The long gaze backwards

Though it seems impossible, Hollywood has stooped to a new low: remaking Wagner operas into movies. The film "Tristan and Isolde," released this past Friday, essentially takes the tragic and groundbreaking Richard Wagner opera and makes it into a travesty approaching soft-core porn, if the trailers are at all reflective of the film's whole.\nI have not seen, nor do I intend to see, this film because the original w me effect as the original, chiefly because ... it isn't the original!\nNext are the films based on books. While these films use imagination to transform words into images, they still rely on a story that someone else wrote. "The Chronicles of Narnia," "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "Pride and Prejudice" all fall in this category, and again I give the abridged list because space in this column is limited. One could also group "The Producers" and "Tristan and Isolde" in this category. Though not based on books, they rely on yet another art form for characters and plot.\nLastly, films based on historical events have been frequent as well. "Munich" and "Good Night, and Good Luck" come to mind, if the latter is counted as history and not propaganda. This genre is almost excusable because it brings true events to dramatic life, but it still relies on actual people and events for characters and plot.\nWhen the most original films of the year are "Wedding Crashers" and "40-Year-Old Virgin," it's not really all that surprising to see why Hollywood hasn't been doing all that well. Even these pretenses at originality are sordid and banal, catered to the least common denominator.\nHollywood's inability to look forward and create something original is what I'd call a nationwide syndrome: everyone looks back. Whether it's the pathetic, gray-haired, geriatric hippie who refuses to believe the '60s are over or congressmen who still think we're in Vietnam, nobody seems able to shake off their past and remember it instead of reliving it.\nAmerica has become a culture mired in "I Love the '60s/'70s/'80s," one that prides itself in fondue parties, horn-rimmed glasses and the Rolling Stones (whose name ought to be the Gravestones). But the generation that gloried in these is aging and dying, and what will the rest of us be left with? Only the memories of a relived youth that wasn't our own.\nIt is up to us, the younger generation, more than ever to look to the future, to define ourselves not based on our parents' generation, but on our own cultural accomplishments. Failure to do so will only condemn not only our generation, but America itself, to an outdated relic of the past, unable to live up to its reputation for innovation and groundbreaking originality.