Kathleen Loock

Introduction: Remake | Remodel

Given that this collection of essays—“Remake | Remodel”—takes its title from the opening track of a retro-album, Roxy Music (1972) by Roxy Music, it seems appropriate to begin with music writer Simon Reynolds’ recent book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. “Instead of being the threshold of the future,” writes Reynolds, “the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the ‘Re’ Decade. The 2000s were dominated by the ‘re-’ prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments” (xi). Across the book, Reynolds mainly takes an interest in a “retro-consciousness” prevalent in contemporary popular music— band reformations and reunion tours, album reissues and revivals, coverversions and mash-ups—but he notes that the current “malaise is not restricted to pop music. … Look at the Hollywood mania for remaking blockbuster movies from a couple of decades earlier. … When they’re not revamping proven box-office successes of the past, the movie industry is adapting much-loved ‘iconic’ TV series for the big screen” (xv). And Reynolds does not stop there. In addition to these “visibly fevered zones of retro-mania,” he discerns other areas of cultural re-production: retro fashion, retro toys, retro games, retro food, retro candy … even retro porn (xvii–xviii). Although the evidence suggests that “the 2000s’ most commercially prominent trends involved recycling” (xix), Reynolds is quick to point out that “Retromania is not a straightforward denunciation of retro as a manifestation of cultural regression or decadence” and that research into the book revealed “the extent to which retro-related issues have been a long-running preoccupation” (xxi–xxii, emphasis added).

American TV Series Revivals: Introduction:

This special issue examines contemporary American TV series revivals with a focus on production and reception contexts as well as the industrial, cultural, and textual practices involved. Each essay is concerned with a different case study and brings a distinct approach to the analysis of the trend on American network television and the online streaming service Netflix. Together, they analyze how revivals rely on past TV experiences to circulate new products through the crowded contemporary media landscape, and how they seek to negotiate the televisual heritage of original series, feelings of generational belonging, as well as notions of the past, present, and future in meaningful ways. This introduction to the special issue provides the definitions, broader historical context, and theoretical framework of televisual repetition and innovation for understanding contemporary TV series revivals.

“Whatever Happened to Predictability?”: Fuller House, (Post)Feminism, and the Revival of Family-Friendly Viewing:

This article examines the Netflix revival of Full House, the family sitcom about three single men raising three girls that was part of the family-friendly “TGIF” (Thank Goodness It’s Funny) lineup ABC aired on Friday nights in the 1980s and 1990s. The 2016 release of Fuller House, I argue, was driven not only by the possibility to exploit an existing property with ongoing media and cultural presence in times of “peak TV” but also by Netflix’s strategic efforts to revive the bygone days of TGIF-style programming and reinvent family-friendly viewing in the era of complex television and online streaming platforms. In analyzing the Full House revival—its production and reception contexts, its carefully crafted text and paratexts, its position among complex dramas and edgy sitcoms—I will also trace the ways in which Fuller House engages in postfeminist discourse and raises pertinent questions about family values, gender roles, and ethnic diversity.

Jewish immigrants as New World explorers and conquistadores: narrative identity fashioning and political purpose in the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT This article examines how Jewish immigrants of the so-called New Immigration (1880–1924) used the space of autobiography to symbolically “discover” and “possess” the New World and discusses this kind of narrative identity fashioning against the national debate over immigration restriction. Works such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), Marcus E. Ravage’s An American in the Making (1917), Elizabeth Hasanovitz’s One of Them (1918), and Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow (1918) take up the El Dorado myth when describing America as a “land of gold” and thus appropriate a popular discourse pattern of Spanish explorers and conquistadores. They also appropriate discourses of wonder and taking possession that are prevalent in traditional European New World writing. Wonder – a direct reaction to the first encounter with unknown places, people, and objects – is omnipresent in these texts and conveyed by various linguistic and narrative strategies. Trading exotic Yiddish names for Americanized versions or entering American educational institutions constitute acts of taking possession, and are, in fact, modern variants of Spanish practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jewish-American immigrant authors negotiated their narrative identities as model American citizens by adopting popular discourse patterns of Spanish discoverers and conquistadores, and by changing them according to their own political purposes, interests, and needs. Such narrative identities framed the immigrants’ transatlantic journey in ways that linked them with America’s mythical past and thus enabled the entire group to feel at home in the United States, to inscribe themselves into the nation’s origin stories, and to (re)negotiate the meaning of Americanness.

The Return of the Pod People: Remaking Cultural Anxieties in Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), based on a novel by Jack Finney, has become one of the most influential alien invasion films of all time. The film’s theme of alien paranoia—the fear that some invisible invaders could replace individual human beings and turn them into a collective of emotionless pod people—resonated with widespread anxieties in 1950s American culture. It has been read as an allegory of the communist threat during the Cold War but also as a commentary on McCarthyism, the alienating effects of capitalism, conformism, postwar radiation anxiety, the return of “brainwashed” soldiers from the Korean War, and masculine fears of “the potential social, political, and personal disenfranchisement of postwar America’s hegemonic white patriarchy” (Mann 49).1