Han Shot First

By: Team Buzzine

April 17, 2008

Isaac Butler expounds on Art vs Profit vs Culture in his fourth installment of: The Enthusiast.

Nothing stays the same forever. David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album, My Life In The Bush Ghosts, was “reissued” last year with a different track order, with songs not originally on the album and one missing track (“Qu’ran”). Michael Mann reedited Heat when it was issued on VHS, and then edited it again when it was put out on DVD, as he has done for all of his recent films. Elvis Costello’s back catalogue has been reissued with new bonus tracks and demos at least three times. Dave Eggers’ novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, was rewritten in between hardcover and paperback. DVDs of a film come packaged now with alternate endings, different plot threads, additional characters, and–if they’re comedies aimed at men–added naked breasts.

One particularly famous example of this is Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic, Blade Runner. Three different versions of the film have screened in theaters. The original “Studio” version came out in 1982. After being presented with an ambiguous, troubling, elliptically-told downer, Warner Bros. demanded that Scott add a voiceover track explaining the film and change the ending. He complied; the film bombed. Over the years, the film gradually gained a kind of legendary status—people knew they hadn’t seen the film as it was intended to be shown. This problem has been addressed twice now, both with the “Director’s Cut” (not actually edited by Ridley Scott) in the early ‘90s and the recent “Final Cut” (actually overseen by Scott) that was released last year (for my money, the last is vastly superior for reasons you can read about here.)

Another film director who has benefited from frequent reissuing is Orson Welles, thanks to various efforts to restore his films to the versions he intended. Most famous of these is Touch of Evil. Like Blade Runner, it has been released in theaters three times and, like Blade Runner, the progression goes: reedited and “compromised” studio version (1958), different version that is truer to the director’s vision of the film (1976), lovingly restored, painstakingly constructed final version (1998). That latter version is now considered the “real” Touch of Evil and, as in Blade Runner: The Final Cut, when people reference the film, it is generally that print they are referencing.

Here, however, is the rub: None of these Touch of Evils are actually Welles’s cut of the film. The 1998 reissue follows as closely as possible a memo that Welles wrote for the editing of the film, while Welles’ original Touch of Evil is lost to time entirely. There is, in other words, no one true Touch of Evil. This is also true of the Criterion Collection’s reissue of Welles’s Mr. Arkadin, which contains three separate versions of the film, none of which are considered definitive (or even particularly satisfying). The viewer is left to create an ideal version of the film in their heads after watching all of the alternatives.

Perhaps there is no longer “one true” anything, in some cases. Thanks to new advances in technology and distribution, we are now entering the age in which there are no longer definitive versions of certain kinds of art. Obviously, in certain kinds of art (the plastic arts, painting, etc.), an object is actually made. We can point to a dramatically oversized sculpture of a typewriter eraser and say, “Yes, that there is a Claes Oldenburg.” In performing and literary arts, however, the waters are getting murkier by the day.

How we got here is perhaps obvious: the profit motive. Record companies and movie studios want to make as much money from their properties as possible. In the cases of Blade Runner and much of Welles’s filmography, they are squeezing blood from a stone—generating money where there wasn’t any to begin with. With the multiple reissues of Elvis Costello, Joy Division, and other recording artists, they are trying to get consumers to purchase products they already own because of perceived added value.

This has unintentionally opened up a Pandora’s Box. Corporate interests may have recognized a need for a market, but that does not mean they can control it. Audiences will exert their own authority to make up their minds about what they like best, regardless of how it is packaged. The Mike Elizondo-produced version of Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine may be the version that she and her record label claim is the official one, but that hasn’t stopped fans and critics from voicing their preference to the (not legally obtainable) Jon Brion version.

Call it the Han Shot First Phenomenon: audiences now reserve the right to decide for themselves what is definitive. This points out a central and uncomfortable truth about making art: ultimately, it is controlled by its audience–not the artists, not the distributors, not the label or studio heads. The audience exerts this control because art is completed when someone interacts with it.

This is rather obviously true in my own artistic discipline: Theatre. While you may change from day to day, the movie you watch and the album on your iPod do not. In the theatre, the performance is at least a little bit different every time. There is some debate about whether this is a good thing or not, but little changes night to night are inevitable. Not only is the play you’re seeing tonight slightly different from the version you could have seen the night before, but where you sit matters as well. There is no editor or cinematographer to guide your eye, and everything happens on stage simultaneously, so angle counts. You and your friend who sits on the other side of the auditorium are, to some extent, seeing different plays altogether.

On top of all of this, there’s a chance the script of the play is at least slightly bastardized. There are several versions of the text of Hamlet (and of many of Shakespeare’s plays), and we are unsure if any of them match up to the original text his company performed. The texts of Greek tragedies that we use today date back not to the ancient Greek era but to medieval Monks who copied them (and presumably adapted them somewhat) to use for the teaching of Greek to students. The phenomenon isn’t limited to classic plays either. Theater columnist Michael Riedel recently raised a stink because a scene may be cut from an upcoming revival of Clifford Odets’s The Country Girl. The current Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof differs from the original production, due to efforts on the part of the creative team to restore the text’s darkness and foul language, both of which Tennessee Williams edited out at the behest of original director Elia Kazan.

The next stage in all of this is already becoming clear. Once the audience feels empowered to interpret and choose which version of a work of art they like the best, it’s only a short jump to audiences making their own versions of things. And thus mash-up culture is born, a world in which every work of art is acknowledging that it is, on some level, a collage, and every audience member is at least part artist (and vice-versa).

Fighting against this trend are the forces of intellectual property, returning us once again to the profit motive. The examples of absurd overreaching when it comes to copyright issues abound, and the absurdity is inevitable because it misunderstands what art is and what its relationship is to its audience on several fronts. The first misunderstanding is to treat art as an object that thus becomes property to be protected, instead of an idea that must exist in the continuum of ideas that has flowed throughout human cultural history. Second is to separate artist from audience when those categories are breaking down more and more every day. Finally, it is a misunderstanding of art to believe that creators have sole control over how it is received, or interpreted, or reused.

Instead of cracking down on all of this activity, corporations should be getting creative about ways of making money off of it. They inadvertently helped create the age of audience art through the creation of the reissue market, and putting the genie back in the bottle is impossible at this point. In a world where quality is subjective, the audience is the ultimate authority on whether something is good or bad, and when we as artists figure out creative ways to respond to this reality, we’ll all be better off.