Your Lego Days are Over, Baby

Hollywood has become culturally inept.

I speak solely, of course, of the blasphemous remake of a one Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that David Fincher has so unceremoniously dragged through the proverbial "remake machine." Not only has this film already been adapted from the world-wide bestselling novels by Stieg Larsson into a riveting 2009 Swedish film, but Hollywood has decided to rip from the pages a story which focuses on the deft human response to a culture which is not like itself.

My main problem comes cemented in the fact that this is America. The great U.S. of A. And here is Larsson, a man who wrote these novels as a testament to the treatment of women in Sweden. Mixed in his writhing narrative are facts about the negative treatment of women in his country, everything from unreported rape to public physical abuse. His facts augment his story as something that could have happened, an unrelenting mimic of a society in which ladies are second class citizens. This is a cultural manifesto, a societal quip, an allegory and a statement. The embellishment of this facet of the story is squeezed into Oplev's Dragon Tattoo with grace and impunity. The treatment of Lizbeth happens. It's vulgar and obscene but it's true to a certain extent, and therefore it is treated with retribution and denial. The cultural as well as visual significance cannot be denied: it is a pressing understanding of the culture in which it was made.

Which is why I just cannot fathom Fincher having any understanding of this.

The way he talks about this story, it's ripped from the headlines bravado with a vulnerable, taken-advantage of girl who must find herself in the pages of a murder mystery, seems to lack any tact. I don't understand how he has any bearing or understanding of how this story holds more weight than that of a crime drama.
More so, I don't understand why it's being made...

2008: Alfredson's Let the Right One In is released (Swedish)
2009: Oplev's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is released (Swedish)
2010: Corneau's Love Crime is released (French)

2010: Reeve's Let Me in is released (USA)
2011: Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is released (USA)
2012: De Palma's Passion is set for release (USA)

Give it a two year window and all of a sudden, it's ours for the taking. Do these movies not already exist? Is there not already a medium on which these films were made and available? This is in no way old hat to Hollywood. The Departed was originally Japan's Infernal Affairs (2002), and Vanilla Sky was the Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (1997). But what I can't seem to wrap my head around is, if the story already exists, why remake it? This is from a purely aesthetic and intellectual standpoint. Obviously it's for the money. There's a guaranteed audience who pay to see films in English, and outside of that there's a guaranteed audience who pay to see Hollywood fair. But from the point of authenticity, are you diminishing the value by duplicating? Aren't you splitting the template, removing the truth of an original by proving to yourself that anyone can do it? And, furthermore, aren't you taking credit for a product you did not actually produce? How is this not plagiarism?

What appears to be the audacious reality is that these directors and producers believe that they can make it better. The product, worn out from two to ten years of play, has outdated itself and must now be done again, only this time it will be better. "We have the technology" rings in my ears as I think this through. A salacious bid that now, we can do it right. We can do it better. We are the beginning and the end of this story. But by ripping the subject from its socio-cultural confines, you've already diminished the product's impact. Hollywood does this to itself as well.

Wes Craven is a director who has thrived in exploitation. Last House on the Left borrowed images straight from Vietnam news reels. This inoculation to the outside world by reincarnating it into a story of retribution and resistance gave audiences a spectator's way of dealing with external crisis. By viewing a reconciliation, no matter how brutal, the mind could deal with the outside forces that bore into their psyche. It's a basic principle of good horror, that it serves a duality of inoculation and entertainment. So, when Rogue Pictures remade it in 2009, is fared and bled and now sits on shelves of forgettable films released in the past decade. It's because it was removed, misunderstood and represented, and let go in favor of the original cult classic. This is happened on multiple occasions within this genre: Dawn of the Dead and growing consumerism, The Hills Have Eyes and suburban sprawl, most recently American Psycho and 80's extreme power in wealth. Outside of these social understandings, these films are not the impactful fan-fare which have trudged through decades to be the cult favorites they are today.

I'm left with a failed understanding of why foreign remakes exceed the impact of the original while remakes of our own fair poorly in the long run (obviously this isn't true of every film, Lola and Scarface being obvious exceptions). Are we that out of touch with the world around us that we must augment their realities to suit the needs of the remake machine? Are our ideas so lacking that we have to plagiarize the intellect of other nations to redeem the driving force of Hollywood forever? Our best director isn't even from the US (I speak, of course, of Christopher Nolan).

My frustration has outlived my purpose. I find I will forever lack the understanding necessary to succeed in such a succubus of an industry. I won't go see the Dragon Tattoo remake. I don't care if it's better than the original, and I don't care if that makes my argument uninformed. The fact is that I will watch the original and read the books with the knowledge and understanding that what I am watching is culturally relevant and not sampling of some misunderstood back beat.

The remake machine will live on, and stories will never be the same.