1957, the year Mel Gibson, who plays Maverick in the movie, was born? What exactly are the

boundaries of a remake? At what point does similarity become simply a question of

influence? And what is the difference between a remake and the current television label "spin-

off"? Darren Star, creator of Beverly Hills 90210 , agrees that his more recent show, Melrose

Place , is a twenty-something spin-off of his earlier high school series, which, in turn, he

claims, is a spin-off of the film The Breakfast Club . How do we define the complex relations

between these texts?

Our collection of essays responds to these questions in a variety of ways and suggests some of

the directions that others may follow, either with a more theoretical interest in defining

"remakes" or with a more focused interest in cultural studies and the meanings of repetition in

whatever shades of difference such texts may suggest.

― 2 ―

II.

We begin with the nature of narrative itself. Edward Branigan has recently reexpressed a

definition of narrative this way: "[N]arrative is a perceptual activity that organizes data into a

special pattern which represents and explains experience" (3). Narratives, therefore, wherever

they are found, both represent and explain or comment on by their structure or content, tone

or characterization, experiences from "real" life. A remake is, of course, a particular form of

narrative that adheres to Branigan's definition but with an additional dimension. We could

paraphrase Branigan to say the remake is a "special pattern which re-represents and explains

at a different time and through varying perceptions, previous narratives and experiences." And

how do we read such a pattern?

"I don't know whether to look at him or to read him," says Robert Mitchum playing a tough

detective in Martin Scorsese's 1991 Cape Fear , as he watches a strip search of the heavily

tattooed Robert De Niro, who plays Max Cady, Mitchum's original part in the 1962 version of

the film. As we consider cinematic remakes, our dilemma is Mitchum's: do we simply watch

or read these texts?

Like Mitchum, of course, we do both. As viewers, we can't help both viewing and reading—

that is, teasing out narrative inferences, pleasures, contradictions, and implications of any

film. But a film like Cape Fear , advertised as a reworking of an earlier film, forces us to read

in a different way, by considering its relationship to the earlier film. Are remakes then merely

another instance of a state of affairs as old as recorded literature? The Greek dramatists retold

classical myths and Homer borrowed almost everything in his epics while transforming the

materials to his own ends. Chaucer and Shakespeare also borrowed liberally from their

precursors. As the centuries passed, the relationship between such texts often became much

more self-conscious. John Dryden's All for Love (1678) was a reworking of Shakespeare's

Anthony and Cleopatra , and audiences were expected to respond to it as such. Ruby Cohn

has chronicled the many transformations of Shakespeare on the twentieth-century stage in

Modern Shakespeare Offshoots . Such intertextual relationships have proliferated in modern

times. In a universe of ever-expanding textuality, the relationships in a text such as James

Joyce's Ulysses (1922) between Joyce and Homer (to say nothing of Joyce's reworkings of

Dante and Shakespeare) are complex indeed. How do cinematic remakes differ from any

modern work that is itself a tissue of other works? In Jorge Borges's story "Pierre Menard,

Author of the Quixote," the title character is quite literally rewriting part of the novel Don

Quixote . Borges's story questions notions of textuality, intertextuality, and originality, issues

that have become central in modern literary debates. Through her work on Bakhtin, Julia

Kristeva introduced the notion of in -

― 3 ―

tertextuality, a term to designate the ways in which any text is a skein of other texts. Earlier

texts are always present and may be read in the newer text. "The literary word," Bakhtin

suggested, "is aware of the presence of another literary word alongside it." Thus texts form

what Kristeva calls a "mosaic of citations," each modifying the other, and many modern

authors, like Borges or T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land , have foregrounded this issue in their

own work. In terms of intertextuality, then, remakes—films that to one degree or another

announce to us that they embrace one or more previous movies—are clearly something of a

special case, or at least a more intense one.

In Palimpsestes (1982), Gerard Genette expanded on Kristeva's notion of intertextuality

through the elaboration of a number of separate categories. These categories form a useful

way of situating cinematic remakes. Genette's first category is intertextuality , which he

defines more restrictively than Kristeva as the "co-presence of two or more texts" in the form

of citation, plagiarism, and allusion. The title of this collection of essays, for example, alludes

to a famous line in Casablanca , a line that was remade (and made famous) as the title of a

film by Woody Allen. Films emulate literature in this respect, as John Biguenet demonstrates

in this volume, and this relationship has a clear bearing on the issue of remakes. Genette's

second category, paratextuality , describes the relationships between the text proper and its

title, intertitles, prefaces, postfaces, notes, epigraphs, illustrations, and so on. While these

relations also apply to film, they are less central to the issue of remakes. Genette's third

category is metatextuality , a "critical relationship par excellence " between texts in which one

text speaks of another, without necessarily quoting from it directly. The example he cites is

Hegel's use of Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau in his Phenomenology of Mind . Although this

relationship does sometimes occur in films, it is quite different from the relationship of texts

within a remake. Metatextuality, as Genette notes, is closely related to his fifth category,

architextuality . This category, the "most abstract" and the "most implicit," refers to the

taxonomic categories of a work as indicated by the titles or, more often, by the subtitles of a

text. This too is less applicable to remakes, although like the other categories it provides a

context for a discussion of remakes. But the category that occupies Genette most centrally in

Palimpsestes, and the one that has the most direct bearing on cinematic remakes, is the fourth

type, hypertextuality . Genette defines hypertextuality as the relationship between a given text

(the "hypertext") and an anterior text (the hypotext) that it transforms. In the literary example

cited above, the hypotexts of James Joyce's Ulysses would include The Odyssey, The Divine

Comedy , and Hamlet . This category provides an apt way of discussing cinematic remakes

and connects them to other intertextual relationships. In the strictest use of the term remake, a

new text (the hypertext) transforms a hypotext. But although Genette's

― 4 ―

distinctions provide a useful way of discussing the remake, his terminology does not take us

far enough. For our concern here is not only with the remake as a category in Hollywood,

where a given film is based on an earlier film, but with an extension of the boundaries of the

term remake to include as well works resulting from the contact between diverse cultures and

different media. Bill Nichols has recently written of the "blurred boundaries" between fiction

and nonfiction today, but his remarks apply to the blurred boundaries between remakes and

the texts they draw from or refer to as well. Nichols observes, "Deliberate border violations

serve to announce a contestation of forms and purposes. What truths, drawing from what

ethics, politics, or ideology, legitimizing what actions, do different forms convey?" (x). We

can substitute "narratives" for "forms" and suggest that the remake both pays tribute to a

preexisting text and, on another level, calls it into question, as Nichols suggests. And although

cinematic remakes—from Anthony Quinn's 1958 remake of his father-in-law Cecil B.

DeMille's swashbuckling New Orleans saga, The Buccaneer (1938), in which Quinn was

himself a minor star, to Philip Kaufman's 1978 chilling remake of Don Siegel's 1956 Body

Snatchers to Kevin Costner's 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves —can stand alone as

entertainment and as independent narratives, independence is not what attracted us as editors

and/or contributors to this project. This is quite purely a collection dedicated to the pleasure of

the pirated text, where remakes constitute a particular territory existing somewhere between

unabashed larceny and subtle originality. Remakes, in fact, problematize the very notion of

originality. More so than many other kinds of films, the remake and, as we shall see, the

makeover—a film that quite substantially alters the original for whatever purpose—invite and

at times demand that the viewer participate in both looking at and reading between multiple

texts.

Beyond simple remakes of one film to another with the same title and story, we are also

interested in extending the definition of remake to include a variety of other intertextual types.

What dynamics and dimensions are involved in cross-cultural remakes in which language,

cultural traditions, psychology, and even narrative sense may differ greatly. Kurosawa's Seven

Samurai (1954) was influenced by John Ford's westerns, and it in turn became the basis for

the Hollywood remake The Magnificent Seven (1960). How do we begin to discuss such a

complicated transposition? The titles may or may not be the same and the films may or may

not stick to the original narratives, but their relation to those narratives is secure. This, we

shall see, especially seems to occur in cross-cultural examples, such as Emir Kusturica's Time

of the Gypsies (1989), which is perhaps better called a makeover of Coppola's Godfather done

in terms of Yugoslav gypsy culture. And then there are those films that simply allude to or

quote from previous films. What does it mean in Honey, I Blew up the Kid to have Japanese

tour-

― 5 ―

ists look up at a fifty-foot-high kid and shout "Godzilla!" Or when the first word we see

posted on the side of the tourists' bus in The Man Who Knew Too Much is "CASABLANCA"?

Such questions have a bearing on notions of intertextuality. As films proliferate, so do the

relations between them.

In the days when the Hollywood studios held sway, remakes provided a fertile source of

material for the theaters' voracious appetites. The bottom line then, as now, was money, and

since the studio owned these properties it could cannibalize them at will. John Huston's 1941

film The Maltese Falcon was the third time Warner Brothers had filmed Dashiell Hammett's

novel. In recent years, high profits have been garnered by adapting French films for the

American screen. The French film Three Men and a Cradle (1985), for instance, grossed

slightly over $2 million in the United States, but the Hollywood remake, Three Men and a

Baby (1987), has, to date, pulled in over $168 million.

But the issues cannot be explained in terms of finances alone. Sometimes, as with The

Maltese Falcon, the remake is a return to an earlier non-cinematic source. Is the filmmaker

trying to correct the earlier adaptation, to render a more accurate version of the original text?

Here textuality provides but a limited explanation for the remake. In addition, films remake

other media—comic books, for example, in Superman, Dick Tracy, and countless other recent

films. And films themselves are source texts for other media, among them television and

radio. To what extent do these media remake their sources? And finally, what motivates a

filmmaker to remake his own work, as Alfred Hitchcock does in The Man Who Knew Too

Much? The term remake, then, comprises a broad range of possibilities.

The specific focus of this volume is the phenomenon of movie remakes, especially as

practiced in Hollywood. As we approach the end of the century, Hollywood possesses a

considerable history it can remake and recycle. One issue seems abundantly simple: there is a

film and, for one reason or another, it is remade and re-released at a later date. The differences

between the two versions may be significant: in Cape Fear, Scorsese paid complicated

attention to why and how Max Cady was framed (the withholding of evidence that the rape

victim was a nymphomaniac); or they may be trivial: what does it suggest about Max Cady in

the contemporary version that he drinks Evian water from a plastic bottle, while Robert

Mitchum drank an endless supply of Bud from cans in the original? The more recent film is

defined, in part, by these very differences. After all, at this writing Casablanca and Gone with

the Wind are in production or preproduction as updated remakes, and the only thing we can be

sure of is that they will differ significantly from their originals. They will tell us as much

about our own concerns in the nineties as they will about the films upon which they are based.

The more we think about the issue of remakes, the more we can see how

― 6 ―

many significant strands of narrative, cinema, culture, psychology, and textuality come

together. Taking the largest possible view—that of human psychology and development—we

can, for instance, make the following observation. Experience and development themselves

depend upon recognizable patterns of repetition, novelty, and resolution. John Belton has

recently written that part of the point of the classical Hollywood film system of narration and

style is not only that these films share many narrative and production elements but that, given

their similarities, "each strives to be different as well" ( American Culture/American Film ).

The remake, especially the Hollywood remake, intensifies this process: by announcing by title

and/or narrative its indebtedness to a previous film, the remake invites the viewer to enjoy the

differences that have been worked, consciously and sometimes unconsciously, between the

texts. That is, every moment of every day, we experience what is familiar, what seems "new,"

and we learn somehow to resolve the difference so we can continue to focus. It was Victor

Shklovsky who argued in the early decades of this century that the function of art was to

defamiliarize the familiar—to make us experience the commonplace in new ways. One way

Play It Again, Sam_ Retakes on Remakes - Andrew Horton.pdf

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