I whispered this to my sisters in a dark theater a month ago. We were about to watch Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women (which is really an adaptation of an adaptation) and were sitting through the previews. Every single preview was for a remake: Call of the Wild, Dr. Dolittle, Emma, Mulan. (And, hot take, they all looked terrible.)
I was miffed. Are we done? I wondered. Have we reached the end of storytelling? Is there nothing more to tell than the stories we’ve already told?
The endless glut of indistinguishable superhero movies creates the same reaction in me. It’s the same thing, over and over again, and we can’t get enough. You could watch these movies without sound and understand the entire narrative; they are rote. Spoiler alert: Even when it seems like the odds are stacked against him, the good guy wins in the end!
But maybe I haven’t been fair to Gerwig and the superheroes. Maybe it’s not all bad, this predilection to love hearing the same stories over and over. Maybe there’s something sweet and very human about it.
At our core, we are storytelling animals, and like all animals, we love the comforts and safety of home. Part of feeling like home is recounting the stories that speak to who we are and what we love. This is why when big, obnoxious families (like mine) get together, we tell the same stories again and again: that time Sam had an “Arby’s moment” on the beach, that time Dad sewed a bikini out of an old curtain, that time cousin Emily gave our grandmother a black eye during street hockey.
Familiar stories breed affection between the teller and their listeners. We strengthen our ties when we tell one another the same stories. We commit them, and each other, to memory. I love this. But I still reserve the right to be annoyed by trashy remakes.