lifebsideben

I finally saw THX-1138, George Lucas’ first “real” movie, made in 1969-1970. I bought the new 2-DVD set sight- (and movie-) unseen at Costco about a month ago, and finally got around to watching it. There were several times through the “Director’s Cut” that I thought, “hmm, that’s a pretty sweet special effect for a relatively low-budget 1970 flick”… and then near the end I started thinking “uh oh, I bet George was hacking this up… that scene looks totally CGI and doesn’t quite match the rest of the movie…” And then it got worse, almost every scene near the end seemed to be obviously “enhanced”. So, I sat through the entire movie again listening to the director’s and co-writer’s commentary, expecting to learn about the scenes / tweaks that had been made for the DVD release. Not a word, nada! Apparently, if you aren’t familiar with the original, you’re supposed to think this version is the original. Incredible. I checked out a couple sites, and found what I was looking for… I found out he pretty much gave it the “Star Wars treatment”–significant cleanup (typically a good thing) and also significant changes/additions (typically not a good thing IMO). There’s even a scene were characters are radically changed, from (I presume) humans, to fully CG characters. Huh??

I just don’t understand some artists’ obsessions with “fixing” past (often, very old) works… there are basically a couple of arguments, one being “they are the artist and entitled to make any changes, any time” and the counter “once a work is published and is popular it becomes part of the culture/consciousness and should not be changed, especially surrepitiously.” I actually agree with both, but to varying degrees. From what I’ve gathered of the changes made in THX-1138, I think a few probably added to the experience and didn’t hurt the story (the mindlock eye-roll effect, cleaning up some of the audio, making the car crash more consistent, adding more bodies to the throng in the hallway), but others really seem like they do (cleaning up the video too much, adding CG to show “more” of the world (it’s supposed to be clausterphobic…), adding a silly-looking darting-car sequence in the beginning of the chase, making the asylum area too white such that the ‘thunder’ audio effect is nonsensical, showing the robot assembly details–totally unnecessary, etc.) And we’re talking a 35 year old movie here! The artist is no longer the same person–leave the original alone. At least give us the original and the “updated” version on the DVDs. Prince tends to do the exact same thing, changing old song lyrics to be more in lline with his new Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. Does he have the right to do this? Of course. Should he? No, if you ask me. Leave the songs as they were… don’t bother performing them if you don’t like their original content. Or make new songs (as he certainly does).

Ultimately, it’s up to the individual… but it worries and saddens me when any artist is so obsessed with their past work, that they spend all this time and effort tweaking/changing/”fixing” it, and don’t spend that time working on new art we could all enjoy (or not, but at least it’d be new, and not just reworks of already-digested material.)