Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Current Issue
Adaptations, Reboots and Remakes in Popular Culture, Dec 2024
- Editorial
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- Articles
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From Scandi noir to Tassie noir: Victoria Madden’s adapting auteurship of noir in Australian television
More LessTasmanian writer/producer Victoria Madden has made no secret of the influence of Scandinavian noir (also known as Nordic noir) on her work. After working in the United Kingdom and Ireland on several prestige television productions, Madden moved back to her native Tasmania and created two locally set and shot limited television series: The Kettering Incident (2016) and The Gloaming (2020). These well-received crime series – dubbed ‘Tassie noir’ by the local press – have staked out a place within the wider emerging genre of Australian noir and the perennially popular global television crime market. The Tasmanian landscape lends itself to comparison with Scandi and other European ‘noirs’ (such as Scots noir) due to its climate and topography, as well as for depicting crime narratives set in remote or marginal places. Looming mountains, treacherous coastlines and cold, rainy weather all contribute to their gothic-noir style. This article will examine Madden’s two programmes in comparison with two classic Scandi noir series, Forbrydelsen (The Killing) (2007–12) and Bron | Broen (The Bridge) (2011–18), tracing commonalties in narrative construction, character, mood and the use of landscape.
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The accidental multiverse: Adaptations and reboots and the new superhero content strategy
More LessEver since Batman Begins (2005) introduced Hollywood audiences at large to the concept of the live-action reboot, it has become a popular strategy for long-tail film and television franchises to wipe the slate (mostly) clean and start afresh for new audiences. Before the 2020s and the cinematic popularization of the multiverse as both a narrative device and a branding umbrella, most franchise reboots were intended to be the dominant continuity for viewers. Thanks to the multiverse, some of these reboots – and the versions preceding them – now exist in a complex web of narrative, thematic and intertextual relationships. This article charts the how, why and so what? of the accidental multiverse; superhero franchises that have multiple narrative versions existing concurrently that were not originally intended to do so. As a potential blueprint for entertainment franchises in the future, the accidental multiverse offers a site for interpreting changing dynamics in industry production and audience reception logics and reminds us that in the streaming, niche-targeted content era, everything is connected.
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‘All you got to do is aim and pull the trigger’: Cinematic adaptations of the Punisher
Authors: Ana Rita Martins and José DuarteThis article examines the complex cultural and political representations and adaptations of Frank Castle, Marvel’s the Punisher, who first appeared in 1974 and again will appear in 2025. While his early visual representations were as a secondary character to Spider-Man, by the 1980s the Punisher became an exemplar of the decline of American urban society, the trauma of the Vietnam War, the growing distrust of law and the rise of Reagan masculine individualism. Charting the shifting cultural and political contexts of the Punisher’s earlier comic book representations grounds discussions of representations of the Punisher’s cinematic representations from the 1980s onwards.
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‘In six months, we’ll be running this planet’: Varying visions of insurgency across the Planet of the Apes franchise
By Jeff SchultzFor those who watched the films playing in 1968, the science-fiction classic Planet of the Apes left a lasting impression, not only visually for its surprising verisimilitude but also for the themes it tackled in a time of great social upheaval, bringing with it thoughtful commentary amidst war, inequality, political and societal strife. Insurgency is one of the unheeded themes that permeated the Apes franchise, which is the focus of this article. While some of the film’s themes are seemingly well explored or at least enjoyed sufficient discussion, the role of insurgency remains overlooked, yet extremely relevant today considering so many current conflicts around the world. This article explores the ten Planet of the Apes films in terms of the insurgencies encountered by characters: Taylor, the Mutants, both Caesars, Aldo, Koba, Noa and Mae. Each insurgency is considered to better understand how the series has consistently covered insurgency which continues to challenge modern society today as much as it did in 1968.
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Ethics and post-evolution: The role of hyperreal adaptations in shaping popular cultural perceptions of animals
Authors: Huw Nolan, Jo Coghlan and Lisa J. HackettIn A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon considers Darwinist claims that some animal stories survive more readily than others. Just as natural selection drives evolution, genetic selection and memetic cultural transmission drive the evolution, mutation and flourishing of adaptations in ever-changing narratives and technological environments. In the telling and retelling of stories, it invites a state of hyperreality, where copies of copies are believed to be real. Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality describes a condition wherein the boundaries between reality and its simulated representations become indistinguishable. He states that ‘[i]t is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality’. In a state of hyperreality, adaptations and representations can assume greater significance and authenticity than the actual reality they depict. Consequently, the simulated experiences and images are perceived as more real and authentic than the tangible reality from which they originate. The hyperreality of film adaptations has been explored through the telling of historical narratives, nation-building and authenticity. Modern adaptations of historical events, especially when delivered through a contemporary lens, have the ability to reshape our understanding of the past. Art and entertainment permeate our consciousness, moulding our identities. Consequently, we become a reflection of what we engage with, and in a dialectical process, we subsequently reshape the world according to our transformed selves. Thus, entertainment facilitates tangible changes in the real world. These are the key ideas examined in this article.
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Reproductive conscription and eugenic horror in Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale
By Mel KennardFirst released in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has since become a seminal work of feminist speculative fiction. Set in the former United States, the fictionalized Republic of Gilead presents a terrifying reproductive theocracy in which all women are subjugated and fertile women are forcibly conscripted into biological slavery. Often satirical and wry, the novel has been celebrated for its depictions of biological essentialism which reduces the titular Handmaids to the status of reproductive vessels for the state. Such representations of biological essentialism define Atwood’s novel as a work of eugenic fiction which echoes the policies and practices of reproductive control that dominated the early eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Furthering this connection is the novel’s use of botanical and agricultural metaphors that continually liken women to both fertile plants and breeding stock, reflecting the language employed in early eugenic rhetoric. In transforming the novel for television, the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–present) extends such metaphors, visually literalizing them to create a work of eugenic horror, which violently and emphatically depicts the consequences of reducing women to their reproductive capacity. In doing this, the television adaptation not only heightens its source text’s eugenic themes but also provides a space in which to reframe Atwood’s Handmaid protagonist, Offred, reconfiguring her as the horror genre’s Final Girl, who not only survives the eugenic horror to which she is subjected but also overcomes it.
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Masculinity, #MeToo and misleading marketing: The unmet sexpectations of the American Gigolo remake
More LessAmerican Gigolo, the 2022 television series which functions as a sequel to the 1980 film, has received an overwhelmingly negative reception with both critics and viewers. An insightful review declaring the show ‘more dud than stud’ encapsulates the problems with viewers’ expectations: despite raunchy marketing promising a direct continuation to the original, there was ‘very little actual sex’ compared to its Paul Schrader written and directed neo-noir predecessor, a choice complicated further with the addition of a controversial backstory in which protagonist Julian Kaye (Jon Bernthal) was revealed to have been a victim of child abuse. The misleading marketing certainly influenced viewer rejection of the show by both promising a continuation to the original and deliberately obscuring the plotline. The post-#MeToo context it was released in, furthermore, may have impacted reception. The sheer venom with which reviewers broached the portrayal of a male victim of abuse, however, raises questions of its own. Despite the rightly criticized aspects of the show, its choice to depict an unconventional male victim as a lead character on primetime television is groundbreaking. Did audiences reject the show for disrupting their nostalgia for Julian, or does heterosexual male victimhood continue to be a societal taboo?
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Give us a clew: Solving fictional crime through the adaptive popular mediums of knitting and sewing
Authors: Lisa J. Hackett and Jo CoghlanPerhaps it is apt that people who knit and sew are drawn to solving puzzles, including fictional and actual crimes. The word clew is an archaic spelling of our modern-day clue. It is derived from the old English cliwen or cleowen, meaning a ball of thread. It may also be a nod to the ball of yarn that Theseus used to escape from the minotaur’s labyrinth in Greek legend. Without his clew, Theseus would have no clue how to escape the labyrinth. Its modern-day association with detective work first began with Edgar Allen Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin who followed ‘clues’ to solve his crimes and was popularized by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. In the past, and more recently fictional and real-life detectives follow clues to solve crimes, and many of them are crafty. This article considers how adaptative the mediums of knitting and sewing are when they are freed from their utilitarian or creative purpose and instead becomes a device to solve crimes.
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