[COLUMN] In Apple's Cape Fear, Nostalgia Comes For Us All | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers through the seventh episode of the remake of Cape Fear that is now streaming on Apple TV. Given that the show is quite driven by its various twists, it’s worth flagging that upfront. If you’re looking for a quick review, the show is frustrating. It has a lot going for it - a game cast, genuine nastiness, a really good Southern Gothic vibe - but also suffers from the classic “this meeting could have been a memo” and the "overreliance on nostalgia” issues that affects streaming adaptations. It starts very well and it ends well enough, but gets quite lost in the middle. So, consider yourself warned. Otherwise, there’s nothing to fear.

Much has been written about what might be termed “the culture of nostalgia.”

Modern pop culture has grown increasingly backwards-looking. Obviously, nostalgia was always a thing. Sequels and remakes always existed. They have been part of literature, film and television since the very dawn of time. However, it does feel like, in recent decades, the trend has accelerated to the point that it has become all-consuming. It is inescapable. It is not just a part of culture, it is culture itself.

In 1990, only a single direct sequel (Die Hard 2) made the worldwide box office top ten, with another indirect sequel (The Hunt for Red October) in the mix. In contrast, last year, only two movies in the global top ten (A Minecraft Movie and F1: The Movie) were not sequels, reboots or remakes. It is a very definite trend, and it is only getting more pronounced. It is the broader culture that feeds into trends like generative artificial intelligence, built around regurgitating existing material.

It is common to talk about this “culture of nostalgia” in the context of genre media and beloved existing properties. This makes sense, as a lot of the more expensive and higher profile examples of it are within these established frameworks. The Force Awakens brought back the primary cast of the original Star Wars, leading to streaming shows built around revisiting existing characters like The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

However, while the gigantic trailers for Avengers: Doomsday ominously promising that “Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) will return” are the most visible manifestation of how pop culture’ gaze has, to borrow an observation from Grant Morrison, “turned inwards and gone septic like a toenail”, the trend is much larger than that. This has been evident for quite a while now, in objects like the Fraser and Night Court sequel series or the mining of horror franchises like Halloween or Scream for nostalgia.

However, this diversification and ubiquity of nostalgia has come to feel particularly pronounced in recent years. Nostalgia is coming for everybody, even audiences not traditionally served within these massive franchise frameworks. For example, April saw the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, a twenty-year-later sequel to a beloved woman-centric franchise that has already outgrossed every Marvel film of last year at the global box office.

It has also been slowly happening within the prestige television space. In recent years, HBO has been fully integrated into the franchise-manufacturing pipeline of Warner Bros. Discovery, producing tie-in shows like The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy alongside spin-offs from its own brands like True Detective: Night Country. HBO even produced films tying into their beloved classic shows, like Deadwood or The Many Saints of Newark.

It seems that Hollywood has cultivated a nostalgia for more than just the media that audiences enjoyed as children. In recent years, there has been a very interesting trend towards leaning into nostalgia for movies and properties aimed at adults. In particular, there has been a wave of lavish and expensive streaming reconceptualizations of mid-budget films from the 1980s and 1990s, reworked as extended miniseries and even multi-season series.

Paramount+ and its subsidiary Showtime, for example, hosted both a remake of American Gigolo starring Jon Bernthal and a reimagining of Fatal Attraction starring Joshua Jackson and Lizzy Caplan. Apple TV has reworked Presumed Innocent as a seasonal anthology show and ran a two-season take on The Mosquito Coast starring Justin Theroux, readapting the novel written by his uncle Paul Theroux. It is quite strange to think of these properties as having “name recognition.”

Cape Fear is the latest example of this trend, a ten-episode premium miniseries on Apple TV, starring Amy Adams, Javier Bardem and Patrick Wilson. Of course, Cape Fear demonstrates that remakes are not a new phenomenon. The series is very heavily drawing from Martin Scorsese’s 1991 thriller, which was itself a remake of a 1962 film of the same name directed by James R. Webb, adapting the 1957 novel The Executioners, written by John D. MacDonald. It’s all a cultural ouroboros.

Still, much like Scorsese’s Color of Money stood out for being a “legacyquel” to The Hustler decades before the trend would become pronounced enough to merit its own label, Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear felt like the exception rather than the rule. Scorsese produced the film in the middle of a run that included Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino and Kundun. He famously swapped it with Spielberg, allowing Spielberg to make Schindler’s List.

Of course, remakes and sequels are not inherently bad. They can serve a purpose. By virtue of its position in the middle of one the great all-timer runs in the history of cinema, Scorsese’s Cape Fear is often overlooked or dismissed. However, it does make something of an argument for its own existence, with Scorsese taking advantage of the fact that he was making the film in the 1990s to render a lot of the subtext of the 1960s original as explicit, horrifying, unsettling text.

Part of what is frustrating about the Apple TV remake of Cape Fear is that it does not really seem to have a similar justification or purpose behind it. There is the twist of gender-flipping the main character, with Amy Adams stepping into the role of the harassed defense attorney played in earlier adaptations by Nick Nolte or Gregory Peck. And, to give the show some credit, it does weave that transformation into the plot and the structure of the season.

There are occasional moments where the series threatens to hit a contemporary nerve, with a heavier emphasis on the class dynamics of the wealthy Anna (Adams) and Tom Bowden (Wilson) locked in a tug-of-war with the more working class Max Cady (Bardem). There is a sense of the inherent hypocrisy of Anna and Tom as “country club liberals” who congratulate themselves for being crusaders of moral virtue while living opulent lives.

“There aren’t the same rules for everybody,” Anna reprimands her daughter Natalie (Lily Collias) in the family’s first scene, when Natalie uses a swearword she just heard her mother employ. In that same sequence, Anna takes a moment to appreciate the beautiful hermetically-sealed bubble that she and Tom have created from themselves, far away from any past sin. “You ever look around and wonder if we deserve all this?” Anna asks, which feels like a loadbearing question. Tom replies, “No.”

However, a lot of the modernity that creeps in around the edges of Cape Fear feels like it is chasing trends. The Bowden family find themselves terrorized by deepfakes and catfishing, which is often employed in ways that feel quite similar to the weird Yoruba rituals that Cady has adopted and weaponized against his enemy. These are often tools to stretch the pulpy thriller from a tight two hours across a full ten episodes.

The show is permeated with nostalgia. This is not necessarily a problem of itself; Scorsese employed a lot of nostalgia in his own remake, recycling the Bernard Herrmann score and bringing back actors Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck for playful cameos. However, stretched across ten episodes, it becomes distracting. The show also borrows Herrmann’s classic theme, using it almost to the point of parody. It features its own riff on iconic scenes from the 1991 film, such as a cinema confrontation.

The fourth episode ends with the reveal that this version of Max has his own stalker, a mysterious masked woman who turns out to be his sister, played by Juliette Lewis, returning from Scorsese’s earlier remake. This gets at the biggest problem with Cape Fear. This is a concept perfectly tailored to a two-hour film. It doesn’t stretch well across a bloated ten-episode season. The streaming version of Cape Fear is most compelling at the start and towards the end, less so in the flabby middle.

In some ways, this is a problem with doing Cape Fear as a nostalgic remake, a show built on the expectation that it will retain a lot of the structure and shape of the original film. That structure does not lend itself to an extended ten-episode season, and so the middle stretch of the show has to try to figure out how to draw out Cady’s campaign of terror while still hewing close to the basic outline of the source material.

Some of the ideas aren’t bad. This is a story about a lawyer being haunted by the sins of their past, so there is something clever in deepening the narrative scope by exploring generational trauma, with Max clearly traumatized by his abusive father (Ron Perlman) and Anna trying to escape her own deadbeat dad (Ted Levine). Still, at a certain point this descends into absurdity, with the reveal that Max has his own daughter (Malia Pyles) serving as “a Trojan horse” to infiltrate the Bowden family.

Giving Max a daughter and a stalker sister feels like the sort of nonsense necessary to help the series reach a predetermined runtime. They feel like the most straightforward ideas to graft on to the premise without having to make any more fundamental changes. The shape of the story would remain largely the same if either character were trimmed. While each serves to expand on the show’s core themes in incremental ways, they also eat up a lot of screentime relative to that value.

Cape Fear is a pulpy thriller, and any version of the story relies on contrivance and suspension of disbelief to keep the target characters vulnerable as Cady wages his siege. However, it’s very difficult to maintain that suspension of disbelief across ten episodes and over multiple weeks of watching. A pot can only convincingly simmer for so long before it boils over, and the streaming adaptation suffers because it has to spend five episodes maintaining a level of tension through contrivance.

So it starts to feel a little convenient that Cady has adopted a religion, “one he created himself”, and is using the drug scopolamine derived from nausea medication to “brainwash” others into compliance. It starts to feel a little absurd when Anna and Tom’s son Zack (Joe Anders) is dosed and programmed to spike the family’s ice tea with the LSD that Tom has been using to microdose. There is a lot of that sort of nonsense in an effort to drag the narrative out to fill the pre-determined space.

Yet there are enough elements here that work. Bardem, Adams and Wilson are all really good in their roles, doing a lot to hold the show together through sheer force of will. There is some nice imagery, such as a sequence of Tom chasing Cady’s daughter through the drywall of the house, literally demolishing the Bowden family home in a very visual expression of the show’s central themes. The series also commits full-throatedly to its Southern Gothic sensibility, to the point that several key beats might make Edgar Allen Poe blush.

There is enough interesting material here to wish that the show were more confident in its own identity, that it were willing to push further from the source material that it is remaking. A lot of the bigger and weirder swings in the middle stretch of the season feel like the series is spinning its whiles in intervals between the next time that it can cue up Hermann’s incredible theme or make the next overt visual reference to Scorsese’s film.

Then again, perhaps it is appropriate that – like its protagonists – Cape Fear cannot escape its own past.