Page 130 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CULTURAL CONTEXT

offerson). Some remakes are released with different titles, such as The
Philadelphia Story (1940), which was renamed High Society (1956). In
addition, studios sometimes remake successful films from another coun-
try. For instance, The Magnificent Seven (1960) is an American version
of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Shichinin no samurai (1954).
Comparing remakes can reveal the interests, preoccupations, and
values that characterize different eras or cultures. For instance, War of
the Worlds, the 1898 H.G. Wells novel about the invasion of earth by a
technologically advanced hostile force of aliens, has been retold several
times. In 1938, Orson Welles produced a radio adaptation that was told
so convincingly that it caused widespread panic among listeners, who
tuned in late, missing the initial disclaimer that the program was only a
dramatization.
Film versions of Wells’s novel were produced in 1953 and 2005. Ac-
cording to Stephen Hunter, comparing the two film versions furnishes
perspective into the mindset of American society in the wake of the
terrorist attack of 9/11:

What one notices instantly is the absence of that ’50s voice of military
or scientific authority. . . . Those conventions made perfect sense back
then: Our government, victorious in war, facing a new Red challenge
(the metaphorical undertone of the alien-invasion genre), was seen as
benign, benevolent and efficient, able ultimately to deal with the enemy.
. . . Perhaps now it doesn’t, when terrorists can take out a big chunk of the
Manhattan skyline and detonate IEDs on Baghdad roadways seemingly at
will. Our general apprehension might be summed up in the phrase “out of
control,” and Spielberg capitalizes on that fear, giving us an out-of-control
world as viewed from the ground. He’s not much interested here in larger
entities like The Government or Science; he focuses instead on working
man Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and his two kids, Robbie (Justin Chatwin)
and Rachel (the great Dakota Fanning), and dramatizes how the Ferrier
family just barely copes with the coming of the things from another world.
We only glimpse soldiers, and one (brilliant) sequence shows them using
Arabian desert tactics against the three-legged Martian fighting machines
and perishing in a wall of fire for their impertinence. The government, the
message runs, is powerless. 19

Increasingly, the distinction between reality and fictional genre has
become blurred. For instance, Dave (1993) is a film starring Kevin Kline
as an ordinary guy whose resemblance to the president of the United

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