This Savage Art

Look at this poster¹, amazing.

Remakes are nothing new. They’re hardly worth commenting on because of their diluted nature and lack of adaptability to the modern world. They usually suffer from a studio’s feeble attempt to cash in on some hot young tv actor’s “hotness” and introduce a new generation to uh, something. I could care less. Just heap it onto the junk pile.

Invasion shares the same DNA of a fantastical story that can be told over and over again, generation after generation. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) at its core dealt with the paranoia of one loosing one’s soul to the masses, mob rule’s style. The original was directed by Don Siegel, with a script co-written by Daniel Mainwaring and (uncredited) Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel “The Body Snatchers” (aka “Sleep No More”) by Jack Finney. Whether it was subversive in nature and Siegel was really commenting on Communism or McCarthyism it’s hard to say. Counting the current incarnation it has been remade three times.

In a game of connect the dots I’ll clumsily segue into the current abomination that is in the planning stages as we speak. The recent news of Rod Lurie‘s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs has officially sent me over the top. It’s not so much the news of a remake, I most likely won’t be seeing it because I hold the original in such high regard. Peckinpah’s craftily twisted film plays on the audiences perceptions of their own moral code. He took shit for it but he challenged the audience. I know that’s not the job of every single director out there, to challenge an audience, but he did, unapologetically. I guess what really gets to me and many who find the original version a great piece of American cinema is Lurie’s attitude towards it.

It’s an interesting film, isn’t it? But it was pretty much killed by a two-second moment on screen where his wife is being raped and she smiles. That was the end of that movie. You can be certain that she’s not going to be smiling in the rape in my film.

If you aren’t acquainted with the the 1971 film it stars Dustin Hoffman as a mild-mannered professor living in the English countryside with his attractive wife (Susan George). A gang of locals harasses them both, graphically rapes the wife and attacks their home. Hoffman fights back with great vengeance and furious anger. The scene is a much debated one. The rapist is an ex-boyfriend of the wife and at one point in this horrific event Susan George gives a half-smile² associating this rape with pleasure. At face value you can read this as the character asked for it and the bitch got what she deserved, that’s if you can pick your knuckles up off the ground long enough to scratch your head. Peckinpah turns an obvious playing-it-straight-to-the-audience moment into a layered, psychotically ambiguous deviation where the woman is manipulating the rapist to get herself out of this heinous situation intact. And that’s only one interpretation! The scene turns everything upside-down, my head exploded the first time I saw it. That’s art baby! Don’t misunderstand my issues with this remake. This isn’t about tampering with the precious work of some revered director, we all know nothing is sacred. This is about just getting it wrong so Rod Lurie, good luck with that. Maybe you should just decide for yourself.³

How long do you think it will be before some genius wants to make an American version of a Bergman or Antonioni film using it as a bargaining chip with an audience to gain some sort of respectability? Good luck with that too.

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Related: Rod Lurie clarifies, sort of. Mr. Lurie, the stage is yours.

1. That striking movie poster above proudly hangs in my home studio. [↩]
2. Which is just as debatable. [↩]
3. If you live in New York and want to see Straw Dogs along with a collection of some great American films from the early 70′s check out The Museum of the Moving Image – Uneasy Riders: American Film In The Nixon Years, 1970-1974 – July 28-September 2, 2007. [↩]