Telling the Same Story Over Again

Over the past few years, I’ve often heard the same complaint: “They already told this story. It’s nothing new. Why bother telling it again?” The complaint is couched as a criticism of the lack of originality in modern movies and current comic books. Bruce Wayne was already replaced as Batman in “Knightfall,” “Knightquest” and “Knight’s End,” so why would we need to read the same story again in “The Quest for the Cowl”?

But is the complaint accurate? Is it fair?

When it comes to telling stories, there’s a long and rich tradition of using the same material over and over again. The roots of this tradition go back at least as far as the theatre of ancient Greece. As part of their festival for the god Dionysus, the Greeks would stage a theatrical competition. They would watch and perform new plays… except the authors weren’t actually encouraged to write new stories for their new plays. Instead, the authors were encouraged to re-tell old stories. Year after year, the Greeks would watch new versions of the same stories: Agamemnon, Electra, Oedipus and so on. The authors and the plays were judged by the quality of their re-telling, rather than the originality of their plot.

We see a similar standard in the theatre of the Middle Ages, though this time the plays were based on Biblical stories rather than the legends of Greek religion and culture. English towns like Wakefield and York would develop their own theatrical presentations. Yet again, the stories were all based on the same source material and judged on the quality of the re-telling.

There’s a shift once we arrive at the theatre of the Renaissance. Authors were no longer expected to tell the same story of Electra or St. Paul again and again. They were given more latitude to come up with new material. And yet, this new material was often based on old material. Renaissance playwrights may not have been re-telling the old stories, but they weren’t above re-using the old plots. William Shakespeare based some of his plays on the works of ancient Roman playwright Plautus and Italian Renaissance author Boccaccio. Shakespeare would even borrow from his contemporaries and peers: “Measure for Measure” is based on a play by George Whetstone that was less than thirty years old. The Bard was certainly not alone in this regard. The practice wasn’t considered to be anything shameful. Indeed, the authors would sometimes acknowledge their sources by making a joke about the original author or staging a play within a play.

Besides, the long and rich tradition of telling the same stories in the past, there is also a recent history of re-using old stories. Sometimes old stories are re-cast in modern settings, putting a new twist on an old tale- kind of like the Renaissance writers re-writing Roman comedies for their own time. The comedies “Strange Brew,” “Clueless” and “O Brother Where Art Thou?” base plots- in part or in whole- on “Hamlet,” Jane Austen’s “Emma” and “The Odyssey.” Sometimes, familiar stories are re-told by a new author- kind of like the ancient Greeks telling the same legends over again. Jack Whyte experienced recent success writing a series of novels on the life of King Arthur, despite the existence of many other versions even from the last half-century.

Sometimes an author will look at an old story from a new angle, telling the tale from the perspective of the villain or a minor character. Tom Stoppard did this for “Hamlet” with his play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” and Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” are based on works as varied as “King Lear” and “The Wizard of Oz” yet they take a similar approach. It’s a new way of telling an old story, but it’s a re-telling of an old story just the same. Even then, it’s not all that new. The ancient Greeks would do something similar, telling the same story from alternate perspectives, whether it’s Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s different views of the sacrifice of their daughter or Jason and Medea’s opposing views of their separation. Sometimes the same author will re-tell his own story, exploring the same subject matter from a different angle or trying out an alternate ending. Filmmaker John Hughes is alternately accused and credited with doing this in “Pretty and Pink” and “Some Kind of Wonderful.”

And of course, sometimes the connections are unintentional. John Lasseter may not have based his cartoon “Cars” on the earlier movie “Doc Hollywood.” But by exploring the same theme- the simple and sometimes nostalgic pleasures of small town life - Lasseter inadvertently told the same story- big city character is stranded in a small town and discovers its charm. All of the trappings may have been different. But the underlying story is the same.

So what’s up with all of this borrowing, re-telling and re-using? Apparently, it’s neither new nor uncommon. As the ancient author of Ecclesiastes once wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Part of the issue is that all stories are based on the same building blocks. There’s a common refrain in writing that there are only two basic plots: man vs. man, and man vs. nature. An example of the first would be “Spider-Man” as a hero, Spider-Man, faces off against a villain, the Green Goblin; an example of the second would be Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” (This is sometimes expanded to include a third plot: “boy meets girl.” However, one could consider this to be another version of the person vs. person struggle, just with a different goal in mind- that of winning someone over instead of defeating them.) In other words, the protagonist of the story will struggle against one of two objects- another person, or the world. Without that struggle, there’s no story. But there’s only so many ways to tell that same struggle.

Furthermore, the more familiar ways are the ones that are most likely to connect to an audience in a universal manner. The story of a lost child connects to us emotionally because of our deep love for our own children and our great fear of losing them. Paul Schrader’s “Hard Core,” Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” and J. Michael Straczynski’s “The Changeling” all address that same love, same fear and same issue. And they all do it by building a story on the same plot in its simplest incarnation- a parent goes in search of a lost child. Yet despite those similarities in story, the three movies are vastly different, focusing on themes from human depravity to the wonder of exploration. The differences are in the telling of the story.

Which brings us, at last, to the issue of comic books. Marvel’s “Civil War” included a superhero registration act as part of its plot. This wasn’t the first time that Marvel had done something like that. About twenty years ago, Marvel told another story with a mutant registration act as part of its plot. So is Marvel guilty of ripping off their audience by asking them to pay for the same story twice? No. For a number of reasons: no. For one thing, the two stories were told twenty years apart. So they’re not being told to the exact same audience. There is a significant portion of the audience that hadn’t read the story the first time around.

But the answer is still no even for those who were around for both versions of the story. The two stories addressed similar themes- our fears of intolerance, especially when paired with government interference. Those fears haven’t disappeared in the twenty years since the first story was written. So it’s appropriate to look at those same issues again. The question then isn’t whether or not the story is completely new. It’s whether or not the new telling looks at the same issue from a new angle, with a new perspective or with new information. And, most importantly, the question is whether or not the new telling is done well.

Noting that “we’ve seen this story before” should be an observation, but not necessarily a criticism. Real criticism should get deeper than that. The new story should be judged for its own merits. Does it deal with its theme well? Was the story worth telling, whether it’s new or not? Was it entertaining? There is a place for comparison. As with the ancient Greek versions of Electra, many did not compare favorably with the others. Yet more than version survived to our time and is considered a classic of literature. The same story can be told again, and told well. And more than one version can be considered worthwhile.

This is not, by the way, a defense of plagiarism. Rather, it’s recognition of the proud, sometimes necessary, occasionally unintentional and often unavoidable tradition of re-telling the same stories.