The second time around

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s topic: “What’s something you wish could be remade or redone but is maybe too iconic or otherwise singular for anyone to actually take on the risk?”

When you look at a chronological list of any artist’s works, the first item can be both less and more than meets the eye. A first novel or movie—to take just two art forms—is always biographically interesting, but it’s also subject to particular pressures that can limit how well it expresses the creator’s personality. It’s the product of comparative youth, so it often suffers from rawness and inexperience, and it enters the world under unfavorable circumstances. For an unproven quantity from an unknown name, the tension between personal expression and the realities of the marketplace can seem especially stark. An aspiring novelist may write a book he hopes he can sell; a filmmaker usually starts with a small project that has a chance at being financed; and both may be drawn to genres that have traditionally been open to new talent. Hence the many directors who got their start in horror, exploitation, and even borderline porn. Francis Ford Coppola’s apprenticeship is a case in point. Before Dementia 13, which he made under the auspices of Roger Corman, he’d directed skin flicks like Tonight for Sure and The Bellboy and the Playgirls, and it took years of kicking around before he landed on The Godfather, which I’m sure he, and the rest of us, would prefer to see as his real debut.

Any early work, then, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. (This doesn’t even account for the fact that what looks like a debut may turn out that way almost by accident. The Icon Thief wasn’t the first novel I attempted or even finished, but it was the first one published, and it set a pattern for my career that I didn’t entirely anticipate.) But there’s also a real sense that an artist’s freshman efforts may be the most characteristic works he or she will ever produce. When you’re writing a novel or making a movie for the first time, you aren’t necessarily thinking in terms of a filmography that will stretch over fifty years: it seems like enough of a miracle to get this one story out into the world. As a result, if you’re at all rational, you’ll invest that effort into something that matters to you. This could be your only shot, so you may as well spend it on an idea that counts. Later, as you grow older, you often move past those early interests and obsessions, but they’ll always carry an emotional charge that isn’t there in the works you tackled in your maturity, or after you had all the resources you needed. And when you look back, you may find yourself haunted by the divide between your ambitions and the means—internal and otherwise—available to you at the time.

That’s why I’m always a little surprised that more artists don’t go back to revisit their own early work with an eye to doing a better job. Sometimes, of course, the last thing you want is to return to an old project: doing it even once can be enough to drain you of all enthusiasm. But it happens. In fiction, the revised versions of novels like The Magus, The Sot-Weed Factor, and The Stand represent a writer’s attempt to get it right the second time. You could see the television version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Joss Whedon’s remake of his own original screenplay in the form that it deserved. In film, directors as different as Ozu, DeMille, Hitchcock, and Haneke have gone back to redo their earlier work with bigger stars, larger budgets, or simply a more sophisticated sense of what the story could be. (My own favorite example is probably Evil Dead 2, which is less a sequel than a remake in a style closer to Sam Raimi’s intentions.) And of course, the director’s cut, which has turned into a gimmick to sell movies on video or to restore deleted scenes that should have remained unseen, began as a way for filmmakers to make another pass on the same material. Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and Ashes of Time have all been revised, and even if you prefer the older versions, it’s always fascinating to see a director rethink the choices he initially made.

That said, this impulse has its dark side: George Lucas has every right to tinker with the Star Wars movies, but not to withdraw the originals from circulation. But it’s an idea that deserves to happen more often. Hollywood loves remakes, but they’d be infinitely more interesting if they represented the original director’s renewed engagement with his own material. I’d love to have seen Kubrick—rather than Adrian Lyne—revisit Lolita in a more permissive decade, for instance, and to take a modern example almost at random, I’d much rather see Brian DePalma go back to one of his earlier flawed movies, like The Fury or even Dressed to Kill, rather than try to recapture the same magic with diminishing returns. And the prospect of David Fincher doing an Alien movie now would be considerably more enticing than what he actually managed to do with it twenty years ago. (On a somewhat different level, I’ve always thought that The X-Files, which strained repeatedly to find new stories in its later years, should have gone back to remake some of its more forgettable episodes from the first season with better visual effects and a fresh approach.) Most artists, obviously, prefer to strike out in new directions, and such projects would carry the implication that they were only repeating themselves. But if the movies are going to repeat old ideas anyway, they might as well let their creators take another shot.