303. Why Remakes

Back in the day, I taught a Senior English elective on film adaptations (including, of course, The Princess Bride). In that class, we would read books that had been made into movies and consider all the decisions that go into telling a story through moving images and sounds rather than black squiggles on paper. Early in the class, I would show my students ten or more distinct adaptations of the same scene (Hamlet, I.iii) and have them consider each choice made by screenwriters and directors. The differences were vast, so even with all the same words, the scenes created entirely different experiences for the viewers.

When a book or movie does well, two ways people have found to capitalize on that success are to create a sequel/prequel or to retell the same story with a different setting or actors. I'm a huge fan of the second kind of art. I love Jane Austen's Emma, so I get a real kick out of watching Amy Heckerling's Clueless. There's a comfort in knowing the basic story and a thrill in finding the parallels. (If you haven't seen Clueless, now's probably a good time to go watch it. I promise the remainder of this post will still be here when you return.)

Recently, I've been reading some remakes I've enjoyed, so I thought I'd recommend them to you.

After reading the first few pages of Nikki Sloane's Pride and Protest, I didn't think I'd like the book. Though it follows, scene-by-scene, Austen's original, the opening chapters appeared to me to be trying too hard with the new names and overlaps and not hard enough on making the characters likable in the way Austen does. Then, I got swept up. I appreciated the clever ways Sloane translated the 1813 marriage plot to 2022 issues of social justice, affordable housing, and the problems with billionaires. Well done, Nikki Payne!

The second remake I enjoyed was Percival Everett's James, which retells roughly the same story as Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's point of view. Everett changed the ending, eliminating the problematic last several chapters in which Tom and Huck toy with Jim, who turns out to have been freed while he was away (a fact Tom knows but doesn't reveal to Jim or Huck as they keep Jim locked up). Jim's/James' version of his life shows a more complex character living under the untenable system of slavery. The first two-thirds of the novel follows Jim and Huck's journey from Hannibal down the river, but the last part gives Jim a separate and new voyage to save his wife and daughter from a breeder. The novel offers the comfort of a well known story and the discomfort (for this white, 2024 reader) of a view into the horrors of slavery. I appreciate that it also weaves thoughtful nuance and maturity into Twain's seemingly simple storytelling. I'm not sure if Everett's book's three sections were supposed to give me Richard Wright's Native Son: Fear, Flight, and Fate vibes, but they did. In any case, overall, I really enjoyed reading the novel for how it breathed new sensibilities into a very old (1884) story.

What remakes have you enjoyed reading or watching? Do you prefer adaptations (Bridgerton, The Shawshank Redemption) or remakes (Ten Things I Hate about You, The Lion King)? What are your favorites in each category? Please share your responses in the comments.