If I said to you, “Describe the movie Scarface”, your brain probably goes to the 1983 Brian De Palma movie where Al Pacino plays a Cuban-American gangster who does an absolute mountain of cocaine and yells “SAY HELLO TO MY LIL FRIEND!”. You probably don’t think of the original Scarface, a 1932 pre-Code gangster film. To be entirely fair (at the risk of sounding like a hipster) you probably wouldn’t have heard of it, since it’s not discussed much outside cinephile circles. Scarface ’83, one of the most influential films of the last 40 years, a film which inspired one if not two generations of artists (esp. in film making and hip-hop) , was a remake. A similar phenomenon in the ’80s happened when Paul Schrader (of Taxi Driver fame) remade the 1942 horror film Cat People as an erotic thriller – which incidentally you should watch if you haven’t already. Nowadays, it’s fashionable to hate on remakes. And this is an understandable response. The market is currently saturated pretty badly with them, and many people are of the opinion that Hollywood’s just plain run out of ideas. The latter, however, is not necessarily the case.

In 2009, the late Herschell Gordon Lewis, aka The Godfather of Gore, said:

I have always felt… any schmuck can aim a camera. To get some bodies in the seats to look at it, is a different talent altogether.

This quote highlights, however indirectly, the relationship between production and the market in capitalism. One of the unique features of capitalism is that in order to continue the circulation of money, commodities have to be produced at a constant rate, and art is no exception, especially now in the digital age. With the remake, studios find a reliable niche. The remake usually possesses a strong amount of nostalgia from the audience who originally saw it, guaranteeing them seats, the creative process times are reduced rapidly because the story’s already been fleshed out, and thanks to IP laws (copyright, trademark, etc;) this or that studio possesses a monopoly on production of this or that story. In other words, lowered production time, lowered risk, increased reward, the perfect venue for making a profit. This is also true of spiritual successors, adaptations, and so on.

Here we need to reiterate the issue is not one of source material. While it was by no means the brainchild of it’s writers and director, the 1978 Superman film with Christopher Reeves is considered a classic of American cinema – and mind you this was long before the superhero movie was normalized. Nor is this even an issue exclusive to cinema. In a more recent example, again though a far cry from original, Bethesda’s reboot of the Doom franchise in 2016 was widely beloved. The constant stream of reboots, remasters, remakes, reprints, reissues, etc; is an issue nested firmly in the relations of capitalist production.

One counterpoint that can be looked at by right-libertarians is that it is not necessarily the fault of capitalist relations per se, but the result of intellectual property giving certain entities a monopoly on ideas. If we generously set aside that this is an inconsistent position for them – as intellectual property is just private property with an intangible twist – it also doesn’t hold true. Let’s remove IP law altogether, effectively thrusting all abstractions into what we call the public domain. It still holds true that capitalist production requires constant output. The easy money of a remake still makes perfect sense, and in fact without these intellectual monopolies, it’s very likely that even more of these things would happen, arguably for lower costs. Of course while it’s entirely possible that this could have a net negative effect on this profitability (no one wants to buy what’s all over the place), extremely high profits have been made under worse conditions.

It’s here that we need to examine something that lies at the very heart of this discussion: Are these constant remakes even a bad thing? And if we’re being consistent the answer is: No, at least not in and of themselves. We’ve demonstrated that in the right hands remakes can be wonderful, even going so far as to surpass the source material. In fact, if we take the example from earlier and thrust this into a society absent IP, the likelihood of these great remakes could even increase due to proliferation. Furthermore, as all art is derivative of some other prior art, the notion of the remake being intrinsically a bad thing does not even hold up. In our current society, popular culture tends to function as a kind of socialized morphine. We all turn on Netflix, Spotify, PornHub, etc, after a long day (or even during it) to escape the monotony of our routines. “I don’t want to think about work or politics, the new season of that show I like just started!”. But this morphine, it has a problem, one that is again firmly rooted in the capitalist system it is normalizing.

With these massive studios, publishers, developers, etc., all having a firm oligopoly on the market, and therefore having priority over the public’s attention, these remakes, no matter how good, come across with this innate feeling of grossness. “I’ve seen this all before”, “This isn’t as good as [thing]”, and so forth. We are made into cynics of the worst kind. This is partly because on some level we’re aware that these studios are exploiting our nostalgia for an easy profit, but also because we feel that we’re being robbed of meaningful choice in the arts. What gets more attention and traction at the theater & apps? The indie brainchild of a new director, or a $500 million dollar blockbuster based on an existing property?

The capitalist system not only exploits our fond memories for an easy profit, it also shoves everything else out of the picture (no pun intended). In the end, we’re not given the meaningful opportunity to find relief or enrichment in our lives through the arts, because even that have been commodified, monopolized, mystified, and sectioned off. Massive ad campaigns, monopolies on stories & venues, and the usual capitalist aggression used to affirm one’s market position, all give us the illusion that we hate this constant stream of rehashed ideas, when in fact the true culprit is the magician himself, not his trick.