Andrew Horton & Stuart Y.McDougal (editors),
Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1998
ISBN 0520205936
362pp
$US 19.95 (pb)
Uploaded 1 July 1999

If the central injunction of structuralist and post-structuralist theory was something like “think relationally, not substantially”, then cinematic remaking offers a particularly compelling model of a practice which makes it impossible for us to think of texts as closed and self-contained bits of aesthetic substance. It depends, of course, on what you mean by a remake – I’ll get back to that problem; but if we take the word in its most general application, as David Wills does, to mean “the possibility that exists for a film to be repeated in a different form” (148), then it’s no more than a particular case of a structure of repetition that is possible for any text (think what’s involved in replaying your grainy old tape of the Rocky Horror Show for the hundredth time). Wills theorizes this structure and its institutional form by way of a Derridean theory of iterability (the citation effect, grafting); his essay is remarkable for being the only one in this anthology to attempt to conceptualize the textuality of the remake in any depth.

A lot hinges on the scope of the definition: precisely because of the way it figures intertextuality more generally, the concept of remaking tends to expand to infinity. The editors try to impose some constraints by defining remakes as “films that to one degree or another announce to us that they embrace one or more previous movies” (3); but intention and recognition may or may not be important to our understanding of what’s going on. Coppola’s The Conversation is surely in some sense a “remake” of Antonioni’s Blow-up (just as State of Siege in some sense remakes The Conversation, and indeed Blow-up “remade” a short story of Cortazar’s); the fact that Coppola denied any connection is beside the point. Conversely, Lloyd Michaels argues that Herzog’s Nosferatu is so closely modelled on Murnau’s precursor film that it can’t be fully understood without reference to it (240); but something, perhaps nearly everything, can be understood, because what’s crucial even in precisely repetitive films like Herzog’s is that the precursor text belongs to a genre: its meanings never belong to it alone. The argument that the recognition of an intertext is crucial to the remaking process is simply not sustainable. Robert Kolker tries to make this point when he writes that “audiences are depended upon to recognize similarities and repetitions from film to film, and indeed they must do this. If they did not, they would have no desire to see stars, plots, generic elements, narrative patterns repeated; and without that desire to fulfill, Hollywood film-making could not exist” (36). But such recognitions have nothing to do with authorial intentions, and they may well apply at a generic level (you’ve seen the star before, but you can’t remember in which movie – and it may even have been in the weekend colour supplement). Remaking is not necessarily about intended effects, nor necessarily about precise identification of an intertext. It is, or it may be, a more general intertextual relation, although this doesn’t mean that it is unstructured or imprecise in its operations.

The central theoretical issue in all this is the one that classical literary theory identified as the question of imitation (imitation, that is, of authoritative precursor texts – “the ancients” – rather than of “nature”). There are some normative issues here (how close may an imitation legitimately be before it becomes mere copying or theft? In Hollywood this has tended not to be an issue because it has been treated predominantly as a commercial issue to do with studio ownership of copyright). But the more interesting questions have to do with the object and the nature of imitation: what precisely is the intertext of an imitation, and what sorts of transformation are worked on it, and to what end?

Complicating the answers to these questions is the reality that the intertext, the precursor text, is never singular and never a moment of pure origin. Leo Braudy asks: “Are James Whale’s Frankenstein and Tod Browning’s Dracula originary texts for the many versions that follow, or are they themselves remakes of the preceding plays, which are in turn remakes of the original novels of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker?” (331). But this underplays the semiotic complexity of both instances, where, on the one hand, it may be that the form of the horror or vampire genre is of far more importance than the relative role of “original” film and “original” novel; and, on the other, the very notion of an origin is put into question by the chain of reworkings, which does not stop at an arbitrarily defined point of initiation.

At the simplest level, a film may rework an earlier film, or it may adapt a text from another medium (a novel, a comic strip, a radio play), or it may be some more complex version of these reworkings. (In scripted films there is already a kind of internal reworking taking place in the transformation of script into audio-visual text.) Some theorists distinguish sharply between the “true” remake of an earlier film and films such as the second and third versions of The Maltese Falcon which return to Hammett’s novel rather than to the 1931 version. At a higher level of generality, the intertext may be an oeuvre rather than a single film: De Palma tends to remake a kind of generic “Hitchcock” movie. Hitchcock does too, but he also remakes both whole movies (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and 1955) and bits of movies – single shots, sequences, and themes (McDougal, 53). Robert Kolker argues interestingly that Scorsese’s Cape Fear is a remake not only of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 Cape Fear but also of aspects of three “minor” Hitchcock movies (Stage Fright, I Confess, and Strangers on a Train); the film is “a secret remake, knowledge of which reveals the film as joke and intricate reformulation, a way of knowing Hitchcock and absolving Scorsese” (39).

At whatever level of generality the intertext exists (or rather can be posited), every remake simultaneously refers to and remakes the genre to which that intertext belongs, and this genre may itself be the only intertext. To take a simple case, John Biguenet argues plausibly that Home Alone repeats a central feature of that genre of animated cartoons (the Road Runner series, for example) in which plots are foiled and bodily hurt is reversible (140); it is the genre as a whole that the film assumes as its intertextual base, rather than any particular example of it (although one only needs to know a single example to “know” the genre). A more complex and more interesting case is set out by Krin Gabbard in relation to The Jazz Singer. Although, he argues, it is always problematic to assume that versions of a generic structure or a common narrative form can be sourced to a putative ‘core’ form or text, The Jazz Singer does in fact seem to represent something like an originary form for the male biopic (97), while “the various versions of A Star is Born, in which the success of a female star results in the suicide of her husband, may provide a better example of what happens to The Jazz Singer when its gender roles are reversed” (98). By developing a combinatory of the features of eight different versions of The Jazz Singer, in all of which the reconciliation of a family functions as a magical fusion of ethnic assimilation with the retention of ethnic loyalties, and where each reworking “was radically refashioned as its ‘narrators’ formulated new stories to accommodate the profound changes in American culture” (104), Gabbard is able to argue that the story represents a kind of cultural myth with core components. This raises very directly the question of what it is that’s being remade by the later films: The Jazz Singer, the biopic genre which it originates and figures, or a more deeply underlying cultural narrative?

Certainly it seems to be the case that some of the most resilient popular genres – vampire movies, the various Superman films, the Robin Hood series – are realized in what are “quasi-independent adaptations” of a popular myth, rather than in a linear succession of remakes (Georgakas, 70); and perhaps also, as Michael Brashinsky notes in writing of Wes Craven’s improbable remaking (in Last House on the Left) of Bergman’s Virgin Spring, that “the remake’s bond with cultural mythology is as solid as it is basic” (166). But this may be to say no more than that film itself, in the fictive and auratic forms it has taken in most of its institutional manifestations this century, is as dependent upon mythical modes of narrative as it has been upon the practice of remaking.

John Frow