Remakes and Remaking: Concepts - Media - Practices [1. Aufl.] 9783839428948

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction. Remakes and Remaking – Preliminary Reflections
I. Intra-medial Intracultural Remaking
The Remade Prequel – Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
Exit Gender, Enter Race. Jonathan Demme’s “Update” of The Manchurian Candidate
(Re)Making Men in the 1950s and 2000s. Delmer Daves’s and James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma
II. Intra-medial Transcultural Remaking
Hollywood Remade. New Approaches to Indian Remakes of Western Films
Hellish Departure? The Departed, Infernal Affairs and Globalized Film Cultures
III. Inter-medial Remaking
The Remake as Re-adaptation of an English Classic. Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist on Film
Romeo and Juliet Re-danced. Choreographic Remakings of Shakespeare’s Tragedy
“Yes, Avatar is Dances with Wolves in space . . . sorta”. Repetitions and Shades of Difference in Two Blockbusters
On the Ethics and Aesthetics of ‘Remaking’ in Web 2.0 Environments
List of Contributors

Citation preview

Rüdiger Heinze, Lucia Krämer (eds.) Remakes and Remaking

Media Studies

2014-12-18 14-48-53 --- Projekt: transcript.titeleien / Dokument: FAX ID 03d3385316590414|(S.

1-

4) TIT2894.p 385316590422

2014-12-18 14-48-53 --- Projekt: transcript.titeleien / Dokument: FAX ID 03d3385316590414|(S.

1-

4) TIT2894.p 385316590422

Rüdiger Heinze, Lucia Krämer (eds.)

Remakes and Remaking Concepts – Media – Practices

2014-12-18 14-48-53 --- Projekt: transcript.titeleien / Dokument: FAX ID 03d3385316590414|(S.

1-

4) TIT2894.p 385316590422

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2015 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Still from »Star Wars Uncut: A New Hope«, with kind permission by the author. © John Martz 2010 Typeset by Lucia Krämer, Rüdiger Heinze, Jan-Niklas Plönnigs Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-2894-4 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-2894-8

2014-12-18 14-48-53 --- Projekt: transcript.titeleien / Dokument: FAX ID 03d3385316590414|(S.

1-

4) TIT2894.p 385316590422

Contents

Introduction: Remakes and Remaking – Preliminary Reflections

Rüdiger Heinze, Lucia Krämer | 7

I NTRA-MEDIAL I NTRACULTURAL REMAKING The Remade Prequel – Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Oliver Lindner | 23 Exit Gender, Enter Race: Jonathan Demme’s “Update” of The Manchurian Candidate

Michael Butter | 41 (Re)Making Men in the 1950s and 2000s: Delmer Daves’s and James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma

Johannes Fehrle | 57

I NTRA-MEDIAL TRANSCULTURAL REMAKING Hollywood Remade: New Approaches to Indian Remakes of Western Films

Lucia Krämer | 81 Hellish Departure? The Departed, Infernal Affairs and Globalized Film Cultures

Martin Lüthe | 97

I NTER -MEDIAL REMAKING The Remake as Re-adaptation of an English Classic: Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist on Film

Till Kinzel | 115 Romeo and Juliet Re-danced: Choreographic Remakings of Shakespeare’s Tragedy

Maria Marcsek-Fuchs | 131

“Yes, Avatar is Dances with Wolves in space…sorta”: Repetitions and Shades of Difference in Two Blockbusters

Sabine N. Meyer | 153 On the Ethics and Aesthetics of ‘Remaking’ in Web 2.0 Environments

Martin Butler | 171 List of Contributors | 181

Introduction Remakes and Remaking – Preliminary Reflections R ÜDIGER H EINZE AND L UCIA K RÄMER

Most critical work on film remakes typically begins with a gesture that is equally defensive and corrective, namely the assertion that remakes have an undeservedly bad reputation and that they have been paid almost no serious attention. This gesture is, or should be, no longer possible. By now, substantial critical work has been produced on remakes – increasingly so during the last fifteen years (e.g. Horton/McDougal 1998a; Forrest/Koos 2002a; Verevis 2006; Oltman 2008; Loock/Verevis 2012a), and intermittently at least since the 1970s (e.g. Druxman 1975; Manderbach 1988). Some of this work still resorts to a default position of evaluating the success of the remake in relation to its ‘original’ – a normative approach that criticism about transcultural remakes seems to be especially prone to (cf. e.g. Manderbach 1988; Kühle 2006). However, in the best cases, the criticism about remakes has succinctly dismantled the common prejudices towards the form, disproved their premises as specious, and shown remaking to be a productive and pervasive cultural practice. Some prejudices against remakes obviously persist, especially in nonacademic texts such as newspaper reviews, film magazines, and Internet blogs. Very often they are based on the simplistic notion that when it isn’t busy making bad adaptations or insipid sequels, Hollywood, as the hegemonic global film industry – and by implication the entire U.S.-American popular culture industry – is still the voracious cultural imperialist that steals or buys good ideas from European and East Asian cinema, or recycles its own old ones from a better, bygone era, because it has no good ideas of its own. It then ‘degrades’ them by adapting them to the tastes of an undemanding, consumerist American audience, and in a last vicious step imposes these products on the rest of the world. However, even outside academia such a reductive view of remakes is not unanimous (apart from being demonstrably counterfactual). If it were, the negative implica-

8 | HEINZE & K RÄMER

tions of derivativeness and unoriginality associated with the label would hardly encourage film producers and distributors to advertise films as remakes. Yet a sizeable number of movie productions not only admit that they are remakes but actually flaunt the fact to capitalize on the audience’s familiarity with the original (Midding 2012: 27). DVD packages of originals and their remakes abound, and Apple TV, for example, offers a separate remake rubric. These examples underline the established status of the film remake as a commercial practice, while also evoking the changes in the way it has been deployed: the current practices point towards a more “symbiotic relationship” (Verevis 2006: 17) of remake and original than in pre-video times, when spectators were less likely to remember or be familiar with the remake’s original.1 The sheer diversity of remakes not only belies facile prejudices but insistently points to their lasting appeal and institutionalized status on a variety of levels (Verevis 2006: 1-34; Moine 2007: 25; Dusi 2011: 361). Film remakes are an established industrial category of textual re-working during which existing, and usually already successfully proven material is recycled – a practice often, but by no means always, motivated by economic risk-management. Despite the great differences between individual remakes in terms of style, theme, structure, and narration, the remake can also be considered a (rather fuzzy) textual category whose member texts are united by their palimpsestic nature, although these intertextual relations may take a myriad of shapes. The label ‘remake’ in advertising – much like a genre label – thus creates an implicit contract between producers and consumers that establishes the possibility to engage with more than one text simultaneously. Used by reviewers, who recur to the remake as a critical category, the label triggers the same effect. Spectators are invited to adopt a comparative form of reception, “to enjoy the differences that have been worked, consciously and sometimes unconsciously, between the texts” (Horton/McDougal 1998b: 6; emphasis in original), or, if they are unfamiliar with the original, to discover it along with the new film. This spectatorial attitude may be triggered by the paratextual marking of a film as remake, but does not depend on it. When spectators recognize so-called unacknowledged or hidden remakes, for example, it is they who ascribe the status of remake to a film. The remake can therefore also be conceived as a category of reception (Moine 2007: 33; Hutcheon 2006:

1

It must be noted, however, that especially the production of transcultural remakes usually still relies on the spectators’ unfamiliarity with the original. The relationship of remake and original in such cases is therefore more openly one of competition, which may potentially lead to the elimination of the original in the audience’s minds (cf. Moine 2007: 30; Midding 2012: 28; Leitch 2002: 38, 41, 50).

I NTRODUCTION

|9

121). Since unacknowledged remakes are usually unacknowledged because their producers have failed to acquire the necessary copyrights and thus try to evade this spectatorial stance, the phenomenon of unacknowledged remakes moreover underlines that remakes are also a legal category (e.g. Moine 2007: 17). A focus on any of these aspects can be a fruitful starting point for an examination of individual remakes or processes of remaking; yet it would seem that the greatest hermeneutic potential lies in their combination and an analysis of how the levels of production, text, reception, and context are negotiated by those involved in creating, marketing, evaluating, and analyzing remakes. Critics have engaged with the remake as a theoretical category, trying to determine its features and boundaries as a critical concept. Yet they have tended to grapple with the remake’s ambivalent position and appeal; an appeal that derives, as most critics agree, from the tension between difference and repetition, surprise and familiarity, recognition and reconstruction, and that thus carries with it conflicted discourses of authenticity and originality, as well as tradition and influence. Unsurprisingly, critical literature has struggled to come to grips with these multiple ambivalences. Some critics have attempted a variety of more or less satisfactory definitions and differentiations (e.g. Kühle 2006: 16, 18; Sainati in Dusi 363). Constantine Verevis, for example, in perhaps the best description of the textual nature of film remakes, states that “film remakes are understood as (more particular) intertextual structures which are stabilised, or limited, through the naming and (usually) legally sanctioned (or copyrighted) use of a particular literary and/or cinematic source which serves as a retrospectively designated point of origin and semantic fixity. In addition, these intertextual structures (unlike those of genre) are highly particular in their repetition of narrative units, and these repetitions most often (though certainly not always) relate to the content (‘the order of the message’) rather than to the form (or the ‘code’) of the film.” (2006: 21; emphasis in original)

Yet, as Verevis himself points out, “any easy categorization of the remake is frustrated […] by a number of factors” and phenomena, such as unacknowledged remakes, non-remakes or alleged remakes that differ significantly in their treatment of the narrative units of the original (2006: 22). Moreover, the issue of narrative units is a slippery one: on a macro-narrative level, all texts are (generic) remakes; on a micro-narrative level, none are. In light of these problems of definition, other texts, especially dictionaries, lists, and bibliographies, take remakes to be so pervasive and self-explanatory that a definition beyond the most rudimentary – a new version of an older film – is not needed. Many scholars predictably offer taxonomies: Thomas Leitch

10 | HEINZE & K RÄMER

(2002), for example, suggests the readaptation (which ignores the first adaptation), the update, the homage, and the true remake (which offers an “improvement”); Michael Schaudig (1996) differentiates between imitative, innovative, and original remakes; Michael Druxman (1975) has the disguised and the direct remake and the non-remake; Harvey Roy Greenberg (1991) distinguishes the acknowledged, close remake from the acknowledged, transformed remake and the unacknowledged, disguised remake; in a “preliminary taxonomy” Robert Eberwein (1998) even lists fifteen different categories that are further subdivided and all in all add up to almost thirty types of remakes. He is the only one to introduce finer distinctions into his typology to capture, for example, aspects of technology (silent to sound), nationality (autoremake from the same country vs. different country), medium (cinema film to TV film), but also gender and race (character constellation), temporal and cultural setting, as well as genre (parody, pornography). Unfortunately, Eberwein’s view is firmly U.S.-centric, and his inconsistent mixture of distinction criteria ultimately renders his typology quite arbitrary. By positing a “film made by a director consciously drawing on elements and movies of another director” (1998: 29) as one type of remake, he moreover expands the notion of the remake to a degree that renders it quite useless as a critical category. As Dusi has pointed out, such typologies and categorizations do not help us explain the praxis of remaking or understand repetitive structures (2011: 362). In an equally pervasive anti-taxonomic bias, some criticism therefore considers all films as remakes. Verevis, for example, suggests that “each and every film is remade – that is, dispersed and transformed – in its every new context or configuration” (2006: 75; emphasis in original) – which may be useful as a reflection about the nature of film and about the role of reception for the constitution of meaning, but would rob the concept of the remake of its potential for textual analysis. Many critics examine the remake as one of many forms and practices of transposition, translation, interpretation, intertextuality, or hypertextuality. Loock and Verevis, for example, state in the latest book on film remaking that this practice belongs to a “broad range of creative and industrial practices that transform and appropriate existing texts (originals or earlier versions)” in “processes of cultural reproduction” (2012b: 12). The smallest common denominator uniting these attempts to come to grips with the remake seems to be their tendency to restrict the notion of remaking to intra-medial re-workings of texts. Moreover, these assessments are usually embedded in references to a plethora of other concepts – such as the prequel, sequel, spin-off, series, makeover or adaptation, the homage, parody, pastiche or quotation, or plagiarism and copying – and a discussion of the fuzzy borders between them and the remake proper (e.g.

I NTRODUCTION

| 11

Moine 2007: 10-12). While all of this is certainly true and may serve as a reminder that remaking is one cultural practice of repetition among others, from which it may or may not be categorically different, it is also rather vague and hence not very helpful. The critical literature and attempted definitions of remakes are usually restricted to the phenomenon of film remakes of other films – so much so that Leitch has even claimed that “only movies are remade” (2002: 37; also Bourdon 2012: 7). Indeed, re-recordings of songs by new artists, for example, are commonly not labeled remakes, though clearly the result of a practice of remaking. It seems both useful and important, therefore, to distinguish between the noun ‘remake’ as a cinematic category, and the practice of ‘remaking’, which also applies to other media and cultural spheres. This distinction, which we owe to Eckart Voigts, also structures our collection, which includes discussions of phenomena of remaking from beyond the realm of film. Film remaking may be “one of several industrial and cultural activities of repetition (and variation)” (Loock/Verevis 2012b: 2), but there are important differences between these cultural activities – differences which are signaled not only by their different labels, but also by their different status. New productions and performances of a symphony by, say, Beethoven, are usually neither called remakes nor re-adaptations (which they are), nor are they typically accused of being mere copies of previous versions of the same piece. The same is true for ballet and theater productions. Clearly, the different forms of reception and evaluation, and the aura and level of prestige accorded to varying practices of ‘differential repetitions’ have to do with the particular medium and art form in which they materialize and thus can tell us a lot about the history, cultural context, function, and perception of a medium and art form. Rather than trying to improve upon existing definitions of the remake or offering our own, we would like to complement them by listing what we can reasonably say about film remakes and remaking. For a start, remaking is a pervasive and perennial practice in different media and art forms. This means specifically that as a cultural and industrial practice it precedes and exceeds film – for example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, unlicensed transnational remakes of drama were quite common – and that in the medium of film, it is neither a recent nor intermittent phenomenon. Remakes have been a common feature from the very advent of film-making. In Hollywood, the remake flourished during the Classical Studio era and has never disappeared (Verevis 2006: 96-97); in many film industries beyond Hollywood, too, the remake is an established category which includes re-workings of texts from the same national or cultural back-

12 | HEINZE & K RÄMER

ground as well as transnational and transcultural remakes. Film remaking, and remaking in general, can thus also be considered multi-directional. Despite the perennial nature of the process of remaking, the products of this process (and their reception) occur in specific historical, social, institutional, and cultural contexts (Verevis 2006: 101). Remaking thus always implies a double temporality of continuity and change, albeit with an emphasis on the latter. For, on the one hand, as Braudy points out, any form of remaking “is a meditation on the continuing historical relevance (economic, cultural, psychological) of a particular narrative” (1998: 331) and can thus have a canon-building effect. Yet, on the other hand, remaking is always more or less transformative, it comes in numerous and quite diverse variations, and can be propelled by a host of different motivations and reasons. The relationship between ‘premake’ (a term borrowed from Oltmann 2008) and remake is complex and defies simplistic hierarchies between ‘original’ and necessarily derivative ‘copy’. After all, the process of remaking is usually conceived of in terms of translating rather than copying, so that a remake is never completely identical with the text it remakes. Remakes in fact evoke distance, rather than proximity, because of the differences that emerge in the process of remaking (Midding 2012: 29). Even in cases where a film remake seems to follow its model shot-by-shot, such as Gus Van Sant’s notorious Psycho or Michael Haneke’s Funny Games US, there are always temporal, spatial, ideological, textual or medial variations between remake and premake (which some critics have tried to capture with terms like ‘close’, ‘literal’, or ‘transformative’), just as there are multiple possible motivations for remaking (technological, economic, aesthetic, historical, ideological etc.). As in other forms of adaptation, remaking can, because of this distance, change the perception of the text or texts that it transforms. Remaking and remakes are dialogic. The remake talks back to and thus potentially multiplies the meaning of the ‘original’ (Dusi 2011: 374), and both depend on each other. There is no remake without a text to remake, and the ‘original’ is only conceived as one because another text has, if not copied, then transformed it. Moreover, there is no one ‘original’: as a logical consequence of the transformative nature of remaking, the remake can never draw on only one other text, but unites intertextual influences form a variety of texts, as does the premake. Remaking is a recursive practice, leading to a perpetuation of texts that are all mutually interdependent. The relationship between remakes and originals is thus “neither their resemblance nor their dissimilarity but an intense circulation of images, ideas and words in a system of exchange” (Jacqueline Nacache qtd. in Forrest/Koos 2002b: 28).

I NTRODUCTION

| 13

Taken together, all of this means that unless we regard them merely as a commercial or legal phenomenon, a critical engagement with remakes and remaking is inevitably comparative along a number of different, heterarchical2 faultlines; it also has to consider a number of different intra-medial, inter-medial, and contextual aspects, such as social, cultural, political, technological, and economical conditions (of premake and remake). This includes audience expectations as well as processes of dissemination and reception. The case studies collected in this volume shine a light at many facets of the film remake and at practices of remaking in other medial environments. In a first section, three papers by Oliver Lindner, Michael Butter and Johannes Fehrle engage with examples of intracultural film remakes. Oliver Lindner opens the volume with an essay about the 2011 film Rise of the Planet of the Apes and about the ways in which the classificatory discourses surrounding the film hint at the instability of the ‘remake’ category. Lindner does not read Rise of the Planet of the Apes primarily as a prequel to the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film or its 2001 Tim Burton remake, but argues for a classification of the film as a remake of the fourth film in the original Apes saga, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). Updating the thematic scope of the older film to mirror the 21st-century zeitgeist by references to genetic engineering, the ethics of medical research and the decline of the West, Rise of the Planet of the Apes has nonetheless the same narrative structure as the older film. Yet, as Lindner shows, the label ‘remake’ was consciously avoided by the studio. Analyzing the prevalent discourse concerning the classification of the film among critics, fans, and in its marketing, Lindner exposes the enduring connotations of unoriginality of the ‘remake’ category. From this discussion, the concept of the remake emerges as “hotly contested terrain”, as Hollywood favoured describing the film as a ‘prequel’ or ‘origin story’ to stress its originality. While the critics’ discourse tended to adopt this usage or opt for the concept of the ‘reboot’, fan websites and private commentaries were apparently more likely to resist the ‘official’ categorisation. The plurality of labels applied to the film, Lindner argues, underlines the instability of cultural texts and categories in general and the category of the remake in particular, as they are shaped by processes of prescription, description and interpretation.

2

The concept of heterarchy is borrowed from social and information sciences. It describes a system of organization in which there is no stable hierarchy of elements but instead a horizontal relation of elements with context- and objective-dependent, temporary, mixed ascendancy.

14 | HEINZE & K RÄMER

In contrast to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the film at the centre of Michael Butter’s essay explicitly signals its status as a remake in its title. Butter presents a comparative reading of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate and Jonathan Demme’s 2004 film of the same name to argue that Demme’s film is an update that conserves the basic plot structure and character constellation of the earlier film while adjusting them to fit a 21st-century context. The thematic focus has changed from Communism to the War on Terror, transnational capitalism and intense media critique. A detailed reading of the films in the context of important ideological discourses of their times of origin moreover reveals that while Frankenheimer’s film presented the conspiracy at the heart of the plot as a mostly external threat, the enemy in Demme’s film is presented as predominantly internal. In addition, the remake re-works the presentation of the link between conspiracy and femininity of the earlier film and racializes the brainwashing scheme at the center of the plot so that in the later version “brainwashing and bioengineering is performed by white scientists on predominantly black soldiers”. Eventually, Butter argues, both films nonetheless affirm traditional notions of the self, since the threat of being controlled by a dangerous Other is overcome by inner-directed agency. Johannes Fehrle’s essay compares Delmer Daves’s 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma with its 2007 remake by James Mangold. The essay’s basic premise is that when the two versions are read against each other, they highlight one of the sources of insight of adaptation and remake studies: they provide an example of the shift in cultural discourses, in this case about gender roles. Fehrle argues that one of the central challenges and changes of the remake of 3:10 to Yuma is its different interpretation of concepts of masculinity. While Delmer Daves’s premake addresses and narratively solves issues of a perceived crisis of masculinity in a 1950s American climate by restoring the patriarchal order, the remake provides enough breaking points to allow for a double reading which reflects a plurality of various gender concepts in the early 21st century. It includes both a slightly updated reiteration of the premake’s reinstatement of a hegemonic masculinity, and, for the more skeptical parts of contemporary audiences, reveals the breaking points in this ideal of masculinity. Thus, the two film versions can then be read to answer a question customarily identified as a key interest of remake studies, the shifting cultural work of texts. While this shift is also at the center of the contributions by Martin Lüthe and Lucia Krämer, which form the second section of the volume, they engage with examples of transcultural rather than intracultural remaking practices. In her essay about Indian remakes of Western films, Krämer begins with the observation that in connection with Hindi films, the fact that filmmakers re-work storylines

I NTRODUCTION

| 15

from other films and film industries – and the fact that these sources usually remain unacknowledged – are often presented as typical of the Mumbai film industry, which thereby emerges as derivative, unoriginal and parasitical. In fact, she notes, the term ‘Bollywood’, which is often used as a synonym for the Hindi film industry or, more generally, popular Indian cinema, has been interpreted by some to express just this derivativeness. As Krämer points out, however, not all remaking in the Hindi film industry is illicit. It is a regular practice to remake older Hindi films, for example, and it is also common for successful films that were originally produced in South India to be remade in Hindi with local film stars. The crucial difference is, she continues, that whereas Indian sources of remakes are generally acknowledged, foreign sources usually are not. In her essay, Krämer first suggests some additions and modifications to the list of ‘Indianization’ strategies that critics have identified in transcultural Indian remakes, before going on to outline the institutional background of unofficial remaking in Bollywood and to discuss its textual and conceptual implications for the notion of the (transcultural) film remake. The essay reminds us that specific practices in film industries beyond Hollywood and Europe may question unspoken assumptions of the alleged ‘norms’ of remakes and remaking. Lüthe’s essay brings together the two spheres of adaptation and globalization in his reading of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed as a remake of the 2002 film Infernal Affairs directed by Wai-Keung Lau and Alan Mak. He argues that one of the central topoi of The Departed – a schizophrenic threat to identity – is inscribed in its very own formal relationship with its central ‘source material’, the 2002 Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs: while The Departed represents a serious effort to remain faithful to its source on the one hand – by deploying extensive verbal, visual, and general cinematographic citations – the film also illustrates an eagerness to leave behind the original Hong Kong film according to the logic of its spatial, and cultural, re-contextualization. Lüthe traces this sense of fragmentation and dislocation both on the level of the remake’s narrative as well as on the structural level (of the form of the remake), further arguing that this remake can as much be read as being about the act of global cultural remaking as about the more conventional and intuitive themes emerging from the movie plot, such as the standard ‘organized-crime-vs.-the-police’ narrative, the audiovisual logic and aesthetics of the movie, or its central characters representing (the will to do) good and evil in the world. The third and last section of the volume brings together four essays that extend the focus to inter-medial remaking practices. Till Kinzel opens this section with a piece that advocates the concept of re-adaptation to conceptualize the textual webs spun around texts that are adapted and/or remade particularly frequent-

16 | HEINZE & K RÄMER

ly. Using the example of Charles Dickens’s classic Oliver Twist Kinzel focuses on the TV miniseries version of the story scripted by Alan Bleasdale (ITV 1999) and David Lean’s film version from 1948 to discuss how their narrative structures and their representation of ‘the Jew’ Fagin illustrate the manifold textual and medial influences shaping each new re-working of the text. Audiovisual versions of the story are always both (inter-medial) adaptations of the novel and its illustrations as well as (intra-medial) remakes of earlier screen versions, and the creativity set free by working within such a textual cosmos, Kinzel argues, means that there can never be a ‘definitive version’ of “masterplots” (Abbott 2002: 42) such as Oliver Twist. In her essay about dance versions of Romeo and Juliet, Maria MarcsekFuchs further investigates the concept of (re-)adaptation, this time in relation to ballet. Marcsek-Fuchs applies the perspectives of (intra-medial) ‘remaking’ and (inter-medial) ‘adapting’ to a chain of texts ranging from Shakespeare’s tragedy and Prokofiev’s score to a series of 20th- and 21st-century choreographies by Leonid Lavrovsky, John Cranko, Sir John MacMillan, John Neumeier, Rudolf Nureyev, Matthew Bourne and Mark Morris. She thereby demonstrates the symbiotic and “palimpsestuous” (Hutcheon 2006: 6) relationship between the practices of (re-)adaptation and remaking that result in versions ranging from classical ballet to contemporary dance which apparently share specific ‘originals’ (foremost Shakespeare’s text and Prokofiev’s score), but which ultimately also constitute a dense web of both intra- and inter-medial allusions, citations and ‘re-writings’, as suggested by Robert Stam’s concept of the ‘cumulative hypotext’ (qtd. in Verevis 2006: 83). Ultimately, Marcsek-Fuchs’s approach to the Romeo and Juliet dance versions via the prism of remaking allows her to draw various more general conclusions. She draws a distinction between implicit and explicit processes of remaking and advocates the suitability of the approach to both entire works and parts thereof. Most important, her study of dance remakings “problematizes the concepts of ‘adaptation’ and ‘remaking’ as two interdependent phenomena, as dance remakings rely on both the medium’s kinetic intramediality and its cultural adaptation processes”. Sabine N. Meyer’s essay proposes that Avatar is in fact a remake of Dances with Wolves. The starting point of her investigation is the exact relation between premake and remake, i.e. the interplay between similarity and difference. Meyer argues that Avatar both confirms, as well as questions, Dances with Wolves. She then investigates both similarities and differences between the movies with respect to plot, character constellations, cinematic styles, and the employment of stereotypes and myths. According to her analysis, both films position themselves strongly against U.S.-American imperialism and environmental degradation and

I NTRODUCTION

| 17

purport to present positive images of indigenous peoples. While doing so, however, they perpetuate long-held stereotypes and myths that, in the final analysis, run counter to their alleged revisionism. The most significant difference between the two movies can be located in their respective conceptualizations of the future. With its optimistic and future-oriented outlook and its emphasis on indigenous survival and pantribal collaboration, Avatar significantly modifies its premake. This modification, however, Meyer argues, does not suffice to categorize Avatar as a re-reading of Dances with Wolves with the aim to subvert the latter. Finally, its situatedness between repetition and difference leads Meyer to an evaluation of indigenous responses to Avatar with a focus on indigenous rights activism. She concludes that the ‘Avatar activism’ of indigenous groups and environmental activists around the world remakes Cameron’s movie and endows it post hoc with a degree of political vision it never had. Her essay thus implicitly extends the notion of remaking to forms of cultural appropriation such as political activism. The volume closes with an essay by Martin Butler that addresses yet another media sphere: Web 2.0 environments. Butler debates the implications of the forms of expression made possible by Web 2.0 contexts for the theorization of forms of ‘making’ and ‘remaking’. His discussion focuses on the example of Star Wars Uncut: A New Hope, an online movie project in which amateur fans recreated 15-second snippets of the original film, which were then re-combined into a remake of Star Wars: A New Hope that is held together by the original soundtrack but mixes a variety of film techniques. Aesthetically, the project illustrates the affinity to mash-ups of remaking processes in Web 2.0 environments. Concerning the ethics of the project, this aesthetics arguably translates into a celebration of creative diversity, amateurism and notions of autonomy and self-expression. While constituting a “web-based archive of media technologies in the very shape of a movie”, Star Wars Uncut: A New Hope thus also contains an implicit political momentum by supporting romantic readings of the democratizing potential of participatory culture, especially, as Butler argues, when it is viewed in relation to Lucasfilm’s attempts at regulating Star Wars fan activity. Going further, Butler suggests that, since participatory environments encourage communal forms of expression in which original individual expression is subsumed in a larger project of collective creation, they may be considered as spaces where remaking is revived “as the modus operandi in cultural production and cultural memory formation” and thus far exceed the notion of remaking generally associated with the film remake as industrial category.

18 | HEINZE & K RÄMER

W ORKS C ITED Abbot, H. Porter (2002): The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdon, Laurent (2012): Les Remakes, Paris: Larousse. Braudy, Leo (1998): “Afterword. Rethinking Remakes”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 327-334. Druxman, Michael B. (1975): Make it again, Sam. A Survey of Movie Remakes, South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes. Dusi, Nicola (2011): “Remaking als Praxis. Zu einigen Problemen der Transmedialität”, trans. Susie Trenka, in: Robert Blanchet et al. (eds.), Serielle Formen: Von den frühen Film-Serials zu aktuellen Quality-TV- und OnlineSerien, Marburg: Schüren, 357-376. Eberwein, Robert (1998): “Remakes and Cultural Studies”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 15-33. Forrest, Jennifer/Koos, Leonard R. (eds.) (2002a): Dead Ringers. The Remake in Theory and Practice, Albany: State University of New York Press. — (2002b): “Reviewing Remakes. An Introduction”, in: Forrest/Koos, Dead Ringers, 1-35 FUNNY GAMES US (2007) (USA/F/UK/A/D/IT, R: Michael Haneke). Greenberg, Harvey Roy (1991): “Raiders of the Lost Text. Remake as Contested Homage in Always”, in: Journal of Popular Film & Television 18.4, 164-171. Horton, Andrew/McDougal, Stuart Y. (eds.) (1998a): Play It Again, Sam. Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley: University of California Press. — (1998b): “Introduction”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 1-11. Hutcheon, Linda (2006): A Theory of Adaptation, London/New York: Routledge. Kühle, Sandra (2006): Remakes. Amerikanische Versionen europäischer Filme, Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag. Leitch, Thomas (2002): “Twice-Told Tales. Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake’, in: Forrest/Koos, Dead Ringers, 37-62. Loock, Kathleen/Verevis, Constantine (eds.) (2012a): Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions. Remake/Remodel, Basingstoke: Macmillan. — (2012b): “Introduction: Remake/Remodel”, in: Kathleen Loock/Constantine Verevis (eds.), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions. Remake/Remodel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1-15. Manderbach, Jochen (1988): Das Remake. Studien zu seiner Theorie und Praxis, Siegen: MuK.

I NTRODUCTION

| 19

Midding, Gerhard (2012): “Der Film und sein Double”, in: epd Film 8.2012, 2429. Moine, Raphaëlle (2007): Remakes. Les films français à Hollywood, Paris: CNRS Éditions. Oltmann, Katrin (2008): Remake – Premake. Hollywoods romantische Komödien und ihre Gender-Diskurse, 1930-1960, Bielefeld: transcript. PSYCHO (1998) (USA, R: Gus Van Sant). Schaudig, Michael (1996): “Recycling für den Publikumsgeschmack? Das Remake. Bemerkungen zu einem filmhistorischen Phänomen“, in: Michael Schaudig (ed.), Positionen deutscher Filmgeschichte. 100 Jahre Kinematographie: Strukturen, Diskurse, Kontexte, München: diskurs film, 277-308. Verevis, Constantine (2006): Film Remakes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

I. Intra-medial Intracultural Remaking

The Remade Prequel – Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) O LIVER L INDNER

I NTRODUCTION “This Year the Revolution Begins” and “Evolution becomes Revolution” – captions like these in cinema trailers for the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes in early 2011 announced a thrilling spectacle in cinemas and on social networks. Directed by Rupert Wyatt and written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, the film was released in August 2011. Ten years after Tim Burton’s remake Planet of the Apes, chimpanzees again could be seen rioting on the cinema screen in the latest part of the Apes saga, produced by 20th Century Fox more than 40 years after the first iconic Planet of the Apes from 1968. Arousing great enthusiasm among critics and spectators alike, the presence of computer-animated animals, in particular, imbued the latest Ape adventure with a sense of innovation. With the help of the Oscar-winning visual effects team WETA Digital, who gained fame through their cooperation with Peter Jackson in his film trilogy The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) and with James Cameron for the film Avatar (2009), the use of motion-capture techniques instead of mere digitized figures catapulted the Apes saga to the cutting edge of contemporary action cinema. The film itself was a huge economic success, generating nearly half a billion dollars in box office revenues and receiving more positive reviews than Burton’s much-slated attempt at reviving the Apes franchise. As every cinema lover is aware, remakes have been part of the film traditions of Western cinema for a long time, testifying to a ubiquitous tendency in popular culture to re-work previous productions, especially those that have found a place in the collective cultural imagination. As Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal have noted in the introduction to their collection of essays on film remakes,

24 | L INDNER

Hollywood now possesses a vast archive of films that, for one reason or another, can be remade and sold again (Horton/McDougal 1998b: 5). Remakes, understood in this essay as new film versions of previously released films, have only recently started to attract scholarly attention, mostly within the fast-growing field of adaptation studies. This is unfortunate, since it can be argued that they testify perhaps more clearly than other cinematic conventions to our culture’s fundamental process of continually remaking itself. Remakes are therefore a particularly worthy subject of investigation, offering insights into the mechanisms of cultural production and reception, and questioning hitherto unchallenged notions of originality as well as the ‘intrinsic’ nature of art. For a scholar interested in the architecture of adaptation and remakes, the universe of the Planet of the Apes saga presents a fruitful field of investigation. Since director Franklin J. Schaffner’s ‘immortal’ Planet of the Apes film of 1968, itself an adaptation of French author Pierre Boulle’s novel La Planète des Singes (1963), the Apes saga has spawned four sequels and three remakes and also a TV series, generated a massive merchandise machinery and has also become an object of interest for scholars of both film studies and cultural studies (cf. Greene 1996; Pendreigh 2001; McMahan 2005; Booker 2006). In the area of adaptation studies, the Apes saga has also attracted considerable interest in recent years (cf. Klimczak 2009; Lindner 2012). In her seminal study A Theory of Adaptation (2006) Linda Hutcheon summarizes that adaptations “set up audience expectations through a set of norms that guide our encounter with the adapting work we are experiencing” (2006: 212), so that the adaptation “involves, for its knowing audience, an interpretative doubling, a conceptual flipping back and forth between the work we know and the work we are experiencing” (Hutcheon 2006: 139). The spectator’s process of ‘interpretative doubling’, of continually juxtaposing the new version with the earlier one, is particularly intense in the case of the Apes saga where a new ‘member’ is added to a group of films and where even the title is only slightly modified, with the acknowledgement of the close connection between earlier film versions and the newest offspring inviting direct comparison. Thus, those spectators familiar with the Apes saga of the 1960s and 1970s, who, in Hutcheon’s terminology, represent the “knowing audience” (2006: 120), will continually compare Rise of the Planet of the Apes to the versions that they already know. Surely, this process will become all the more complex the more films of the Apes franchise are known and remembered, depending also on the audience’s emotional involvement with the films. Most studies investigate remakes from two main angles: that of the remake’s relation to the original or to previous adaptations, and the relationship between

T HE R EMADE P REQUEL

| 25

the remake and the zeitgeist at the time of its production and reception. Investigating remakes from the perspective of cultural studies, this paper aims to explore the complexities of film remakes of sequels by analyzing the manifold connections of the ‘new member’ Rise of the Planet of the Apes to previous films of the ‘Apes universe’. In a first step, the paper will relate Rise of the Planet of the Apes to the 1972 film Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (dir. J. Lee Thompson). It will analyze how precisely Rise of the Planet of the Apes as a remake develops the Apes theme in response to the cultural climate of our early 21stcentury world. The second part of the paper will argue that the way Rise of the Planet of the Apes has been marketed sheds light on Hollywood’s strategy of emphasizing novelty. It will not only investigate the way in which earlier Apes films have been either incorporated or completely ignored in the marketing campaign and in the film studio’s announcements, but also look closely at audience reception, to problematize popular contemporary notions of the concept of the remake, with special regard to the marketing of the film as a prequel.

R ISE OF THE P LANET OF THE A PES (2011) AND C ONQUEST OF THE P LANET OF THE A PES (1972) Every film remake can be seen as a form of transculturation in the sense of what Hutcheon terms the “‘right’ resetting or recontextualizing” by the adapter, highlighting the role of the cultural climate in which the remake is produced (Hutcheon 2006: 146). As is the case with cultural products in general, new versions of older films are generally produced for financial reasons. They can capitalize on the original and thereby, unlike new stories, have the bonus of coming from a tried and often greatly-revered original. However, remakes as a category of films are also problematic, since they are regularly criticized as being weak versions of a powerful original. As Brashinksy summarizes, in contrast to film adaptations of literary works, the remake “interprets the work of the same medium and thus bares its own secondariness” (1998: 163). In the following, Rise of the Planet of the Apes will be investigated, with special attention paid to both the narrative structure and how the thematic scope of the new film responds to the current cultural climate. I will treat Rise of the Planet of the Apes as a remake of the fourth film of the original Apes saga, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Although the new film is not (yet) part of a new series and, in contrast to the 1972 film, does not refer explicitly to aspects narrated in previous films, a comparison between the two films reveals very quickly how much they have in common. It is not surprising that 20th Century Fox decid-

26 | L INDNER

ed to retell the story of the fourth film of the original five parts of the Apes saga, since thematically it is the most important one in relation to the iconic first part: it reveals how apes could become the dominant species on Earth. Burton’s 2001 version, in contrast, picked elements from the first and the last of the original Apes films. The narrative structure of Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is very similar. Both films have the chimpanzee protagonist Cesar who grows up among humans, develops an emotional bond with them, is later forced to live among his own kind and, facilitated by his superior intelligence, unites his fellow apes and starts a rebellion. Major new aspects of the 2011 version are the theme of genetic engineering, medical research, and the ethical responsibility of the researcher, replacing the ethical question about treating apes as slaves in the original film. Other innovations are, for example, the focus on Cesar as part of a human family, the setting of San Francisco, and the selfinduced pandemic that leads to a reduction of humanity and gives the film a distinct eco-thriller feel. However, the changes in the new film do not undermine its status as a remake. In fact, they rather confirm it, since most of the alterations can be seen as elements that modify the cultural and temporal setting of the original story to make it attractive for a 21st-century cinema audience (cf. Eberwein 1998: 29). Of course, updating a story is a central characteristic of any remake or adaptation. As Horton and McDougal point out, “the remake invites the viewer to enjoy the differences that have been worked, consciously and sometimes unconsciously, between the texts” (Horton/McDougal 1998b: 6; emphasis in original). Looking at the plot of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes as the fourth part of the original series, it is very easy to discover its main thematic focus. As mentioned above, it delivers an explanation of how apes could become the superior species on earth and therefore is a prequel to the first and most famous film of 1968. It centers on the revolution of the apes imported, raised, and trained to work as servants for Americans in the near future.1 The chimp Cesar (Roddy McDowell), who has inherited the capacity to speak from his parents, manages to unite the apes in the ape training center and stages a successful rebellion. By displaying scenes of ‘ape auctions’ and incorporating the figure of the black spokesman MacDonald (Hari Rhodes), who is sympathetic to the apes’ cause and explicitly denounces their status as slavery, the spectator is left with little

1

It is somehow ironic that the film shows America under a dictatorial regime in 1991, in reality the year when the Cold War was finally won with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

T HE R EMADE P REQUEL

| 27

doubt about the film’s political and cultural references. Perhaps more alarmingly, the film depicts an American future in which fundamental civil rights are absent and in which a city is in the grip of a ruthless governor (cf. Winogura 1972: 23). These elements can indeed be related to the cultural climate of the early 1970s, with the Civil Rights movement and its precarious successes preoccupying much of the American public. Spectators of Rise of the Planet of the Apes who know Conquest of the Planet of the Apes will be engaged in Hutcheon’s process of ‘interpretative doubling’, and will perceive but also evaluate the alterations. In strong contrast to the 1972 film, the apes in Wyatt’s film are not part of the social environment of humans, with the exception of Cesar, who is raised by the young scientist Will Rodman (James Franco). The human drama in Wyatt’s film centers on Will, researcher for the pharmaceutical company Gen-Sys, who illegally uses a lab-generated virus to cure his father (John Lithgow) of dementia. Born in the lab, the little chimp Cesar displays superior intelligence as a result of genetic engineering and is treated like a human by Will and his family. A veterinarian and a modern Cassandra, his girlfriend Caroline (Freida Pinto), embodies the warning voice that foreshadows the consequences of Rodman’s irresponsible actions. Whereas the focus in the original film is mainly on the suppression of one group by another and its consequences, the new version moves away from the ‘us-vs.-them’ theme, tackling a broad number of topics and offering various levels of association to the viewer. An investigation of how the newest Apes film mirrors the current cultural climate of the early 21st century appears particularly fruitful since it sheds light on the general function of remakes within the culture industries. Then as now, the apes in the films derive their power primarily from the fact that they can be regarded as symbols of a force threatening to undermine Western society. Two of the film’s essential thematic aspects are the question of ethics in medical research and the decline of the West. The importance of the topic of medical research and its ethical dimension becomes clear even from watching the various trailers to the film, in which this aspect serves as an introduction to the story. Rodman is crafted as a sympathetic Frankenstein who plays with fire and unintentionally creates a virus fatal to humans. Of course, the film here reflects many general anxieties linked to the rise of genetic engineering over the last decades, specifically with regard to its moral implications. With the mapping of the genome completed in 2004, a new stage in genetic research has been reached, challenging the accepted limits of science. Moreover, demographic trends in many Western societies predict a sharp rise in the proportion of the elderly over the next decades, making the film’s theme of how to treat the elderly appropriately

28 | L INDNER

seem fundamental. With this, Wyatt’s film has opened up the Apes saga to a topic that viewers would probably not have expected. The film also negotiates American or even Western anxieties about political and cultural decline. Rise of the Planets of the Apes suggests two main readings of how this downfall could be induced. Firstly, the rebellion of the apes galvanizes fears of the attack of an external enemy. Secondly, the presence of genetically altered apes also suggests the end of the West as a result of irresponsible research and thereby another Original Sin arising from the internal architecture of capitalism itself. Both readings, of externally and internally induced decline, will be examined in the following. It has been a major focus of studies on previous films of the Apes saga to analyze the story through the lens of race and ethnicity (cf. Booker 2006: 105; Greene 1996: 8). Cultural texts dealing with interspecies war, whether the opponents are animals or extraterrestrials, do not primarily derive their attraction from the unlikely possibility of conflict between humans and rational animals. It is the animal as a trope for the Other, another human group, that generates much of the excitement of this ‘subgenre’ of science fiction. The original film is generally regarded as a comment on the Cold War with the apes as a signifier for Soviet Society. Its sequels, on the other hand, with their display of a strictly hierarchical society with apes on top and humans as slaves, address the question of race in American society. The ideological subtext of Burton’s 2001 remake “negotiates another example of how cultural differences first lead to a process of Othering, then to colonial exploitation and, finally, to a ‘post-colonial’ age of harmony” (Lindner 2012: 123). The Burton film hit the cinema screens in summer 2001. Although the production of the film and its release happened before the Twin Towers were destroyed by militant Islamists, the movie did offer some interesting aspects that could be related to the disaster of 9/11: a war between two species that has the characteristics of a culture clash, humanity under the American leadership of astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) fighting the fervently religious and racist group led by the ape army as well as the explosion of the American space station Oberon (Lindner 2012: 127). In his study 40 Jahre Planet der Affen, Peter Klimczak even claims that Burton’s film can be interpreted as a reverberation of terrorist attacks by Al Qaida between 1993 and 2000 (2009: 86). Not surprisingly, Rise of the Planets of the Apes can also be brought into relation with America’s war on terror, although, as will be shown, the film offers multiple ways of reading the apes’ ‘revolution’. The representation of the apes as a group as well as their strategy of bringing disorder to the city center of San Francisco in the final part of the film bears a number of allusions to 9/11, but al-

T HE R EMADE P REQUEL

| 29

so to the tactics of guerilla warfare adopted by militant Islamist groups. As Klimczak points out in his analysis of the 2001 remake, the presence of genetically altered apes who turn against their creators can be linked to the way the USA systematically equipped militant Islamist groups during the 1980s in Afghanistan (2009: 87). A similar situation arises in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Possibly the most striking feature concerning the actual conflict between the two groups in the film is their imbalance in terms of weaponry. While the San Francisco police is equipped with military technology, the apes only use their muscle power and even convert fence-pickets into spears, which can, for example, be linked to the notorious carpet knives used by the 9/11 suicide bombers. Furthermore, the rioting apes are shown as an all-male group and not as a population, underlining its status as an ‘army’ (although, as the audio commentary by the screenplay writers on the film’s DVD/Blu-ray package reveals, there are also female ape characters included, which, however, have no significant role and cannot be distinguished visually from the males). One of the most obvious allusions to 9/11 lies in the use of the Golden Gate Bridge as a venue for the battle between apes and the police. With this iconic construction and all its symbolic undertones, the film locates the battle in the very heart of American culture, which also presents a stark contrast to the original Conquest of the Planet of the Apes where the conflict is located in a non-specified American city. Another reference to 9/11 can be identified in a scene where a group of apes invades an office block. Filmed with the camera moving parallel to the running apes, this display of the destruction of the offices, themselves a symbol of the ordered mechanisms of capitalism and American dominance, evokes the intrusion of unexpected and uncontrollable alien forces. Of course, beyond the references to Al Qaida, the conflict between the apes and the Americans can, on a broader level, also be interpreted as a general clash between the West and formerly/newly colonized peoples.2 Arriving from Africa and Asia, the apes furthermore represent the most vulnerable, economically marginalized groups of urban America, its ‘dark and exotic’ underbelly. With reference to classic post-colonial theory, the apes can be regarded as signifiers of the ‘dark Other’, the antidote to the West and its modern, rational worldview. Here, binaries such as black/white, civilization/nature, modernity/tradition or constitutional/tribal come into play.

2

This topic has already been explored, for example, in James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar (the apes taking sanctuary in the famous redwoods near San Francisco find their equivalent in the famous tree of life of the Na’vi in Cameron’s spectacle).

30 | L INDNER

Furthermore, Rise of the Planet of the Apes tackles a topic on the cinema screen that has gained much prominence since the turn of the millennium: the alleged ‘decline of the West’. On the surface level of the film text, advanced American research endeavors finally bring about the demise of American civilization. Moreover, the global pandemic even leads to the danger of the extinction of humanity. Whereas the few apes escaping into the redwoods near San Francisco comprise a very minor threat to American civilization, the outbreak of a pandemic as a result of a lab accident is by far the more disturbing scenario. It also fundamentally supports the credibility of the plot since the rise of an ape civilization without other catastrophic factors bringing humanity to its knees is hardly credible and was already a somewhat problematic element in the original Apes films. The spread of a global pandemic as a result of lab experiments or other factors has become one of the set-pieces of last decade’s sci-fi cinema, featuring, for example in 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007), in Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2007), I am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) or Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011). In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the spread of global disease is displayed as part of the end credits. By having an airline pilot suffering from the virus and then showing patterns of global flight routes, the global nature of the disease is powerfully evoked in a reference to our globalized world and its innumerable networks. The film, one could also argue, powerfully corresponds to notions of the West’s decline in recent studies. In his bestseller Why the West Rules – For Now (2010), Ian Morris describes the seemingly contradictory relationship between the rise of a culture and the dangers that undermine its dominance. Morris claims that the more sophisticated and complex a culture becomes, the more it is exposed to threats both from within and from outside competitors (2010: 195). To conclude, Rise of the Planet of the Apes displays many characteristics that place it within the category of a remake, sharing its narrative structure with Conquest of the Planet of the Apes while updating the original’s thematic range to mirror the contemporary zeitgeist. However, as will be shown below, an investigation of the film’s status will demonstrate that the concept of the remake is hotly contested terrain, in which the ‘official’ voice of the Hollywood film studio, keen on stressing innovation, comprises an agent intent upon its demise as a category.

T HE R EMADE P REQUEL

T HE R EMAKE

THAT

D ARE

NOT

| 31

S PEAK ITS N AME

With the five original films between 1968 and 1973, a remake of the first Planet of the Apes in 2001 and a widely-known franchise of the Apes brand, the producers of any new film related to this complex heritage would surely be very cautious in marketing their product in such a way as to link it to this heritage while striving to convince the public of its fresh and innovative status. Small wonder then, that the term ‘remake’, with its problematic connotations, is highly contentious in 20th Century Fox’s enterprise aimed at breathing new life into the Apes franchise in the 21st century. In 2001, Tim Burton introduced his new version of Planet of the Apes as a ‘reimagining’, thereby rejecting the term ‘remake’, which has drawn criticism and ridicule from commentators, film critics and movie fans alike.3 Generally, the circumvention of terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘remake’ curbs audience expectations that the original source will be faithfully adhered to, as well as overriding the need for a direct comparison with a much-admired original. Moreover, the omission of these terms highlights the originality of the film as a creative art work in its own right and can be seen as a major marketing strategy. As will be shown below, this strategy is continued with Rise of the Planet of the Apes. By remaining within the classic title range, the film clearly signals its belonging to all previous products of the Apes saga. The trailer to Wyatt’s film, however, presents the story as entirely independent and new, focusing strongly on the innovative element of medical research that leads to the apes’ ‘revolution’. The only direct reference to the Apes saga is detectable in the logo of the film title, which also features on the official movie poster, announcing the film’s relationship to the original series. In Hollywood’s ‘official’ terminology, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is defined as a ‘prequel’ or an ‘origin story’. At first glance, this seems justified, since the story of the film itself works independently from the story of any previous film, or, in other words, it does not need to allude to the story of another film to become understandable to the viewer. A prequel can be generally defined as a film that contains a narrative which tells events that happened chronologically prior to those told in another, earlier film.4

3

For a more detailed discussion of Burton’s strategy of circumnavigating the term ‘re-

4

The popularity of prequels has surged in the wake of the famous trilogy of prequels of

make’ see Lindner 2012: 128-29. the Star Wars saga of which the final film was released in May 2005. In fact, the pro-

32 | L INDNER

Clearly attached to the label ‘prequel’ or ‘origin story’ is the quality of novelty. The spectator is lured into the cinema with the promise that the story of a successful film (surely a precondition for taking its theme up again in a prequel) is further explored by shedding light on events prior to that story. The year 2011 saw many so-called ‘origin stories’ in Hollywood cinema, among them The Green Hornet, Thor, X-Men: First Class or Captain America: The First Avenger. Thus, the ‘origin story’ of how the planet is conquered by apes fits into a general trend of film production that exploits the successful formula of ‘disclosing’ origins and which contemporary viewers are familiar with. If one treats the new film as a prequel, one of the most interesting questions about the release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is to exactly which earlier film the prequel actually refers. Clearly, one would expect that the prequel could be linked to the 2001 remake of the original Planet of the Apes, since Burton’s film is the chronologically youngest part of the Apes saga and since both films are based upon respectively the first and the fourth parts of the original saga. Interestingly, however, the audio commentaries of both screenplay writers as well as the director only refer to the original 1968 film. Actually, its remake of 2001 is never even mentioned. Why this neglect of the newer version? One could argue that by linking the new Planet of the Apes film to the original the prequel manages to profit from the iconic status of a cinematic masterpiece that is very much part of the American cultural imagination. However, taking into view the whole Apes saga there remains a glaring contradiction. By referring exclusively to the first part of the five original films, it is suggested by the producers that the prequel is an entirely new story that illuminates the thematic developments of an earlier original film: either the 1968 version or its remake of 2001. In doing so, however, the fact that the prequel itself can be seen, as shown above, as a remake of the fourth part of the original Apes saga, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, is ignored. Therefore, to be precise, the film should be regarded as a remade prequel or, in other words, a remake that serves as a prequel. If one refers to the 1968 film and its sequels, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a remake of the fourth part of the original saga, itself a prequel to the 1968 film. Similarly, if one links the film to Burton’s 2001 version, it can also be regarded as a remade prequel that explores events prior to the story of the 2001 remake. However, depending on whether the 1968 film or its 2001 remake is the viewer’s point of reference, the process of ‘interpretative doubling’ will bring about differing interpretations of the new film, for example concern-

duction of these three films has brought the concept and the term to general notice among cinema audiences.

T HE R EMADE P REQUEL

| 33

ing its narrative logic. Since the 2001 remake incorporated some important variations (humans are still capable of the faculty of speech, apes have conquered several planets etc.), the narrative linearity between the new film and the respective previous film will also influence the spectator’s evaluation of Wyatt’s film as a successful or flawed contribution to the Apes saga. As Michel Foucault pointed out in his classic analysis of the role of the author, consumers of cultural texts, in their search for meaning, employ generallyaccepted rules of authorship that influence their interpretation. Whereas Foucault speaks of these models of authorship rather as “projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts” (Foucault 1977: 127), the authors of Rise of the Planet of the Apes do indeed act as a direct guide on how to understand the film. As part of the Blu-ray edition of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the audio commentaries of the screenwriter and the director offer insights into where the producers place their film within the Apes franchise. To the viewer, these comments direct not only channels of interpretation, but they also seem to provide a direct and non-mediated opportunity to reconstruct the creative process inherent in the film’s production. Interestingly, neither the screenwriters nor director even mention Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, despite its close resemblance to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Again, it is the iconic first part of the original series which serves as the only reference point for the latest Ape adventure. In an interview, Wyatt insisted on the novelty of his film: “It’s not a continuation of the other films; it’s an original story. […] It’s a total reimagining with regards to certain characters, certain story points and the facts of the original films.” (Wyatt qtd. in planetoftheapes.wikia.com) Here, Wyatt echoes Burton’s denial of his 2001 film being a remake and his preference for the term ‘re-imagining’. Indeed, Rise of the Planet of the Apes presents an illuminating example of the way the concept of a ‘remake’ is today treated in Hollywood cinema. Although, as shown above, the story is very similar to Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, any relationship with this part of the series is denied, so that, seemingly, the new 2011 film can be directly linked only to the famous first film of the Apes saga without being associated with its far less successful sequels. Therefore, its importance is increased: it is a film that, in the true fashion of a prequel, aims to shed light on the developments leading to a world dominated by apes, so powerfully evoked in Schaffer’s 1968 film. In order to emphasize this connection, there are several explicit links to the original film from 1968, a common strategy for Hollywood films marketed as either sequels or prequels (Biguenet 1998: 137) and an attempt to appeal to the fans of the Apes franchise. The remark “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape”, the words spo-

34 | L INDNER

ken by Taylor in the 1968 film, are also uttered in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a reference that all sequels and the 2001 remake have taken up, too. In one scene Cesar is playing with a plastic Statue of Liberty, an allusion to the ending in the 1968 film when the astronaut Taylor happens upon the half sunken Statue of Liberty and finally realizes that he has returned to Earth. Moreover, a TV news report announces the takeoff of a spaceship called ‘Icarus’, a direct reference to the spaceship from the original film.5 Whereas the remake of 2001 was able to stake its relation to the 1968 film with a cameo appearance by Charlton Heston, the lead actor in the original, and thus claim legitimacy as a worthy member of the Apes saga, Rise of the Planet of the Apes includes a scene which shows a TV film starring Heston (the actor died in 2008). In stark contrast, any playful references to later apes films, specifically the remake from 2001, are far less prominent or even non-existent. Thus, the film’s status as a prequel is strengthened, whereas the fact that it retells the plot of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is ignored. One critic has slated this strategy of insisting on novelty by remarking acidly that the film studio “expect(s) us to know nothing at all except the ‘Planet Of The Apes’ brand name” (Kimmel 2011: n. pag.). As probably the most popular source of information on the Internet, Wikipedia acknowledges the film’s link to Conquest of the Planet of the Apes but also states that it is not a “direct remake”, since the new film does not fit into the sequentiality of the original series (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”). This leaves us with the somewhat troublesome notion of an ‘indirect’ remake. The question is how the audience responds to this ambiguity. Does it rather connect Rise of the Planet of the Apes with the 1968 film, the 1972 original, the 2001 remake of the 1968 film or with all of them? And what about the process of ‘interpretative doubling’ that Hutcheon has described? Can we speak about an ‘interpretative trebling’ or even quadrupling? Since it is not possible to access the thinking of the large majority of cinema audiences, the adaptation scholar has to rely on film critics and online fan platforms to discern general trends of film reception, although this will only present a fragmentary and distorted picture. It usually only discovers the opinions of those who care enough about the film and its somewhat confusing relations to the previous films of the Apes saga.6

5

Many more allusions to the 1968 film are mentioned in the audio commentary by screenplay writers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, part of the 2012 Blu-ray edition.

6

Moreover, we have to be aware of the fact that the scholarly approach to remakes entails a devotion to the films that the majority of viewers, with their non-specialist responses to films, will not share.

T HE R EMADE P REQUEL

| 35

A survey of film reviews from 2011 reveals that most film critics have used the terminology of the film studio and called the film a ‘prequel’, connecting it to the famous Planet of the Apes of 1968, whereas neither Boulle’s novel as the original source text nor Conquest of the Planet of the Apes are mentioned. A typical example of how the relationship between the new film and the Apes saga is characterized in film reviews is provided by Todd McCarthy, who claims that “Fox has wisely steered clear of attempting another remake of the original, which was bungled so badly by Tim Burton a decade back, settling instead on a contemporary scientific yarn that serves as a plausible prequel to all the other films” (2011: n. pag.). Of course, stressing the status of the new film as a prequel and claiming that it serves to give a credible story of what leads to the events depicted in the 1968 film ties in very well with the producers’ and the film studio’s intention of presenting a ‘new’ product. McCarthy even goes a step further, declaring that the new film serves as a prequel to “all the other films” and thus enriches the whole Apes saga. This position is echoed in another review, which asserts that “if you ever wondered how apes managed to take over in the ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies, ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ provides your answer” (Goodykoontz 2011: n. pag.). The reluctance to link the new film with the concept of a ‘remake’ is illustrated in Peter Howell’s review: “Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes is both a reboot of the franchise and the origin story that the 1968 progenitor lacked (although 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes provided one, as well as an ape rebel named Caesar).” (2011: n. pag.) As in McCarthy’s review, Howell also uses the term ‘prequel’ and refers to the 1968 film. At the same time, however, the reviewer mentions the parallels between Wyatt’s film and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and also refers to it as a previous prequel. Obviously, Howell’s review strives to reconcile two contradictory aspects. It aims to acknowledge the novelty and innovation of the new film while it also concedes that something very similar has been there already. Other critics pursue the same policy, conceding that the new film “shares the shape of Conquest of the Planet the Apes, the franchise’s most militant episode” (Hall 2011: n. pag.), or comprises a “reworking (of) the primate-rebellion storyline of the original film series’ concluding entry” (Barsanti 2011: n. pag.), or they regard the film as “kinda, sorta a remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” (DeKinder 2011: n. pag.). Several critics have opted for the concept of a ‘reboot’ to describe the relationship between the two films (cf. Shirey 2011: n. pag.). Arguably, in terms of cinematic terminology, the term ‘reboot’, understood in this context as a new film which is loosely based on an earlier film and expands the earlier film’s nar-

36 | L INDNER

rative universe (cf. Urbanski, 2013: 8), is not on the same level with the remake, which has more or less strictly defined characteristics. What also becomes apparent is that Burton’s film from 2001 is universally called a remake in the reviews that have mentioned it. The really interesting question is, of course, why is Burton’s film called a remake but not Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes? One could argue that the similarities between Conquest and Rise are even greater than those between Schaffner’s film and Burton’s 2001 version. One explanation could be that, by explicitly defining the new film as ‘prequel’ and ‘origin story’, the film studio has spread concepts that comprise the very opposite of what is commonly understood as a remake. Another factor that could have influenced the critics is that Wyatt’s film, in contrast to Burton’s remake, comes up with a slightly different title, substituting ‘conquest’ for the less martial and more sympathetic ‘rise’ (the justified rebellion of suppressed groups). However, in contrast to ‘official’ evaluations in online newspapers or film magazines, fan websites and private commentaries are, on the whole, more prone to apply the term ‘remake’ to Wyatt’s film (cf. Haine 2011; Weinhold 2011). For a cultural studies scholar, the way in which movie fans question the prescriptive policy of Hollywood film studios, can be regarded as an example of the workings of popular culture. Popular culture, from this perspective, is not simply imposed from above, but is created through complex processes of negotiation that can also wrest the power of interpretation from the dominant forces in the culture industries (Storey 2009: 234). Despite Hollywood’s all-too-blunt tactics in marketing novelty, there is no boundary to the layers of the viewer’s very own process of ‘interpretative doubling’ involved in the consumption of films that are related to each other. Thus, in debates about the status of Wyatt’s film, the concepts of ‘prequel’, ‘origin story’, ‘remake’, and ‘reboot’ exist simultaneously, a testimony to the multiple perception of cultural texts in processes of prescription, description, and interpretation.

C ONCLUSION The article has tried to shed light on two aspects of Rise of the Planet of the Apes: its status as a remake of an earlier film and the way that this status is treated by both producers and viewers. As shown, in its use of most of the basic storyline of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Wyatt’s film can clearly be regarded as a remake that updates the plot, the setting and the thematic range to match the zeitgeist of the early 21st century. Since Rise of the Planet of the Apes

T HE R EMADE P REQUEL

| 37

offers the viewer a range of possibilities of how to relate the film to his or her own cultural environment, the probability of its commercial success as a remake is enhanced. Humanity’s cruel treatment of animals, the tale of a conflict between generations, the fall of the West because of external or internal factors, the ethics of medical research, the problem of Alzheimer’s – all these readings comprise hooks for the viewer to link the film to his or her own experience, convictions, knowledge of politics or history and general ideological affiliations. With its thematic novelties of genetically altered apes (only touched upon in the 2001 remake) and, even more prominently, a global pandemic, the film adds new components to the thematic range of the Apes saga. Investigating the concept of the remake, the film presents an interesting example of Hollywood’s strategy of claiming novelty and innovation. Whereas the official websites, marketing campaigns, product merchandise and the overwhelming number of film critics emphasize its status as a prequel, it is in the fan websites and private commentaries that the remake is acknowledged and compared to the original fourth film of the Apes series. Apart from showing cinema’s hunger for novelty, this treatment serves as an example of how a classic Hollywood film studio re-writes its own traditions, highlighting its iconic films that have found a place in the cultural imaginary while discarding less successful sequels. It also shows the negative connotations generally attached to the label of a ‘remake’ and the persistence of notions of originality in audience reception that have long been questioned in the field of Adaptation Studies. The case of Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its relationship to the Apes saga raises a number of questions. Most importantly perhaps the question of who has or who should have the authority to label cultural texts? Is a remake only a remake if the film studio announces it as such? How useful is the ‘remake’ as a conceptual category if it is avoided by the producers of cultural texts? How exactly can the relationship as well as the boundaries between a ‘remake’ and a ‘reboot’ be described? Does the way Hollywood prescribes associations of the film with other films influence the spectator’s process of ‘interpretative doubling’? Will the viewer discard his or her knowledge of an earlier version of that film and instead treat the new film as a ‘prequel’ that claims to tell something entirely new? Finally, the sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes hit the cinemas in summer 2014. The film offers further points of exploration concerning its relationship to Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the original series, as well as new ways of ‘interpretative doubling’. The story of the ape rebellion continues, and with this, a new chapter in the complex and fascinating debate on the form, content, and marketing of remakes.

38 | L INDNER

W ORKS C ITED Barsanti, Chris (2011): “Film Review. Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, , 4 Aug. 2011, accessed on 28 Aug. 2012. Biguenet, John (1998): “Double Takes. The Role of Allusion in Cinema”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 131-146. Booker, M. Keith (2006): Alternate Americas. Science Fiction Film and American Culture, Westport/London: Praeger. Brashinsky, Michael (1998): “The Spring, Defiled. Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 162-171. CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972) (USA, R: J. Lee Thompson). DeKinder, Mathew (2011): “Rise of the Planet of the Apes Mostly Monkeyshines”, , 5 Aug. 2011, accessed on 27 Aug. 2012. Eberwein, Robert (1998): “Remakes and Cultural Studies”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 15-33. Foucault, Michel (1977): “What is an Author?”, in: Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 124-127. Goodykoontz, Bill (2011): “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, , 3 Aug. 2011, accessed on 25 Aug. 2012. Greene, Eric (1996): Planet of the Apes as American Myth. Race and Politics in the Films and Television Series, Jefferson/London: McFarland. Haine, Paul (2011): “Review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, , 18 Sept. 2011, accessed on 27 Aug. 2012. Hall, Corey (2011): “Gorillas in the Cyst”, , 3 Aug. 2011, accessed on 28 Aug. 2012. Horton, Andrew/McDougal, Stuart Y. (eds.) (1998a): Play It Again, Sam. Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley: University of California Press. — (1998b): “Introduction”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 1-11. Howell, Peter (2011): “Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Monkey Shines”, , 4 Aug. 2011, accessed on 25 Aug. 2012. Hutcheon, Linda (2006): A Theory of Adaptation, London/New York: Routledge. Kimmel, Daniel M. (2011): “Review – Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, , 5 Aug. 2011, accessed on 28 Aug. 2012.

T HE R EMADE P REQUEL

| 39

Klimczak, Peter (2009): 40 Jahre ‘Planet der Affen’. Reihen- und Zeitgeistkompatibilität – über Erfolg und Misserfolg von Adaptionen, Stuttgart: ibidemVerlag. Lindner, Oliver (2012): “‘An Entirely Different and New Story’. A Case Study of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001)”, in: Pascal Nicklas/Oliver Lindner (eds.), Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation. Literature, Film, and the Arts, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 117-131. McCarthy, Todd (2011): “Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Film Review”, , 3 Aug. 2011, accessed on 26 Aug. 2012. McMahan, Alison (2005): The Films of Tim Burton. Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood, New York: Continuum. Morris, Ian (2010): Why the West Rules – For Now, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Pendreigh, Brian (2001): Planet of the Apes. Or How Hollywood Turned Darwin Upside Down, London: Boxtree. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) (USA, R: Franklin J. Schaffner). PLANET OF THE APES (2001) (USA, R: Tim Burton). planetoftheapes.wikia.com (n.d.): “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, accessed on 28 Aug. 2012. RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011) (USA, R: Rupert Wyatt). “Rise of the Planet of the Apes 2011 Official Movie Trailer”, , accessed on 20 Aug. 2012. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (n.d.): , accessed on 29 Aug. 2012. Shirey, Eric (2011): “How Conquest of the Planet of the Apes Differs from Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, , 13 Nov. 2011, accessed on 27 Aug. 2012. Storey, John (2009): Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Urbanski, Heather (2013): The Science Fiction Reboot. Canon, Innovation and Fandom in Refashioned Franchises, Jefferson/London: McFarland. Weinhold, Matt (2011): “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, , accessed on 27 Aug. 2012. Winogura, Dale (1972): “Dialogues on Apes, Apes, and more Apes”, in: Cinefantastique 2, 17-37.

Exit Gender, Enter Race Jonathan Demme’s “Update” of The Manchurian Candidate M ICHAEL B UTTER

T HE R EMAKE

AS

U PDATE

In one of the earliest scholarly engagements with remakes, Thomas M. Leitch (1990) distinguishes between four types of film remakes: the “homage” is primarily meant to honor the original film; the, as Leitch somewhat confusingly calls it, “true remake” tries to surpass and thus effectively erase the need for the original; the “readaptation” is less concerned with an already existing film version of the story and primarily refers back to an earlier literary source, most often a novel or a play; and the “update” adjusts the story as presented in the original film or an earlier literary source to make it relevant for a changed social and cultural context. Unsurprisingly, this typology has drawn a lot of criticism (Oltmann 2008: 85). It mistakenly suggests that in most, if not in all cases, there is a literary source on which the original film is based, it conflates notions of intramedial and inter-medial remaking, and it does not acknowledge that there are films that should be placed in more than one category, as paying homage to a classic pretext surely does not exclude the possibility of updating its storyline and character constellation. My purpose here, however, is not to critique either Leitch’s typology or the often not more convincing ones developed by later scholars (many of which the introduction to this volume addresses). Far more narrowly, and modestly, this paper discusses the relationship between John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate and Jonathan Demme’s

42 | B UTTER

remake of the same title from 2004 – and for this purpose Leitch’s notion of the update will prove helpful.1 Interestingly, though, in the remake’s making-of documentary “The Enemy Within: Inside The Manchurian Candidate” (2004), which is included among the

1

For readers unfamiliar with Frankenheimer’s film a short plot summary is in order: The film revolves around two American soldiers, Sgt. Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey) and Major Marco (Frank Sinatra) who are abducted together with their platoon by enemy forces during the Korean War and transported to Manchuria, where a team of Russian and Chinese scientists brainwashes them. Shaw is turned into a sleeper agent who can be activated by way of playing cards and code words and will then execute every order (and forget what he has done afterwards). After three days they are returned to Korea and set free but they now all believe that they were openly attacked by enemies and only survived because of the heroic conduct of Shaw who because of Marco’s report is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor after their return to the United States. There, Marco is haunted by nightmares in which he glimpses bits and pieces of what really happened but which he cannot make sense of until he learns that another member of the platoon, Al Melvin has the same nightmares. Meanwhile, Shaw’s overbearing mother, Eleanor Iselin, tries to promote the political career of her husband, Johnny, a U.S. Senator, by exploiting her son’s fame. What is more, halfway through the film the audience finds out that she is Shaw’s American operator and the mastermind behind the conspiracy that began in Manchuria. The conspirators’ aim is to win the nomination for the vice presidency for Iselin and to then have his running mate assassinated in order to secure the nomination and then the presidency for Iselin, who is as much under the control of his wife as Shaw is. As this plot slowly unfolds, Marco is on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but he recovers when he meets a mysterious woman on a train, Rosie, who takes a fancy to him and nurtures him. Moreover, when he and Melvin independently identify the communist scientists who brainwashed them from photographs, the FBI finally believes Marco that the patrol was never attacked and begins to covertly investigate Shaw. At about the same time, Shaw’s fate seems to take a turn for the better when he re-connects with and secretly marries his girlfriend Jocie, whose father is one of Iselin’s most fervent opponents. Eleanor Shaw, however, manages to reestablish control over her son and has him kill Jocie and her father. Shortly before the convention where Shaw is supposed to kill the presidential candidate, though, Marco and his team of FBI agents accidentally manage to break Shaw’s conditioning. Acting on his own, Shaw shoots Iselin, his mother, and then himself at the convention. The film ends with a tearstained Marco, comforted by Rosie, praising Shaw’s heroism.

E XIT G ENDER , E NTER R ACE: T HE M ANCHURIAN C ANDIDATE

| 43

special features on the DVD, screenwriter Daniel Pyne initially casts the remake as a re-adaptation: “We tried to surprise people, as the film unfolded. We tried to do what Condon does in his original novel, which is to utilize many different genres. He’s writing a thriller. He’s writing a comedy. He’s writing a political satire. He’s writing a social satire. And he’s writing a Greek tragedy, all at the same time.”

However, preserving this generic hybridity does not really distinguish the 2004 film from the 1962 version, since Frankenheimer’s film already is, as Matt Bell puts it, “a war film, a coming-home film, a satire of American politics, an oedipal melodrama, a ‘problem film’ centered on a social misfit, a detective film, a romantic comedy, an espionage thriller, and a revenge tragedy” (2006: 88). Thus, rather than adequately describing the difference between two adaptations, Pyne’s comment unveils that the two versions have a lot in common. Unsurprisingly, therefore, throughout the rest of the ‘making of’, both he and Demme consistently position their film primarily vis-à-vis Frankenheimer’s film, with Condon’s novel invariably entering their thoughts in second place. For example, according to Demme, “[a]nother big challenge that [they] were faced with was somehow justifying the title Manchurian Candidate. In the first movie, and in the book, it refers to Manchuria as a hotbed of communism.” Pyne then explains that “Eleanor Shaw was the big point of departure for me from where this new movie really separated itself from the original movie and from Condon’s novel.” And a little later he admits that “It was incredibly challenging to come up with a new way of killing Senator Jordan and his daughter. I didn’t wanna go anywhere near the old movie. It was one of the places where I really thought about what had been done in the old movie and how beautifully done it was.” (“The Enemy Within” 2004) He leaves out that Frankenheimer’s film closely follows Condon’s novel in its staging of the killings, unwittingly bringing to the fore that the film is not primarily a re-adaptation but a remake, as its major point of reference is not the novel, but Frankenheimer’s film. This, of course, is not surprising since The Manchurian Candidate is usually considered – unjustly, as I have argued elsewhere2 – “one of those cases where the film seems to eliminate the need for the text from which it comes” (Jackson

2

See Butter 2014: 264-82 for a reading of Condon’s novel and Frankenheimer’s film that suggests “that both texts are equally complex and function in a very similar way” and that “if any of the two texts deserves to be labeled more critical than affirmative, it is the novel and not the film” (2014: 264).

44 | B UTTER

2000: 40). Therefore I am exclusively concerned here with the relationship between the films. I read Demme’s version as an update of Frankenheimer’s film that retains its basic plot structure and character constellation but that also adjusts them to fit its 21st-century context: The story is no longer set in the Cold War but in the post-9/11 present, with the patrol having been abducted during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Behind the abduction are no longer the Communists, but Manchurian Global, an Enron-like American-based company that, since “business can always be better”, as one member of the board puts it, wants to place its own president in the White House. Diverging from Frankenheimer’s film, their candidate for this position is no longer Senator Iselin, who is completely eliminated from the plot, but Raymond Shaw himself, whom his military fame as savior of the patrol has catapulted into Congress already. As in the earlier version, though, Shaw (Liev Schreiber) has a complicated relationship with his mother, Eleanor Iselin (Meryl Streep), who, reflecting the updated social and political environment, serves as a Republican senator herself and secures the vice presidential nomination for her son early on. Thus, whereas the original film ends with the convention, the remake begins with it. As in the original, though, the plot mostly revolves around Major Marco (Denzel Washington) and his attempts to find out what really happened during the war and what the conspirators are up to. Unlike in the original, it is Marco who eventually pulls the trigger to foil the plot. Programed by the conspirators to shoot Shaw’s running mate during the celebrations on election night in order to secure the presidency for Shaw, Marco shoots Shaw and his mother – a deed then covered up by the FBI. Instead of Communism, then, Demme’s film focuses on the War on Terror and on transnational capitalism. Moreover, the new film intensifies the original’s media critique. Whereas Frankenheimer’s film blamed television for the rise of the McCarthyian Johnny Iselin, Demme’s version, by way of the omnipresence of commercials, billboards, and sensationalist news coverage, suggests that the American people are blatantly manipulated by those who control the media. Finally, the film also updates the original’s anxiety about brainwashing. Whereas in Frankenheimer’s film the Communist conspirators rely on Freudian psychoanalysis, hypnosis, and stimulus-response conditioning to turn the American soldiers into sleepers, in Demme’s film, Manchurian Global’s scientists, evoking contemporary anxieties about bio-engineering, use computer animations, psychotropic drugs, and high-tech chips implanted into the victims’ bodies. In the final analysis, though, both the original and the remake thus work to re-affirm traditional notions of self and agency. As Timothy Melley has convincingly demonstrated, during the 1950s American social scientists as well as the public became quite preoccupied with brainwashing because it allowed for the

E XIT G ENDER , E NTER R ACE: T HE M ANCHURIAN C ANDIDATE

| 45

recasting of systemic social conditioning as intentional manipulation and thus worked to preserve the notion of an autonomous, albeit threatened, self: “the theory of brainwashing studiously avoids structuralism; it preserves the intentionality at the heart of individualism by understanding social control as the work of an exceptionally powerful, willful, rational, and malevolent human agent – the brainwasher” (2008: 149). Exactly the same is true for Demme’s remake. Here, too, manipulation is not the result of systemic effects, but of meticulous planning and execution. Both films thus not only raise the specter of “otherdirectedness”, as 1950s discourse called it (Riesman 1950), but also carry the promise that this external control can be broken and inner-directed agency can be restored. While the films’ media critique and theories of identity and agency would deserve closer attention, I want to focus here on two closely related differences that create a certain ideological tension between the two films. Whereas Frankenheimer’s film casts the conspiracy largely as an external threat, Demme’s film, reflecting the development of conspiracist fears over the second half of the twentieth century, revolves around an internal enemy. Moreover, the original film forges a close link between the conspiracy and women’s manipulation of men more generally, thus echoing a major concern of the 1950s and early 1960s American culture. The few critics who have engaged with Demme’s film have argued that the remake does exactly the same. I will argue, however, that the remake can be read to evoke the link between conspiracy and femininity, but that it does so only to then dismiss it. More specifically, and here the differences between the two films I focus on converge, Demme’s film suggests that the image of the threatening female Islamist terrorist is a smokescreen intentionally set up by the true conspirators, the white American males who control Manchurian Global, in order to detract attention from their plotting. Moreover, while the original film genders the threat of conspiracy by casting brainwashing as a feminine technique employed to manipulate American men, the remake racializes the scheme: its updated version of brainwashing and bioengineering is performed by white scientists on predominantly black soldiers.

F OREIGN C ONSPIRATORS AND D ANGEROUS W OMEN IN F RANKENHEIMER ’ S O RIGINAL As Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González pointedly put it in What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America, John Frankenheimer’s film is “both comment on and expression of common Ameri-

46 | B UTTER

can ideas and ideologies at the height of the Cold War” (2006: x).3 On the one hand, the film satirizes some of the anxieties that preoccupied American culture during the 1950s because it is already temporally and ideologically removed from that decade; on the other, the film is still very much shaped by other discourses of that decade and thus voices anxieties associated with the 1950s in much the same fashion as countless other texts produced during that decade. Thus, the film no longer shares the 1950s concern with a conspiracy against the federal government and society conducted by large numbers of ‘real’ Americans who have been infected by the virus of Communism. At the same time, however, the film reinforces the link 1950s culture had forged between the Communist threat and a host of unrelated social concerns such as anxieties about the emasculation of the American male and the destructive influence of overbearing, manipulative women on their partners, husbands, and sons, and thus on the nation as a whole. During the Great Red Scare of the early to mid-1950s, many Americans – and by no means only the right-wing fringe around Senator Joseph McCarthy – worried about a vast conspiracy against the American government and the educational sector that was allegedly orchestrated in Moscow but carried out by ‘real’ Americans who had secretly become members of the American Communist Party.4 These fears were voiced in a broad variety of texts – from the Chamber of Commerce’s report on Communists within the Government (1947) via Joseph McCarthy’s infamous Wheeling speech (1950) and Ernst and Loth’s Report on the American Communist (1952) to J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit (1958), and from the novels of Mickey Spillane to films such as Big Jim McLain (1952) or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). They led to a number of legal measures such as the McCarran International Security Act of September 1950 or the Communist Control Act of 1954, which made “membership in [the Communist party] clearly a crime” (Heale 1990: 182), and which provided anti-

3

Apart from Jacobson and González’s book-length study, Frankenheimer’s film has generated a number of excellent shorter interpretations that have considerably shaped my thinking about the film. Apart from those I quote, cf. Carruthers (1998) and Gardner (1994).

4

I use the term ‘Great Red Scare’ and not the far more popular one ‘McCarthyism’ because the climate of fear and suspicion that appears to us today inextricably linked to McCarthy existed before he entered the scene in 1950, and it endured after his censure by the Senate in 1954. McCarthy is thus best considered the product of a cultural and political climate that he fuelled further (Schrecker 1998: xii).

E XIT G ENDER , E NTER R ACE: T HE M ANCHURIAN C ANDIDATE

| 47

Communists with the necessary instruments to conduct veritable witch-hunts for alleged Communists. At first sight, Frankenheimer’s film seems to articulate similar fears, because it revolves around a conspiracy whose goal it is to place a puppet in the White House. Yet, unlike in most 1950s conspiracist texts, in The Manchurian Candidate this is almost entirely a foreign plot, masterminded by Russian and Chinese conspirators. The only American consciously involved in the scheme is Mrs. Iselin who controls the unsuspecting dupe Johnny Iselin and her son Raymond whom Russians and Chinese have – against his will and without his knowledge – turned into a sleeper. Thus, the 1950s fear that large numbers of ‘native’ Americans might work for the enemy is implicitly dismissed in the film. Moreover, through the figure of Senator Iselin, the film critiques and satirizes Joseph McCarthy. Like McCarthy, Iselin is, at least in public, a loudmouthed bully who drinks too much, confuses numbers all the time, craves and exploits media attention, and does everything to promote his career – and who unwittingly supports the Communist conspiracy he has set out to fight. In fact, by poking fun at McCarthy via Iselin, the film suggests that right-wing alarmists are as big a danger to American democracy as Soviet communism is. From this vantage point, then, Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate truly appears as the “Kennedy administration film” as which Michael Rogin has famously classified it (1987: 253). With its focus on conspirators located outside the country and its release coinciding with the Cuban Missile Crisis (Jacobson/González 2006: 171), it confirmed the worldview – Communism as a real but largely external danger – that Kennedy shared. However, while the film criticizes and modifies the established conspiracy narrative of the 1950s, it nevertheless reinforces the link that American culture forged between the Communist threat and a host of unrelated social concerns. As many studies have shown, during the 1950s, many Americans were concerned about what they perceived as the “moral decline” of America (Cuordileone 2005: 66). For them, the steadily rising divorce rate, the apparently drastic spread of homosexuality, and the increasing presence of women outside the domestic sphere were ultimately rooted in the emasculation of the American man. Intellectuals and sociologists like William Whyte or David Riesman suggested that men were increasingly no longer ‘real’ men, but de-individualized organization men, no longer autonomous decision-makers, but other-directed, weak, and effeminate. Unsurprisingly, women were blamed for what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously called “The Crisis of American Masculinity” in a 1958 Esquire essay. Many Americans became obsessed with what Philip Wylie had labeled “momism” during the 1940s already, with the allegedly fatal influence of literal

48 | B UTTER

and figurative mothers, controlling, manipulative, self-absorbed “moms” on males. They feared that overbearing mothers made men unfit for normal relationships, robbed them of their autonomy, and could even turn them into homosexuals or communists, or both, as the pink and the red scare were inextricably connected in the eyes of many. As Elaine Tyler May puts it, “moral weakness was associated with sexual degeneracy, which allegedly led to communism” (1988: 86). This “marriage of perversion and subversion”, as Jacobson and González call it in an apt metaphor (2006: 142), permeates countless cultural texts of the period – the writings of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover just as much as Hollywood films like Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Them! (1954), or virtually all Hitchcock movies of the time such as North by Northwest (1959), whose famous train scene Frankenheimer quotes in one of the key scenes of The Manchurian Candidate. In North by Northwest, Carry Grant’s Roger Thornhill only gets into trouble because he is too close to his mother. On the run from both the Communist conspirators and the FBI, he initially becomes the helpless toy of Eve, who, it seems, is part of the conspiracy, before it turns out that she is a spy for the FBI. Later, however, Eve becomes an important catalyst for Thornhill’s remasculinization, and by the end of the film she has been thoroughly domesticated (indicated by the white nightgown she wears in the final scene) and the ‘proper’ gender hierarchy has been restored. The Manchurian Candidate forges an even stronger connection between the Communist conspiracy and “momism”; in fact, it conflates these two dimensions entirely. This begins with the famous brainwashing scene during which the American soldiers are made to believe that they are witnessing a ladies’ garden club meeting in an American hotel. Throughout the scene, the two settings – the Chinese lecture hall and the American hotel – merge completely. At times, the Chinese Yen Lo lectures about brainwashing, at others about flowers; in some shots he addresses the Communist conspirators, in others the garden club. The same goes, in reversed fashion, for the president of the club. Thus, the film casts brainwashing as a feminine technique, and Yen Lo, representative of an ethnicity habitually feminized in Western culture, only does in more extreme form what all women in the film do. Shaw’s mother enjoys complete control over Iselin, and she orchestrates and supervises all of his public performances. In one shot through which the film casts TV as a feminized tool of control, she is shown checking Iselin’s TV image, creating the impression that he is merely an actor in a show she is directing. And Shaw, the film suggests, is the perfect candidate for the Manchurian conspiracy because he has been brainwashed by his mother his whole life. Indeed, whereas anti-Communists feared that mothers might spoil

E XIT G ENDER , E NTER R ACE: T HE M ANCHURIAN C ANDIDATE

| 49

and pervert their sons and thus anchor a propensity for the subversive ideology of Communism in them, The Manchurian Candidate turns the mother herself into a Communist agent. Beneath Mrs. Iselin’s respectable and matronly outward appearance lurks a Communist pervert who betrays her son and her country. However, Mrs. Iselin is not the only female brainwasher in the film. Jocie, Raymond’s love interest, is a highly ambivalent figure who – in a fashion that echoes the brainwashing scene – talks Major Marco into postponing his attempt to de-brainwash Shaw for a couple of days so that she and Shaw can enjoy their honeymoon, and thus unwittingly contributes to the tragic turn of events. And Rosie, Marco’s love interest, is even more explicitly cast as a manipulator when she meets Marco, at this moment clearly “the embodiment of masculinity in crisis” (Jacobson/González 2006: 162), on the train to New York City. Her playfully casting herself as Chinese aligns her with the conspiracy in a metaphorical sense early on, thus misleading a critic like Roger Ebert, who wrote: “My notion is that Sinatra’s character [Major Marco] is a Manchurian killer, too – one allowed to remember details of [Shaw’s] brainwashing because that would make him more credible. And Leigh? She’s Sinatra’s controller.” (Qtd. in Jacobson/González 2006: 151) This is of course not literally true, but the hypnotizing way in which she has Marco memorize her telephone number – an act that recalls how Eve in North by Northwest makes Thornhill remember her compartment number – establishes her as yet another brainwasher, and the rest of the film confirms this impression. Marco remains weak and under her control until the end; he is much weaker indeed than Shaw whose control mechanism he only accidentally breaks. Unlike in the novel, where Marco is the stronger of the two and decides to re-program Shaw, in the film it is Shaw who decides what needs to be done, and he kills Iselin, his mother, and himself. Marco, as always, arrives too late to prevent this, and the final shot of the film shows him, in the presence of Rosie, praising Shaw’s heroism and then starting to cry. The remasculinization that North by Northwest has its protagonist undergo by restoring his agency does not occur here. Frankenheimer’s version of The Manchurian Candidate, then, assumes an ambivalent stance toward 1950s discourses: it dismisses the fear of a huge, internal conspiracy, but affirms anxieties about the harmful influence of overbearing women. Thus, it genders the conspiracy it projects.

50 | B UTTER

D OMESTIC C ONSPIRATORS AND S TEREOTYPES S MOKESCREENS IN D EMME ’ S R EMAKE

AS

According to the few critics who have written about Jonathan Demme’s remake, the same goes for the new film. In fact, they insist that the link between femininity and conspiracy is even stronger in the remake. Antje Dallmann, for example, writes: “The latest version portrays a further escalation in this crisis [of masculinity]: While men are grouped together as uncannily manipulated victims, women are portrayed as independent and manipulative.” (2007: 108f.) In much the same fashion, Mark Wildermuth suggests: “Although the misogynistic trope’s vigor is evident in the first film, its renewal and intensity are equally clear in the second.” (2007: 121) These claims, however, are debatable, to say the least. For example, the meeting on the train between Marco and Rosie plays out very differently in Demme’s version. While Marco is even more devastated in the new film than in the 1962 version, Rosie appears far less and not more enigmatic than in the original. As a result, their encounter is not nearly as disturbing as in Frankenheimer’s film. When she tells Marco her phone number, there is nothing hypnotizing about it – and he does not need to remember it anyway because, unlike in the original, she takes him home with her right away, because he is quite obviously incapable of finding a hotel for himself. She comes across as friendly, concerned, slightly flirtatious, and insecure, not nearly as self-assured as Janet Leigh’s Rosie in the old version. This impression is confirmed throughout the film, and it is not even challenged by the fact that Rosie later turns out to be an FBI agent shadowing Marco and trying to verify the veracity of his claims. She may lie to him initially, but several scenes show that she genuinely cares for him, and apart from taking him in she never makes him do anything, but rather supports his actions, and eventually initiates the cover up after Marco has shot Shaw and his mother. Rosie thus clearly is no manipulator, and even her story that they have met before is true.5

5

Rosie’s first words to Marco are “Paper or plastic?” in order to remind him that she knows him from “the grocery store.” And in fact, an earlier scene shows her asking exactly this question when Marco is paying at the check-out. However, since her face is never shown during the short exchange the casual viewer is unlikely to recognize her. Moreover, it is completely unclear what she is doing there. Marco has not yet started his own investigation at this point in time, thus there is no reason why the FBI should watch him already. While these questions might motivate some viewers to come up with an alternative, ‘paranoid’ interpretation of the film that presupposes that

E XIT G ENDER , E NTER R ACE: T HE M ANCHURIAN C ANDIDATE

| 51

Accordingly, Dallmann’s claim that “Mother is no exceptional figure” is not convincing (2007: 108). Whereas Frankenheimer’s version clearly aligns its Rosie with Shaw’s mother, casting both as controllers, albeit of different kinds, Demme’s film contrasts the two. In addition, Jocie is of no importance in the remake, does not marry Shaw and only appears in two or three short scenes. What is more, Shaw’s mother clearly is both a conspirator and a manipulator, but she enjoys considerably less power over her son than in the old version. Shaw comes across as a fairly normal and indeed likeable human being whom his mother can only get to do what she wants by activating his control mechanism by means of a verbal code. I also disagree with Wildermuth’s claim that Rosie is visually aligned with the conspiracy. The basis for this argument is that those members of the patrol who begin to remember what really happened have nightmares in which they are brainwashed and in which the murders occur as they really happened, but in which they are handled not by the male white scientists actually responsible but by Arab women. The audience is confronted with these false images both through the notebooks of Al Melvin, an African-American soldier, which Marco finds in his apartment after Melvin has committed suicide, and through Marco’s own nightmares. One of these nightmares occurs a couple of minutes before Marco meets Rosie on the train. According to Wildermuth, in the scene on the train, Rosie “recall[s] the Iraqi women in the dream sequence” because she is like them dressed in “dark apparel” (2007: 125). This, however, is not the case. Rosie, an African American like Marco, is not dressed in black as the Arab women in Marco’s nightmare and Melvin’s notebook are, but in a beige coat. Moreover, she does not “almost take the place” of the civilian contractor whom Marco briefly imagines before he sees her (Wildermuth 2007: 125). The contractor, who led the patrol into a trap and who emerges as the scientific mastermind behind the brainwashing plot later, appears in Marco’s dream sitting directly opposite of him. When he disappears, the camera pans to the right, and then Rosie appears, a few rows further back, smiling at Marco. In addition, a bullet wound that Marco briefly imagines seeing on her forehead a few seconds later visually

nothing is what it seems, I would suggest that this inconsistency is best regarded as one of a couple of logical gaps that one only notices when watching the film repeatedly. Others are that Marco suddenly detects and easily removes the chip that has been implanted into his shoulder more than ten years ago and that has been sitting right under his skin, or that Shaw remains under the control of the conspirators even after Marco has removed the chip from his shoulder (if it is not important, why put it there in the first place?). These gaps, I would suggest, are best ignored.

52 | B UTTER

aligns her with the soldier that Marco was made to shoot by the brainwashers. Thus, the scene on the train does not link her to the conspiracy but associates her with its victims – a reading further corroborated by the fact that, as I discuss below, the film projects the plot as racialized, as directed by white men against blacks. But even if Rosie is not linked to the conspiracy, Wildermuth is on to something because the images of the Arab women are puzzling indeed. They echo both stereotypical representations of Islamist terrorism in post-9/11 American culture, imagined simultaneously as entirely backward (the women’s garbs) and technologically sophisticated (the women talk about bio-engineering), and the oscillation between garden club meeting and Manchurian lecture hall in the original film. However, whereas in Frankenheimer’s original the mother and Communist effectively merge in order to suggest a link between “momism” and conspiracy, the Arab women are gradually replaced in Demme’s film by white male scientists, as Marco, in later scenes, manages to remember what really happened. Accordingly, I contend that the memory of the Arab women functions as a smokescreen intentionally planted by the conspirators in their victims’ brains in order to mislead them should they begin to remember the truth. This becomes most obvious in the scene in which Marco relives, with the help of a drug, how he was made to shoot one of the patrol’s soldiers. Here white scientists orchestrate the affair, and the Arab women reappear only on posters in the background that identify them as the “enemy” (Image 1). Image 1:Posters of Arab women as the ‘enemy’

Source: DVD The Manchurian Candidate (2004), Paramount 2004

E XIT G ENDER , E NTER R ACE: T HE M ANCHURIAN C ANDIDATE

| 53

Accordingly, Manchurian Global “wears the mask of terrorism”, but not, as Sonja Georgi argues, because the film suggests that “multinational capitalism and international terrorism have formed a strange liaison” (2012: 155, 147). Rather, the real conspirators – American businessmen and not ethnically marked foreigners – use the specter of Islamist terrorism to divert attention from their schemes. This, I would contend, must be read as a comment that in the post-9/11 world the true enemy of America seems to be such an ethnic other, but that the real threat is homegrown – an enemy who consciously manufactures the fantasy of a foreign foe to get away with its own crimes. Thus, the film eventually links the manipulative and emasculating power of the media not to the feminine, as Frankenheimer’s original does and as American culture has so frequently done in the second half of the twentieth century, but to the deeds of white men, the scientists, who use drugs, implants, and computer animations to plant a fiction in the minds of American soldiers, just as their corporate bosses manipulate the American people through false alerts and TV commercials. However, Demme’s film also racializes this plot in a very specific fashion. The two soldiers who suffer most from the brainwashing they undergo, Marco and Melvin, are both black, whereas those who abuse them are white. Moreover, the scientific mastermind behind the scheme is said to have conducted experiments on blacks in South Africa during the 1980s. This in turn links up with the star persona Denzel Washington brings to the movie. Since his role as black South African activist Steven Biko in Cry Freedom (1987), Washington has repeatedly played characters that suffered from and fought against racist violence. But the film recalls not only the history of racism and racial segregation in and outside the U.S. by these means. Through its plot, it also evokes, for example, more specifically the long history of medical experimentation conducted by whites on blacks (cf. Washington 2006). This, however, creates a certain ambivalence. Not only is it not clear whether or not the film wishes to suggest that today’s big corporations treat every citizen as they manipulated African Americans during, for example, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Between 1932 and 1972, blacks were told that the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) was treating their syphilis, while government doctors left it untreated to study the progression of the disease (Jones 2006). Moreover, the film’s allusions to government-sanctioned violations of black bodies clash with the overall image of the conspiracy the film paints. Like virtually all conspiracy narratives since the 1960s, and unlike the original, then, Demme’s remake suggests that most of the conspirators are located not outside, but inside the country, that the threat to democracy and liberty is not foreign, but homegrown. However, while most post-1960 conspiracy narratives assume that the federal government

54 | B UTTER

has already fallen prey to the conspiracy and that agencies such as the FBI, or the PHS, for that matter, have therefore been turned into instruments of the plot, this is not the case in Demme’s remake. The reason is surely that for the film to function as a remake it was necessary to retain the original’s basic plot idea of placing a brainwashed sleeper in the White House. But the rather positive role that government agencies therefore play in Demme’s film – since they have not yet been infiltrated, they work to foil the conspiracy; Rosie, the film’s most positive character, is an FBI agent; and the FBI eventually frames Manchurian Global and protects Marco – clashes with the history of institutionalized racism it simultaneously evokes. In the end, therefore, the remake is as ambivalent as the original, albeit in a different fashion, and this ambivalence is further increased by the ending. Whereas Frankenheimer’s film restores Shaw’s agency – he decides what to do and acts accordingly – but not Marco’s, it remains entirely unclear who or what is responsible for the foiling of the conspiracy in Demme’s version. Marco confronts Shaw on Election Day and reveals the conspirators’ plot to him. “And what makes you believe that they haven’t figured you in?” Shaw replies, suggesting a further complication to the plot that is seemingly confirmed a moment later when Shaw’s mother calls Marco, activates him, and, we gather, orders him to shoot the president elect at the victory party later that evening. Yet, in the end Marco shoots Shaw and his mother, and we never really understand how this comes about. Maybe Marco was never activated in the first place. The fact that he had removed the conspirators’ implant from his body earlier supports this reading, but the fact that he perceives the world in exactly the fashion as the activated Shaw does when he takes mother’s calls, i.e. everything around him lightens up, indicates the opposite. Or is Shaw ‘reprogramming’ Marco by missing the spot where he is supposed to survive the shooting and looking up to Marco’s hiding place significantly several times? The movie leaves this open, thus, probably unintentionally, fostering a sense of paranoia and agency panic that we are used to now, but that found one of its first cultural expressions in the original The Manchurian Candidate and that is “updated” in Demme’s remake.

W ORKS C ITED Bell, Matt (2006): “‘Your Worst Fears Made Flesh’. The Manchurian Candidate’s Paranoid Delusion and Gay Liberation”, in: GLQ. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.1, 85-116. BIG JIM MCLAIN (1952) (USA, R: Edward Ludwig).

E XIT G ENDER , E NTER R ACE: T HE M ANCHURIAN C ANDIDATE

| 55

Butter, Michael (2014): Plots, Designs, and Schemes. American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Carruthers, Susan L. (1998): “The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the Cold War Brainwashing Scare”, in: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18.1, 75-94. Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America (1947): “Communists within the Government. The Facts and a Program”, Report of Committee on Socialism and Communism, Washington, D.C.: GPO. Cuordileone, Kyle A. (2005): Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, New York: Routledge. Dallmann, Antje (2007): “Manchurian Candidates. Conspiracy Fiction, Visual Representation, and Masculinity in Crisis. Three Variations on a Popular Theme”, in: Antje Dallmann/Reinhard Isensee/Philipp Kneis (eds.), Picturing America. Trauma, Realism, Politics and Identity in American Visual Culture, Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 81-112. Ernst, Morris L./Loth, David (1952): Report on the American Communist, New York: Holt. Gardner, Jared (1994): “Bringing the Cold War Home. Reprogramming American Culture in The Manchurian Candidate”, in: Joel Schwartz (ed.), Proceedings of the Conference on Film and American Culture, Williamsburg: Roy R. Charles Center, College of William and Mary, 23-29. Georgi, Sonja (2012): “Cyber-noia? Remaking The Manchurian Candidate in a Global Age”, in: Kathleen Loock/Constantine Verevis (eds.), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions. Remake/Remodel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 145-158. Heale, Michael J. (1990): American Anticommunism. Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hoover, J. Edgar (1958): Masters of Deceit. The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, New York: Holt. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) (USA, R: Don Siegel). Jackson, Tony (2000): “The Manchurian Candidate and the Gender of the Cold War”, in: Literature Film Quarterly 28.1, 34-40. Jacobson, Matthew Frye/González, Gaspar (2006): What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, James H. (2006): “The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment”, in: Wolfgang U. Eckart (ed.), Man, Medicine, and the State. The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century, Stuttgart: Steiner, 251-262.

56 | B UTTER

Leitch, Thomas M. (1990): “Twice-Told Tales. The Rhetoric of the Remake”, in: Literature Film Quarterly 18.3, 138-149. May, Elaine Tyler (1988): Homeward Bound. American Families in the Cold War Era, New York: Basic Books. McCarthy, Joseph (1950): “Speech at Wheeling, West Virginia.” 9 Feb., repr. in: “Communists in Government Service” (1950), Cong. Rec., 81st Cong., 2nd sess., vol. 96, part 2, Washington, DC: GPO, 1954-57. Melley, Timothy (2008): “Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Postwar United States”, in: New German Critique 35.1, 145-164. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) (USA, R: Alfred Hitchcock). Oltmann, Katrin (2008): Remake – Premake. Hollywoods romantische Komödien und ihre Gender-Diskurse, 1930-1960, Bielefeld: transcript. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) (USA, R: Nicholas Ray). Riesman, David (2001) [1950]: The Lonely Crowd. A Study of Changing American Character, New Haven: Yale University Press. Rogin, Michael P. (1987): Ronald Reagan. The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, Berkeley: University of California Press. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. (1958): “The Crisis of American Masculinity”, in: Esquire 51, 64-66. Schrecker, Ellen (1998): Many Are the Crimes. McCarthyism in America, Princeton: Princeton University Press. “The Enemy Within: Inside The Manchurian Candidate” (2004): Making of feature on DVD The Manchurian Candidate, dir. Jonathan Demme, Paramount, 2004. THEM! (1954) (USA, R: Gordon Douglas). THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) (USA, R: John Frankenheimer). THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (2004) (USA, R: Jonathan Demme). Washington, Harriet A. (2006): Medical Apartheid. The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, New York: Doubleday. Whyte, William (1956): The Organization Man, New York: Simon & Schuster. Wildermuth, Mark E. (2007): “Electronic Media and the Feminine in the National Security Regime. The Manchurian Candidate before and after 9/11”, in: Journal of Popular Film and Television 35.3, 120-126. Wylie, Philip (1942): Generation of Vipers, New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

(Re)Making Men in the 1950s and 2000s Delmer Daves’s and James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma J OHANNES F EHRLE

According to Lee Clark Mitchell, the Western has from its beginning “fretted over the construction of masculinity, whether in terms of gender (women), maturation (sons), honor (restraint), or self-transformation (the West itself)” (1996: 4) Consequently, the genre is “deeply haunted by the problem of becoming a man” (Mitchell 1996: 4). Mitchell’s claim holds particularly true for Delmer Daves’s 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma and its 2007 remake by James Mangold. They collectively address all of the concerns Mitchell identifies: there are problems with women and sons, and the solution to these problems is a self-transformation through honorable behavior. When the two versions are read against each other, they highlight one of the sources of insight of adaptation and remake studies: they provide an example of the shift in cultural discourses, in this case about gender roles. Both Daves’s and Mangold’s movies trace their origin to a short story by pulp writer Elmore Leonard. This suggests the question of whether Mangold’s movie is in fact a remake or if it is not rather a re-adaptation, and – more broadly – what exactly constitutes the similarities and differences between adaptations and remakes. Both adaptations and remakes constitute a recognizable and more or less openly announced engagement with a prior text. Linda Hutcheon sees remakes as “invariably adaptations because of changes in context”, and concludes that “not all adaptations necessarily involve a shift of medium or mode of engagement, though many do” (2006: 170). Conversely, Andrew Horton and Stuart McDougal treat adaptations as a subtype of remakes when they write that “films remake other media – comic books, for example” (1998b: 5). It is at the risk of exposing my bias as more influenced by adaptation than remake studies that I follow Hutcheon in regarding remakes as a subcategory of

58 | FEHRLE

adaptations. While Hutcheon suggests a broad definition of adaptation, necessary for her project of theorizing adaptation across media and centuries, I believe that a more limited study of the relatively young medium of film can follow the more narrow terminology used in everyday parlance. I therefore understand adaptation as involving what Irina Rajewsky calls a “medial transposition” (2005: 51), while a remake describes a film which is based to a large extent on another, prior film.1 Boundaries blur, however. Even where they are relatively distinct, remake and adaptation share a number of key characteristics. Both are what Hutcheon calls “a form of repetition without replication” (2006: xvi), and thus inevitably change the text they remake or adapt. Both are strongly informed by intertexts beyond their announced primary source text(s), and both reflect shifting ideologies, cultural and historical context, and so forth. While adaptations as well as remakes are influenced by changing technological environments, what differentiates the two is that remakes do not have to ‘translate’ the language of one medium into another. Because it uses the same medium, a shot for shot remake can rely fairly directly on its host text by using the same camera angles, focal lengths, lighting, mise-en-scène, and so forth – even as it (necessarily) involves changes in its cast, acting, film stock and so forth. Even recent attempts of ‘panel for shot’ ‘remakes’ (adaptations) based on the equally visual medium of comic books, such as Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005), have to remediate, translating still into moving pictures, the soundless medium of comics into sound film, drawn images into photographic ones, and so forth. Pascal Lefèvre, in his examination of film adaptations of comic books, identifies this “different visual ontology” of photographic and drawn images as one of the key problems in comic book adaptations (2007: 9). Although the recent advent of digital postproduction, CGI and other technologies have somewhat lessened this divide by making possible films that remediate a comic book aesthetic, any adaptation still involves a shift of media and a creative decision-making process different from that of a remade film, since, regardless of technological shifts, e.g. from film to digital, most movies still create moving images through photographic means. Coming back to 3:10 to Yuma, and the question of whether Mangold’s version constitutes a new adaptation of Leonard’s short story or a remake, the answer is fairly obvious: not only does the 2007 movie give credit to Halsted Welles, the first movie adaptation’s screenwriter, more importantly the older

1

See also Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis: “A remake is generally considered a version of another film, whereas one of the principal arguments of adaptation theory is concerned with the movement between different semiotic registers” (2012: 6; emphasis in original).

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 59

movie introduced a number of major changes and additions to the short story which the remake maintains. Most notably, Daves’s film adds a backstory telling how the outlaw (renamed Ben Wade in both movies) is captured and brought to Contention by his guard (a deputy sheriff in the short story, the farmer Dan Evans in both films). The remake reuses this added element and re-writes it only slightly by further expanding its primary host text – the earlier film –, primarily in an attempt to cater to what it presumably perceives as a contemporary audience’s taste for action sequences. What constitutes the center of the short story and the climax of the older film version – a psychological battle between the outlaw and his guard in a hotel room as they await the arrival of the train that is to take the outlaw to Yuma prison – becomes only one of a number of climaxes in the latest version. The two film versions can then be read to answer a question customarily identified as a key interest of remake studies, the shifting cultural work of texts. As Leo Braudy writes: “A remake is […] always concerned with what its makers and (they hope) its audiences consider to be unfinished cultural business, unrefinable and perhaps finally unassimilable material that remains part of the cultural dialogue – not until it is finally given definitive form, but until it is no longer compelling or interesting.” (1998: 331)

One of these sites of “unfinished cultural business” is that of gender roles, which are according to Judith Butler and others in a continual process of remaking.2 In a patriarchal society ideology furthermore needs to meet the constant challenge of justifying and obscuring the dominant societal position held by men. The Western genre has been a particular focal site of masculinity’s reaffirmation, as Jane Tompkins, Lee Mitchell, and others have shown. In her provocatively reductive reading, Tompkins points the finger at the Western’s obsession with masculinity when she claims: “The Western doesn’t have anything to do with the West as such. It isn’t about the encounter between civilization and the frontier. It is about men’s fear of losing their mastery, and hence their identity, both of which the Western tirelessly reinvents.” (1992: 45) Martin Weidinger similarly stresses the necessity to constantly remake masculinity in cultural texts, and the Western’s central function in this process of renegotiation:

2

Throughout my reading of gender as a performative act is informed by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (2006).

60 | FEHRLE

“Männlichkeit als sozial konstruierte Geschlechtlichkeit muss immer wieder neu zur Schau gestellt, neu definiert und reaffirmiert werden [...]. Die Figur des Westernhelden muss somit als work-in-progress angesehen werden. Dauerhaft garantierte und abgesicherte Männlichkeit existiert nicht, Stillstand bedeutet Männlichkeitsverlust.” (2006: 97)3

A remake of a Western which addresses its concerns with and anxieties about masculinity more explicitly than many other texts in the genre, can thus be read to reveal the shifting discourses surrounding gender roles, both male and female, in the last fifty years, as sites of crises each movie addresses.

D ELMER D AVES ’ S 3:10

TO

Y UMA

Elmore Leonhard’s short story, published in 1953, is mostly an unambiguous dime story about ‘real men’. It is fairly straightforward in its celebration of the various versions of hegemonic masculinity it relates: the stoic manliness of the outlaw who is certain that his gang will rescue him, and the heroic masculinity of his antagonist, who fulfills his duty despite overpowering odds. Daves’s film, on the other hand, begins to question gender identities by problematizing Dan’s patriarchal function as head of the household and provider, as well as his heroic standing in a way that must have seemed more shocking in a 1950s Eisenhower America than it does today. The remake, finally, builds on this nascent ‘crisis of masculinity’ and makes it more explicit.4 It also shifts the main source of critique of its protagonist’s masculinity from Dan’s wife to his oldest son. Before I analyze the textual differences, however, I want to give a brief plot synopsis of the films. Both movies tell the story of Dan Evans, a rancher who is hired as part of a group of men to bring a famous outlaw, Ben Wade, to Contention and put him on the train to Yuma. The men are chased by Wade’s gang, but manage to mislead them by using a coach as a decoy and taking Wade to Contention on horseback. When they reach Contention, Evans and Wade hide in a hotel room while

3

‘Masculinity as a socially constructed gender category has to be continually displayed, redefined, and reaffirmed anew […]. As a result the character of the western hero has to be seen as a work-in-progress. A permanently guaranteed and secured masculinity does not exist; stagnation means loss of masculinity.’ (My translation).

4

I use the term ‘crisis of masculinity’ to describe a situation in which parts of a patriarchal society (male or non-male) perceive traditional masculine gender roles and the underlying hegemonic position of men under attack and in need of defense.

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 61

waiting for the train to arrive. A psychological battle ensues as Wade tries to bribe, sweet-talk, overpower, and threaten Evans into letting him go, but the rancher remains steadfast. The tension grows as Wade’s gang gathers outside the hotel waiting for the men to come out. Evans eventually manages to deliver Wade to the train station, an act he cannot accomplish without the outlaw’s help. Delmer Daves’s movie version contains a number of significant changes and additions to the short story. The outlaw’s antagonist is no longer a deputy but a rancher experiencing financial anxiety due to a drought. Most significantly, Evans’s family has an unusually strong presence for a Western, which can be explained by the film’s interest in exploring Dan’s role in this family unit. He has two sons, Mark and Matthew, and a wife, Alice, whom he feels he cannot adequately provide for. Evans stumbles into the situation of having to deliver the outlaw to the train station. He only signs on because the two hundred dollars offered by Butterfield, the operator whose stagecoaches Wade has robbed, provide him with enough money to buy water rights and will thus allow him to save the family farm. As quickly becomes apparent, Daves’s Dan Evans (Van Heflin) is under attack from multiple fronts. His youngest son Mark clearly thinks his father is a superhuman figure, but Dan cannot live up to his expectations. The film opens with Dan and his sons witnessing a stagecoach robbery by Ben Wade. When Wade and his gang notice Dan and tell him not to move, his youngest son asks: “You gonna let them do this to you”, to which Dan defensively responds: “Not much else I can do.” After Wade shoots the stagecoach driver Matthew again presses Dan for action: “Aren’t you gonna do something?”, which puts Dan further on the defensive: “What? And get myself shot, too?” These continued challenges do not mean that Matthew doubts his father. On the contrary, later in the film he repeatedly shows his admiration by telling Wade that his father could easily kill him. Nevertheless, these expectations put Dan under pressure. He finds himself in a situation in which he cannot live up to the expectations of his sons and fulfill the demands of a 1950s hegemonic masculinity: to be a ‘real man’, i.e. to embody the ideal of heroic masculinity, he would have to engage the outlaws; that he instead opts for what Simon Petch in his Freudian reading has identified as “the reality principle” (2007: 52) does not make him particularly heroic or masculine. A scene which takes place when Dan and his sons return to the farm is striking with regards to the concept of masculinity as a gender identity performance learned in large parts by imitating a paternal figure. As this scene in which Alice, Dan’s wife, questions ‘her boys’ about the Wade encounter makes clear, Matthew, the older son, has already departed from his younger brother’s state of ide-

62 | FEHRLE

alization of his father and his adherence to the pleasure principle with its demands for instant gratification. Instead he imitates Dan. The acting highlights the different ways in which Dan and his sons perform their (nascent) masculinity. While Dan tries to cover his unease with grumpy stoicism, an evasiveness “coded as passive aggression” (Petch 2007: 54) which dominates his actions towards his wife for the first half of the film, Mark and Matthew, as soon as Alice challenges Dan’s and by extension his (and their) gender identities, immediately side with their father. It is telling that they perform their developing masculinity – thus far a boyscoutish excitement – by mimicking their father’s, especially apparent in Matthew’s defense “you want us all to get shot?” The parallel between Dan and his sons, established through their similar wording, is played out in cinematographic terms as well. When Matthew utters his defense of masculinity in the face of reality, he is shot from a low angle which sets him off against the sky, with his younger brother gazing up at him, directing our eyes to Matthew and his proclamation (Image 1a). This angle, which often demonstrates dominance, control, and determination, is an angle which in the Western has become an established way of setting off a man from the landscape he dominates. It is also the way in which Dan was framed in the first scene – albeit, as befits his role as pater familias, in an even more extreme upward angle (Image 1b). Images 1a & b: Shooting men against the sky: Dan and his sons

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 63

The scene not only highlights the masculinity of Dan and his sons, it is also interesting in terms of the female gender role, the main opposition against which masculinity is constructed in a binary gender system, and the film’s underlying 1950s gender roles. The scene opens with a soft musical theme, accompanying first a crane shot of the Evans’s farmstead, then the first appearance of Dan’s wife, Alice (Leora Dana), as she leaves the family home. In a sequence of shots, Alice is cinematographically established as belonging to the farm. Costuming, mise-en-scène, and cinematography work together to symbolically contain her in the family home in a shot/reverse shot sequence which frames her within the wooden beams of the farm’s porch (Images 2a & b). Images 2a & 2b: Containing Alice

Throughout the sequence Alice is portrayed as representing traditional female values of the 1950s. The camera looks down on her from an upward angle when she talks to Dan before he leaves, and the director groups her with her arms around her sons, as Dan rides off to do his duty (Images 3 & 4). Her submissive role and concern for her family, both for the boys and Dan, puts into context and cushions her attack of Dan on account of his less than manly demeanor. It also visually balances her vocalizing of her (and the patriarchal audience’s) unease about Dan’s unmanly actions.

64 | FEHRLE

Image 3: Alice as the ‘good wife’

Image 4: The 1950s nuclear family

Source Images 1-4: DVD 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2007)

Shortly after Dan’s second return to the farm, Alice again hesitantly confronts Dan about his actions during the Wade encounter. As in all of the scenes in which Alice confronts Dan, her words are cushioned by her conforming to the image of the 1950s version of the ‘good wife’. In this exchange Alice is worried primarily about Dan’s function as a role model for his boys, an issue that will gain center-stage in the remake, but which in the 1950s version is still mitigated by the obvious adoration and concern the boys have for their father. Alice’s doubts, likewise, clearly stem from concern and love for her family and Dan, not the sense of barely contained frustration that Gretchen Mol’s Alice portrays in Mangold’s remake. The exchange nevertheless constitutes a major challenge to Dan and must be seen as a key scene setting of his attempt to regain his masculinity.

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 65

It is enlightening to read Alice’s concerns and Dan’s impotence to vindicate his actions against the background of what feminist critic Jane Tompkins has written about language in the Western. In West of Everything Tompkins devotes a chapter to the opposition of words and actions in Westerns. She links the woman’s talkativeness and the man’s disdain for language to the dichotomies of West vs. East and man vs. woman, claiming that the Western is “at heart antilanguage” (1992: 50). The genre holds deeds over words, which are erased, becoming empty and meaningless, in the film’s final act of redemptive violence. The female perspective, represented by both women and effeminate men is thus formulated only to be devaluated. In the 1957 version of 3:10 to Yuma, Dan likewise does not have an effective control of language; he cannot explain himself to his wife, in large part because within the logic of the genre such explanations make no difference. Dan can only redeem his masculinity through action – by taking Ben Wade to the train station. Ben Wade (Glen Ford), in contrast, qualifies Tompkins’s claim. He is Evans’s direct opposite in almost every way. He is very secure in his masculinity, and he frequently uses language to charm women and manipulate men. The first half of the movie shows him impressing various women, including Dan’s wife, while large parts of the second half of the movie are devoted to his attempt to sweet-talk Dan. Dan’s request that Wade “not talk to [him] for a while” shows the power of Wade’s language. It complicates Tompkins’s position: occasionally ‘real men’ in Westerns, from Owen Wister’s Virginian onwards, are able to talk without compromising their manliness. They can do this as long as they are able to back up their words with deeds, and as long as their words are part of their larger masculine role of dominating their environment – both human and nonhuman –, even if this domination does not always have to take the form of “laconic put-downs [which] cut people off at the knees” (Tompkins 1992: 51). For Dan Evans, whose masculinity is compromised at the film’s outset, on the other hand, the only option to regain his masculinity are deeds; to deliver Wade to the train under the admiring eyes of his wife. With this ending Daves’s film makes a rapid turn towards a 1950s happy ending. As Carol MacCurdy argues it “demonstrates the script’s conflicting aims in terms of wanting both to follow Leonard’s bravura ending and homage to male bonding, as well as satisfy a 1950’s audience’s expectations for moral clarity” (2009: 282). The movie’s ending which shows Dan and Wade on the train as it starts to rain, “erases any moral complexity or interrogation of masculinity by having divine intervention shower Dan literally with raindrops, showing that heavenly forces are on Dan’s side” (MacCurdy 2009: 282). This act of God, which ends the drought that has put the Evans farm under hardships, also leaves the two hundred dollars Dan has

66 | FEHRLE

earned at his disposal, allowing him to buy his wife pearls and thus remedy another shortcoming of his masculinity which Wade had earlier taunted him with. The ending of Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma thus shows Dan’s manhood “confirmed in all possible domains: financial, moral, physical, domestic, and heavenly” (MacCurdy 2009: 283). The crisis of masculinity addressed in the film’s first half is symbolically met as the protagonist redeems himself through his heroic deed of walking Wade to the train station. When we put the film into its historical context it is easy so see reflected in it the increasing uncertainty about received notions of hegemonic masculinity after the Second World War. The film speaks to a society in which women were beginning to open up for themselves more central positions in the workforce and society at large, began to earn their own disposable incomes, and started to question their traditional positions, thus challenging the role of men as the unquestioned provider and head of the family. Like many 1950s films, 3:10 to Yuma addresses what Matthew Jacobson and Gaspar González have called a decade of “vexing contradiction” (qtd. in Butter 2014: 229) in which, as Butter argues, “the changes that we usually associate with the 1960s began. While many Americans found these developments liberating, others were troubled by an apparent rise in homosexuality, allegedly dysfunctional families, the increased presence of women outside the domestic sphere, female emancipation in general, as well as the supposed feminization of the American man both through the influence of overbearing women and the emasculating effects of de-individualized office work.” (2014: 229)

It is certainly no coincidence that in this climate, the 1950s saw the highest number of Westerns produced in the genre’s history. While other Westerns of the period answered the challenges to received gender roles by making their male heroes even more ‘masculine’ and dominant, or by introducing strong women characters such as Vienna and Emma in Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Johnny Guitar, a film which opens up the male ritual of the duel for its female antagonists, 3:10 to Yuma chooses a third strategy. In its challenges to Dan’s masculinity, the film reflects the increasing complexity of gender roles and power dynamics – a process which, from a hegemonic patriarchal perspective, seemed like a ‘crisis of masculinity’ – and solves this alleged crisis in its fictional universe through the traditional plot of the beleaguered male stepping up to his task and redeeming himself through his actions. Within this scheme Alice, who was earlier given a slightly more dominant function, has to be reintegrated into a patriarchal setup by performing the traditionally female function which Virginia Woolf famously described as that of “looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 67

reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (2008: 45). Alice admiringly reflects her man’s manliness for him as well as the audience in the film’s central transformational scene.5 Only after Alice leaves the domestic sphere of the family farm to find Dan in the hotel and beg him to not risk his life by delivering Wade to the station, can he, who – worn by Wade’s teasing – had earlier shed tears about his inability to adequately provide for Alice, (re)gain his masculinity. Her presence and plea put him in a position in which he can only disregard his wife. Both in a generic Western and a 1950s context it is unthinkable for Dan to answer to his wife’s pleas and remain a man. Her feminine presence – at first sight a transgression of female subservience – thus forces his crisis-shaken masculinity back into its traditional patriarchal role. It therefore acts as a major accomplice to the film’s restoration of traditional masculinity. In other words, the film grants a seemingly more dominant role to its main female character only to have this opening for feminine agency culminate in making Alice the catalyst that ‘fixes’ Dan’s unbalanced masculinity. Alice’s role in the final analysis thus turns out to be the main force of the policing of traditional gender roles, which in stark contrast to her earlier position of seeming autonomy – an autonomy which was, as I have shown, visually undercut throughout – puts her back in the role of a subordinate 1950s wife. What is more, it is only her female presence and Dan’s reaction of ‘manning up’ which convince Wade, the second audience and mirror for Dan’s act of selftransformation, to cooperate with him by jumping on the train in the end. Alice’s centrality to Wade’s decision is suggested not only by Wade’s repeated comments about what a great wife Alice must be, but also by the editing of the central scene between Dan and Alice, which includes a long close-up of Wade. In Daves’s film, Alice’s female Otherness leads to a male bonding between the former antagonists which dominates the film’s last shots and recalls the earlier male unit formed by Dan and his boys when they were confronted by Alice’s questioning – with the important difference that now two ‘real men’ form this unit against the female challenge.

R EMAKING M ASCULINITY

IN

J AMES M ANGOLD ’ S F ILM

James Mangold’s remake is even more explicitly about a supposed ‘crisis of masculinity’ which by the 1990s was a widely discussed phenomenon. In Man-

5

In my reading of the hotel scene I am indebted to Wibke Schniedermann’s comments on an earlier version of this article.

68 | FEHRLE

gold’s film we can see how this alleged crisis is transformed and answered in the 21st century. The most striking difference between the premake (to borrow Katrin Oltmann’s term) and the remake in this respect is the figure of Dan’s oldest son, renamed William. He takes over and intensifies what in the earlier script was Alice’s role of questioning Dan’s masculinity. While in both films there is a challenge to Dan’s masculinity from both his wife and his sons, even if it is an unintentional challenge on Mark’s part in the premake, the balance of where the main thrust comes from shifts. This shift indicates a change in discourses about masculinity in the fifty years lying between pre- and remake. The remake is as much about William and his search for a role model in his process of growing into a man, as it is about the psychological struggle between Dan Evans and Ben Wade. The film thus picks up a major issue of the popularizers of America’s latest ‘crisis of masculinity’, the men’s movements, particularly the so-called mythopoetic men’s movement since the 1980s. In publications such as Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), one of its major manifestos, the movement argued that men had become effeminate liberals, since the education of boys was left to women, and that men needed to reconnect with their sons in order to teach them how to become real men. As Susan Jeffords has argued, this perceived crisis manifested itself not only by a proliferation of images in the 1980s of what she calls “hard bodies”, i.e. heroes who are strongly ‘masculine’ in both their physique and their behavior, but also in arguments that “women can change the embryo to a boy, […] only men can change the boy to a man” (Bly qtd. in Jeffords 1994: 9), which are picked up and reiterated in countless films in the 1990s.6 This shift from women to sons as a new measuring stick against which masculinity is judged, is apparent in the vastly increased role of William. William’s increased importance is already apparent in the remake’s opening. In the first shot of the film we see William reading an outlaw dime novel, which foreshadows his later infatuation with the larger-than-life outlaw, Ben Wade, played by Russell Crowe as a charming sociopath. The film establishes William, briefly

6

Films from John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991) to David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) have – with varying degrees of irony – included statements that could have been written by Bly. Boyz n the Hood in particular picks up the debate with such statements as Furious Style’s proclamation: “Any fool can make a baby, but it takes a man to raise children”, or Reva Styles: “I can’t teach you how to become a man.” Fight Club’s Tyler Durden likewise reflects the men’s movements’ ideas, when he confronts the narrator with his assessment of what ails men in contemporary America: “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 69

shifts to his sleeping brother Mark, then to Dan’s wife Alice, and only then to Dan Evans (Christian Bale) sitting up in bed anxiously clutching a rifle. The film’s editing already upsets the patriarchal hierarchy by suggesting Dan’s position as at the bottom of the family’s pecking order. Dan’s inability as a man is symbolically represented by his amputated leg, which both physically and psychologically cripples him. His cowardice haunts him, and leads him to invent stories of his heroism during the Civil War when in fact he lost his leg to friendly fire during a retreat. In the movie’s first scene in which the Evans’s barn is burned down by a group of thugs, Dan’s wooden leg becomes the central symbol for his powerlessness. In a scene overloaded with phallic symbolism, Dan is emasculated when his prosthesis falls off after Tucker, one of the thugs, hits him over the head with his rifle butt. The cinematography visually underlines his impotence through an extreme low-angle shot showing an out-of-focus Tucker looming over him, as well as the camera’s gaze which lingers on Dan’s cut-off leg and the severed prosthetic replacement. Dan is symbolically and literally incapacitated in the defense of his home. He has to strap his leg on again so that he can enter his burning barn to save what can be saved, but manages to arrive only after his son William. Through Bale’s pronounced limp throughout much of the film, the prosthetic leg remains a yardstick for Dan’s standing as a man. Only in the film’s climactic run to the train station is Evans’s mobility restored along with his masculinity. The scene ends with its most obvious indication of Dan’s problems as a ‘man’. In a final confrontation with his son, Dan promises: “I’ll take care of this”, for which his son rebuffs him with the direct challenge: “No you won’t!” The cinematography leaves Dan isolated from his family, which forms a unit against him with William as his main challenger in the foreground and Alice and Mark in the background, literally standing behind William (Image 5). Dan in contrast is – in a not particularly subtle use of imagery – filmed against the flames of his burning barn, turning away from both his family and the audience (Image 6). What follows this new opening scene is similar to Daves’s version: Dan signs up to take Wade to the train to Yuma; Wade is brought to Dan’s house and starts to charm Alice as well as the boys. Once again, the remake makes Dan’s reasons for taking Wade to the train, the rebuilding of his male identity, which has taken a beating for too long, more explicit. As Dan says, when his wife tells him that no one will think less of him if he does not take Wade to the train station: “No one can think less of me”, and a little later: “I am tired of the way [the boys] look at me. I am tired of the way that you don’t.”

70 | FEHRLE

Image 5: Dan versus the family unit

Image 6: Dan’s masculinity in flames

Once again, the rebuilding of Dan’s masculinity needs an audience and a mirror. Whereas Alice served this function in the 1950s version, it is now William who takes over this role. It is he, not Alice, who leaves the family farm to watch and eventually fuel his father’s actions. What dominates the middle section of the film is a psychological struggle between Evans and Wade over who will become William’s role model. Carol MacCurdy has made this the center of her reading of Mangold’s remake. She argues that throughout the film Wade tries to make William into a hedonistic, amoral person like himself whereas Dan appeals to higher ideals and morality. In the end, Wade realizes Dan’s worth, and allows him to become a role model for William, when he allows Dan to deliver him to the train before William’s eyes. William’s final refusal to shoot Wade after his father’s death indicates that he will follow the path laid out by his father to become ‘a good man’. In her final assessment, the film thus aims “to re-awaken the male spirit from defeat and isolation and to reconnect it to fatherhood, real work, and male community based on shared values” (MacCurdy 2009: 291). Elisa Bordin has similarly argued that the film aims to restore men as fathers. She connects the remake’s shift of focus onto fathers and sons to the 1980s and

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 71

1990s men’s movements. As Bordin writes: “Whereas in 1957 fatherhood was not an issue to investigate, being still perceived as a given state of masculinity and not as a source of anxiety, in 2007 fatherhood is perceived as the ultimate resort to regain an imperilled masculinity.” (2014: 115) While MacCurdy and Bordin certainly point to one of the film’s central claims, I am convinced that the film ultimately offers its audiences a more conflicted reading. The film’s final minutes confound any single interpretation. It is in these moments that Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma goes furthest beyond the premake, whose psychology also requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief when it comes to Wade’s cooperation on the way to the train station. In contrast to MacCurdy, however, I find the psychology and character motivation in the remake even more contradictory and shifting. While this fact may owe in large parts to the screenwriting capabilities of Michael Brandt and Derek Haas of Wanted and 2 Fast 2 Furious fame, it nevertheless opens up an interesting alternative reading that reflects an increased skepticism in early 21st-century culture. I will argue that the film attempts to offer multiple readings, catering both to crisis-shaken men and to viewers who are too critical of straight-faced endorsements of traditional images of heroic masculinity to buy straight Western heroes any longer. Since MacCurdy and Bordin have already provided convincing readings of the film as reaffirming men, I want to focus on the second, more critical reading of the film’s ending. In my opinion, the interactions between Christian Bale’s Dan Evans and Russell Crowe’s Ben Wade which inform Dan’s gender performance can be seen as much closer to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum than the mythic ancestral masculinity promoted in Bly’s Iron John. Just as in the premake, in a central scene Dan Evans is discouraged and thereby confirmed in his intention of delivering Wade to the train station. William – taking over Alice’s role in the premake – acknowledges his father’s heroism for having made it as far as the hotel and similarly begs him not to continue. There is an emotional scene in which Dan passes the position of head of the household with all its patriarchal implications to his son, a ritual symbolized by the handing over of a broach which Dan received from Alice. The camera work in this scene is particularly revealing: for a scene that is ostensibly between Dan and his son, the camera lingers on Wade who watches the interaction for a very long time. The editing and cinematography – by means of a shallow, racking focus which repeatedly pulls from the two members of the Evans family to Wade sitting in a chair watching them, but keeping all three in the frame – clearly include Wade in the exchange and focus on his emotional reactions as much as on Dan’s and William’s (Image 7). The sequence borrows and extends Wade’s inclusion in the

72 | FEHRLE

premake to inform us that witnessing this intimate contact is what changes Wade’s mind about cooperating in his delivery to Yuma. In contrast to the premake, the shot/reverse shot sequence, which constantly looked down on Alice and up to Dan, is changed in the remake. The handheld camera now increasingly points up at, and thus renders more and more manly, the old alpha male Dan and – to a lesser extent – his successor William, whose rising stature to manhood is acknowledged both by his father and the camera. The changed gender setup of this parallel scene thus also changes its filmic language, from upholding a male hegemony which looks down on its female counterpart to an all-male exchange where both participants can meet on eye level, in a bridging of their generational difference. Image 7: Wade as observer

Shortly after the highly symbolic broach hand-over we learn that Wade never knew his father and was abandoned by his mother as a child. By itself this would be a fairly common amateur-psychological explanation for a bad guy’s motives. In this case, however, things are a bit more interesting: for the rest of the movie Wade will collaborate with Dan. However, rather than believing that he sees the wrongs in his wicked ways and repents, as suggested by MacCurdy, my interpretation of his change of heart is that Wade merely changes objectives, staying truer to the persona of a manipulative sociopath that has been built up throughout the movie. Rather than trying to further impress William, he now uses his creative power to mold the Evans family into the model family he himself never had.7 When

7

I wish to thank the participants in my class “Westerns” taught at Freiburg University in 2008/09, particularly Matthias Morten, for an inspiring discussion of this interpretation.

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 73

they get shot at by his gang on their way to the station, Wade repeatedly saves Dan’s life by pulling him behind cover or asks if Dan thinks he can make the jump from one building to another – in short, he helps Dan in situations in which he could easily have overpowered him and escaped. This compromises any critical viewer’s notion of Dan’s heroism, which in the 1950s version was built up almost entirely in the film’s final walk to the train station. In contrast to Van Heflin’s Dan, Bale’s Dan Evans lacks the competence to back up his manliness. Wade’s participation in, or rather orchestration of, Dan’s act of ‘manning up’ becomes painfully evident in a scene in which Wade easily overpowers Dan, who is not fully aware of the outlaw’s collaboration yet, and shoves Wade about as if he were still a prisoner rather than a co-conspirator. While choking him with his chains, Wade tells Dan that he has impressed his son enough and can stop now. Dan is only able to turn the situation when he begs Wade to let him become a hero for his sons’ sake, relating the less than heroic episode in the Civil War during which he lost his leg, and the emotional pain his lie about his supposed heroism has caused him. What follows is the sequence with the most illogical character motivation in the entire movie. After having been shot at from all directions for ten minutes, Dan simply stands still staring up at Wade in admiration of his own act of having managed to deliver Wade to the train, with his back turned to Wade’s entire gang. Wade’s second in command Charlie Prince shoots Dan in the back and Dan dies in the arms of his son. While director James Mangold has stated the opinion that contemporary audiences would not have bought Delmer Daves’s ending (MacCurdy 2009: 291), the changed ending does not only cater to 21stcentury cynicism, but changes the entire meaning of Dan’s act. Dan is caught in exactly the double-bind Kevin Boon points out in his exploration of the role of heroism in masculine identity construction: “Because mythos collapses when it enters the real, men inevitably fail to realize the masculine heroic, since the mythic must always remain abstract and exterior to lived experience.” (Boon 2005: 304) In other words, Dan has to die because he could not have upheld his performance of mythic male heroism after returning to his pedestrian life on the farm (his lived experience). Given Wade’s central role in guiding Dan’s action, Dan’s performance in the movie’s final minute goes beyond the Butlerian sense of gender as a necessarily performative act, and enters the space of performance in its theatrical sense, i.e. the impersonation of someone for an audience – namely his son William – creating in this performance a simulacrum of a heroic masculinity that has no signified in everyday lived experience. The audience on the other hand sees both sides and can choose whether or not to buy Dan’s performance of a male heroism. If this is not enough, the film’s final shots again ques-

74 | FEHRLE

tion any reading of the film as having a straightforward message or morality. After we have learned that Wade has escaped from Yuma twice before, Wade kills his gang, then boards the train of his own volition, powerful and in control. His control is exemplified by his chasing another prisoner from his seat through his aura of authority and by handing his gun to a guard, while the camera slowly moves in on Wade’s face. Having regained the generically charged props of horse, gun and hat, always important in the Western, but in 3:10 to Yuma particularly mythically endowed through the film’s insistence on their importance as symbols of a man’s standing, as Pete Falconer has argued (2009: 62-64), the outlaw “at the end ironically resembles the classic Western hero who saves the community by killing the outlaws and riding off” (Nichols 2008: 213). This connection is also reinforced in the filmic language of the scene. Whereas the script ended with the dramatic and admittedly manly words: “CLOSE ON—WILLIAM. William stands there. Watching the train disappear. Forever changed” (Brandt/Haas 2006: 114), the final edit of the film does not end with this shot. Instead it shows William kneeling next to his father’s dead body, dwarfed in a series of long shots by both Wade and the train (Image 8), followed by a close-up of William’s face looking, depending on viewer interpretation either scared, overwhelmed and depressed, or “forever changed” in the heroic way the script suggests. Image 8: William’s final shot

Source Images 5-8: DVD 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Lionsgate (2008)

Even more importantly, the final seconds are Wade’s, not William’s. The camera continues to move in on Wade’s face, showing him, now in full close-up, whistling for his horse, which in the film’s last shot rapidly catches up to the train. The final long take which shows Wade’s train ‘ride into the sunset’, with his horse catching up, makes it very obvious that Wade will once again go free and

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 75

that from a pragmatic standpoint Dan’s death was therefore ultimately in vain: his death does not lead to the fulfillment of the higher ideals of justice the protagonists in both movies called upon to justify their actions. The supposed ‘honoring’ of the death of a minor character, Doc Potter, who was killed in the pursuit of justice, must seem pointless to a postmodern audience; Dan’s death does not make Potter’s more meaningful – Wade will go free, and law and order will be in as precarious a state as ever. Furthermore, if Dan was not able to embody a masculinity he could only briefly impersonate, what does this model imply for William’s further path in life? Is he indeed changed for the better, as MacCurdy believes, or is it not more plausible to believe that he inherits the same crisis that brought about Dan’s unhappy life and his finally pointless death? If we adapt this reading, Dan’s is a concept of masculinity which does not fail because the individual is lacking in ‘manly essence’, as would have been the case for the role of the effeminate, unmanly man in the traditional Western, but because its design is deeply flawed. When focusing on the figure of Dan Evans, the film can thus not only be read as a classic Western reaffirming men and masculinity, but also as staging the paradox at the bottom of the role of the hero in contemporary constructions of masculinity: “The hero figure, as the ideal against which masculinity is judged, simultaneously denotes manhood and demotes male identity. It largely defines the masculinity to which many western men aspire and just as thoroughly defines their inevitable failure.” (Boon 2005: 304) The film can thus be read as bleaker and more contemporary than it seems at first. As far as it celebrates any masculinity, it seems to be the Nietzschean, amoral, manipulative hypermasculinity of Wade, not the idealistic moral masculinity of Dan Evans.

C ONCLUSION As I have argued, one of the central challenges and changes of the remake of 3:10 to Yuma is its different interpretation of concepts of masculinity. Delmer Daves’s premake quite clearly addresses and narratively solves issues of a perceived crisis of masculinity in a 1950s American climate by restoring the patriarchal order. The remake, at first glance, seems to follow its predecessor in its celebration of its masculine hero, even while it updates the source of attack on masculinity as revolving around the relation between fathers and sons, making it a film in line with Jeffords’s hard bodied 1980s and 90s films, but strangely at odds with the revisionism found in most other contemporary Westerns. As I have argued, however, Mangold’s film provides enough breaking points to allow for a double reading which reflects a plurality of varying gender concepts in the early

76 | FEHRLE

21st century. It includes both a slightly updated reiteration of the premake’s reinstatement of a hegemonic masculinity, thus catering to a need to believe in the metanarrative of heroism which, according to Boon, resurged after the attacks of 9/11 (2005: 303), and – for the more skeptical parts of contemporary audiences – reveals the breaking points in this ideal of masculinity. To this more skeptical part of the audience a non-ironic, heroic masculinity has become outdated, and can only be upheld briefly in Dan’s quasi-theatrical performance. The film emerges as a cultural text that on the surface seems to reiterate traditional concepts of masculinity but cannot sell these with a straight face, leaving – whether intentionally or not – a back door for a second, more critical interpretation. By shifting the main source of attack and reconciliation of Dan’s masculinity from Dan’s wife to his oldest son, the movie not only reflects changed anxieties about male gender roles, with its father-son setup it also aligns itself with a trend which Leo Braudy sees in remakes more generally: “[W]hen we imagine a combat of generations that reflects the tides of history, it seems invariably male/male, in a kind of masculine cultural parthenogenesis. No wonder then that many remakes are concerned with generational (often father/son) contests of meaning, and conflicts over the proper uses of authority and power.” (Braudy 1998: 332) The father-son setup also stages the challenge of the remake to its own ancestor, the premake, against which it has to pit itself.

W ORKS C ITED 3:10 TO YUMA (1957) (USA, R: Delmer Daves). 3:10 TO YUMA (2007) (USA, R: James Mangold). Baudrillard, Jean (1994): Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bly, Robert (1990): Iron John. A Book about Men, Reading: Addison-Wesley. Boon, Kevin Alexander (2005): “Heroes, Masculinity, and the Paradox of Masculinity in Contemporary Western Culture”, in: The Journal of Men’s Studies 13.3, 301-312. Bordin, Elisa (2014): Masculinity & Westerns. Regenerations at the Turn of the Millennium, Verona: ombre corte. BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991) (USA, R: John Singleton). Braudy, Leo (1998): “Afterword. Rethinking Remakes”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 327-334. Brandt, Michael/Haas, Derek (2006): “3:10 to Yuma: Final Shooting Script:”, , accessed on 29 Oct. 2014.

(R E)M AKING M EN IN THE 1950 S AND 2000 S: 3:10 TO Y UMA

| 77

Butler, Judith (2006): Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butter, Michael (2014): Plots, Designs, and Schemes. American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present, Berlin: de Gruyter. Falconer, Pete (2009): “3:10 Again. A Remade Western and the Problem of Authenticity”, in: Rachel Carroll (ed.), Adaptations in Contemporary Culture. Textual Infidelities, London: Continuum, 61-71. FIGHT CLUB (1999) (USA, R: David Fincher). Horton, Andrew/McDougal, Stuart Y. (eds.) (1998a): Play It Again, Sam. Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley: University of California Press. — (1998b): “Introduction”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 1-11. Hutcheon, Linda (2006): A Theory of Adaptation, London/New York: Routledge. Jeffords, Susan (1994): Hard Bodies. Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. JOHNNY GUITAR (1954) (USA, R: Nicholas Ray). Lefèvre, Pascal (2007): “Incompatible Visual Ontologies? The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images”, in: Ian Gordon/Mark Jancovich/Matthew P. McAllister (eds.), Film and Comic Books, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1-14. Leonard, Elmore (2006): “Three-Ten to Yuma”, in: Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories, New York: Harper, 46-70. Loock, Kathleen/Verevis, Constantine (2012): “Introduction. Remake/Remodel”, in: Kathleen Loock/Constantine Verevis (eds.), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions. Remake/Remodel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1-15. MacCurdy, Carol A. (2009): “Masculinity in 3:10 to Yuma”, in: Quarterly Review of Film and Video 26.4, 280-292. Mitchell, Lee C. (1996): Westerns. Making the Man in Fiction and Film, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nichols, Mary P. (2008): “Revisiting Heroism and Community in Contemporary Westerns. No Country for Old Men and 3:10 to Yuma”, in: Perspectives on Political Science 37.4, 207-215. Oltmann, Katrin (2008): Remake – Premake. Hollywoods romantische Komödien und ihre Gender-Diskurse, 1930-1960, Bielefeld: transcript. Petch, Simon (2007): “Return to Yuma”, in: Film Criticism 32.2, 48-69. Rajewsky, Irina O. (2005): “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation. A Literary Perspective on Intermediality”, in: Intermédialités 6, 43-64. SIN CITY (2005) (USA, R: Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller).

78 | FEHRLE

Tompkins, Jane P. (1992): West of Everything. The Inner Life of Westerns, New York: Oxford University Press. Weidinger, Martin (2006): Nationale Mythen – männliche Helden, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus-Verlag. Woolf, Virginia (2008): A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

II. Intra-medial Transcultural Remaking

Hollywood Remade New Approaches to Indian Remakes of Western Films L UCIA K RÄMER

Anybody who reads user comments on the Internet Movie Database about popular Hindi films moderately frequently will be familiar with posts that speculate about or claim to have identified Western models which the respective Hindi film has re-worked or plagiarized. Karan Johar’s 9/11 picture My Name is Khan (2010), for example, whose hero suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, was identified as “Rain Man meeting Forrest Gump”; Vishal Bhardwaj’s gangster flick Kaminey (2009) sparked a discussion whether the film was “Inspired by Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”; and before Aziz Mirza’s Kismat Konnection (2008) was even released, imdb.com users already speculated whether the film would be a remake of or inspired by Just My Luck (2006), a copy of 2 Weeks Notice (2002), or a “remade remix” of Peter Chelsom’s Serendipity (2001) (imdb.com). This game of ‘Spotting the Original’ is admittedly not restricted to Hindi films, as many Hollywood films are subject to similar remarks on the discussion boards of the Internet Movie Database. In connection with Hindi films, however, the fact that filmmakers re-work storylines from other films and film industries – and the fact that these sources usually remain unacknowledged – are often presented as typical of the Mumbai film industry, which thereby appears as derivative, unoriginal and parasitical. In fact, the term ‘Bollywood’, which is often used as a synonym for the Hindi film industry or, more generally, popular Indian cinema, has been interpreted by some to express just this derivativeness. Director Mani Shankar, for instance, stated in an article by newspaper The Hindu in 2003 that the word “epitomises our plagiarism and shows the desperate vacuum of ideas” in the Mumbai film industry (qtd. in Rajamani 2003: n. pag.). This claim has been supported by (among others) journalist Shakuntala Rao, who thinks that

82 | K RÄMER

“[b]eing insulted by the term Bollywood to describe the Hindi film industry seems to emanate a false sense of national/cultural pride. It is also a denial of an acknowledgment that Bollywood stories are often created, cloned, adapted and inspired from Hollywood” (2007: n. pag.) and, one might add, increasingly from other national cinemas, such as those in South Korea and Hong Kong. The Hindi film industry is indeed “notoriously appropriative” (Ganti 2007: 440), and there are many first-hand anecdotes to illustrate its habit of ‘unofficial’, ‘disguised’, ‘unlicensed’ or ‘unacknowledged’ remaking.1 British film reviewer Anil Sinanan, for example, reports that he “once stood on a set in India and witnessed a director taking strict instruction from a DVD of an American film that was playing at his side” (2006: n. pag.). Possibly even more striking is critic Anupama Chopra’s complaint, “It got to the point where I said to one director, ‘Where is your artistic skill?’ And he looked right at me and said: ‘My skill is knowing what to steal’.” (Qtd. in Wax 2009: n. pag.) Not all remaking in the Hindi film industry is illicit. It is a regular practice to remake older Hindi films,2 for example, and it is also common for successful films that were originally produced in South India to be remade in Hindi with local film stars – a trend that has visibly intensified since the success of Ghajini (2008), the Hindi remake by director A.R. Murugadoss of his own Tamil film of the same name. The crucial difference is that whereas Indian sources of remakes are generally acknowledged, foreign sources usually are not. So far, a limited number of academic texts have examined the adaptational strategies used in these unacknowledged remakes and have tried to position the films institutionally in relation to their Indian and global markets. In the present article, I want to add to the existing literature in two respects. I will first suggest some additions and modifications to the list of ‘Indianization’ strategies that critics have identified in transcultural Indian remakes, before I then go on to outline the institutional background of unofficial remaking in Bollywood and to discuss its textual and conceptual implications for the notion of the (transcultural) film remake.

‘I NDIANIZATION ’ S TRATEGIES The re-working of foreign material for Hindi films has been approached by film and media scholars in mainly three ways. There are case studies of individual

1

For this terminology cf. Verevis 2006: 5-9, Dusi 2011: 361f., Smith 2003: 187.

2

For an analysis of the recent remakes of several classic Hindi films, cf. Cossio (2013).

N EW A PPROACHES TO I NDIAN R EMAKES OF W ESTERN F ILMS

| 83

films that ‘Indianize’ foreign texts, such as Mary Donaldson-Evans’s article about Ketan Metha’s Madame Bovary adaptation Maya Memsaab (1992), or Michael Lawrence’s essay about Do Phool (Abdul Rashid Kardar, 1958), a film adaptation of Johanna Spyri’s children’s novel Heidi. A second strategy has emerged in the most recent texts about the phenomenon. They approach the Bollywood remake in the context of globalized cinema, identifying and analysing concrete textual changes but placing them in a larger context of transculturality. Iain Robert Smith, for example, does not try to identify national cultural reasons for the textual changes in Hindi remakes but examines Zinda, the unofficial Hindi version of South Korean film Oldboy, in terms of cultural exchange in the context of global media and geo-cultural flows (2013: 195). He regards the film “less as an attempt to ‘Indianize’ the source text than as an attempt to create a Bollywood film which engages with the common stylistic and narrative tropes of the global horror genre” (2013: 193) in order to reach beyond India. In another article, Neelam Sidhar Wright has identified a boom of various forms of remaking in Hindi cinema in the new millennium and interprets this trend as “the prime example of the current identity-collapse of Bollywood cinema” (2009: 206) where Bollywood has to cater to its traditional audiences while “being recast and remoulded to fit the international market” (2009: 206). My own suggestions for modifications and additions refer predominantly to the third trend in the literature about transcultural Bollywood remakes: the identification of the films’ general ‘Indianization’ strategies. Sidhar Wright, for example, detects the addition of emotion and sensation, “a need to transfer what is literal into the figural” (2009: 204), and the necessity “to accommodate Indian ethics and censorship” (2009: 205) as key adaptational strategies in Bollywood remakes of Hollywood films. Yet, to date, the most exhaustive attempts to systematize the textual changes, or ‘normalizations’ (Raby 1995: 838), of foreign films for an Indian cultural environment have been presented in two articles by Tejaswini Ganti and Sheila Nayar. Ganti (2007, orig. 2002) approaches ‘Indianization’ as a re-formation of foreign films to please Indian audiences, i.e. as a practice governed by how Hindi filmmakers think about their own audience. She regards the filmmakers as an interpretive community with a rather paternalistic, even condescending attitude towards their audience, who decide which films to re-make on the grounds of what they perceive to be their potential for identification and acceptance by Indian spectators. According to Ganti, the filmmakers’ worries about non-acceptance are exacerbated in the case of remakes, since “[t]he process of adapting a Hollywood film […] generates a self-consciousness about social norms and moral codes that can make filmmakers more cautious than when they pro-

84 | K RÄMER

duce films from an original screenplay. Because the practice of adaptation is motivated by a conscious desire to manage risk, Indianization tends to be a conservative process that precludes innovation in narrative and generic practices.” (2007: 447)

Ganti identifies three key strategies of ‘Indianization’: the addition of songs; the addition of emotion (not only as a state of feeling, but also as relating to interpersonal relationships), which also makes the narrative more moral; and the expansion of the narrative of the original film: in contrast to what Indian filmmakers call the “single-track” narrative of Hollywood films, Hindi films, which tend to be considerably longer, usually contain several parallel tracks and subplots. Where Ganti speaks of ‘Indianization’, Nayar speaks of ‘chutneyfication’ to describe the narrative changes that are made to render Hollywood films “acceptably Indian” (2003: 73). Focusing on the endings and resolutions of the films she investigates, Nayar identifies love-triangle-type scenarios, the treatment of parents and family themes as well as denouements of sacrifice, whose underlying principle is the fulfilment of one’s sacred duty (i.e. dharma), as key adaptation strategies in transcultural Bollywood remakes. Both Ganti and Nayar have a rather narrow focus, since they both concentrate on so-called ‘Bollywood formula films’, i.e. films that represent the salient structural, ideological and thematic features of Hindi cinema of the 1990s and noughties. Nayar moreover restricts herself further to romances and family dramas. Because of this limited perspective Nayar’s and Ganti’s lists of adaptational strategies require some additions and modifications. I want to concentrate on three points. The first is the role of star actors in the Hindi film fraternity for the practice of remaking; I then argue for the need to consider references to Indian politics as another Indianization strategy; and lastly, in contrast to most existing case studies, I want to emphasize that Hindi film remakes often draw not only on one but on several other films.

S TARS Even more so than in Hollywood, the star is the decisive factor for whether a Hindi film actually gets made. Empirical research has shown that to the spectators of Hindi films the presence of a particular star is as important as the topic or story for their decision to watch a film. This basically means that many spectators will watch a film simply on the basis of whether a star they admire is in it, and any new film with one of the megastars thus comes with a built-in audience. In the context of remaking, it comes as no surprise that original roles are adapted

N EW A PPROACHES TO I NDIAN R EMAKES OF W ESTERN F ILMS

| 85

to fit the image and talents of particular stars, which allows them to play up to audience expectations. Besides the routine addition of musical numbers, this showcasing of the star includes wardrobe and make-up choices as well as the creation of scenes that foreground the stars’ most famous qualities as actors and their aura. One particularly blatant example of this is the film Ghulam (1998) starring Aamir Khan. Ghulam is usually treated as a remake of Elia Kazan’s classic On the Waterfront (1954) (cf. e.g. Nayar 2003: 73), which is indeed the source of the main plot of the film. None of the critics so far seem to have taken into account, however, that Ghulam also contains scenes and plot strands from Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) and features a motorbike gang reminiscent of The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953). The common denominator of these American films is that they star the probably most famous representatives of method acting: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Robert De Niro. In Ghulam, Aamir Khan is set to follow in their footsteps. Khan has the image of being dedicated and risk-taking and, in brief, of being ‘the actor’ among the Hindi film stars. Not only did he refuse to play in several films simultaneously when this was still the norm for star actors in Bollywood, as he wished to be able to concentrate fully on one role at a time. He also famously once took a two-year break from acting because he felt the need to grow his hair for the tile role in Mangal Pandey (Ketan Mehta, 2005). In Ghulam his image collapses with that of his American models. Not content with simply remaking On the Waterfront, Ghulam relies on references to a best-of collage of method acting in order to showcase the talent of its star and pander to his image. Khan is given the opportunity to shine in the material, and for those in the know, the implicit relation to the work by De Niro, Brando and Dean creates an additional intertextual level where mere association with these performances already suggests Khan’s status as actor extraordinaire, which in turn raises the prestige of Ghulam. The practice of tailoring remakes as star vehicles is of course not restricted to Hindi cinema. Here, however, it is supported by the social structure of the industry. Despite the significant changes resulting from the corporatization of the Hindi film industry since the beginning of the new millennium, the industry is still strongly organized as a social network structure based on personal acquaintance (Lorenzen/Taeube 2007: 25; Punathambekar 2013: 13-14). Many of its members do not tire to refer to this social cosmos as a ‘fraternity’, thus underlining the importance of close interpersonal relationships for business cooperations. Often members of the industry will even emphasize that their relationship to others resembles family relations – and many of them are, of course,

86 | K RÄMER

indeed related in this way: the Kapoors, the Bachchans and the Roshans are only the most famous names among the film dynasties of Hindi cinema. This structure can make it easier – at least for established directors – to actually get the exact star they had envisioned for their film and, in the case of remakes, to ‘Indianize’ the material by means of casting. When Amitabh Bachchan took on the role of the powerful patriarch in Sarkar (2005), Ram Gopal Varma’s “tribute” to The Godfather, for example, director and star had already been wishing to work together for a very long time (Sen 2005: n. pag.), and Bachchan gladly accepted to play a role that had been tailored especially to showcase the intensity associated with his 1970s films and his superstar aura (Jha 2005: n. pag.).

R EFERENCING I NDIAN P OLITICS Apart from this institutional factor, Ganti and Nayar, because of their choice of films, also choose to ignore that some remakes do not go for the genre mixing that they both consider typical of Hindi films. The so-called ‘masala films’ of the 1970s and 1980s used to mix very disparate moods and generic modes in an attempt to appeal to diverse audience preferences. The romances and family dramas of the 1990s and early 2000s, which were at the heart of the Bollywood boom, tended to mix melodrama, comedy, tragedy and song-and-dance. Yet, Hindi crime dramas and gangster films since the 1990s, for example, have rarely indulged in genre mixing – remake or not. In Sarkar, for instance, it was duly avoided. Instead, the Indian film, while playing on the themes of family and treason that are already present in The Godfather, invests the story with an even more explicitly political angle, not least by transferring it into the present time, since the sarkar, i.e. the godfather figure, is the only provider of justice for his suppliants in the face of incompetent and corrupt police officers and politicians. Here we find a different point of emphasis in the ‘Indianization’ of the original than in the romances and family dramas examined by Ganti and Nayar. In those films the socio-cultural assimilation of the source text for Indian audiences is mainly based on the depiction of gender relations and the relations between parents and children. Sarkar clearly goes beyond this into the realm of politics, with a discussion of the relation between state and citizen and the failure of the contemporary state to provide justice. One could argue, of course, that even this is just a different version of the parent-child theme, if one casts the nation metaphorically as family, and thus the relationship between state and citizen as a parent-child relationship. In Dil Bole Hadippa! (2009) by Anurag Singh, an unofficial remake of American teenage

N EW A PPROACHES TO I NDIAN R EMAKES OF W ESTERN F ILMS

| 87

romance She’s the Man (Andy Fickman, 2006), precisely this thematic link between state and family is emphasized by the inclusion of a diaspora theme. Both films share the plot of a young woman dressing up as a man and playing in a male sports team (football and cricket, the Indian national sport, respectively). However, by making the girl’s love interest, Rohan, a British-Asian man who initially feels alienated both in India and in Britain, Dil Bole Hadippa! can introduce a completely new plot about Rohan’s developing self-realization in the Punjab. Rohan becomes a perfect illustration of “portable” ‘Indianness’ (Uberoi 1998: 308) that is independent of citizenship and place – a deterritorialized notion of ‘Indianness’ that also underlies various schemes by the Indian government such as the PIO (Person of Indian Origin) and the OCI (Overseas citizenship of India) cards and the yearly celebration of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Nonresident Indians Day, since 2003). The diaspora theme in films such as Dil Bole Hadippa! transports the notion of a global pan-Indianness, connecting spectators of Indian – or in some films more generally South Asian – descent across the globe. While the horror remake Zinda positions itself as a transnational film by drawing on various influences from international cinema (Smith 2003: 194), the “transcultural hypertextuality” (García Avis 2013: n. pag.) of Dil Bole Hadippa! positions the film as transnational in a different sense: its cultural translation – and thus cultural specification – targets viewers in the South Asian geo-cultural sphere, which spans all continents.

M ULTIPLE P RETEXTS

FOR

M ULTIPLE S TORYLINES

The plot of Rohan’s Indian self-realization in Dil Bole Hadippa! is a very good example for one of the key strategies of ‘chutneyfication’ identified by Ganti: it perfectly illustrates that Hindi filmmakers adapting a Western film usually consider it necessary to expand the “single-track” narrative of the original. Ganti fails to mention, however, that this need is not infrequently satisfied by means of a mix of borrowings, i.e. by a combination of scenes and/or entire plot strands from different films. This phenomenon deserves special attention, since a combination of several texts not only illustrates once again the appropriative tendencies of Bollywood. The selection of pretexts can moreover be indicative of the ideological frameworks in which the filmmakers feel compelled to move. The above-mentioned Ghulam is one example of this phenomenon; another is Anurag Basu’s Life in a Metro (2007). Life in a Metro is an ensemble piece centered on the topics of love, marriage, responsibility and the life struggle in Mumbai, with interrelated storylines re-

88 | K RÄMER

volving around ten main characters. The film won the Filmfare Award for Best Screenplay and was nominated in the ‘Best Story’ category for the International Indian Film Academy Award. This merely underlines the timeless brilliance of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) and David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), however, as the two main plot strands of Life in a Metro are tightly modelled on these two films. One plot strand moreover draws heavily on the more recent Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne, 2002), both in terms of story (character interaction, situations) and individual shots. One of the most striking images from Lyne’s film, the close-up of a woman’s quivering belly, which indicates her simultaneous sexual arousal and nervousness, has been faithfully reproduced. This combination of pretexts might seem surprising at first glance, especially in the way they are used. For although all films share the theme of marital fidelity, or rather infidelity, the ways in which the topic is approached are quite different in all of them. In Brief Encounter, the married middle-class protagonists never consummate their love, opting instead for uneventfully respectable lives; the middle-class moral framework is firmly upheld and stability restored. In The Apartment, adultery is endemic among the bosses of the protagonist, an office worker, illustrating not only their immorality, but also the thoughtlessness and ruthlessness that drive their behaviour both in their private and their business lives, thus hinting at the rottenness of the managerial class. Here, too, marital infidelity is symbolic of a loss of stability. The married woman’s affair in Unfaithful has similar ideological implications, since her marital infidelity has destructive and ultimately disastrous effects. One might even see the film as an antifeminist text, as the woman’s wish for sexual fulfilment and her giving in to temptation lead to death and the destruction of the family. Yet, while the woman is ultimately disgusted by her own behavior, Unfaithful also clearly presents her emotional and sexual excitement at the beginning of the affair, as her guilt is overridden by elation and fulfilment. Life in a Metro combines the moralistic framework from The Apartment and Brief Encounter, which upholds the sanctity of marriage, with the visual eroticization and sexualization of bodies in Unfaithful, while never hinting, in contrast to Unfaithful, that a sexual encounter outside marriage might be enjoyable. There is adulterous sex in Life in a Metro, but it is presented as entirely joyless and, like in The Apartment, as the prerogative of men. The result is not untypical of Hindi films of the noughties, which combine conservative notions of marriage and male and female sexuality on the story level with a sexualized and titillating presentation of actors’ bodies. From a Western point of view, this can create the impression of a temporal slippage or split modernity, as contemporary Indian

N EW A PPROACHES TO I NDIAN R EMAKES OF W ESTERN F ILMS

| 89

characters in contemporary settings act on the lines of Western film characters from the 1940s to early 1960s.3

B OLLYWOOD R EMAKES AND THE N OTION T RANSCULTURAL R EMAKE

OF THE

The adaptation of foreign films into a different national cinema (and thus usually a different cultural sphere) is of course always an international affair. In contrast to the earlier paragraphs of this essay, which were concerned with the ways in which specificities within the Hindi film industry shape the new texts, and thus with processes of ‘Indianization’ on the textual level, the final part of this essay shifts the perspective a little by considering unacknowledged Bollywood remaking in the context of the international film market. Against this background I will argue that the practice forces us to revise some of the established notions about remakes as an industrial category. In addition I want to suggest that the way in which Hindi filmmakers have been handling the production of remakes epitomizes the changing role of Indian films generally in the international film market. The extent of unacknowledged remaking in Bollywood is so endemic that the English Wikipedia entry on Bollywood has an entire paragraph devoted to plagiarism. This state of affairs is possible because except for some high-profile releases, such as blockbusters or selected award-winning films, Hollywood and other foreign films are relatively unknown in India. Like the U.S., India has a domestic market that is in principle large enough for the country’s film industry to survive and that is predominantly geared to domestic product. The audiences are not used to watching foreign films in dubbed versions nor to subtitles. All this favors films with original Indian verbal tracks whose stories are set in a fictional world whose cultural practices and values are readily recognizable to the spectators. Moreover, also like their U.S. counterparts, Indian audiences have a strong affection for their domestic stars (cf. Kühle 2006: 9). In contrast to the hegemonic role that U.S. films play in many other film markets around the world, their box-office share in India therefore hovers around only 5 percent (Thussu 2008: 99).4 Indian filmmakers can thus safely assume that most Western

3 4

Cf. Williams’s notion of remakes as transhistorical exercises (2002: 152). According to Saikat Chatterjee, “[f]or decades, Hollywood tried to pry the market open with blockbusters dubbed in local languages, yet success was fleeting”, which is

90 | K RÄMER

films will be unfamiliar to almost all but the most cinephile members of their Indian audiences, and they have used this circumstance to appropriate films quite freely and, in the vast majority of cases, without bothering to obtain remaking or adaptation rights. Some of the basic notions developed around ‘official’ remakes therefore need to be modified in the Indian context. For example, when Verevis speaks of remaking as an industrial category and posits the remake as a category which (similar to genre) establishes and is based on a contract between filmmakers and audience, the same obviously does not apply to these unacknowledged remakes. Nonetheless, unacknowledged remaking is so widespread in the Hindi film industry that it must surely be considered an institutionalized industrial category. It conforms to David Wills’s description of the remake as “a precise institutional form of the structure of repetition” (1998: 148), yet follows quite different rules than those associated with Western film remakes – a healthy reminder that the theories and categories established by the still “Hollywoodcentric” criticism in film studies (Shohat/Stam 2003: 2) cannot simply be transferred onto other national cinemas but must always be tested, and if necessary revised, in light of variations and differences. The unacknowledged Bollywood remake thus emerges as a specific national variety of the remake as industrial category. Yet, even unacknowledged Bollywood remakes are of course remakes in the sense that they exemplify a specific textual category – a category of texts sharing “readily recognizable narrative units” (Verevis 2006: 1) with a source text, but also occupying a position of ‘controlled deviation’ from it (Dusi 2011: 365). An analysis of the relationship of similarity and variation between remake and ‘original’ then allows us to compare the two films concerning their socio-cultural relevance and inspiration, the personal choices of their filmmakers as well as their stylistic and narrative elements. In the case of remakes of Western films in mainstream Indian cinema, the differences from the ‘original’ which occur in the process of transcultural remaking from expropriation to permutation and domestication (Martinez 2009: 14) are usually quite considerable, as Ganti has pointed out: “Although remakes from other Indian languages resemble the original screenplay, adaptations of Hollywood films barely do because they have been transformed […] to conform with the conventions of Hindi cinema.” (2007: 440) In a similar vein, Nayar suggests that “[a] remake in Bollywood […] can never literally imply a remake, for the popular Hindi film is heavily circumscribed by the expectations and de-

why Fox, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros. now use local talent to produce Indianlanguage films. See Hoad (2012) for their continuing lack of impact.

N EW A PPROACHES TO I NDIAN R EMAKES OF W ESTERN F ILMS

| 91

mands of its audience” (2003: 74; emphasis in original) regarding, for instance, the depiction of sexual mores, multiple plots, musical numbers or character types. Hence Nayar’s use of the term ‘chutneyfication’ rather than ‘remake’. Due to the different aesthetics and storytelling conventions in Bollywood films, “pure duplication is not the industry’s intent” (Nayar 2003: 75) when it comes to reworking or making over a Hollywood film. It may be due to the considerable slippage resulting from such re-workings of other films in transcultural Hindi remakes that the ‘Spotting the Original’ game leads reviewers and critics to discover remakes even in cases where the similarities between the alleged original and the adaptation are of the most tenuous kind. Apparently, the notion of parasitical Bollywood is so ingrained that commentators are eager to see remakes everywhere5 – an attitude sometimes even found in academic work. Nayar, for example makes the far-fetched claim that Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) is a revamp of the film Jack & Sarah (1995), although the parallels between the two films are extremely slim and hardly text-specific. In both, a mother dies in childbed; her husband is left with a daughter to bring up and interfering grand-parents, and he finds a new love. Further vague surface similarities between the films exist in two scenes: one, the leave-taking of husband and wife (while the wife is still alive in KKHH, however, she is already dead in Jack and Sarah) and two, a scene on a bench (between husband and new love interest in KKHH, between the husband and his father in J&S). On this basis, the application of the label ‘remake’ appears rather fanciful.6 Perhaps the most surprising aspect of unacknowledged Bollywood remaking is that the Hollywood studios whose products were appropriated for the Indian market used to turn a blind eye on it, even though Indian law, despite its rather restricted interpretation of film copyright, would have allowed them to legally pursue unauthorized ‘rip-offs’ of storylines and peculiar visual elements (Banerjee 2010: n. pag.). Only in 2009 did they start to challenge such cases of plagiarism in court when 20th Century Fox sued BR Chopra Films for an unauthorized remake of the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny and obtained a $200,000 settlement (Wax 2009: n. pag.). This change of policy reflects the fact that Hollywood is keeping a sharper eye on the growing Indian film market, while at the same time Indian corporations have been breaking into Hollywood and Indian producers are seeking business relations with American studios. Anil Ambani’s

5 6

See e.g. the list of ‘Bollywood Remakes’ compiled by Good God Entertainment. See instead the more convincing analysis of how KKHH re-works and mixes various local and international pretexts into a “glocal masala film” in Richards 2011: 345-349.

92 | K RÄMER

investment in DreamWorks SKG Studios has been the most striking example of this development, while the forging of distribution deals between Indian producers and Hollywood distributors is probably more relevant for the international visibility of Indian films. My Name is Khan, for example, would have been a financially successful film even without international distribution by 20th Century Fox, but certainly not on the same scale.

C ONCLUSION : P LAYING BY

THE

R ULES ?

Still, the production of unofficial remakes persists, as Indian filmmakers often cannot or simply will not spend the prices quoted by the right holders (Ayaz 2007: n. pag.). This underlines the current ambivalent international status of Bollywood. On the one hand, the practice might be interpreted positively as a form of subversive appropriation and empowerment. Where transcultural film remakes produced and distributed by Hollywood have been considered “a structure of dominance” expressing and consolidating the power of Hollywood in the global film market (Herbert 2006: 31), the unacknowledged Bollywood remake can be regarded as a form of resistance. As for all remakes, its relationship to the ‘premake’ can, after all, be interpreted as a form of competition, both economically and artistically (cf. e.g. Leitch 2002: 41). However, from a different angle, especially in light of the fact that the references to the original need to remain hidden, it can also be seen as reinforcing an image of Bollywood as the unrespectable cousin or ‘poor relation’ of Hollywood, both in creative and financial terms. It is because of this precarious international image that a growing number of Indian filmmakers who are interested in establishing business and artistic relations with film corporations abroad have started to ‘play by the rules’ and, in a bid for international respectability, acquire the necessary rights when they want to remake or adapt copyrighted material. The first widely publicized case was Dharma Productions’s acquisition of the remake rights of Stepmom (Chris Columbus, 1998) for their film We are Family (Sidharth Malhotra, 2010), which was duly announced in press releases in order to boost the film’s credentials. Since then there has also been an official Indian remake of The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969), and “Original Entertainment has closed a five-picture deal with Millennium Films for Bollywood remakes of ‘Rambo’, ‘The Expendables’, ‘16 Blocks’, ‘88 Minutes’ and ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’.” (McNary 2013: n. pag.) Moreover, Hollywood is of course not the only source of inspiration. UTV Motion Pictures and director Imtiaz Ali have allegedly teamed up to co-produce an

N EW A PPROACHES TO I NDIAN R EMAKES OF W ESTERN F ILMS

| 93

official Hindi remake of Korean action comedy My Girlfriend is an Agent (Seong-il Cheon, 2009), and Iranian blockbuster Cease Fire (Tahmineh Milani, 2006) seems also set for an official Hindi remake (Shackleton 2011: n. pag.; Sahgal 2013: n. pag.). It remains to be seen whether the growing number of official remakes (and their aggressive publicizing) will help to modify the image of the Hindi film industry as derivative, unoriginal, and parasitical. Whatever the development, the phenomenon of unacknowledged Bollywood remaking remains a healthy reminder of how the specific practices in film industries beyond Hollywood and Europe may question unspoken assumptions of the alleged ‘norms’ of remakes and remaking.

W ORKS C ITED Ayaz, Shaikh (2007): “Steal Factory”, , 22 Aug. 2007, accessed on 7 Nov. 2014. Banerjee, Arpan (2010): “How Hollywood Can Sue Bollywood for Copyright Infringement and Save Indian Cinema”, , accessed on 25 June 2013. “Bollywood” (n.d.): , accessed on 9 Nov. 2014. BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945) (UK, R: David Lean). Chatterjee, Saikat (2010): “Hollywood Goes Bollywood as U.S. Studios Target India Filmgoers”, , 5 June 2010, accessed on 9 Nov. 2014. Cossio, Cecilia (2013): Allarme a Bollywood. Dilaga la febbre del remake!, n.p. DIL BOLE HADIPPA! (2009) (IN, R: Anurag Singh). Donaldson-Evans, Mary (2010): “The Colonization of Madame Bovary. Hindi Cinema’s Maya Memsaab”, in: Adaptation 3.1, 21-35. Dusi, Nicola (2011): “Remaking als Praxis. Zu einigen Problemen der Transmedialität”, in: Robert Blanchet et al. (eds.), Serielle Formen. Von den frühen Film-Serials zu aktuellen Quality-TV- und Online-Serien, Marburg: Schüren, 357-376. Forrest, Jennifer/Koos, Leonard R. (eds.) (2002): Dead Ringers. The Remake in Theory and Practice, Albany: State University of New York Press. Ganti, Tejaswini (2007) [2002]: “‘And Yet my Heart Is Still Indian’. The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood”, in: Julie F. Codell (ed.), Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema, Malden/Oxford: Blackwell, 439-457.

94 | K RÄMER

García Avis, Isadora (2013): “Transcultural Hypertextuality in Televisual Remakes. An Approach from John Fiske’s Typology of Intertextuality”, Presentation at Conference ‘Adventures in Textuality. Adaptation Studies in the 21st Century’, University of Sunderland, 4 April 2013. GHAJINI (2008) (IN, R: A.R. Murugadoss). GHULAM (1998) (IN, R: Vikram Bhatt). Good God Entertainment (n.d.): “Bollywood Remakes”, , accessed on 7 Nov. 2014. Herbert, Daniel (2006): “Sky’s the Limit. Transnationality and Identity in Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky”, in: Film Quarterly 60.1, 28-38. Hoad, Phil (2012): “Will Hollywood Ever Conquer Bollywood?”, , 14 Feb. 2012, accessed on 13 Mar. 2012.

JACK & SARAH (1995) (F/UK, R: Tim Sullivan). Jha, Subhash K. (2005): “I designed ‘Sarkar’ for Amitabh. Varma”, , 5 July 2005, accessed on 9 Nov. 2014. KUCH KUCH HOTA HAI (1998) (IN, R: Karan Johar). Kühle, Sandra (2006): Remakes. Amerikanische Versionen europäischer Filme, Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag. Lawrence, Michael (2012): “Hindianizing Heidi. Working Children in Abdul Rashid Kardar’s Do Phool”, in: Adaptation 5.1, 102-118. Leitch, Thomas M. (2002): “Twice-Told Tales. Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake”, in: Forrest/Koos, Dead Ringers, 37-62. LIFE IN A METRO (2007) (IN, R: Anurag Basu). Lorenzen, Mark/Taeube, Florian Arun (2007): “Breakout from Bollywood? Internationalization of Indian Film Industry”, , accessed on 9 Nov. 2014. Martinez, D.P. (2009): Remaking Kurosawa. Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema, Basingstoke: Macmillan. McNary, Dave (2013): “Original Ent. Plans Bollywood Remakes of Rambo, Expendables”, , 15 May 2013, accessed on 21 June 2013. MY NAME IS KHAN (2010) (IN, R: Karan Johar). Nayar, Sheila J. (2003): “Dreams, Dharma and Mrs. Doubtfire. Exploring Hindi Popular Cinema via Its ‘Chutneyed’ Western Scripts”, in: JPF&T – Journal of Popular Film and Television 31.2, 73-82. OLDBOY (2003) (South Korea, R: Chan-wook Park). Punathambekar, Aswin (2013): Fom Bombay to Bollywood. The Making of a Global Media Industry, New York/London: New York University Press.

N EW A PPROACHES TO I NDIAN R EMAKES OF W ESTERN F ILMS

| 95

Raby, Michel J. (1995): “‘I lost it at the movies’. Teaching Culture through Cinematic Doublets”, in: The French Review 68.5, 837-845. Rajamani, Radhika (2003): “Starspeak on Bollywood”, , 25 June 2003, accessed on 2 Sept. 2011. Rao, Shakuntala (2007): “Bollywood vs Hollywood”, , 29 Apr. 2007, accessed on 27 Jan. 2009. Richards, Rashna Wadia (2011): “(Not) Kramer vs. Kumar: The Contemporary Bollywood Remake as Glocal Masala Film, in: Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28, 342-352. Sahgal, Geety (2013): “Sharman, Mohanlal Finalised for Remake of Iranian Film, Cease Fire”, , 18 Apr. 2013, accessed on 22 June 2013. SARKAR (2005) (IN, R: Ram Gopal Varma). Sen, Raja (2005): “Sarkar is a Director’s Film”, , 29 June 2005, accessed on 23 June 2013. Shackleton, Liz (2011): “UTV, Imtiaz Ali Team for My Girlfriend is an Agent Remake”, , 11 Nov. 2011, accessed on 22 June 2013. Shohat, Ella/Stam, Robert (2003): “Introduction”, in: Ella Shohat/Robert Stam (eds.), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, New Brunswick/London: Rutgers University Press, 1-17. Sidhar Wright, Neelam (2009): “‘Tom Cruise? Tarantino? E.T.?...Indian!’. Innovation through Imitation in the Cross-cultural Bollywood Remake”, in: Iain Robert Smith (ed.), Cultural Borrowings. Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation [= Special issue of Scope: An Online Journal of Film & TV Studies]. University of Nottingham. 194-210, , accessed on 20 June 2013. Sinanan, Anil (2006): “My Life as a Bollywood Film Fan”, , accessed on 6 Oct. 2011. Smith, Iain Robert (2013): “Oldboy goes to Bollywood. Zinda and the Transnational Appropriation of South Korean ‘Extreme’ Cinema”, in: Alison Peirse/Daniel Martin (eds.), Korean Horror Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 187-198. THE APARTMENT (1960) (USA, R: Billy Wilder). Thussu, Daya Kishan (2008): “The Globalization of ‘Bollywood’. The Hype and the Hope”, in: Anandam P. Kavoori/Aswin Punathambekar (eds.), Global Bollywood, New York/London: New York University Press, 97-113. Uberoi, Patricia (1998): “The Diaspora Comes Home. Disciplining Desire in DDLJ”, in: Contributions to Indian Sociology 32, 305-336. UNFAITHFUL (2002) (USA/D/F, R: Adrian Lyne).

96 | K RÄMER

Verevis, Constantine (2006): Film Remakes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wax, Emily (2009): “Hollywood Finally Challenging India’s Booming Bollywood over Knockoffs”, , 26 Aug. 2009, accessed on 13 July 2012. WE ARE FAMILY (2010) (IN, R: Sidharth Malhotra). Williams, Alan (2002): “The Raven and the Nanny. The Remake as Crosscultural Encounter”, in: Forrest/Koos, Dead Ringers, 151-168. Wills, David (1998): “The French Remark. Breathless and Cinematic Citationality”, in: Andrew Horton/Stuart Y. McDougal (eds.), Play It Again, Sam. Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 147-161. ZINDA (2006) (IN, R: Sanjay Gupta).

Hellish Departure? The Departed, Infernal Affairs and Globalized Film Cultures M ARTIN L ÜTHE

Both within recent scholarship in cultural studies and recent film-making two topical fields have figured prominently: firstly, the topic of what could most broadly be referred to as adaptation and, secondly, the topic of globalizing culture(s) and cultures of globalization. Not surprisingly, then, scholars have separately examined and explored the realm of adaptation as well as the sphere of globalization with regard to their respective roles and meaning-making potentials as part of our contemporary processes of cultural production. In the course of this contribution I attempt to bring these two spheres in productive tension and dialogue in my reading of Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Academy-Award-winning film The Departed as a remake of the 2002 film Infernal Affairs directed by Wai-Keung Lau and Alan Mak.1 The Departed – much like Infernal Affairs – critically deals with and explores the production, the performance, and ultimately the lack of fixity and guarantee of (social) identities and powerfully expresses an immanent fear of a loss of the certainty of a coherent self. Accordingly, I conceive of one of the central topoi of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed – a schizophrenic threat to identity – as inscribed in its very own formal relationship with its central ‘source material’, a 2002 Hong Kong movie by the English title Infernal Affairs: while The Departed represents a serious effort to remain faithful to its source on the one hand – by deploying extensive verbal,

1

I set out using the term ‘remake’ heuristically and in line with how Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis have recently conceived of it as “generally considered a version of another film” and thus belonging to what they call the same “semiotic register[…]” (2012: 6; emphasis in original).

98 | L ÜTHE

visual, and general cinematographic citations – the film also illustrates an eagerness to leave behind the original Hong Kong film according to the logic of its spatial and cultural re-contextualization as I will illustrate throughout this essay. Both ideas, that of cultural remaking, as a practice of adaptation, and that of schizophrenia hold powerful places in postmodern theory as well as postmodernist cultural production This essay, then, deploys schizophrenia as an umbrella term for the overall cultural conditions relating to what one could describe as a general cultural and individual distrust towards the promise of an alleged stability and fixity suggested by the term ‘identity’ as they occur in a postmodern or late modern cultural setting.2 In no way does the essay aspire to use the two movies as authentic or realist depictions of how the term schizophrenia functions as a part of medical discourse and has been transfixed by said discourse, nor does it intend to add yet another complication to the study of postmodern identities and the seemingly waning meaningfulness of identity as a category. Rather, I make use of the term to allude to a distinct discursive tradition of self-description within postmodernity and the field of cultural studies after and in response to the linguistic turn and attempt to show how the movies at hand perform and interrogate such overall distrust towards identity.3 As Anne Lovell puts it in reference to those thinkers who have ascribed a connection between schizophrenia and postmodernity: “In contemporary philosophy and literature, the alienation, estrangement, and incomprehensibility that often characterize schizophrenia come to stand for ways of being in the world. Schizophrenia provides a primary metaphor for the conditions of modernity (Sass 1992) and postmodernity (Jameson 1991). Similarly, the fragmented discourse and continual dislocation of meaning of multiple referents associated with schizophrenia are mirrored in postmodern aesthetics and, some would say, in the experience of the postmodern self […].” (1997: 355)

2

For an extensive discussion of schizophrenia in clinical and postmodern cultural theory and with regard to how the concept of schizophrenia travels between the realms of the clinical and the cultural in complex ways, see for example: Woods (2011) and White/Hellerich (1998).

3

Of course, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have most famously and notoriously theorized and worked with schizophrenia as a prism to understanding contemporary cultural formations, especially in conjunction with a postmodernist capitalist episteme; see, for example, Deleuze/Guattari (1987); also, Fredric Jameson (1991) establishes schizophrenia as meaningful for postmodernism’s cultural production, as the following quote by Anne Lovell in the text suggests.

T HE D EPARTED , I NFERNAL A FFAIRS AND G LOBALIZED F ILM C ULTURES

| 99

I attempt to trace this sense of fragmentation and dislocation both on the level of the remake’s narrative as well as on the structural level (of the form of the remake), because this essay discusses a ‘transnational remake’ of a movie that interrogates these uncertainties relating to being in the (contemporary) world, which makes this instance of remaking so culturally meaningful in the first place. In an unpublished dissertation on “Transnational Remakes” between China and the USA, Jinhua Li rightfully asserts: “[These] transnational exchanges allow us to map Hollywood-China relationship [sic!] in the new millennium, which transcends literal and figurative borders and boundaries and obtains new significations through different cultural articulations. Both Chinese and American films transform prior narratives to accommodate new political and cultural agendas.” (2011: iv)

Suitably then, this essay explores the relationship between The Departed and Infernal Affairs using intersectional4 analytic categories of identity in two specific ‘glocales’ in order to make sense of this particular moment in global film production and as a distinct expression of a structural postmodern schizophrenia embedded in and constitutive of late capitalism – and globalization. Obviously, this schizophrenia provides a crucial element for remakes and adaptations in this partly globalized world, as it seems to speak to the complex relationship between self and other, source and remake, inherent in the act of remodeling a cultural artifact that has already created meaning a first time around. This remake then, like other late-capitalist remakes, can as much be read as being about the act of global cultural remaking as about the more conventional and intuitive themes emerging from the movie plot, such as the standard ‘organized-crime-vs.-the-police’ narrative, the audiovisual logic and aesthetics of the movie, or its central characters representing (the will to do) good and evil in the world. The Departed produces and interrogates that notion in a number of scenes; this chapter analyzes two of them in support of the overall argument put forth regarding the ‘intersectedness’ of remaking and globalization. I argue that The Departed in its most decisive changes of the original plot places additional emphasis on the loss of traditional markers of guaranteed, wholesome, unified identities, such as ethnicity, sexuality and romance, religion, or patriarchal generational lineage as the late-capitalist state of being and by doing so, in a decisive shift from its Asian original, the movie embodies and articulates a cultural anxie-

4

For an illuminating discussion of the frequently deployed term ‘intersectionality’ and my use of it here, see McCall (2005).

100 | L ÜTHE

ty towards globalization as a possible threat to the given formation of transnational cultural production and exchange under the leadership of the United States. Said paranoia, this chapter asserts, culminates in The Departed’s treatment of Asia as both unwanted and threatening Other, whereby the movie playfully expresses and acknowledges its own subconscious fear of being Other in relation to its Asian source. While one critic has referred to The Departed as merely “a bloated version” (Dawson 2012: n. pag.) of Infernal Affairs, I attempt to more closely observe the significance and ‘narrative location’ of said “bloating”, i.e. to take the distinctive narrative additions to the original film particularly seriously. The first part of the chapter examines the trope of schizophrenia in The Departed and Infernal Affairs, before my reading of these films informs a subsequent analysis of the depiction of late capitalism and Asia in The Departed and, in conclusion, observes the inherent schizophrenia of the practice of remaking itself.

S CHIZOPHRENIA AND H YBRID I DENTITIES D EPARTED AND I NFERNAL A FFAIRS

IN

T HE

Infernal Affairs, much like its Hollywood remake The Departed, follows the work and private lives of two young policemen, who both have been implemented as moles by opposing teams to infiltrate organized crime on the one and the police on the other hand. As a viewer, we are made to understand that we might be watching a version of what Thomas Elsaesser calls the “mind-game film”, as part of which “one overriding common feature […] is a delight in disorienting or misleading spectators” (2009: 15); however, in the case of both Infernal Affairs and The Departed the narration remains reliable and it is not the spectator who is facing his/her participation in a mind-game, but rather the two protagonists of the movies, which then provides a crucial element of the spectators’ joy in watching the movie unfold. The mind-game at play in both movies emerges from two powerful and interrelated uncertainties for the characters and on the level of the plot: firstly, the extent to which both protagonists in each of the movies have to pretend to be someone else produces an intense state of psychological uncertainty and a complication of the notion of unified, stable identity. Secondly, this growing subconscious awareness of a legitimate distrust of the self finds a catalyst in the very conscious awareness by the characters of the double infiltration and the consequences of their possibly being found out – i.e. a more or less legitimate reproduction of distrust of anything Other, which in its extreme, clinical form would

T HE D EPARTED , I NFERNAL A FFAIRS AND G LOBALIZED F ILM C ULTURES

| 101

amount to a state of paranoia.5 The plots of Infernal Affairs and The Departed center on the pair of characters of Chan Wing Yan and Lau Kin Ming, and Billy Costigan and Colin Sullivan, respectively, with the Chan Wing Yan and Billy Costigan characters serving as the police’s moles infiltrating organized crime, and Lau Kin Ming and Colin Sullivan as organized crime’s mole infiltrating the police. Each of the characters also enters complex son-father relationships with the respective leaders of organized crime and the police, as the plots unfold. Consequently, in the course of both movies, the audience witnesses each pair of moles become progressively uncertain of who they consider themselves to be, thereby expressing the above-mentioned theme of a distrust of the self that we find in a number of movies and narratives beginning in the late 1990s and arguably continuing to this day, for example, in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010). We find this best expressed by the twin-characters Chan Wing Yan and Billy Costigan, the ‘good moles’ infiltrating the mafia, who both at different moments in the films express their anxiety to forget who they really are and – consequently – how to be themselves and act in accordance with themselves. Strikingly, however, the extent to which this uncertainty is utilized in both movies marks one major departure of the Scorsese remake: The Departed more excessively deploys and problematizes two common markers of identity production, namely those of class and ethnicity in the Costigan character, which then also works to emphasize and exaggerate Costigan’s mental instability, his schizophrenia. Unlike Chan Wing Yan, who manages to find solace and peace by resting or sleeping in the psychotherapist’s chair, Costigan’s more tumultuous relationship with his psychotherapist has him express his mental confusion, confess his contemplation of suicide, and request powerful psychotropic drugs to cope with his schizophrenia and paranoia – which then ultimately leads to a romance between him and his therapist. However, it is the filmic insistence on the combined ethnic and class background of the Costigan character that makes for an even more significant and noteworthy departure from his Infernal Affairs doppelganger. As part of a lengthy interview scene in the exposition at the beginning of the movie, during which the audience finds out why Costigan was chosen to become the mole, The Departed capitalizes on and literally interrogates the topic of

5

I use the term ‘paranoia’ both broadly and heuristically, referring to a heightened distrust of Others and the environment. In the context of the movie this leads to progressively alienated, unsettled, distrusting characters, especially in Costigan, Dignam, and Costello.

102 | L ÜTHE

schizophrenia. The scene utilizes the concept of schizophrenia as both form and content for the interview. Essentially, the interview scene reveals the schizophrenic nature of Costigan’s upbringing, who socially and geographically grew up in two different places demanding him to perform according to specific sociocultural codes in order not to be found out as an alien Other. As Detective Sergeant Dignam, a hard-boiled supervisor and older brother figure, remarks in that interview, “You little fucking snake, you were like different people” to which Costigan replies, “Are you a psychiatrist?”, thereby already alluding to a sense of paranoia the plot of the film will then further build on and also pointing the audience to the bloated significance of the mind as a terrain of medical and psychoanalytical productivity. The scene additionally marks one of three instances in which the pair of Captain Queenan, the father figure to Costigan in The Departed, and Dignam performs the quintessential schizophrenic police routine, namely that of the good and the bad cop; the schizophrenia of which becomes especially apparent in this performative doubling of the content of the interview and with an awareness that the double of Queenan and Dignam are the result of the split of the original character of Wong from the Hong Kong movie.6 Queenan’s and Dignam’s behavior furthermore doubles the exact schizophrenic axis they confront Costigan with: namely, that of ethnicity and class in the context of the Boston ‘glocale’. Here, more so than in the original, the specific intersectedness of class and ethnic backgrounds of the characters is brought to the fore and they seem to matter more than the characters’ specific affiliation to either the police force or the mafia. This schizophrenic split provides one of the crucial threads of the Hollywood movie, which interestingly enough ‘bloats’ an aspect only implicitly hinted at in the original – probably due to its commonplace nature in Hong Kong history: namely, the history of colonialism as a history of schizophrenic colonial and postcolonial subjects, which in the movie we find embodied in the villain Hon Sam, whose very name points us to Hong Kong’s peculiar colonial past. As Margherita Heyer-Caput in her essay on The Departed rightly observes: “The loss of ethnic consistency is incarnated in the most powerful way by Frank Costello’s character. A figure of ethnic contamination, […] Costello intertwines aspects of the filmic referent, the Chinese boss Hon Sam, his dual historical referent, the Irish-American

6

Margherita Heyer-Caput similarly analyzes the ‘interrogation scene’ in The Departed, if with a decisive focus on ethnicity and religion: Heyer-Caput (2011: 175). The depiction of Catholicism in the movie furthermore works to intensify the production of specific ethnic identities, as Heyer-Caput convincingly shows.

T HE D EPARTED , I NFERNAL A FFAIRS AND G LOBALIZED F ILM C ULTURES

| 103

mobster James Bulger, and the Italian-American gangster Frank Costello, born Francesco Castiglia.” (2011: 173)

Here, Scorsese capitalizes on the history of organized crime in the United States in general, and Boston specifically, in order to emphasize an all-encompassing state of schizophrenia in the characters of the movie, at which point Scorsese visualizes the specific significance of intersecting histories of organized crime, ethnicity, and masculinity. In accordance with and reference to Infernal Affairs, the audience finds these intersecting histories most violently expressed in the character of the movie’s main villain, Frank Costello. Not surprisingly then – for Scorsese – the inherent tension of the ethnically ‘contaminated’ character is at times resolved around Catholic religious symbolism; which marks another powerful text absent in Infernal Affairs, even though it is safe to argue that both films begin to address questions of “ultimate concern” – Paul Tillich’s (1957) definition of religion – with their titles (Heyer-Caput 2011: 173f).7 Leaving the topos of religion aside and the question it raises regarding my argument for now, I argue that it is the very earthly threefold intersection of masculinity, sexuality, and violence that deserves more attention and – again – makes an illuminating shift from Infernal Affairs to The Departed apparent.8 Infernal Affairs is a violent movie, and one of the most surprising and horrendous outbursts of violence, a scene set in and around an elevator with surprise shootings filmed from close distance – can be found in both the original and its remake. However, Scorsese much more openly demarcates the violence at play in The Departed as a highly sexualized, violent expression of male-to-male competition and as a decisive feature of the ethnic masculinities portrayed. Even more so, it is the significant sexual overtone of almost any violent act in The Departed that might be found shocking by audiences watching the movie. As the discovery of either mole seems imminent and fast-approaching, the tension between the male pairs on either side rises in both movies and the heretofore father-son-like relationships threaten to deteriorate and break under pressure. However, Scorsese chooses to depict these rising tensions with regard to both sides: Costello’s language and behavior now powerfully evoke a perverted mind in a sexual sense, most notably in his very specific threats to rape Sullivan’s girlfriend if he fails him and does not find out who in his team is working

7

Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) address religiosity and Catholicism rather explicitly, while other films from Scorsese’s oeuvre do so more implicitly.

8

For a discussion of religious themes in Scorsese’s oeuvre, see Palmer 2007.

104 | L ÜTHE

undercover against him; whereas Costigan and Dignam’s personal feud finds itself on the verge of complete explosion with the genre-specific confrontational threats of demasculinization along with outbursts of physical violence. Costello’s threats and the overall sexual – at times homo-erotic – tension far exceed the cultural practice of ‘ball-busting’ as a signifier of Italian-American male culture in general and the imagination of Italian-American mafia culture in particular.9 Rather, the frequent references to sexuality and sexual violence between the male protagonists in The Departed express the movie’s accentuation of the lost guarantee of one’s stable and ‘sane’ sexuality in postmodern globalized culture and further works to establish an ethnically hybrid Italian-Irish-Americanness. And, as the movie lets us know in three different instances, the general paranoia depicted in the film produces a legitimate distrust of one’s own sexuality and of sexuality as a private ‘safe-haven’. In one of the showdowns of the movie Sullivan lets the audience and Costello find out that “all that murdering and fucking” have produced no sons to point out a decisive shortcoming in one of the movie’s central male characters by questioning his physical capacity to reproduce. Similarly, as part of the aforementioned romantic triangle between Sullivan, Costigan, and Madolyn, who ends up being pregnant by either one of them, the movie establishes that Sullivan might at times or at least once have to deal with erectile dysfunction. The movie suggests Sullivan’s alleged ‘sexual failure’ embedded in a montage sequence of crude phallic imagery surrounding the brief scene, during which Madolyn, peeling a banana, comforts her partner in the morning after the alleged incident of what he seems to be experiencing as his ‘sexual failing’. The montage serves as an illustration of both of the male characters, who are moles, familiarizing themselves in their new respective environments, with Costigan having to bear witness and partake in excessive forms of male-on-male violence, which is juxtaposed with Sullivan’s suggested softening and sexual insecurities. The movie thus blurs these two depictions of specific crises of masculinity, of which one results from the allegedly intrinsic ‘violent nature’ in the production of male identities in all-male fraternities, and the other from a supposed feminization and softening of the young male urban professional – a role Sullivan starts to embody as the movie evolves – in a late capitalist context. The movie depicts both of these types of responses to the 21st-century continuation of crises of masculinities and its distinct challenges as problematic and deconstructs them both as non-

9

For an analysis of the cultural meaning and significance of Hollywood representations of ‘ball-busting’ and similar linguistic strategies and comedic coming-of-age rituals, see Torresi (2007: 533ff.)

T HE D EPARTED , I NFERNAL A FFAIRS AND G LOBALIZED F ILM C ULTURES

| 105

sustainable types of men. Here, the film explicates the interconnected significance of sexuality and violence for the production of these postmodern male types, while simultaneously highlighting and establishing the very limits and futility of such production in the realm of the movie and its main characters, who all face violent and violently surprising deaths, an element the remake might be best known for. Sullivan’s and Dignam’s fighting, especially with regard to Queenan’s breaking them up, generates an original theme of brotherly love and competition, which then allows for an ending which provides a different degree of closure – through a brotherly revenge-plot. Dignam, however, notably carries the traits of both sidekick-as-clown and, especially with regard to his use of language, sexually insecure teenager; which is partly why the end of the movie, during which Dignam functions as the physical hand of righteousness and justice by shooting Sullivan, might strike an audience as less ‘convincing’ or satisfactory than the original ending of Infernal Affairs. Still, Dignam’s becoming an avenger almost seems to express a certain nostalgia for a male innocence found and nurtured in an all-American inner-city working class, whose quintessential character trait could be referred to as a specifically American righteousness that is powerfully and decisively interconnected with a working-class hard body of the lonesomeavenger type.10 There is an even more striking violent death in The Departed, when the movie has Sullivan – in altering a scene from the original – stab an innocent man on the street, who happens to be dressed like both Costigan and Sullivan in the scene. Scorsese sets the beginning of the sequence in a porn theater, where Sullivan and Costello have a meeting to exchange information on the chase for the mole. In this scene, which visually frames and thereby addresses questions of filmic visuality, of seeing and being seen, they are being followed and observed by Costigan, who in his choice of clothing strikingly resembles Sullivan, which visually emphasizes the similarity of their situation. In this scene they are hunting one another down, with Sullivan gathering crucial information on Costigan and Costigan physically following Sullivan. In the scene, though, Costigan never manages to get a visual of Sullivan to the effect that his identity remains obscure. In a self-reflexive manner the scene, in a brief intermission, during which Costigan sees a fragmented reflection of himself on the blades of a wind chime, alludes to both of the scene’s central concerns, namely visuality and the fragmentation of identity: Costigan never sees the Other, but instead is made to look

10 For a discussion of hard bodies and the cultural function they performed, especially in the 1980s and 1990s in Hollywood, see Jeffords (1994).

106 | L ÜTHE

at his visually fragmented self. What is more, as the scene and chase evolve, Sullivan stabs yet another visual doppelganger of the two main characters of the movie, whose crucial distinctive feature is his visual ethnic Asianness; it is in this scene, which revolves around seeing, being seen, and having watched, that The Departed alludes to its own tumultuous relationship with its original, with its ‘Asian Other’. Concluding the scene, we see Sullivan watching the filmed video of the last second of the chase from a security camera in another inconclusive attempt to visually identify his own Other, now Costigan again, in the plot.

L ATE C APITALISM

AND

G LOBAL ASIA IN T HE D EPARTED

This final segment analyzes the ways in which the film, in addition to the characters and configurations discussed above, also remakes the plot according to what speaks to a sense of globalization anxiety, specifically in the context of the relationship between the United States and China. For a very different context of globalized cultural production – professional basketball in the United States and the NBA – Grant Farred frames discourses and anxieties in the realms of race, globalization, and macro-economic developments somewhat broadly in terms of a “phantom”; he writes: “In the American neo-liberal, imperial imaginary, China is both what is most intensely desired and what is most greatly feared. […] If China has long been, like many nations around the world, anti-American, it is also distinct in the new century. China is different, in part, because of its burgeoning economic prowess, and because of an antagonistic history with the US.” (2006: 82-83)

In a way then, Grant Farred’s book inspired the subsequent reading of Scorsese’s remake of Infernal Affairs.11 The remake came at a time when globalization discourse found itself powerfully impacted by the ‘rise of China’ and the pervasive ‘rise-of-China’ discourse as the most powerful economic competitor of the United States in the global and globalized market. In this segment I accordingly scrutinize the ways in which The Departed gives voice to and reproduces this anxiety of the rise of China that is inscribed into the movie’s characters and narrative, as

11 For an additional discussion of film-making with a focus on postmodernism and globalization, see Ogden (2010).

T HE D EPARTED , I NFERNAL A FFAIRS AND G LOBALIZED F ILM C ULTURES

| 107

well as the aforementioned schizophrenic nature of the remake – relationships marked by simultaneous fear and fascination with its original.12 The theme of the rise of Asia emerges in two instances of powerful significance to the movie plot, one of which the chapter above mentions, and, naturally, they mark powerful departures from the original movie, which depending on your point of view is either all about ‘Asianness’ and the rise of Asia, as epitomized by Hong Kong, or void of any concern of its own Asianness and more generally reproduces global narratives of bad vs. evil, schizophrenia, patriarchal lineages, and conspiracy. The Departed strikingly alters one of the climaxes of the plot of Infernal Affairs by transcending the drug-trade plot of the original in favor of an alleged conspiratorial involvement of Frank Costello in what leads to a “major transaction of microprocessors” with, as the audience is to find out, the Chinese triads – a practice immediately and dismissively commented upon by the cop Ellerby. Referring to the processors, he quips, “yes, those! I don’t know what they are, you don’t know what they are, who gives a fuck!?” On the one hand, the idea of the exchange of microprocessors works to further emphasize a specific strand of technophobic paranoia clearly embedded in Infernal Affairs, with regard to telecommunications in general, and cell phone use specifically. It is during the transaction scene in both movies – a drug trade in the original – that the use of cell phones for both sides becomes especially instrumental; both movies allude to the postmodernist subjective position as dependent on and entangled with technological apparatuses. However, The Departed, in changing the object of the hand-off from the standard of the genre – drugs – to microprocessors, further emphasizes the notion of telecommunications as power and as the symbolic of power and danger in the late-capitalist global economy that even the mobsters are a significant part of. As soon as the scene focuses on the trade-off, the movie expresses the specter of dangerous Asia/China for late-capitalist globalization in at least three ways: Firstly, and most bluntly, the Chinese triads’ demeanor is overtly aggressive and Costello’s translator immediately points out to Costello, as well as the audience, that two of the Chinese men carry automatic weapons; the camera cap-

12 Eric Lott analyzes the complexities that the cultural form called blackface minstrelsy brings to the fore in North American culture; he discards simplistic readings of minstrelsy as merely and only a racialist ridicule of African-American cultural Otherness and rather establishes the simultaneity of seemingly paradoxical psycho-cultural attitudes towards black(face) culture; it is to this context that he refers with the phrase “fear and fascination” (1993: 2ff.) which functions strikingly analogously to Grant Farred’s diagnosis of the U.S.’s “imperial imaginary” cited above (2006: 82).

108 | L ÜTHE

tures the guns just after the translator’s assertion and provides visual proof for the display of ‘Asian excess’; secondly, the figure of the translator embodies the permanent pending threat of miscommunication on a global scale through globalization which the scene’s aggressive monologue by the triads’ leader further emphasizes. Thirdly, the subsequent, rather brief, translation informs the audience about the presence of a Chinese government official and his anxiety regarding the deal at hand. This presence, of course, highlights the ever-looming topdown conspiracy of the corrupt communist Chinese government and their alleged interconnectedness with organized crime in a kind of ‘globalizationconspiracy scheme’. In a process of historic blending, the movie and the microprocessor-transaction scene weave together some of the most powerful fears nested in the American cultural imaginary: namely, the Cold War fear of Communism as the big political and economic Other, the ever-increasing fear of the loss of an imagined global economic hegemony, and the technophobic stance towards the intersections between technological innovation and globalization, especially as they are so closely intertwined with the former two kinds of anxieties. Frank Costello’s authoritative enunciations in response to the translation channel and synthesize the cultural fear and discursive distrust of China’s emerging role in the globalization formation and frame them as an Orientalist continuum. Hence, his speech, especially in its frequent deployment of racial stereotypes of Asians and Asian men on the one and the home field advantage of Costello and his gang on the other hand – he repeatedly says “in this country” – exposes the Chinese mobsters as a threatening Other. The movie produces the Chinese mobsters, and the entangled communist government, as an ultimate Other in the sense that The Departed shows that even Costello, as the archetype of an American mobster, i.e. a generally distrustful agent, yet adhering to the rules of the game in line with American values in the broadest sense, is unnerved by the business partnership he has acquired. This the movie captures in a quintessentially Orientalist sentence which brings together an imagined American phallic superiority, the feminization of Asia, and a somewhat nostalgic sentiment for national crime vs. transnational crime; Costello says: “For his own good, tell Bruce Lee and the Karate Kids, none of us are carrying automatic weapons, because here, IN THIS COUNTRY, it don’t add inches to your dick, but you get a lifesentence for it!”13 Costello continues to insult the Chinese buyers and loosely al-

13 The orthographic emphasis (mine) is meant to illustrate Costello’s emphatic enunciation in the scene.

T HE D EPARTED , I NFERNAL A FFAIRS AND G LOBALIZED F ILM C ULTURES

| 109

ludes to the geopolitical and military significance of the exchange to be conducted demanding the money in exchange. The (stereo-)typical insults of the scene enter into a tense relationship with the inversion of the money flows and the flow of goods of late globalized capitalism, as part of which the traditional stereotype of Asia as exploited and feminized returns with a vengeance in the shape of the producer of global commercial goods – especially and strikingly the production of those technological goods – chips, processors, and cell phones – that parts of the movie’s own production of paranoia focus on. Here, then, Scorsese’s remake still imagines the United States as the epitome of global technological production and progress, selling goods to Asians, who are also very likely to be ratted out to the FBI by Costello himself; maybe this scene – like the stabbing of the Asian doppelganger mentioned above – subconsciously expresses The Departed’s own troubled schizophrenic identity as the American remake of a finalized Asian product in this late phase of globalized economic and cultural production and exchange. After all, the specter of Asian cinema began to haunt Hollywood’s own imaginary during the time of production of The Departed as a consequence of a new founding moment of Chinese cinemas (Li 2011: 4ff.).

C ONCLUSION : H ELLISH D EPARTURE S CHIZOPHRENIA OF R EMAKES ?

AND THE

As Fredric Jameson reminds us in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: “The word remake is […] anachronistic to the degree to which our awareness of the preexistence of other versions is now a constitutive and essential part of the film’s structure” (1991: 20). Still, and especially because of the constitutive significance of an intertextual original (a contradiction in itself, maybe), it is in the changes from original to remake, this chapter argues, that we can best trace some of the specific meanings of the remake’s re-interrogation of its own past – its imagined original. It is also here that the remake’s own schizophrenia emerges: if only in the Lacanian sense of “a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or meaning” (Jameson 1991: 26). While it is oversimplifying to read the changes in the remake as a result of such a breakdown in the signifying chain, they might occupy the space in-between the series of signifiers rather than between signifier and signified. The final change in the remake, the finale and conclusion of the movie, invites something similar to a conclusion in what follows.

110 | L ÜTHE

In a striking new ending, Scorsese has Dignam return to solve the technological and legitimate contextual paranoia established in the course of the movie through his use of one of the most significant American artifacts: the handgun. While the original movie leaves the audience with the notion that the triad’s mole manages to ‘succeed’ by getting rid of almost everyone around him knowing his true identity, supposedly leaving him on a career path within the police department, The Departed brings back the trope of the lonely gunman, who reinstates justice in a gesture of American individualism and male bravado, thereby embodying the proverbial law of American individualism Costello expresses in the voice-over truism that starts the film “I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me!” The final scene is set against the backdrop of a quintessential architectural symbol of American exceptionalism, the Massachusetts state capitol, signifying the fundamental good of American democratic values embodied in the architecture of the state capitol buildings across the country. However, the camera shows the audience a rat strolling along the windowsill, reminding us of an abstract threat out there attempting to subvert and infiltrate the very foundations of capitalist democracy in the United States and the world. Where the audience of Infernal Affairs was left to ponder the success and survival of the specific villain of the movie still, and now safely, pretending to be the law, the finale of The Departed, with its violent concluding gesture, almost makes one forget about the ‘Asian conspiracy’ and ‘globalization schemes’, as it firmly reinstalls The Departed – through the trope of the lonely gunman as an icon of the Western genre – in one of the United States’ most crucial artistic traditions to mark its exceptional progressivism: that of American film itself.

W ORKS C ITED Dawson, Mike (2012): “Comparative Examination. Infernal Affairs and The Departed”, , accessed on 12 Apr. 2013. Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Felix (1987): A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elsaesser, Thomas (2009): “The Mind-Game Film”, in: Warren Buckland (ed.), Puzzle Films. Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, Malden: Blackwell, 13-41. Farred, Grant (2006): Phantom Calls. Race and the Globalization of the NBA, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

T HE D EPARTED , I NFERNAL A FFAIRS AND G LOBALIZED F ILM C ULTURES

| 111

Heyer-Caput, Margherita (2011): “Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, Or the Quest for a Departed Ethnic Identity”, in: Dana Renga (ed.), Mafia Movies. A Reader, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 173-182. INFERNAL AFFAIRS (2002) (Hong Kong, R: Wai-Keung Lau/Alan Mak). Jameson, Fredric (1991): Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Jeffords, Susan (1994): Hard Bodies. Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Li, Jinhua (2011): Transnational Remakes. Gender and Politics in Chinese Cinemas and Hollywood (1990-2009). Unpublished dissertation, West Lafayette. Loock, Kathleen/Verevis, Constantine (2012): “Introduction. Remake/Remodel”, in: Kathleen Loock/Constantine Verevis (eds.), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions. Remake/Remodel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1-15. Lott, Eric (1993): Love and Theft. Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovell, Anne M. (1997): “‘The City Is My Mother’. Narratives of Schizophrenia and Homelessness”, in: American Anthropologist 99.2, 355-368. McCall, Leslie (2005): “The Complexity of Intersectionality”, in: Signs. Journal of Intersectionality 30.3, 1771-1800. Ogden, Benjamin (2010): “How Lars von Trier Sees the World. Postmodernism and Globalization in The Five Obstructions”, in: Quarterly Film Review 27.1, 54-68. Palmer, R. Barton (2007): “Scorsese and the Transcendental”, in: Mark T. Conrad (ed.), The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 231-246. RAGING BULL (1980) (USA, R: Martin Scorsese). Sass, Lois A. (1992): Madness and Modernism. Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. TAXI DRIVER (1976) (USA, R: Martin Scorsese). THE DEPARTED (2006) (USA, R: Martin Scorsese). THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988) (USA, R: Martin Scorsese). Tillich, Paul (1957): Dynamics of Faith, New York: Harper & Row. Torresi, Ira (2007): “Quick Temper, Hot Blood. The Filmic Representation of Italian-American Speech and Rhetorical Strategies”, in: Norman Fairclough/Giuseppina Cortese/Patrizia Ardizzone (eds.), Discourse and Contemporary Social Change (= Linguistic Insights. Studies in Language and Communication, vol. 54), Bern/New York: Lang, 531-548.

112 | L ÜTHE

White, Daniel R./Hellerich, Gert (1998): Labyrinths of the Mind. The Self in the Postmodern Age, Albany: State University of New York Press. Woods, Angela (2011): The Sublime Object of Psychiatry. Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

III. Inter-medial Remaking

The Remake as Re-adaptation of an English Classic Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist on Film T ILL K INZEL

D ICKENS

AND

F ILM

Oliver Twist is one of the most frequently remade stories for the cinema and/or the TV screen (Burstyn 2014: 78).1 Charles Dickens is a master storyteller whose narratives have a tremendous visual potential. In contrast to more psychologically attuned writers of the realist persuasion, Dickens presents sequences of images to give expression to his view of the human condition (Gelfert 2011: 322). Many descriptions of atmosphere and characters are extraordinarily vivid and thus lend themselves to medial transpositions. One only needs to think of the ‘bleakness’ and ‘fogginess’ of novels such as Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend in order to conjure up unforgettable images and characters. It is therefore understandable that, as Brian McFarlane notes, the “idea of Dickens’s amenability to the film medium dies hard” (1996: 105) Oliver Twist shares these quasi-visual and atmospheric features in providing first of all clear distinctions in setting between different walks of life that intersect in the novel. Then there is the plot of the tale that narrates the Parish Boy’s Progress with reversals of fortune, the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth, of corrupted morals and good hearts, of crime and punishment, of loyalty and be-

1

So far, there is no research into remakes/re-adaptations of radio plays based on Oliver Twist, in contrast to adaptations for child readers, including illustrated classics and graphic novels (see Thiel 2013).

116 | K INZEL

trayal, love, and murder, securing the readers’ interest in the sequence of events. In addition to this, Dickens also offers a memorable cast of characters that have successfully become inscribed in popular cultural memory. Dickens’s novels were already tremendously popular in the nineteenth century, since text-image combinations in magazines and books added visualizations to the written text as well as a performative quality in dramatizations for the stage. This was further enhanced by Dickens’s own dramatic talent in his public readings of the novels (Kaplan 1988: 443-444). The decline of Dickens’s popularity, his falling out of favor due to a change in readers’ tastes, in the later part of the nineteenth century, could not erase the panoply of his most memorable characters from cultural memory (Reinhold 1990: 19-50, 718). In fact, Dickens early on proved very attractive for the film industry, leading to a great number of movie adaptations, the total number of which is hard to determine.

E ARLY H ISTORY

OF

O LIVER T WIST R E - ADAPTATIONS

Oliver Twist features prominently among Dickens adaptations (see Schmidt 2012). First published in serialized form in 1838, it was turned into a movie several times, including musicals and animated pictures, including Disney’s Oliver and Company (1988) which is both an Americanization and an ‘animalization’ of the original story (Burstyn 2014: 78-82). There are said to be nineteen versions of Oliver Twist as silent film adaptations, at least four sound movies plus numerous adaptations of the story for television or video that can only be mentioned summarily in the present paper (Paganoni 2010: 307). It goes without saying that only a few pertinent themes and issues can be pointed out for further consideration. In fact, the main object of this article is to take a closer look at the ways that multiple interactions between different elements of the ‘same’ story constitute what I call the remake as re-adaptation. Whereas a remake can be defined as (the production of) a new version of something pre-existing (see the discussion by Heinze and Krämer in the introduction to this volume), a readaptation is a remake that is not just linked to earlier film versions but also to the text (or story) that was originally adapted. A re-adaptation is characterized by the complex negotiations inscribed into it because of its intermedial reference points. The elements of the ‘same’ story can be combined and disjoined in various ways so that the story of the boy Oliver Twist created by Dickens can no longer be regarded as the only authoritative source. By remaking earlier films of the same story, these remakes also remake the story itself, adding further layers

T HE R EMAKE AS R EADAPTATION: O LIVER TWIST

| 117

of visualization and thus interpretation to an already crowded place (Elliott 2004). Not all of the film versions seem to be extant; especially the early ones before 1915 were short “one- or two-reel compressions” of the novel.2 In fact, one of the earliest adaptations based on Oliver Twist is the 1897 reel The Death of Nancy Sykes (Desmond/Hawkes 2005: 83). As Sue Zemka rather funnily notes, Nancy, who, of course, was far from being ‘Mrs. Sykes’, “was first murdered in the slim three-volume edition of Oliver Twist published in early November 1838”, five months before the serial run of the novel was actually finished. As Zemka further notes, it was already ten days later that Nancy was murdered for the first time on stage, in what was called a “serio-comic burletta” by George Almar (Zemka 2010: 29). Thus begins the story of adaptations from Oliver Twist, a story that reaches right through to the present. Dickens himself contributed to this by means of his own dramatizations and dramatic representations of the “Murder of Nancy” in the course of his “farewell tour” in the winter of 1868 to 1869, when “he went on murdering ‘Nancy’ with a regularity that became addictive”, as Fred Kaplan (1988: 532-533) notes. The first feature-length version appeared in 1916, another one in 1921, directed by Millard Webb, but unfortunately no longer available. This version, however, seems to have been a modernized version, somewhat along the lines of the fairly recent (1998) adaptation of Great Expectations directed by Alfonos Cuarón and starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke, in which the story is transferred to the U.S. and more specially New York. This great number of adaptations poses the question what should be regarded as the pre-text or pre-medium of later movie versions. Which movie is actually a remake of what? It seems obvious that a more recent movie is not just another adaptation of the novel and it is also not just a remake of an earlier film or films. In fact, I would like to suggest the usefulness of the category ‘re-adaptation’ for the kind of movie that is based on some literary text but also responds to earlier adaptations of the same text. This implies an at least two-fold relationship (book and one movie plus X). Any movie version that comes later than the first or possibly just a widely known adaptation of the story needs to be viewed in contrast to the plotline of the book as well as the visual concepts embodied in the earlier film(s) (Loock/Verevis 2012: 5; Leitch 2002).

2

This as well as the following information is taken from the entry on “Oliver Twist” in: Tibbetts/Welsh (1999: 167-169, esp. 168).

118 | K INZEL

O RIGINALITY

AND

C HANGE

IN

F ILMIC R ETELLING

The need to produce something else or new while ostensibly producing the same thing all over again, makes for some of the most interesting details in readaptations. Thus, not every remake leaves the story or plotline untouched, expanding or contracting the original version. Every remake in the realm of film is always also a retelling on the same medial level, once the ‘original’ story has been transposed to the medium of film. Filmic retelling may thus share important features of literary re-writes that can include retellings with a subversive twist (Breuer 2003). However, the remake as remake would seem to be particularly problematic under a regime of originality claims. For in what consists the artistic value of retelling a story that has already been told, and possibly a number of times? In this connection it seems to me helpful to quote from some remarks by the German eighteenth-century author Christoph Martin Wieland, who was accused of being unoriginal in his storytelling. He responds to this charge in the following way: “Man macht mir den Vorwurf, ich sei nicht originell. Man sollte doch finden und erfinden unterscheiden. Was ist überhaupt der Stoff unserer Gedichte [i.e. Dichtungen]? Fast Alles läßt sich bis auf die entfernteste Periode des Menschengeschlechts zurückführen. Woher nahmen die Mauren den Stoff der contes und fabliaux, woraus die Provençalpoesie und später die romantische Epopoe der Italiener hervorging? Haben nicht Shakespeare und Milton fast allen Stoff entlehnt? Woher nahm Homer seinen Stoff? Es müssen einmal in Asien Menschen gelebt haben, deren Ereignisse die ersten Keime der Fabel geworden sind. Nebenbei mögen auch Träume Stoff für Wachende geworden sein. Ich habe selbst einige Träume der Art gehabt. Aber die Verarbeitung des Stoffs ist die wahre Erfindung.” (Böttiger qtd. in Petrikowski 2012: 18; emphasis in original)3

3

‘I am accused of not being original. One should, however, distinguish between finding and inventing. What exactly is the material of our poetical works? Almost everything can be traced back to the most distant period of the the human race. From where did the Moors take the topics of their stories and fairy tales, out of which grew provencal poetry and then the romantic epic poetry of the Italians? Have not Shakespeare and Milton borrowed almost all their themes? From where did Homer take his material? There must have been human beings in Asia whose events became the germs of the story. Occasionally dreams may have become material for waking people. I myself have had some dreams of this kind. But the re-working of the material is the true invention.’ (My translation).

T HE R EMAKE AS R EADAPTATION: O LIVER TWIST

| 119

Wieland responds to the charge of not being original by pointing out the difference between finding and inventing. The themes of most of our fictions can be traced back to the earliest times of human existence, he claims, and mentions a few famous examples of poets like Shakespeare, Milton and Homer, who relied on already existing stories. Wieland concludes that therefore true invention consists in the productive re-working of pre-existing material. Regardless of the different media that can be employed to re-narrate any given story, the stories themselves are hardly ever original – in their entirety, that is. For every re-telling of a story is presented in a particular way and is no mere recapitulation (Hutcheon 2013: 9-10). In fact, according to Wieland, the way it is poetically re-worked can be regarded as a truly ‘original’ procedure. Remaking a story that is already well-established in a given medium, such as Oliver Twist on screen, poses the challenge of telling the same story but differently. Any remake implies a remaking on various levels; it is not only a remaking of the same story but a constant reshuffling, expanding and contracting of the original (‘same’) story, but also a sometimes surprising change of the cast of characters, including the amalgamation of characters or the transposition of character traits from one person to another, so that composite characters come into being. There are also more or less subtle changes in the sympathy accorded to individual characters such as Nancy, Sykes, or Fagin, emphasizing more positive or negative character traits early on in the film or negotiating features of both early versions of the text of Oliver Twist and its visualization in illustrations, stage performances and movies. Slight changes or emphases thus may turn out to be highly significant for the overall atmosphere of the story – and for an interpretation which still looks towards the novel Oliver Twist as the master text.

B LEASDALE ’ S R E -F ASHIONING

OF

O LIVER T WIST

The most radical refashioning of the plot seems to occur in the TV version scripted by Alan Bleasdale (1999), a version that includes an extensive prequel to the story, as Maggie Brown succinctly sums it up: “While Dickens ploughs on forward in time in a 19th-century kind of way (as have numerous films, musical and TV versions that have appeared since), Bleasdale dives backwards and doesn’t catch up with himself until the end of the first episode when Bumble names the baby Oliver Twist.” (1999: n. pag.) Let me further report what “Tom McGregor”, described in the cover blurb as the pseudonym of a “well-known novelist and journalist” living in London, says about the production of the 447page-long script for the Bleasdale remake. Michelle Buck, Controller of Drama

120 | K INZEL

at United Productions, had planned a four-hour dramatization, but Alan Bleasdale and Keith Thompson wanted to do seven hours. Buck recalled that she was horrified, arguing that Oliver Twist was a short book – for Dickens, that is. When Bleasdale reported back to Michelle Buck some months later, it was clear that this remake would be different from others: “When he told me that Oliver wasn’t born until the end of the second hour I laughed. Then I read the script.” We will, of course remember, that in Dickens’s novel, Oliver is already “ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble” in the very first paragraph of the novel. Buck’s reaction to the film script was as follows: “It was stunning; the most engrossing script I’ve ever read. It’s a Romeo and Juliet; it’s star-crossed lovers...and of course it makes absolute sense.” (McGregor 1999: 15) The TV version does not invent anyone but expands on a few hints and background stories to be found in chapter 51 of the novel (McGregor 1999: 8). Bleasdale himself has commented on the weaknesses of Dickens’s plot, for it is precisely those weaknesses that he sought to redress in his remake: “The weakness lies, in my genuinely humble opinion, in that Dickens was making the plot up as he went along, chapter by chapter, in monthly instalments for a magazine. He was also a remarkably young man, attempting his first format novel. Like almost every writer, of any age, he wouldn’t have had a clear picture, when he started his journey, where his travels would take him and where his final destination was to be. Naturally, writing in this manner, with no opportunity to revise text before the next instalment date or produce a second draft, it is clear that near the end Dickens painted himself and his plot into quite a desperate and multi-coloured corner.” (McGregor 1999: 8)

Bleasdale implies that these natural shortcomings of a first novel could be – and were – changed in his adaptation. His re-adaptation thus also offers the remake not just as one more version of the same story but actually as an improvement on the plot presentation of earlier versions. In fact, Bleasdale criticizes Dickens for introducing, in the pages of chapter 51, “the most remarkable, indeed fabulous, collection of minor characters. We meet, albeit second-hand, and for the first and last time, Edwin Leeford, the father of Oliver Twist; Mrs Leeford, the wicked witch of a wife of Edwin Leeford; Agnes Fleming, the haunted young mother of Oliver Twist, and her loving but broken father, the retired sea captain, Mr Fleming. And it is also here, in Chapter 51, that he explains, finally, Monks’ mad and lurking pursuit of his half brother, Oliver Twist.” (McGregor 1999: 8)

T HE R EMAKE AS R EADAPTATION: O LIVER TWIST

| 121

Bleasdale saw this sketch in chapter 51 as his chance to retell the story of Oliver Twist by adapting “the wonderful story that Dickens threw away” (McGregor 1999: 8) and to begin with this ending provided by the Victorian novelist. The script was regarded as the first prerequisite for offering a wholly different Oliver Twist. But there was more: an approach that stressed a “very strong visual style with lots of blackness and filth”, juxtaposing the filthy parts with the life of luxury and colour in the households of the Leefords and Brownlow (McGregor 1999: 15). Bleasdale’s business partner Keith Thompson here explicitly references two earlier Dickens adaptations, first David Lean’s seminal version of Oliver Twist, then the BBC version of Bleak House starring Diana Rigg, calling them the best Dickens adaptations “with regard to the look.” (McGregor 1999: 15)

R E - ADAPTING F AGIN : C HALLENGING S TEREOTYPES ? A central problem for every adaptation/re-adaptation of Oliver Twist, and a good illustration of the shifting cultural parameters influencing features of these readaptations, is the presentation of “the Jew” Fagin, a problem that begins with the novel. For it is already in the novel that this intriguing character is all too often mentioned not by name but rather by the stereotypical “the Jew”, a feature of the text that Dickens, in later versions, attempted to revise, since he had come to realize the highly problematic depiction of Jewish life in his novel (Dickens 1993: 65-71). The undeniable anti-Semitic element of Dickens’s portrayal of Fagin, something which had already been criticized by contemporary readers (Kaplan 1988: 472-473; Meyer 2005), is most evident in the constant, almost staccato-like references, in the text, to “the Jew”; and this surely poses a particular problem with regard to the presentation of Jewishness in more visual media formats. The challenge of dealing with stereotypes in fiction and their evaluation leads to different solutions of the problem in the adaptations: either the excision of all explicit references to Fagin’s Jewishness or the inclusion of culturally specific information linking Fagin to a Middle-European, Czech background, forcing Robert Lindsay in the Bleasdale version to speak Czech, a language not familiar to him (McGregor 1999: 98). This feature clearly underscores the alien nature of Fagin, but despite the fact that he leads a marginalized existence, he is absolutely central to the success of the story as such: “Fagin and the Artful Dodger are the stars of the book”, Claire Tomalin rightly observes, “as every dramatization has made clear” (2011: 97).

122 | K INZEL

The issue of anti-Semitism can hardly be avoided in film representations of the novel, comparable to versions of Shylock on stage and screen, since visual images tend to be much more powerful than mere words. The most problematic re-adaptation in this regard was David Lean’s Oliver Twist from 1948, in which Fagin is played by Alec Guinness, who presented him with a significant difference. Whereas both the Oliver Twist versions of 1922 and 1933, as Richard Dunn notes, “showed Fagin at play with the boys as he trained Oliver to pick pockets” (1993: 95-96), Guinness was made up to order as the Jewish stereotype “with an enormous nose, long hair, and a beard and talking with an unmistakably Jewish accent.” This was regarded by many as tasteless at the least, especially as only a brief time span had passed since news of the near-annihilation of the Jews had reached the world. There can be no doubt that, as Maria Cristina Paganoni remarks, in “film adaptations the rendering of Fagin’s otherness is further complicated by the act of repositioning Jewishness within cultural and political contexts subsequent to World War II and the genocide of the Jews” (2010: 308). In the Western part of Berlin, the film was withdrawn from a cinema after protests in the spring of 1949, as the Spiegel reports on this event in the edition of February 26th, 1949, which highlights the intensely political reception of this particular retelling of Dickens’s story. The way Guinness portrayed Fagin also led to the ban of the movie in the U.S. until 1951, as Dunn (1993: 96) explains: “Even then, some 11 minutes, mostly close-ups of Fagin, were expurgated, and a complete version was not shown in America until 1970.”4 This problematic depiction of Fagin the Jew as a Jew was not only true to Dickens’s original rendering of the text (Helbig 1999: 119), although, as mentioned above, he later eliminated many of the disturbing generic references to “the Jew” as the result of complaints. It was also true to the first visual ‘adaptation’ of the story in George Cruikshank’s illustrations. Cruikshank contributed 24 engravings to the book, all produced in the years from 1837 to 1839. Fagin features in a number of these illustrations. Again, Dunn notes that it “was Lean’s fidelity to the Cruikshank illustrations and to the Dickens characterization that, more than 100 years after Dickens, provoked so much revived criticism about anti-Semitism” (1993: 96), so in this case a remake does not only create something conspicuously new but also draws on earlier forms of visual presentation. Lean’s remake thus cannot merely be referred back to earlier filmic presentations of Oliver Twist, nor can it be regarded as a mere adaptation from Dickens’s text.

4

Already in 1949, a direct attempt at censorship was involved in the complaint against reading and studying Oliver Twist in secondary schools on the basis of the charge that the book “contained offensive portrayals of Jews” (Amey et al. 1997: 217).

T HE R EMAKE AS R EADAPTATION: O LIVER TWIST

| 123

Thus, the plurimedial text-image combination of Dickens’s story feeds into the filmic presentation of Fagin as a Jew. The wildly enhanced stereotypical Jewishness of Fagin in the Lean movie further intensifies the audiences’ iconic memory already present in 19th-century illustrations by George Cruikshank. The close link between the different media in the 19th century retained its importance for the many film adaptations in the 20th century, especially because these remediations5 of the Oliver Twist story made the main characters much more memorable, as Richard Dunn points out: “The Dickens characters became more distinct through the illustrations that accompanied each monthly part, and the memorable George Cruikshank illustrations forever determined the physical appearance of the stage and film characters, particularly Fagin, Bumble, and Sikes, and they also gave clear direction to the setting of the major scenes.” (1993: 93)

When Lean embarked on the filming of Oliver Twist, he had already produced one Dickens adaptation, namely Great Expectations, His Great Expectations movie made Lean wary of another Dickens adaptation, as his biographer Gene D. Phillips notes, since he did not want to repeat himself (a great problem for remakes in every respect, but especially so for artists) and he did not want to be pigeon-holed “as a mere illustrator of classic novels and plays” (Phillips 2006: 123). As this quotation indicates, the adaptation of works of literature was then considered as a kind of secondary discourse, a mere illustration of an original (cf. Hutcheon 2013: 20, 31) – and this in spite of the fact that a fairly large number of earlier adaptations had already appeared. To consider an adaptation and especially a re-adaptation as a mere illustration highlights the priority of the source text as well as the lack of independence enjoyed by the director. Lean, however, did go on to do another Dickens, aiming to make it a darker and gloomier film than the first one (Phillips 2006: 123). Lean read the novel twice before writing the script of the movie, something he had already done with Great Expectations. It is also known that Lean shared the famous view of Eisenstein (as well as of D.W. Griffith) claiming that Dickens was a writer with a great affinity to the cinema (Eisenstein 1979: 395). Lean cooperated with Stanley Haynes on the script, choosing the scenes from each chapter that he wanted included in the movie. Although cutting a lot of material, minor characters and unnecessary episodes, his aim was to create the impression that nothing was lost,

5

I use this term in the sense explained by Linda Hutcheon as “translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system (for example, words) to another (for example, images)” (2013: 16).

124 | K INZEL

so that the audience would actually think that they had seen the whole book (Phillips 2006: 126). It is important to note that Lean had been aware of problems with the presentation of Fagin in his film, for he received a warning by the American film industry’s censor to the effect that care should be taken not to be offensive to a ‘racial’ group (Phillips 2006: 129). Although Lean had made sure that Fagin is never identified as a Jew in the script, he nevertheless refused to have the long nose designed for Guinness to be toned down, something he would later come to regret (Phillips 2006: 129). This episode clearly points to a potential problem with adaptation as well as remake in relation to the literary work it is meant to somehow represent: Being ‘true to the text’, as in the case of Guinness’s representation of Fagin, can actually lead to a problematic actualization of those features of the text that should not have been actualized due to their morally dubious character. Alec Guinness’s performance as Fagin turned out to be deeply problematic for another reason as well, namely because of his almost exclusive attention to external, i.e, visual features of Fagin to the detriment of a more subtle exploration of psychological conditions such as hate, despair, and madness, as Missler (1987: 34) notes. It is not irrelevant to note this role of Guinness in the projection of Fagin, since it was Guinness himself who contributed decisively to the way he appeared (Helbig 2008: 18). But even this kind of characterization, it could be argued, survived the transposition from one medium to the other, as already Dickens himself had indulged in a tendency towards focussing on external features. The lack of psychological complexity in his fictional characters is the flipside of the coin of visual intensity often rightly ascribed to Dickens (Reinhold 1990: 532-534). For the later Bleasdale version, reflecting on Guinness’s depiction of Fagin was crucial: Bleasdale acknowledges Guinness’s frighteningly brilliant performance, but moves away from his “appalling” and “shocking” performance to a more children-friendly version, presenting a “wandering magician, a street entertainer” that would not only be politically correct but also appealing to children (McGregor 1999: 98). It is also worth noting that the actor Robert Lindsay had to remake his own earlier version of Fagin in the London Palladium “as the sort of singing Shylock familiar from the Lionel Bart musical” (McGregor 1999: 98).

C HANGING

THE

M ASTERPLOT

The issue of the presentation of Fagin as a Jew was not the only aspect of interest concerning Lean’s re-adaptation. Let me therefore briefly consider how Lean

T HE R EMAKE AS R EADAPTATION: O LIVER TWIST

| 125

changed the beginning of the story. Whereas Bleasdale introduced a rather lengthy version of the prehistory of Oliver Twist, Lean shows Oliver’s mother in the following manner: “A pregnant woman, who is in the throes of labor, struggles at night across a storm-wipped heath.” (Phillips 2006: 130) The film thus begins not with Oliver’s birth but with his mother’s desperate attempt to find cover somewhere, only to die in childbed shortly afterwards. The first words spoken in the movie are those of the physician at the workhouse in which she was allowed to give birth. He says: “It’s all over; the old story – no wedding ring, I see.” (Phillips 2006: 130) Lean’s version thus condenses dramatically the verbosity of much of Dickens’s dialogues, paring the words down to essentials. This, of course, also changes the linguistic structure of the storytelling. And for those viewers familiar with the original story or perhaps the earlier adaptation from 1933, this already sets the tone for a much more ‘lean’ interpretation of Oliver Twist. In addition, one might even be tempted to read the medical doctor’s words concerning the “old story” as a reference to the old story of Oliver Twist itself, a story that had already been remediated and re-worked in many ways. The story of a novel called The Adventures of Oliver Twist serves as the pretext for such a great number of movies that are simultaneously adaptations and remakes that Oliver Twist becomes a symbolic test case for the concept of the remake as re-adaptation. All movie versions of Oliver Twist known to me differ in some respects from each other, but no amount of changing – i.e., adding or subtracting from – the plot has produced a remade version that can no longer be recognized as Oliver Twist. In this sense, Oliver Twist belongs to those stories that H. Porter Abbott calls “masterplots”, i.e. “stories that we tell over and over in myriad forms and that connect vitally with our deepest values, wishes and fears” (Abbott 2002: 42).6 In fact, as the case of the Bleasdale remake has shown, sustained reflection on earlier adaptations as well as the source text can lead to significant changes, especially additions, that need not, however, create the impression of something completely out of tune with the earlier versions. Remakes are particularly interesting objects of study in relation to cultural and

6

There are, of course, the interesting cases of “narratives which maintain more or less close intertextual links with Oliver Twist as they have adopted certain characters of plot elements from it”, one example being Vikas Swarup’s 2005 novel Q & A, adapted as Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 (Egbert 2014: 144-145).

126 | K INZEL

political contexts and may be affected in their reception by what is deemed morally or politically correct at a given moment of time.7 Bleasdale’s Oliver Twist poses a number of questions for considerations of remakes and re-adaptations, since it is definitely both a remake and a re-adaptation. But at the same time it is something more, because of the extensive prequel-like re-writing of the script, providing the original with more background than can actually be found in the text written by Dickens. Remaking the earlier Oliver Twist movies here involved a re-writing of the story itself that gave more room to characters like Monks’s mother, in whom Dickens was not interested.

T HERE

ARE NO

D EFINITIVE R EMAKES

The remake as re-adaptation thus proves to be a surprisingly flexible way of approaching the same story in a seemingly similar way while subtly altering it. Every remake in this sense adds variations of the story to the history of its interpretations that at the same time affirm the iconic status of a particular story, a phenomenon that has been called “staging the palimpsest” with regard to intermedial stage adaptations (Pietrzak-Franger/Voigts-Virchow 2009). This is particularly obvious in the case of The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Different adaptations lead to complex structural relationships between the various remakes, opening up highly interesting changes in emphasis and ideological evaluation concerning particular elements of the ‘original’ plot. The creativity set free by working within what might appear to be the constraints of a given story also suggests that it does not make much sense to claim, as Helbig (2008: 16) does, that one or the other particular adaptation – even if it is David Lean’s Great Expectations or Oliver Twist – are definitive Dickens adaptations [“definitive Dickens-Adaptionen”]. This is also underscored by the important observation that there is not, and has never been, even a definitive text of Oliver Twist (Schmidt 2012: 117). This insight should also help to qualify the persistent notion, here expressed in the words of critic Lev Grossman, that “[p]erfect translation is impossible: a book, however deftly adapted, remains a book, and a movie must be a movie” (2012: 48). Grossman’s claim that “the basic incompatibility between books and movies is something that we […] have

7

Maria Cristina Paganoni (2010) has explored this issue with regard to Jewishness and anti-Semitism by drawing not only on David Lean’s Oliver Twist but also on Polanski’s version, which I have ignored in this paper in favor of the less frequently discussed Bleasdale Oliver Twist.

T HE R EMAKE AS R EADAPTATION: O LIVER TWIST

| 127

to discover and rediscover over and over again” (2012: 48), convincing as it may sound in light of various ‘unsuccessful’ adaptations, needs to be balanced by the insight into the compatibility between some books and film that suggests that we need a more nuanced account of what precisely, e.g., in terms of narratology, enables not only adaptation but re-adaptations and thus remakes (cf. McFarlane 1996; Elliott 2004). The remake as re-adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist thus turns out to be a kind of film based on a text that is constitutionally nondefinitive. This is a further reason why there cannot be a definitive remake. There are many ways to skin a cat.

W ORKS C ITED Abbott, H. Porter (2002): The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amey, Lawrence/Hall, Timothy L./Jensen, Carl/May, Charles/Wilson, Richard L. (eds) (1997): Censorship, vol. 1: Abelard, Peter – Front, the, Pasadena/Englewood Cliffs: Salem Press. Anonymous (1949): “Erschießt uns doch. Twist – Zwist”, in: Der Spiegel 9.1949, 25-26. BLEAK HOUSE (1985) (UK, R: Ross Devenish/Susanna White). Breuer, Rolf (2003): “Re-Writes/Kontrafakturen/Wi(e)dererzählungen”, in: Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 53, 95-110. Brown, Maggie (1999): “Oliver with a Twist”, , 22 Nov. 1999, accessed on 11 Apr. 2013. Burstyn, Franziska (2014): “Charles Dickens. A Disney Carol – Disney’s Adaptations of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol”, in: Welz/Schenkel, Dickens on the Move, 73-86. Desmond, John M./Hawkes, Peter (2005): Adaptation. Studying Film and Literature, Boston: McGraw-Hill. Dickens, Charles (1993) [1838]: Oliver Twist, New York: Norton. Dunn, Richard J. (1993): Oliver Twist. Whole Heart and Soul, New York: Twayne. Egbert, Marie-Luise (2014): “‘Please, sir, I want some more’. Representations of Poverty on the Move”, in: Welz/Schenkel, Dickens on the Move, 135-149. Eisenstein, Sergei (1979): “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today”, in: Gerald Mast/M. Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 394-405.

128 | K INZEL

Elliott, Kamilla (2004): “Literary Film Adaptations and the Form/Content Dilemma”, in: Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across Media. The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 220-243. Gelfert, Hans-Dieter (2011): Charles Dickens. Der Unnachahmliche, München: Beck. GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1946) (UK, R: David Lean). GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1998) (USA, R: Alfonso Cuarón). Grossman, Lev (2012): “The Screen’s the Limit. Cloud Atlas and the Lure of Unfilmable Books”, in: Time 19, 48-49. Helbig, Jörg (1999): Geschichte des britischen Films, Stuttgart: Metzler. — (2008): “Zuckerbrot und Peitsche. Die kritische Rezeption von David Leans Dickens-Adaptionen Great Expectations und Oliver Twist”, in: Matthias Bauer (ed.), David Lean (= Film-Konzepte 10), München: edition text + kritik, 15-22. Hutcheon, Linda, with O’Flynn, Siobhan (2013): A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge. Kaplan, Fred (1988): Dickens. A Biography, New York: Morrow & Co. Leitch, Thomas M. (2002): “Twice-Told Tales. Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake”, in: Jennifer Forrest/Leonard R. Koos (eds.), Dead Ringers. The Remake in Theory and Practice, Albany: State University of New York Press, 37-62. Loock, Kathleen/Verevis, Constantine (2012): “Introduction. Remake/Remodel”, in: Kathleen Loock/Constantine Verevis (eds.), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions. Remake/Remodel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1-15. McFarlane, Brian (1996): Novel to Film. An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, Oxford: Clarendon. McGregor, Tom (1999): Oliver Twist. The Official Companion to the ITV Drama Series, London: Virgin. Meyer, Susan (2005): “Anti-Semitism and Social Critique in Dickens’s Oliver Twist”, in: Victorian Literature and Culture 33, 239-252. Missler, Andreas (1987): Alec Guinness. Seine Filme – sein Leben, München: Heyne. OLIVER AND COMPANY (1988) (USA, R: George Scribner). OLIVER TWIST (1922) (USA, R: Frank Lloyd). OLIVER TWIST (1933) (USA, R: William J. Cowen). OLIVER TWIST (1948) (UK, R: David Lean). OLIVER TWIST (1999) (UK, R: Renny Rye). OLIVER TWIST (2005) (UK/CZ/F/IT, R: Roman Polanski). OLIVER TWIST, JR. (1921) (USA, R: Millard Webb).

T HE R EMAKE AS R EADAPTATION: O LIVER TWIST

| 129

Paganoni, Maria Cristina (2010): “From Book to Film. The Semiotics of Jewishness in Oliver Twist”, in: Dickens Quarterly 27.4, 307-320. Petrikowski, Nicki Peter (2012): Stellenkommentar zu Christoph Martin Wielands Die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva, Frankfurt a.M.: Lang. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika/Voigts-Virchow, Eckart (2009): “Staging the Palimpsest. An Introduction to Adaptation and Appropriation in Performance”, in: Monika Pietrzak-Franger/Eckart Voigts-Virchow (eds.), Adaptations – Performance across Media and Genres. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, Trier: WVT, 1-16. Phillips, Gene D. (2006): Beyond the Epic. The Life and Films of David Lean, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Reinhold, Heinz (1990): Charles Dickens und das Zeitalter des Naturalismus und der Ästhetischen Bewegung. Eine geschmacksgeschichtliche Untersuchung (= Anglistische Forschungen 201), Heidelberg: Winter. Schmidt, Johann N. (2012): “Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens – Frank Lloyd, David Lean, Carol Reed, Roman Polanski)”, in: Anne Bohnenkamp (ed.), Literaturverfilmungen, Stuttgart: Reclam, 104-119. Thiel, Elisabeth (2013): “Downsizing Dickens. Adaptations of Oliver Twist for the Child Reader”, in: Anja Müller (ed.), Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature, London: Bloomsbury, 143-161. Tibbetts, John C./Welsh, James M. (eds.) (1999): Novels into Film. The Encyclopedia of Movies Adapted from Books, New York: Checkmark. Tomalin, Claire (2011): Charles Dickens. A Life, London: Viking. Welz, Stefan/Schenkel, Elmar (eds.) (2014): Dickens on the Move. Travels and Transformations; Charles Dickens Bicentenary Conference 2012, Leipzig, Frankfurt a.M.: Lang. Zemka, Sue (2010): “The Death of Nancy ‘Sikes’, 1838-1912”, in: Representations 110.1, 29-57.

Romeo and Juliet Re-danced Choreographic Remakings of Shakespeare’s Tragedy M ARIA M ARCSEK -F UCHS

Prokofiev’s ballet score to Romeo and Juliet (Op. 64) has been repeatedly rechoreographed since its first performance in 1938 until the present. Choreographies by Leonid Lavrovsky, John Cranko, Sir John MacMillan or Rudolf Nureyev, but also contemporary balletic versions, such as those by Matthew Bourne or Mark Morris, are only a few of the representative examples that not only re-adapt the musical score to choreographic dramaturgy but stand for re-adaptations of the common source text, Shakespeare’s Renaissance tragedy. Besides Prokofiev, other composers like Charles Gounod or Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky created musical representations of the tragic love story.1 All of these versions are readaptations of a bundle of source texts; at the same time, they all make use of medial features that connect them intra-medially. Both instrumental music and ballet are non-verbal forms of expression und create meaning through their medial forms of composition. Additionally, dance is a plurimedial art form that transports musical, kinetic, and cultural information. Re-creations in both media will adhere to the respective medial rules and repeat as well as vary its specific forms of artistic communication when re-adapting certain source texts. Practices of repetition in dance range from re-choreographings to reconstructions of ar-

1

Re-composition in music and dance always means a choice of genre and/or medium: Charles Gounod’s opera Romeo et Juliette (1867) and Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture (1869) form two contrasting examples. Prokofiev’s work with a libretto by Leonid Lavrovsky is one of the few full-length compositions specifically devised for ballet only.

132 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

chival works as well as recreations of stage versions for film. As these enumerations show, practices of remaking go hand in hand with practices of adaptation. This essay will study a chain of Romeo and Juliet choreographies as practices of remaking and thereby demonstrate how instances of adaptation and readaptation of a literary source involve remaking of kinetic features. By tracing a chain of choreographic adaptions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, ranging from Lavrovsky to Morris and from classical ballet to contemporary dance, I will illustrate how the two practices of re-adapting and remaking can form a symbiotic and ‘palimpsestuous’ relationship.2 Each allegedly new choreography of Prokofiev’s ballet can be read as a separate adaptation of the Shakespeare play. Yet, while these versions seem to share the same bundle of ‘originals’ (Shakespeare’s texts, Prokofiev’s score, librettos, etc.), they together form a whole web of kinetic allusions, citations, and ‘re-writings’.3 The theoretical study of remakes and remakings allows us to read this chain of choreographies from another, intra-medial perspective. Therefore, this essay views the chain of Shakespeare choreographies not only as products but also as processes of intra- and inter-medial “rereading/rewriting” (Oltmann 2008: 11; emphasis in the original; see also Eberwein 1998: 15). However, Thomas Leitch, in his essay on “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of Remake”, makes a clear difference between film remakes and practices of repeated creation in other media. “[B]allets are sometimes recreated or rechoreographed […]; plays are reinterpreted by each new set of performers; but only movies are remade” (Leitch 2002: 37). While it can be beneficial to read re-choreographings of ballets with the idea of restaging in mind, I would like to discuss the relatedness of theatrical recreation and remaking and by doing so reveal more features in the process of ballet re-choreographing than would have been possible through concepts of theatrical ‘reinterpretation’ and ‘restaging’ alone. Additionally, I will problematize and approximate the concepts of inter-medial adaptation and intra-medial remaking. For this line of thought, it is necessary first to set adaptation and remaking apart as two contrasting as well as interlinked practices. Instead of discussing

2

Linda Hutcheon uses this term to describe “adaptations as adaptations” and names Michael Alexander, the “Scottish poet and scholar” as the first to introduce the expression (2013: 6).

3

I am indebted to Lucia Krämer’s lecture “Introduction to Adaptation Studies: Novels into Film and Beyond” held at the Technische Universität Braunschweig for the image of the web, which helps to explain the complex interrelationship of parameters involved in processes of adaptation.

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 133

adaptation and remaking as synonyms or adaptation as an umbrella term that subsumes remaking as one of the many different ways of adapting stories, I would like to introduce the notion of two axes for critical thought: that of intermedial adaptation and that of intra-medial remaking.4 In dance creation, both the crossing of medial boundaries and intra-medial repetition are present at the same time: adaptation of literary/musical sources to movement and repetition of kinetic elements taken from codified ballet vocabulary coincide. Thus, for this paper, I would like to consider the notion of remaking not only as a practice but also as an analytical tool for study that allows reading a chain of medial recreations from an intra-medial perspective. Therefore, intra-medial remaking and intermedial adaptation stand here for both contrastive practices and contrastive starting points for investigation. As a first step of studying rechoreographings of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet as practices of remaking, I will relate theoretical notions originally linked to film studies to dance production. In a second part, I will investigate a chronological chain of Romeo and Juliet productions, including discussions on remaking processes even in their source texts. The aim is to show remaking in practice, to reveal the interplay of adaptation and remaking and to illustrate the potential of re-reading/re-writing source texts via self-referential means of expression in a web of kinetic allusions.

R ECHOREOGRAPHING

AS

R EMAKING

Let me start by relating the practice of reviving and rechoreographing ballets to some of the categories of remaking suggested by Rüdiger Heinze and Lucia Krämer in the introduction of this volume. In the following, I would like to read dance remaking as both industrial and textual categories and thereby highlight contextual and medial features of this art as well as its paradoxical nature in uniting innovation with tradition and globalization with regionalism.

4

This paper works with a narrow understanding of adaptation that uses the term for cases only that include media change. Even though Linda Hutcheon’s and Julie Sanders’s wider notions could reveal further complexities of remaking with such a plurimedial art as dance, the interplay of inter- and intra-medial processes is best described via this rigid and in some ways simplified way of distinction. For Hutcheon’s pluralistic approach to adaptation studies, see her study A Theory of Adaptation (2013). For Sanders’s interrelating of adaptation and intertextuality, see her book Adaptation and Appropriation (2006).

134 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

Dance Remaking as Industrial Category Ever since the first documented ballet version of Romeo and Juliet by Vincenzo Galeotti in 1811 (Edgecombe 2006: 70),5 William Shakespeare’s tragic love story has been put into dance as well as other media time and again. Ben Power and Bijan Sheibani’s 60-minute adaptation at London’s National Theatre, Carlo Carlei’s newest film version and Rasta Thomas and Adrienne Canterna’s rock ballet, uniting Vivaldi with pop music and ballet with modern movement styles, all premiered in 2013. One reason for the frequent recourse to this canonical literary source is, like with film, economic security. Ballet recreations are, similar to film remakes, “commercial products that repeat successful formulas in order to minimize risk and secure profits in the marketplace” (Verevis 2006: 37). The production costs of high-budget ballets might in no way add up to those of cinema blockbusters, but the risk of deficit looms high with theatre’s financially least secure sister art. In order to benefit from the economic advantages of a “presold property” (Braudy 1998: 328), most choreographies of Shakespeare’s play stick to the original title, while possibly referring to the Renaissance work, the musical composition and/or earlier choreographies at the same time.6 This way the effect is thrice secured. Yet, as with film, artistic success is another reason for remaking an existing dance production. For choreographers of classical ballet it is still a badge of quality to have attempted ‘a Shakespeare’, let alone to have added one’s name to the list of famous Romeo and Juliet adaptors. However, this aspect of prestige is dependent on genre and historical context. The ballet world with its elitist and aristocratic tradition seems to encourage highly selective canon building and stardom, while modern dance, as it developed in the early 20th century, encourages individualism and originality. Therefore, modern choreographers, such as Mark Morris, will stress their distance to existing adaptations and their individualistic motivation to undertake a new version. The influence of modern and

5

Galeotti’s ballet seems to refer rather to Steibelt’s operatic adaptation than directly to Shakespeare’s play (Bournonville qtd. in Edgecombe 2006: 70). This lets us anticipate the heterogeneous and ‘palimpsestuous’ nature of any dance (re-)adaptation.

6

Composers often change the title to signal national origin: both Berlioz and Gounod entitle their respective works Roméo et Juliette (cf. Kennedy/Bourne 1996). More recent choreographies mark their updated nature and approach to the respective source texts by slight changes or additions to the title, e.g. Matthew Bourne’s Romeo, Romeo (2007), Peter Martins’s Romeo + Juliet (2007) and Mark Morris’s Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare (2008).

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 135

postmodern dance as well as the blending of styles brought about a change in the role of the choreographer, his oeuvre and thus in the choreographic approaches to Romeo and Juliet. Yet, dance harbors the paradoxical coexistence of tradition and innovation. Therefore, although the role and evaluation of remaking in ballet7 has altered, new dance versions of Romeo and Juliet keep sneaking into theaters, cinemas, and festival programs. Be it the mythical quality of sources and remakings or a quasi-oedipal strife of each newcomer to cast off the paternal aura of his predecessor (Braudy 1998: 328f.), the new choreography seems to contribute to an “unfinished cultural business” (Braudy 1998: 331). It adds “unrefinable and perhaps finally unassailable material that remains part of the cultural dialogue” (Braudy 1998: 331). This illustrates a second paradox, which is not reserved but very specific to ballet creation: the coexistence of influence and originality. Some of the ballet makers that I will discuss later started out as dancers with exactly the premakers of their ballet, e.g. John Neumeier was a student and Kenneth MacMillan a colleague of John Cranko. Citations and updates seem prefigured for a young choreographer who owes much to his mentor. Yet there is also cross-cultural influence and internationalization, where contact and citation are less direct, as is the case with Lavrovsky and Nureyev. A third paradox relates to the reception of ballet remakes: Whilst it is possible to compare balletic remakings (this is especially true for balletomanes who can see related productions and additionally make use of a wide range of media to watch different versions today), most ballet-goers privilege ‘their’ (regional) choreography. As Leitch states for film, remakings “invoke the aura of their originals” (2002: 44). Thus the audience remembers this aura, which they seemingly own and against which the theatregoer of a specific community measures a competing version: e.g. Lavrovsky lovers in Moscow or Cranko fans in Stuttgart. The simultaneously regional and international nature of ballet production allows the ballet fan to read ‘his’ version as the only true balletic adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Dance Remaking as Textual Category After a review of contextual factors of ballet remaking, I will now focus on medium specific factors, contrast signification in drama and dance and with that il-

7

‘Remaking in ballet’ is to refer to all practices of re-choreographing in classical dancing, be it entire works or fragmental sections. The term takes the plurimedial nature of ballet creation into account and thus reflects remaking of all or partial strands of this plurimedial web.

136 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

lustrate how processes of inter-medial adaptation and intra-medial remaking go hand in hand in dance (re-)production. Every choreography of Prokofiev’s balletic score Romeo and Juliet, be it Psota’s first version in Brno, Lavrovsky’s filmic re-working in Leningrad, or Mark Morris’s modern dance interpretation in New York, seems at first glance to relate mostly to its literary source, to Shakespeare’s play. Yet, while both verbal stage as well as dance adaptation go back to a whole bundle of sources on which Shakespeare’s play is based, the Romeo and Juliet ballets referred to in this paper have Prokofiev’s score as their common medial starting point. Although each choreographer, just like the director of the play, will have to make his own adaptive decisions in how to choreograph the ball scene, for which the Shakespearean text gives little kinetic information (cf. Shakespeare 2000: 1.4.129ff.), Prokofiev’s programmatic score and libretto help to guide the choices of movement patterns, speed, and mood. It seems as if the musical score served as a prism which bundles the textual web of Shakespeare’s play into a focal point from which a new web of choreographic ‘re-writings’8 can emerge. It is the intermedial quality of dance, combining movement patterns of the body, music, and cultural allusions into a unity, which then invites the viewer and critic to read the balletic Romeo and Juliet adaptations with the theoretical perspective of remaking in mind. In addition, it is then this perspective which reveals the chosen examples not only as a chain but also as an intermedial web of remakings. Furthermore, this focus illustrates the multifaceted kinship (Braudy 1998: 328) and coexistence of two strategies of artistic production: that of adaptation and remaking. Let me illustrate this first by showing the two strategies separately via two choreographic scenes from the ballet. Romeo and Juliet Adapted The balcony scene serves well to show medial differences and dance adaptation at work. Romeo and Juliet exchange much referential information in Shakespeare’s text. Such statements as Juliet’s “What man art thou that, […], / So stumblest on my counsel?”, “How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?” or “What o’clock tomorrow / Shall I send to thee?” (Shakespeare 2000: 2.1.9596; 105; 212-213) cannot be translated literally into dance vocabulary. Although “formulaic sign language” (Edgecombe 2006: 68) or gestures inspired by history

8

The term ‘choreography’ derives from Greek and referred originally to the act of ‘writing dance’. Only since the 18th century has it come to mean “the art of composing dance” (Craine/Mackrell 2004: 104).

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 137

painting have been used to indicate such complex ideas as beauty, marriage or death in (post-)Noverrean ballet d’action,9 Balanchine in the 20th century laments the limitedness of mime. “You cannot indicate your mother-in-law and be readily understood” (qtd. in Edgecombe 2006: 68). Even Noverre, who in the 18th century helped ballet to become a “dramatic art” by approximating dance and theater (Edgecombe 2006: 67), stressed the performative and emotive function of movement: “In a ballet there must be a good deal of spectacle and of action to replace speech, much passion and feeling to take the place of discourse, and, even so, the passion must be strongly expressed in order to create great effects.” (Qtd. in Lynham 1972: 131) Therefore, the verbal complexity of Shakespeare’s balcony scene is replaced by a kinetic text of motions and emotions. Although both composer and choreographer – especially through their interdependence – can imitate the dialogical and poetic structure of the dialogue in Shakespeare’s text, it is only through self-referential musical and kinetic means that the viewer can sense this intermedial imitation: The dialogic or overlapping arrangement of musical themes and movement patterns can mirror the structure of the textual balcony scene.10 Nevertheless, the primary target of adaptation in both music and dance are seemingly emotions such as fear and passion, which then are put into movement via Prokofiev’s nine-minute Larghetto. Edgecombe compares this process to Samuel Johnson’s concept of metaphysical conceit and underlines the metaphorical relationship of text and dance (2006: 66). It is here that the aspect of remaking is prominent. A comparison of a chain of balletic balcony scenes reveals similar choreographic techniques: In most of the choreographies studied for this paper, solos of Romeo and Juliet are followed by a long and intimate pas de deux with impressive lifts and turns. The final kiss and Juliet’s return to some balcony both climax and end the scenes, the music often counterpointing the greatest moment of

9

Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810) “saw in ballet the potential for real drama that told stories and expressed emotions”. He is credited for the “development of the ‘ballet d’action’” (Craine/Mackrell 2004: 349), a form that put plot at the center of choreographic and stage production. For this, the use of gestural pantomime was included into choreography, which imitated verbal communication through a codified kinetic vocabulary.

10 Nancy Isenberg demonstrates convincingly how Prokofiev uses musical genre and compositional technique to mirror Shakespeare’s poetic structure in the play. The sonnet form is imitated by the musical choice of the madrigal, and the lovers’ exchange is represented through dialogic arrangement of respective themes (Isenberg 2004: 133-134).

138 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

intimacy. One could explain the chain of choreographic citations via the supremacy of Prokofiev’s programmatic music over choreographic freedom and via the academic rigidness of ballet vocabulary. However, an informed audience senses – and the ballet expert knows – the many balletic forms the choreography can take. The pleasure lies in the interplay of repetition and variation (cf. Hutcheon 2013: 4). Romeo and Juliet Remade The “Dance of the Knights”, number 13 in Prokofiev’s score, is a striking example of dance remaking in practice. The following comparison of several versions of the same dance fragment reveals three aspects of the study of dance remaking. Firstly, remaking as an analytical category can be applied to the macro level of an entire work as well as to the micro level of segments, with the latter allowing for a more detailed synchronic analysis of remaking and adaptation at work. Secondly, the study of dance remakings illustrates that reinterpretation happens on all medial levels of this plurimedial art, each rendering its own reading of the respective pretexts. Thirdly, the study of this confined musical and choreographic piece clearly reveals the close intra-medial connections and the high number of kinetic cross-references among the versions. All of my choreographic examples – Lavrovsky, Cranko, MacMillan, Neumeier and Nureyev – between 1940 and 1977 make use of a specific pattern in this celebratory entrance dance to the ball. Lavrovsky interpreted the piece as a Cushion Dance, which like the music has clearly distinguished parts, subdividing the choreography into a male, a female, and a duet section. The piece underlines the aristocratic and patriarchal status of the Capulets whilst at the same time exhibiting the relationship of the Lord and Lady of the house. It is striking that not only the dance type but also movement patterns are repeated in the respective choreographies. The arrangement of couples into lines as well as the synchronous movement of the whole tableaux reoccurs in most of the variants. However, the choreographers use enough variation in step pattern for them to qualify as separate choreographies. Variations include forward instead of sideway movements and delicate footwork instead of spacious striding. Even more interestingly, each version reinterprets gender relationships. In Lavrovsky’s version (1940), the ritualized choreography implies more gender equality than hierarchy through choreographic repetition by men and women alike. In contrast to this, Cranko’s version of the dance (1958/62), which takes up much of Lavrovsky’s kinetic material, foregrounds the patriarchal hierarchy of the Renaissance. The only gesture of male courting is represented in the final tableau: the men

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 139

kneel and the ladies pose; an image, which in the context of the entire dance seems artificial decorum. Nureyev’s variant (1977) returns to a more equalizing reading; he decentralizes Lord and Lady Capulet and stresses the communal aspect of the ball by including folk elements where men and women move in separate blocks, dance against each other and thus playfully engage in a battle of sexes. These examples demonstrate not only how a chain of remakings interconnects artefacts both intra- and inter-medially but also how each remaking is an attempt at “rereading” and reinterpreting several hypotexts (Eberwein 1998: 15): the dramatic, musical, and kinetic sources. As Stam puts it, “new hypertexts do not necessarily refer to original hypotexts, but rather encompass the entire chain of remakings that form a ‘larger, cumulative hypotext’” (qtd. in Verevis 2006: 83). This aspect of accumulation implies not only a linear but also a web-like structure in dance remaking. Here, it is not only the chain of intra-medial references that leads to accumulation of hypotexts, but also the inter-medial interconnectedness of media involved. The description of adaptation as “processes of palimpsestuous layering” and as “products of a multi-referential and multitextual web” (Pietrzak-Franger/Voigts 2009: 2) holds true for both layers of dance production, the adaptative and remaking strategies. Furthermore, this aspect of accumulation refers not only to the hypotexts but also to the hypertexts, since the strategies of remaking apply to all of the multimedial features of ballet, such as dance genre, music, but also set and costume. In order to demonstrate this web-like structure and further aspects of dance remaking, I will now turn from rather general and theoretical thoughts on such aspects as production, reception, and intertextuality to a more specific and historically arranged discussion of examples, namely to a chain of balletic remakings of Romeo and Juliet from Leonid Lavrovsky to Mark Morris.

B ALLET R EMADE : C UMULATIVE H YPOTEXTS The following chronological approach, ranging from textual and musical sources to a chain of Prokofiev choreographies, will show the medial complexity of dance remaking at work. The discussion of the sources as well as the comparison of the versions in chronological order will again highlight the multifaceted interplay of adaptive and remaking processes as well as illustrate the cumulative nature of plurimedial remaking.

140 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

Text Where does this long chain of ballet remakings begin? We could start with what would seem the source, namely with Shakespeare’s text. Yet, Romeo and Juliet, like other Shakespeare plays, is less a starting point than a web of texts where practices of adaptation and remaking coincide; it is in itself what Stam would call a “cumulative hypotext” (qtd. in Verevis 2006: 83). There are two aspects that illustrate this: 1) the play is based on several pretexts of other genres, media, and languages. The plot as we know it had precursors in a series of Italian novellas such as Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino (1474) and Luigi da Porto’s Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amati…(1530), which themselves conflated other (often orally transmitted) mythmaking tales (Levenson 2000: 3-4). Bandello renewed and expanded da Porto’s version (1554), and Boiaistuau translated the latter into French (1559), which then became the source for a poem by Brooke and a novella by Painter, two of the sources that Shakespeare most likely knew (Koppenfels 2009: 492). Thus, the story travelled through a series of texts, genres, and countries until it reached some textual form that we think of as Shakespearean.11 Moreover, it went from page to stage and then back to several printed versions. 2) The printed versions form again a web of texts where practices of adapting and remaking merge. The first quarto (Q1) was compiled by actors, who reconstructed the play from their memory, while the second (Q2) most likely was copied from a manuscript version. Both quartos seem to relate to the same performance text (Koppenfels 2009: 492). Q3 (1609) then follows Q2 and forms the basis for the First Folio edition in 1623, a process that involves much re-writing and re-structuring. Thus aspects of re-writing and intra-medial remaking coincide with practices of inter-medial adaptation, all of which contribute to what Levenson would call ‘mobile texts’ (2000: 103) and add to a constant rereading/reinterpretation of the myth. Music The musical pretext of the ballets is another case of a ‘cumulative hypotext’. The production history of what we perceive today as Prokofiev’s score reveals a similar web-like and multistrand process to the one we saw with the literary pretext(s). Again, terms like ‘re-writing’, ‘reinterpreting’, and ‘remaking’ help to describe this compositional process. Again, aspects of inter-medial adaptation

11 For Levenson, “[t]he primary source of the Romeo and Juliet fiction is myth” (2000: 2).

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 141

and intra-medial remaking go hand in hand. And again, there is no single musical source that stands at the beginning of balletic interpretation.12 This web-like process of compositional recreation and reinterpretation feeds into choreographic inspiration even though a shared musical pretext seems to be the common denominator of many balletic versions. The conglomeration of interrelated versions and musical ‘texts’ in many ways foreshadows processes of choreographic remakings to come in the way they juxtapose repetition and variation. The following discussion of the musical production history will show, however, how the generation of a seemingly homogenized musical pretext is based on the interplay between intra-medial remaking processes and cultural change. Sergej Prokofiev was commissioned to compose a ballet based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 1935. Leonid Lavrovsky (choreographer), Adrian Piotrovsky (playwright), and Sergej Radlov (director) devised the libretto together with the composer. Their intense collaboration resulted in several versions of the score. The first draft in January 1935 had five acts, which was then revised after much debate into a four-act version (Morrison 2009: 32).13 Yet the first performance of the piano score was greeted with mixed responses. Greatest matter of dispute among critics was the choice of denouement. Unlike Shakespeare’s play, Prokofiev and his collaborators intended a happy ending. Juliet was to wake up in the presence of Romeo and Friar Lawrence. The couple would celebrate their reunion in a joyous dance and thus outwit the battling society by exiting in triumph. As Prokofiev explained, “the causes which pushed [them] into such vandalism were purely choreographical: living people can dance, those that are dying can never do it lying down” (qtd. in Zolotnitsky 1995: 114). Furthermore, “socialist realism demanded uplifting final messages” (Felciano 1998: 392). While conservative Russian Shakespeare defendants condemned this version, others read political impetus into this interpretation and “lauded the idea of basing proletarian art on the classics” (Morrison 2009: 36). Then again, during the 20th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, subversive stage interpretation was “taboo” (Morrison 2009: 37). The heated dispute ended in the revision of the score. The tragic ending was restored, yet not by entire re-writing. Prokofiev exchanged many of the existing pieces to match the politically sanctioned reading: the theme representing the couple’s happy reunion now became

12 Even if the score happens to be the same, the musical interpretations vary. 13 The cumulative nature of this musical pretext is underlined by the blurred nature of its sources: According to Morrison, it is neither clear in what language Prokofiev read Shakespeare’s play, whether he mixed the translated editions nor what genre he intended his first draft to be: opera or ballet (2009: 32).

142 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

the musical language of Juliet’s death (Morrison 2009: 38).14 However, there was more discontent and more need for re-composition, since even this revised version did not meet with immediate approval. Politically conservative supporters of Socialist Realism condemned it as too dissonant, and leading dancers, such as the first Juliet, Galina Ulanova, decried it as undanceable. Therefore, it took another three years for a first stage performance to premiere. Yet, the curtain neither lifted on the theatre stage which commissioned the ballet in the first place, Moscow’s Bolshoi, nor the first theatre to stage it in Russia, the Kirov in Leningrad. The first choreography known is Ivo Váňa Psota’s creation in Brno (1938) (Felciano 1998: 392-393). Thus, the only way Prokofiev could perform his work in Russia after its immediate completion was by re-writing the score into a series of symphonic suites (Op. 64 b/1936; Op. 64c/1937) and piano scores.15 This historical survey of what Morrison characterizes as the “clandestine story” of a score’s making (2009: 31) illustrates again how this “cumulative” pretext simultaneously combines practices of adaptation and remaking. Similarly, the following examples of choreographic remakings of exactly this musical source generate further ‘cumulative pretexts’ for yet again other remakings. Intermediality and Practices of Remaking: The Ballets Despite the ballet’s first performance through Psota’s choreography, most see Leonid Lavrovsky’s 1940 version at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad as the starting point for a long series of Prokofiev choreographies. It is the common reference point which choreographers either imitate or subvert. Be it his festive ball scene with the “Dance of the Knights”, his acrobatic pas-de-deux under the balcony or his dramatic fencing scenes, Lavrovsky set choreographic as well as interpretative standards. He offered a preliminary reading of both Shakespeare’s and Prokofiev’s pretexts, also by collaborating on the score’s libretto. Like Prokofiev, he worked under commission (Edgecombe 2006: 75) and had to endure severe political censorship as well as the beginning of World War II (Felciano

14 For a thorough description and comparison of the versions see Morrison 2009: esp. 38-40 & Appendix I. 15 According to Rita Felciano, the broadcast of the two suites on “Czech radio” was one of the reasons for Psota and Prokofiev to meet and plan the score’s choreographic premiere (1998: 393).

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 143

1998: 394), much of which influenced the core of dramaturgical decisions.16 Rita Felciano describes this version, which was indebted to Socialist Realism, as follows: “For his production, Lavrovsky chose to emphasize romanticized spectacle, setting the Shakespearean tale in broad strokes, with huge crowds and realistic street and fighting scenes. His Verona is one of coarse brutality and feudal repression, which have fatally infected even personal and family relationships, one example of which is the incestuous relationship between Lady Capulet and Tybalt. Against these forces of corruption, the lovers cannot prevail. With the exception of some lively folk dances and a few ballet sequences given to Juliet, this version relied heavily on pantomime and cinematic sweep to sustain its dramatic narrative.” (1998: 394)

As this description demonstrates, Lavrovsky’s choreography as well as Prokofiev’s score both stay close to many aspects of the Shakespearean pretexts, while at the same time contributing to a chain of further re-readings and re-writings, as with Lavrovsky’s foregrounding of social conflict and his Freudian reading of Lady Capulet’s and Tybalt’s relationship. Lavrovsky, like others that would follow, introduced his own kinetic and dramaturgical interpretation and with that his own text, despite the fixed libretto and despite the dominating score. Felciano describes the music as a “straitjacket” for the choreographer, through the “strongly suggestive visual imagery – a skill Prokofiev acquired writing music for films – and the tightness of its programmatic structure” (1998: 392); this effect is intensified also by the titles of the individual musical pieces. From the start at the Kirov, adaptive processes accompanied intra-medial practices of remaking. One example is that of Lavrovsky’s own restaging of his choreography. The following outline approximates the concepts of restaging and remaking. While seemingly similar in terms of resetting choreography, by reading these restagings with critical aspects of remaking in mind, intra-medial comparison and metamedial parameters move into focus. Six years after its celebrated premiere in Leningrad, Lavrovsky restaged his version for the Bolshoi in Moscow. This included not only changes in theatre setting as well as historical context – the war had been over by then – but also changes in the meta-medial aspect of casting. Galina Ulanova, whose balletic

16 The time of the score’s first creation was a time of severe political turmoil in the arts. The Stalinist regime dismissed Radlov from his position as director of the Leningrad Opera House, Prokofiev’s first wife was expelled and Adrian Piotrovsky was executed (Glaser 2011: n. pag.; Streller 2003: 205).

144 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

impersonation of Juliet has supposedly “never been surpassed” (Felciano 1998: 394), joined the revival, but this time with a different partner. Furthermore, after six years, she had undergone an immense personal and artistic development, which also meant that her and her viewers’ interpretation of the same choreography was different. A far more complex example of how remaking accompanies adaptation is Lavrovsky’s own film Romeo and Juliet in 1955. While the intra-medial replication of balletic scenes shows us strategies of remaking, the inter-medial transposition from stage production to film illustrates adaptation. In this film both strategies are medially intertwined. Unlike filmed stage productions, which also use film techniques to underline choreographic artistry, Lavrovsky changed the choreography to meet filmic needs: Instead of introducing the family feud through danced mime and choreographed fencing scenes, the dance is reduced to filmic pantomime, recalling the effects of silent film. Yet, it is the balcony scene which shows this medial blend of adaptive and remaking strategies the most. Lavrovsky has the lovers meet in a bush of roses. Juliet then has an illusion, dreaming of their emotional union through dance. A close-up on Juliet’s face introduces this introspection, which then reveals the couple dancing in a visual haze. The choreography of Lavrovsky’s grand pas-de-deux serves here as a balletic stream of consciousness of an otherwise silent film encounter, all accompanied by Prokofiev’s music. Crosscultural Remaking This film version as well as the Bolshoi’s guest appearance in London (1956) turned Lavrovsky’s choreography into a crosscultural inspiration for further balletic remakings. Unlike Frederic Ashton’s creation, which opened before the impact of the Lavrovsky legacy in 1955, John Cranko’s version heavily relies on Lavrovsky’s pretext and more so on both stage production and film screening. A reading of Cranko’s version leads us from a medium-specific to a more pluralistic view on dance remakings. As the example will show, crosscultural contextualization and internationalization of ballet production lead to dramaturgical rewritings and thus to choreographic decisions, both interlinking adaptive and remaking processes. Cranko’s first choreography had its premiere in Venice (1958), performed by young stars of the Scala in Milan (such as Carla Fracci). Nancy Isenberg very convincingly describes how the post-war context of 1950s Italy affected Cranko’s interpretation of play, score, and choreographic pretext (2004: 132133). Isenberg sees several socio-cultural aspects reflected in Cranko’s drama-

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 145

turgy, such as the “beginning of mass migration”, the “post-war Economic miracle” as well as the prominent role of media, which produced “icons of permissiveness” and supported a change in gender perception (2004: 132). Cranko not only subverted Lavrovsky’s choreographic focus on the political feud by placing more emphasis on the protagonists and by changing the ending – his ballet concludes with the lovers’ death and no reconciliation of the families. He also freed “the body from the technical rigor of Russian-style dance movement”, thus stressing individualism and corporeal expressiveness (Isenberg 2004: 131). As did Lavrovsky, Cranko restaged his choreography for the Stuttgart Ballet in 1962, this time with a new cast (e.g. Marcia Haydée as Juliet) and a new set design by Jürgen Rose, both of which entailed changes in movement as well as audience response. Self-Referential Aspects of Remaking According to Felciano, Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography of 1965 for London’s Royal Opera House had to stand out against a triple pretext: Lavrovsky’s, Ashton’s, and Cranko’s versions; and yet it bears traces of all three (1998: 396). MacMillan continues the process of individualization begun by Cranko and focuses on “the maturing relationship between Romeo and Juliet. A dreamlike quietness envelops them, and is often expressed in stillness.” (Felciano 1998: 396) Felciano highlights the paradoxical nature of the choreography by contrasting terms like “rambunctiousness” with British “restraint” and characterizes the fencing scenes as highly formalized (1998: 396). Stylized and rhythmic fencing with both rapier and sword, as suggested by Renaissance combat technique, is interspersed by balletic leaps on the music. Not only do repetition in floor patterns, choreographic structuring of duets and ensemble pieces in combination with dramaturgical references (such as the obligatory kiss in the balcony scene) demonstrate intra-medial remaking, the recreating of balletic versions, and with it the re-reading of the web of source texts, also re-write and continue writing medial and international ballet history. Through this, processes of choreographing, re-choreographing, and all aspects of remaking that are connected to it – for example in terms of set, costume or cast – find constant renegotiation. Furthermore, former balletic Romeos become (re-)makers of the ballet (Nureyev, Neumeier), who not only change their function in this process of ‘re-writing’, but through the international and mobile nature of ballet production also help to spin a web of cross-cultural intertextuality. The change in casting can evoke and renegotiate aspects of age, gender, and national identity in ballet (re-)production. MacMillan originally set the ballet on

146 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable as the “star-crossed lovers”. He then, at the last minute, changed the cast for the opening night to Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Fonteyn, a mature British ballet icon, and Nureyev, a young Soviet refugee under political asylum, were both celebrities with completely different cultural backgrounds (Carman 2011: 36). Their impersonation of MacMillan’s choreography remained iconic for further productions, both in terms of ballet technique and cultural impact. Changes in theater conventions, media technology, and dance styles – modern and contemporary styles increasingly affected ballet as an art form whose history goes back to the 17th century – go hand in hand with remaking strategies of the ballets and thus bring about changes in the production processes of balletic Romeo and Juliet productions. Thus, as John Frow stated for film remakes, dance remakings are also remakings of genre (qtd. in Verevis 2006: 63)17 and through the multimedial nature of the art also of medium. Medial Self-Referentiality and Gender The following three examples show three different ways of using balletic conventions to reinterpret gender relations in both Shakespeare’s play and ballet tradition. John Neumeier uses dance technique to stress Juliet’s development from girl to bride, Rudolf Nureyev blends balletic foregrounding of the male dancer with dramaturgical emancipation of Juliet, and Matthew Bourne re-functionalizes gendered re-writing of Shakespeare’s play for choreographic inspiration. John Neumeier’s Romeo und Julia, first created for Frankfurt Ballet (1971) and then re-worked for his own company Hamburg Ballet (1974), effectively demonstrates how medial features of ballet tradition can be used to foreground re-readings of both balletic pretexts and Shakespeare’s play. His connection to Cranko’s version is a special one: he himself was a student of Cranko, both as a dancer and choreographer. Furthermore, Neumeier blended the role of dancer and choreographer in the restaging of his own production by casting himself as Romeo for his Hamburg premiere. Even more interesting is his use of kinetic means and subversion of ballet conventions in order to foreground his (gendered) reading of the play. According to Felciano, he took “his inspiration from the ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty’ movement of the 1960s […and choreo-

17 “John Frow argues that […] every remake is simultaneously a remaking of the conventions of the genre to which it belongs, and (for those viewers unfamiliar with the presumed original) the genre may be the only point of reference” (Verevis 2006: 63).

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 147

graphed] his Romeo and Juliet with a strong focus on the protagonists’ youth and budding sexuality” (1998: 396). Act 1 scene 3 of Shakespeare’s play tells about Juliet’s first confrontation with her marriage to Paris. It is the first moment in the play that foreshadows her transition from being a 14-year-old girl to a (sexually) mature woman. In many ballet versions, she dances this scene in point shoes, beautiful costume, and with kinetic precision. Although her allegro movements allude to her subversive and youthful nature, the virtuosity of her point shoe dancing underlines artistic artificiality. Neumeier’s female protagonist, on the other hand, enters bare-footed, is wrapped only in a towel, and moves with everyday gestures of a young girl who is not afraid to show her (almost) naked body to the nurse, her mother, and her female companions. It is through her lack of dance skills and dance attire that both her inexperienced youth and her subversive potential are highlighted. Many of the dance versions enlarge the first meeting of the lovers by a longer section of secluded pas-de-deuxs, which are repeatedly interrupted by mother, nurse and Tybalt – dramaturgical additions, which are encouraged by Prokofiev’s score. In Neumeier’s version of this added section, Juliet now wears point shoes as well as festive dress for the first time. The choreography imitates the formalized poetic structure of the play’s dialogue by having Juliet try the dance steps she learnt from her mother earlier in the ballet. Neumeier himself describes how he parallels dance communication and verbal plot: In the beginning, Juliet seems incapable of dancing, while Romeo presents himself as the virtuoso in ballet art. Yet at her grave, he is unable to move anymore, and Juliet’s newly acquired artistic movements cease after his death as well (Neumeier: n. pag.). By means of a selfreferential use of ballet technique to characterize Juliet and her sexualized relationship to Romeo, Neumeier also offers his reading of the play through a blending of medial signifying processes. He contributes to what I would call the web of multimedial re-writings of the play. Each dance production adds to an endless chain of interpretations and reinterpretations. What differentiates this type of (re-)staging from other theatrical forms, however, is its special restriction to nonverbal kinetic and musical communication as well as its implicit intermedial references to the verbal/theatrical text.18 Neumeier enhances this latter effect by in-

18 Set and costume are two of the parameters that link dance and theater production, while also having different effects on performance in each genre/medium. In the case of balletic remakings of Romeo and Juliet this interconnection through set illustrates the web of intermedial cross-referencing. For example, MacMillan’s set by Nicholas Georgiadis “evoked Franco Zefirelli’s theater production for the Old Vic” (Carman 2011: 36).

148 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

cluding a play-within-the-play (or pantomime within the dance), thus alluding to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Felciano 1998: 397), and by relying “less on pure dance than on dramatic gesture and everyday movement” (Felciano 1998: 397).19 The use of balletic conventions to foreground changes of the play is even more prominent in the gendered reading of Rudolf Nureyev’s 1977 version for the London Festival Ballet. His Romeo and Juliet, like his ballets in general, like to foreground the artistry of the male dancer. While for many centuries it had been common to display the skills of the ballerina through the support of her male partner(s), Nureyev adds a number of male solos to display male virtuosity. However, in his Romeo and Juliet, he contrasts this by adding a reversed dialogic section to the usual balletic balcony scene. He includes the structure of a canon, whereby Juliet performs a movement pattern first, which Romeo then repeats. She is even the one who starts the final kiss so prominent in many balletic balcony scenes. By this, Nureyev does both: he implicitly references back to the Shakespearean text and gives a medial interpretation of Juliet’s dominating role in the scene. One production that illustrates changes in the gender concepts of ballet history, re-writes the gender model of the Shakespearean sources text(s) and furthermore uses its own process of remaking balletic Romeo and Juliet for other dance adaptations is Matthew Bourne’s project Romeo, Romeo (2007). What started out as medial rumor about a male-male version of the “star-crossed lovers”, ended up as a choreographic experiment in preparation for Bourne’s Picture of Dorian Gray. In order to adapt Oscar Wilde’s novel to ballet and in order to tell about homosexual love without enhancing stereotyped prejudice, the British choreographer had dancers work with him on a male-male version of Shakespeare’s love plot and thus used his strategies of remaking to find his choreographic language. According to an interview with Alastair Macaulay, he wished to experiment on “male-male duets express[ing] romantic and sexual love”, which both worked kinetically and convinced a conservative audience (Bourne/ Macaulay 2011: 576). Thus, a remaking and re-gendering of Romeo and Juliet as a ballet served here as a choreographic and dramaturgical workshop for yet another adaptation of another literary genre.

19 Neumeier himself refers to Shakespeare’s play as his major inspiration and less the previous ballet productions (Neumeier: n. pag.). While I respect the choreographer’s self-description, I would still argue that through the underlying score, through the intra-medial intertextuality of ballet conventions and through the foregrounded subversion of some of these conventions, the production refers to previous ballet productions through both repetition and variation.

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 149

Cumulative Remaking in Ballet My last example refers back to the start of this paper, to the beginning of the chain of Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet variations, and at the same time away from strictly balletic aesthetics to contemporary dance production. Mark Morris’s Romeo and Juliet, On the Motifs of Shakespeare (2008) is a perfect example of “cumulative remak[ing]” (Stam qtd. in Verevis 2006: 83), which illustrates the web-like intertextuality and cross-referential intermediality of ballet (re-)production and literary dance adaptation. Mark Morris’s modern dance version takes Prokofiev’s score as a reference point, as did the ones discussed so far. But unlike the others, Morris’s version is based on Prokofiev’s first and at the time unpublished draft with the happy/open ending. In 2006/2007 Simon Morrison, Princeton scholar and expert on Prokofiev’s work, discovered the 1935 piano score, the first and soon rejected draft of the ballet. This early version was to be called “Romeo and Juliet, on the Motifs of Shakespeare”, a title that Morris took up in order to distance himself from other ballet productions but also to mark his revolutionary innovation by using the spectacularly regained ‘lost’ score. According to this draft, the ballet would have been different in instrumentation, in speed, and of course in its ending (Morrison 2012). The appendix in Morrison’s profound study on Sergej Prokofiev, The People’s Artist (2009) cites the libretto of this early version. The great surprise is, even though it tells us about Juliet’s recovery in Romeo’s company, the ending is “[u]nscripted” (2009: 402) and thus, one could argue, open. The script reads as follows: “55. Entrance of Romeo and Juliet. Juliet slowly comes to herself […]. Romeo begins to dance with the reviving Juliet. Everything in their movement reflects their mood. The music is bright, but it does not attain a forte. 56. [Unscripted.]” (Qtd. in Morrison 2009: 402)

Mark Morris stresses this open ending but also counteracts it. By choreographing this ending, he makes the audience witness the couple’s happy reunion. Yet, as Apollinaire Scherr points out, “the dance concludes by turning itself inside out. The reunited lovers leap out of Juliet’s window and enter a room of stars. We live in a room (or two); they ‘live in love forever,’ Morris writes in the program notes. And it looks suspiciously like the universe. With Romeo’s palm held up to Juliet’s, as when this pilgrimage began, the lovers orbit each other, moving farther apart as their magnetic pull – on our heart – increases. They are still circling after the music ends, the lights dim, the curtain falls.” (2010: 303)

150 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

What Morris calls into question is not only the ending, but also the genre of tragedy (Scherr 2010: 299) and, I would argue, ballet making itself. He does not only give his Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet a new interpretation by casting Mercutio and Tybalt as women, but this choreography seems to suggest a non-gendered reading of the ballet. While the set determined choreography in other versions, the design by Martin Pakledinaz inverts the relationship: the dancers interact with a miniature Verona made of movable houses. With this balletic world premiere of Prokofiev’s original draft, Morris not only wrote back at previous pretexts but also wrote back at ballet tradition, possibly starting his own new chain of remakings in contemporary dance.

C ONCLUSION New versions and existing ones can be analyzed along the lines of re-adaptation, as has been done before. This essay has shown how the act of reading a series of Romeo and Juliet ballets as processes of remaking calls our attention much more strongly to their intra-medial relationship as well as to the complexity of an inter-medial web of references. If one discusses the ballets’ textual and musical sources on the one hand, and the chain of balletic remakings on the other, two distinctions become clear: 1) we can contrast implicit vs. explicit processes of remaking. A comparison of the various “Dance[s] of the Knights” reveals explicit kinetic repetition and reference, while at the same time implicitly hinting at other remaking processes connected to the medial sisters of this plurimedial art. 2) Therefore, remaking as an analytical strategy can either be used on the macro or the micro level; on an entire work and the entirety of its plurimediality or on isolated fragments and selected media of this plurimedial blend. The study of dance remakings also approximates and problematizes the concepts of ‘adaptation’ and ‘remaking’ as two interdependent phenomena, as dance remakings rely on both the medium’s kinetic intra-mediality and its cultural adaptation processes. Finally, yet importantly, this essay has illustrated how the medium of dance (with its kinetic and cultural implications) and its processes of balletic remakings contribute to (kinetic) re-readings of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as Prokofiev’s scores. With that, each balletic remaking adds to the endlessly growing web of interrelated medial texts. We can describe the process of dance remakings with the words of Roland Barthes: a balletic Romeo and Juliet enters a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations from the innumerable centers of culture” (Barthes 1978: 146). Each remaking is such a tissue in itself. It will

R OMEO

AND

J ULIET R E-D ANCED

| 151

be a pleasure to witness more dance texts entering this tissue of happy and tragic Romeo and Juliet ballets, all ending in C-major, until someone recomposes Prokofiev’s ending.

W ORKS C ITED Barthes, Roland (1978): “Death of the Author”, in: Ronald Barthes/Stephen Heath, Image – Music – Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 142-148. Bourne, Matthew/Macaulay Alastair (2011): Matthew Bourne and his Adventures in Dance. Conversations with Alastair Macaulay, London: Faber. Braudy, Leo (1998): “Afterword. Rethinking Remakes”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 327-334. Carman, Joseph (2011): “Swept Away. From Lavrovsky to Martins, Romeo and Juliet’s Balcony Scene Has Captured Audiences’ Hearts”, in: Dance Magazine 2.2011, 35-39. Craine, Debra/Mackrell, Judith (2004): Oxford Dictionary of Dance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eberwein, Robert (1998): “Remakes and Cultural Studies”, in: Horton/McDougal, Play It Again, Sam, 15-33. Edgecombe, Rodney S. (2006): “Trans-Formal Translation. Plays into Ballets, with Special Reference to Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet”, in: The Yearbook of English Studies 36.1, 65-78. Felciano, Rita (1998): “Romeo and Juliet”, in: Selma Jeanne Cohen (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Dance, New York: Oxford University Press, 392-399. Glaser, Linda B. (2011): “In Composing ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Prokofiev Witnessed Betrayal, Exile, Execution”, , accessed on 20 Feb. 2014. Horton, Andrew/McDougal, Stuart Y. (eds.) (1998): Play It Again, Sam. Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hutcheon, Linda, with O’Flynn, Siobhan (2013): A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge. Isenberg, Nancy (2004): “Accomodating Shakespeare to Ballet. John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet (Venice 1958)”, in: Ladina Bezzola Lambert/Balz Engler (eds.), Shifting the Scene. Shakespeare in European Culture, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 129-139. Kennedy, Michael/Bourne, Joyce (eds.) (1996): Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music, 4th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

152 | M ARCSEK -F UCHS

Koppenfels, Werner von (2009): “Die frühen Tragödien. Romeo and Juliet”, in: Ina Schabert (ed.), Shakespeare Handbuch. Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt, Stuttgart: Körner, 492-499. Leitch, Thomas M. (2002): “Twice-Told Tales. Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake”, in: Jennifer Forrest/Leonard R. Koos (eds.), Dead Ringers. The Remake in Theory and Practice, Albany: State University of New York Press, 37-62. Levenson, Jill L. (2000): “Introduction”, in: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-125. Lynham, Derek (1972): The Chevalier Noverre. Father of Modern Ballet, London: Dance Books. Morrison, Simon (2009): The People’s Artist. Prokofiev’s Soviet Years, Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2012): “On Pointe: The Music of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Guest Lecturer Simon Morrison, January 2012”, , accessed on 15 Jan. 2014. Neumeier, John (n.d.): “Ballet von John Neumeier – William Shakespeare – Romeo und Julia. Zum Stück”, , accessed on 10 Jan. 2014. Oltmann, Katrin (2008): Remake – Premake. Hollywoods romantische Komödien und ihre Gender-Diskurse, 1930-1960, Bielefeld: transcript. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika/Voigts-Virchow, Eckart (2009): “Staging the Palimpsest. An Introduction to Adaptation and Appropriation in Performance”, in: Monika Pietrzak-Franger/Eckart Voigts-Virchow (eds.), Adaptations – Performance across Media and Genres. Papers Given on the Occasion of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, Trier: WVT, 1-16. ROMEO I DZHULYETTA (1955) (USSR, R: Lev Arnshtam/Leonid Lavrovsky). Sanders, Julie (2006): Adaptation and Appropriation, London: Routledge. Scherr, Apollinaire (2010): “Mark Morris’s Romeo and Juliet”, in: Southwest Review 95.1, 298-303. Shakespeare, William (2000) [1597]: Romeo and Juliet, ed. Jill L. Levenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Streller, Friedbert (2003): Sergej Prokofjew und seine Zeit, Laaber: Laaber Verlag. Verevis, Constantine (2006): Film Remakes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zolotnitsky, David (1995): Sergej Radlov. Shakespearean Fate of a Soviet Director, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

“Yes, Avatar is Dances with Wolves in space . . . sorta” Repetitions and Shades of Difference in Two Blockbusters S ABINE N. M EYER

I NTRODUCTION When Kevin Costner’s New Western Dances with Wolves hit the movie screens in 1990, many critics initially responded positively, hailing it as a healthy departure from the Western’s legitimization of America’s colonial past. Native American activist and scholar Edward D. Castillo, for instance, lauded “its sensitive exploration of a native culture” (1991: 14). Very soon, however, Native and nonNative scholars began to deconstruct the apparently positive images of Native Americans created by the movie, emphasizing its continued use of stereotypes and clichés, its confirmation of racial hierarchies, and its inaccurate portrayal of a supposedly dying race (e.g. Huhndorf 2001). Native scholar Elizabeth CookLynn even went so far as to accuse Costner of making viewers believe that “all of the crimes and vices of the American/European colonialist’s character are somehow outweighed by Kevin Costner’s boyhood wish to ‘be an Indian’” (1991: 10). Considering the flood of critical reviews, it might come as a surprise that almost twenty years later James Cameron produced a movie that viewers were quick to categorize as a remake of Dances with Wolves, some of them condemning it as highly derivative, even as a case of plagiarism (cf. Cconyersjr 2010; Brooks 2010; Boucher 2009). Other popular-culture productions spoofed Cameron’s heavy borrowing from Costner’s blockbuster. In November 2009, Comedy Central aired the South Park episode “Dances with Smurfs”, which satirized Avatar’s close reliance on Dances with Wolves and compared the Na’vi to the

154 | M EYER

cartoon Smurfs (“Dances with Smurfs”: n. pag.). Cameron himself acknowledged the links between both movies. When asked whether there was “some heritage linking [Avatar] to Dances with Wolves”, he answered: “Yes, exactly, it is very much like that”, asserting that Costner’s movie was one reference point for him, “sorta.” He further said: “I just gathered all this stuff in and then you look at it through the lens of science fiction and it comes out looking very different but is still recognizable in a universal story way. It’s almost comfortable for the audience […]. They’re not just sitting there scratching their heads, they’re enjoying it and being taken along. And we still have turns and surprises in it, too, things you don’t see coming.” (Qtd. in Boucher 2009: n. pag.)

This article proposes that Avatar is indeed a remake of Dances with Wolves. What interests me is the exact relation between premake and remake, i.e. the interplay between similarity and difference, as Katrin Oltmann has stressed (2008: 12). I will demonstrate that Avatar both confirms, as well as questions, Dances with Wolves, a paradox that, according to Oltmann, exists between all pre- and remakes (2008: 12). While the first part of my article will investigate the similarities between these two blockbusters by comparing their respective plots, individual scenes, character constellations, cinematic styles, as well as their employment of myths and stereotypes, the second part will focus on the differences between them. The paradoxical relation between pre- and remake will then lead me to an evaluation of indigenous responses to Avatar with a focus on indigenous rights activism.

S IMILARITIES BETWEEN A VATAR D ANCES WITH W OLVES

AND

Plot A few minutes into Avatar, it becomes clear that Cameron reverts to an old American fable that goes back to 19th-century cultural productions dealing with the settlement of the United States: a Euro-American becoming a member of a Native American tribe and adopting a Native identity. While this formulaic plot was the basis of canonical texts, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841), and of a number of Hollywood films, such as Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), it was famously re-enacted in 1990 by Kevin Costner’s soldier John Dunbar. Alienated from so-called white civilization during his

R EPETITIONS AND S HADES OF DIFFERENCE IN A VATAR AND D ANCES WITH W OLVES

| 155

military service in the Civil War, Dunbar had himself transferred to a frontier outpost “to see the frontier before it’s gone”, as he says. During his gradual involvement with the Sioux, he learns that the racist attitudes that his military superiors hold of these Natives are wrong and that white society is deeply flawed. Initiated into the Sioux band by Stands With a Fist, a white woman who has lived with this band for a long time, he undergoes an identity crisis which is resolved by his adoption of a Native name, his marriage to Stands With a Fist, and his utter loyalty to the Sioux in the fights against the encroaching U.S. military. In the end, Dunbar and his pregnant wife move back to white civilization, thus leaving the tribe to its ultimate destruction by the settlers and military. In Avatar, Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine, is frustrated about the bad medical treatment and the low pension he has received after serving in the military and sees his journey to the planet Pandora as the ending of his old and the beginning of a new life. Piloting the body of an avatar, a technical creature formed with human and Na’vi DNA (the Na’vi are Pandora’s indigenous population), Sully – who is sullied by human values – is sent out to explore the Na’vi. His findings are supposed to support the racist Colonel Quaritch in his mission to remove these indigenous people in order to get access to unobtainium, a mineral to be found in abundance underneath their settlement. In exchange, Sully will get paid the spinal surgery that will allow him to use his legs again. On his mission, he, i.e. his avatar, meets the Na’vi princess Neytiri, who initiates him into Na’vi society, teaches him the Na’vi language, culture, and particularly their ecologically sound way of life. She ‘unsullies’ him, so to speak. They fall in love and enter a life-long bond. Jake is adopted by the tribe, becomes their acknowledged leader, helps them unite with other tribes against the humans, the so-called Sky People, and thus saves them from destruction. In the end, the Americans are forced to leave Pandora and Sully, through an indigenous ceremony, gives up his human body and becomes a Na’vi. Besides minor differences, both movies obviously have very similar, if not almost identical, plotlines. Moreover, environmental destruction is the focal point in both of them. While in Dances with Wolves the soldiers and settlers litter the frontier and extinguish the buffalo for no reason, in Avatar America’s military-corporate complex perceive nature merely in terms of potential energy resources and behave negligently toward the planet’s flora and fauna. Stereotypization While Cameron claims that the Na’vi were a “compilation of characteristics from indigenous communities from around the world” (qtd. in Lee 2010: n.

156 | M EYER

pag.), they most clearly resemble the Native Americans living in the Great Plains, filmic versions of whom we have encountered in Hollywood productions for decades and, of course, also in Dances with Wolves. They have long hair, wear feathers, are portrayed as extremely slender and muscular, and ride on equine-like Direhorses. Moreover, they live in clan structures similar to those of the Plains tribes. Their actions are often accompanied by the sound of drums – an instrument also well-known from Plains tribes’ culture. Not only do the indigenous protagonists of Dances with Wolves and Avatar look similar, but they are also represented through the same stereotypes. Dances with Wolves has certainly succeeded at creating positive images of Native Americans. The Sioux are presented as noble savages, displaying a high degree of morality, living in a functioning community, understanding and respecting each other. More precisely, Costner’s Sioux are construed as ecological Indians, a subtype of the noble savage, who live in harmony with nature and connect with the animals symbiotically (Garrard 2004: 125). Throughout the movie, tribe members are shown frowning upon the mess left behind by the soldiers and their inattention to the flora and fauna of the Great Plains. Avatar zooms in on and expands the ecological Indian stereotype (Baird 2012: 79). Just like the frontier in Dances with Wolves, the new frontier Pandora – visualized by Cameron through the use of computer-generated imagery – is conceptualized as an exotic paradise full of wonders and possibilities yet highly vulnerable to the exploitation by the human invaders. The Na’vi’s symbiotic connection with the planet’s natural wonders is emphasized in the first encounter between Sully and Neytiri, which is also the first introduction of the Na’vi to the viewers. When Sully, on his first tour through the jungle, is attacked by viper wolves, Neytiri intervenes in his favor and chases away or kills the animals. Their ensuing interaction reveals their contrasting value systems and relations to the environment. Sully does not see that Neytiri is praying during the act of killing; instead, he ponders admiringly her “impressive” deed. When he finally thanks her for “killing those things”, she hits him with her bow, punishing him for his crude intrusion into her world. She then vents: “Don’t thank. Don’t thank for this. This is sad. Very sad only.” Neytiri also extinguishes his torch, an unnatural, manmade element of civilization, which makes it impossible for Sully to perceive the jungle’s bioluminescent plants. All civilizational devices, the movie seems to argue, separate and alienate man from his environment. The cinematography supports Neytiri’s representation as an ecological Indian. When she enters the scene, fighting the wolves, she is often presented through medium long shots, partly in slow motion, that allow us to see how effortlessly and elegantly she moves within her environment.

R EPETITIONS AND S HADES OF DIFFERENCE IN A VATAR AND D ANCES WITH W OLVES

| 157

The close connection the Na’vi have with nature is even technologically enhanced. They can connect themselves via neuro-conductive antennae with plants and animals and thus communicate and exchange information with them. As Daniel Mendelsohn phrases it, “they can commune not only with other creatures but with what constitutes a planet-wide version of a technology with which we today are very preoccupied” (2010: n. pag.). This simultaneous fashioning of the Na’vi as pre-civilized and atechnological ecological Indians (as opposed to technology-prone humans) and as a hypercivilized and technologized people is the greatest unresolved contradiction in Avatar (Mendelsohn 2010: n. pag.). As Mendelsohn has rightly argued, this contradiction displays “Cameron’s ambivalence about the relationship between technology and humanity” (2010: n. pag.). ‘Going Native’ and ‘White Savior’ Myths Not only do Dances with Wolves and Avatar feature ecological Indians, but their white protagonists, John Dunbar and Jake Sully, are construed along the ‘going Native’ and ‘white savior’ myths. “By adopting Indian ways”, Shari Huhndorf has argued, “the socially alienated character uncovers his own ‘true’ identity and redeems European-American society.” “[F]orms of going native”, she has further claimed, “also support European-American hegemony” (2001: 5). In the course of the movies, both characters increasingly go Native, i.e. they are transformed from alienated, white Americans into members of the respective tribes, shedding their former identities. Both heroes thematize their increasing alienation with their former culture while living among the Natives: Dunbar: “I had never really known who John Dunbar was. […] I knew for the first time who I really was.” Sully: “Everything is backwards now. Like out there is the true world and in here is the dream. It’s hard to believe it’s only been three months. I can barely remember my old life. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Like Dunbar, the American hero of the frontier, Jake is celebrated as “‘a New Man emancipated from […] history,’ leaving behind the mistakes of the degenerate Old World, with all […] possibilities of the New World available before him” (Shohat/Stam 1994: 141). In the course of Dances with Wolves, the color of Dunbar’s skin, hair, and eyes darkens, his hair grows long, and his European-style beard and clothing vanish. Similar to its premake, Avatar also visualizes Sully’s mental transfor-

158 | M EYER

mation by having him undergo a physical transformation. Throughout the movie, the body of his avatar transforms from a more European version – fully clothed and with full hair – into a stereotypically Native version of himself – shaved scalp, indigenous decorations, sparsely clothed. In addition, towards the end of the movie he displays the same bioluminescent glow as all plants, creatures, and humans indigenous to Pandora (Images 1 to 6). Both movies also employ the motif of rebirth. While in Dances with Wolves, Dunbar is renamed by the tribe into “Dances with Wolves”, the name – and the later marriage ceremony – signifying tribal adoption, Jake goes through various adoption ceremonies (killing an animal, riding an Ikran, etc.) until he finally even gives up his human body entirely. In preparation for this shedding of human identity, Sully remarks in his last video-log: “I don’t want to be late for my own party. It is my birthday after all. This is Jake Sully signing off.” Images 1-6: The transformations of John Dunbar and Jake Sully

R EPETITIONS AND S HADES OF DIFFERENCE IN A VATAR AND D ANCES WITH W OLVES

| 159

Sources: DVD Dances with Wolves (1990), 20th Century Fox (2011); DVD Avatar (2010), 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2010)

Not only do Dunbar and Sully go Native, but they also turn into super-Natives who soon excel all the other members of the tribe. Dunbar saves the Sioux in the attack against the hostile Pawnee (Image 7). Sully, in turn, is appointed leader in the fight against the Americans after having managed to subdue and ride the Toruk, a huge and ferocious bird of prey (Image 8). He thus becomes Toruk Makto, a title which has only been bestowed upon five other Na’vi before him. As the following scene analysis from Avatar will demonstrate, the cinematic language employed in both movies underlines the ‘white superiority’ topos that is highlighted on the level of plot. Sully’s arrival at the Tree of Souls on the back of the Toruk is announced by an enormous shadow appearing on the faces of the Na’vi, who are praying and chanting. They scream and hide their faces, indicating that what they see is too much for them to bear. What they see – and the camera here adopts their lowangle, i.e. inferior, perspective – is the descent of the Toruk, surrounded by a halo of sunlight, its wings glowing magnificently. The following shot underlines Sully’s superiority: now the camera is positioned above Sully, so that the viewers can see the great number of Na’vi screaming and scattering in fear at the sight of the Toruk. Sully gets off the predator calmly, strokes its flanks and through these actions establishes his leadership role within the Omaticaya clan, whose members form an alleyway to let him pass, fall on their knees, and touch his illuminated body in reverence. Reaction shots of the faces of Tsu-Tsey, the

160 | M EYER

clan’s chief, and of Mo’at, Neytiri’s mother and the clan’s spiritual leader, suggest that both of them will now accept Sully’s help and leadership despite their initial skepticism or, in Tsu-Tsey’s case, hostility towards him.1 Both call him “Toruk Makto” reverently, thus declaring their subordination to him. Neytiri confides to Jake that she was afraid for her people but that since his arrival all her fears have dispersed. A few minutes later in the film, Sully gives a rousing war speech, calling the Omaticaya to arms against the Sky People. His power as Toruk Makto is so great that he is confident to be able to mobilize the other clans on Pandora as well: “When Toruk Makto called them, they came.” Even though, on the level of speech, Sully pays deference to Tsu-Tsey, asking him for permission to speak and emphasizing that he needs his support, the movie’s aesthetic codes have already revealed to the viewer that Sully is now the unquestioned leader of the Na’vi. Significantly, Tsu-Tsey is relegated to the role of a translator, steps aside as a possible suitor for Neytiri, and, quite conveniently, dies in the battle against the Sky People. While Avatar thus occasionally hints at crosscultural egalitarianism, such occasional hints are certainly not sufficient to overwrite the racial hierarchies between Sully and the Na’vi that it establishes on the levels of plot and cinematic aesthetics. By recurring to this “white savior syndrome” (Cammarota 2011: 243), Avatar, as well as its premake Dances with Wolves, turn the Natives into natural creatures without agency, who are dependent on the benevolence of EuroAmericans. Both movies thus reinforce “the racial hierarchies [they] claim to destabilize” (Huhndorf 2001: 3), which causes Slavoj Žižek to condemn Avatar as a “rather conservative, old-fashioned film” (2010: n. pag.). Image 7: Lt. Dunbar in the fight against the Pawnee

Source: DVD Dances with Wolves (1990), 20th Century Fox (2011)

1

On the level of characters, Tsu-Tsey corresponds to Wind in His Hair in Dances with Wolves, whose trust and friendship Dunbar only wins slowly through repeated acts of bravery.

R EPETITIONS AND S HADES OF DIFFERENCE IN A VATAR AND D ANCES WITH W OLVES

| 161

Image 8: Toruk Makto’s arrival

Source: DVD Avatar (2010), 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2010)

Point-of-View Just as Costner’s Dances with Wolves, Cameron’s Avatar is a “fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people” (Newitz 2009: n. pag.). Dunbar and Sully are the unquestioned focalizers through whose eyes we perceive the Natives, thus inevitably partaking in their colonial gaze. In order to heighten the personal nature and the immediacy of information, Dunbar notes down his daily experiences with the Sioux in a diary, while Sully uses a video-log. Even if we do not see both characters writing down or recording their impressions, we frequently hear their voiceovers. Both movies thus encourage audience identification with their respective protagonists. Manichean Worldview Finally, both Dances with Wolves and Avatar are based on the very same Manichean worldview. They merely invert earlier characterizations of EuroAmericans as good and Native Americans as bad, which were frequently employed in classic Westerns. While, with the exception of a few well-intentioned characters, the majority of Americans are utterly evil stock villains, the respective tribes are portrayed as moral heroes. There is no middle ground between good and bad. Avatar by far exceeds Dances with Wolves with respect to the impeccable portrayal of indigenous peoples. Whereas the viewer has to witness the Native Americans engage in three massacres in the course of Costner’s movie, Cameron eventually decided to cut the only scene showing the Na’vi massacring

162 | M EYER

the mining crew that assaulted Hometree (Baird 2012: 80). Avatar’s “expedient moralizing” (Justice 2010: n. pag.) serves significant functions: First, the morally elevated Na’vi allow Cameron to show “what qualities the good humans will attain” (Justice 2010: n. pag.). Second, by solely assigning the colonial guilt to pathologically racist members of military-corporate America – especially the colonels in both movies are portrayed as insane, evil eco- and man killers – the viewers can dissociate themselves from those evil characters and give in to the belief that only exceptionally few people did or would act like this. This “comforting lie” disentangles audiences from their potential complicity with such crimes, allows them to feel anger toward the villains, and to fully empathize with the hero, whose altruism and good-heartedness suffices to offset their evil doings (Justice 2010: n. pag.). This one-sided identification process with the heroes, which ignores any shades of moral grey, facilitates the viewers’ self-absolution from colonial guilt.

R EPETITION WITH

A

D IFFERENCE

Remakes, as Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal have argued, “provoke a double pleasure in that they offer what we have known previously, but with novel or at least different interpretations, representations, twists, developments, resolutions” (1998: 6). After the similarities between Avatar and Dances with Wolves, I will therefore now shed light on the differences between the two blockbusters. The most striking difference can be found in the realm of cinematic aesthetics. While Dances with Wolves can pride itself on supplying us with extreme long shots of panoramic landscapes and captivating scenes of buffalo herds galloping by, Avatar’s “enormous visual power, the thrilling imaginative originality, the excitingly effective use of the 3-D technology” seem “bound to change permanently the nature of cinematic experience henceforth”, as Mendelsohn has argued (2010: n. pag.). I shall not elaborate on such differences of media aesthetics here, however, but will instead concentrate on the ways in which Avatar deviates from its premake on the levels of setting and plot. Historical Contextualization While Dances with Wolves is clearly a retrograde film, looking back melancholically and nostalgically to the second half of the 19th century and bemoaning the past horrors of settler colonialism, Avatar is set in a utopian fantasy world, on a far-away and unknown planet in 2154, as Jake’s video-log indicates. Despite be-

R EPETITIONS AND S HADES OF DIFFERENCE IN A VATAR AND D ANCES WITH W OLVES

| 163

ing set on a different planet in the future and thus disentangled from the viewers’ present, Avatar abounds with implicit or explicit references to American colonial history. Cameron himself announced that Avatar’s plot was based on “the violent struggles that took place in the past in North America” (qtd. in Lee 2010: n. pag.). Thus, the American military’s destruction of Hometree, the home of the Omaticaya clan, in order to get access to the unobtainium deposited below reminds viewers of the forceful removals of numerous Native American tribes throughout the 19th century in order to exploit the resources found on their homelands. More explicitly, the march of the crying and physically weakened Na’vi away from Hometree strongly evokes images of the infamous Trail of Tears. Various verbal allusions also firmly ground Avatar in U.S.-American colonial and imperialist discourses across the centuries. By characterizing Pandora’s inhabitants as “roaches”, Colonel Quaritch echoes Colonel John M. Chivington’s instruction to his troops at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864 to “[k]ill and scalp all [Cheyenne], little and big. […] Nits make lice.” (Churchill 2001: 129) Dr. Max Patel’s mention of the “shock and awe campaign”, in turn, takes viewers back to the War on Iraq. Despite differing radically in time and space, the settings of both movies are inextricably intertwined through the logic of colonialism. The portrayed conflict between indigenous peoples and military-corporate colonizers, Cameron seems to argue, has happened across the globe at all times and will be part of our existence for many years to come. Instead of spreading melancholia, however, Avatar exudes optimism: one human being is enough to bring about change and to break through the vicious circle of colonialism. Vanishing Indians vs. Indigenous Survival Avatar’s ending significantly deviates from that of its premake. Costner ends his movie in the style of dozens of Westerns, recurring to the motif of the vanishing Indian. We first see Dunbar and his probably pregnant (white) wife, Stands With a Fist, leaving behind the tribe and moving back to the white world. The depiction of the couple reminds us of the biblical story of Joseph and Mary seeking for a safe place to give birth to the savior (Huhndorf 2001: 4). This iconographic depiction suggests that the indigenous tribal world is on the verge of decline and thus not a safe haven for this holy family. The child to be born will be endowed with the best character traits from both worlds and might thus be able to save Euro-American society from within. The Sioux, however, are destined to vanish, and the white hero is unable to change their destiny. As the on-screen writing – assuming the authority of a history book – informs us, thirteen years after the story’s end, the Sioux were defeated completely and surrendered to live on res-

164 | M EYER

ervations. The people the viewers have come to know throughout the movie, thus the implication, have ceased to exist. The cinematography of Dances with Wolves allows American viewers, in particular, to mourn this loss and to regret their ancestors’ involvement in the Natives’ extinction. In opposition to this melancholic story of defeat and disappearance, Avatar ends on a triumphant note for the technologically sophisticated and ecologically friendly indigenous peoples. After the glorious victory of the Na’vi, achieved through a powerful alliance of all of Pandora’s indigenous clans, the majority of human beings are sent back to their renegade world, while a worthy few are kept on Pandora. We never learn the motivation behind the Na’vi’s decision to keep some humans: neither can they breathe on Pandora, nor do the Na’vi have the technology to transform them into avatars. Through their continued presence, the movie seems to reassure the viewers that there is some hope concerning the rehabilitation of humankind and that a peaceful collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous people is possible. The climactic ending of the film shows the ceremony, Sully’s “birthday”, in which he abandons his human form altogether and is transferred into the body of his avatar. “In the closing moments of the film the camera lingers suspensefully on the motionless face of avatar-Jake; suddenly, the large, feline eyes pop open, and then the screen goes black. We leave the theater secure in the knowledge that the rite has been successful, that the avatar Jake will live.” (Mendelsohn 2010: n. pag.) Instead of melancholia and nostalgia about the dying of a race, we have an optimistic ending celebrating the future of a people who are able to successfully fuse technology and environmental concerns and alluding to the fact that the few remaining human beings on Pandora might transport this knowledge and mindset back to Earth.

C ONCLUSION : A VATAR AND I NDIGENOUS R IGHTS ACTIVISM My analysis has demonstrated that the relationship between Dances with Wolves and Avatar is paradoxical, to yet again employ Oltmann’s terminology. Both position themselves strongly against U.S.-American imperialism and environmental degradation and purport to present positive images of indigenous peoples. While doing so, however, they perpetuate long-held stereotypes and myths that, in the final analysis, run counter to their alleged revisionism. The most significant differences between the two movies can be found in their respective conceptualizations of the future. With its optimistic and future-oriented outlook, its

R EPETITIONS AND S HADES OF DIFFERENCE IN A VATAR AND D ANCES WITH W OLVES

| 165

emphasis on indigenous survival and pantribal collaboration, Avatar significantly modifies its premake. This modification, I would argue, does not suffice to categorize Avatar as a re-reading of Dances with Wolves, with the aim to subvert the latter. Especially the perseverance of several ‘good’ humans on Pandora appears too conciliatory a filmic move to read Cameron’s blockbuster as a critique of Costner’s. I would rather agree with Daniel Heath Justice who has claimed that Avatar “neither disorients nor dislocates viewer expectations” (2010: n. pag.). Even though it does not subvert its premake, Avatar’s situatedness between repetition and difference may have been responsible for the mixed reviews the movie received from indigenous communities.2 While indigenous reviewers have particularly vented their frustration about Cameron’s recycling of the white savior myth and his adoption of yet another colonial gaze, hardly anyone has dismissed the movie entirely (cf. Justice 2010: n. pag.; Lee 2010: n. pag.). Its ability to elicit indigenous support despite its conservative racial politics, I would argue, is achieved through its emphases on resource exploitation and environmental justice and, more significantly, on pantribal collaboration and indigenous rights, which inextricably link it to contemporary indigenous identity politics. Ever since the establishing of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples by the Commission of Human Rights in 1982, it has been the attempt of indigenous peoples all over the world to (re)discover their collective identity, to fill the term ‘indigeneity’ with content, and to build global indigenous alliances through which human rights issues can be efficiently addressed (Niezen 2003: 4; 2009: 8, 27). The indigenous peoples’ movement – called ‘indigenism’ by Ronald Niezen – has sought to promote and to protect the rights of the world’s “first peoples”, who are united in the claim to have survived on their lands despite colonialism and corporate exploitation (2003: 4-5). It thus “takes the form of a global network of those who share a consistent sense of self, a common sense of timelessness and fragility, and complementary aspirations of self-determination” (Niezen 2009: 9). In order to effectively assert their rights, indigenous leaders and organizations must represent their indigenous constituents and their concerns in a way appealing to a broad mass of people. Niezen elaborates: “The moral persuasiveness of indigenous peoples’ claims to recognition and rights derives ultimately from a more universal perception of collective grievance, cultural loss, and nos-

2

Dances with Wolves’ meandering between the traditional Western and revisionist Western has led to similarly mixed reviews.

166 | M EYER

talgia, that is to say, from a sympathetic public that looks to timeless ways of life as a source of personal and civilizational improvement.” (2009: 11)

Read against this background, it is understandable why Avatar has been received so positively by many indigenous communities. Its setting in a fantasy world and its focus on indigenous land and environmental rights allow indigenous peoples all over the globe to project their realities, their fight against land loss and environmental destruction in particular, onto the film. Gerge Poitras (Mikisew Cree) has emphasized that he “realized during the film that this was the story of so many indigenous peoples all around the world, and definitely the story about me and my people’s struggle” (qtd. in Lee 2010: n. pag.). Bolivia’s indigenous president, Evo Morales, has identified with the movie due to its depiction of resistance against capitalism and the fight for the environment (“Evo Morales”: n. pag.). With its vision of indigenous survival, the movie has also inspired indigenous communities around the world with hope. Carlos Mamani Condori, the chairperson of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, has said to Cameron: “This story of Pandora is the story of the fight of all the indigenous around the world. […] it has been the story going on for years, and is still going on. That is why I thank you for this movie. […] It gives hope, and a positive message to the indigenous communities” (qtd. in Lee 2010: n. pag.). Besides highlighting the links between the Na’vi’s and their own struggles, indigenous peoples all over the world also laud Avatar’s strong and visionary endorsement of pantribal alliances – “indigenous cosmopolitics”, as Joni Adamson has recently called them (2012: 146). In this vein, Julia Good Fox (Pawnee) praises Avatar for its exploration of connections, on the levels of both content and aesthetics. While aesthetically serving as a “network of connections to other films, history, and recent political and contemporary events”, its plotline reminds indigenous peoples across the globe of their shared experience of suffering and demonstrates to movie audiences that “individuals still connect to each other’s humanity despite overwhelming hurdles.” It is such connections amongst each other, rather than some form of spirituality, that enable the Na’vi to fight back America’s military-corporate complex (Good Fox 2010: n. pag.). The formation of pantribal alliances and transnational relationships with non-indigenous organizations/activist groups – ideally across the globe – lies at the heart of indigenous rights activism and is a prerequisite for effectively communicating indigenous grievances, resisting forced displacement, and securing collective survival (Niezen 2009: 11). Finally, a number of indigenous – and non-indigenous – groups have employed Avatar as a strategic tool to voice their political concerns. By emphasiz-

R EPETITIONS AND S HADES OF DIFFERENCE IN A VATAR AND D ANCES WITH W OLVES

| 167

ing the Na’vi’s connection to nature and their ecologically responsible way of life, the movie extols the positive contribution indigenous ways of living and knowing make to non-indigenous societies all over the world and thus heightens the viewers’ sensitivity to indigenous environmental concerns. Lacking discursive authority and the financial means to launch equally successful film projects representing their interests, indigenous groups have built on the popularity of Avatar and the sympathy it has elicited among viewers to attract public attention for their own causes. In March 2010, for instance, a coalition of First Nations and environmentalist groups placed a full-page notice in Variety, titled ‘Canada’s AvaTar Sands’ in order to attract the readers’ attention to their campaign against the Alberta oil sands (Mitchell 2011: 3). In September that year, the indigenous inhabitants of Fort Chipeywan even invited Cameron to Alberta to support them in their struggle (Pape 2010: n. pag.). Around the same time, Avatar’s director also began to support advocacy organizations and indigenous groups in their protest against the Belo Monte hydrological dam planned by the Brazilian government. Cameron, these groups argued, was to highlight “the real Pandoras in the world” (Barrionuevo 2010: n. pag.). After his visit to the Amazon, the Californian director produced a twenty-minute documentary, A Message from Pandora, about the plight of the Amazonian tribes, which is now part of the collector’s edition DVD release of Avatar (Mitchell 2011: 21). Avatar’s power of mobilization has even led to the creation of a new term in the scholarly dictionary of participatory culture. Thus, Henry Jenkins speaks of “Avatar activism” when describing the phenomenon of “people around the world […] mobilizing icons and myths from popular culture as resources for political speech” (2010: n. pag.). Cameron was surprised at the resonance of his movie. During a panel discussion, “Real Life ‘Pandoras’ on Earth: Indigenous Peoples’ Urgent Struggles for Survival”, at the Ninth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City in April 2010, he stated: “I never really dreamed that a Hollywood film could have that significant of an impact. […] Not only is this an opportunity, it is a duty. I do have a responsibility now to go beyond the film, because it doesn’t teach, and to become an advocate myself and use what media power I have to raise awareness.” (Qtd. in Lee 2010: n. pag.) Cameron is right – Avatar does not teach. What it does, however, is to repeat the plotline, themes, character constellations, and cinematography of an iconic movie, Dances with Wolves, which a large number of viewers know and emotionally connect to, while endowing the remake with significant differences (setting and emphasis on indigenous collaboration and survival). It seems to be this tension between pre- and remake that works so advantageously for the movie in terms of

168 | M EYER

participatory culture. Moreover, it goes without saying that the Avatar activism of indigenous groups and environmental activists around the world remakes Cameron’s movie, endowing it post hoc with a degree of political vision it never had. The case of Avatar thus perfectly illustrates that “adaptation and remaking are not only industrial and textual categories”, as Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis remind us, “but also reception categories which depend upon the existence of audience activity” (2012: 10).

W ORKS C ITED Adamson, Joni (2012): “Indigenous Literatures, Multinaturalism, and Avatar. The Emergence of Indigenous Cosmopolitics”, in: American Literary History 24.1, 143-162. AVATAR (2010) (USA, R: James Cameron). Baird, Robert (2012): “Cries with Indians. ‘Going Indian’ with the Ecological Indian from Rousseau to Avatar”, in: Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman (ed.), American Indians and Popular Culture, vol. 1, Santa Barbara: Praeger, 69-86. Barrionuevo, Alexei (2010): “Tribes of Amazon Find an Ally Out of Avatar”, , 10 Apr. 2010, accessed on 10 July 2012. Brooks, David (2010): “The Messiah Complex”, , 8 Jan. 2010, accessed on: 10 July 2012. Boucher, Geoff (2009): “James Cameron. Yes, Avatar is Dances with Wolves in space . . . sorta”, , 14 Aug. 2009, accessed on 24 June 2012. Cammarota, Julio (2011): “Blindsided by the Avatar. White Saviors and Allies Out of Hollywood and in Education”, in: Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 33.3, 242-259. Castillo, Edward D. (1991): “Review of Dances with Wolves”, in: Film Quarterly 44.4, 14-23. Churchill, Ward (2001): A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, San Francisco: City Lights. Cconyersjr (2010): “Movie Review. Avatar…The Remake of the Decade”, , 22 Jan. 2010, accessed on 24 Sept. 2012. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth (1991): “The Radical Conscience in Native American Studies”, in: Wicazo Sa Review 7.2, 9-13. “Dances with Smurfs” (n.d.): , accessed on 22 July 2013. DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990) (USA, R: Kevin Costner).

R EPETITIONS AND S HADES OF DIFFERENCE IN A VATAR AND D ANCES WITH W OLVES

| 169

“Evo Morales ‘Identifies’ with Avatar Film” (2010): , 1 Dec. 2010, accessed on 24 Sept. 2012. Garrard, Greg (2004): Ecocriticism, London: Routledge. Good Fox, Julia (2010): “Avatars to the Left of Me, Pandora to the Right. An Indigenous Woman Considers James Cameron’s Avatar”, , accessed on 11 July 2012. Horton, Andrew/McDougal, Stuart Y. (1998): “Introduction”, in: Andrew Horton/Stuart Y. McDougal (eds.), Play It Again, Sam. Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1-11. Huhndorf, Shari M. (2001): Going Native. Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jenkins, Henry (2010): “Avatar Activism”, , 15 Sept. 2010, accessed on 11 July 2012. Justice, Daniel Heath (2010): “James Cameron’s Avatar. Missed Opportunities”, , 20 Jan. 2010, accessed on 24 Sep. 2012. Lee, Jessica (2010): “Avatar Activism. James Cameron Joins Indigenous Struggles Worldwide”, , 26 Apr. 2010, accessed on 11 July 2012. Loock, Kathleen/Verevis, Constantine (2012): “Introduction. Remake/Remodel”, in: Kathleen Loock/Constantine Verevis (eds.), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions. Remake/Remodel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1-15. Mendelsohn, Daniel (2010): “Avatar”, , 25 Mar. 2010, accessed on 25 Sept. 2012. Mitchell, Emma (2011): Seeing Blue. Negotiating the Politics of Avatar Media Activism. Unpublished Honours Thesis, Sydney. Newitz, Annalee (2009): “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?”, , accessed on 11 July 2012. Niezen, Ronald (2003): The Origins of Indigenism. Human Rights and the Politics of Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. — (2009): The Rediscovered Self. Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice, London: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Oltmann, Katrin (2008): Remake – Premake. Hollywoods romantische Komödien und ihre Gender-Diskurse, 1930-1960, Bielefeld: transcript. Pape, Gordon (2010): “What Does Avatar Have In Common With Canada’s Oil Sands?”, , 30 Sept. 2010, accessed on 22 July 2013. Shohat, Ella/Stam, Robert (1994): Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media, London/New York: Routledge.

170 | M EYER

Žižek, Slavoj (2010): “Avatar. Return of the Natives – Slavoj Žižek on the ‘Brutal Racist Overtones’ of James Cameron’s Avatar”, , 4 Mar. 2010, accessed on 24 Sept. 2012.

On the Ethics and Aesthetics of ‘Remaking’ in Web 2.0 Environments1 M ARTIN B UTLER

In light of what some scholars have announced as another ‘mediamorphosis’ (e.g. Fidler 1997), i.e. the continuous and ever-accelerating shift towards digital communication and media convergence that we have been witnessing over the last years, the discussion of the forms and functions of remakes this volume sets out to contribute to might well benefit from a widened theoretical and methodological perspective – a perspective which incorporates exactly this medial shift and which, through this very incorporation, may lead to a range of questions that shed new light on categories and concepts that we have been dealing with to date. In order to contribute to this widening of perspective, the present article examines and discusses some of the parameters and implications of ‘remaking’ in Web 2.0 contexts. It starts from the assumption that social media and other channels of consuming, distributing, and producing cultural forms of expression provided in Web 2.0 contexts have contributed to the evolution of a set of new – and distinctly different – signifying practices which fundamentally question notions of ‘author’, ‘recipient’, and ‘text’. Against the backdrop of these developments, the ‘making’ – and, consequently, the ‘remaking’ – of cultural artifacts seems to be no longer a prerogative of the media industries; instead, the technological advances of the last decade and their promises of participation in the ‘making’ and ‘remaking’ of literary and other medial narratives and forms have begun to foster grassroots creativity and new forms of political agency within the cultural field.

1

Parts of this argument also appear in Butler, “The Promise of Participation.”

172 | B UTLER

In the following, I will particularly focus on one example of Web 2.0 remakes, namely the online movie production Star Wars Uncut. In so doing, my contribution not only sets out to illustrate the dynamics of what Axel Bruns has labeled ‘produsage’ (2006), i.e. the convergence of processes of reception and production through the use of social media; it also discusses the need to rethink ‘received’ conceptual and terminological notions to come to terms with the genre/mode of ‘remaking’ in a digital age. Against the backdrop of these more general considerations about the aesthetics and ethics of online remakes, it particularly underlines the distinctly ideological momentum entailed in practices of remaking in Web 2.0 environments. Three years ago, in the summer of 2010, a “full, feature-length, shot-for-shot retelling of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope”2 (Byford 2012: n. pag.) was released on the Internet. It consists of small, 15-second segments of individually created ‘remakes’ of scenes, or parts of scenes, from the original Star Wars movie (or ‘premake’, to use a term by Katrin Oltmann, 2008) released in 1977. The segments, 473 of them altogether, compiled and cut by the curator of the online movie project, indeed form a one-to-one reproduction of the premake’s mise-enscène and montage, but do not follow any common aesthetic make-up: Some come as amateur live footage, some are computer animated, others are stopmotion Lego set-ups, “flash animation, Claymation, 3-D animation, old- and new-school video-game graphics, […] paper dolls, masked performers and sock puppets” (Zoller Seitz 2012: n. pag.) – sometimes, the ‘semiotic register’ (a term borrowed from Constantine Verevis, qtd. in Carroll 2009: 36) of the remake’s segments is so different from the premake that one may find it difficult to decide whether this is a remake or an adaptation after all (a terminological debate which is worth leading though). The outcome of this project, a movie called Star Wars Uncut, was characterized by its curator as a “crazy fan mash-up remake” (Hoang 2013: n. pag.). It gathered amateur movie segments from all over the world, was heralded by academics and non-academics alike as an example of the democratic appeal of the Internet, especially in times of social media, which, according to web enthusiasts, would allow fans to become creators of media content, thus actively engaging in processes of cultural production and challenging the alleged monopoly of the media industry. Associated with these anti-capitalistic notions of resistance against corporate media business, the film project, as well as the website on which the individual

2

The information on the details of the production process is taken from Byford 2012, Zoller Seitz 2012, Hoang 2013, Stelter 2010 and Lloyd 2010.

E THICS AND A ESTHETICS OF ‘R EMAKING ’

IN

W EB 2.0 E NVIRONMENTS

| 173

segments could be posted, gained enormous reputation and media coverage. The online magazine Vulture called it “the greatest viral video ever”, arguing that “Star Wars Uncut is a collectively made work of postmodern folk art, as arresting and significant as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can silkscreen or a Robert Rauschenberg collage painting built around photos filched from newspapers. […] Lucas’s work was a call; this is a response.” (Zoller Seitz 2012: n. pag.) In 2010, Star Wars Uncut even won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Fiction (Stelter 2010: n. pag.). Shortly after the Emmy celebration, The New York Times underlined the ideological dimension attached to the remaking of the Star Wars premake, using a David-vs.-Goliath rhetoric in stating that “[t]he award is all the more remarkable because, in a world in which television heavyweights like HBO and NBC mount big-budget campaigns to win Emmys, ‘Star Wars Uncut’ is just a hobby for its creator, Casey Pugh, a 26-year-old Web developer who lives in Brooklyn.” (Stelter 2010: n. pag.) Even more romanticizing, Vulture Magazine saw the online remake not only as a remake of a movie, but as a restoration of a true childhood experience long corrupted by dull and streamlined media: “Part of the reason people go to the movies”, Vulture states as a response to the online remake, “is to recapture that childhood sense of absolute creative freedom – that buzz that you used to get from tear-assing around the neighborhood on a bike or skateboard pretending you were riding in the Kentucky Derby or zooming into hyperspace. Pugh and his army of collaborators get this, and their glee is infectious. When the Millennium Falcon escapes the Mos Eisely spaceport, the moment is dramatized by some kid galloping through a house with a towel on his head.” (Zoller Seitz 2012: n. pag.)

In an astonishingly similar vein, the pop-culture spin-off of the Los Angeles Times, called Hero Complex, praised the project for reviving, or remaking, an entire lifestyle, an attitude, or a mental disposition of a past generation of unspoiled human beings: “For all that it is newfangled, it’s also fundamentally oldfashioned”, it argues and goes on to state that “[i]n days of yore – not so long ago or far, far away as all that, but before movies and television, radio and records turned us into habitual consumers of other peoples’ inspirations – humans made their own fun: They entertained themselves by entertaining one another. They played the piano, sang in the parlor, wrote poetry, painted pictures. […] ‘Star Wars Uncut’ may exist by virtue of a fleet of modern technologies, but in that it is homemade

174 | B UTLER

and participatory, it recalls an older world of amateur theatricals, puppet shows and party pieces.” (Lloyd 2010: n. pag.)

The collective online remake of the Star Wars premake, I believe, seems indeed to be a particularly telling example that illustrates what the process of ‘remaking’ in these media environments actually entails: aesthetically, the ‘remaking’ of the movie turns out to follow the logic of mash-up, i.e. a “combination of data, functionality or other content from two or more sources into a new single integrated form” (Sonvilla-Weiss 2010: 248). What is important is not the creation of a coherent visual design; on the very contrary, it is the active and highly deliberate maintenance of creative diversity which is at stake here, combined with a celebration of amateurism that, in turn, emphasizes notions of autonomy and self-expression. The visual make-up, however, as heterogeneous as it may be, is neither chaotic nor is it incomprehensible, as coherence is established via the editing procedure as well as the soundtrack. After having discussed the aesthetic and ethical characteristics of Star Wars Uncut, one may wonder why this remake has been characterized as the “greatest viral video ever”, as Vulture puts it (Zoller Seitz 2012: n. pag.). What, in other words, contributes to the special position this Star Wars remake holds among ‘everyday users’ as well as scholars and critics? As my observations on the romanticizing narratives of online democracy and participatory cultures have already indicated, its special status might indeed derive from the particularly political momentum this collaborative online project entails. And, to be sure, this political momentum becomes even stronger as soon as we widen our view and have a look at how the creators of the premake relate to participatory cultures. Lucasfilm was one of the first production companies that saw both the need and the economic benefit of providing participatory interfaces enabling fans of the Star Wars universe to actively contribute to shaping this very universe by making up their own versions of the saga. As Elana Shefrin notes, already “in the late 1990s, the StarWars.com official website began granting free web space to fans who desired to post their creations” (2004: 275), so from very early on fans were involved in modeling and remodeling the Star Wars galaxy. But here is the rub: the participation in the ‘production’ of Star Wars spin-offs, sequels, and remakes on the web was (and still is) heavily regulated and framed by a set of restrictions and limitations. Moreover, fans might (and may) add their submission to the website, but, as Shefrin continues, “only if their submissions would become the studio’s intellectual property” (2004: 275.). Henry Jenkins, in his formidable book on Convergence Culture, has also hinted at the Star Wars producers’ ways of ‘allowing’ participation only to a cer-

E THICS AND A ESTHETICS OF ‘R EMAKING ’

IN

W EB 2.0 E NVIRONMENTS

| 175

tain degree, pointing out that George “Lucas wants to be ‘celebrated’ but not appropriated. Lucas has opened up a space for fans to create and share what they create with others but only on his terms.” (2006: 154) Arguing that “the active fan audience offers cultural producers the opportunity to forge strategic alliances that can democratically influence the power hierarchies in the artistic field” (2004: 275), Shefrin similarly claims that “while Lucas’s and Lucasfilm’s flagrant commodification of participatory fandom has not visibly eroded the general audience consumption of their franchise products, it has clearly resulted in a loss of symbolic prestige among media critics and Star Wars fans” (2004: 275f.). What Lucas’s website provides, in other words, is a mere make-believe, a ‘rhetoric of participation’ that exploits the symbolic capital of the saga and its creator for marketing purposes. Against this backdrop, it does not really come as a surprise that these highly restrictive ‘policies of participation’ implemented by Lucasfilm stand in contrast to the fans’ belief that the producers of Star Wars shall not limit creative expression among their true adherents. In the end, then, it is the fans’ trust – and with it their romantic idea of a limitless universe of imaginary freedom they inhabit side by side with the movies’ producers – which is severely shaken by this act of limiting creativity (Shefrin 2004: esp. 270f., 274f., 276). And indeed, as Elana Shefrin points out, “while some fans were appreciative, others have been highly critical of the policy, complaining that their creative designs are being co-opted by a corporate decision that violates fair-use laws and compromises their personal chances of profiting from their artistic practices” (2004: 275). Moreover, firstgeneration fans perhaps ‘want to believe’ – they want to believe in the creation myth of the Star Wars universe, with its mastermind George Lucas finding ways to realize his project in spite of adverse circumstances – a master narrative of ‘do it yourself’ creativity, which does not really fit into a restrictive policy that limits creative expression. Star Wars Uncut, then, turns out to be something like the aesthetic and ideological counterpart to the well-designed interface of interaction provided by Lucasfilm. The remake and its production platform seem to incorporate everything that the official website is not able to offer: it presents and represents a particularly unspoiled grassroots creativity and promotes a ‘do-it-yourself ethics’ expressed both through an aesthetics of amateurism and the ‘not-for-profit’ agenda posted on the project’s website. It would be far too easy, however, to neatly split up the world into corporate media businesses like Lucasfilm on the one hand and – as its antagonists – small, independent niche productions such as Star Wars Uncut. This would just add to the ‘David-vs.-Goliath’ rhetoric employed by the magazines and newspapers

176 | B UTLER

quoted above. In fact, once we dig deeper into the issue, we find out that even they cannot keep up this nice distinction between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in today’s media business. For instance, in the aftermath of the Emmy Awards, The New York Times reported that “Lucasfilm, which is notoriously protective of the ‘Star Wars’ brand, contacted him [i.e. Casey Pugh, the director of Star Wars Uncut] early in the creation of ‘Uncut’ and told him that it wanted to support the project. Because Mr. Pugh has signed a nondisclosure agreement, there is little he can say about the discussions with the company, except that ‘Lucasfilm isn’t out to make money on this, and neither am I’.” (Stelter 2010: n. pag.)

Moreover “Lucasfilm said in a statement Friday that ‘we are really pleased that they won an Emmy for their efforts’ and that its long-time partner for fan productions, Atom Films, is in talks with the producers. Atom holds an annual Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge, which culminates in screenings of winning films on the Spike channel, and ‘we hope that some day “Star Wars Uncut” can air on Spike,’ Lucasfilm said.” (Stelter 2010: n. pag.)

“Lucasfilm isn’t out to make money on this, and neither am I.” Although such a disclaimer, in times of the emergence of numerous Web 2.0 business models, may sound ridiculously hypocritical, I do indeed believe that at the heart of Lucasfilm’s attempts at incorporating the remake into their streamlined system of media production, there lies a bigger issue, i.e. the question of both authorship and ownership in the era of digital reproduction and distribution. In other words, the act of remaking Star Wars online eventually turns out to be an act of reclaiming at the same time, an act of letting those that made it popular in the first place participate in its very creation. Thus, what is at stake here, is a set of questions that Henry Jenkins has put together nicely in a piece on remixing Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick. With respect to the ways in which Web 2.0 changes our ideas of authorship, ownership, and copyrights, he asks: “In what sense does a culture have a ‘right’ to retell stories that are part of its traditions? In what sense are they ‘our stories’ rather than the legal property of the people who first created them? After all, much contemporary discussion of copyright starts from an assumption that authors have rights while readers do not.” (Jenkins 2010: 109) Though Moby-Dick might be a case different from Star Wars, I think these questions can also be raised with regard to the online remake. Interestingly enough, exactly these questions have been at the center of the debate surrounding the collective production of Star Wars Uncut. For instance,

E THICS AND A ESTHETICS OF ‘R EMAKING ’

IN

W EB 2.0 E NVIRONMENTS

| 177

one of the reviewers in the aforementioned Vulture Magazine points out that the remake is “the best argument […] for an overhaul of outmoded copyright laws which, if enforced to the entertainment industry’s satisfaction, would make such works illegal and essentially un-viewable” (Zoller Seitz 2012: n. pag.). One could even push it further, as Henry Jenkins does, arguing that this claim for a revision of copyright laws and, with it, the revision of our notions of authorship “is not that radical when read against a larger backdrop of human history, though it flies in the face of some of the most persistent myths about creative genius and intellectual property that have held sway since the Romantic era” (2010: 109). Put into a historical perspective, then, ‘remaking’ or ‘retelling’ could well be considered established cultural practices of producing and disseminating texts, especially, perhaps, in pre-print cultures, when concepts of authorship were based on the idea that text production naturally entails a collaborative dimension (Jenkins 2010: 108). Therefore, participatory environments that bring forth products like Star Wars Uncut can indeed be said to contribute to what Jenkins called a “revitalization of the old folk culture process in response to the content of mass culture” (2006: 21). They produce and reproduce a particular poetics of folk culture, i.e. forms of cultural articulation which heavily rely on oral modes of circulation, which are thus characterized by their spreadability (cf. Jenkins 2006: 139) and, as a consequence, show “no clear marks of individual authorship” anymore (Jenkins 2006: 139). In other words, what we witness in Web 2.0 environments – and this may sound somewhat romanticizing again – is a revival of remaking as the modus operandi in cultural production and cultural memory formation. That these processes of remaking, more often than not, result in a product that (intended or not) carries a particularly parodic potential (maybe the Star Wars remake is a quite exceptional case here) and may thus cross the thin line between remake and parody, can, I believe, best be explained by the deliberately staged aesthetics of amateurism hinted at above, which add to the ideological momentum of remaking in Web 2.0 contexts. To be precise, the parodic element in online remakes becomes overtly political as soon as we read it in light of a notion of amateurism which Edward Said has outlined in his book Representations of the Intellectual, and which Boykoff and Sand, drawing on Said, use to conceptualize ‘strategic amateurism’ (2011: n. pag.). Characterizing the contemporary intellectual, Said states that she or he “ought to be an amateur, someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of in-

178 | B UTLER

teracting with its citizens as well as with other societies.” (Qtd. in Boykoff/Sand 2011: n. pag.)

This notion of ‘strategic amateurism’, then, as Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand convincingly illustrate in their essay “Of Experts and Inexperts”, is very much in line with the concept of the “tactical media practitioner” outlined by the Critical Art Ensemble, a working group whose “focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism” (Critical Art Ensemble 2013: n. pag.). “The ‘tactical media practitioner’”, as Boykoff and Sand argue, drawing on the Ensemble’s observations, “explicitly prefers amateurism to experthood since […] ‘[a]mateurs have the ability to see through the dominant paradigms, are freer to recombine elements of paradigms thought long dead, and can apply everyday life experience to their deliberations. Most important, however, amateurs are not invested in institutionalized systems of knowledge production and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome of their process such as maintaining a place in the funding hierarchy, or maintaining prestigecapital’.” (Boykoff/Sand 2011: n. pag.)

Against this backdrop, besides their undoubtedly entertaining character as parodies, forms of ‘reusing’ digital materials to ‘remake’ different kinds of audiovisual texts always incorporate an ideology-driven impetus; and Star Wars Uncut, as one of the more elaborate forms of crowd-sourced online entertainment, is certainly no exception, as I have tried to show in my contribution. It is characterized by strategic amateurism combined with the tactical media practitioner’s expertise of how and when to use it for a particular effect. It is thus not by coincidence, I think, that one reviewer of the Star Wars remake calls it a “perfectly imperfect shadow version of the original film” (Lloyd 2010: n. pag.), thereby highlighting simultaneously its D.I.Y. make-up as well as the intentionality and the ethical dimension of this very make-up.

W ORKS C ITED Boykoff, Jules/Sand, Kaia (2011): “Of Experts and Inexperts”, , accessed on 17 Aug. 2013. Bruns, Axel (2006): “Towards Produsage. Futures for User-Led Content Production”, in: Fay Sudweeks/Herbert Hrachovec/Charles Ess (eds.), Cultural Atti-

E THICS AND A ESTHETICS OF ‘R EMAKING ’

IN

W EB 2.0 E NVIRONMENTS

| 179

tudes towards Communication and Technology, Perth: Murdoch University Press, 275-284. Butler, Martin (forthcoming): “The Promise of Participation. Collaborative Modes of Cultural Production in Web 2.0-Contexts”, in: Martin Butler/Albrecht Hausmann/Anton Kirchhofer (eds.), Precarious Alliances. Cultures of Participation in Print and Other Media, Bielefeld: transcript. Byford, Sam (2012): “‘Star Wars Uncut: Director’s Cut’ Crowdsources Episode IV, 15 Seconds at a Time”, , 21 Jan. 2012, accessed on 16 Aug. 2013. Carroll, Rachel (2009): “Affecting Fidelity. Adaptation, Fidelity, and Affect in Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven”, in: Rachel Carroll (ed.), Adaptation in Contemporary Culture. Textual Infidelities, New York: Continuum, 34-45. Critical Art Ensemble (2013): “Critical Art Ensemble”, , accessed on 24 Oct. 2014. Fidler, Roger (1997): Mediamorphosis. Understanding New Media, Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Hoang, Linda (2013): “Edmontonian among Fans Worldwide Working to Recreate Star Wars Movie”, , 25 Apr. 2013, accessed on 16 Aug. 2013. Jenkins, Henry (2006): Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. — (2010): “Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies. Remixing Moby Dick”, in: Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss (ed.), Mashup Cultures, Wien: Springer, 98-119. Lloyd, Robert (2010): “‘Star Wars Uncut’: The World Remakes a Classic”, , 26 Aug. 2010, accessed on 17 Aug. 2013. Oltmann, Katrin (2008): Remake – Premake. Hollywoods romantische Komödien und ihre Gender-Diskurse, 1930-1960, Bielefeld: transcript. Said, Edward W. (1994): Representations of the Intellectual. The 1993 Reith Lectures, New York: Vintage. Shefrin Elana (2004): “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom. Mapping New Congruencies between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture”, in: Critical Studies in Media Communication 21.3, 261-281. Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan (ed.) (2010): Mashup Cultures, Wien: Springer. STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE (1977) (USA, R: George Lucas). STAR WARS UNCUT (2010) (USA, R: Casey Pugh/et al.). Stelter, Brian (2010): “An Emmy for Rebuilding a Galaxy”, , 27 Aug. 2010, accessed on 16 Aug. 2013.

180 | B UTLER

Zoller Seitz, Matt (2012): “The Fan-Made Star Wars Uncut Is the Greates Viral Video Ever”, , 24 Jan. 2012, accessed on 15 Aug. 2013.

List of Contributors

Martin Butler is Junior Professor of American literature and culture at the University of Oldenburg. His main areas of research include the study of popular culture, particularly focusing on the history of political music, forms and figures of cultural mobility as well as cultures of participation in Web 2.0 environments. Apart from a number of articles in these areas, he has published a monograph on Woody Guthrie (Voices of the Down and Out, 2007) and has co-edited an essay collection on protest songs (Da habt Ihr es, das Argument der Straße: Kulturwissenschaftliche Studien zum politischen Lied, 2007, with Frank Erik Pointner), Hybrid Americas: Contacts, Contrasts, and Confluences in New World Literatures and Cultures (2008, with Josef Raab), Sound Fabrics: Studies on the Intermedial and Institutional Dimensions of Popular Music (2009, with Patrick Burger and Arvi Sepp), EthniCities: Metropolitan Cultures and Ethnic Identities in the Americas (2011, wit Jens Gurr), Pop / Wissen / Transfers: Zur Kommunikation und Explikation populärkulturellen Wissens (2014, with Susanne BinasPreisendörfer and Jochen Bonz), and a special issue of Popular Music and Society on musical autobiographies (forthcoming, 2015, with Daniel Stein). Michael Butter is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen. He is the author of The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939–2002 and Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present. He has co-edited several collections and special issues, most recently Arnold Schwarzenegger: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Body and Image (with Patrick Keller and Simon Wendt), Counterfactual Thinking/Counterfactual Writing (with Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe), and Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East: A Comparative Approach (with Maurus Reinkowski). He is currently writing a monograph about the heroization of American presidents in poems and songs from Washington to Lincoln.

182 | R EMAKES AND R EMAKING

Johannes Fehrle is Assistant Professor (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) for American Studies at the English Department of Mannheim University. He is author of a forthcoming monograph on revisionist Western novels in U.S. and Canadian literature, and co-editor of Herausforderung Biolgie (with Rüdiger Heinze and Kerstin Müller), as well as Rethinking Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence (with Werner Schäfke; forthcoming). He has published a number of articles on film, comics, and novels. His current project is a monograph on adaptations in U.S.-American cultural history. Rüdiger Heinze is Professor for American Studies at the English Department of the TU Braunschweig. He is author of a monograph titled Ethics of Literary Forms and of another about children of immigrants in the USA (forthcoming). He is co-editor of a number of collections, among them The Disappearance of Utopia? (with Jochen Petzold) and Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology (with Jan Alber). He is also editor of a series (with Kerstin Müller) on the dialogue between the so-called “two cultures”. He has published articles in various journals, among them Narrative, European Journal of American Studies and Journal of Postcolonial Writing, as well as in many collections. His current research interests are in utopian/dystopian/post-apocalyptic imaginings, as well as in transmedial narratology and popular culture. Till Kinzel received his Dr. phil. (2002) and Habilitation (2005) from the Technical University of Berlin. He has published books on Allan Bloom (Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika; 2002), Nicolás Gómez Dávila (2003, 4th enlarged ed. forthcoming), Philip Roth (Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens, 2006) and Michael Oakeshott (2007). Most recently, he has edited writings by J. J. Eschenburg (Von Chaucer zu Pope; Über William Hogarth und seine Erklärer; both 2013; Kleine Geschichte des Romans von der Antike bis zur Aufklärung, 2014) and Eduard Gibbon and co-edited Imaginary Dialogues in English (2012) and Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy (2014, both with Jarmila Mildorf), as well as Johann Joachim Eschenburg und die Künste und Wissenschaften zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (2013) and a book on the reception of Edward Gibbon in Germany (2015; both with Cord-Friedrich Berghahn). Current research interests include audionarratology as well as dialogue poetry. Lucia Krämer is Assistant Professor for British Literary and Cultural Studies at Leibniz University Hanover in Germany. She obtained her PhD at the University of Regensburg with a thesis about biofictional representations of Oscar Wilde

C ONTRIBUTORS

| 183

(Oscar Wilde in Roman, Drama und Film, publ. Peter Lang 2003) and continues working sporadically on Victorian literature and culture. Lucia has also co-edited an interdisciplinary volume about authenticity (Fiktionen von Wirklichkeit: Authentizität zwischen Materialität und Konstruktion, publ. transcript 2011). The two main points of focus of her research in the past few years, however, have been adaptation and Bollywood, with numerous publications on both topics. She is currently co-editing a German handbook, Adaption, for de Gruyter and preparing a monograph for Bloomsbury based on her Habiliation thesis about Bollywood in Britain, for which she won the Britcult Award in 2013. Oliver Lindner is Professor of EFL Teaching (literature and culture) at Kiel University, Germany. His research interests include eighteenth-century literature, Daniel Defoe, British youth cultures and science fiction. He has published two monographs, “Solitary on a Continent” – Raumentwürfe in der spätviktorianischen Science Fiction (2005) and “Matters of Blood” − Defoe and the Cultures of Violence (2010), and three edited collections of essays, Teaching India (2008), Commodifying (Post)Colonialism (with Rainer Emig, 2010) and Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation (with Pascal Nicklas, 2012). Martin Lüthe is an Assistant Professor at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (FU Berlin). He received his M.A. from Bonn University in the fields of American Studies and Anglo-American History (Cologne) and his Ph.D. from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at the University in Gießen. Lüthe published the monographs “We Missed a Lot of Church, So the Music Is Our Confessional”: Rap and Religion (Lit Verlag, 2008) and Color-Line and Crossing-Over: Motown and Performances of Blackness in 1960s American Culture (WVT, 2011) and is currently working on a project tentatively titled Functions of Futures: Writing Media Change in Late 19th and Early 20th Century US Culture. Maria Marcsek-Fuchs is lecturer and research staff of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the English Department of the TU Braunschweig. She is currently publishing a monograph on Dance and British Literature: An Intermedial Encounter with Rodopi/Brill Publishing in its series Studies in Intermediality. Handbook articles on Adaptation and Intermediality as well as on Dance and Intermediality Studies are forthcoming. Further research interests are early female higher education in Britain, contemporary Shakespeare Studies, participatory culture as well as postmodern popular culture. She has recently commenced a new book project on Postmodern Shakespeares. In addition to her research and

184 | R EMAKES AND R EMAKING

teaching in literary and cultural studies, Maria Marcsek-Fuchs is a certified choreographer and theatre practitioner. In both her artistic work as well as her research activity, she has a strong focus on inter-art, intermedial and interdisciplinary perspectives, which for this study lead to an interrelation of literary and dance histories. Sabine N. Meyer is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Osnabrück and the Coordinator of the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law. Her research explores the history of American reform movements, concepts of gender, ethnicity, and civic identity in the United States in the nineteenth century, representations of Native Americans in American popular culture, as well as the intersections of law and Native American literature. Her publications include articles on the teaching of U.S. history in German universities (Journal of American History (2010)), on Native American literature and the transnational turn (Transnational American Studies, ed. Udo Hebel (2012)), and on representations of Native Americans in television and film (Ethnoscripts, zkmb (2013), Provincializing the United States, eds. Ursula Lehmkuhl et al. (2014)). Her book, We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota, is currently in production with the University of Illinois Press and will come out in July 2015. She is currently working on her second book project, “The Indian Removal in Law and Native American Literature,” which explores the interfaces between removal legislation and literary representations of removal in Native American texts from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.