Ideas Are Not Sacred: Productive Destruction

Hi, my name is Lily, and I am an utter nerd. 

The way you can tell (besides how often I talk about the weird movies/shows/books/plays I love) is on my Google homepage. My personalized Google listings are nothing but film, book, and theatre news, most often in the horror or fantasy genres. 

Which means I’m perfectly positioned to notice how incredibly, pervasively, foaming-at-the-mouth angry everyone is about remakes. 

“Well duh,” you say. “People have been angry about remakes since there have been remakes.”

And of course they have, this is going to smack strongly of recency bias, but stick with me.

The Issue at Hand

I don’t personally get upset when a beloved old franchise announces a reboot, so I spend a lot of time listening to the arguments of people who do.

The strange thing is, a lot of the rage seems to boil down to the idea that a particular character, concept, or story is “sacred” and shouldn’t be touched to preserve the legacy (more on that shortly). 

There are more recent, more controversial examples out there, but for the sake of the argument, let’s take any Batman film/show since the 80’s. Every time Batman or the Joker gets reincarnated on the screen, fans will rave about how the previous version was better, or even worse, that these characters shouldn’t be reinterpreted ever. 

Jared Leto cheapened the character Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger made famous. Robert Pattinson isn’t a tough enough guy. Ben Affleck doesn’t hold up to Christian Bale, and on and on. 

What I’m interested in, amidst all these opinions, is why we hold the notion that ideas are or should be sacred in a way that makes them untouchable. 

Ideas Should Be Stolen

Large caveat incoming: I am not suggesting that you commit copyright infringement. At all.

What I am suggesting is that there are useful ways to spin or readdress almost any concept out there. 

If you can find new nuance in the work or the teachings of someone you admire, within the bounds of legality, you should do it. If you know of a way to take an idea and make it more accessible or useful to a new sector of the population, that’s a good thing.

To my mind, concepts and lessons are supposed to grow and change. If they don’t, their usefulness is seriously limited. We are meant to take ideas that inspire us and add our own experiences or meaning to them to then inspire others. 

One of the buzzwords I see used in all of these headlines about remakes is “legacy,” as in, “They’re stomping on [insert name of beloved thing]’s legacy.”

It is a wonderful thing to be known and loved for putting a new concept or story into the world. 

How much better is it to be known for creating something that went on to inspire dozens, hundreds, thousands of people to create and learn and grow? How much more longevity and complexity does that give your original thought? 

I’ll leave you with an example that’s very close to my heart. There is a playwright out there in the world by the name of Charles Mee, who started something called the (re)making project. I encourage you to read the entire “About the Project” section of his website, but here’s the gist, in his own words:

I first read this passage as a young college student, and it meant everything to me. It made his plays the first texts presented to me in school that weren’t monuments to be looked at but clay to be worked with and shaped and explored in a way that leaves your hands messy and your thoughts racing. 

So, when you can, take a legacy that touches you and swing a sledgehammer through it. Find a new structure or seed inside it that helps you speak more clearly and powerfully to others.