#169 Hollywood necromancy: Remake (1995) by Connie Willis

Connie Willis is known for her stocked awards cabinet and for her lengthy novels in the "Oxford Time Travel" series. But this major figure of US SF has not always been concerned with exploring the past, or with doorstop-sized tomes. Remake (1995) is one of her less discussed novels, short enough to sometimes be categorised instead as a novella.

This is story set in what was then the near future, and is now the recent past - potentially the year 2018. This is a story about the movie business, about a Hollywood system completely devoid of creativity and trapped in a grim cycle of reinventing and remixing old successes instead of doing anything new. It is also a story about computer-generated slop, made up of ground-up fragments of older works, and passed off as something new. It's fair to say that Remake has some eerie connections with the way the 21st century is actually going.

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Transcript

When Alien: Romulus was released in 2024, it was widely viewed as a remix of various elements from previous films in the series. The most contentious element was the inclusion of a crude and uncanny digital recreation of the actor Ian Holm, who appeared in the original Alien in 1979 and died in 2020. Wendy Ide, writing in the Guardian, described this inclusion as "ghoulish, exploitative, disrespectful, and unnecessary". The film was otherwise well-received, and made $350 million. Director Fede Álvarez said he was in no rush to make a sequel, but studio bosses felt differently. A follow-up soon began production, and the franchise juggernaut rolled on.

American SF writer Connie Willis wrote about Hollywood cynicism, digital necromancy, and the queasy future of movie-making in her short novel Remake (1995). It is set in a 21st century scenario in which film production is entirely digitised, the dead are routinely brought back to life on screen, and new films are reconstituted and remixed from scavenged fragments of old ones. 30 years on, Willis' work rhymes uncomfortably with the plastic fakeness which has infiltrated not just Hollywood, but our whole media and information environment.

The cutting room floor

In the early 21st century - likely the year 2018 - Hollywood is undergoing rapid change. A series of corporate consolidations has led to the emergence of ILMGM as the dominant studio. Every studio is locked in legal struggles over the rights to use the likenesses of deceased actors in new, digitised films, made largely by cannibalising the classics of the 20th century. Live action films are no longer made at all in North America - only poorer countries like Brazil and China still rely on living actors.

Tom is an editor in the precarious employment of a mogul at ILMGM. He makes a living by editing old films, chiefly by eliminating from them any sign of smoking or the consumption of alcohol. The irony of this studio-mandated moral crusade is not lost on him, as Hollywood is steeped in booze, casual sex, and a dizzying array of designer drugs. While Tom genuinely loves the movies, he is left jaded by this ruthlessly commercial environment.

When he meets Alis, he belatedly realises that at least in her, a belief in movie magic is still alive. Alis wants to be a dancer on screen, but the cynical Tom goes out of his way to crush her dreams. When she disappears, he seeks her out, perhaps because if Alis can't realise her ambitions, the silver screen dream is truly over.

Have you seen…?

Connie Willis is a huge and enduring presence in SF, but Remake is one of her least-discussed books. While it is most commonly classified as a short novel - and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1996 - it is sometimes defined instead as a novella, and in this category it won the Locus Award. Certainly the book is short, coming to just 140 pages in the first paperback edition from Bantam, which followed a lavish limited edition version published by Mark V. Ziesing. 

There is very little plot in Remake, and what narrative it has is not particularly interesting, nor does it resolve satisfactorily. This is a tightly-focused, claustrophobic piece of work, with only a few characters and set largely in one room. At times the novel almost drowns in Willis’ vast tide of often arcane references to classic mid-20th century cinema, particularly musicals. While this fits with Tom’s intensely film-oriented view of the world, it can become exhausting. What makes Remake interesting is the way Willis takes what was happening to the movie business in 1995, and extrapolates it into the future.

Now that future time period is in the past, Remake perversely becomes more relevant than ever, in today’s era of resurrected screen icons, toxic nostalgia, synthetic digital culture, and the constant repackaging of old media into new forms.

Proto-slop

In Remake, Hollywood is in total creative retreat. Studios make no attempt to break new ground, and give no concessions to film as art - money is everything. Corporate and legal maneuvers have almost completely supplanted the creative process. Workers like Tom are expected to be glad to have any work in the industry at all, even as they are made to butcher classic films in the editing suite. It is easy to see the connection with Hollywood today, and the working conditions which have precipitated recent strikes.

Published in the year Toy Story was released, Willis’ novel also anticipates the rapidly increasing digitisation of film-making, which is nearly as pronounced in today’s reality. The cut-and-shut remixed films in Remake anticipate the rise of “AI” slop, in which the works of artists and writers are taken without permission, ground up, and regurgitated in new forms. The executives of ILMGM resemble today’s tech bros, who believe that their plundering of other people’s labour is somehow a form of creativity. The difference is that in Remake, the manipulation of old films is done manually, not by algorithms.

Not all of Willis’ predictions quite hit the mark. In the novel, it is mid-century Hollywood classics which support a continuing fascination. Today, it is more recent films like Star Wars which have become continually reinvented franchises. The kinds of films and personalities that Willis’ characters are so focused on seem to be quickly receding into the rearview mirror - the likes of Gold Diggers of 1933, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe are clearly past the peak of their cultural significance.

The Remake treatment

Remake is a demonstration that concerns about the declining creativity of Hollywood, and its over-reliance on technology, are not new. 30 years ago, Connie Willis imagined a sort of cultural dystopia in which technology pushes art and real craft out of cultural production. Today, this SF novel with an unusual focus on the film business has a wider resonance. One might say that not only film, but various other artforms are receiving the Remake treatment. Willis’ novel is a reminder that movie magic, and creativity more generally, is worth fighting for.