Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

E.T. Down the Memory Hole
The Dangers of Revisionist Pop Culture

As my lovely wife says, "E.T.'s been thrown down the memory hole."

The new version of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial has been digitally altered. Footage has been added. Special effects have been improved. And significant pieces of the movie have been completely changed. A close-up of a law enforcement officer loading a shotgun has been removed. Other LEOs have had their weapons digitally remastered into less politically incorrect objects.

What is truly lost in these edits, however, is what I would have thought an important message in the original film: the harshness of the adult world, in its full brutality, arrayed against innocent children and their wide-eyed alien friend. Now, the world of E.T. has been made immeasurably softer -- a gentle world of sweetness and light whose adult fears have been blunted to match the nostalgic perception of E.T. as a childhood gem full of nothing but charming happiness.

When Lucas created the new version of the original Star Wars film, he did something similar -- though even more egregious. The scene in the cantina in which Han Solo shoots Greedo in cold blood was an important one in establishing Han's character. Evoking the Western films that the cantina scenes were intended to imitate, Han's actions made it clear that he was a rugged, somewhat dangerous individual skilled at looking out for himself. He was never intended to be a hero. Rather, he was a somewhat amoral man hoping to enrich himself, eventually won over to the side of the righteous through the friendships he developed along the way.

Lucas, though, wanted to change history. This is a man whose movies have become increasingly oriented towards children through the years, a man whose films have slowly but surely transformed from the stark, dark world of The Empire Strikes Back (the most critically acclaimed of the Star Wars films) to kids' half-drama-half-farces peopled by cute teddy-bear-like Ewoks (whom I like nonetheless) and shucking-and-jiving Gungans. A universe in which the forces of Evil blew up planets full of innocents has given way to one in which children win Ben Hur-style chariot races and save, purely by accident, everyone fighting the Dark Side's minions.

It was not enough to have made this sea change in his filmmaking, though. Lucas needed the past to square with the present, so he altered the Cantina scene to show Greedo firing first and Solo firing in self-defense. This completely undercuts the character of Han and totally excises an important dimension of the original film.

The trend among filmmakers to retroactively alter their movies -- replacing the original films permanently with new versions that better match their present thinking (or worse, which better match the politically correct sensibilities of the day) is a disturbing one, for it once again demonstrates the uncanny prescience of George Orwell's 1984. If you have not read this book, you must -- for Orwell predicts a great many disturbing trends within society that have been becoming reality, slowly but surely, for decades.

As a people, even when engaged in such seemingly trivial pursuits as entertainment, we do not like to be reminded that things used to be different than we see them now. We do not like to be confronted with our changing sensibilities. And now, as digital editing becomes more and more easy to manipulate with stunning clarity and realism, we have the tools necessary to prevent this from happening. Movies and television are a window to the eras in which they are made, a portal to the past that captures forever little pieces of ourselves and our culture. They are, perhaps, the single most influential source of information about popular culture -- one that countless people have seen and will see, especially when the movies are immense hits.

To go back and rewrite these movies forever, erasing and superseding the previous versions, is yet another facet of Orwell's dystopia come to life. It is historical revisionism in action, taking place in a cultural sphere that we are unlikely to consider serious. We would be fools to dismiss it so easily. For once we become comfortable with rewritten historical entertainment, it is not so large a step towards rewritten historical fact. We've seen this happen for some time now in the realm of textbooks and other historical records. When it takes hold over those media that constitute the evidence of our own eyes, it takes a step closer to owning our minds and our memories.

It may not seem like a big deal, but it is.

Be disturbed.