So the other night–

(I swear, this isn’t the beginning of a bad joke. Bear with.)

So the other night, myself and a friend of mine are watching the remake of Halloween. I should hope, as a film major, that I know a little bit about film, and this friend certainly does. So we’re complaining, a bit pretentiously, about the movie we’ve voluntarily set out to watch: “Ugh, why would you remake such a classic?” “Ugh, Rob Zombie’s directing style is all wrong for the atmosphere.” “Ugh, why would you try to totally explain away all the mystery that makes Halloween creepy in the first place?”

Of course, the movie was terrible. Or at least nothing like the original us horror elitists tend to idolize.

But it got me thinking — why don’t people remake books?

“HAH! Because that’s a terrible idea, it’s completely different,” you automatically think, and how perceptive you are.

But why? What makes it such a different animal?

Films and novels have the same goal: to tell a story in the best way possible according to the demands of the material. That might call for being understated, over the top a la Michael Bay, abstract like William S. Burroughs, or something else entirely.

But if we can, and commonly do, “rewrite” someone’s images — and even, more literally, their dialogue — why not somebody’s words? It’s effectively the same process: taking the meat of a story and revamping the bells and whistles for the sake of modernizing it, fixing a flaw, or fleshing out some murky part of the plot.

Yet no one rewrites books. No one even takes the idea seriously. Does this mean that novels are more personal and unique than films? That a story on paper can only be told one way? That style and content are more closely intertwined than in perhaps any other medium?

Anyway, I’ll be thinking about all this when I do my “surfer dude” retelling of Ulysses.