Completely original

Within the first chapter of Austin Kleon’s book ‘Steal like an artist’ he states:

“All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”

To expound on these two sentences let’s look at the movie ‘Shrek’.

An extremely popular children’s film that took the world by storm and spawned three sequels.

Now ‘Shrek’ is not completely original.

It contains characters we all known well (Snow white, Pinocchio, the 3 blind mice and the gingerbread man).

It holds lines that are nods to other stories (“that’ll do donkey, that’ll do” & “He huffed and he puffed and he sent an eviction notice”).

The instrumental music might be original but the pop songs are certainly not (‘Bad reputation’ by Half Cocked)

And to bring our list to a close Lord Farquad has employees who hold up reaction cards like a studio would do when filming a TV show.

But ‘Shrek’s references are easy to spot.

What about a film I thought up until very recently to be completely original?

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’.

Now I thought this movie was wholly unique because I had a never seen anything like it.

But film buffs on the internet have.

In the below video ‘The Royal Ocean Film Society’ categorically prove that ‘Inception’ is not completely original.

https://youtu.be/hc3qcfzHvnk

They show how similarities can be seen between ‘Inception’ and movies like ‘Paprika’, ‘Dark City’, ‘Last Year on Marienbad’ and ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’.

The ‘No art is 100% unique’ theory is starting to look more like an iron clad law now.

Which is very empowering for the creative!

If no creative work is completely original then that frees you up from the torture of trying to think outside the box.

Stay inside the box and remix, reuse and recycle!