You cannot speak “on” such a text,
you can only speak “in” it, in its
fashion, enter into a desparate plagiarism....
Roland Barthes
The Pleasure of the Text1
In poker, when cards are poorly shuffled and redealt the result is often a “ghost hand.” If the last hand was good, its ghost is likely to be a poor, watered-down thing better left unplayed. In their long Hollywood history, most remakes of earlier films have been ghost hands, shallow attempts to trade in on an original’s smash success via new stars, new technology, sometimes a new setting—rarely as profitable as the first movie, and artistically best left unmade.2
By no means is remaking necessarily dictated by pursuit of gain alone. The new version may be sincerely or ironically intended as homage or satire; may be intended to open up psychological/political possibilities latent in the original movie that its makers weren’t aware of or couldn’t pursue because of censorship (e.g., Blake Edwards’s Victor, Victoria [1982]—a remake of a now-forgotten German film of the 1930s with a much more suppressed homoerotic subtext).3/4
Steven Spielberg’s purposes in rehashing the World War II chestnut A Guy Named Joe (1943) into Always (1990) would appear to be highly personal, located well beyond the profit principle. The war has been the director’s preferred locale in many of his pictures—1941 (1979), two of the Indiana Jones cycle (Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981], Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [1989]), and the underrated Empire of the Sun (1987). Spielberg’s father served as a radio operator with a B-25 bomber squadron in Burma as a young man.5 Spielberg is proud of this, but has not spoken of any influence his parent’s military career played specifically upon his filmmaking choices. He clearly admires the hometown and frontline virtues commended by the media of the time—all that boyish spunk and good-humored doing without. He has been particularly enchanted by A Guy Named Joe since adolescence; has seen the film numerous times; greatly admires its director, Victor Fleming; has said he’s always wanted to make an old-fashioned love story like the one in Joe instead of the action spectaculars that have been his hallmark.6
A Guy Named Joe was actually a slight, sentimental piece of business scripted rather lumpishly by Dalton Trumbo, redeemed by Victor Fleming’s crisp direction. Daredevil pilot Spencer Tracy, madly in love with free-spirited airperson Irene Dunne, loses his life diving upon a Nazi ship, then joins a spectral squadron of dead heroes with a mission to instruct a new generation of live ones. Tracy’s prize student, Van Johnson, falls for Dunne. By the conclusion, Tracy has renounced his jealousy, recapitulating the renunciation theme privileged in Casablanca and other World War II movies. He proudly lets Dunne go “out of my heart” into a star-spangled future with Johnson.
Tracy’s sidekick in A Guy Named Joe is the sturdy Ward Bond. At the beginning of Always, John Goodman, the oafish replicant of Bond’s Al Yackey, states:
What this place reminds me of is the war in Europe . . . which I personally was never at, but think about it ... the beer is warm, the dance hall’s a quonset, there’s B-26s outside, hotshot pilots inside, an airstrip in the woods . . . It’s England, man, everything but Glenn Miller! Except you go to burning places and bomb ’em until they stop burning. You see, Pete, there is no war here. This is why they don’t make movies called Night Raid in Boise, Idaho, or Firemen Strike at Dawn. And this is why you’re not exactly a hero for taking the chances you take. You’re more of what I would call—a dickhead.
Having asserted that no good war can be found to fight in contemporary America, it is Spielberg’s enterprise to have it fought anyway—by the pilots who extinguish raging forest fires with chemicals dropped from ancient planes similar to the ones his father flew in. There are such pilots, working in outfits roughly like the one Yackey describes, and they do run enormous risks. But the director reduces his relocated narrative into negligible sound and fury, roaring piffle unable to carry the weight of the original’s perilous combat context.7
The leads, Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter, own the sexual spark of Peanuts kids. Both are literally dwarfed by their earlier counterparts—particularly Hunter, compared with Dunne’s luminous persona. Spielberg makes a nod at feminism by using Hunter in a role meant to reprise her feisty producer in Broadcast News (1987), much as he deployed Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark as a tough-minded foil for Harrison Ford. By the end of Raiders, Allen had been reduced to an impotent screaming Mimi. In Always, whether due to direction or scripting, Hunter is rendered into a querulous tomboy. Dunne’s image is vastly more adult, competent, and sensuous on or off the ground. Her (and Tracy’s) eroticism gains a keener edge from their passion’s implicit lack of consumption. Hunter beds Dreyfuss tastefully, without a jot of sensuality.
The couple’s dialogue in Always, reaching for the lucid sassiness of those 1930s and 1940s movies that conspicuously foregrounded equal footing between the sexes, rings like The Goonies (1985) instead of Adam’s Rib (1949). Lacking the poignant edge of universal wartime insecurity, Dreyfuss and Hunter indulge in inane New Age chatter about commitment, your thing, my thing, so forth.8 The oddly juvenile—and asexual—quality of their relationship infects Spielberg’s work more definitively than ever, thoroughly subverting the intended romanticism of his project in and away from the bedroom.
For example, in A Guy Named Joe, Tracy slow dances with Dunne at the officers club, while a single flyer eyes her speculatively. In Always, at the firefighters’ canteen dance, Hunter is besieged by a horde of grimy smoke jumpers who ogle and paw at her like moonstruck Boy Scouts. The sequence could have been filmed at sleep-away camp.
Always in the main rates as an unfortunate ghost hand (about ghosts). The screenplay unwittingly telegraphs its own obituary in Yackey’s initial admonition to Pete. Always is instructive about Spielberg’s increasing blind spots: his childlike predilection for wretched excess, visually and aurally; his simpleminded admiration for the male-bonded professionalism celebrated in the movies of Howard Hawks and John Ford; and, above all, an unreflective hankering—similar to Pete’s—after what the director evidently valorizes as an ideologically simpler era he never lived through (he was born in 1947) but chiefly experienced via its pop culture artifacts.
Essentially, Always interprets as a postmodern fantasy based on an agitprop version of the war—one cracked mirror held up to another, Baudrillardian simulacra both. Whatever its shortcomings, A Guy Named Joe did possess a substantive ideological agenda. The film sought to console audiences that their loved ones weren’t really dead—only translated to a newer realm of struggle.9 It was pitched at alleviating the guilt of women who had found new men after their husbands or boyfriends had been killed. It virtually elided any notion of fear or panic in combat, purveying the message that no matter how rough the fighting got, an American soldier would still acquit herself with grace and good humor—even as he died.10 Finally, A Guy Named Joe intensively promoted the necessity for teamwork rather than classic American rugged individualism. In a sense, Pete had to die to learn from his ghostly fellowship that the war could not be survived and won by seat-of-the-pants soloists.11
Compared with its source, Always is radically drained of ideological freight. Yackey’s “dickhead” speech usefully reads as Barthesean “inoculation” against the attainder that practically nothing except tepid New Age romance is at stake in this juvenile text, with its infantilized protagonists.12 Spielberg centrally privileges nostalgia and pastiche, that mimesis of dead styles from the “imaginary museum” analyzed by Jameson and other cultural critics.13 The film is resolutely ignorant or uncaring about actual history;14 for all its feminist pretensions, its sexual politics are deeply—if unpolemically —conservative. It is profoundly informed by the “aesthetic frisson in emptiness”15 so often encountered in recent remakes and sequels.
My specific psychoanalytic interest resides in the intensely rivalrous spirit inhabiting Spielberg’s “homage.” In his seminal Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom16 theorizes that many of the strongest poets were compelled by their anxiety about a predecessor’s power to deviate sharply from his praxis. Instead of Bloom’s “swerve,” Spielberg plunges unabashedly into A Guy Named Joe. The metaphor is literally fleshed out in Always’s establishing sequence, a peaceful scene of two men fishing on a lake. Behind them, a huge PBX seaplane descends, its foreshortened image slowly filling the screen; wavering ominously in the lambent air, until the men, alerted by the sudden, terrifying roar of its engines, dive out of their canoe, barely escaping destruction as the plane hurtles upon them.
This arresting sequence is extremely difficult to place within Always’s narrative schema. It can only be linked diegetically with an anecdote Dorinda (Hunter) tells much later in the film to her new lover about a flying vacation she took with Pete (Dreyfuss) in a PBX seaplane rigged as a “scoop” craft. From the air, Pete saw a fire in a small-town courthouse. He onloaded water from a nearby lake, dove on the conflagration, completely missed the courthouse, and disastrously flooded the town. Dorinda bubbles with laughter as she relates the episode. Her humor appears curiously callous for a character presented as so empathic, particularly when one considers the misery that must have attended Pete’s blunder.
Always’s introduction may have been intended as a “raid” upon audience sensibility—reminiscent of the thunderclap establishing sequence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); also to anticipate Dorinda’s tale of Pete’s scooping up water from the town lake. The connection in the “conscious” narrative between the two cinematic events is, at best, obscure. I would suggest that this very tenuousness, along with Dorinda’s oddly unsympathetic humor, may be understood analytically as symptoms of an intruiging textual uneasiness; exemplifying strategies of isolation and crude denial, defenses directed against the occulted recognition within Always’s text of its own bristling competitiveness with A Guy Named Joe. Under this rubric, the men in the boat, the town, and its people can be taken as one entire symbol of the source film, which Spielberg has raided and swamped in transgressive adulation.
Throughout Always, Spielberg and his writers tamper egregiously with quite unproblematic scenes from A Guy Named Joe, adding a punched-up soundtrack and overwrought visuals. To cite but one example: In the original film’s climax, Dunne steals the plane Johnson was supposed to pilot in a solo suicide mission and bombs a Japanese ammunitions dump, aided by the ghostly Tracy. The explosions and gunfire of the bombing sequence are modest for a war film of the time. As they return to home base, Tracy speaks eloquently of the wonderful life waiting for Dunne. She lands, and Tracy bids her good-bye. Spielberg has Hunter steal the plane to extinguish a blaze trapping a platoon of smoke jumpers in a hard-to-reach mountain site. The pyrotechnics and acoustics of Hunter’s overflight rival Luke Skywalker’s run at the Deathstar. Afterwards, Dreyfuss gives the Tracy farewell speech, virtually unchanged. The plane then stalls, crashes into the water, and sinks like a stone. Hunter, in extremis and goggle-eyed, then momentarily sees Dreyfuss. He pulls her to the surface, a few feet from the runway where her new lover is waiting. She walks toward him, Dreyfuss bids her good-bye, end of story.
Spielberg obviously must have believed that these hyperbolic, clumsy changes (of which making Dreyfuss visible is the most risible, the latent rendered absurdly blatant) were artistically justifiable, satisfying elaborations. But inflicting them upon the yeoman work of the original appears as questionable as the enterprise of the Yiddish theater entrepreneur who earlier in the century advertised his company’s production of Hamlet as a “shoyshpil fun Vilyam Shakspir—farendert un farbesert”—drama by Shakespeare, changed and improved.17 One cannot know if the impresario was only repeating a hoary theatrical precedent by convincing himself that he was, after all, only doing for Shakespeare what he believed Shakespeare had accomplished for Hollingshead.
The central issue for the purposes of this discussion is not Always’s merits relative to A Guy Named Joe—rather the extraordinary merit the latter has “always” held for Steven Spielberg; and the attendant possibility that an unconscious Oedipally driven competitiveness constitutes the dark side of Spielberg’s intense admiration for the original and its director. Some evidence can be adduced on this score from several anecdotes in Spielberg’s biography.
The senior Spielberg has a background in electrical engineering and helped design early computer technology. He comes across as a pragmatic, hard-driving individual, intensely passionate about scientific progress, equally passionate about conveying the wonders of the universe to an impressionable, admiring little boy:
With Dad everything was precision, accuracy, “head-on.” He had the fastest slide rule in Arizona and spoke two languages: English and Computer.18
When I was a five-year-old kid in New Jersey . . . my dad woke me up in the middle of the night and rushed me into our car in my night clothes.... He had a thermos of coffee and had brought blankets, and we drove for about half an hour. We finally pulled over to the side of the road, and there were a couple hundred people, lying on their backs in the middle of the night, looking up at the sky. My dad found a place, spread the blanket out, and we both lay down. . . . He pointed to the sky, and there was a magnificent meteor shower.19
This memory would later form the organizing stimulus for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Spielberg’s first filmmaking experience involved emulation of and competition with his father, however lighthearted:
A long, long time ago, I became interested in moviemaking simply because my father had an eight-millimeter movie camera, which he used to log the family history. I would sit and watch the home movies and criticize the shaky camera movements and bad exposures until my father finally got fed up and told me to take over. I became the family photographer and logged all our trips.20
It would not be unfair to say that Spielberg’s father thus inadvertently launched Steven’s career.
Another episode speaks to more pointed youthful rivalrous feelings. When Spielberg was eleven, his father came home and gathered the family in the kitchen:
He held up a tiny little transitor he had brought home and said: “This is the future.” I took the transistor from his hand.... And I swallowed it. Dad laughed, then he didn’t laugh; it got very tense. It was like the confrontation scene between Raymond Massey and James Dean in East of Eden. One of those moments when two worlds from diametrically opposite positions in the universe collide. It was as if I was saying, “That’s your future, but it doesn’t have to be mine.”21
Spielberg’s quotation from East of Eden is illuminating. In the movie, James Dean gives a classic performance as a rebellious late adolescent, Cal Trask, desperately struggling to overcome his father’s perennial displeasure while wrestling with his own strong ambivalence. The father is a stern, religious farmer who, like Spielberg’s parent, greatly valorizes scientific progress. He sustains massive losses in an ill-advised effort to send iced-down vegetables by rail cross-country. The scene Spielberg alludes to occurs after the father refuses to accept the gift of “dirty” money Cal made in crop future speculation during World War I. One notes that Cal’s “tainted” agricultural enterprise was a spectacular success, whereas the father’s failed abysmally (albeit “honorably” from the latter’s censorious viewpoint).
Steinbeck’s novel and the film derived from it are elsewhere rich in Oedipal resonances. Cal competes keenly with his brother Aaron for the father’s love, as well as for Adam’s fiancée. Aaron’s “good” persona obviously prefigures the preternaturally upright, idealized/envied paternal imago for Cal.
One may inquire if Spielberg has discovered an analogous idealized father/rival in Victor Fleming. The leitmotif of A Guy Named Joe is the struggle in its hero’s heart with another aviator over the same love object. Did a similar competition exist in Spielberg’s psyche with Fleming, “ownership” of the original film its aim, anxiety upon the prospect of fulfilling that aim inevitable?
From this perspective, Pete’s “accidental” flooding of the town in Dorinda’s tale takes on the ambiguous valence of a Freudian slip, where conflicted motive lies concealed beneath a gratuitous facade. Pete’s rather surprising incompetence may be construed as a mask for Spielberg’s ambivalent designs upon A Guy Named Joe and its creator. It may be speculated that the director aimed consciously to “hit the target,” i.e., render appropriate obeisance toward Fleming and his work, but could not resist indulging in a species of cinematic overkill, and went considerably wide of the mark.
No proof should be drawn from the above that Spielberg is particularly “neurotic.” One speaks here only to the presence—and possible influence—of unconscious conflictual residues in the director’s films. On the evidence of biographical material as well as his own brief autobiography, he seems an engaging, assertive individual, who has labored exceptionally well under the stresses of his idiosyncratic craft, devoted to family and friends off the job.22
Setting aside the incidents previously described, there seems to have been little overt, serious conflict between Spielberg and his father. He speaks of him consistently with affection, and evidently remained close to him following his parents’ divorce in his mid-teens.
Spielberg has spoken of his mother with equal approval and not a little awe:
She had more energy than hundred mothers her age. The image I have of her is of this tiny woman climbing to the top of a mountain, standing there with her arms out and spinning around. My mom was always like a little girl, who never grew out of her pinafore . . . she left a large wake.23
Although somewhat estranged from peers during late childhood and adolescence—the nature, degree, and hurtfulness of his alienation varies considerably from one report to the next—Spielberg indicates that life at home was generally happy. The tempermental differences between his parents did cause him distress, related by the director with characteristic boyish diffidence:
My mom and dad were so different. That’s probably why they were attracted to each other. They both love classical music . . . aside from that, they had nothing in common.... My mother was a classical pianist. She would have chamber concerts with her musician friends, in the living room, while in another room my father would be conferring with nine or ten other men in the business about how to build a computerized mousetrap. These opposite lifestyles would give me circuit overload. My tweeters would burn out and my only insulation would be my bedroom door which remained closed for most of my life. I had to put towels under the jamb so I couldn’t hear the classical music and the computer logic.24
Spielberg’s account could have been drawn from the pages of a Thomas Mann novel. He depicts himself as a suburban Tonio Kröger, his identifications riven between an artistically inclined, emotive mother and a burgher-like father, firmly anchored in scientific and business reality.
It can be reasonably argued on the basis of available sources that the director emerged from the Oedipal vicissitudes of early childhood with balanced, loving perceptions of his father, indeed both parents. Against this favorable background, with further unstinting parental affection he was able to weather the internal turmoil and external stresses of his adolescence. Drawing upon his native creative endowment, he eventually forged a primary identification with his mother’s artistic inclinations, but he also internalized his father’s scientific interests and business acumen. The result is the adult of today—an auteurproducer-entrepreneur extraordinaire, exceptionally skillful at Hollywood’s intricate business, passionate in advancing the technical parameters of filmmaking, eyes fixed literally and figuratively upon the stars.
However, even an immensely successful, stable son who enjoys a harmonious relationship with his parents may still harbor considerable unconscious fantasy referable to childhood traumata, including the Oedipal struggle. When that son is an artist, such fantasies may fuel his art, successfully or quite otherwise. For instance, Spielberg has little to say about the impact of his parents’ separation, but its signature is written poignantly across the characters of Elliot in E.T. and Cary Guffey’s wonderful toddler in Close Encounters.
Both are children of divorce, each the apple of his mother’s eye (like Spielberg), uncontested victor on the Oedipal field—a contest no little boy really wants to win. Each bears the stigmata of paternal loss—loneliness and longing openly articulated by Elliot, wordlessly by the younger child in his delighted tropism toward the blinding presence on the other side of the door. Recuperation of the father’s absence is accomplished for both in a relationship with alien voyagers, themselves condensations of omnipotent father and achingly vulnerable child.
Human paternal surrogates in these and other Spielberg films are frequently portrayed as impersonal authoritarian oppressors or benevolent facilitators. Alternately, positive and negative paternal imagos are condensed in a single character. In Close Encounters, the polarization is manifested on the one hand by the officers who attempt to thwart Roy Neary and his fellow visionaries from realizing their quest; on the other, by Lacombe, the luminously intelligent director of the secret mountain project whose intervention sends Neary across the galaxy.
In E. T., Keys, the leader of the team dispatched by the government to apprehend Elliot’s “visitor,” initially presents as a cold, impersonal bureaucrat (Spielberg deliberately keeps him and his minions faceless in their early appearances). As the tale unfolds, Keys evolves into an increasingly sympathetic character. He can empathize with Elliot’s neediness because of his own childhood yearning for an “ET.”
These divided representations may be taken as embodiments of the child Spielberg’s ambivalent perceptions of paternity—Oedipally shaded, as yet unintegrated imagos of the powerful, beloved father who unveils the heavens to his adoring son, or the no less powerful, harsh authority figure who seeks to impose his iron will upon his resentful offspring. The negative side of the equation is further darkened by the spectre of paternal abandonment, which conceivably still haunts the director’s imagination—abandonment through divorce in E.T. and Close Encounters (Spielberg’s adolescent experience, projected backwards upon those films’ youngsters?) or through rank indifference, in the case of Indiana Jones’s work-obsessed father.25
I have noted in an earlier essay on Fellini that “the connection between the artist’s triumphs or disasters in his creative life or his mundane affairs is incompletely understood at this stage of psychoanalytic theory.”26 Pathobiography is an especially risky venture, often vitiated by dubious reportage, bias (including the myths artists spin around themselves), scant clinical information. Freud himself acknowledged the limitations of interrogating Leonardo’s oeuvre on the basis of a few historical details and a single, if trenchant, dream.
Acknowledging the fragmentary and inferential nature of supporting evidence, I submit that an Oedipal gloss does offer modestly plausible grounds (internally plausible, that is, in terms of depth psychology) upon which to explicate Always’s overreaching and excessive contrivance. The only Spielberg film to treat heterosexual romance at length imbricates sexuality in a triangulation between two heroes and the woman they both love. The theme is common and ancient—and one that would seem to have proved particularly thorny for the director.
Other causes within and external to Spielberg’s psyche life that may have contributed to the film’s aesthetic deficiencies must also be properly recognized, however. These include other directorial psychodynamics27 and the dynamics of collaborators, financial and other “realistic” exigencies, and the creative limitations of other major or minor players in the production.
Setting aside Spielberg’s specific difficulties in remaking A Guy Named Joe, it does not seem untoward to suggest that an intrinsic Oedipal configuration lies deeply embedded in the remaking process, waiting to be evoked in the triangle between remaker, maker, and the original movie—all the more troublesome to the degree that the source is perceived by its remaker as a mysterious, ultimately unavailable plentitude.28 Barthes’s remarks on the text as maternal object and the Oedipal thrust of narrativity seem apposite here:
The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body . . . in order to glorify [and] embellish it.29
Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflict with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?30
Pace other contributing factors, one speculates on the extent to which the shape (perhaps the quality, as well) of remaking depends upon the project’s Oedipal significance for the remaker—notably, on how competitive strivings evoked by the maker and source are processed intrapsychically and artistically.31 (An Oedipal dynamic would clearly have greatest impact when a director, or another personality under its sway, exerts central influence over the remaking project.32)
In-depth exploration of this issue lies beyond the scope of this inquiry, but several possible outcomes can be tentatively advanced for those cinematic “cases” where significant Oedipal inflection of the original constitutes a problematic for the remaker:
1. The text exists under the sign of unwavering idealization; the remaker forswears competitive designs and remains unreflectively—even stultifyingly—“faithful” to it.
2. The remaker, analogous to a creative resolution of childhood and adolescent Oedipal conflict, eschews destructive competition with the maker, taking the original as a point of useful, relatively unconflicted departure.
3. The original, as signet of paternal potency and maternal unavailability/refusal, incites the remaker’s unalloyed negativity. This precipitates a savage, contemptuous attack upon the original, in which its significant elements are erased, disfigured, and/or parodied.
4. The remaker, simultaneously worshipful and envious of the maker, enters into an ambiguous, anxiety-ridden struggle with a film he both wishes to honor and eclipse. Caught up in contested homage, he eclipses his own native gifts—one ventures this was the case with Spielberg in Always—dwindling down into a hopelessly compromised raider of the lost text.
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Krin Gabbard, William Luhr, Peter Lehman, Robert Eberwein, and Ellen Pall in this study.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 22.
Michael B. Druxman’s Make It Again, Sam: A Survey of Movie Remakes (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1975) remains the most comprehensive investigation of Hollywood remaking practice. Druxman views remaking as a function of industry pragmatism, variously undertaken due to a shortage of “product”; the cost effectiveness of recycling previous scripts; the profit potential of deploying new stars and techniques in proven vehicles, etc. He documents the transformation of some thirty films at length and cites many other remakes briefly in an approach avowedly more anecdotal than hermeneutic.
The following common remake categories derive from Druxman’s work and my overview of the subject:
The acknowledged, close remake: The original film is replicated with little or no change. Advertising and press book material may inform viewers of the remaker’s intention to hew to the previous movie’s narrative and characters. Verisimilitude can constitute a strong selling point. Notable examples are found in the biblical epic subgenre (e.g., Ben Hur, 1907, 1925, 1959).
The acknowledged, transformed remake: Transformations of character, plot, time, and setting are more substantive than in the above category. The original movie is openly but variably mentioned as a source, ranging from a small screen credit to significant foregrounding in promotion. Remakes in this category during the past two decades include A Star Is Born (1976), Heaven Can Wait (1978), Stella, and Always (1990).
The unacknowledged, disguised remake: Major alterations are undertaken in time, setting, gender, or—most particularly—in genre. The audience is deliberately uninformed about the switches. Disguised remaking peaked roughly from the 1930s through the early 1950s—the heyday of the studio system, when the relentless demand for new films, wedded to a perennial lack of fresh material, compelled frequent reuse of earlier screenplays. Any list of disguised remakes would be formidable. See Druxman, Make It Again, particularly pp. 13-24, for examples.
The second volume of William Luhr and Peter Lehman’s study of Blake Edwards’s oeuvre (Returning to the Scene: Blake Edwards, Volume 2, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989) contains an elegant inquiry into the more complex aesthetic and ideological premises behind remaking. Edwards is highlighted as a model of the consummate improviser who refuses to valorize the original as a historically fixed, complete project. He assays “not so much . . . to remake the film as ... to replicate the conditions that allowed the film to be made [returning] to the creative moment when the original film could have developed in any number of directions” (pp. 209-10). Again, “[his] remakes often question the premises of what they reprise, and often attempt to reformulate the mainstream cinema of which they are apart” (p. 224).
Corollary to Luhr and Lehman’s study, Robert Eberwein suggests that a remake always exists under the sign of erasure, effecting “a kind of reconstruction of the original.... Erasing it [presents] an opportunity to recuperate the voyeuristic lack we experience in our viewing of the original” (“Remakes: Writing under Erasure,” presentation at the Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, 1988, p. 3). Eberwein theorizes that the remaker’s efforts invade implicitly forbidden territory, redolent with primal scene associations.
Allusions to material from previous film has been escalating in American cinema since the 1970s. In effect, these are remakes in miniature, embedded pars pro toto in the “parent” film’s associative matrix. Nöel Carrol’s investigation provides valuable insights into remaking a whole film, as well as its parts (“The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies [and Beyond],” October, no. 20 [Spring 1982], 51—81).
Jerry Tallmer, “Jawing with Steven Spielberg,” New York Post, Entertainment Section, 28 June 1975, p. 1.
“The Most Powerful Man in Hollywood: Spietberg—From E.T. to TV,” Rolling Stone, no. 459 (October 1985), 77; “Behind the Camera: A Candid Conversation about the Past and Future Films of Steven Spielberg,” Prevue Magazine, November 1981, p. 46.
Consultation with government and private agencies concerned with combating forest fires occurred during the production of Always. The numerous departures from firefighting realities thus do not proceed from ignorance, but would seem to be dictated by a melding of melodramatic license (had Pete in reality dropped chemicals from his craft upon Al Yackey’s burning plane, it would most certainly have crashed); the director’s penchant for hyperbole (vide infra); and sexism. Thus, Hunter and one or two other women are the only female pensonnel at the firefighting station and related locales; in fact, the percentage of feminine smoke jumpers ranges anywhere from 25 percent to 30 percent. The pilots, however, are exclusively male as of this writing. (Information supplied by Mr. Arnold Hartigan, Public Affairs Officers, Boise Interagency Fire Center, 3905 Vista Avenue, Boise, ID 83705.)
In A Guy Named Joe, Pete is still subject to military discipline after his death. His squadron of ghostly “advisors” is commanded by a general modeled after Billy Mitchell, who rebukes Pete for letting his jealousy toward Van Johnson affect his guidance with a stirring homily on making the world safe for democracy. Corollary to its transformation of Joe’s protagonists into New Age post-Reaganites, Always metamorphoses the squadron and its commander into Hap, a feminine angel-cum-EST facilitator (played with tooth-grinding sweetness by Audrey Hepburn), who gently chides Pete with no-brainer epigrams that could have been culled from the back of Celestial Seasons tea bag packages.
A point made by Pauline Kael in her review, New Yorker, 8 January 1990, pp. 92-93.
I am indebted to Krin Gabbard, associate professor of comparative literature, State University of New York—Stony Brook, for these observations.
The tutoring of the American “loner” on the communitarian values required by the war in films like Casablanca and Air Force (1943) is discussed at length by Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Ariel Dorfman comments tellingly on the trend toward infantilization in the mass culture of the late twentieth-century capitalism (“The Infantilizing of Culture,” in American Media and Mass Cullure: Left Perspectives, ed. Donald Lazere [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 145-53). Dorfman’s arguments are exceptionally pertinent to much of Spielberg’s oeuvre as director and producer in recent years.
“Pastiche is ... the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language” (Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Verso), p. 16).
“In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum” (Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 18).
“The very style of nostalgia films [is] invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though . . . we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience . . . an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history . . . we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach” (Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 20).
“American political life has never been a consistently reliable source of sustenance; and most people who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s have come to count, for their sense of value and style and even identity, on the ambient culture that has given postwar American life its special richness . . . this culture seems to have reached a very high level of technical accomplishment, and then to have run out of anything fresh to say . . . [it] seems thrillingly vacant. The wonderful package has nothing inside. . . . There is a genuine frisson in emptiness,” Louis Menand, “Don’t Think Twice: Why We Won’t Miss the 1980s,” New Republic, 9 October 1989, p. 22.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of lnfluence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
I am indebted for this transliteration to Mr. Zachary Bayer, chief librarian of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1048 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10028.
Steven Spielberg, “The Autobiography of Peter Pan,” Time, 15 July 1985, p. 62.
Herbert Margolis and Craig Modderno, Penthouse interview with Steven Spielberg, February 1978, p. 102.
Margolis and Modderno, Penthouse, pp. 142, 144.
Spielberg, “Autobiography,” p. 62.
Inter alia, above interviews. Donald R. Mott and Cheryl McAllister Saunders, Steven Spielberg, Twayne’s Filmmakers Series, ed. W. French (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986); Dian G. Smith, “Steven Spielberg,” in American Film Makers Today (Poole/Dorset: Blandford Press, 1983), pp. 135-45.
Spielberg, “Autobiography,” p. 62.
Spielberg, “Autobiography,” p. 62.
According to the history supplied by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Professor Henry Jones is a noted medievalist caught up with proving the historical reality of the Holy Grail. The death of his wife left him to raise his son. His scholarly obsession and unremitting criticism made his son revolt against his authority. During his teens, Indy left home to pursue his own peculiar archeological ambitions. The stormy relationship of Jones Senior and Junior echoes the fractiousness of Adam and Cal Trask in East of Eden, previously cited by Spielberg in describing the signatory moment of rebellion against his own father.
The Last Crusade openly portrays angry division between father and son as in no other Spielberg film. The Joneses’ search for the Holy Grail is a rather heavy-handed symbol of their quest to heal their rift. Their mutual competitiveness is enormous, vis-à-vis Always’s Oedipal motif, the film has Indy unknowingly sleep with the same woman his father had bedded in aid of finding the Grail.
Harvey R. Greenberg, “81/2: The Declensions of Silence,” from The Movies on Your Mind: Film Classics on the Couch from Fellini to Frankenstein (New York: Saturday Review Press / E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 167.
Such as, for instance, a pre-Oedipal / oral relationship between the remaker and the original film, hallmarked by the primitive drive toward fusion with and incorporation by the “maternalized” source. In this regard, see Holland’s analysis of the reader’s oral relationship with the literary text. Norman N. Holland, “The ‘Willing Suspension of Disbelief,’” in The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 63-103.
My remarks are obviously pitched at the Oedipal relationship between a male remaker and his subject, predicated upon the industry-driven reality that virtually all remaking has been done by men of films made by other men. I have so far been unable to discover remaking of a “male” original undertaken by a female director or other key female cinema figure (and welcome information on this subject). In the highly unlikely circumstance of a woman remaking another woman’s film, the elaboration of an Electra “complex” corresponding to the male Oedipal dynamic around the source is plausible.
Barthes, Pleasures of the Text, p. 37.
Barthes, Pleasures of the Text, p. 47.
The articulation between neurotic conflict and artistic effectiveness must be viewed as exceptionally problematic. It is analytically naive to suppose that in all instances a “serious” Oedipal conflict related to the original film would necessarily compromise the aesthetic effectiveness of the remake. For instance, Oedipally motivated, hostile “defacement” of the source film could still be accomplished through great art, if in a spirit of great contempt.
Since emerging as a major force in Hollywood, Spielberg usually wields this sort of influence over the pictures he directs. Although in most cases he has not written the screenplay of his films (Close Encounters was one notable exception), crucial conceptual, narrative, and visual elements are often his. He is intimately bound up with script selection, then rewriting and/or interpretation during film production. Thus, it may reliably be assumed that, much like Hitchcock, the salient psychodynamics of the screenplays he chooses to “process” closely reflect his own preoccupations.