New Millennial Remakes

CHAPTER 8 New Millennial Remakes CONSTANTINE VEREVIS WHEN ASKED in a recent interview what appealed to him about “rebooting a series that had already been interpreted,” Christopher Nolan replied that when he undertook Batman Begins (2005), the irst installment in Warner Bros.’ he Dark Knight Trilogy, “there was no such thing conceptually as a ‘reboot.’ hat idea didn’t exist” (Foundas 2012/13: 7). his chapter takes Nolan’s comment as a starting point for a preliminary investigation of the state of cinematic remaking in the irst decades of the new millennium. In an earlier period, the 1980s and 1990s, ilmmakers and their production companies had been forced to defend serial ilmmaking— speciically, ilm remakes and sequels—against accusations that aesthetically inferior remakes (and commercially timid sequels) were evidence that Hollywood had exhausted its creative potential.1 By the beginning of the new millennium, however, there was evidence of a discursive shit, with subsequent industry discourses framing publicity more positively around a new ilm’s “remake” status by ascribing value to an earlier version and then identifying various ilters—technological, cultural, authorial—through which it had been transformed (“value-added”). In the irst instance, this move can be seen as 1. Lütticken, for example, opens “Planet of the Remakes” with an account of the “widespread critical and popular aversion to remakes of classic—and even not-so-classic—ilms” (2004). 148 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 148 12/19/16 3:10 PM NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES 149 a commercial strategy (a way to sell a back catalogue), but it also identiies a serial practice in which the remake does not simply follow an original but recognizes new versions as free adaptations or variations that actualize an implicit potentiality at the source. his trend, which has increasingly led to authorized remakes that bear only a generic resemblance to their precursors, seems to have found its apotheosis in the “reboot”: a legally sanctioned version that attempts to disassociate itself textually from previous iterations while at the same time having to concede that it does not replace—but adds new associations to—an existing serial property.2 In other words, it marks out not merely a critical-historical moment in which remakes no longer linearly follow and supersede their originals but also a digitized, globalized one in which multiple versions proliferate and coexist. NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES ARE INTERMEDIAL Recent accounts of Hollywood cinema (notably, Schatz 2009, Elsaesser 2012, and Balio 2013) tell a similar story, namely, that since the turn of the century a combination of forces—conglomeration, globalization, and digitization—has contributed to a new historical period of “postproduction.”3 For these writers, postproduction signals the way in which production practices have changed signiicantly over the past two decades (with an increased emphasis on editing, sound design, and special efects; compare Elsaesser 2012), but it also signals a transformed media culture, one characterized by a proliferation of viewing screens and new communicative technologies (iPhones, Twitter, Instagram), a rapid increase in digital distribution (downloading, streaming), and intensiication of interest in moving-image content (iTunes, Netlix, YouTube) (Corrigan 2012).4 As Nicolas Bourriaud describes it, post-production, and the art of post-production—that is, the proclivity of ilmmakers to interpret, reproduce, remake, and make use of available cultural products—is a response to the “proliferating chaos of global culture in the information age [. . .] characterized by an increase in the supply of works [and an associated] eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work” (2002: 13). 2. On this point, see the category of non-remake: a ilm that goes under the same title as a familiar property but has an entirely diferent plot (Verevis 2006: 7). 3. his term is taken, in the irst instance, from Bourriaud 2002. 4. For a recent discussion of the impact of new media technologies, see Stenport/Traylor’s (2015) claim that contemporary remakes/adaptations exemplify conceptual frameworks for digital information organization. 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 149 12/19/16 3:10 PM 150 CHAPTER 8, CONSTANTINE VEREVIS Costas Constandinides’ recent work on adaptation (a term that he uses to describe practices of cinematic remaking) accords with this account of postproduction, speciically his argument that the shit of all culture to digitized forms of production, distribution, and communication—along with the capacity of digital modes to remake and remodel existing material and media— at once undermines oppositions between original and copy and demands a theory of “post-celluloid adaptation” (2010: 19–26). In such an account, the remake is not (as in earlier deinitions) described as a ilm based upon another ilm (or ilms) but deined from an intermedial perspective as the translation of narrative units and popular characters from a preexisting (celluloid) medium to a new, digital one: Post-celluloid adaptation can be [. . .] deined as the transition of familiar media content from a traditional medium—print, ilm, and television—to a new media object or a set of new media objects that embrace the concept of the main end-product. [Furthermore, post-celluloid adaptation] does not simply describe the transition of familiar images from an older medium to a new [one], but a process that is a symptom of the cultural logic of convergence culture. (Constandinides 2010: 24) he suggestion that cinematic remakes are bound up in questions of translation and intermediality is not an exclusive one (e.g., Dusi 2012 and Evans 2014) and is evident enough in, for instance, the Todd Haynes–directed television miniseries remake of Mildred Pierce (HBO 2011), a version (of a novel, a ilm, and a textbook melodramatic ilm noir) that Pam Cook describes as a “multidimensional cultural event that has no single [point of] origin”: he [Mildred Pierce] miniseries is decidedly transmedia—announced as a ilm on the credits, made for television, based on a book—signalling the convergence characteristic of contemporary media and the variety of [ways it opens up to] potential consumer experiences. (Cook 2013: 379; emphasis added) Haynes had already explored the domestic drama in his 2002 ilm Far from Heaven, a revision of the narrative economy and moral structures of the melodramas of Douglas Sirk (in particular, All hat Heaven Allows 1955) and other ilmmakers, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Max Ophüls, and John Stahl (Willis 2003). Haynes’s miniseries version of Mildred Pierce similarly invokes multiple intertextual structures, not only the melodramatic urgency at the center of Cain’s 1941 novel, which the miniseries “sticks [to] as close as the 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 150 12/19/16 3:10 PM NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES 151 most clinging mother” (Smith 2011: 19), but also Michael Curtiz’ 1945 ilm version, referenced in the remake’s visual approach through its employment of relected surfaces, frames within frames, and shots through windows and doorways (Stevens 2011). Moreover, like Far from Heaven—which not only remakes ilm history but also recuperates some thirty years of feminist ilm theory—Haynes’s version of Mildred Pierce invites comparison with classic Hollywood ilm and recalls “the foundational debates that preoccupied ilm studies during the highly signiicant phase of its development as an academic discipline in the 1970s and 1980s” (Bergfelder/Street 2013: 371). his intermedial (or “transmedial”) relationship between old and new (millennial) media is perhaps more immediately focused around an example such as Peter Jackson’s 2005 blockbuster remake of King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933). he original story’s mythic dimension, its inherent spectacularity, and open interpretability had made it a site of ongoing cultural and industrial remaking, with theatrical reissues (1938, 1942, 1946, 1952, 1956), sequels (Son of Kong 1933), spin-ofs (Mighty Joe Young 1949), cross-cultural adaptations (King Kong vs. Godzilla 1962), and—following the massive commercial success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)—Dino De Laurentiis’s epic remake, King Kong (1976), an overt parable of hird World exploitation that ends, in hubristic swagger, with Kong ascending the (then recently completed) twin towers of the World Trade Center. Riding the crest of a wave of fan enthusiasm for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson revisited the story of King Kong with solemn respect and an estimated $200 million budget, treating his remake to impressive, state-of-the-art digital efects. More signiicantly, Jackson employed new media strategies to engage fans, and render the ilm’s oicial “website a powerful paratext of the main text, or created a ‘database as non-linear narrative’” (Constandinides 2010: 24; also see Gray 2010). As Cynthia Erb (2009) points out in her extended reception study of the multiple versions of King Kong, Jackson established a relationship between the 1933 ilm and the 2005 remake by way of a collection of video-blog entries, initially shown on a Jackson-approved independent fan website, before the remake was released on DVD as King Kong: Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries (2005). he diaries not only demonstrate Jackson’s personal investment in, and creative transformation of, a pioneering (special efects) classic but also underline the signiicance of establishing an approach to new millennial remakes that attends to the transformation of popular serial forms in and through new media platforms. he remediation that characterizes the example of King Kong—and the way this extends into the immersion of the viewer through the interactive pleasures of game play and IMAX 3-D technologies—is evident in the more recent 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 151 12/19/16 3:10 PM 152 CHAPTER 8, CONSTANTINE VEREVIS example of RoboCop (2014), a remake, or “reboot” as it has typically been labeled, in which the ilm, or “main end-product,” clearly draws upon previous versions of the phenomenon and its global reputation as ilm series and video game.5 he example of RoboCop demonstrates how a digitally networked culture organizes and manages information, with Sony Pictures setting up the ilm’s oicial website—as the homepage for (the ictional) OmniCorp, creator of the RC2000 (or RoboCop) project—to embrace the potential of the web and so engage a “multiplicity of textual relationships that function across collaborative media [. . .] for [textual and] commercial purposes” (Constandinides 2010: 24). Online features, such as OmniCorp’s Keynote announcement of the RC2000 Project at CES 2027, resist any simple reduction of the site to its promotional function and of the remake to any direct or singular relationship between itself and Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987). Instead, the 2014 RoboCop adopts a nonlinear and nonhierarchical database logic, inserting the new millennial version into a collection of artifacts—RoboCop (1987), RoboCop 2 (1990), RoboCop 3 (1993), RoboCop television series (1994), RoboCop: Prime Directive miniseries (2000), RoboCop vs. Terminator video game (2006)—and extending its content across new aesthetic and media forms (most evidently the website’s hyperlinks to social media and online game platforms). Despite some withering review comments—for instance, the perceived anomaly of a “PG-rated reboot” of Verhoeven’s vicious, R-rated critique of Reaganomics (Nayman 2014)—RoboCop, like King Kong before it, demonstrates that in the new millennium it becomes increasingly diicult to lay claim to a clear-cut distinction between feature ilm and other media forms (James 2010). In a contemporary context, networks of interdependence across media require that new millennial remakes be understood as part of a more generalized condition of intermediality. NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES ARE TRANSNATIONAL A digitally networked communications context transforms the way in which ilms are made, distributed, and consumed, generating new commercial and textual conigurations of adaptations and remakes (Hutcheon 2013). Participatory and social-media cultures precipitate new (unauthorized) versions of recognizable properties and proprietary characters for immediate dissemination on the Internet: consider, for example, noncommercial fan productions such as fanvids, mash-ups, and recut trailers (described in Loock/Verevis 2012). hese appropriations have become part of a remix culture (e.g., in the 5. For the term remediation, see Bolter/Grusin 1999. 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 152 12/19/16 3:10 PM NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES 153 Our RoboCop Remake online spoof), but oicial adaptations and remakes just as clearly support and maintain commercial conglomerate interests, including the negotiation of intellectual property rights and payments. Such authorized forms of cultural transfer are not restricted to Hollywood remakes of foreign, or non-English-language, ilms (Graser 2009) or to the relentless pursuit of synergy and brand extension characteristic of so-called total ilm (Elsaesser 2012). Trade journals such as Variety cast a wider net, reporting that “remakes are ringing up box oice gold in Europe, prompting a proliferation of local hits being redone for neighboring markets and causing some curious cases of cross-pollination” (Vivarelli 2011: 6). European investment in remake rights is consistent with the logic behind the selling of formats for television—in a prominent example, the Danish/Swedish crime series Broen/Bron (2011), remade on the United States–Mexico border as he Bridge (USA 2013), and again as the Sky Atlantic and CANAL-PLUS TV series he Tunnel (UK/ France 2013)—and coproduction deals where even large companies seek to limit their budgets and cover a broader audience right from the outset. Once stigmatized as “an American cheap trick,” remakes of ilm (and television) properties that have been substantial commercial successes in single European markets increasingly provide universal themes and subject matter for crossborder translation or transliteration. Variety cites, among others, the example of France’s Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis/Welcome to the Sticks (2008) remade as a German-Italian coproduction, Benvenuti al sud/Welcome to the South (2010), earning $50 million in Italy alone (Vivarelli 2011). In the case of a high-proile European export, he Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (novels and ilms), Yellow Bird, the production company behind the Swedish-Danish ilm version (Män som hatar kvinnor 2009), bought the rights to Stieg Larsson’s 2005 novel (the irst of the so-called Millennium Trilogy) shortly ater its release and consequently earned a main production credit in the Hollywood version, he Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). As Neil Archer points out, citing a 2011 production report, for Yellow Bird “‘cross border thinking and higher budgets’ are key to the company’s success, which in itself underlines the already transnational, genre [oriented] and propertyconscious nature of the company and its output” (2012/13: 5). he transatlantic collaboration yielded a much-anticipated remake, directed by David Fincher and starring Daniel Craig and (in the title role) Rooney Mara. Although the remake performed inancially “below expectation” (Gant 2012), Fincher’s “cutting edge Hollywood narrative skills” and “authorial interests,” established in psychothrillers such as Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007), transformed the dull mise-en-scène and clumsy exposition of Oplev’s irst adaptation into “thumping pumping cinema” (Newman 2012a: 18). his type of example resists and 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 153 12/19/16 3:10 PM 154 CHAPTER 8, CONSTANTINE VEREVIS complicates earlier suggestions that cross-cultural remakes are simply evidence of American “cultural imperialism” (Vincendeau 1993). Indeed, concerns around moves to lit exemptions (originating in the 1990s General Agreement on Tarifs and Trade talks) that treat European ilms diferently than they do other products under international free-trade rules in the European Union were recently reversed by Wim Wenders, who argued that abandoning the EU cultural exemption would in fact hurt Hollywood just as badly as it would Europe because EU ilms would not be there as counterpart to enrich and inform American cinema, speciically, through the U.S. practice of remaking European feature ilms and television formats (Macnab 2013). he cross-pollination described by Wenders can be found in a recent example such as Prince Avalanche, David Gordon Green’s 2013 remake of the little-known Icelandic ilm Either Way/Á Annan Veg, directed by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson (2011). Green’s reputation as U.S. independent ilmmaker was principally forged across his irst two features: George Washington (2000), a coming-of-age drama, described at the time of its release as a “poetic, tender, utterly individual and richly atmospheric” ilm (Kemp 2001: 49), and the indie romance of All the Real Girls (2003) which perfectly aligned “poetic rapture [and] gauche self-consciousness” with the antics of its star-crossed lovers (Brooks 2003: 37). Green’s indie star had faded with his later involvement in studio comedies, such as the Judd Apatow–produced, stoner ilm Pineapple Express (2008), but Prince Avalanche—insofar as it borrowed from the earlier indie dramas its unhurried pace and naturalistic aesthetic, and took from the later work its more comic characterizations—brought together the two contradictory impulses. Less evident (from the press kit and reviews that described Prince Avalanche as a “loose adaptation” of Either Way) was just how closely, not only in terms of plot and dialogue but also mise-en-scène, Green’s ilm followed Sigurðsson’s version. With Either Way producer and cinematographer Árni Filippusson acting as executive producer, and with the input of long-time collaborators—Tim Orr (cinematography), Richard A. Wright (production design), and David Wingo (music, with the Austin-based band Explosions in the Sky)—Green maintained the original ilm’s 1980s period setting but transposed the Icelandic location to a section of landscape in central Texas, scorched and rendered ghostly by wildire, to vividly evoke a sense of place. More tellingly, Green “personalized” the work, opening it up by way of a series of visual and musical interludes that, similar to George Washington, served to loosely hold the ilm together, as if by some “tenuous poetic connective tissue” (Jones 2004: 39). he cross-border thinking of new millennial remakes is not limited to such examples from European and U.S. ilm but extends beyond, to instances 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 154 12/19/16 3:10 PM NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES 155 of global or “world” cinema. Indeed, a signiicant development in recent accounts of cinematic remaking has been the recognition of intensive crosscultural interactions, foregrounded through such notions as a mediascape of globalization and its uptake in descriptions of transnational ilm remakes. hese discussions work to reverse the unidirectional routes of inluence identiied by critics of globalization and emphasize more-dynamic transactions and avenues of cultural exchange. In one example, Iain Robert Smith (2008) embraces a framework of “critical transculturalism” to engage with debates on the “transnational lows of media [and] intersecting nature of cultural production” in and through an exploration of Turkish appropriations of American popular culture, speciically the case of Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda/Tourist Ömer in Star Trek (1974). In another instance, Hilary Hongjin He (2010) examines the “intercultural dialogue” established between Hollywood and China in “localized versions” of ilms such as the action-thriller Connected/ Bao chi tong hua (2008), remade in Hong Kong from the 2004 U.S. ilm Cellular and regarded as the irst oicial Chinese remake of a Hollywood ilm. In a more recent example, Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, A Gun, and A Noodle Shop (2009) transposes Joel and Ethan Coen’s debut neo-noir thriller Blood Simple (1984)—itself a rewriting of the hard-boiled iction of James M. Cain—to rural Northern China in the guise of a slapstick period comedy. hese accounts capture the multidirectional nature of cinematic remaking: simultaneously looking “outwards (transnationalism, globalization), inwards (cultural traditions and aesthetic conventions), backwards (history and memory), and sideways (crossmedial practices and interdisciplinary research)” (Wang 2008: 10). hese (and other) descriptions of worldwide media traic insist that new millennial remakes be understood as part of more general migratory movements and practices of global translation.6 NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES EMBRACE THE POSTAUTEUR In Elsaesser’s account of new millennial Hollywood, the forces of conglomeration, globalization, and digitization require that (blockbuster) ilms perform well not only locally (U.S. domestic) and internationally but also on multiple platforms, including “the ilm’s internet site, the movie trailer, the video game and the DVD as both textual and promotional entities” (2012: 284). If one 6. For other “world cinema” examples, see Phu (2010) on Ringu/he Ring, Richards (2011) on Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and Shin (2012) on he Happiness of the Katakuris/he Quiet Family. 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 155 12/19/16 3:10 PM 156 CHAPTER 8, CONSTANTINE VEREVIS accepts Elsaesser’s suggestion that global Hollywood has entered a digital or franchise era of post-production, a blockbuster like Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version of War of the Worlds (previously adapted as he War of the Worlds 1953) can be understood as a “signature product,” an instance in which a preexisting ilm or property no longer provides a (closed) narrative model but rather functions as a blueprint for remediation. Ideally, the blockbuster remake becomes a prototype and basis for generating serial forms (sequels, series, and cycles), producing tangible objects (DVDs, soundtracks, and books), and providing commodity experiences (games, rides, and theme park attractions) (Elsaesser 2012: 283–85). Extending this line of argument, one can describe the way in which new millennial ilmmakers, for example, postauteurs such as Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh (in examples such as Batman Begins, he Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Ocean’s Eleven 2001), seek to insert themselves into the innumerable lows of global ilm and media production, not by setting out to create something that is new (original) but rather by remaking what already exists: revising it, inhabiting it, and putting it to use (Bourriaud 2002). In a global marketplace, available forms are remade and remodeled, and then “serialized” and “multiplied” in sequels, series, and cycles across expanding territories and media platforms (Lewis 2001 and Elsaesser 1998). he paucity (until quite recently) of critical approaches to the ilm remake has been attributed to the concept’s “anti-authorship quality” (Quaresima 2002: 75), but with the new millennial remake, the authorial agency and “brand-name vision” of the postauteur becomes a key element of promotion and reception (Corrigan 1998). hus, Steven Soderbergh can create a version of Solaris that directly invokes earlier properties—Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 ilm and Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel—but upon the ilm’s release reviewers noted that Soderbergh had transformed the source material even more than Tarkovsky, abandoning its broad philosophical questions to focus primarily on the love story: the relationship between Kris (Chris in the remake) and his wife Rheya, and—in a reprise of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)—their opportunity for a “second chance.” Although Soderbergh claimed that his interest in Solaris was driven by the ideas at the center of the book—“[the novel] just seemed to be about everything I [was] interested in personally”—reviewers drew attention to the thematic and stylistic similarities between Solaris and Soderbergh’s other ilm work, describing the remake as an authorial revision: a property transformed according to auteur predilections into “an intimate two-hander between a man and a woman” (Romney 2003: 14). In a further comment, one that underlines how cinematic remaking can be understood in terms of a ilmmaker’s desire to repeatedly express and modify a particular 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 156 12/19/16 3:10 PM NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES 157 aesthetic sensibility and worldview, Amy Taubin calls Solaris “the most personal, interiorized narrative of [Soderbergh’s] career, [a ilm that] could be his Pierrot le fou or Vertigo” (2002: 78). In a more recent example, the press kit for Passion, Brian De Palma’s 2012 French-German (English-language) remake of Alain Corneau’s psychodrama Crime d’amour/Love Crime (2010), announces: “Brian De Palma returns to the sleek, sly, seductive territory of Dressed To Kill [1980] with an erotic corporate thriller fueled by sex, ambition, image, envy and the dark, murderous side of PASSION,” before going on to note that “the screenplay is written by De Palma with additional dialogue by Nathalie Carter [and is] based on the French ilm Crime d’amour.” Separated by only a few years from Corneau’s original, De Palma’s Passion—a ilm initiated by the same Paris-based production company and characterized by its use of hi-tech, glass, and polished-steel interiors—“presents [itself as] a model of production and distribution strongly inluenced by [the] contemporary audiovisual landscape”: the principal characters, Christine (Rachel McAdams) and Isabelle (Noomi Rapace), “shoot on their mobile, edit on their laptop, project it at the staf meeting, and stick it on YouTube” (Álvarez/Martin 2013). In and through this distinctive mise-enscène, De Palma not only engages his signature preoccupations (doubling and artiice, including an elegant, extended split-screen sequence that ends with a violent murder) but also ofers a crucial innovation: a “knotty, triangular construction [that] rotates through Christine, Isabelle and Dani [Karoline Herfurth],” transforming the two-sided conlict of the original players (Kristin Scott homas as Christine and Ludivine Sagnier as Isabelle) into a “disturbing, serial chain [in which] the competitiveness never ends, but [in an eloquent metaphor for the remake itself] only ever perpetuates itself, expanding and renewing with each new turn of the screw” (Álvarez/Martin 2013; emphasis added). In a perhaps less evident example, Nathan Lee mounts an inspired postauteur defense of Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween, one of a cycle of contemporary treatments of an entire era of American low-budget horror ilms bracketed by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the Romero-backed Night of the Living Dead remake by Tom Savini (1990). As described by Kim Newman, the tone for the new cycle was set by ilms such as Marcus Nispel’s he Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003; Tobe Hooper 1974) and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead, but ten years on “the cycle has yielded too many unmemorable redos of the likes of When a Stranger Calls and Prom Night plus genuinely disastrous takes on Halloween and It’s Alive” (2013: 91). Contra Newman, Lee’s assessment recognizes not only how the Halloween remake is repurposed within a 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 157 12/19/16 3:10 PM 158 CHAPTER 8, CONSTANTINE VEREVIS new discursive ield but also how it is re-envisioned in/as a genuine authorial innovation: Given the hallowed status of the original, [and] the prejudice and blind spots of critical orthodoxy [. . .] Halloween (07) has not been seen for what it is: the remake as legitimate parallel creation. An independent feat of imagination that extends, ampliies, and in certain regards improves on the source material, this most original and morally complex of the current [horror] remake cycle properly belongs to a discussion of the distinctly remade: Schrader’s Cat People [1982], Carpenter’s he hing [1982], Invasion of the Body Snatchers per Kaufman [1978] and Ferrara [Body Snatchers, 1993]. (2008: 26; emphasis added) Elsewhere, Lee writes that Zombie’s Halloween is a ilm that “demands to be taken on its own terms,” a work that is “[close] in spirit to Soderbergh’s rethinking of Tarkovsky in his Solaris” (2013: 50). In a contemporary context, postauthorship describes a shit in emphasis from a regime of rights based on authorship and originality toward one centered on trademark and reproducibility (Grainge 2008: 11), but the new millennial remake also provides unique possibilities for the means of expression. NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES ARE CHARACTERIZED BY PROLIFERATION AND SIMULTANEITY he new millennium is characterized by an exponential increase in content and availability, not only through ilms on DVD but through ilms (and fragments of ilms) via VOD streaming and on the Internet. If the new millennium is distinguished by unprecedented access, then selection becomes a major concern: not how to see ilms but how to choose between them (Cousins 2010). Just one expression of this is found in Paul Schrader’s comments around his ilm he Canyons (2013), a work that he describes as an example of “post-Empire” independent ilmmaking. Schrader borrows the term from he Canyons’ cowriter, Bret Easton Ellis, who says that American ilm has come into a late, or postimperial, period: the U.S. ilm empire was of the twentieth century, but U.S. culture has now entered a period in which it is making ilms out of the remains of the empire, “the junk that’s let over” (Gross 2013: 26). For Schrader, the number-one fact of digital cinema is that it has become easier to get a (low-budget) ilm inanced, but—because of the sheer volume of work that gets made—it is increasingly diicult to get anyone to see it. In the 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 158 12/19/16 3:10 PM NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES 159 case of he Canyons, Schrader says that he “got lucky” with the “noise factor” surrounding the ilm. He says that he and Ellis, along with he Canyons’ lead actors, Lindsay Lohan and porn-star James Deen, had “some cachet” with interest groups: We were in with four diferent sub-groups of interested people. [. . .] Lindsay has four million (Twitter) followers, and James has half a million. Bret has 250,000. [. . .] When you’re pitching a movie, that’s the question they ask: Is it going to make noise? Are you going to hear this above the din of the avalanche of ilm productions? And if the idea has noise, then they are interested in it. [. . .] And this idea [he Canyons] had noise. Some of it by design, some of it by luck. (Gross 2013: 27) As the volume of ilms and versions of ilms increases and accelerates across media and delivery platforms, not only do presold titles and characters contribute to the noise factor (especially for genre ilms), but the same conluence of factors—conglomeration, globalization, and digitization—also feeds a fascination among audiences and practitioners with recycled properties, or what Simon Reynolds (2011) calls a “retromania” for revivals, reissues, and remakes. Moreover, where remakes were once understood to compete economically and culturally with their previous versions, contemporary remakes typically enjoy a more complementary relationship with their originals, with publicity and reviews oten drawing attention to earlier versions (which are increasingly available and so appear closer in time). For instance, as recently as 2011, Video Ezy magazine ran a promotion (“Not Lost in Translation”) which not only used the line “laughter is an international language, something proven by the fact that this month’s hilarious comedy Dinner for Schmucks actually comes from a hugely successful French ilm titled he Dinner Game” to advertise a new release, but also drew attention to a whole back catalogue of double (or doubled) features: he Departed (2006) and Infernal Afairs (2002), Let Me In (2010) and Let the Right One In (2008), he Ring (2002) and Ringu (1998), Vanilla Sky (2001) and Open Your Eyes/Abre los Ojos (1997), and several others. he signiicance of the noise factor is plainly evident in authorized (non-)remakes such as Ocean’s Eleven and he Italian Job (2003)—ilms that retain little more than the title from a previous version in order to invest the new production with a narrative image and added aesthetic and commercial value. hus, the 2003 version of he Italian Job might be seen as just another generic heist movie and star vehicle for Mark Wahlberg and Charlize heron, but its presold title and iconic Mini Cooper tunnel chase sequence functions both as a marker of distinction and as an opportunity for remodeling (literally 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 159 12/19/16 3:10 PM 160 CHAPTER 8, CONSTANTINE VEREVIS in the case of ilm’s tie-in with the 2001 new generation Mini Cooper S series). To this end, the ilm’s Paramount Pictures website included comments by director F. Gary Gray: “I liked a lot of things about the original. It had great style and unforgettable performances. But the ilm that we’ve made is for modern audiences, with updated technology.” Executive producer James Dyer similarly noted that the 1969 version was a point of departure, not replication: “[Our] movie is a little diferent. It’s not a remake [. . .] but it does use similar tools to tell the story: heist, armored truck, gold, Mini-Coopers.” Following the 2003 theatrical run of he Italian Job, both versions were simultaneously released to DVD, with extras on the remake DVD not only drawing attention to the original but featuring scenes from it. he subsequent release of Paramount Home Video’s “he Italian Job Git Set” DVD edition, which included both 1969 and 2003 versions, demonstrates that just as adaptations of literary properties oten lead viewers back to source novels for a irst reading, remakes encourage viewers to seek out original—or parallel—ilm properties (Corrigan 2002). A remake title, proprietary character, or signature tune may contribute to audience interest around a new release and mark it out in a digitized culture distinguished by accelerated proliferation, but it also plays a part in the identiication of a body of work for commemoration and canonization. It is clear that the popularity and reputation of some titles—such as he Evil Dead (2013/1981) and Fright Night (2011/1985), Fame (2009/1980), and Footloose (2011/1984)—is present in advance of their remaking, and it is equally evident that U.S. remakes of relatively little known properties do not draw much attention to their European originals. But in other cases remakes reintegrate previous versions into a new present, just as cover versions of popular music so oten do for original recordings. For instance, Kim Chapiron’s Dog Pound (2010) occasioned another look at the institutional reformism of Alan Clarke’s social-realist Scum (1979), with the latter subsequently remastered for release on DVD/Blu-ray (2013). Similarly, Breck Eisner’s 2010 remake of George A. Romero’s 1973 he Crazies, following remakes of all three ilms in Romero’s Dead franchise, is said to be “among the best of the recent run of do-it-over-again movies” for the fact that it gives “a feeling that Romero really lives in this story” (Newman 2010: 51; emphasis added). Or, in an example which demonstrates that originals are never pure or singular, Len Wiseman’s “80s style blockbuster reboot” or “uber-digi remake” of Total Recall (2012) not only revisits key scenes from Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 version but “lazily rips of entire images and scenes from Blade Runner [1982], inciting in us the desire to leave this irritation behind and go and see that movie again” (Atkinson 2012b: 104). In a contemporary media landscape—one characterized by 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 160 12/19/16 3:10 PM NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES 161 self-referencing and interconnection—the new millennial remake becomes (in this case, quite literally) an archive of and for the future. NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES DO NOT ERASE OR OVERWRITE BUT COEXIST Film remakes provide an illustration of new millennial ilm culture, perhaps most clearly in the concept of the “reboot,” borrowed from computer technology to describe the process of “beginning again” to recommercialize a ilm property or franchise by denying or nullifying earlier iterations. Citing examples such as Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013); Marc Webb’s he Amazing Spider-Man (2012); J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek (2009); and “the quintessential reboot,” Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, William Proctor argues that the reboot difers conceptually from the remake insofar as it is a franchise-speciic concept: A remake is a singular text bound within a self-contained narrative schema; whereas a reboot attempts to forge a series of ilms, to begin a franchise anew from the ashes of an old or [critically or commercially] failed property. In other words, a remake is a reinterpretation of one ilm, a reboot “re-starts” a series of ilms that seek to disavow and render inert its predecessors’ validity. (2012a) In making this distinction, part of Proctor’s aim is to shore up the concept of the reboot in face of opportunistic advertising that seeks to promote (mere) sequels—Tron Legacy (2010), Terminator Salvation (2009), or he Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)—by assigning them a reboot label and thus aligning the ilms with the critical and commercial success of the Dark Knight trilogy. he term reboot, along with a string of (remake) euphemisms (e.g., encore, reworking, reitting, retooling, retread, redo, makeover) has gained cultural currency in recent years. For example, Sight and Sound magazine reports, “Most of the industry’s recent reboots have been expensive disasters [. . .] as with this reconstitution of John Carpenter’s he hing” (Atkinson 2012a: 76); “Danny Cannon’s Judge Dredd (1995) is likely to be remembered as the version that got it wrong. [. . .] However, a generation on, the lop has got its reboot” (Newman 2012b: 34); and “there is a memorable scene in the 1982 ilm of Conan [the Barbarian, in which Conan is harnessed to a massive millstone that he must turn in perpetuity] but there is no equivalent scene in Marcus Nispel’s relaunched or remade or rebooted Conan” (Pinkerton 2011: 57). Perhaps the most inspired employment of the term is found in Tim Lucas’s account of the serial saga of 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 161 12/19/16 3:10 PM 162 CHAPTER 8, CONSTANTINE VEREVIS Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan the Ape Man, speciically the ilms made ater Johnny Weissmuller’s departure from the series. Describing a set of eleven post-Weissmuller ilm titles (ive ilms starring Lex Barker and another six Gordon Scott), Lucas writes: “Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959) reboots the franchise in the same way that Casino Royale did with the Bond ilms. [. . .] Scott rises admirably to the occasion [. . .] and carries the ilm to the most exciting climax of the entire series” (2010: 88). Each of these examples, even the retrospective designation of the Tarzan ilms, supports the notion of (franchise) rebooting, but the idea that a new version somehow erases (or overwrites) previous iterations is at odds with a digitally networked culture in which new media do not replace the old but add layers and associations to it. As Proctor says, “a reboot is a brand-new product, yet it is already old. [. . .] here is no blank slate” (2012b). he fact of multiple, parallel versions that coexist rather than erase or overwrite is evident in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake—or failed reboot—of TwentiethCentury Fox’s Planet of the Apes (1968).7 Poised at the beginning of the new millennium, Burton’s version was backed with an estimated budget of $110 million. It was seen by some as a “jittery catalogue of millennial anxieties” (O’Hehir 2012: 12) but more typically as a ilm that had transformed the B-movie aesthetic of the Planet of the Apes ilm and television series into a B-movie blockbuster: “a wild concept coated in incongruous corporate gloss” (Brooks 2001: 56). Despite its diferences, the re-imagined Planet of the Apes owed much to Schafner’s version: its reputation, its progeny, and especially its well-remembered ending in which astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) realizes in his discovery of a bomb-blasted Statue of Liberty that the ape planet is actually a postapocalyptic Earth. Indeed, reviews of Planet of the Apes consistently focused on Burton’s transformed ending, in which astronaut Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) crash lands on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, only to ind that the chiseled features of Abraham Lincoln have been replaced by those of gorilla General hade, describing it as “spectacularly befuddling” and a “monkey-puzzle of an ending” (Brooks 2001: 56). As disingenuous as the Burton ending might be, these reviews miss a more obvious point, namely, that the Planet of the Apes remake has a twist ending because the original does. hus, it may well be the case that the “crazed inal coda [. . .] makes little in the way of logical sense, and clashes conspicuously against the pedestrian narrative that precedes it” (Brooks 2001: 56), but the ending makes perfect remake sense, displaying a narrative logic that builds upon—rather than cancels—the memory of the cult original. 7. For more on the Apes franchise, see the preceding chapter in this volume. 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 162 12/19/16 3:10 PM NEW MILLENNIAL REMAKES 163 Vivian Sobchack inds something similar in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), a reboot of the Alien franchise, impressively extended through its ictional Weyland Industries website. As described by Sobchack, the estimated $130 million ilm is a work that gets caught (literally) between a rock (the planet LV-233) and a hard place (the spaceship Prometheus). More precisely, the diiculty some viewers found with Prometheus was that it presented itself as a type of remake—a prequel to Scott’s Alien (1979)—and a completely original ilm—a reboot of the Alien franchise—only to fall apart because, like Burton’s Planet of the Apes, it obeys a remake logic that is not matched to the narrative logic of the discreet (rebooted) episode. he result was confusing, illogical, and disjointed plotting. In Sobchack’s metaphor, the bedrock in this case is the industry franchise and mythic universe initiated by Scott’s sci-i horror hybrid Alien—aterwards sequelized in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992), and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1997)—and the tension between remake and reboot logic is evident in Twentieth Century Fox’s own promotional material which presents Prometheus as a ilm that “started out as a prequel” but wants to function as a “stand-alone ilm [. . .] that tips its hat to elements of the original Alien” (2012: 33). Ultimately, the ilm leads back to the future, with the planet’s various xenomorphic life forms transmuting at the end into “the old alien we’ve come to love—a kind of annunciation of a hoped-for sequel to the prequel” (2012: 33). However, the key question for Sobchack, as for the reboot, remains: “how to get out of this double bind between origins and originality?” (34). As she puts it: while [Prometheus has been] rightly criticized for its unforthcoming and ultimately incoherent narrative, and its oten arbitrary character motivation and editorial (il)logic, Prometheus is indeed coherent as an allegory of its own struggle with and resistance to its origins. [. . .] hat is, not able to escape that old mythology completely and unable to integrate it with a new one, the ilm instead signiies the resistance brought to bear against both. (34) As much a discursive formation as an industrial or textual one, the category of the reboot thus reimagines not simply a speciic ilm (or ilms) but the concept of the remake for the new millennium. CONCLUSION he ive interrelated “theses” put forward in this chapter—new millennial remakes are intermedial, new millennial remakes are transnational, new 00i-287 Kelleter 1p.indb 163 12/19/16 3:10 PM 164 CHAPTER 8, CONSTANTINE VEREVIS millennial remakes embrace the postauteur, new millennial remakes are characterized by proliferation and simultaneity, and new millennial remakes do not erase or overwrite but coexist—begin to sketch out a provisional map, or at least some signiicant lines and contours, for a “media-historic proile” of new millennial remakes (Kelleter/Loock 2014). he remake has never been a static thing but a concept that is always evolving. And while it may be too early to draw conclusions as to the nature of a distinct historical period, these notes should demonstrate that the present and future of cinema is a re-vision of its past, especially in the new millennium, and that aesthetic and economic evaluations of ilm remakes (good or bad, success or failure) are less interesting than the cultural and historical signiicance of new millennial remaking practice. BIBLIOGRAPHY Álvarez López, Cristina and Adrian Martin (2013). “To the Passion.” Lola 4. April 6, 2014. http:// www.lolajournal.com/. Archer, Neil (2012/13). “he Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009/2011) and the New ‘European Cinema.’ ” Film Criticism 37.2: 2–21. Atkinson, Michael (2012a). “he hing.” Sight and Sound 22.1: 76–78. ———(2012b). “Total Recall.” Sight and Sound 22.10: 104–5. Balio, Tino (2013). Hollywood in the New Millennium. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 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