The Eradication of Memory: Film Adaptations and Algorithms of the Digital

Abstract

This article analyzes how film adaptations and remakes exemplify and illustrate what the authors argue have recently emerged as two dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding cultural representation and digital information organization: an accelerated techno-historical forgetfulness, or an increasingly rapid cultural half-life of ideas, and theories of database logic and practices of digitally networked search culture. Discussing these frameworks with respect to film adaptation and remake theory and history, we draw on the global phenomenon of Stieg Larsson’s crime-fiction Millennium trilogy and especially the two film versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , by Niels Arden Oplev (2009) and David Fincher (2011), respectively.