New Wine in Old Bottles

Voice is choice when it comes to retelling old stories

Photo by Clément Bergey on Unsplash

I’ve had a phrase on repeat, lately—in my head but also out loud to anyone within earshot. It goes like this:

There are no new stories under the sun.

But there are always new voices to tell any story.

The ideas behind this assertion are fascinating, which is why I keep bringing it into conversations. (So annoying, I know!)

This is Part 1 of a two-part essay about the writer’s voice. I’m offering context here about how voice functions in specific pieces of popular culture. In Part 2, I’ll reflect on how voice affects our choices and our preoccupations as we’re writing fiction.

I recently watched a TV series and a film, both remakes of decades-old material, and was struck once again by the power of voice to transform an old story into something new and fresh, carrying an emotional resonance all its own.

Voice really is choice.

The first piece I watched is The Amateur, the 1981 Canadian spy thriller that itself is based on a novel and is the basis for the 2025 film of the same name, starring Remi Malek as the anti-hero, Charles Heller. I haven’t seen the new film yet, but when the old one popped up on a streaming service, I grabbed it so I’d be able to compare the two.

Here’s the logline for the 1981 film:

After the wife of a CIA analyst is murdered by terrorists, he blackmails his superiors into sending him on a field assignment to Czechoslovakia to assassinate her killers, only to discover a deeper conspiracy.

This summary is true to the film, a large portion of which takes place in a dreary, gray Czechoslovakia (or what passed for it). I found the film to be inexplicably flat, sluggishly paced, and containing gaps in continuity that destroyed any suspension of disbelief. It was hard to care about any of it.

Roger Ebert nailed it in his two-star review, calling it “a routine, even laughable, spy thriller.”

Here’s the logline for the recent remake:

When his supervisors at the CIA refuse to take action after his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack, a decoder takes matters into his own hands. He turns his intelligence expertise into a weapon, embarking on a dangerous mission of revenge.

Notice how there’s no mention of the Czech Republic. This film isn’t about a place, it’s about one person’s response to difficult circumstances. Charlie’s profession—that of decoder—is emphasized (it’s true in both films), and we’re told explicitly that he will weaponize his expertise. Moreover, it’s clear this is a revenge movie, whereas the original film hints at a broader conspiracy of some sort that seemingly sidelines the revenge motive.

These are not trivial distinctions. They reflect deliberate decisions to re-voice the story, to shift its center of gravity in terms of the stakes and what matters both to the protagonist and the audience.

Interestingly, given today’s easy lean into graphic violence, I believe the new film ends with Heller sending his wife’s assassin into the arms of the law, whereas in the original, Heller shoots him outright.

This choice suggests that the Malek version seeks to preserve a sense of the man’s integrity, perhaps his inner goodness, whereas the original is more interested in what I’ll call “masculine completion,” where the protagonist must kill in order to preserve his integrity as a man avenging not just his wife but his country.

You could say cultural shifts are responsible for such choices. But so too is the creative team’s voice: How they choose to tell the story, to frame it, to contextualize the main characters, very much affects the film’s ethos—and determines what the viewer takes away from the work as a whole.

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The other fascinating example of how voice shapes an old story involves Tina Fey’s new remake of Alan Alda’s The Four Seasons, also from 1981. Here’s the original’s logline:

A close-knit group of three couples navigates the complexities of marriage and friendship as they take four vacations together, each season, and one of them divorces, forcing everyone to examine their relationships. One of the couples divorces and the man brings a much younger woman on the next trips, causing tension within the group.

And the current version:

A group of college friends, now in their 50s, gather for their annual holiday reunion, only to find that their carefully constructed lives are tested by unexpected events and the changing dynamics of their relationships.

While the newer logline is a bit more elegant, these are basically getting at the same story. But the remake offers some profound changes in how the story unfolds that reflect very specific decisions about the story’s overall voice.

Three alterations are particularly striking. (That one of the couples is gay in the current version hardly bears mention, as that’s such an obvious update.)

First, where the Alda version leans into relatively superficial witty banter, the new version largely avoids that artifice, giving room for the characters to speak in more emotionally authentic voices. They feel real and their vulnerabilities do too. These voices are, quite literally, remaking the story in their own image.

Second, the new version adds the death of a main character and that unexpected development acts as a powerful catalyst on the other characters’ need to self-reflect and change. This pushes the envelope, in terms of stakes, into deeper territory than the original.

Third, the pregnancy of the “younger woman” (a main character’s post-divorce girlfriend) is used as a plot twist to drive a wedge between characters in the original. In the remake, the pregnancy is announced in the film’s final moments as a way to bring everyone closer.

Alda used his voice to write a contemporary comedy of manners for the upper-middle-class white people who were viewed as the face of American culture at that time (erroneously so, but that’s another story)—and who enjoyed not becoming too upset.

Fey and her co-writers want more: They want to voice a story that doesn’t shy away from life’s messy undercurrents, the existential angst of modern living, and so they deliberately eschew broad comedy in favor of something a shade darker.

I suppose that every piece of art, in every form, represents the artist’s voice in some way—whether overtly or quite subtly. Even if that’s true, we have many choices when it comes to shaping how our voice is reflected in our work.

Stay tuned for Part 2 for more on that theme.

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WRANGLING THE DOUBT MONSTER: FIGHTING FEARS, FINDING INSPIRATION

“A compassionate truth bomb on every page.”

--Stacy Frazier, Write it Scared podcast

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