How ‘The Grinch’ Told a (Green) Tale Along Reseda Boulevard

“I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree,” as Ogden Nash once put it, but driving down Reseda Boulevard to work in the morning, I find that billboards are pretty much all there is to look at. And although certainly unlovely, they often have a great deal to say about the current state of popular culture, if we choose to read them carefully enough.

I knew, for example, that something was up in September when I began to see billboards featuring the image of a group of sprinters chasing what looked like a furry green man who had mostly sprinted off the billboard, leaving only a green leg and arm in clear view. It took a few weeks for the next installment of billboards to make it clear that the green man was, as I had thought, the Grinch, and a few weeks more for the revelation that the beloved animated Dr. Seuss tale was being remade, with live actors this time around.

But that wasn’t the only Hollywood remake to be found in recent months on the billboards of Reseda. Other tableaux announced the return of “Charlie’s Angels,” who apparently haven’t aged a bit in the 20 years or so since we last saw them, and who seem fit and well if a trifle more menacing than they did in their first incarnation.

So, the billboards told me, if the summer before last emerged as the season of the witch, we are now well into the season of the Hollywood remake.

Remakes, of course, are nothing new. “Cape Fear” (1991) had Robert De Niro reprising Robert Mitchum’s menacing turn from 1962. “Psycho” (1998) put Anne Heche in Janet Leigh’s shoes (or, one should say, shower). And in “Popeye” (1980), Robin Williams, like Jim Carrey today, plays a well-known cartoon character. But new or not, why are remakes so common?

One explanation might be that the Hollywood remake reflects the postmodern conviction that in an essentially meaningless world, the task of the artist is not to create new cultural images or meanings but simply to recycle existing images from the vast storehouse of contemporary culture. From Andy Warhol’s soup cans to Madonna’s revamping (or re-vamping) of such cultural icons as Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, the postmodern artist repeats what has already been done, but with an ironic twist that lets us know that there is a difference the second time around, a difference that makes it difficult to take both the original and its repetition seriously.

But I don’t think that these Hollywood remakes are postmodern in that sense. For one thing, they tend to be reverent toward their originals.

The pre-release hype leading up to the remake of “Psycho,” for example, insisted that it was going to be a shot-by-shot recreation of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece. It wasn’t, of course, but the new version was anything but ironic.

Similarly, the remakes of “Charlie’s Angels” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” both clearly want to recapture, not ironize, the effects of their originals. Just look at the elaborate makeup and special effects lavished on the “Grinch” to make it look as much like Dr. Seuss as possible, while the casting director of “Charlie’s Angels” clearly had it in charge to find 21st-century equivalents to the goddesses of the ‘70s.

Indeed, it is that reverence toward the popular cultural past that is probably the key to the whole business. For a culture tends to reproduce those cultural productions that it most values--as when in the classical era the Roman poet Virgil sought to remake Homer’s “Odyssey” and “Iliad” in the “Aeneid,” and in the 17th century John Milton combined the “Iliad” with the Bible to create “Paradise Lost.”

Similarly, different generations of actors and directors have found in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” a platform for the expression of their own lives and times, from the hesitant Hamlet of the Romantic era to the Oedipal Hamlet of the age of Sigmund Freud.

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So if cultures are always remaking their own cultural icons, the message I read on the billboards of Reseda Boulevard is a lesson in cultural values.

In the reprise of “Charlie’s Angels,” for instance, we may find a culture that so values sex appeal that each generation wants to get a shot at casting its current goddesses in the angel role.

But the return of the Grinch is rather more complicated. For although it probably simply serves, in part, as a vehicle for Carrey, there’s more to it than that. Because the original “Grinch” of Dr. Seuss was, in effect, a remake of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge from “A Christmas Carol.” And that story was a remake, if you will, of the age-old story of sin and redemption, with a good deal of Victorian sentimentality thrown in. Such a story, the tale of a man who once was lost but now is found, is certain to have a universal resonance within a Judeo-Christian culture. And so each generation wants to retell it with the technology at its disposal, first in print, then animation and now with computer-generated special effects.

But perhaps the bottom line here is that the parable of the Grinch is a proven Christmas-season moneymaker. Add to this the proven box-office appeal of special effects technology and Jim Carrey, and you have all the ingredients of a Hollywood remake whose primary purpose, after all, reflects another great American value: making money.