Fads and fashions

Lone Veiler on why Great New Ideas are usually no such thing at all

Recently, I have been even more aware of the number of remakes, retakes, and reinventions that go on around me all the time. There is a constant stream of any number of Great New Ideas which are touted as the best, the last, the ultimate, the only. Take a trivial example, Jane Eyre, a novel which is a bit like Marmite. I happen to love both, but there are those for whom this isn't the case. Over the years, there have been several versions of the book, none of which come close to the original novel in spite of enormous sums of money thrown into the productions.

Cursed as these reinventions generally are by scriptwriters who miss the Christian point entirely, a viewer might genuinely wonder why she leaves Rochester at all. He's got a mad wife in the attic? So what? Jane's genuine scruples are rather baffling out of the context of her faith. There has even been a horror/paranormal reworking of the book, in which Jane becomes a vampire hunting, werewolf and zombie slayer. Although she is still a governess, which is something I suppose.

Of course, the movie of a book I had most wanted to see was Lord of the Rings. Or I thought so. Beautiful to watch, wonderful sets, but again, liberties with the tale, liberties with the characters, and no Glorfindel, which is frankly unforgiveable. It's a bit curate's egg. Among some of my friends, this view is akin to heresy, but I can live with that. I try not to dwell on what was done to The Hobbit. There is no excuse possible for ‘re-envisioning’ The Hobbit in that way apart from the generation of filthy lucre.

Great novels are not the only ones infected by the spirit of the age. Our fêted BBC (may its licence fee soon be abolished) recently made a complete dog's breakfast of Poirot. Yes, Poirot. You have to try really, really hard to muck that up. The mother in law didn't want to see an edgy, gritty, dark, and morally dubious Poirot mired in modern politics. I wholeheartedly agreed with her. It certainly wasn't Agatha Christie, and it wasn't entertaining. Whoever thought John Malkovich would be great as a tubby Belgian detective had obviously never heard him as Unferth in Beowulf, another great piece of casting. Or perhaps they had.

'We know we are suffering from the editing of our Faith during the 1960s, and before, and attempts to make it relevant and accessible then and now which are having an awful effect.'

It apparently all comes down to making things 'relevant'. Well, relevant with regard to what exactly? Watching only some of the execrable Poirot, I saw extremely laboured and very heavy handed modern political analogies crowbarred unsubtly into a cosy period detective drama. It makes me realise why I tend not to watch TV.

As in art, so in life, it's the same in the workplace. New boss, established work force, new initiatives that turn out not to be new at all, just a revamp of the boss before last's great new initiative which didn't work then either. It's a jargon filled, box ticking, envelope pushing waste of time for the poor souls having to implement these fine schemes, but can look awfully good on the CV of the boss, now convincingly failing upward. This is a tad cynical I will admit, but having friends and relatives in a variety of professions, all of whom say pretty much the same thing, and my own albeit limited experience, it's not an entirely inaccurate picture.

The tendency to want to change everything with little thought as to whether it really will be an improvement, or change for the sake of change, is part of human nature. It's part of the arrogance we have, thinking everything we do has to be better than our predecessors. We can't even leave perfectly good books alone without feeling we could do better if this was tweaked, and that was left out, and perhaps this added for a bit more relevance. Perhaps we should change some of the vocabulary because it isn't inclusive enough, change the sex of the protagonist to make it really inclusive, get rid of some of the social conventions that might upset the few at the expense of the many. Even Dr Who is now a woman, which as I was told by one of the show's target audience, makes no sense, because he's a Time Lord not a Time Lady.

Does it matter? Yes, I think it does. We as a Church seem to be being led towards worldliness rather than away from it. We know we are suffering from the editing of our Faith during the 1960s, and before, and attempts to make it relevant and accessible then and now which are having an awful effect. We are still reaping the rewards of having our Faith watered down. To live might be to change, but I always took that to mean first and foremost we change ourselves, not things read and believed by generations before us, even if now they don't conform to current fads or fashions. So, I'll stick to the original Jane Eyre, and Lord of the Rings novels. I'll also stick with the old Missal. If it ain't broke, and all that.