Prequels, Sequels And Spinoffs — Why We Don’t Let Stories End Anymore

-Essay-

TURIN — Italian author Enrico Brizzi has announced the sequel to Jack Frusciante Has Left the Band 30 years later, which of course it is entirely legitimate. It was also legitimate for American author Stephen King to write Doctor Sleep 36 years after The Shining, and for Canadian author Margaret Atwood to publish Testaments 34 years after The Handmaid’s Tale.

Writers live with the ghosts of their characters. And ghosts have an irritating habit of demanding attention long after they first appear. The problem is not the writer’s but ours: we who read or watch movies and series and do not resign ourselves to the fact that stories end.

A few years ago, Italian author Gennaro Sasso, a fine philosopher and Dante scholar, noted an implied but central apocalyptic reading of “Divine Comedy”: for the Italian poet, the story was in a sense already over when he was writing it. Yet for us, no story ends — just as in our imagination, we do not end.

A beautiful game

It is not just a matter of affection for the characters in a novel or movie. Fan writers (fans who rewrite and reinterpret a beloved tale) continue the story to appropriate it. And this is not new. Orlando Paladin, the opera by Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, began as the protagonist of the French anonymous poem “Song of Roland,” which has been retold countless times (including in two very similar Italian poems: Boiardo’s “Orlando in Love” and Ariosto’s “Orlando furioso”).

Since then, the Janeites have reimagined Jane Austen’s stories. And they are still prolific, creating versions with zombies and a noir version by the English mystery writer P.D. James. The affair of “Pygmalion” went from Greek mythology, to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, to the 1964 American musical My Fair Lady.

Countless Star Wars fans know perfectly from the endless prequels, sequels and spin-offs.

And there is nothing wrong with that, as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek suggested a decade ago: Why shouldn’t we rewrite classic masterpieces by adding, without changing the explicit content, detailed descriptions of sexual activities, underlying power relations and so on? Or, why shouldn’t we simply retell the story from another perspective, as the Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard did by rewriting Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the point of view of two minor characters (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”)?

The great American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury was enraptured, asking us to imagine our favorite novels by Kipling, Dickens, Wilde, Shaw or Poe brought back to life 30 years from now. What unintended changes would they undergo? Would Poe’s Usher collapse only to rise again? Would The Great Gatsby do 20 laps around the pool? Would Cathy of Wuthering Heights rush to Heathcliff’s cry from under the snow?

It’s a game, and it’s beautiful. But to require an official sequel is a bit different. As countless Star Wars fans know perfectly from the endless prequels, sequels and spin-offs. After all, Indiana Jones is always ready to retrieve his whip and hat, and Marvel heroes will continue to fight for our great-great-grandchildren.

In an age of light, a darkness rises.On June 4, don’t miss the two-episode premiere of #TheAcolyte, a Star Wars Original series, only on Disney+.

Sequels have become a must

As for novels, I discovered American writer Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett in 1991. The sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind answers all of readers’ questions, as one might surmise, returning Scarlett O’Hara to Ireland, to a new motherhood and, above all, to the arms of Rhett Butler.

After his 1963 novel The Graduate, American author Charles Webb imagined Ben and Elaine married and with offspring in the 2007 sequel Home School. And Ira Levin, American author the 1967 horror novel Rosemary’s Baby, produced the very ugly Son of Rosemary in 1997, with Andy, the unwitting Antichrist, reaching the fatal age of 33.

Yet today it is even worse. We do not resign ourselves to a TV series ending without a second season, and a third, and a fourth, and so on. We are unable to let go of the characters we loved, and we just don’t stop at dreaming or writing fan fiction that prolongs the dream. We want more.

We have lost the sense of the end.

In some cases we settle for epigones. That happened in the late 1990s when, after Harry Potter’s unexpected and mind-blowing success, literary siblings flourished from Artemis Fowl to Eragon. Small stuff, when we think about it now; today, our taste for series is embedded, sequels have become a must.

We have lost the sense of the end. A quarter of a century ago, Paolo Fabbri, the incomparable intellectual and exquisite semiotician, told me that we had a problem with the apocalypse: we know that the end of the world is necessary for a new one to be reborn, but we deny it. In fact, we exclude it.

“Contemporary culture is extraordinary,” he wrote, “It does not care about its own beginning (leading scholars to question what is called the loss of meaning of history). It does not care about the end. It removes the apocalypse. This means that the apocalypse, itself has no end. We should then change its name. Let’s call it hypercalypse.”

Hypercalyptic and integrated as we are, we want an encore. And we don’t care how long we have to wait.