Positively the Same Dame

In the history of film criticism, as well as everywhere else, complaints about how there’s nothing new are nothing new. “The prevalence of remakes and allusions among recent Hollywood releases might be taken as a sign of the exhaustion of form in the contemporary cinema,” Ann Cvetkovich wrote in 1991, a year that yielded reduxes of Father of the Bride and Cape Fear; seven years earlier, in 1984—which brought Out of the Past out of the past and into a new adaptation—Frederic Jameson diagnosed in the pastiche of early 1980s neo-noir “the insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode.” The sentiment has been remixed and repeated countless times in the decades since. Nothing is sacred, but some movies are close. In 2023, when a rumored remake of Vertigo starring Robert Downey Jr. was in the works, an article in Variety asked, rhetorically, “You don’t remake a film where the whole hook of the remake is that the original is so monumental, so transcendent, with such a mythic place in the culture that there’s no way it could ever be matched. So why try?”