Dead-On vs Neon

The relationships between media, self, and society are deep and varied. They give and take, affecting each other for good or for ill. One especially complex relationship is between society and film re-makes. Media is often a good indicator of what society finds important at the time of the media’s creation. Re-makes this idea a step further because there is an earlier document to use as a comparison; this comparison reveals which elements have been diminished and which have been brought into the limelight, showing the current priorities.

In Media Literacy Education, a class I’m attending at BYU, we watched Hairspray (1988). I hadn’t seen it before, but I had seen Hairspray (2007) once, a few years back. The two, with nearly twenty years separating them, are quite different. One of the biggest distinctions, that I noticed, is their portrayal of the romantic development between Tracy Turnblad and her dashing counter-part Link Larkin. In the ’88 version, the two start dating almost immediately after Tracy joins the show. There is not much fuss about it, and the story turns its focus onto racial inequality instead. In ’07, the romance takes much longer to develop; the story focuses more on this relationship than anything else. Audiences love a good love story. The ’07 film panders to this by making the story about a chubby girl wooing Zac Efron. It’s a shallow cop-out.

What it also shows is that media, in this vein at least, cares more about money than anything else. The Hairspray from ’88 was made for about $2 million, and it made back over $6 million on that investment. Compare that to the one filmed in 2007: its budget was $75 million and it made $200 million worldwide. They got big names, made it a musical, added in sleek, colorful art design, and lost all the deep meaning that Hairspray had going for it in the first place. Yeah, it still had much of the same storyline, Penny Pingleton still fell in love with Seaweed, but it lost its bite, its power.

One of my favorite scenes in Hairspray ’88 was when Mrs. Pingleton wandered around the ‘bad side of town’ looking for her daughter. Her fear was over the top and ridiculous. She screamed and freaked out at nearly every turn, and it was easy to laugh at her and the fantastical way she acted. The reason I loved it, though, is because it spoke of a sad, true reality. I’m from a city in Georgia, and yeah, there are parts of town that white people rarely go. Twenty-five years hasn’t changed that. Race relations is a hugely important topic in society still, though some people believe that racism is done and gone. I think those people are crazy, and I’m so sad that films like Hairspray are being re-made with dulled messages and pure spectacle. Hairspray ’88 may have been silly and over the top, but it kept its eye on the prize and never forgot what it was about.