Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 15-July-07
 

The Modernized Movie: A Passage to Mediocrity

Watching trailers for "Nancy Drew" and "The Dark is Rising" got me thinking about why filmmakers feel the need to modernize older tales and why doing so often spells disaster. Hollywood seems to think that moviegoers, particularly younger ones, cannot or will not relate to characters who don't look, talk, or act like themselves. You see this thinking at work in the marketing of "black" movies (i.e., movies in which the majority of actors are African-American, supposedly making them accessible to black viewers en masse) and when someone of a certain gender is injected into a film so that viewers of the same gender can feel represented (e.g., Arwen's heightened role in "The Fellowship of the Ring"). But this assumption is too feeble to determine how a movie is written, cast, or advertised. For one, it can easily be overcome by the popularity of a central character (like Batman, who is weirder and richer than most) or an actor (consider Will Smith's universal appeal). Also, a truly well written and presented story will usually find an audience (like "Brokeback Mountain," which started out a "gay" movie and ended up a hit). And when it comes to teen and preteen viewers this belief makes the least sense of all. Their prejudices and self-definitions have not yet ossified, so they're more likely to accept unfamiliar sights at the cineplex.

What the modernizers don't realize, to their detriment and ours, is that unfamiliarity unlocks the door to wonder. My horror at the above mentioned trailers is that the movies they promote strip the protagonists of at least part of their original magic. Since childhood I have read and reread Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew books and Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series and loved them because they don't take place in my neighborhood. I am fascinated by how the mature, late-teen Nancy, a product of the 1930s, never leaves home without a sturdy pair of pumps, is chastely courted by her fraternity-jock boyfriend, and takes time to freshen her lipstick while pursuing or being pursued by counterfeiters. She might have been on the high end of average in the thirties, but she is exotic to me in a way that the laptop-wielding high schooler in the recent movie could never be.* Similarly, the mall-going, hormonal American star of the upcoming "Dark is Rising" adaptation obviously suffers from having lost the rustic, British nature of the book's hero, who was contemporary in 1973. (Plus, his mentor is Merlin, whose wanderings don't extend to the U.S. as far as I have heard.) By forcing these characters into new attitudes, the movies diminish their allure.

Hollywood studios often defend themselves by saying they give people what they want. Perhaps they are correct that the average American is frightened by things foreign and limits his or her travel to safe destinations that are crowded with tourists and sanctioned by mass media and popular opinion. (I'm going to Disneyland!) Yet even if this is so, it's all the more reason for movies to offer non-threatening, short-term passage to other perspectives — especially when the source material supplies the passport. Widespread escapism can derive from details such as clothing and accent, and from the mindset of a bygone culture. When a filmmaker is inspired by a book rich with extraordinary detail, it's folly to prevent this from happening.

*I know Nancy has been updated by publishers, too, and think it's rubbish.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.