Everything Old is New Again

An image from The Bad Sleep Well

Are remakes a new phenomenon? The short answer is 'no'. There is a fallacy in pop culture that cinema is becoming increasingly unoriginal - that we are awash in an endless sea of remakes, reimaginings, sequels, prequels, adaptations, and franchises. Perhaps top of this list is the idea that superhero films are ruining cinema. 

I'm not here to venture an opinion on the quality of said superhero films, I tend to believe that their quality varies depending on a range of factors, however, I would argue that any perceived lack of variety could find its parallels in other eras of fiction.

• Martial Arts films of the '70s and '80s.
• Spy novels of the '60s.
• Action films of the '80s and '90s.
• Western films of the '30s, '40s, and '50s.
• Penny Dreadfuls of the 19th century.
• Spaghetti Westerns of the '60s.
• Teen comedy films of the '00s.
• Vampire/Supernatural novels of the late '00s. 

And so on.

A generic formula responds to the desires of the market as much now as in previous eras, and the quality in such genres was as variable then as it is now. 

Something that I find quite fascinating about cinema in particular is the way in which even the most celebrated 'original' films are the culmination of a long echo chamber of ideas that are borrowed and refracted over time. Here is one example:

1. Revenge of the Sith (2005) includes a scene in which Palpatine formally establishes the beginning of the Empire. During this scene, the speech he makes is intercut with shots of Anakin murdering Palpatine's enemies. This pays direct homage to the baptism scene in The Godfather, in which Micheal Corleone consolidates his place at the head of the family while his underlings orchestrate the murder of rival mob bosses. Both films deal with the rise and establishment of a corrupt power.
   
2. The Godfather (1972) begins with a big wedding reception where a mafia don's daughter has just gotten married to a young man who has worked his way into this shady family. Journalists are parked just outside the main action, photographing the various high profile figures in attendance. This scene deliberately replicates a similar scene at the beginning of Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, in which a company kingpin's daughter has just gotten married and journalists watch from outside while discussing the various high profile figures in attendance. Both films deal with a Machiavellian patriarch whose legacy is steeped in violence and crime.
   
3. The Bad Sleep Well (1960) is a modern Japanese adaptation of Hamlet. Instead of a medieval Danish court of intrigue and murder, the action is set in the corporate boardrooms of corrupt Japanese businessmen. Like Hamlet with his wavering quest for revenge, Nishi is a young company man who hides his identity while working to expose the men who killed his father. 
4. Hamlet (1599) is one of the most well-known stories of all time and perhaps Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. It is not, however, a story entirely of Shakespeare's creation. Shakespeare is thought to have directly remade a now-lost play that also featured a Danish prince named Hamlet who is urged by a ghost to pursue revenge.
   
5. Hamlet (c. 1580s) is the suspected name of a play by Thomas Kyd, a highly influential figure in Elizabethan theatre. Referred to as Ur-Hamlet by scholars, this play likely leaned on the 'hero-as-fool' trope, which flows back into the untraceable realms of ancient storytelling. It is also thought to be a loose retelling of a Scandinavian folk tale about a prince named Amleth. 
6. Amleth (c. 1100s) is a folk tale in which a prince dresses himself in rags and pretends to be insane as a means to disguise his quest for revenge against his uncle. This uncle, Fengo, murdered Amleth's father so he could marry his mother Gerutha. Fengo eventually sends Amleth to England with two escorts carrying a letter instructing the English king to kill the prince. Amleth, however, switches this letter so that the escorts get killed instead, and he returns to Denmark to watch his own funeral and then finally take revenge on is uncle. Like Hamlet, The Bad Sleep Well, The Godfather, and Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith, this story deals with the theme of corruption and the extreme behaviours that surround it. 

So, as we can see, even Shakespeare isn't immune from this 'unoriginality' problem. Here are some other examples of great films that can be traced to earlier texts that explore the same themes.

• A Fistful of Dollars (1964) - a spaghetti western remake of the 1961 samurai film Yojimbo, which was an adaptation of the hardboiled detective novel Red Harvest (1929). Thematic core: an outsider takes on a lawless community.
• A Bug's Life (1998), an animated film about a misfit putting together a group of warriors to save an ant colony from an evil grasshopper, which sounds a lot like the Western classic The Magnificent Seven (1960), which is a direct remake of Seven Samurai (1954). Thematic core: the value of community and team-work.
• The Searchers (1956) is a famous Western based on a 1954 novel of the same name. 1970s films as varied as the seedy crime dramas Taxi Driver (1976) and Hardcore (1979), and the sci-fi epic Star Wars (1977), and the more recent television series Breaking Bad (2000s) and the film Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) all draw upon plot elements or iconic shots from The Searchers. Thematic core: the anti-hero's journey. 

And here are some films that challenge the notion that 'original' stories in cinema have ever been common.

• Gladiator (2001) is recognisable to most as a throwback to the sword-and-sandals epics of the 1950s and 1960s. Dig a little deeper and you'll find The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), which tells the same story. 
• The most famous cinematic versions of Ben-Hur (1959), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and The Ten Commandments (1956) are not the first film versions of these stories. All were made as silent films in the mid-1920s first. 
• Star Wars (1977) used the 1958 samurai epic The Hidden Fortress as both a narrative and stylistic influence. George Lucas replicated the idea of a kidnapped princess and a grizzled samurai, as well as the narrative choice of telling his story from the point of view of two comical and lowly characters. He also 'borrowed' Akira Kurosawa's way of using vertical wipes to transition from one scene to another. The Japanese director's influence is so keenly felt in the Star Wars trilogy that Rian Johnson would borrow stylistically from Kurosawa's 1980s samurai epics Ran and Kagemusha much later in The Last Jedi (2017).
  

Some of the above are more obvious than others but what's interesting is that none of the famed directors responsible for the above classic films would even try to hide their influences if asked. There's a tendency in pop criticism to reject texts that aren't original or to bemoan the replication of ideas. But, like the great painters who obsessively toiled on a singular topic or style, or playfully subverted each other's works to add new meaning to common themes, should storytellers not also be lauded for mining common material in new ways? These directors and writers are combining old ideas with new genres, or diving deeper into a particular story to explore a new context.

There are, after all, only 3, 6, 7, or 36 types of stories (depending on which writer you trust).