Well, here’s something to wake some of you up.
A Hunter student has called my attention to the fact that NBC – in an effort to do better with younger audiences – plans to remake Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 10-part masterpiece originally made for Polish television.
According to industry gossip, their focus will be on reshaping the piece to reach both late teens and the still much-valued 18 – 24 year-old demographic. A decaying Boston will stand-in for Poland in the earliest days of the post-communist era.
I had a funny and completely unexpected reaction when I heard this.
I have always been an appreciative consumer of all sorts of mash-ups and remakes and assorted subversions of the canon. And no one would have blabbed more sincerely about the way that both the modernist and post-modernist impulses made this possible. It’s not that the 20th and 21st century troublemakers paved an easy path for the barbarians to rush the palace gates, or that they protected them from injury and scorn, but the modernists and their descendants did at least bring the bolt cutters that snapped open the lock.
Well, now I find myself in a funny place.
Mr. Subversion just discovered his limits. While I might come to see this remake as something valuable, it would be among the very first remakes I have ever found even minimally acceptable. But I’ve been surprised before.
The lesson for me is pretty obvious:
Art that challenges our tendency to view any aspect of life or art as sacred makes an indispensable contribution to the cause of free expression. Even when one sees a specific challenge as deeply offensive (as I often do) the simple act of heresy is a visible reminder of what one could choose to do if they felt it was important.
This, though, is the first time that the canon they’re proposing to mess with is my canon! And I’m stunned at how protective I feel. I don’t want to overstate my indignation, but when the property being proposed for a makeover is something you believe to be the most profound and revealing film ever made on what it means to be a human being, I don’t want to understate it either.
OK, I admit it.
This time it’s my sacred space, and I can’t say that I feel very subversive. I do, though, see more clearly how others must have felt when a work of art or culture that they cherished was threatened by profit-driven commercial interests.
It doesn’t feel so good. At all. Because the network of The Apprentice, The Celebrity Apprentice, The Recently Paroled Apprentice, and The Hobbled By Lower Back Pain Apprentice is going to _____ with my film?
Yup. And now its my turn to be angry, offended and worried about just how bad it will get.
MEDIA AND MAYHEM 