Yesterday Lou had her fourth surgery related to her cleft. Recently I thought back to the day she was born, and how her condition caught us off guard. T had to be strong for Lou that day. Lou has been strong for us ever since.
It was a surprise. Not just her condition, the whole thing was a
surprise, for me anyway. We were in the middle of moving across the
country when my wife called to tell me she'd been feeling nauseous.
Starting a PhD program wasn't going to be the only big endeavor that
year. If I'd been planning we might have waited, but when I told people
this my wife corrected me, "This is exactly when I wanted to have the
second."
That spring I warned my professors and classmates that I
might disappear for a couple weeks after spring break. I also ruined the
Fourth of July for any of them who also had mid-April birthdays (if
that's you, maybe your parents like fireworks too). I made a lot of
jokes during those 40 weeks. It's how I respond to stress. One that I
kept coming back to was that the baby would have a cleft palate. I don't
know why I was fixated on that, but any time I expressed anxiety over
the birth that's what I went to. It wasn't totally out of nowhere, my
uncle had been born with a cleft.
From the beginning this labor
was different than our first. It progressed very quickly and lasted just
four hours in total. By the time the midwives arrived at our apartment
T was already in transition and ready to push. When Lou emerged we
were thrilled to have our first daughter. She was healthy and screaming
and purple, just like you expect. When I looked at her little
wailing face announcing herself to the world something seemed out of
place. "She's got something stuck under her nose" the midwife said
trying scratch it away. I knew what it was, "She has a cleft."
My
heart sank. Not because the cleft was a huge problem, as I said, my uncle had one,
in the fifties, and he's fine. I was worried about the scars she'd have,
but more than anything I was gripped an irrational thought, "I caused
this." It was my fault. It was because I had made all those stupid
jokes. No one really knows why clefting occurs. It's an almost random
one in 700, but two of the risk factors are family history (ding!) and
being Asian (I'm half Japanese), so in a way it is my fault.
Clefting
is usually diagnosed on the 20 week ultrasound. I found that out on the
Internet a few minutes after my Lou was born. Sure enough, it's clear
on the pictures if you know what to look for. It shouldn't have
been a surprise, the tech should have caught it. We should have had
time to prepare. Instead all we knew was what we could find online, so
naturally I was panicked. The one useful thing we learned is that Lou
wouldn't be able to nurse. The open spaces in her lip and her oral cavity
made it impossible to create a seal or to generate the vacuum needed to
suckle. If we'd labored in a hospital they'd likely have been able to resolve it there. But Lou, like all of our children, was born at home. Now it felt like a race against time. The baby needed to eat and
we had no idea what to do.
We called our pediatrician. He told us
he'd look into it and asked if we could come in. My wife tells me we
went, though I have no memory of being there. When we arrived he told us
he had set up an appointment at Children's National Medical Center. We were lucky, Lou had been born on a Tuesday, Cleft Clinic day at CNMC. By the
time Lou was three hours old we were starting a day-long series of
meetings with the team who would handle her care for the next 19 years.
We learned that she will need between 7 and 9 surgeries during that
time span. We learned that she will always have scars. Most importantly we
learned how to feed her using special bottles called Haberman Feeders, that look like tiny turkey
basters. Ever the joker, I nicknamed her "Zoidberg" after the Futurama
character. The most amazing part of that visit was T. There she was, sitting in the examination room taking it all in just three hours after giving birth. Each time a new doctor came in looking at the chart they'd pause, look confused, and then ask T, "Is this right? She was born three hours ago? Why didn't we come to you?" T would explain the home birth and the doctors would gaze at her as if she were a unicorn.
Having a cleft baby isn't easy. My wife pumped 11 times
each day for the first six months, before tapering off to 8. We had to
plan our lives around being able to pump, which is more complicated than it sounds. We couldn't be away from electricity for more than a couple hours at a time. T pumped in the car while commuting. She pumped at baseball games. She pumped everywhere. Still, it's also not as hard as
raising children who have more serious conditions. Lou has a speech
impediment. She has an IEP for speech therapy, but she'll grow out of
everything except the scars. She's grown to be a resilient and vibrant
girl. She doesn't mind talking about her cleft. Whether it's enduring
two major surgeries before she was a year old, or something she would
have had anyway, she's fearless. We started calling her "Crash" based on
her propensity to push her physical limits, then get up and dust
herself of with a resounding, "I'm OK!" She is. She was always going to
be. I shouldn't be surprised.
Maybe you heard that we got a huge blizzard here on the east coast about a month ago. School was closed for a week, it was actually a nice break. I love when the kids are home and it's all of us just hanging out. The kids like it too. Even with all the love of being home we do end up looking for things to do. This blizzard gave us a chance to take on a project we'd been talking about for a few months, the kids' version of Eddie Izzard's "Death Star Canteen" bit.
If you haven't seen, then for crying out loud, click the link. It's brilliant. If you prefer there's also an animated version and a fantastic stop-motion Lego version.The problem for me as a parent is that there's some cursing, so I can't play it for the kids. The bigger problem is that I forgot about the cursing, played it for one kid, then had to play it for the other kid. Then they both started dropping casual f-bombs. So we had to clean it up. First, we found a transcript online, and I bowdlerized it. We had fun doing readings of that for a while, and then reciting it on weekend mornings while making breakfast. Once Buddy decided to be Darth Vader for Halloween we knew we'd end up doing a filmed version. The blizzard finally gave us the time.
Now look, I don't know how this goes for the Holderness family, but making a movie like this with a four year old kind of sucks. Also, Buddy is kind of a perfectionist so not getting it in one take was frustrating. The main problem for Lou was waiting for her part, and being quiet. But after a few dozen takes it finally came together. So below I present to you a clean, kid friendly version of Eddie Izzard's Death Star Canteen.
I didn't know Oren Miller. Oren died a few months before I would have had a chance to meet him. Oren was a blogger, and a father, and many other things that I don't know about because I never got to know him.
Last weekend I went to the Dad 2.0 Summit, a conference for bloggers and brands to come together and talk about "the changing voice and perception of modern fatherhood." I was there because I was introduced to a Facebook group of dad bloggers. The group was founded by Oren as a place were these dads could come together for support. There's a lot of discussion about writing, about growing an audience, about the mysteries of SEO (search engine optimization). Guys share their writing and comment on each other's posts. There's also a lot of personal support. There are parenting discussions. It's also a place where guys can vent about family or work or anything else they can't express to people in other parts of their lives. And it's not just complaining about things, there's real raw emotion there at times, and the support they get from the group is inspiring.
I attended Dad 2.0 as a recipient of a Miller Grant, a scholarship to help writers attend the conference. Without the grant I would have been hard pressed to attend. Our family lives on one income, so it's a luxury for a stay at home dad like me to lay out money to attend a writing conference. I was also selected to read a piece I had written as part of the conference's Blogger Spotlight. It was a fantastic experience for someone like me who is still almost wholly unknown in the blogging world. It was like fantasy camp for bloggers. Having a chance to meet with other writers, to make connections with brands, and to get mentoring from PR people and industry insiders would have been worth more than what I would have paid if I had not received the grant. Being there for free was like winning a sweepstakes. Just attending that weekend and being chosen to read doubled my social media engagements and followers. It's meant getting retweets and shares from people with much greater online presence than I have. It's also meant deeper connections with a large group of dads I had only known through avatars and online comments. It was chance to not only grow as a blogger, but to extend a network of friendship and parenting support throughout the country (and Canada, Hi Canada!).
None of this would have happened if not for Oren Miller. If not for his idea of a "A blogging dads group. So crazy it just might work" I wouldn't have had this experience. If not for the support and inspiration I gleaned from his group I may not have written your favorite post on this site. All the things I've posted in the last year might have remained stray stubs of thought rattling around my head along with random baseball statistics and grocery lists. Instead, they're here. I'm here. You're here.
One of the themes of the conference was legacy. The Friday keynote speaker, Brad Meltzer noted that your résumé fades after you die, your legacy is determined on the impact you have on the people around you. He's right, but I think there's room for both. The dad bloggers group is part of Oren Miller's résumé. It's also an artifact of the impact he's had on the people around him. It feels weird to say, because I feel like I'm laying claim to something I don't really deserve, but I am part of Oren's legacy. Anything I accomplish as a blogger, any writing that reaches an audience as a result of this space has its roots in the dad bloggers group that he started. Without Oren there's no Interdisciplinary Life.
Someone asked the conference attendees what their one missed opportunity or one regret was about the conference was. I didn't answer because I still felt too unworthy to say it publicly. Claiming a little piece of Oren's legacy felt like I might be trying to take it from the people who really knew him. It made me feel like a poser. My biggest regret is that I didn't write this post in the Oren Miller tribute book that was going around the conference, and was later presented to Oren's wife Beth. My biggest missed opportunity was being too afraid to approach Beth after her heart wrenching reading of a letter that Oren had written to himself several years before. I didn't have the confidence to approach her and tell her that even though I never knew Oren, that I owed him, and her, a debt of gratitude.
I understand now that by appreciating the community he built, by taking a place with those he brought together, I can never take anything from those who loved him. If anything, I hope they see his legacy being amplified. It still feels weird to write this.
For every action, there is an equal chance your sister will run screaming to tell on you.
"The scientific method is an ongoing process,
which usually begins with observations about the natural world. Human
beings are naturally inquisitive, so they often come up with questions
about things they see or hear and often develop ideas (hypotheses) about
why things are the way they are." -Wikipedia (the source of all the combined scientific knowledge in the world)
Maria Montessori noted that, "children are like little scientists." It's true. For my kids though they're like little scientists who would be on a senate climate change panel. They are ignorant of, ignore, or misinterpret all previously available science in favor of their own observations.
The quotes below are just from this morning.
Buddy:
"It's chilly, I'm going to turn the light off because lighter things reflect heat and are cooler and darker things are warmer."
Lou:
"That's 6 pies? How can you tell?"
"Because that's how many inches it is"
"When I close my eyes I can still see, it's just that all I see is black." "Did you know giants are made by people? Not 'fi fie fo fum' giants. Like, stop lights."
"I'm eating atoms."
"You know what's funny about talking? You just have to move your mouth
in the way you say the words. Unless you're talking to yourself"
"Daddy, what do I sound like? Because when I see a video I don't talk like me."
OK, so some of them are spot on. I love them when they have a little bit of knowledge. It's entertaining for me, and eventually educational for them.
What observations do your kids make about the world? Let me know in the comments.
I've seen this picture (and many like it) floating around the internet for a while now, and I bet you have also. It's fine. I don't personally ascribe to the assertions, but I get it. I do. I do think that if you invite people over and then let your dog act like an asshole you're a poor host, but that's me. If this is really your stance, I'm fine with it. The thing that gets me is that the people I see post this stuff on social media are often the people who refer to their dogs as children. They call them "fur babies" or "my kids" or whatever other manner of silliness that equates owning a dog to being a parent.
Oh man, I hope I applied to enough good preschools
This has bothered me for a long time. It's been at least seven years, maybe more. It's been so long that I've had this post sitting here as a draft for at least a year. I haven't been able to write it though because so many of my friends seem to hold this belief. Look, I'm going to say this straight out: your dog is not a baby. Your dog. Is not. A baby. It's not. It's not even close. Yes, you love your dog. You love your dog a lot. You love your dog more than you've ever loved any human. That's fine. You say you love your dog as much as I love my kids. That's asinine. I have dogs. I love them. Before I had kids I indulged the dogs. We had an awesome time. I know what it's like to have dogs and no kids. I love my little furry friends, but even before having kids I knew I wasn't parenting my dogs. First of all, they were two-years-old when we got them, so they were basically adults. Second, they're dogs.
"You're home!"
The real issue is one of actual responsibility. Sure, there are some similarities. Both parents and owners have to keep their charges fed and clean up poop. Dog owners have to occasionally worry about getting a sitter. Both worry about proper socialization behavior. Both need regular doctor visits and can't brush their own teeth. You can't leave either in a car while you're shopping. That's where similarities end.
"OK, I left some water. See you when I get back"
I can leave my dogs home alone for a few hours while I go to work or run errands. Can't do that with a baby. In some states you can't do that with a kid until they're older (in human years) than many dogs will ever get to be. When it comes to Tater Tot and Saracen, I'm not worried about the long term psychological effects of bullying or the public school system . I don't think about what pressures society might put on my dogs vis-a-vis their gender identities. I have no anxiety at all regarding what my dogs will do after high school. I'm not worried that we're not saving enough to help them get through college. I never think about what I'd do if my dogs faced a tough job market. I'm not worried about my dogs hitting puberty, because it's socially
acceptable for me to sterilize them. No fears of unwanted pregnancy
here. On the other hand, had they not been rescues I could have arranged
breeding for them. That's frowned upon with American children. Besides,
my dogs have each other. They're best friends. I worry about my kids
starting to date and how I'll handle those early relationships that I
know are going to end in tears. I worry about what kind of example I'm
setting for the kids in how I interact within my own marriage. I worry
that they'll be hurt, that they'll be damaged. I don't really have those
concerns for the dogs.
Spinsters
But the main problem is that if I had a list like the one above you'd all think I was a horrible parent. Let's recap, but imagine it's my three kids we're talking about.
1. I live here, you don't. 2. Sniff test is mandatory 3. If you don't want jam on your clothes stay off the furniture. 4. Chances are my parents like me more than they like you. 5. To most people I may be an obnoxious spoiled child, but to my parents I'm an angel who can do no wrong. 6. If you're nice to me...well, no promises.
So no. You're dog is not like a kid. Because there are people who support you letting your dog act like a brat.
I'm not really sure how I got here. Seriously, it's weird. OK, I know how I physically got to where I am. It's not hard, I'm sitting in my "office." (OK, it's a TV tray and a folding chair in a corner of my bedroom, but it's what I've got.) What I mean is, when I look back to who I was twenty years ago, or even twelve months ago, I don't know how I got to this point in my life.
This past weekend I headed off to my first Dad 2.0 Summit. It's a conference for dad bloggers. At this time last year the site you're reading had been around for twelve years and had thirty posts since 2013. On Saturday I read to an audience of guys who get more views in a day than my most popular piece has had in two months. It's was certain to be a packed house, mostly because I went on five minutes before Michael Strahan of NFL fame and now the co-host of Live! With Kelly and Michael. I have business cards for my blog. I headed to a DC hotel to talk to other bloggers and sponsors about "the changing voice and perception of modern fatherhood." This is not where I expected to be. How did I get here? It's sort of the big question of my life. There are people who say you should pursue your dream no matter what. They say that you should never give up. They imply that if you quit on your dream you have some kind of moral deficiency. I disagree. I think there's a lot of value in giving up on a goal.
When I was three-years-old I was going to be a fireman. At age six I wanted to be a stay at home dad. From five to eighteen I was definitely going to be an actor. That was the dream. I didn't get into my first choice theater schools, and I realized the odds I was facing chasing a life on stage. I went for a back up. I became a sign language interpreter, a field I'd become aware of by accident when I joined Inner City Outings (now called, Inspiring Connections Outdoors), a Sierra Club group that took disadvantaged kids on wilderness trips. When I volunteered to be a white water rafting guide for ICO I had no idea that half of their members were Deaf. It took two years on the Dean's List to convince my family that interpreting was a real major. It took seven years to complete my B.A., working full time and taking community college courses for the first few years. Then I signed up for two more years and got a master's.
The truth is, I was such a lousy student in high school that no one should have expected me to go to college. My guidance counselor refused to meet with me. My mom told me that, "butlers make good money." As if I'd ever have the poise or patience for being a butler. No one had any faith in the idea that I'd do anything productive. I didn't give them any reason to. I had gone from being considered gifted and talented through 8th grade, to being a near drop out who managed to fail PE. Yet somehow I've made it this far.
I loved acting because I never wanted one job. I wanted every job. I wanted to do everything. I chose interpreting because it gave me something similar to acting. I still get to become other people every time I go to work. As an interpreter I've worked for almost every department in the Federal government. I've worked for a Major League Baseball team. I stood in front of 900,000 people at my hometown team's championship parade. I've been to China. I've worked in health care, education, law, tech, and even theater. That's the dream. I was re-watching The Office series finale recently on Netflix. At the end, Jim talks about his journey being at the company and how he never expected it to lead to anything. He ends up saying, "Everything I have I owe to this job." Like Jim, I also met my wife at work. (Thanks Obama Interpreting). Everything else that I've done has grown from there. T has been everything you could want in a supportive partner.
I was climbing the ladder at the company where we met when my mom died. T was one hundred percent behind the idea of ditching everything and moving home to be close to my brother, who was still in high school. Three years later, when I had a chance to pursue a PhD she was one hundred percent behind abandoning the life we'd built in California to come back to the east coast with a one-year-old and one on the way. The strength of our lives and the foundation of our relationship has been our flexibility. Our willingness to change our lives on the fly to pursue opportunities has always led to better opportunities. Everything I have accomplished I owe to her willingness to help make it all happen. It's a trait I try to repay when she pitches an idea for something she wants to do.
Now I'm here at this conference where I have been selected to read a post to a room full of bloggers. I'm here because T shared my dream of having one of us stay home. I'm here because T agreed that I should be the one to do it. I'm literally living the life I'd dreamed of as a kid.
I'm here because a member of another side project, Your Mom is so Berkeley (a joke between co-workers attracted 5,000 strangers who wanted make fun of my hometown), suggested I join a group of dad bloggers on Facebook. So I joined the group, got inspired, and wrote. Then something happened that hadn't happened for me before. If you look at the right hand column you'll see that this blog dates back to 2003, but it wasn't until last year that most of you started reading it. I never expected this. I can't figure out if it's weirder that I was there at this conference, or that some people actually recognized me.
OK, if you made it this far, thanks because it's basically been a weird list of how cool my life is. I do have a larger point.
My life has been very cool. I've played rugby in England because I met a guy at Kinkos who was printing recruiting flyers for a rugby team. I refereed a televised rugby game because I got hurt and couldn't leave the game behind so I picked up a whistle and a former teammate was able to assign me to a televised game.
My life has been this way because I've allowed myself to have multiple dreams. Though I've wanted to be different things at different times I've always been ready to seize the next opportunity. As I think more about it I realize that all I've really wanted in my life is to do cool things. It's meant giving up on some dreams. It's meant making sacrifices. But the thing that's carried me through, the thing that's made my life the amazing experience it's been, is that I've been willing to find happiness along many paths. I didn't get stuck on having one goal. I don't know where I'd be if I'd stuck with acting. I doubt I'd be making a living at it. I know that I would never have met T, my kids would be different kids.
It's OK to give up and shift gears. Don't limit yourself. It's OK to decide you want to do something else. Giving up is great. I encourage it. It's made me everything I am.
PS: As I was writing this post about how great my life is here and how much I love doing exactly what I'm doing T sent me a job posting for just about the only job that could get me to leave being a stay at home dad. It's back home in California. It would mean pulling the kids out of school and moving them across the country. It would mean T leaving a very good career. It would mean leaving the house we just bought this summer.
Are reboots really always worse then the originals? Do we only think that because they're now remaking movies we remember from our childhoods? Read on as I take you on a fake scientific journey into the mind of the modern American film viewer.
Introduction
It started as it always does, with an argument on Facebook. In March of last year I posted that I liked the Robocop reboot. This comment was met with great derision from friends and family alike. I often find myself alone when it comes to liking sci-fi movies and comedies. Not because my friends don't like sci-fi or comedies, but because my standards are pretty low sometimes. All I want is to be entertained for 90 minutes, usually while doing something else at the same time.
"DMJ: You can like it. You just can't claim that it was in any way A) necessary or B) better than the original
RS: Nothing ruins the original. If you like the original you can still watch that. I think both are interesting. I thought it was a different take on how they stripped him of his humanity, doing it over time instead of all at once. I don't think many remakes or reboots are necessary. And no, it's not better, it's different."
For a long time I maintained that the reason so many adults didn't like the Star Wars prequels was because they weren't eight-years-old when they saw them. My belief was that if you could control for nostalgia and age you would find that the second trilogy was just as good as the first. (My opinion on this has shifted with the release of Episode VII. I'm now just as bitter over the crappy prequels as the rest of you.) This logic led me to see if I could do just that.
Methodology
Like any worthwhile social scientist I decided to experiment on the people close to me. It turns out that my dear wife had not seen either Robocop movie before watching the reboot with me.
"RS: T is great because not only did she watch this with me last night (she hated it) but she's begrudgingly agreed to watch the original with me tonight. This is a great opportunity because she's never seen it, so she can determine if one or the other is better, worse, or just different, without the interference of expectation or childhood nostalgia.
AM: Yes!!!!! Best experiment ever. Please do a full write-up!"
Then T decided to taunt me by proving that having not seen Robocop in the 80s was perfectly normal (it's not). Instead she got me thinking that I could turn this into a full fledged (fake) scientific study. If you're not familiar, this is the kind of study I do as a linguist/general academic, but applied more haphazardly and without institutional review. So basically it's just like most of the crap research you read on Facebook. (I so FLS.)
"Science y'all!"
"RS: Dude, y'all. T inadvertently found me a pool of people who had never seen either movie. Some of them are agreeing to watch them both and then report back. Science y'all! Science!
T: OMG. This was supposed to be "See, I am not that unusual, plenty of people have never seen Robocop," not "Here you go, I found you some lab rats!"
So in full pseudo-science style I asked a pool of willing friends who had not yet seen either movie to watch both the original and the reboot within 72 hours. I counterbalanced the order they should watch them in to negate ordering effects. I asked them to answer four questions:
1. Was either one a "good" movie?
2. Was one better than the other, or were they just different?
3. Any other comments?
4. Can you fly Bobby?
Results
I had six respondents, five female, one male, all in their 30s. None of them had seen either Robocop movie prior to the experiment.
1. Was either one a "good" movie?
None of the respondents asserted firmly that either movie was good. Five of the six stated that the original was not good with just one saying, "I found both movies relatively entertaining." This respondent did not state relative to what standard. Other reviews of the original included,
1. "The 1987 version was decidedly bad."
2. "The original was so bad that pretty much anything would have been better."
3. "I give it an "F." How's that?"
A few respondents had positive comments about the reboot, though it still fell short of being a "good" movie. One respondent did give it a B while saying, "I was surprised by how much I actually liked the 2014 version. I wouldn't purchase it or anything crazy like that, but I would probably watch it again." Others noted:
1. "I would say 2014 was approaching good."
2. "The second one was actually pretty good but that could also be that watching it right after the first one skewed how good it seemed."
3. "I didn't think either movie was particularly good, but the remake was certainly more complex and was clearly trying harder."
2. Was one better than the other, or were they just different?
As noted above all of the respondents agreed that the 2014 version of the film was better. The reasons mostly dealt with issues of plot, gore, and character development. Respondents did not like the amount of blood in the original, and found the character development weaker. While many respondents noted that both films tried to address problems with mass media and sociopolitical issues of their times, they felt that the reboot did a better job connecting those issues with the plot of the film.
1. "2014 was better. The story was far more developed and cohesive; the emotional thru-line was existent, for one, and it had a more clear (though not totally clear) political POV. "
2. "The reboot was better. The original? I hated it. Hated it so much that I was a little bitter over the time I spent watching it when I could have been doing absolutely anything else. It was unnecessarily gory, had no discernible plot. It just...stopped. It just stopped at the end. I wasn't sad, but it was still pretty abrupt, like they ran out of red corn syrup and had to stop filming."
3. "Another big factor in why 2014 was better was Joel Kinnaman -- he's a solid actor and that makes a huge difference when you're dealing with cyborg characters. I liked that there was romance and a little sex in it, which, unlike the gore in 1987, wasn't gratuitous -- the bedroom scene served to underscore what Murphy lost when he became a cyborg."
4. "I didn't think one was much better than the other; I don't
think the original has passed the test of time very well, but I don't
think the reboot will either. They're both basically moral panic time
capsules."
There was one fantastic deconstruction of how the films are just different that is shared below in its entirety.
3. Any other comments?
This section primarily explored the themes of the two films and how they related to the sociopolitical issues of times in which they were made. Respondents also explored the differences between the films that related to aspects other than which was better, or whether either was "good."
1. "Several things popped up about race and culture, like how the reboot stated with middle eastern suicide bombing. I couldn't tell if the point was these were "good" guys standing against invasion by foreign rule via the robots or if they were just stereotyped middle eastern suicide bombers thrown in an American film. All the people of color were bad or secondary in the reboot. So there were more Black people in the reboot, but the one "good" guy, Alex's partner, is still just the partner and of course he gets shot. Then the Black female chief turns out corrupt. Still seems, in both films, it's the "strong white male" who saves the day. I feel like, in Detroit especially, it would have been more than believable to have Alex Murphy be an African American police officer. The original did have the female partner and there were no real strong female characters in the reboot, the wife just plays the wife. I even thought that Dr Norton could have been female or a person of color, but nope, still a white guy. It just struck me that both films were "white guys have all the power and money" kind of movies. I am glad I have seen them and see why the original was so popular even though the blood was a bit much for me."
2. "The original relied on a fairly simple plot structure and more gratuitous violence, while the remake presented itself as a more serious drama. It seemed to be sort of drinking from the same cup as the Manchurian Candidate remake, but with less to work with.
Other differences I noticed: The reboot was overall much more heavy-handed and delved into more explicit detail on issues that were only touched on in the original (like unethical experimentation on human subjects). The reboot relied much more heavily on the family, on the importance of emotion, and on neuro-chemical determinism (although with some degree of not quite knowing what to do with neuro-chemical determinism). The emphasis is on the limits of technology and the importance of human relationships and neuro-chemistry (to what end, I'm not sure), while the original more straightforwardly depicts technology as an improvement on human abilities. Conversely, the original was much more heavy-handed about the soulless villainy of both street criminals and weapon manufacturers, so it might even out.
Actually the reboot seemed to scrap all of the criminal-gang plot and replace it with family drama and science angst, which seems like a wise choice, since when watching the original, all of the criminals' scenes had me thinking "Why am I supposed to care about this? Oh, right, because it's an "80s Street Crime Moral Panic Movie." The use of news show intervals in both movies was also somewhat different; in the reboot they were a sort of expositional device, while in the original they were some sort of meta-commentary thing that's very of its time and wouldn't carry over to a current audience that well."
4. Can you fly Bobby?
Only one respondent answered this question, which was disappointing. "No, but Kurtwood Smith's performance was one of the few decent things about the original."
Conclusion
When controlling for nostalgia remakes can be held as being better than the original films. Remakes can achieve their goal of bringing an older story to a new audience by effectively updating the peripheral aspects of the narrative to better resonate with modern film goers. This study provides a small toe hold for the notion that the poo-pooing of remakes may well be the purview of nostalgic fanboys.
Limitations
This study had several limitations. The sample size was small. The participant pool was heavily skewed towards one gender. All of the respondents were in their thirties. This study used only one film and its remake as source material. This study could be expanded to include more, and more varied participants in order to give a more holistic picture of how movie goers juxtapose original works and their remakes.
Other valid questions brought up by reviewers of this project include, "If you're controlling for nostalgia, are you also doing anything to control for advances in film making technology in the last 20 years?" And, " It's a fake academic paper. You have three children, right? How do you have this kind of time on your hands?"
To the first question the answer is, no. However, few of the comments from respondents included commentary on things like special effects or other aspects of film making that have advanced. One participant specifically noted that they were discounting those differences in their analysis.
To the second question, um...I don't really. But here we are.
Appendix: Participant's Deconstruction of How the Movies are Just Different
Overall I think they are very different films with different motivations as far as their place within the culture and era during which they were released. I felt like the reboot had more planned propaganda dealing with the USA and its global role and the problems many of us see with America playing "daddy" to the world with our troops in way too many places. The Pat Novak character was sort of the voice of this issue. There is also more of a sense of the issues presented in "1984" and the ethics of robotics and their role in a human world. I found the Novak scenes a little odd.
The original was very much an "80's" film to me with the language (could they say "fuck" more? Called each other "buddy" and "mister" in a way that was comical) and gore/violence that was noticeably absent in the reboot. It didn't seem to have as big of an agenda, but more reminded me of a comic-book-turned-movie sort of film. The killing and shooting of people was gross to me - from the first time the ED 209 kills that office guy when it glitches near the beginning - bleck! And how Alex is injured is so much more gruesome in the original. The acting of the "bad guys" is almost comical with the forced laughs and loud declarations of much of what they say. It seemed more a film to just entertain with 80's language and violence, which seemed more prevalent in films then (Terminator, etc). I liked that as far as its seeming intent, but it was just so much shooting and blood. I did also like that Robocop didn't know he was Alex and part of the plot was him figuring that out. I suspect, if I had seen the original when I was young, I would have been irritated by how the reboot didn't do this.
There was the idea of corporate greed that I think was a part of 80's politics more than some of the global issues that are more focused on now. I missed Alex having someone that was "there" for him in the original - like Dr. Norton in the reboot. I didn't like nor dislike his female partner in the original. I just didn't buy their relationship so her being the one human that helped him at the end had kind of an "eh" factor to me. In both films, I didn't like how no one explained what was going on to Alex when he was first "turned on" as a robot. I felt, in the reboot, that scene was less than believable because they just turned him on and unlocked him and let him go without explaining what had happened. I did like in the original how the audience got to see from the robot's perspective as he was created and turned on.
So they were just really different to me. I liked less 80's gore in the reboot (and less of the word fuck to be honest). Novak's string of expletives at the end seems to show his zeal for using robotics and anger that it wasn't happening. But then he supports America even as Americans have denied what he obviously wants. So it seemed contradictory - his desire for robotics with his undying devotion to America
