We live in the age of the remake , where everything new turns out on closer inspection to be just a not-so-fresh version of something older . If we ’ re young , we don ’ t know the difference . If we ’ re older , we insist that the original was better . This isn ’ t just one of the awkward symptoms of ageing . There are whole fields of academic study devoted to such phenomena . We use the word “ deuterocanonical ” ( or we do if we are theologians ) to describe “ secondary ” texts – repetitive , overlapping , possibly even plagiarised , telling the same story in less effective ways – that are excluded from the main canon of a particular religion ’ s scriptures . It might seem frivolous , or maybe even blasphemous , to suggest a parallel between ancient letters purporting to be by the Apostle Paul , but clearly done later in imitation of him , and endless remakes of Spider Man , but what we are concerned with here , in these notes , is precisely the uncertain border line between popular culture and what can only be described as canonization , a word that drifts between religious and secular meanings .
Let ’ s dwell on the remake for a moment . In 1998 , the American film director , photographer and musician Gus Van Sant released a controversial new version of Alfred Hitchcock ’ s Psycho , a movie that is regularly listed as among the greatest of all time . An urban legend quickly sprang up that Van Sant ’ s Psycho was an identical , frameby-frame remake of Hitchcock ’ s movie , a real-life representation of an idea first evoked by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story “ Pierre Menard , autor del Quijote ”, in which the man of the title painstakingly rewrites Cervantes ’ classic word for word , but in doing so makes it his “ own ” and claims a new kind of authorship . It ’ s a beguiling concept , as many of Borges ’ are . Elsewhere in his body of story-conundrums , he has someone create a one-to-one scale model of the earth , which , by definition , has to be the size of the earth and therefore impossible to tell apart from the “ real ” thing .
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