Remaking and the film trilogy: Whit Stillman's authorial triptych.

The trailer for the 2006 Melbourne International Film Festival features a scruffy, bespectacled teenager sandwiched between two suited Hollywood executive types in the back of a limousine. As the car moves through a neon-lit streetscape, the execs use a nonquestion initially directed at the kid--"Okay, so your script is a sequel, right?"--to launch into a breathless exchange concerning the relative economic benefits of sequels, prequels, and postsequel prequels before deciding between themselves that a sequel remake (which they term a "sequel-sequel") is the way to go with this project and turning again to the kid to ask him how much he wants for the trilogy or, better, the tetralogy, reassuring themselves and him that "he can stretch ... he'll stretch ... we'll stretch it ... yeah, yeah. "The scene fades to black over their final mumblings, and the tagline for MIFF 2006 comes up: "It's a long way from Hollywood."

This trailer raises a number of pertinent issues relating to the field of film remakes and sequels. First, and most obviously, it gestures toward the actual ubiquity of sequels, prequels, and remakes in Hollywood right down to the parodied categories of "quadrilogies" (Scar), Mot, ie 1-4 [Keenen Ivory Wayans/David Zucker, 2000-06]), "sequel remakes" (Dawn of the Dead [Zack Snyder, 2004]), and "postsequel prequels" (the second Star Wars trilogy [George Lucas, 1999-2005] or the parody-worthy case of the couplet Exorcist: The Beginning [Renny Harlin, 2004] and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist [Paul Schrader, 2005]). Second, the parody, notwithstanding the fact that it is parody, expresses the longstanding tendency within "serious" film circles to conceptualize the film remake and series in only such commercial terms--as, precisely, Hollywood typified. And third, in much the same way that the humorously specific categories actually reflect contemporary Hollywood output, the confusion the breakneck scene evokes over their differentiation can suggest one way of approaching remakes, sequels, and series, namely, as terms between which there is a considerable amount of slippage. In the trailer this slippage is indicated literally in the way one type morphs seamlessly into another: a remake of a sequel is interpreted as a sequel-sequel, eliminating any suggestion of difference between the terms, and this in turn is understood as a series, a trilogy that is stretched into a quadrilogy. The trailer's parody of Hollywood lies in the understanding that, for the blockbuster industry, the types are of interest only for their monetary value, and one can easily be marketed or stretched into another to improve a product's commercial chances. The types are considered as the furthest things from critical forms.

What the trailer, perhaps inadvertently, raises, then, is a number of questions about these types of films. To what extent can remakes, sequels, and series be approached as critical forms? Does slippage actually exist amongst the categories, and, if so, is this slippage specific to a commercial system? Even beyond Hollywood, is a remake always a type of sequel (as the trailer suggests) and vice versa? And can a series, as an example of multiple sequels, also be approached as a type of remaking? This article takes a specific interest in the last question by way of a discussion of the film trilogy, a type that, arguably, exemplifies a coincidence of the sequel and the remake. Throughout film history, the trilogy can be approached as a type closely associated with auteurism, a link established largely through the films and discourses of the European art cinema. Through an examination of Whit Stillman's three films Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998) I hope to describe how the evolving norm that Thomas Elsaesser describes as the "international art cinema" (18) can offer an imaginative take on this association and suggest new directions for both auteurism and serialization.

Remakes and Sequels

Before turning to the specific trilogy form, though, we might usefully examine the terms in which the types of sequel and remake have been discursively differentiated. Broadly speaking, the sequel and remake are typically distinguished on the basis that a sequel continues a story, while a remake repeats it. For Thomas Leitch, this difference in rhetorical stance reflects a fundamentally different narrative appeal: "The audience for sequels wants to find out more, to spend more time with characters they are interested in and to find out what happened to them after their story was over. The audience for remakes does not expect to find out anything new in this sense: they want the same story again, though not exactly the same" (142). Although either process can theoretically advance in an infinite number of directions, the concept of the sequel is generally far less flexible and open to interpretation than that of the remake. On the one hand, this is an industrial effect of(international) product output, where film sequels tend to announce themselves explicitly through means involving numbers and/or the repetition of original title terms. (1) On the other hand, the phenomenon is also an effect of the critical discourse that exists on sequelization, which, especially when compared to that on film remaking, does not attempt to think beyond this acknowledged concept of the sequel to ideas of disguise, transformation, and difference. In relation to remakes, the sequel as it is dominantly conceived can be compared only to the "direct" remake.

Drawing attention to specific "types" of remakes is typical of the industrially pragmatic approach to film remaking that critics have historically taken. Michael Druxman's 1975 survey Make It Again, Sam: A Survey of Movie Remakes stipulates three general categories of remaking specific to pre-1975 Hollywood: (1) the disguised remake, in which a new film does not draw attention to its earlier version; (2) the direct remake, in which a new film makes some alterations to an original property but does not hide the fact that it is based on an earlier production; and (3) the nonremake, in which a new film creates an entirely new plot but goes under the same title as an original property (13-15). More recent work tends to question the usefulness of a taxonomic approach, arguing for the degree of subjectivism involved and the inevitable overlap between categories when applied to (especially contemporary) examples. (2) What is interesting about the taxonomic approach for our argument, though, is that even within the commercial and historical contexts that such surveys took place, a significant degree of flexibility is admitted to the concept "remake" that is still not accorded to that of "sequel." The discourse of sequelization continues to exist largely in industrial and commercial terms, where what "counts" as a sequel is an acknowledgment of an earlier production.

In the popular imagination, the remake and the sequel are two types of filmmaking that are commonly thought of together as evidence of postclassical Hollywood's efforts to capitalize on preexisting audiences. This association, of course, is what the MIFF trailer plays upon, and it remains best described by J. Hoberman's term "sequelitis" ("Ten Years" 34). The discrepancy in film studies' theorization of the two types raises two obvious questions. First, is it practical to consider film sequels in the terms acknowledged for film remakes? And, following on from here, what does this indicate about the difference, or lack thereof, between the two types? If we conceive of film remakes as particularly crystallized examples of the patterns of repetition and difference that characterize genre filmmaking more generally (Verevis 5), we could say that the historical taxonomies of remakes are founded upon the difference that the patterns of repetition produce. We have said that the sequel continues an earlier text, while a remake repeats it. What isn't acknowledged in this rhetorical stance, though, is that the process of continuation that the sequel undertakes is also a process of repetition--of characters and actors, of plot scenarios, themes, and styles, and of title terms. These elements are repeated in a different form insofar as they are, precisely, continued: as with film remakes, the difference in these productions is encapsulated within their terms of repetition. The discourse of sequelization, though, does not have the terms to acknowledge the levels of difference that can arise in the course of film sequels. Specifically, it cannot describe the fundamental transformations that often arise from a change in directors across the course of a series, something clearly visible in the Mission: Impossible films (Brian De Palma, 1996; John Woo, 2000; J. J. Abrams, 2006).A reverse scenario can perhaps be perceived in last year's sequel to Basic Instinct: the self-consciousness that the second film demonstrates toward the first can almost qualify the sequel as, in Druxman's sense, an effective nonsequel; the new film may go under the same title and character configuration as the first, but it puts forward an entirely new scenario and, furthermore, an entirely new attitude to this scenario. (3)