All Our Mutated Memories
when nostalgia turns noxious
“It might be time to face it
It ain’t as fun as it used to be, no
You’re goin’ under
You ain’t as young as you used to be
It might be time to face it.”
I was 12 years old when M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender came out. I had, like many other 12 year olds, seen the entirety of the cartoon on which it was based. Of course we all know how this story goes. There’s little point in rehashing the negative reception to that movie, which in itself seemed emblematic of an overall rut in its director’s career. Despite the horrific disappointment, I remember thinking that maybe a live action version of this story was still possible.
I’m 25 now. The trailer for Netflix’s new Avatar series has been released, and I’m beginning to doubt that last point. To paraphrase Ian Malcolm, just because you could doesn’t mean you should.
Don’t worry, there’s no revisionism here. Shyamalan’s movie was bad then, it’s still bad now. And because of that, the directive to whoever would tackle ATLA next was foregone conclusion: it would need to be be more faithful to the source material. Fine, I can get behind that. Except uh-oh! Original series developers Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko left during the pre-production phase due to “creative differences” — which is almost always a death rattle in this field.
I can’t know precisely what conversations led to the decision, though in just under a month’s time perhaps we’ll all be able to discern why it was made. A trailer alone can’t be an indicator of a project’s quality. But while watching this particular trailer I was struck by just how ineffectual the whole affair seems, and it solidified a thought that’s been brewing for a while: you can only reinvent the wheel so many times before it breaks. I think when Shyamalan tried this the first time a lot of the issues people took with it, especially regarding inconsistency to the show, were truly adaptational decisions. They didn’t necessarily demonstrate a lack of understanding of the material, merely an attempt to reframe it. It is a different—though not altogether separate — matter that his reframing did not serve the story well.
Anyway this isn’t an itemization of all the ways The Last Airbender missed the mark, it’s about much more than that. It’s about progress. It’s about how something has infected the way we perceive art, let alone make it. How our current pop cultural moment handcuffs thousands of talented creatives and technicians into pantomiming the exact cadence of a previous work so we can try to recapture our lost youths. Yes, it’s about nostalgia— a word the Greeks gave us to describe the pain of returning home. While looking back on the past can be fun, trying to wrestle it into the present is an ultimately fruitless endeavor, the returns on which can only diminish with each attempt.
Let’s Talk About Accuracy
Ask someone who isn’t a comic fan to list the top three or five attributes they associate with Superman. I tried this with my girlfriend, and I imagine the list she gave would be the same you’d get. She called out his red and blue costume with an S on the chest; his powers of flight and superhuman strength. She mentioned his well-kept dark hair first, saying “it would be weird if he was blonde.” And I agreed with her. Why is that, though?
In just 14 years, the Man of Steel will be a century old. Yet he still more often than not has all of those aforementioned attributes. They are part of his iconography, they help us recognize him but they are not alone what makes him. Over the course of his publication history, creatives have solidified his appearance and powers, as well as certain characteristics. We understand that Superman is usually compassionate, measured, and humble…but does he always have to be? While the internet is littered with comments and videos and debates on the subject of “lore accuracy” I’m here to tell you that doesn’t really exist. There is not really a “true” Superman, Spider-Man, Goku, etc. There are only ideas, patiently crafted and aggregated, referencing each other and coagulating into a median we more or less culturally align on. Characters like this exist on a bell curve, and a story about them isn’t invalid just because it falls left of center.
Consider for example the division on Zack Snyder’s interpretation of Superman. I’m among the number who found him too gloomily one-note, but there are obviously many people who resonated with him for myriad reasons. The great thing is that neither my distaste nor their enthusiasm stops either party from seeking out Superman stories that depict the character as we like him. I think (or hope) that people comprehend this rationally. Yet our emotional investment overrides that logic with every new release. Outraged discourse invariably ensues, and it’s not uncommon to find opinions that essentially boil down to, ‘If every single version of these characters isn’t the version I specifically find definitive, then it’s worthless.’ This perspective, myopic as it is, tends to make enough noise to reach the ears of studio heads who more often than not come to the conclusion that as much as people clamor for new material, they don’t really want it to be new.
I’m not comfortable going so far as to say that canon is irrelevant, and that would be an oversimplification of what I’m working through here. I do think adherence to “accuracy” as a rote checklist can limit creative potential, and in the worst cases be used as a shield against criticism or a crutch to replace the infusion of genuinely intriguing ideas. Still there’s yet another question on this train of thought:
What does it even mean to adapt something?
Adaptation Calculation
Oxford Languages defines adapt as “make suitable for a new use or purpose; modify”. In the context of translating art across mediums, this word appears to have lost its intention and become little more than a For Sale sign on popular IP (which, considering the business model of most streamers, is chillingly appropriate). But when you are adapting a story in the truest sense, it behooves you to consider how you’ll use the tools of the given trade to enhance the story.
A novel, for example, doesn’t suffer as many restrictions on length in order to be commercially viable as film does. Book to film adaptations historically struggle to satisfy the reader audiences because there’s just no way to capture every detail of the story in a traditional feature. Of course movies trade written detail for visuals, so you can see Gandalf battle the Balrog instead of only reading about it.
In addition to the bare visual element, live action film utilizes cinematography, score, sound design, and performers. Animation uses all of those things too, if in slightly different ways. Its unique strength lies in its visual freedom. Character designs can be more overt, human features and proportions are subject to interpretive exaggeration (consider Bruce Timm’s broad chested superheroes and long-legged heroines). Performances matter just as much! I still believe that human emotion is best captured en vivo, but it can’t be overstated how technology has allowed us to advance to a place where actors can inhabit animated/computer-generated characters not just vocally, but physically as well.
My point is that every medium has its own strengths and weaknesses. Therefore in adaptation, which is an act of translation, something will inevitably be lost. The balancing act is to make the gains outweigh that loss. But these days I find myself wondering if some translations simply don’t work. Maybe among those inevitable losses are some elements too crucial to make up for, and maybe nothing can ever be as great in the present as it is in our memory. Trying and failing to recapture a bygone era isn’t just sad, it potentially harms our ability to appreciate the era we’re actually in.
The case of Avatar especially hurts because it could perpetuate an idea that a story isn’t legitimate until it’s been made live action. This is the kind of sentiment that filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and Guillermo Del Toro passionately decry, but they are only two voices against a cacophony.
So What?
Well I said it was a train of thought, didn’t I? We’ve made a lot of erratic stops. Sorry about that. When I first had the idea it was just about the foibles of adapting certain source material, but as I started writing, it became about much more. If I were getting graded on this my professor would chastise my lack of a thesis statement. I don’t really have one though. I’m sharing my thoughts on a very frustrating topic, and I don’t expect that frustration will subside once this is published.
Is it too late to break the wheel? On bad days I think so. Major studios, motivated by profit and increasingly risk averse, have turned into nostalgia flytraps; using familiarity like a pheromone to lure audiences with no grasp on how to enhance the narrative or further explore the themes of the original. What more obvious example than the recent inundation of live action Disney remakes? And the cycle is only getting shorter. While the window for new work to prove commercially viable shrinks exponentially, studios are sifting through the old to resuscitate premises that expired with dignity in a desperate wave of creative necromancy.
It is obvious we’re in a bubble and we can only wonder what will be left once it pops. As cynical as this little op-ed reads, I’m not entirely without hope. For all my hemming and hawing over Netflix’s Avatar, it could wind up being an entire generation’s introduction to that story. It could very well be their definitive interpretation. It doesn’t have to satisfy me. Hence, the Tame Impala quote at the beginning of this piece. Though I’ll continue to discuss and debate for the sake of it, I‘ve come to accept when things are not for me. I hope you, dear reader, can do the same.
