Is It Really An Homage Or Are You Just Lazy?
Or “Why Are There So Many Bad Movies?”
This is more of a question than an outright essay. It’s about the intertextuality of film and art, and how we can learn to appreciate good v bad homage. I don’t want to make this a textbook, so while intertextuality is mostly the product of writing and homage is usually more to do with directing, I’ll be conflating the two.
Sooner or later, novelty always wears off, and an art form must refocus on content and style. Following the high renaissance, the Mannerist artists took the symmetrical purity of high renaissance art and “corrupted” it by replacing the circle with the oval, and deliberately introducing tension to paintings that would otherwise be placid and boring. Why bother taking on Raphael as a technician of realistic painting when you can stylize your work and break new ground? Even Michelangelo became a Mannerist architect, in his design of the Medici library. As with these things, film would change. This movement lasted a lot longer than the high renaissance.
This is a large scale homage: generations of artists looked at the tools and thinking of the Renaissance artists and asked themselves “what can I do with this thing, that is new?”
At this point in the history of film, as with art, there is history, or a “text.” With a text, artists in the field can now refer to it in their work. This is where intertextuality comes in. Since all recorded arts (I’m counting painting as a record since they survive past the life of the artist) can be compared apples to apples with their descendant works, it is possible to compare The Magnificent Seven (1960) to The Magnificent Seven (2016) to The Seven Samurai (1964) and to The Seven Samurai (in development) just as it is to compare Rembrandt’s Self Portrait (1640) to Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514–1515) to Titian’s Portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo (1510).
Unlike traditional sequels or remakes (though since two of these films aren’t yet released it’s hard to say if they aren’t just lazy remakes) these are films that exist on a continuum, because each is the retelling of the same story through a slightly different medium (first a 1950s style samurai movie, then 1960s western, then modern western, etc.) in the same way the aforementioned paintings were.
The modern, lazy practice of drilling nostalgia as though it were an oil field is well documented. I mean, how many times can Guy Ritchie remake Get Shorty?
The term homage is thrown around a lot, but it seems to me the difference between homage (arguably Pulp Fiction pays homage to the many films that make it up, shot for shot, scene for scene) and laziness (The Untouchables staircase sequence which “pays homage” to Eisenstein’s Odessa Staircase sequence, and isn’t as good as the original) is whether the new piece elevates the art, or just leans on intertextual nostalgia. One could argue that the Tarantino film takes the scenes out of context and by giving them a new context in a new genre, it generates new meaning (combining the work of directors like Hitchcock with genres that existed in his lifetime, but he never worked in), whereas The Untouchables sequence doesn’t do anything that literally any other version of the same scene would have, and it isn’t better than the original.
Of course, in art there’s always a temptation to rely on excellent past work to inform the new work. It’s actually a very good thing, but think of all the hacks we’ve never heard of who imitated Titian’s portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo. They were quite rightly forgotten. And do you think that anyone will hold up certain Famous Character v Famous Character films as masterpieces in twenty years the way people remember Schindler’s List or Unforgiven? So how can anyone get away with saying a lazy film is an homage? Do they do it to cast the blame for its badness on the bones of dead artists, or do they think the audience will believe that a bad film is clever because it references something they hold in high regard, even if the audience doesn’t understand it?
Context is always the most obvious thing one can point to that makes an homage good rather than bad. Take Jaws. Jaws was in many ways, a Hitchcock film. It used camera moves of his (the “Hitchcock zoom” from Vertigo was used during the shark attacks) color (blue suit=either hero or henchman of the antagonist) and patterns (red and white stripes=violence is about to happen, as with the red and white gas pumps and buildings preceding bird attacks in The Birds and on the beach in Jaws, where the red and white striped tents dominate before the shark attacks). This is homage, because it’s taking the tools of a great dead thriller director and putting them to use on a modern masterpiece of his genre, and making it arguably better than the films of the dead artist. Their use is thoughtful and deliberate and one can’t really think of something else one could substitute in those places these methods were used.
So next time you see a bad film and someone says it’s an homage, go check out the thing the film is referencing and decide for yourself if what’s been done is in any way an improvement or clever. And if you love a film and find out it’s “also an homage” do your homework and decide if it’s not just reheated leftovers. Don’t get suckered by a director who placates your need for nostalgia with your favorite spaceship.
