[MACHINERY RUNNING]
Everything old is new again, which
I don't mean in the Kirby Ferguson slash Arthur C. Danto
sense that everything is a remix or all of the new ideas
have been had and so we are left to just endlessly recombine
the set of things which already exist,
though that doesn't mean that we're not.
I mean it slightly more literally-- old things are
being turned into new things a lot.
And this has inspired suspicion in some,
disappointment in others, and confusion
in the wondering many-- why are there so many remakes?
Movies, video games, television shows, comic books,
even some music and people-- you name
it and it's being updated from its yester form
and repackaged for a now audience.
And not just new entries into old series,
but also and maybe mostly reboots and re imaginings,
continuations and new beginnings for older properties.
More and more, it feels like the past is coming back
to haunt the box office.
Pac Man's a bad guy?
Let's be totally clear here that remaking things is not
some uniquely modern practice.
But using Wikipedia's list of remade films
as a reference-- so get your statistical grains of salt
ready-- the 10 years since 1980 with the most remakes
are all between 2002 and 2011.
The droid you're looking for put together
this awesome infographic about the recent economic situation
with regards to remakes, and I think
it strikes right to the practical heart of the matter.
Why remakes?
They're profitable-- they come with a built-in storyboard
format or arc, names, reputations,
and most importantly, audience-- low cost, high return.
Plus, as Yohana Desta at Mashable points out,
even if originals tank, remakes can still
be wildly profitable, particularly
in international markets.
Remakes also mean that producers don't have to license new IP.
They can use for free or cheap whatever's just laying around,
like Spiderman.
Chillin' in the box somewhere.
But OK.
The practical reason-- dollars-- doesn't happen for no reason.
For all of the complaining that we've reached overload
on this flood of damn remakes and sequels,
if audiences were actually frustrated or bored,
the powers that be would stop making them
because they'd be bad for business.
So the economics are the how, but really only half
of the why.
The other half of the why is why, amid apparent frustration,
audiences continue to throw their bottle caps at reboots.
One explanation has been offered by the preeminent media
theorist of our time, Simon Pegg.
In a blog post he writes, the children of the '70s and '80s
were the first generation for whom
it wasn't imperative to grow up immediately
after leaving school.
This extended adolescence has been cannily co-opted
by market forces.
Suddenly, here was an entire generation crying out
for an evolved version of the things
that they were consuming as children.
This demographic is now well and truly
serviced in all facets of entertainment,
and the first and second childhoods
have merged into a mainstream phenomenon.
To say my generation is crying out
for remakes is a bit of an overstatement,
but I think it's fair to say we are supportive of them.
We're adults now, have disposable income,
and had childhoods that allow us to, and are fun to,
look back on-- unlike previous generations.
We're very lucky in that regard.
Pegg even references perennial sourpuss
Jean Baudrillard and his concept that more information with less
meaning might be entertaining, but ultimately distances us
from what is real, which is a concept that we talked
about our Orphan Black video.
If someone forced me to get Baudrillardian,
I might argue that our apparent support of media which
returns to well belies a collective narcissism
because remakes allude, on some level,
to younger, less complicated past us that we can show off.
It's not nostalgia, because I really
don't think it's about wanting to go back.
It's about wanting to conspicuously advertise
some connection we have to past media.
Anyway, I like Simon Pegg's idea.
I think it's provocative and it's also
awesome to see Scotty flex his postmodern theory muscles.
But I think there is another aspect
to the recent surge in remakes-- heck, there are probably
dozens.
But I want to talk about one.
So in the late '40s, these two guys, Theodore Adorno
and Max Horkheimer griped and groaned
about what they called the culture industry.
You see, before the infection by capitalism,
creative endeavors were meaningful works of art.
But in the face of capital they became
commodities and this ruined everything
and made Theo and the Horks sad.
Movies and radio, they wrote, need no longer
pretend to be art.
The truth, that they are a business,
is made into an ideology in order
to justify the rubbish that they deliberately produce.
Crankiness.
And to think they were writing before reality TV
and native advertising.
They would be so pissed today-- or maybe excited
that a growing media ecosystem provides ever more people
with the ability to create and distribute
meaningful works of culture without having
to involve massive production entities, new distribution
methods, direct to artist payment, new forms,
animated gifs.
Still can't escape capital, though.
Hm.
Anyway, I think one could argue that Gen Xers and maybe early
Millennials were the first to experience culture initially
or primarily as that industry that Adorno and Horkheimer so
bemoaned.
For lots and lots of us, endless duplication
and wide distribution is synonymous with our experience
of culture in a way that it wasn't for our parents
or their parents.
And I don't just mean copying VHS tapes
or taping music off of the radio,
trading or downloading MP3s or movies.
I mean duplication like mass industrial duplication
which got media toys, food, and clothes onto shelves
and into our homes.
Baked into so much of the culture
that we are remaking today is the very idea
that it is always already remade.
It came to us originally through a process
of industrial technological duplication.
Reduplicate.
Adorno and Horkheimer called this one, too.
They said that capital was able to triumph
because of the technology of duplication.
Culture, they said, is made the way
it is not because that's what can or should be made,
but because that is what is capable of being made
by available methods of production-- copyable,
repeatable made profitable.
And what really is a remake, if not a duplication of some kind?
As more things are made there will be more things to remake,
and more of those remakable things
will bear on them some mark that remaking
is warranted because they are products
of a cultural moment where duplication, mass production,
remaking is endemic to the conditions of creation
in the same way it is for, say, industrial goods.
We don't complain about the endless remaking of light bulbs
because that is the idea of light bulbs.
And I'm maybe arguing that it is also increasingly the idea
of popular culture.
Adorno and Horkheimer-- and to a certain degree,
we-- perceive a lazy unity of things always made the same.
But as Simon Pegg suggests, there is also a comfort in it--
not, I don't think, because we want to be children again,
but because it feels right, or maybe not right, but expected,
compulsory even.
Now, who do I see about another Dune remake?
What do you guys think?
Why are there so many remakes?
Let us know in the comments and accept no duplications.
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OK.
So because we have two weeks worth of comment responses
to do, we're going to try something
a little bit different and we uploaded comment responses
for the "Do We Live in the Future" and "The Button"
episode as their own video.
If you got to this video from any social media
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In a second it will just go over to the next video.
If you haven't, then we'll put a card or an annotation
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But before you do that, before it happens,
just a couple of bits of news.
I'm going to be GeekyCon this summer, which
I am super excited about.
So anybody who will be at GeekyCon, let's hang out.
And we are going to be taking next week off.
So the next time you see me, it will not be next week
but the week after that, if you don't
count the common responses video that if you're in the playlist
will start now-ish.