Two reality checks

The other day, my mother complained that all of our conversational quotations now come from Napoleon Dynamite whereas they used to come from Shakespeare. I tried to come up with some clever Shakespearean retort and I couldn't.

Then last night I watched "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" which is of coursed based on Homer's "The Oddysey" and it made me realize that since I had never read the full Oddysey (although I knew the story quite well), I was missing out on some subtle references - humorous and symbolic.

We should never let the ever-more-modernizing technological presentations of man's great stories overshadow the stories that are closer to the foundation. I watched an interview with George Lucas on the Criterion Collection DVD release of "Hidden Fortress", an Akira Kurosawa movie that noticeably influenced Lucas. In this interview he mentions the theory that there are really only 32 plots in the whole world of literature. And you could make a case for a bigger or smaller number, really, but the point is that so many things, even though they seem original, are just revisions and re-presentations of older material. And this is often not out of any laziness or copycatting on the part of today's movie makers and writers. Sometimes it's blatantly a case of no-talent hacks using someone else's ideas because they can't think of their own. But often, even when one does come up with an original idea, it is still very similar to a previous work. Totally by accident.

There is something to be said for "firsthand sources", or the primacy of the earlier versions of the works - simply because they are less colored by the effects of any earlier work. A remake of an old story will always show the effects of the earlier story, whereas the first instance of said story will be quite foundational and original.

On the other hand, movies reflect our culture, and seeing how Star Wars updates the messages of Hidden Fortress, or how A Fistful of Dollars takes a fresh look at Yojimbo is a great way to see the differences in worldview between the two directors, and between the two time periods and cultures. But we will never recognize these differences without a thorough knowledge of what came before.

I will always endeavour to provide context for the various movies that arise, as much as I can tell. But some things are not always obvious. We'll work on it together.