Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox

D. Varndell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137408594
• eBook ISBN: 9781137408600
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox explores the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze using the framework of Hollywood's current obsession with remaking and rebooting classic and foreign films. Through an analysis of cinematic repetition and difference, the book approaches remakes from a range of philosophical perspectives.

Part I

The Problem of Choice

1

Shot for Shot Remakes

Schrödinger’s cat

Remakes are often criticised for trying to update originals, often prompting the disapproving question, “if it isn’t broken, why (try to) fix it?” The shot for shot remake, by contrast, takes the original film and creates a new version of it, prompting the equally disapproving question, “why not just rewatch the original?” For Paolo Cherchi Usai, there are three “motivations” for wishing to see the same film more than once. First, “the pleasure of repeating an experience of pleasure”. Second, “a desire to obtain a fuller perception of what has already been seen”. Third, following “a change of opinion”.¹ Anat Zanger expands this logic to encapsulate the motivations of remake audiences, in whom she identifies a masochistic desire “to have the already-known experience repeated”, even though it is “accompanied by the presentiment that it never will be”.² Adapting Deleuze, we can say that there are three modalities to such a desire: one can have the “same” film, an “identical” film or a “similar” film. Of the first, we have the nonsensical notion that I can “have my cake and eat it too” – not another cake, but that exact same cake I just ate; not another film, but the one I have already seen. However, the idea of the “same”, Deleuze argues, “constitutes the greatest and the longest error” on account of the fact that if the thing that returns is indeed the same “One”, it would have “begun by being unable to leave itself”. Thus, repetition is no more the “permanence of the One than the resemblance of the many”.³ We can paraphrase Heraclitus’ statement that “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man,” by pointing out that no viewer ever watches the same film twice, for they are not the same viewer. But what of the film? Does it, like Heraclitus’ river, change over time? Is it not perfectly possible to watch an identical version of Psycho? The term “identical”, Deleuze suggests, works backwards, imputing into an original an identity that is “retrojected”, such that resemblance is interiorised. When dealing with identical versions, we get attempts to “relate different to different by means of difference”, which is no longer an “error but illusion”.⁴ But how can we be sure of this identicality? Even the closest shot for shot remake runs a risk not unlike the one encapsulated by Kierkegaard in his anecdote about a sailor who falls from the top of the mast without injuring himself. When the sailor invites others to try it, none will, least of all the sailor himself. Equally, there is always an element of chance involved in remaking. For these reasons, the shot for shot remake is neither a return of the same nor of the identical, but, rather, it remains firmly within the modality of the “similar”, in which difference remains different, enabling us to speak about that which is the same.

The suggestion that audiences are motivated by repeating pleasurable viewings, a desire to perceive more and a change in opinion maps perfectly onto the experience of audiences who go to see magic shows. Nothing could be more obscene than a magician who, having completed a successful “trick”, then reveals the mechanism and means by which the trick was performed (or indeed, the audience member who shouts it out). Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige suggests that every magic trick consists of three “acts”. With the “pledge”, the magician shows the audience something ordinary, a bird for instance, arousing the audience’s curiosity. Via a “turn”, the magician takes this ordinary thing and makes it do something extraordinary; he causes the bird to disappear. In the final act, the “prestige”, the magician must cause to reappear the ordinary thing that has vanished, which, if successfully completed, leads to his much deserved applause. In the film, a talented magician, Angier, is desperate to know how (in order to perform it better) his arch rival, Borden, is able to transport himself from one end of the stage to another in the blink of an eye. At first, Angier attempts to use a ringer of himself, employing a drunken stage actor as his double. However, as night after night he ends the show beneath the stage as his inebriated proxy basks in the audience’s rapturous applause, Angier resolves to find another way to perform the trick. His obsession with perfecting Borden’s transportation show leads him to a mysterious scientist, Nikola Tesla, whose experiments appear to have resulted in the invention of a real transportation machine. However, an air of mystery still surrounds Angier’s performance. At the film’s climax, the secrets to both magicians’ transportation tricks are revealed, along with the sacrifices each made for his show. Borden’s trick is no more complex than his dedication to his art: each night of his adult life, he switched places with his identical twin, meaning that during the day, one of them was disguised as his assistant and ingénieur, Fallon. To keep their secret safe, Borden and Fallon lived interchangeable lives, swapping homes and even lovers. In a chilling scene, when one of the brothers loses a finger, the other mutilates himself with a chisel to keep up appearances. However, the secret to Angier’s transportation technique is far more disturbing. Tesla’s machine, so it turns out, rather than transporting its subject, duplicates him. Thus, in a twisted variation on Schrödinger’s Cat, one version of Angier arrives on stage to enjoy the applause, while another version, to keep safe the secret, drowns in a water tank below stage.

Both magicians relate in different ways to Deleuze’s three modalities of the same, identical and similar. Having begun his search for the perfect transporter trick through a repetition of the similar (using a surrogate), Angier ends up succeeding by duplicating himself through a repetition of the same (neither one of the Angiers has the claim to originality). Borden, by contrast, seems to begin with the perfect repetition of the same, only for it to be revealed that he was succeeding by leading a double life, exchanging places with his “identical” twin. However, if we change our perspective, a different relationship to Deleuze’s triad emerges. For Borden, the return of the same comes with the “prestige”, or the shock that he can pull off the trick, whereas for Angier, even with a “magical” machine, the return of the same is contained in his horrendous self replication and what amounts to a type of homicidal suicide. Both instances are strictly impossible, and constitute an “error” on account of the fact that Angier cannot leave himself any more than Borden can, whose wife begins to suspect the switches. Unlike the identical twin brothers in Alexandre Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask, in which one lives life to the fullest measure as king, while the other languishes in prison with his identity concealed, neither Borden nor Fallon can live his life to the full. Hence, just as one of the Angier clones must die, so too must one of the twins at the end of the film. For Borden, the return of the identical is “retrojected”, as Deleuze puts it, and works only on the basis that the twin brothers interiorise their resemblance through their repetition of the difference between them – the loss of a finger, say, which works in their favour, strengthening the illusion of self sameness. For Borden, the sacrifice is no less great than for Angier, as he and Fallon take turns to return home to a wife and child only one of them loves. Two halves of a life that do not equate to a whole, any more than Angier’s 50–50 chance of surviving each performance.

Early in the film, Borden points out to his audience that “you’re not really looking [to see how the trick is performed, because] you don’t want to know. You want to be fooled.” However, one of the truly breath-taking ideas in the film is the fact that, ultimately, the fools are Angier and Borden themselves, for “nothing is hidden”, as Rupert Read argues of the final scene, “if only we can learn how to see what is before our eyes”. There is less difference between Borden and Angier than between the twins or the clones. Borden and Fallon look identical, but their personality differences lead Fallon’s wife to commit suicide as a result of her husband’s inconsistent nature. Angier might be the “same” as his replicated self, merely “here” (on stage) rather than “there” (in the water tank), but they cannot interact. He can coexist with his doppelgänger only in the moment of the “turn”, and only for as long as the audience (not to mention the unlucky clone!) hold their breath. Moments before Borden is to be hanged, having been falsely accused of drowning “the” Angier, he apologises to Fallon, telling him to “go and live your life in full now, all right? You live for both of us.” However, as Read correctly points out, the film’s ending is more depressing than it first appears. Far from being freed to live life “fully”, it is “the spirit of Angier [which] lives in the surviving Borden twin” as a “miserable form of survival; a form dependent on a failure (on both their parts) to live decently”.⁵ Deleuze puts it slightly differently, pointing out that “if you are caught up in another person’s dream, you’re fucked”.

The film ends with a tracking shot of a secret room filled with the watery tombs containing Angier’s dead doubles. Hence, while we must begin with the basic premise that a remake is always two, one story point, but always at least two plots, we must insist that we can never have both. To repeat: one cannot watch a film for the first time, twice. Unlike the commonplace assertion of the genre critic, who reminds us constantly of the genealogy of form and typology; in contrast to the structuralist critic’s insistence on the fractious diversity of the myths into which all stories tap; and against the Derridean evacuation of even these multitudinous centres: against all this, remakes count exactly for two, and one of these is destined to drown or be hanged. The Prestige repeats the nonsensical idea of the one who wants to “have one’s cake and eat it too”, albeit in the form “to have oneself and kill him too”; not another me that looks the same, but the exact same me, the one I have just created. As Badiou puts it, there is no simple opposition between incommensurate positions such as these. There will be a victor and a vanquished, and “philosophy”, as he points out, “confronts thinking as choice, thinking as decision”. It is “a choice of existence or a choice of thought”.⁶

The precise locus of the horror experienced by Angier when confronted with this choice of existence is not just the trauma of executing himself night after night. After all, what does it matter if you know you will be the “original” on stage, while your illegitimate clone downs? Read, however, notices a small detail from a scene in which Angier, having replicated himself for the first time, grabs a gun and moves to shoot his newly created double. However, just before being cut short by the gunshot which kills him, Angier’s replicated self says, “no wait. I’m the . . . ” moments before he is killed. “What was he going to say, had he not been cut off?”, asks Read: “surely ‘ . . . real Angier!’ ” The horror that dawns on Angier is that he cannot be sure that he is not, himself, the double, since neither of them is the real Angier, “because, roughly: they both are”.⁷ The chances of survival, then, are even. A remake, by definition, splits one film into two, but a decision must be made, and something has to be lost in making this decision. Shot for shot remakes often get made because the cinematic apparatus itself boasts new technological means (for example, Talkies and Technicolor, CGI and 3D) or because they offer an improvement or update to the original, which has aged badly. As Hitchcock put it of his own auto remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, “the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional”.⁸ So which version of The Man Who Knew Too Much does one watch? The “talented”, if amateur, original, or the “professional” remake? The promising apprentice’s first magic, or the sorcerer’s mastery of it? Gus Van Sant’s “art house” remake of Psycho updates Hitchcock’s “professionally made” Psycho with a professionally remade Psycho for the 1990s. However, like Angier’s dilemma, the shot for shot remake poses a new cinematic twist on “Schrödinger’s Cat”. With Schrödinger’s dilemma, there are two possible outcomes, but only one cat. With the shot for shot remake, two versions are available, but the viewer cannot watch both first. “Perhaps this ‘same’, the identity of nature and degrees of difference, is Repetition”,⁹ Deleuze surmises. Either way, as Renata Salecl points out, “something is always lost when we choose”.¹⁰ With remakes, there is always more than one way to skin a cat.

“Nothing happens, twice”: Funny Games U.S.

Repetition, in the shot for shot remake, is rather mechanical. It is a mask furnished by the death drive, or a “verticality” where the “never seen” and the “already seen” are far from opposites, but signify the same thing. If in attempting to repeat Psycho one can only effect the impression of sameness, it is thus only through representation that one can have success. What gets signified is masked by the signifier, which is in turn masking what it signifies. A shot for shot remake is thus what has never been seen and has already been seen, at one and the same time. This is encapsulated in the “déjà vu” scene from The Matrix, when Neo points out that he has just seen two black cats that looked identical, causing everyone to panic. Trinity demands “How much like it? Was it the same cat?”, thoroughly confusing Neo. This is not a repetition of the “same” but a “glitch in the Matrix”, caused when the machines “change something”. This is why J. Hoberman misses a crucial dimension to the shot for shot remake when she notes that the pleasure of watching Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is “likely to be restricted to a narrow range between briefly enjoyable déjà vu and mild disappointment”.¹¹ After all, Neo doesn’t see the “same cat”, since “There is no cat”. The logic of the shot for shot remake is closer to Jean Baudrillard’s “world of the doppelgänger”, a world “without mirrors or projection or utopias as a means of reflec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Part I: The Problem of Choice
• Part II: The Problem of Distance
• Part III: The Problem of the Exception
• Conclusion: Encore Deleuze
• End Notes
• Bibliography
• Index