The Remake That Crossed

Martin Scorsese's film opens in U.S. theaters on October 6, 2006, distributed by Warner Bros. Box Office Mojo records the release date. But the story has already crossed a border: The Departed remakes the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. The American Film Institute's catalog names Alan Mak and Felix Chong as the source-film writers and William Monahan as the new film's screenwriter.

Those names belong in the account before the argument begins. Otherwise, an article about cultural recognition manages to misplace the people it means to recognize. A remarkably efficient way to become your own example.

A story changes its address

In the Boston-set film, Leonardo DiCaprio plays an undercover police officer infiltrating a criminal organization; Matt Damon plays the organization's mole inside the police. Jack Nicholson plays crime boss Frank Costello. The doubled premise makes institutional appearance unreliable: the person who looks properly installed may be the threat, while the person apparently outside the law may be serving it.

The adaptation invites a parallel question about our own habits of attention. A viewer may encounter this story through Scorsese, DiCaprio or Damon rather than through Hong Kong cinema. Familiarity can be a useful entrance. It can also become the point where curiosity stops.

That is a possibility, not a finding about this film's audience. A release record cannot tell us whether viewers know the earlier film, seek it out afterward or mistake the remake for an original story. Nor does the existence of a remake establish that its makers have erased their predecessors. The source attribution is there in the catalog. Claims about unfair contracts, missing compensation or deliberate concealment would require evidence this account does not have.

The smaller question remains worth keeping: does discovering a story in our own cultural vocabulary make us more interested in the people who told it elsewhere?

Let the credit become a route

There is no need to treat adaptation as contamination. Moving a narrative into another setting can produce new work rather than merely a more marketable duplicate. Monahan's screenplay and Scorsese's direction deserve to be considered as creative contributions, not dismissed because something came before them. Cultural exchange would be rather sparse if borrowing disqualified everyone involved.

But exchange asks more of us than enjoying what arrives. Coherenceism's obligation to return what we take offers a useful standard here: let attention travel toward the source as well as toward the new version. For a viewer, that need not mean becoming an expert before buying a ticket. It can begin with remembering a title and two writers' names.

Infernal Affairs. Alan Mak. Felix Chong.

A credit tells us where a story came from. Curiosity decides whether that information becomes a relationship with another work or stays a line we skip on the way to the familiar names.

Enjoy the Boston version. Then consider making the return journey. The remake can be an introduction rather than a replacement; our attention has a part in deciding which.