The Sad Lesson of Remakes

      The Dark Knight is a sign of a global ideological regression for which one is almost tempted to use the title of Georg Lukács’s most Stalinist work: the destruction of (emancipatory) reason. This regression reached its peak in I Am Legend, a recent blockbuster casting Will Smith as the last man alive. The film’s only interest resides in its comparative value: one of the best ways to detect shifts in the ideological constellation is to compare consecutive remakes of the same story. There are three (or, rather, four, including the original source) versions of I Am Legend: Richard Matheson’s novel from 1954; the first film version, The Last Man on Earth (Italian title: L’Ultimo uomo della Terra, 1964, Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow), with Vincent Price; the second version, The Omega Man (1971, Boris Sagal), with Charlton Heston; and the last one, I Am Legend (2007, Francis Lawrence), with Will Smith. The first film version, arguably still the best, is basically faithful to the novel. The startling premise is well known—as the publicity slogan for the 2007 remake says: “The last man . . . is not alone.” The story is yet another fantasy of witnessing one’s own absence: Neville, the sole survivor of a catastrophe which has killed all humans apart from him, wanders the desolate city streets—and soon discovers that he is not alone, that a mutated species of the living dead (or, rather, vampires) is stalking him. There is no paradox in the slogan: even the last man alive is not alone—what remains with him are the living dead. In Lacan’s terms, they are the a which adds itself to the 1 of the last man. As the story progresses, it is revealed that some infected people have discovered a means to hold the disease at bay; however, the “still living” people appear no different from the true vampires during the day, while both are immobilized in sleep. They send a woman named Ruth to spy on Neville, and much of their interaction focuses on Neville’s internal struggle between his deep-seated paranoia and his hope. Eventually Neville performs a blood test on her, revealing her true nature, before she knocks him out and escapes. Months later, the still living people attack Neville and take him alive so that he can be executed in front of everyone in the new society. Before his execution, Ruth provides him with an envelope of pills so that he will feel no pain. Neville finally realizes why the new society of the infected living regards him as a monster: just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become a mythical figure who kills both vampires and the living while they are sleeping. He is a legend as the vampires once were. The first film version’s main difference with the novel was a shift in the ending: the hero (here called Morgan) develops a cure for Ruth in his lab; a few hours later, at nightfall, the still living people attack Morgan, who flees, but is finally gunned down in the church where his wife has been buried.

      The second film version, The Omega Man, is set in Los Angeles, where a group of resistant albinos calling themselves “The Family” have survived the plague, which has turned them into violent light-sensitive albino mutants, and affected their minds with psychotic delusions of grandeur. Although resistant, the members are slowly dying off, apparently due to mutations of the plague. The Family is led by Matthias, formerly a popular Los Angeles television newscaster; he and his followers believe that modern science, and not the flaws of humanity, are the cause of their misfortune. They have reverted to a Luddite lifestyle, employing medieval imagery and technology, complete with long black robes, torches, bows and arrows. As they see it, Neville, the last symbol of science and a “user of the wheel,” must die. The final scene shows the human survivors departing in a Land Rover after the dying Neville gives them a flask of blood serum, presumably to restore humanity.

      In the last version, which takes place on Manhattan, the woman who appears to Neville (here called Anna, accompanied by a young boy Ethan and coming somewhere from the South—Maryland and São Paolo are mentioned) tells him that God has sent her to bring him to the colony of survivors in Vermont. Neville refuses to believe her, saying that there cannot be a God in a world afflicted by such suffering and mass death. When the Infected attack the house that night and overrun its defenses, Neville, Anna, and Ethan retreat into the basement laboratory, sealing themselves in with an infected woman on whom Neville was experimenting. Discovering that the last treatment has successfully cured the woman, Neville realizes that he has to find a way to pass it on to other survivors before they are killed. After drawing a vial of blood from the patient and giving it to Anna, he pushes her and Ethan into an old coal chute and sacrifices himself with a hand grenade, killing the attacking Infected. Anna and Ethan escape to Vermont and reach the fortified survivors’ colony. In the concluding voice-over, Anna states that Neville’s cure enabled humanity to survive and rebuild, establishing his status as a legend, a Christ-like figure whose sacrifice redeemed humanity.

      The gradual ideological regression can be observed here at its clinically purest. The main shift (between first and second film versions) is registered in the radical change in the meaning of the title: the original paradox (the hero is now legendary for vampires, as vampires once were for humanity) gets lost, so that, in the last version, the hero is simply a legend for the surviving humans in Vermont. What gets obliterated in this change is the authentically “multicultural” experience rendered by the title’s original meaning, the realization that one’s own tradition is no better than what appear to us as the “eccentric” traditions of others, a realization nicely