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Jess-Cooke

Second Takes
Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel
Critical Approaches

Edited by
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Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis

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Second Takes
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Also in the series

William Rothman, editor, Cavell on Film

J. David Slocum, editor, Rebel Without a Cause

Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema

Kirsten Moana Thompson, Apocalyptic Dread

Frances Gateward, editor, Seoul Searching

Michael Atkinson, editor, Exile Cinema

Bert Cardullo, Soundings on Cinema

Paul S. Moore, Now Playing

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann,

Ecology and Popular Film

William Rothman, editor, Three Documentary Filmmakers

Sean Griffin, editor, Hetero

Jean-Michel Frodon, editor, Cinema and the Shoah

copyright law.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable
copyright law.

and
.

Edited by
Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Constantine Verevis
Second Takes
Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Cover image: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Gore Verbinski, 2007).
Courtesy Walt Disney/The Kobal Collection/Mountain, Peter.

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2010 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic,
electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Production by Eileen Meehan

Marketing by Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Second takes : critical approaches to the film sequel / edited by

Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, horizons of cinema)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3029-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3030-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Film sequels. I. Jess-Cooke, Carolyn, 1978– II. Verevis, Constantine.

PN1995.9.S29S84 2010
791.43'75—dc22 2009022995

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
copyright law.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable
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—CV

.
—CJC

Manny & Maxie, Milli & Monti)

and my son Phoenix, with much love

For Julie, Zoi, Mia (and the M&Ms:

For my husband Jared, my daughter Melody,
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable
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Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1
Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis

1. Redefining the Sequel: The Case of the (Living) Dead 11

Constantine Verevis

2. Of “True” Sequels: The Four Daughters Movies,

or the Series That Wasn’t 31
Jennifer Forrest

3. Sequel-Ready Fiction: After Austen’s Happily Ever After 45

Thomas Leitch

4. Before and After, Before Before and After:

Godfather I, II, and III 65
R. Barton Palmer

5. Sequelizing Hollywood: The American “Smart” Film 87

Claire Perkins

6. From Remake to Sequel: Ocean’s Eleven and

Ocean’s Twelve 105
Joyce Goggin
copyright law.

vii
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

viii Contents

7. Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection: Serenity,

Mourning, and Sequels to Dead Television Shows 121
Ina Rae Hark

8. Prequel: The “Afterwardsness” of the Sequel 139

Paul Sutton

9. Circulations: Technology and Discourse in

The Ring Intertext 153
Daniel Herbert

10. Sequelizing the Superhero: Postmillennial Anxiety and

Cultural “Need” 171
Simon McEnteggart

11. Before and After and Right Now: Sequels in the

Digital Era 191
Nicholas Rombes

12. Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom:

The Case of Pirates of the Caribbean, Or, How a
Theme-Park Attraction Spawned a Multibillion-Dollar
Film Franchise 205
Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Works Cited 225

List of Contributors 243

Index 245
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Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Illustrations

Figure I.1. Live Free or Die Hard (aka Die Hard 4.0;
Len Wiseman, 2007). Courtesy 20th Century Fox/
The Kobal Collection/Masi, Frank. 2
Figure 1.1. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero,
1968). Courtesy Image Ten/The Kobal Collection. 12
Figure 1.2. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978).
Courtesy United Film/The Kobal Collection. 19
Figure 2.1. Four Mothers (William Keighley, 1941).
Courtesy Warner Bros/The Kobal Collection. 32
Figure 3.1. Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maquire, 2001).
Courtesy Miramax/Universal/The Kobal
Collection/Bailey, Alex. 46
Figure 4.1. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola,
1974). Courtesy Paramount/The Kobal Collection. 66
Figure 5.1. Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971). Courtesy
Warner Bros/The Kobal Collection. 88
Figure 5.2. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach 2005).
Courtesy Samuel Goldwyn Films/The Kobal
Collection. 97
Figure 6.1. Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001). Courtesy
Warner Bros/The Kobal Collection/Marshak, Bob. 106
Figure 7.1. Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005). Courtesy Universal
Studios/The Kobal Collection. 122
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ix
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

x Illustrations

Figure 8.1. Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005). Courtesy

Warner Bros./D.C. Comics/The Kobal Collection/
James, David. 140
Figure 9.1. Ringu/Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998). Courtesy Omega/
Kadokawa/The Kobal Collection. 154
Figure 9.2. The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002). Courtesy
Dreamworks/The Kobal Collection/Morton,
Merrick. 160
Figure 10.1. Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006). Courtesy
Warner Bros/D.C. Comics/The Kobal Collection. 172
Figure 10.2. X-Men: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006).
Courtesy 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection. 178
Figure 11.1. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986). Courtesy 20th
Century Fox/The Kobal Collection. 192
Figure 12.1. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
(Gore Verbinski, 2003). Courtesy Walt Disney
Pictures/The Kobal Collection. 206
Figure 12.2 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Gore
Verbinski, 2007). Courtesy Walt Disney/
The Kobal Collection/Mountain, Peter. 213
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Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the following people for their relevant
assistance and stimulating conversations that greatly aided the produc-
tion of this book: David Hancock, Christopher Land, Sanjay Sood, Evita
Cooke, Claire Perkins, Deane Williams, and Noel King. At SUNY Press,
James Peltz and Murray Pomerance have acted as supportive and encour-
aging editors from the commencement of the project, and they are to be
warmly thanked for their heartening feedback and sharp editorial vision
at various stages of the project. Thanks also to the School of English,
Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University for fur-
nishing the book with images. Finally, a special thanks to our contribu-
tors: working with each one of you has been a genuine pleasure.
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xi
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Introduction

CAROLYN JESS-COOKE AND CONSTANTINE VEREVIS

TONIGHT’S SCHEDULE FOR A LOCAL cinema reads as follows:

Die Hard 4.0 (15) Hostel Part II (18)

Directed by: Len Wiseman Directed by: Eli Roth
Starring: Bruce Willis, Timothy Starring: Bijou Phillips, Lauren
Olyphant, Maggie Q German, Roger Bart
11:00 13:50 17:10 20:10 21:20 21:30

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Ocean’s Thirteen (PG)

Surfer (PG) Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Directed by: Tim Story Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt,
Starring: Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Matt Damon
Chris Evans 20:50
11:00 13:20 15:30
Pirates of the Caribbean: At
Harry Potter and the Order of the World’s End (12A)
Phoenix (12A) Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Directed by: David Yates Starring: Johnny Depp, Orlando
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Bloom, Keira Knightley
Watson, Rupert Grint 17:50
10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 13:00 13:30
14:00 14:30 15:00 16:00 16:30 17:00 Shrek the Third (U)
17:30 18:00 19:00 19:30 20:00 20:30 Directed by: Chris Miller
21:00 Starring: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy,
Cameron Diaz
11:10 11:40 12:20 12:50 13:40 14:40
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15:10 15:40 16:10 16:50 17:20 18:10

18:40 19:10 19:50 20:201

1
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

2 Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis

S
TRIKINGLY, EVERY FILM LISTED here is a sequel. This being summer
of 2007, it is not unusual for sequels to hold a strong cinematic
presence—but every screening? And, looking at film releases sched-
duled for the coming months, the horizon is filled with sequels. Pre-
vious months have been very similar: Hannibal Rising (Peter Webber,
2007) took $82 million worldwide at the box office—not bad for a fourth
installment—while Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) has taken almost $1
billion worldwide since its release just three months ago.2 A recent article
in the New York Times puts this into perspective: “In the last five years,
only about 20 percent of the films with more than $200 million in domes-
tic ticket sales were purely original in concept, rather than a sequel or an
adaptation of some pre-existing material” (Cieply). What is the signifi-
cance of this, we ask, and why is sequel production increasing when crit-
ics have been lamenting about the sequel’s dismal impact on originality
since cinema began? What can the various “takes” on sequelization these
films offer tell us about the sequel’s relation to the text(s) from which it
departs? More important, what does this sequel-dominated remit suggest
about contemporary film production? What are the forces governing this
resurgence of sequelization?
A closer examination of the films listed here provides some clues.
First on the menu is Die Hard 4.0 (Len Wiseman, 2007), which sees Bruce
Willis retake the lead as action tough-nut John McClane (at 52 years old,
no less) nineteen years after the first Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988).
copyright law.

Figure I.1. Live Free or Die Hard (aka Die Hard 4.0; Len Wiseman, 2007).
Courtesy 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection/Masi, Frank.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Introduction 3

Willis has personally endorsed this venture as “better than the first one,”
whereas The Guardian stumbles to call it a sequel “(quatrequel? tetrequel?)”
(qtd. in Sciretta; see also Bradshaw). Both discussions signal the film’s
unequivocal derivation of previous texts, that the film is always in relation to
its heritage and that both its meaning and entertainment value ultimately
derive from a negotiation of the first three Die Hard episodes (1988, 1990,
1995). The term “sequel” is thus invested with notions of “better-ness”
and retrospectivity, but is additionally thrown into question by sequels
that are not “part twos.” In this regard, discussing Fantastic Four: Rise of
the Silver Surfer (Tom Story, 2007) and Hostel Part II (Eli Roth, 2007) as
“first” sequels seems appropriate, whereas Shrek the Third (Chris Miller,
2007) and Ocean’s Thirteen (Steven Soderbergh, 2007) offer what has come
to be known as the “threequel,” or third film installment, which does not
close the series (like the final part of a trilogy) but which does not really
take it anywhere either (see Hendrix). “Threequels” are gap-fillers, appar-
ently, or textual bridges that keep fans interested and merchandize sales up.
Purportedly, and as its title suggests, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
(Gore Verbinksi, 2007) is the conclusion of a multibillion-dollar trilogy,
although the enormous range of Pirates’ tie-ins sweeping across the globe
is enough to suggest that this film’s textual boundaries take the concept
of sequelization (or indeed “threequelization”) to a whole new level.3 It is
likewise with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007),
the fifth film in the series, the release of which preempts by one week the
release of the last book in the Harry Potter series. Again, the hailstorm of
textual aftermaths and merchandize tie-ins surrounding, preceding, and
informing this film makes differentiating between book and film, film and
sequel, sequel and merchandize very difficult.
From this relatively small list of films emerges a wide range of tex-
tual categories, cues, and connections that challenge any existing theory
of intertextuality or even, as Gérard Genette puts it, transtextuality, his
definition of “everything that brings [one text] into relation (manifest or
hidden) with other texts” (Architext 81). This list also challenges previous
notions of the film sequel as a “part two” or continuation of a previous
“original,” insofar as the term “sequel” comes to mean, in some cases,
the continuation of a continuation, whereas the concept of “originality”
is swiftly unmoored from its safe corner in the harbor of literary (and
film) theory and set adrift amid the squalls of narrative recycling. If this
list is anything to go by, things have gotten a lot more complicated in
critiquing textuality.
This book confronts the complications film sequels and their dis-
cursive aftermath(s) pose. Taking a range of sequels as case studies, the
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following chapters propose dynamic new critical approaches to emergent

shifts across the spectrum of textual relations. Vigorously contending
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

4 Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis

with the sequel’s industrial, aesthetic, cultural, political, and theoreti-

cal contexts, these chapters open new vistas on the exciting landscape
of textual transposition. As one of few books dedicated to the subject
of film sequelization,4 this collection discusses the sequel’s investments
in repetition, difference, continuation, and retroactivity, and particularly
those attitudes and approaches toward the sequel that see it as a kind of
figurehead of Hollywood’s commercial imperatives.
For indeed the sequel—like the cinematic remake—has been largely
disparaged throughout cinema’s history as a textual leech, a formulaic
financial format, and the assassin of “originality” (see Berliner; Castle;
Greenberg; Hoberman; Verevis). Claire Perkins provides the example of
the trailer for the 2006 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF),
and the way it valorizes the novelty and cultural value of its programming
by contrasting it to the assumed dearth of originality in contemporary
Hollywood:

[The MIFF trailer] features a scruffy, bespectacled teenager

sandwiched between two suited Hollywood executive-types in the
back of a limousine. As the car moves through a neon-lit streetscape,
the execs use a non-question initially directed at the kid—“OK, so
your script is a sequel, right?”—to launch into a breathless exchange
concerning the relative economic benefits of sequels, prequels and
post-sequel prequels before deciding between themselves that a
sequel remake (which they term a “sequel-sequel”) is the way to
go with this project, and turning again to the kid to ask him how
much he wants for the trilogy or—better—the tetralogy, reassuring
themselves and him that “he can stretch . . . he’ll stretch . . . we’ll
stretch it . . . yeah, yeah.” The scene fades to black over their final
mumblings, and the tagline for MIFF 2006 comes up: “It’s a long
way from Hollywood.” (14)

In a similar way a spate of recent commentaries use terms such as

“hackneyed,” “avaricious,” “unnecessary,” and even “sucky” to discuss
the sequel and project sequelization as a purely capitalist endeavor with
terrifying outcomes for originality (see Coates; Nelson; Sullivan).5
Yet before we continue to rant about originality, we should really
consider whether it ever really existed in the first place. Sequelization,
we argue, operates not only as a secondary film venture but, as many
highly self-reflexive and resolutely metareferential sequels denote, as a
deconstructive framework within which such sweeping generalizations
and fundamentally problematic terms such as “originality” and “inter-
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textuality” can be unpacked and repositioned in the new contexts within

Introduction 5

which contemporary film is produced. Closer examination of sequel criti-

cism reveals the real argument often not to be about sequelization, but
about a variety of Hollywood activities and reception practices under the
cloak of a dubious “villain.” Indeed, most of the articles and reports that
decry the sequel in such terms tend to cite it as a “recent” cinematic
virus that has reached a peak, and in many ways it appears that the term
“sequel” is employed—often mistakenly—to describe a whole range of
imitative, derivative, appropriational, and remaking activities, as well as to
define various processes of exchange between film studios and audiences
(see Friend, “Copy Cats”; Silverman; Simonet). In short, the sequel’s
discursive circulations are overloaded with accusations and definitions
that otherwise demand closer scrutiny.
This book unpacks the cynicism and misinformed definitions sur-
rounding sequelization and goes on to examine its more critical regis-
ters. We have titled this book Second Takes in recognition of the ways in
which the sequel recapitulates features of an “original,” but additionally
offers something new to its source. In contradistinction to the remake,
the sequel does not prioritize the repetition of an original, but rather
advances an exploration of alternatives, differences, and reenactments
that are discretely charged with the various ways in which we may reread,
remember, or return to a source. Concomitant with the gamut of mer-
chandizing tie-ins, cross-media platforms, and film franchises that inform
contemporary Hollywood cinema, the sequel is primarily a site within
which communal spectatorship and paratextual discourses may be circu-
lated, and by which the experience of an “original” may be extended,
revisited, and heightened.
From such critical registers the collection’s first chapter departs.
Constantine Verevis’s chapter examines the strategies of multiplication
and serialization that inform multifilm franchises and series. Seeking ulti-
mately to overcome the limitations of purely taxonomic definitions that
seek to differentiate sequels from remakes, series, and sagas, the film
sequel is interrogated here as a function of a network of commercial
interests, textual strategies, and critical vocabularies. By looking to the
ways in which this network is played out in George A. Romero’s (living)
Dead trilogy—Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978),
Day of the Dead (1985)—and its various off-shoots, including Romero’s
recent Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2007), Verevis
argues for the inseparability of the sequel’s commercial, textual, and
critical imperatives, at the same time calling for an overturning of the
historical prioritization of an “original” text, offering the political and
authorial modes at the heart of sequelization as much more compelling
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critical frameworks.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

6 Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis

Such discussions of the sequel’s various categories and textual rela-

tions outlined in Verevis’s chapter are expanded on in Jennifer Forrest’s
chapter, in which she defines the idea of a “true” sequel as distinct from
other forms of film serialization. Looking principally to a group of films
from the Hollywood studio era, Forrest proposes discrete differences
between the series and the true sequel. Negotiated through the example
of Four Daughters (Michael Curtiz, 1938) and its sequels—Four Wives
(Michael Curtiz, 1939) and Four Mothers (William Keighley, 1941)—
Forrest’s definitions prove vital for an analysis of contemporary industry
practices that increase the audience for a product (sequels that are in
reality a series) by appealing deceptively to a more sophisticated specta-
tor—one that is conditioned to consume film “originals.” Telling the
difference, Forrest argues, is not always in the studios’ interests.
Textual transpositions—whether between sequels and serials or
originals and sequels—are, first and foremost, understood as industrial
products. Yet Thomas Leitch’s chapter adds a new form of textual
transposition to the mix—“sequel-ready” fiction—which highlights the
“marriage” that has taken place in recent years between literature and
media, or rather the conditions by which this union has taken place.
Although literary adaptation has been a dominant cinematic force since
its inception, one may argue that the course of appropriation has not
been entirely smooth. In the case of Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones
(prefigured in Fielding’s columns for the Independent) and its filmic incar-
nations—Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maquire, 2001) and Bridget Jones:
The Edge of Reason (Beeban Kidron, 2004)—Leitch argues that the source
text contains those elements that are necessary for an easy filmic transac-
tion and, more important, for an apparently “natural” stream of sequels
to emerge. By examining the matrix between the narrative dynamics
that make fictional texts peculiarly hospitable to sequels and the cultural,
social, and indeed sexual shifts that produce these texts, Leitch demon-
strates movements between text and screen that orient the concept of
“sequel” firmly within the “original.”
Both the considerations of sequelization as distinct from serializa-
tion and the sequel as connective tissue across a textual collective as For-
rest and Leitch explored are readdressed in R. Barton Palmer’s chapter.
Here Palmer notes the methods by which an “original” is constructed
as such specifically by those “part twos” and derivations that offer ret-
rospectively interpretive contexts. In turn, the sequel is constructed as a
mechanism of reorientation within several related texts. As demonstrated
by The Godfather and its Parts II & III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974,
1990), Palmer’s notion of reorientation seeks to address the forces bind-
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ing the Godfather texts together. The sequel is identified as a method

Introduction 7

by which we can more fully understand and explore this collectivity, in

the same moment as the singularity of each film is maintained and rede-
fined through the sequel’s textual imperatives. Palmer’s considerations
of “before” and “after” additionally inform his analyses of the films as
he identifies the process of “sequeling” at the films’ commercial and
textual levels to be a key factor in the texts’ narratological and aesthetic
operations. From this vantage point, a broader perspective is shed on
the process of sequelization in terms of the treatment of beginnings and
endings that are encountered throughout adaptational successions.
Considerations of “beforeness” and “afterwardsness” are addition-
ally explored elsewhere in the collection throughout their spectatorial
and hermeneutic contexts. Calling on the Warner Brothers’ Batman
film franchise—in particular Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005),
Paul Sutton’s chapter explores the notion of the prequel, drawing on the
notion of “afterwardsness” as a way to approach the prequel’s theoreti-
cal, cultural, and economic boundaries. Despite its semantic registers of
“beforeness,” Sutton notes that the prequel is most often made after
an “original,” and, accordingly, negotiations of “before” and “after”
underscore the prequel. Yet far from remaining as an internal logic, the
prequel’s skewed temporality spills over into its external operations. The
guiding light of this chapter is the idea of “afterwardsness” as an expres-
sion of the reconstructive and re-creative nature of spectatorship. This
process of spectatorship, Sutton argues, re-creates or remakes the films
it “remembers,” while at the same time enabling the “autotranslation” of
the viewing subject. The prequel emerges from this study as a categori-
cal process that takes place outside of the modes of film production and
within the boundaries of audience reception.
Among the most critical issues informing the film sequel are its
imbrications in cross-cultural dialogues. Daniel Herbert’s chapter notes
the important cultural interactions circulating among Japan, South
Korea, and Hollywood, throughout the remaking and sequelization of
Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring in a cycle of films that includes Ringu (Hideo
Nakata, 1998), Rasen (Jôji Iida, 1999), and The Ring (Gore Verbinski,
2002). Cohering within a “macro-regional” textual geography, these
films—which evoke an entire wave of Hollywood remakes of Asian films
that has become a significant trend within the global cultural industries—
function to thread together connections and expose tensions between
the cultures from which the texts derive. Herbert artfully composes a
metaphor, geographic as well as economic and cultural: namely that of
The Ring Intertext as the Pacific Rim. His chapter not only demonstrates
the ways in which these interactions circulate among The Ring cycle’s
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aesthetic strategies, transnational identities, and technological erasures,

8 Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis

but also reminds us that sequelization is by no means a phenomenon

limited to Hollywood filmmaking.
Simon McEnteggart’s chapter looks to cultural anxieties within the
sequel in relation to the superhero subgenre, with a specific emphasis on
films of the first decade of the twenty-first century and of the post-9/11
landscape. Whereas superhero films are often regarded cynically as film-
ic ventures aimed at a specific fan-base, McEnteggart argues that the
superhero sequel registers cultural anxieties during the era of production.
As an example, Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner, 1978) vocalizes
concerns regarding the post-1960’s decline in religious ideology and the
“invisible threat” of the cold war throughout the narrative. In turn, its
sequels focus on an actual attack by the cold war ideology on American
ideals and institutions (Superman II, 1980), the anxieties regarding the
advancement of technology, corrupt bureaucracy, and masculine duality
(Superman III, 1983), and the fears involving nuclear power (Superman
IV: The Quest for Peace, 1987). Whereas superhero films made prior to
9/11 typically contain internal battles of “good versus evil,” McEnteggart
argues that sequels created in the post-9/11 period—Superman Returns
(Bryan Singer, 2006), Blade II (Guillermo del Toro, 2002), X-Men 2 (Bry-
an Singer, 2003), and Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi, 2003)—feature greater
external threats posed by the “other” and are symbolic of the “war on ter-
ror” that President George W. Bush proposed. In examining superhero
sequels, valuable theoretical frameworks regarding cultural and historical
anxieties are revealed, as well as the evolving state of political awareness
in popular culture texts.
Interrogating a different aspect of US filmmaking, Claire Perkins
considers cultural difference in terms of the processes of exchange and
dialogue established between two historical periods and their atten-
dant cultural resonances. By considering several recent films, such as
The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001), Lost in Translation (Sofia
Coppola, 2003), and The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005),
Perkins juxtaposes this “smart” cinema with the commercial system of
the Hollywood blockbuster. Perkins proceeds to reveal the American
“smart” film as a sequel to the “New Hollywood” of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, primarily in terms of its method of repeating themes of
alienation—typified in Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 film, Scarecrow—and by
substituting irony and nihilism for the nostalgia and anger (or activism)
of the earlier period. By arguing that “smart” cinema signals a kind of
cultural transition (facilitating the creation of a “new image” in com-
mercial filmmaking), Perkins further suggests the sequel as a type of
critical lens through which to rethink the formal and political crises of
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the first “New Hollywood.”

Introduction 9

Hollywood’s self-appropriation and canonization is the subject of

Joyce Goggin’s chapter. As Goggin sees it, the original, the remake, and the
sequel serve as showcases for popular stars rather than as sites of adaptation
for any revered artistic antecedent. By investigating the Ocean’s films—
Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone, 1960) and its Steven Soderbergh directed
remake (Ocean’s Eleven, 2001) and sequels (Ocean’s Twelve, 2004, and Ocean’s
Thirteen, 2007)—Goggin considers autoreflexivity in these films as the pro-
motion of the famous stars who act in them. The sequel’s commercial
dimension is further considered in the light of the Las Vegas context, in
which the narrative emphasis on gambling, stealing, and materialism is seen
to serve as a uniquely referential portrait of the sequel’s economic purposes.
The “nowness” on which the Ocean’s series banks is therefore constituted
by the temporality of the gambler, and the logic of “presentness” extends
to the films’ trademark, self-conscious humor (predicated on the stars’
awareness of their own popularity at the time of production). These films
not only construct a kind of “nowness” through the hype of Las Vegas,
gambling, and pop-cultural icons, but also return to themselves for source
material, thereby bringing the past repeatedly into the present.
Turning to the film-television interface, Ina Rae Hark explores the
dynamics of resurrection inherent in the sequel phenomenon by look-
ing to Serenity, the 2005 feature film sequel to Joss Whedon’s hybrid
science fiction/Western television series Firefly, cancelled by the FOX
network after only eleven episodes had been broadcast in 2002. Universal
approved the follow-up film in part because it served as a loss leader to
persuade Whedon to sign a picture development deal with the studio,
but the studio also held out the possibility of a series of film sequels if
Serenity became a box-office success. Whedon thus had to craft a film
that provided fitting closure for fans of the truncated series—the “decent
burial” of the chapter’s title—yet one that also left open the possibility of
“resurrection.” Hark’s chapter draws on fan discourse to demonstrate the
ways in which Serenity and Firefly deal with death, loss, and mourning,
and how they provide a unique perspective on the metatextual bereave-
ment process that sequels to past television programs invariably enact.
Nicholas Rombes speculates on how new and emerging digital
mediums and interfaces—ranging from DVDs, to video cell phones, to
the video iPod—are reshaping traditional notions of the sequel. As this
chapter observes, imagining “before” and “after” is becoming increasingly
difficult as the ubiquity of communication technologies and media inter-
faces means that narratives are in a continually “present” state. During
the classic cinema era viewers had relatively little control over, or physical
interaction with, the screen. Sequels were released and viewed according
copyright law.

to the wishes of the studios. Today, however, what does it mean to release
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10 Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis

a sequel when audiences exercise a much greater degree of control not

only over the film cycle that includes sequels, but also over the temporal
dimensions of individual films themselves? Furthermore, the numerous
bonus features, added material, and alternate endings and footage includ-
ed in DVDs today contribute to the dissolution of the sequel.
Finally, the sequel’s role in an ever-increasing landscape of media
convergence and franchising is considered in Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s chap-
ter. With a focus on the Pirates of the Caribbean (Gore Verbinski, 2003,
2005, 2007) films, merchandizing, and related media outputs, this chap-
ter looks to the forms of consumer participation across the franchise
as what she calls “sequelized” spectatorship. Sequelized spectatorship is
considered in terms of the many forms of interaction and participation
with which the Pirates’s spectator engages, which include a long list
of secondary spectatorial encounters, as well as role-playing, secondary
performance, and generational correspondence. The primary method
by which the franchise achieves this, Jess-Cooke argues, is by creating
another kind of sequel: that is, a sequel to the ideological and cultural
architecture of the film’s production house, the Walt Disney Company.
Operating as a process of ideological exchange and perpetuation, the
sequel thus enables the retransmission of Disney values throughout the
Pirates franchise, while the qualities of community and synergy attributed
to piracy across its textual history rereads the Walt Disney Company as
an institution for the community, or one in which a sense of belonging
and collaboration can be located. Citing Disney’s collaborative structures
as a means by which its films and media platforms are perpetuated across
generations, the chapter posits sequelized spectatorship as the way in
which the text invites the spectator to rewrite it across multiple media
arenas, activities, physical territories, and generational boundaries.

Notes
1. See <http://www.cineworld.co.uk/reservation/ChoixResa.jgi?DATE=200
70713&CINEMA=53>. Accessed 12 July 2007.
2. The exact figure is $886,140,575. See <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/
movies/?id=spiderman3.htm>. Accessed 20 July 2007.
3. Since the time of writing (2007), a fourth installment—Pirates of the
Caribbean 4 —has been projected for release in 2011.
4. Others include Budra and Schellenberg, eds., Part Two: Reflections on
the Sequel; Drew, Motion Picture Series and Sequels: A Reference Guide; Husband,
Sequels: An Annotated Guide to Novels in Series; Jess-Cooke, Film Sequels: Theory
and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood; Nowlan and Nowlan, Cinema Sequels
and Remakes, 1903–1987.
copyright law.

5. See also <http://www.comixtreme.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-15344.

html>. Accessed 22 July 2007.
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1
CONSTANTINE VEREVIS

Redefining the Sequel

The Case of the (Living) Dead

I
N HIS ESSAY “INNOVATION and Repetition,” Umberto Eco outlines
several types of serial repetition that characterize the universe of
(post)modern mass media. These categories are: the retake, remake,
series, saga, and intertextual dialogue, or dialogism (166–73). Eco’s typology
of media repetition provides a useful point of entry to a discussion of
film seriality—retakes, remakes, and series—but Eco’s categories (and his
examples) are not without difficulty and overlap. As Leonardo Quaresima
points out (with reference to film remakes), these serial phenomena are
“both well-known and immediately recognisable [terms] commonly used
in everyday language and film publicity campaigns alike, [but they are
phenomena] whose status is undefined” (75). This chapter takes a par-
ticular interest in the category of the retake—or sequel—but seeks to
overcome the limitations of purely taxonomic definitions, both those that
describe the retake as a commercially minded decision to “recycle the
characters of a previously successful story in order to exploit them, by
telling what happened to them after the end of their first adventure” (Eco
167), as well as those that outline the various textual subcategories of
the sequel: direct continuation sequel, in-name-only sequel, fake sequel, virtual
copyright law.

remake, and so on (see Thonen). Moving beyond these approaches, this

11
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12 Constantine Verevis

Figure 1.1. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968). Courtesy
Image Ten/The Kobal Collection.

chapter interrogates the film sequel as a complex situation: a function of

a network of commercial interests, textual strategies, critical vocabularies,
and historical contexts. This understanding of the sequel will be advanced
through the example of George A. Romero’s Dead trilogy—Night of the
Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1979), Day of the Dead (1985)—and
the terrible progeny that ultimately lead to his fourth and fifth zombie
features, Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2007).1
With his feature film debut—Night of the Living Dead—George
Romero is credited with having transformed the modern horror film
and (more particularly) the zombie mythology of the 1930s and early
1940s, known principally from Hollywood films such as White Zombie
(Victor Halperin, 1932), Revolt of the Zombies (Victor Halperin, 1936),
and I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943). Outside of nine-
teenth-century Caribbean travel literature, the North American public
was mainly unfamiliar with voodoo (or voudoun) rites and zombie folklore
until the publication of William Seabrook’s autobiographical account of
his travels in Haiti, The Magic Island (1929). The first signs of the influ-
ence of Seabrook’s travelogue and of the arrival of the zombie figure
in American popular culture was Kenneth Webb’s 1932 production of
Zombie for the New York stage (Bishop 198–99; Russell 9–17). In the
copyright law.
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Redefi ning the Sequel 13

same year, and at the crest of the American horror film boom, direc-
tor-producer team Victor and Edward Halperin took the essentials of
Seabrook’s research into zombie mythology—“the Haitian setting, the
sugar cane fields and voodoo trappings”—to devise the astutely mar-
keted White Zombie for Universal Pictures (Russell 22). Subsequent
films—including Revolt of the Zombies, the Halperin brothers’ “unofficial
sequel” to White Zombie (28)—were interested in the ghoulish figure of
the zombie but, with the notable exception of I Walked with a Zombie,
not necessarily in its attendant Caribbean heritage and voodoo history.
Voodoo thrillers such as Zombies of Mora Tau (aka The Dead that Walk,
Edward L. Cahn, 1957) continued into the next decade but the 1950s
is considered a transitional period for the zombie genre with its core
“issues of voodoo, race and colonial anxiety [gradually] supplanted by
fears of invasion, of brainwashing and mass apocalypse” (47). Through
the 1950s—in films such as Creature with the Atom Brain (Edward L.
Cahn, 1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), and Invis-
ible Invaders (Edward L. Cahn, 1959)—zombies and zombification become
the perfect vehicle for encapsulating cold war “anxieties about the loss
of individuality, political subversion and brainwashing” (52). If this cycle
of films anticipates Romero’s broad revision of the zombie film genre,
then the most direct precursor to the Dead films (especially in so far as
it challenges the distinction between the living and the dead, between us
and them) is The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow,
1964), an Italian-American adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 vam-
pire-apocalypse novel I Am Legend (62–64).2
Romero has consistently acknowledged that he drew inspiration
from the premise of Matheson’s I Am Legend—the story of one last
human in a desolate world populated by plague-spawned, zombie-like
vampires—to sketch a (never published) three-part short story that
became the genesis of the Dead series (see Fischer 638; Gagne 24; Hick-
enlooper 346; McCarty 61; Waller 275; Yakir 60). Commonly referred
to as “Anubis,” Romero’s story is described “as an allegory about what
happens when an incoming revolutionary society [in this case, the living
dead] replaces an existing social order” (Gagne 24). In the first part of
“Anubis” a group of people takes refuge in a farmhouse as the recently
deceased inexplicably rise from the grave to feed on the flesh and blood
of the living: “In Part I [the zombies] appear, but operative society seems
to be staying on top of it, even though there’s a lot of chaos. . . . It’s Part
I that we turned into Night of the Living Dead: the new society appears
and attacks every aspect of our society. . . . People don’t really know
how to deal with it. . . . The scientific society has absolutely no answers”
copyright law.

(Romero qtd. in Yakir 60).

14 Constantine Verevis

The second episode, which takes up the story some six months
later, finds that the zombie phenomenon has become widespread and
uncontrollable to the extent that “there [is now] an equal balance [of
power], with the outcome [for established society] undecided” (60).
Attempting to contain the plague, a posse of heavily armed military
personnel moves through a contaminated area exterminating the living
dead, but as it does so the team accidentally leaves behind a cache of
weapons. A group of zombies discovers the arms, and (as in Dawn of the
Dead) there is the first glimmer of recognition and remembrance. The
third movement (the basis for the original screenplay of Day of the Dead)3
is set some years after the initial outbreak. The balance of numbers has
shifted, and now a different militia—an army of the living dead—pur-
sues a lone, wounded human across a desolate landscape. Of the final
installment, Romero says: “in the Third Part, it [is] the zombies who
are operative. I have this vision of a layered society where the humans
are little dictators, down in bomb shelters, and they fight their wars
using zombies as soldiers. . . . It’s a return to what the zombie was in the
beginning [namely, a slave in a class struggle]” (60). While the films of
the Romero trilogy turned out to be very different, the progression of
the phenomenon—its serialization—and principal thematic concerns are
basically in evidence at the source (see Gagne 25).
Night of the Living Dead has been called one of “a select wax-works
of films whose names alone unspool their images” (Doherty 20). Initially
a modest commercial success on the drive-in circuit, Night of the Living
Dead was rereleased theatrically in 1970, and it began to build its cult
status as a midnight movie. The US critical response to Romero’s film—
typified by notorious reviews in Variety and the Chicago Sun-Times—was
mostly hostile (see Gagne 36), but good press and strong box-office
returns in Europe paved the way for its critical reevaluation, includ-
ing Robin Wood’s describing Night of the Living Dead (and the Dead
trilogy) as “one of the most remarkable and audacious achievements of
modern American cinema” (“Woman’s Nightmare” 45). As Wood (and
others) have pointed out, Night of the Living Dead’s enduring reputa-
tion and widespread influence resides not only in its excessive visceral
jolts and frustration of genre conventions, but also in the overturning of
dominant cultural norms and unmasking of tensions in patriarchal and
domestic relationships (Wood, “Apocalypse Now” 91). More evidently,
and well before Romero seriously considered an “official” sequel to his
cult hit, “Night of the Living Dead—like all commercially successful genre
films—was imitated, borrowed from, and exploited [serialized] by other
storytellers” (Waller 297). Kim Newman says: “the most obvious and
copyright law.

immediate effect of the success of Night of the Living Dead was a sudden
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Redefi ning the Sequel 15

epidemic of inferior [low-budget] flesh-eating zombie films” (Nightmare

Movies 6). Most notable of these was Benjamin Clark’s Children Shouldn’t
Play with Dead Things (1972), a film that follows a theater troupe of
hippies to a lonely Florida burial island where their midnight incanta-
tion and ersatz ritual inadvertently awakens the dead. As in Night of the
Living Dead, the various players take refuge in a deserted house where
they are besieged by the blood-thirsty zombies. The actors desperately
fight off the ghouls, but ultimately all are consumed before (in an ending
that anticipates the start of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2) the living dead board
a small boat and float back toward the mainland (Newman, Nightmare
Movies 7; Russell 71–72).
In Spain, where Night of the Living Dead was particularly well
received, Romero’s film was revised in Jorge Grau’s Spanish-Italian
coproduction (filmed in England), The Living Dead at the Manchester
Morgue (Fin de Semana para los Muertos, aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie,
1974). Described as a film “so close to Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead as to be almost a crib” (Glaessner 78; see Waller 297–98), The
Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue follows two characters, George
and Edna, who are accidentally thrown together during an ill-fated
weekend in the British countryside. Together the couple discovers the
beginnings of a zombie plague—apparently caused by the high-pitched
hum of agricultural machinery—but are unable to secure from local
authorities any assistance in their attempt to confine its spread. At the
Southgate Hospital morgue—a locus of zombie activity—George tries
to save Edna from the swelling horde of the undead, but on discover-
ing that she has already become a zombie pushes her into a treatment
room, set alight in the chaos. As described by Jamie Russell, there is (at
the moment of Edna’s engulfment in the flames) a certain ambiguity—a
moment of identification—that anticipates the increasingly sympathetic
treatment of zombies across Romero’s later body of work (83). George
survives the conflagration at the morgue but—when later shot dead (in
a reprise of the ending of Night of the Living Dead) by the bigoted Ser-
geant McCormick—returns as a zombified hero to take his revenge on
the police officer and the bankrupt value system he represents. These
generic revisions—in particular the overly political message of Grau’s
ecologically driven zombie plague and the film’s challenge to “values of
authority, heroism and religious faith”—anticipate the trajectory of the
Dead trilogy, with The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue “bridging
the gap between Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and his later Dawn
of the Dead” (81).
According to Paul Gagne, Romero’s “desire to find a metaphorical
copyright law.

‘underbelly’ comparable to that in Night of the Living Dead [was] one

16 Constantine Verevis

of the main reasons” for taking several years to develop the Dawn of
the Dead sequel (87). The inspiration for expanding the zombie concept
beyond his first feature reportedly came around 1975 when Romero was
introduced to the huge Monroeville shopping mall (southeast of Pitts-
burgh), a closed environment that suggested itself as the perfect set-
ting for the “equal-balance” part of the trilogy (see Gagne 83; Manders
38–39; Yakir 60). Soon after his visit, Romero began writing a screenplay,
“darker and bleaker” than that of Night of the Living Dead, which “cen-
tred around this couple, a guy and a pregnant woman, who were living
up in [the] crawlspace [of the mall to escape the zombie hordes]. He
was like a hunter-gatherer going down into the mall for supplies and
food” (qtd. in Gagne 83). Romero went on to widen the idea—in the
finished screenplay, four survivors take refuge in a shopping mall where
they create an ideal of consumer living—into Dawn of the Dead’s overt
critique of a 1970s rampant culture of consumption. At the same time,
Romero’s interest in the second installment of the Dead series appears
to have been initiated as much by commercial imperatives as it was by an
interest in serializing the allegorical message of Night of the Living Dead
across subsequent decades. Although Romero’s first film had performed
solidly, the Image Ten consortium (a limited partnership established to
produce the film) had received only a modest return on the substantial
revenue generated by the property. One reason for this was the fact
that a copyright line had been inadvertently left off the film’s credits in
a series of late changes of title from Night of the Flesh Eaters to Night
of Anubis, both of which were finally rejected in favor of Night of the
Living Dead. The oversight led to the distribution of countless black
market prints (and unauthorized video cassettes), and Romero has stated
that the release of a colorized version of Night of the Living Dead and
then an authorized remake—the Tom Savini directed Night of the Living
Dead (1990)—were “purely financial” decisions by the producers of the
original film to license the property and recoup lost earnings (Frasher
19; Gagne 39).4
Second (and more significantly), although Romero was responsi-
ble for the initial “Anubis” story, the screenplay for Night of the Living
Dead was a collaboration between Romero and John Russo of the Image
Ten consortium. Romero and Russo (along with others at Image Ten)
retained ownership of the Night of the Living Dead property, but a falling
out of the cowriters ultimately led to the development of two separate
pathways to sequelization. Russo was the first to react, developing the
story of the living dead initially through a literary “remake”—a noveliza-
tion of Night of the Living Dead (1974)—which was followed with a story
copyright law.

sequel, Return of the Living Dead (1978; Waller 297). Around the time
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Redefi ning the Sequel 17

that Russo’s second book was published, Romero announced his plan to
produce not only a film sequel (Dawn of the Dead), but also to project a
Dead trilogy along the lines of “Anubis.” But because Romero and Russo
had coauthored the Night of the Living Dead screenplay, there was some
dispute over who legally owned the film sequel rights. A formal agree-
ment was worked out in 1978 when the Laurel Group (the company
Romero and Richard Rubinstein had formed to produce Martin, 1976)
sold Dawn of the Dead to United Film Distribution whereby Romero
was given the right to produce and distribute his sequel and Russo the
permission to develop his Return of the Living Dead story (and subsequent
screenplay) into a film. The significance afforded to the titles of the films
in communicating a set of public expectations around the serialization of
the property is indicated by the fact that the Laurel Group had already
moved against a Chicago film distributor that had tried—in an instance
of faux sequelization—to rerelease Messiah of Evil (aka Dead People, aka
Revenge of the Screaming Dead, Willard Huyck, 1973) as Return of the
Living Dead (Gagne 166). Although the Motion Picture Association of
America ultimately ruled that Romero did not have exclusive rights to the
use of the title “Living Dead,” it was determined under the agreement
that (the proposed) Return of the Living Dead could not be promoted as
an “official” sequel to Romero’s Night (Gagne 166; Peachment 19).
Numerous commentators have observed that the repetitions of
Dawn of the Dead (and the later Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead)
effectively blur the “threshold between that of a genre film, a sequel, and
a remake” (Sutherland 68). Gregory Waller, for instance, describes Dawn
of the Dead as “a continuation and an elaboration” of Night, at once “a
reconsideration of the major themes and assumptions of the earlier film
[a remake], and an informed, ambitious, innovative expansion of the story
of the living and un-dead [a sequel]” (298). In another example, Tim
Lucas refers to Dawn of the Dead as a “non sequitur sequel to . . . Night
of the Living Dead” for the fact it does not recycle characters from the
first film but “shows how a different group of people react when the
recently dead revive to satiate their hunger for warm, living flesh” (41).
At a level of generality, the Romero zombie films—in particular the tril-
ogy—do seem to repeat (or remake) the same basic plot in which a group
of survivors takes refuge in a safe environment (a deserted house, a shop-
ping mall, an underground bunker, a walled city) that it protects from
the zombie hordes until finally the haven is overrun. More specifically,
Wood argues that Night and Dawn of the Dead are based on the same
triangular structure in which the central group of survivors is threatened
by both the living dead and a strongly masculinized group: the rednecks
copyright law.

in Night, the motorcycle gang in Dawn. In the later Day of the Dead this
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18 Constantine Verevis

structure is extended so that a small group is endangered (on the one

hand) by the zombies, and (on the other) by the military and the scien-
tists, the latter of which together stand for the corrupt superstructure
of US patriarchal authority and the masculine-rationalist ideology that
underpins it (Wood, “Woman’s Nightmare” 46). But at the same time,
Wood insists that Romero never repeats himself, stating (elsewhere) that
the first two installments of the trilogy not only work together to redefine
the zombie genre but are very distinct from one another: “Dawn of the
Dead is much more than the elaborate re-make it has been taken for”
(“Apocalypse Now” 91). Specifically, Wood refers to the several ways
in which Dawn of the Dead (and Romero’s subsequent Day of the Dead)
extend—or serialize—the narrative, historical, and political allegory of
Night of the Living Dead.
The most obvious textual marker of the narrative serialization of
the Romero zombie trilogy is the “diurnal progress of their respective
titles”—night, dawn, and day—which signals the advancement and escala-
tion of the zombie plague (Sutherland 68). At the end of Night of the Liv-
ing Dead, the nightmare of corpses returning to feed off the flesh of the
living—a calamity apparently caused by radiation from a returning Venus
probe—seems to have dissipated as quickly as it began. But the film’s
uneasy resolution—not just the fact that the sole survivor of the night
(the black hero, Ben) is gunned down by the redneck posse, but also that
establishment values (love, heroism, family) have proven so ineffectual
in the face of the crisis—suggests that the containment of the plague is
more apparent than real. Dawn of the Dead begins with the heroine Fran,
a Pittsburgh television station employee, sleeping against a red control
booth wall. She awakens with a start to find the studio in chaos, with
confused attempts to transmit information—news bulletins of the type
seen in the besieged farmhouse of Night—about the escalating zombie
crisis. The opening sequences of Dawn—the disorganized and frantic
activity at the television station and (next) an equally chaotic and desper-
ate scene in which state troopers attempt to clear a tenement building
of the living dead—work as traditional exposition scenes, communicating
information (eliminating the need for any direct knowledge of the previ-
ous installment) and emphasizing how rapidly the institutions of society
can disintegrate (Gagne 86; Waller 298–99). The major part of Dawn of
the Dead follows the fortunes of four survivors—Fran and her boyfriend
Stephen, and two troopers, Roger and Peter—who flee the city carnage
in a helicopter only to discover masses of shambling zombies roaming
the countryside. Below them, a scene of military convoys and redneck
posses hunting down, and making sport of, the zombies unfolds. As Ed
copyright law.

Lowry and Louis Black point out, this extermination game “might be the
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Redefi ning the Sequel 19

closing moments of Night of the Living Dead,” but where the earlier film
implied that the threat had been contained, Dawn of the Dead sequelizes
the event “to suggest that the [zombie] threat has already succeeded in
destroying civilization as we know it” (17).
Dawn of the Dead is not a “conventional” or direct sequel but rath-
er—like a historical saga (Eco 169–70)—focuses on the efforts of a (later)
group of people who battle to survive as the epidemic (unleashed some
time earlier) escalates out of control. In this respect Dawn of the Dead
follows the second part of “Anubis” (in which the balance of things is
at a point where the outcome is undecided), but Dawn serializes another
important aspect of that installment: the development of a zombie conscious-
ness. The early scenes of Dawn of the Dead—in which armed posses hunt
down the undead—not only demonstrate the rapid break down of civil
order but also begin to complicate the distinction between victim and vil-
lain (see Waller 300). Reflecting on Dawn of the Dead and its relation to
the other films of the trilogy (and beyond), Romero says that the progres-
sion—the sequelization—of the zombie revolution is its central point:

In my mind, the zombies have always been evolving. . . . Even in

Dawn I was trying to show some zombies with “personalities”—a
soft-ball player, a nun . . . that poor guy on the escalator, just trying

Figure 1.2. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978). Courtesy United
copyright law.

Film/The Kobal Collection.

20 Constantine Verevis

to get by. I was trying to give them some sympathy. And at the very
end, when Peter is escaping and a zombie grabs his gun, he makes a
decision that it is a better gun than the one he has. In other words, I
have tried to make them progress. Bub [the slightly “domesticated”
zombie in Day of the Dead] to me is [a] classic Karloff [character],
a sympathetic monster. (qtd. in D’Agnolo-Vallan 24)

When the four protagonists of Dawn of the Dead land their helicopter
on the roof of the suburban mall that will become their refuge (and
ultimately their prison), they observe that the zombies are irresistibly
drawn to the shopping center because they dimly remember that it once
played a major part in their lives. As Steven Shaviro points out, “[the
zombies] seem most fully human when they are wandering the aisles and
escalators of the mall like dazed but ecstatic shoppers” (92). Once evicted
by the survivors, the swelling number of zombies in the car park and at
the entrances to the mall is evidence of their determination to penetrate
the sealed environment and reclaim their “materialistic past” (Iaccino
154–55). In a telling scene—and in answer to Fran’s question: “Who
the hell are they [the living dead]?”—Peter observes: “They’re us, that’s
all.” Throughout the film, we see evidence of conditioned behavior, and
toward the end, when Stephen falls prey to the zombies, he “remembers”
the false wall that his friends erected to conceal the entrance to their
hideout and leads the other zombies to the refuge. As Fran and Peter
make their escape to the helicopter one of the zombies wrestles a rifle
from Peter and stares curiously at the weapon. More than any other
single action, this gesture—the remembrance of the firearm—anticipates
the third installment in the series.
Drawing on the third stage of “Anubis,” Romero devised an initial
script treatment for Day of the Dead that takes the zombie revolution
to the point where the undead have vastly outnumbered humanity and
gained intelligence enough to perform basic tasks.5 Set some five years
after the plague has begun, the story tells of a new world order where
the populace is divided into social castes: the civilian masses, living in
squalid conditions above ground; teams of scientists living underground
and working at ways to condition the zombies; a military faction devoted
to shaping the zombies into an army of the living dead; and the corrupt,
former politicians who control the military operation and live in com-
fort deep in the compound (Gagne 147–48; Williams, Knight 129–30).
Newman describes the script for (the unrealized) Day of the Dead as
one that depicts “a future world where living and dead have come to
terms, and trained zombies fight wars on behalf of human masters who
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live in walled city states. . . . Facetiously announced as Zombies in the

Redefi ning the Sequel 21

White House [the never realized version of Day of the Dead ends] with the
establishment in the ruins of the old society of an ambiguously utopian
new normality” (“Day of the Dead” 267). Unable to secure funding for
his ambitious scenario, Romero was forced to reduce the scope of Day
of the Dead substantially, but nevertheless advanced his third installment
in the direction of establishing ever-greater similarities between the liv-
ing and the nonliving. The completed Day of the Dead begins (where
Dawn left off) with a civilian-military expedition—consisting of scientist
Sarah and her three male colleagues—landing its helicopter in a Florida
street and then, on finding masses of zombies (and no sign of survivors),
returning to its underground military base. In the facility (overseen by
the ruthless autocrat, Captain Rhodes), the eccentric Dr. Logan (nick-
named “Frankenstein”) employs a variety of conditioning techniques in
the interest of training and controlling the zombies. Logan’s pet proj-
ect is a domesticated zombie, affectionately known as “Bub,” who has
been educated to remember socially conditioned instinctive behavior, to
recognize objects, and to perform simple tasks. But when Rhodes dis-
covers that Logan has trained Bub by feeding him human flesh carved
from the remains of fallen soldiers, he summarily executes the scientist.
Discovering Logan’s body, Bub moves from feelings of deep sorrow to
ones of vengeful anger. In the final scenes of the film, Bub discovers
a cabinet of weapons and leads the living dead (who have overrun the
compound) in an impressive “zombie coup” against Rhodes and his men
(Iaccino 157; Rowe, “Man of 1,000 Zombies” 67). At the end of Day
(in a reprisal of Dawn) only Sarah, John, and their friend McDermott
escape the bunker, making their way by helicopter to a remote tropical
island to begin anew.
The increasing power and intelligence of the living dead (and the
associated reemergence of the class struggle) across Romero’s zombie tril-
ogy relates to another overarching aspect of its serialization: namely, its
political dimension. Romero says that, at the time he decided on a follow
up to Night of the Living Dead, he had also “gotten the idea that it would
be nice to do one of these [zombie films] for every decade and try to
reflect the attitude of the times” (qtd. in M. Simpson 60). Night of the
Living Dead in particular is described as a film that “seized the zeitgeist by
the throat”: a film that presents a hopeless world where nothing matters,
and in this way reflects the social upheavals and breakdown of civil order
that occurred during the turbulent period of the 1960s (Doherty 20).
Although the social allegory of Night was not initially commented on,
there has (in the decades since its release) been a proliferation of social
and cultural interpretations. In an early evaluation, R. H. W. Dillard sees
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Night of the Living Dead as a film whose assault on government, family,

22 Constantine Verevis

and individuality “undercuts [the most] cherished values of our whole

civilization,” a film whose real horror is not a result of “inspiring a fear of
the dead or even a fear of the ordinary world” but rather a consequence
of “its refusal to resolve those fears in any way that does not sacrifice
human dignity and human value” (27–28). Others have variously seen the
film as a comment on US involvement in the Vietnam War (Higashi), a
metaphor for the black experience in America (Lightning), a depiction of
the radical futurelessness of the nuclear age (Caputi), and as a critique of
capitalist-consumer society: “Romero’s zombies stand in for those work-
ers and consumers who, since the flash-point year of 1968 . . . have been
thrown on the scrap heap. Economically extinct, socially displaced, they
return to devour those who have survived them” (Beard 30). Wood, in
particular, has taken up the latter approach, insisting that Night of the Liv-
ing Dead (and the trilogy as a whole) must be seen historically “in terms
of Romero’s [serialized] responses to changes in American society and
ideology” (“Woman’s Nightmare” 45). For Wood, each one of the films
is, in its own unique way, “an assault on the structures and assumptions
of patriarchal capitalism”: Night is centered around the 1960s nuclear
family and its inner tensions; Dawn is focused on 1970s consumerism
and dominant couple relationships (both heterosexual and male-buddy);
and Day is centrally concerned with (militaristic and scientific) structures
of 1980s masculine-rationalist ideology (45–46).
Although Romero maintains that he missed the opportunity to
extend the political commentary of the Dead trilogy into the 1990s, he
did contribute a screenplay to the Tom Savini-directed remake, Night of
the Living Dead (1990). Some critics insist that Savini’s version fails to
impress—and fit into the Romero cycle and mythos—exactly because
it does not take the opportunity to draw parallels between the zombie
as surplus human capacity and conscious fears (of the decade) about
mass unemployment (Beard 30). Against this view, others contend that
whatever the commercial imperatives behind the Night remake, Romero’s
authorship is exactly expressed through the remake’s implication of social
plague and serialization of the trilogy’s politics of gender. Notably, Barry
Keith Grant argues that where the depiction of the catatonic Barbara in
the original Night of the Living Dead seems to support “sexist assump-
tions about female passivity, irrationality and emotional vulnerability,”
the remake transforms Barbara into “an active, assertive character . . .
a narrative agent [and a survivor]” (65). In this assessment, Romero
emerges as a writer-director with a particular interest in gender rep-
resentation, one who serializes his principal female character: from the
original Barbara, “in a state of limbo on the outskirts of women’s libera-
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tion,” through Fran’s intermediate depiction of the “untrained survivor,”

Redefi ning the Sequel 23

and on to Sarah as “a woman of the 1980s [and] natural leader” (Gagne

90). Accordingly (and even though the Savini version mostly follows the
narrative invention of the original), Barbara not only survives (second
time around), but does so by exhibiting a “clear-headed, unsentimental
resourcefulness” lacking in the film’s male characters (Grant 69). Follow-
ing the escape trajectory mapped by her predecessors Fran and Sarah, the
new Barbara survives “by deducing [that] the correct strategy in response
to the zombie attacks [is] neither to defend the house . . . nor to retreat
to the cellar . . . but to flee. . . . She acts more effectively, in other words,
free of the territoriality associated in the film with masculinism” (67).
Barbara’s respite is, however, only short-lived, for what she discovers
on rejoining the living is that her fellow humans—who sadistically ridi-
cule the zombies and use them for target practice—are no different to
(indeed, probably worse than) the zombies. The final scene of the torture
of zombies and the passing overhead of a private helicopter not only
foreshadows the (already completed) Dawn sequel,6 but encapsulates the
trilogy’s movement from initially presenting the undead as a monstrous
threat to recognizing “hysterical masculinity” as the greater danger (74;
see Iaccino 153; Perez 59).
The historical and political dimensions of the Romero written and/
or directed Dead films—Night, Dawn, Day, and (the next) Night—con-
tribute to an understanding of their serialization, but these films are
more evidently marked as (official) sequels/remakes by the promotional
strategies that characterize each of the successive installments. In this
understanding of the film sequel, the logic of the phenomenon resides
in the commercial (and sometimes critical) success and value of an earlier
(original) film, and the reciprocal interest the sequel generates in the
previous installment (or installments) of the “franchise.”7 In continental
Europe, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was followed by a unique edit
of Dawn of Dead, overseen by coproducer Dario Argento and released
under the alternative title, Zombi (Gagne 97; Marcus). The immediate
commercial success of Zombi saw it quickly followed by Lucio Fulci’s
Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesheaters), the first one of several Italian zombie
films to use a numerical suffix to promote itself as a semisequel and
exploit the market’s eagerness for more graphic scenes of the dead return-
ing to consume the living. The film follows a newspaper reporter and
young woman (in search of her missing scientist father) to a Caribbean
island where the pair discover a zombie epidemic—evidently caused by
voodoo rites—that culminates in the rise of the island’s maggot-eaten
zombie conquistadors. Despite its title, Fulci’s film bears little (if any)
direct narrative resemblance to Zombi, and (as Russell points out) it
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appears equally inspired by contemporaneous Italian cannibal films and

24 Constantine Verevis

earlier Caribbean-set zombie movies as it does by the Romero-Argento

film: “when Argento wrote that Dawn of the Dead [Zombi] was his cre-
ation [Fulci reminded him] that zombies were around even before [such
films as] I Walked with a Zombie, [and that] zombies belong to Haiti
and Cuba, not to Dario Argento” (142). This defense of Fulci’s own
(“original”) contribution to the zombie film genre seems further sup-
ported by the suggestion that Zombi 2’s graphic depiction of decaying
zombies, and specifically of the undead shambling though the island’s
desolate palmy streets, anticipates Romero’s later Day of the Dead (see
“Rev. of Zombie” 75). Ultimately, while Zombi 2 (at least) initially seeks
to locate its commercial identity in the Romero-Argento sequel, the film
and its offspring—notably, Fulci’s later “zombie trilogy” (1980–1981) and
the “nonsequel” of Zombi 3 (1988)—serialize only a loose set of generic
features and attributes belonging to a larger zombie canon.
The question of false or indirect sequelization is perhaps even more
evident in the case of Return of the Living Dead, the film that grew out
of Russo’s paperback of the same title. Following some years in devel-
opment, Russo’s original treatment for a sequel to Night of the Living
Dead made its way to Orion Pictures where it was substantially rewritten
before production began in 1984. According to Gagne, Russo’s initial
script—which “wanted to retain the gutsy feeling of starkness and reality
from Night”—was set some ten years after the events of the first film:
“the plague is gone but not forgotten, and certain precautions are still
being taken by religious groups and cults” (166). By contrast, the Orion
Pictures version, which Dan O’Bannon rewrote and directed, transforms
the material into a horror-comedy hybrid, retaining only a single direct
plot link to Night of the Living Dead. O’Bannon says the studio had
little interest in the Return of the Living Dead property unless it retained
its title—its “most exploitable element”—but that issues of intellectual
property (authorship) and Romero’s ongoing concern over the legality of
the enterprise motivated him to change details from the original Russo
script and directly address its relation to Night of the Living Dead: “I knew
audiences . . . would want to know what the connection was between the
two films. I wanted to get it out of the way and give them a good initial
laugh. If I hadn’t done that I would have been in serious trouble with the
people who would figure I had just ripped-off Romero, or would try and
place it somewhere in his trilogy” (qtd. in Jones, “Dan O’Bannon” 19).
Return of the Living Dead establishes a type of continuity when Frank, a
manager of a medical supply warehouse, tells his assistant Freddie the
“real story” behind Night of the Living Dead. The film, Frank explains,
was based on a true incident that took place at a Pittsburgh veteran’s
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hospital where an accidental chemical spill led to the reanimation of

Redefi ning the Sequel 25

dead bodies: “they told the guy who made the movie that if he told the
true story, they’d sue his ass off, so he changed all the facts around.”
Taking Freddie to the basement to show him the airtight gas containers
in which the now dormant corpses have been stored, Frank accidentally
unleashes another (near unstoppable) zombie plague. From this point,
the film at once resembles Night—it follows the attempt of a restricted
number of characters to survive the overnight ordeal—but also radically
departs from Romero’s mythos, featuring zombies who talk, run, and
will not be stopped by a blow to the head. Although Romero took steps
to ensure that Return of the Living Dead would not clash with the near
contemporaneous release of Day of the Dead, the title of O’Bannon’s
“illegitimate sequel” nonetheless led to confusion among industry and
public alike, and is thought to have limited the financial success of the
official Romero chapter (Gagne 167; see Biodrowski; Peachment).
Return of the Living Dead was a substantial commercial success—gen-
erating its own run of “official sequels”: the “virtual remake” of Return of
the Living Dead Part II (Ken Wiederhorn, 1988) and Return of the Living
Dead 3 (Brian Yuzna, 1993)—but the ongoing touchstone for zombie
films continued to be the Romero-authored trilogy. Shinji Mikami cited
Night of the Living Dead (along with Fulci’s Zombi 2) as a starting point
for the “survival horror” of his Resident Evil PlayStation video game,
one commentator noting that the interface “lifted wholesale the camera
angles and action sequences from Romero’s classic zombie flicks such as
Dawn of the Dead” (Russell 172). Romero was in turn briefly considered
as director for the feature film version of the Resident Evil franchise that
had already generated three video-game sequels and a series of books.
The resultant 2002 feature (directed by Paul Anderson) retains some
of the popular zombie characters from the game (notably the zombie
Doberman dogs), but operates as a prequel to the “narrative,” depicting
the events leading up to the transformation of the fictional Raccoon City
from ordinary American town to living dead necropolis. The “manic
zombie mayhem” that ensues from a laboratory outbreak of the corpse
reanimating virus focuses on attempts by a small band of survivors to
escape the compound, and (like the video game) has been described as a
“scene-for-scene copy” of Dawn of the Dead but (tellingly) one that “fails
to situate Resident Evil zombies within any larger social [political] context”
(Foundas 24). Most significantly, the mainstream commercial success of
Resident Evil—and its (direct narrative) sequel Resident Evil: Apocalypse
(Alexander Witt, 2004)—was to contribute to industry confidence in
big-budget zombie films, notably the Zack Snyder directed (authorized)
remake of Dawn of Dead (2004).8 Recognized as a “commercial title that
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[had] permeated pop culture in a way that [was] disproportionate to the

26 Constantine Verevis

success of the original film,” Dawn of the Dead provided a presold prop-
erty ready for generic revision (Jones, “New Dawn” 36). While retaining
the shopping mall setting as a temporary refuge for its (expanded) group
of survivors, the Dawn remake ultimately borrows little from the Romero
mythos (and sociopolitical subtext), and (like Resident Evil) imagines its
zombies not as sympathetic souls, but as terrifying and powerful killing
machines (Jones, “New Dawn”; Wheaton).
Universal Picture’s Dawn of the Dead remake is the single film most
often credited as catalyst for the revival of the “legendary Dead fran-
chise,” enabling Romero to broker a $15 million-plus deal with Univer-
sal for the (long in development) fourth installment, Land of the Dead
(Chang 58; Rae 46; Rowe, “Land of the Dead” 53). However, in critical
accounts, these economic imperatives most often take second place to a
description of the political and authorial serialization of the Dead films:
“The Dead cycle—the fulgurating black and white of Night of the Living
Dead, the bloody comic-book humour of Dawn of the Dead, the radical
nihilism of Day of the Dead—represents something . . . personal, obsessive
and fundamental to [Romero’s] oeuvre. [. . .] It is, in Romero’s words, ‘the
place where I can show most how I see the world’ ” (D’Agnolo-Vallan
23, emphasis added). Land of the Dead thus advances (serializes) Rome-
ro’s personal, critical, and (frequently) subversive look at the respective
decade in which each Dead installment is located, in this case present-
ing a fortified city as an (obvious) allegory for the United States, living
with—but not facing up to—the realities of global terrorism. Described
as “virtually Karl Marx’s Das Kapital on the multiplex screen” (Martin)
and “a cartoon of Bush II-era cruel America” (Newman, “Land” 76),
Land of the Dead focuses on a Pittsburgh-like city—a city between two riv-
ers, protected by water—controlled by the corrupt technocrat Kaufman
who has constructed a luxurious walled community—the lavish high-rise
development of Fiddler’s Green—for himself and a privileged group of
survivors. At the base of Kaufman’s palace-fortress is a squalid encamp-
ment of less fortunate survivors, including mercenaries (Riley, Charlie,
and—later—Slack) who forage for supplies in the outside world in a
heavily armored vehicle, named Dead Reckoning. Across the water—in
the land of the dead—the excursions of the marauding (often vicious)
humans attract the attention of Big Daddy, an evolved zombie who leads
an army of the dead in an attempt to reclaim what is rightfully theirs
from the blinkered and unsustainable society of Fiddler’s Green.
Land of the Dead begins with a title—“Some Time Ago”—and an
explanatory montage sequence of degraded sound and image that Meghan
Sutherland describes as “an impressionistic primer on the events of night,
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dawn, and day that lead up to the ‘land’ we find before us” (67). A second
title card—“Today”—gives way to a scene of stale, shambling corpses that
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Redefi ning the Sequel 27

establishes that the zombies have been undead for many years and that
society—as we know it—ended long ago. In contrast to their digitally
rebooted kin (in Dawn of the Dead redux, Resident Evil, 28 Days Later
[Danny Boyle, 2002], and the like) these are slow-moving zombies but
evidently ones that are continuing to evolve, the opening scene revealing
a trio of decaying musicians who manage an approximate tune. Later in
the opening, Land of the Dead introduces the zombie “hero” Big Daddy,
an “everyman” former gas station attendant who seems at the point of
moving beyond the undead’s tendency to repeat only simple tasks to
regain real intelligence. Watching Big Daddy from a concealed vantage
point, the living “hero” Riley observes: “[The zombies are] trying to be
us. They used to be us. [They are] learning to be us again.” Romero
adds: “Big Daddy is not instantly as sympathetic as [Dawn of the Dead’s]
Bub. He is [a revolutionary figure like] Zapata . . . I have always felt less
attraction for the humans. I may have a protagonist [like Riley] who is
thinking a bit more clearly than all the others, but the humans have
always been less sympathetic to me” (qtd. in D’Agnolo-Vallan 24). At the
end of Land of the Dead, the action heroes (and lead players)—Riley and
his offsiders, Charlie and Slack—escape the besieged city but Big Daddy
dispatches the villain Kaufman and leads the zombie slaves to freedom.
In this—the most optimistic ending of the Dead series—Romero appears
to have fashioned a more conventional genre film and (according to
commentators) for the first time “purpose built” an ending to anticipate
a commercial sequel with some of the same characters (Jones, “Dead
Reckoning” 66). But the sequelization of Land of the Dead resides prin-
cipally in Romero’s authorship, his “unique signature” and “sociological
commentary” (Rae):

[Land of the Dead] continues the same themes [as the trilogy] of
people not communicating, things falling apart internally and peo-
ple not dealing with it. . . . That’s the theme that runs through all
of this. . . . The idea of building a society of glass, and not caring
about what’s going on around you—wearing blinders. (Romero qtd.
in Rowe, “Land of the Dead” 51)

I tried to set up a little depiction of what America is like today. . . .

I always see the zombies as an external force . . . and in a distant
way the zombies represent what we, the global community, should
really be thinking about: something like . . . power to the people.
(Romero qtd. in D’Agnolo-Vallan 24)
copyright law.

Just before Romero returned with Land of the Dead, Simon Pegg
and Edgar Wright, the British actor-writer-director team responsible for
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

28 Constantine Verevis

Spaced (1999–2001), took up the idea that the Dead trilogy is a series of
reports on isolated incidents (in the larger story of the end of civilization)
to envision the “rom-zom-com” (romantic-zombie-comedy) of Shaun of
the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004). In a “reverential” handling of Romero’s
oeuvre, Wright and Pegg say they wanted to “treat the zombie genre
with respect”:

We didn’t want to make fun of the zombies, we wanted to keep

them real and serious but then transplant our comedy and romance
into it. In a way the zombies are an exacerbation of the human
problems in the film rather than what the film is actually about. . . .
We always kind of imagined that [Shaun of the Dead] is part of the
Romero universe. . . . If Dawn of the Dead and what’s happening in
Pittsburgh is the big story then, our film is what’s going on in the
background. (qtd. in Williams, “Real Scream” 5)

Shaun of the Dead thus preserves not only the narrative invention—a
group of survivors takes refuge in a local pub from a horde of shambling
zombies—but also the mythos of a Romero zombie film, giving it a local
and contemporary sociopolitical “subtext” by situating zombification in
the everyday drudgery and routine of north London life. Across the body
of Shaun of the Dead—in such episodes at that in which Shaun and his
friends practice at being zombies in order to move undetected through a
horde of the living dead—the filmmakers literalize the now famous Dawn
of the Dead line—“they’re us [and we’re them]”—and serialize Romero’s
imperative that the zombie film allegorize the state (and shame) of the
nation. In recognition of this gesture, Romero in turn “authorized” Pegg
and Wright’s deferential treatment of the Dead trilogy by inviting the
pair to cameo as zombies in a Land of the Dead club sequence. Finally,
in placing Shaun of the Dawn within the historical tradition (mythos) of
Romero’s “Anubis” and Dead trilogy—the attenuated spine of the con-
temporary zombie cinema—Pegg and Wright not only pay a debt of
influence, but also underline the authorial and political dimension at the
core of the sequelization of the Dead.

Notes
1. George Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007) was in production at the time
of writing (2007).
2. At the time of writing (2007) a Francis Lawrence directed remake of I
am Legend was in production.
3. The screenplay is available as a DVD extra on the Divimax Special
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Edition of Day of the Dead.

Redefi ning the Sequel 29

4. See also Walter Marcus’s account of the Anchor Bay DVD 30th Anni-
versary Limited Edition of Night of the Living Dead—extended with new material,
including an epilogue with Debbie Rochon—as a (similar) attempt to recoup lost
profits, in this case by Image Ten investors John Russo and Russell Streiner.
5. At the time of writing (2007) a Steve Miner directed remake of Day of
the Dead was in production.
6. Szebin says: “On Savini’s Night of the Living Dead, the fine line that
separates sequel and remake is slightly blurred. . . . The action of the original
film ends about 65 minutes into the new version, with the remainder of the story
taking a new direction” (9).
7. This (cumulative) value is clearly communicated in a promotional item—
such as the theatrical trailer for Romero’s Day of the Dead—which draws attention
to the progression of the Dead series and the authorial vision of its creator.
8. Romero’s film had, in a sense, already been “officially remade” as a
panel-for-panel redraw in Steve Nile’s graphic novel version, Dawn of the Dead
(IDW Publishing, 2004). Chris Ryall later contributed a Land of the Dead graphic
novel to the same IDW series (2005).
copyright law.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable
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2
JENNIFER FORREST

Of “True” Sequels
The Four Daughters Movies,
or the Series That Wasn’t

A
CCORDING TO THE COMMON wisdom, sequels, series, genre films,
remakes, and spin-offs operate in the same territory: they revisit
familiar material or formulas, and they appeal primarily to popular
audiences. They also generally enjoy a degraded status compared to their
more esteemed colleagues, originals. In a 2002 New York Times article,
Michiko Kakutani bemoaned the “recycling mania” that has seemingly
greatly “accelerated” in recent years (1). As prevalent as this practice
seems today, however, not only has it been a staple of studio production
from the industry’s inception, its frequency also significantly pales in
comparison to that of the Classic Hollywood period when studios got the
maximum use of their properties as well as of their contract employees
(see Simonet). While references to a “recycling mania” strive to reduce
all instances of revisited material to the same deplorable activity, sequels,
series, genre films, and remakes possess their own distinct characteristics
and reflect different industry practices.
The most discussed, and often most reviled, among recycled pro-
ductions during the 1990s were remakes, especially US versions of
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31
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

32 Jennifer Forrest

Figure 2.1. Four Mothers (William Keighley, 1941). Courtesy Warner Bros/
The Kobal Collection.

critically successful foreign films. However, unlike when they are read-
aptations of classic literary works, remakes generally do not result in
multiple films. Two notable exceptions to the limited number of remakes
to which a same source text or film can give birth exist. First, producer
Bryan Foy claimed to have “used the plot of Tiger Shark (1932) suc-
cessfully in ten other films by changing the title, the locale of the story,
and the names of the characters” (Macgowan 344). It is no wonder that
Foy, who was nicknamed the “Keeper of the Bs,” worked at Warner
Brothers, where, as Douglas Gomery notes: “Stories were used over and
over again” (115). Almost as impressive in numbers were the six versions
of George S. Kaufman’s play The Butter and Egg Man (1925), also at
Warner Brothers.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century the media has shifted
its focus from predatorial remakes to sequels and series, which are under-
standably the most visible of the types of recycled materials produced in
Hollywood, and which lend themselves to seemingly endless variations
on a theme and a formula. In today’s descriptions of films, distinguish-
ing between sequels and series is often difficult, first, because critics use
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the words virtually interchangeably, and second, because studios usually

Of “True” Sequels 33

identify both sequels and series by repeating the title of the initial film
and/or affixing a number identifying each film’s place in a production
sequence. The difference between the two, however, goes beyond the
technical definition of (1) a sequel (usually only one film) featuring the
same characters and continuing the story of a previous film;1 and (2) a
series (usually a minimum of three films) presenting recurring characters
in unrelated episodes.2 Contrary to Kakutani’s classification of the two
within the same industry recycling practice, studios intentionally design
sequels and series for different audiences. During the Classic Hollywood
period, series films were almost exclusively B-unit productions and tar-
geted primarily the popular audiences of second-run theaters. Although
the dismantling of the old studio system with the US government’s suc-
cessful Paramount antitrust prosecution did not kill series production,
series no longer fell solely into the B-film category—they can, and often
do, boast big-name stars and blockbuster budgets. They also continue
to appeal to a spectator looking for entertainment rather than for films
presenting greater aesthetic aspirations or psychological challenges. The
entertainment-seeking spectator knows how to analyze the taglines that
indicate a “false” sequel—a film that may lead to a series—and the
“true” sequel—a film that functions as a companion piece (emphasis
on the singular) to its predecessor.3 The “true” sequel offers characters
that have psychological depth, that seem to live and breathe beyond the
screen, as opposed to the stock characters of series films who always
behave in the manner that is conventional to them. The “true” sequel
caresses a certain spectator’s class sensibilities by appealing to his or
her preference for works of quality. So, in opposition to the current
trend that film critics have of labeling three or more films that draw on
the same source texts (New Hollywood blockbusters and, retroactively,
Classic Hollywood B-movies) as franchises, a term that clearly empha-
sizes the commercial over the artistic values of the films, I define the
“true” sequel as a film that promotes itself as having distinctly more
high-brow ambitions.
A group of films exists from the Classic period that on the surface
offers examples from almost all of the recycling categories mentioned
above: the Four Daughters films—Four Daughters (Michael Curtiz, 1938),
which was remade as Young at Heart (Gordon Douglas, 1954); Four Wives
(Michael Curtiz, 1939); Four Mothers (William Keighley, 1941); and a
“reworking” of the first film, Daughters Courageous (Michael Curtiz,
1939), itself remade as Always in My Heart (Jo Graham, 1942).4 While
possessing this complex family relationship, the nuclear Four Daughters
films seemingly function most as a short (in terms of Classic Hollywood),
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but successful, series. However, by the very nature of their conditions of

34 Jennifer Forrest

production, distribution, and exhibition, the two films that follow Four
Daughters are instead “true” sequels.
Four Daughters, Four Wives, and Four Mothers, the core films in the
group, follow the love lives from courtship to marriage to motherhood of
the four musical Lemp sisters, played by three real life sisters, Priscilla,
Lola, and Rosemary Lane, with Gale Page as the fourth. Their widower
father (played by Claude Rains), as a professor of music, holds the fam-
ily together through good times and adversity, first, through the classi-
cal music and musical performance that bind all members, and second,
through good sense, good humor, and unconditional love. The films were
based on the popular Fannie Hurst story “Sister Act,” which appeared
in Cosmopolitan in 1937. Hurst properties had served Universal Studios
and Warner Brothers well from the 1920s to the 1940s (and in the
1950s and early 1960s with several remakes and readaptations), leading
to some of the definitive melodramas of the Classic Hollywood period:
Back Street (John Stahl, 1932; Robert Stevenson, 1941), Imitation of Life
(John Stahl, 1934; Douglas Sirk, 1959), and Humoresque (Jean Negulesco,
1946). A lesser known author’s play was used for Daughters Courageous,
which conveniently facilitated the refitting of its basic narrative structure
and the dynamics of its characters’ relationships toward a reorientation
and an exploration of those elements cited and praised by film critics
and audiences of Four Daughters: the palpable sensual magnetism between
good-natured Priscilla Lane and surly bad boy John Garfield and the
relationship between the girls and their father, here returning to the
family after having abandoned them twenty years earlier.
James L. Limbacher’s Haven’t I Seen You Somewhere Before? Remakes,
Sequels, and Series in Motion Pictures and Television, 1896–1978, and Ber-
nard A. Drew’s Motion Picture Series and Sequels: A Reference Guide both
list Four Daughters, Daughters Courageous, Four Wives, and Four Mothers as
a series. While Robert Nowlan and Gwendolyn Wright Nowlan’s Cinema
Sequels and Remakes, 1903–1987, does not officially include Daughters
Courageous in its referencing of the Four Daughters “sequels,” it does,
nevertheless, cite it as a “pseudo-sequel,” contrasting it with the two
films featuring the daughters as wives and mothers, which were the “real
sequels” (258). In his review of the film for the New York Times, Frank S.
Nugent was at a loss for the correct classification: “Not exactly a sequel,
yet not exactly a brand-new theme either, the Strand’s ‘Daughters Coura-
geous’ is the Warners’ attempt to recapture the mood and the popularity
of their brilliantly successful ‘Four Daughters’ of last season” (“Strand’s
‘Daughters Courageous’ ”). After mentioning the basic structural simi-
larities between the two films as well as a shared mood, he nevertheless
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concludes that: “The resemblance ends there, in a way; for the story is
new and quite disassociated from the earlier venture.” And yet, he adds:
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Of “True” Sequels 35

“Still the film cannot be considered completely apart.”

The Nowlans’ reference to “real sequels” does not offer, howev-
er, any theoretical role for the term beyond the concrete function of
identifying a film that follows sequentially in production another film
featuring the same characters, this whether the storyline is picked up
again or whether an unrelated episode is offered. Indeed, Cinema Sequels
and Remakes includes, for example, the Charlie Chan, Sherlock Holmes,
and Thin Man films in its discussion of sequels according to the logic
of the book’s title, but acknowledges in the introduction that a distinc-
tion between the two practices does in fact exist: “The basic difference
between a sequel and one film in a series is that in the former, the story
of a previous movie is continued in some way, whereas in the case of the
latter, there is no real connection between the films, save some central
characters who reappear” (xi). In this less than rigorous vein, the reader
has difficulty determining if the Nowlans consider the Four Daughters
movies as operating in the same territory as the Charlie Chan, Sherlock
Holmes, and Thin Man films (sequential films in unrelated episodes), or
if they function as sequels with each successive film picking up the thread
of the preceding one. Finally, Bosley Crowther, the film critic for the
New York Times who reviewed only Four Mothers, referred to it as “the
third and latest of this domestic series” (“The Lemps Again”).
All indicators seem to point to a series: whether one speaks of an
A-class series such as the Thin Man, or a B-class series such as Charlie
Chan, the “four” in the Four Daughters films offers an apparently easy
way to recognize that the movies are related, just as Warner Brothers
had intended. While the “reworked” Daughters Courageous did not have
“four” in its title, (1) it was released less than a year after Four Daugh-
ters, a film still fresh in the minds of audiences if not just for the five
Academy Award nominations it received; (2) it directly advertised its
filiation through the repetition of another title word “daughters”; and
(3) it literally boasted the same ensemble cast. Not much has changed
since the late 1930s. While series today more readily qualify as A-class
pictures, if only from their budgets and big-name stars, studios continue
to repeat an essential component of the title of the original film, usu-
ally, as noted earlier, by offering the same title and adding a number.
While the numbers ostensibly indicate sequentiality, and some degree
of continuity usually exists from one episode to another (much more so
than in Classic Hollywood series), such films (the Lethal Weapon mov-
ies, the Superman movies, and so on), especially when studios release a
third entry, are nine times out of ten series.
As noted earlier, the Four Daughters films present some of the
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basic characteristics of series. Like the Four Daughters films, many series
from the Classic Hollywood era stemmed from only one source text
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36 Jennifer Forrest

or series of texts. The first of the eight Maisie movies (1939–47), for
example, was officially based on a loose adaptation of Wilson Collison’s
novel, Dark Dame (1935); all of the subsequent nine entries retained only
the title character. Like Four Daughters, whose popularity, it has been
noted, inspired its “reworked” Daughters Courageous featuring the same
cast as the earlier film, some series spawned “reworkings,” but usually the
studios conceptualized them as potential series. After the seventh entry
in the Saint series, for example, author Leslie Charteris refused RKO
any further rights to his novels. RKO responded by acquiring the rights
to Michael Arlen’s short story “The Gay Falcon,” and put the Saint’s
George Sanders in the “carbon copy” lead role of the Falcon (Pitts 241):
this time the name had changed but the basic narrative structure was the
same. The Falcon movies were, in essence, a thinly disguised continua-
tion of the Saint movies. And like Four Daughters and its remake Young
at Heart, a series entry can lead to readaptations: the Falcon entry, The
Falcon Takes Over (Irving Reis, 1942), was the first adaptation of Raymond
Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely (1940). It was remade (or readapted) as
A-movies in 1944 as Murder My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk), and in 1975
as Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards).
All these similarities do not, however, necessarily make a series
of the Four Daughters movies. On the contrary, recycling properties,
casts, or pairings, and role types and narratives reflected the standard
marketing strategies studios used in the hopes of minimizing the role of
chance in any given film’s reception, and this on all levels of production,
low budget, and high budget. While winning formulas were typical, they
functioned differently for the As and Bs. Regarding the recycling of prop-
erties, Warner Brothers, the studio that produced the Four Daughters
films, “operated on a volume basis,” producing all their films, big ones
as well as small ones, “cheaply and efficiently,” a practice that translated
into the continual reuse of source materials (Balio, Grand Design 112–13).
With respect to A-films, however, Tino Balio notes that, while it would
seem logical that a studio, especially one like Warner Brothers, would
seek to squeeze out of them a maximum number of similarly structured
stories, the opposite was the case: they “seldom recycled expensive prop-
erties (for example, Green Pastures) because they were by definition easily
recognizable by many people and therefore were likely to make audiences
feel cheated if reused. The number and percentage of remakes Warner
Brothers produced increased significantly after 1934, but the majority
of these pictures were Bs” (100). One can infer that the studio felt that
the audience for B-movies did not attach importance to works based on
their literary or artistic pedigree.
copyright law.

Similarly, while studios subjected top-tier actors to a certain degree

of the stereotyping with which lesser players were all too familiar, they
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Of “True” Sequels 37

strove for greater role diversification for the former than for the latter.
After all, stars filled seats in a studio’s first-run theaters, and stars deter-
mined the rental fees distributors paid for the better quality films (versus
the flat fees paid for Bs). The key was to exploit stars just enough without
overexposing and devaluing studio product. In terms of A-class stories
and stars, then, finding that balance in which the studio got the most for
its money while still promoting a quality product was essential.
As Balio notes regarding the development and exploitation of a
studio’s major stars: “A star’s popularity and drawing power created a
ready-made market for his or her pictures, which reduced the risks of
production financing” (Grand Design 144). Such a strategy was at work
in the recasting of the ensemble players of Four Daughters in Daughters
Courageous. In fact, with respect to the relation between Four Daughters
and Daughters Courageous, the two practices—star formulas and reuse of
source materials—overlapped. Although the source materials for Four
Daughters and Daughters Courageous were decidedly different, the screen
adaptation of Dorothy Bennett’s play Fly Away Home (1935) was tailored
in such a way as to duplicate as much as possible the basic relations from
Four Daughters. In this sense, like the Falcon films as a repackaged ver-
sion of the Saint movies, Daughters Courageous is based just as much on
Fannie Hurst’s story as Four Daughters (that is, a remake). In another
sense, however, the relationships between the characters of Daughters
Courageous and the narrative built around them were determined by the
stars’ personas, which in turn determined the final shape the characters
would take and the kind of trials they would encounter in the narrative.
In the case of Four Daughters, Errol Flynn was originally slated to star in
the film, a casting that would have radically changed the film in its focus
on the male lead: the script would have been developed according to the
dimensions of his star image. With his withdrawal from the production
to do The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, 1938), the script was
rewritten to focus on the four daughters (Roberts).
While Fly Away Home contained many narrative points of inter-
section with Four Daughters (one parent raising four children), the plot
had enough narrative dissimilarities (the parent is the mother, not the
father, with the latter having left the family when the children were
very young, and so on) that the film played against the expectations
established by the first film (differentiation in Claude Rains’s role, not
as the glue that binds the family together, but as the disrupter of the
family), which in turn allowed it to maintain the market value of its
stars and to guarantee that the film was a quality, not an assembly-line
(series), production.5 Finally, regarding the transfer of the basic pat-
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tern of Four Daughters in Daughters Courageous, Four Wives, and Four

Mothers, as well as the repetition of the core cast, although one can
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38 Jennifer Forrest

perceive similar structural relationships in other cast reunions, most

notably in dynamic pairings—the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers, William
Powell/Myrna Loy (in the six non–Thin Man movies), and Spencer
Tracy/Katherine Hepburn groups of films, for example—one is disin-
clined to qualify them as “true” series in the same way one would do
so with the Charlie Chan, Sherlock Holmes, and Maisie movies. Once
again, the major indicators of distinction with respect to the Classic
Hollywood era are the class of movie involved and the degree of product
differentiation applied: the Charlie Chan films were B-unit productions
featuring minimal change in terms of narrative structure and personnel
as well as aggressive product exposure, the Tracy/Hepburn films were
A-unit productions possessing significantly more differentiation in order
to protect the studio’s investments both in quality properties and in its
upper echelon personnel.
Apart from the Thin Man series, there are no other examples of
“true” A series. The Andy Hardy series, of which the second film is clear-
ly a B-movie was technically upgraded to A-class when, in 1939, Mickey
Rooney became the number one star in Hollywood (a position he held
for three years) precisely because of his popularity in the role of Andy
Hardy. The Hardy family pictures “were grossing three to four times
their cost,” and accordingly, the studios responded by elevating them
to A status, “at least outside the largest metropolitan areas” (Crowther,
Lion’s Share 256; Balio, Grand Design 102), a notable distinction given
that the important first-run theaters were precisely in major cities. Balio
includes the Busby Berkeley Gold Diggers musicals from Warner Broth-
ers as another example of an A series. Discussing them as a “true” series
rather than as a group of films is problematic. “The plots varied only
a little from picture to picture,” notes Balio, a characteristic that can
technically qualify the films as series pictures, but it identifies them just
as readily as a subgenre (the backstage musical, a genre to which the
Broadway Melody “series” from MGM would also belong). The films
deviate in an important way from the series formula, however, in that
“the original leads were not repeated in the subsequent pictures. Rather,
the series was held together by Busby Berkeley’s elaborately staged musi-
cal numbers” (Grand Design 102). In addition, the name that connects
the films, “Gold Diggers,” does not encompass all the Warner Brothers
films from the period that featured the same theme and, contrary to what
Balio says, many of the same players in a variety of combinations: 42nd
Street (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, 1933), Footlight Parade (Lloyd
Bacon and Busby Berkeley, 1933), and Dames (Ray Enright and Busby
Berkeley, 1934). The minimal varying of personnel and the maximal
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varying of characters points to the effort by Warner Brothers and MGM

Of “True” Sequels 39

respectively to associate the films carrying the words “Gold Diggers” and
“Broadway Melody” with distinctive, non–series A productions.6
Like the other major studios, Warner Brothers attempted repeat-
edly to create dynamic couplings and partial encore casts both on and off
the screen. This was, after all, unit production. Four Daughters, Daughters
Courageous, and Four Wives had the same A-unit producers, Hal B. Wallis
and Henry Blanke; the same A-unit director, Michael Curtiz; and the
same A-unit screenwriter, Julius J. Epstein (all nominated for Oscars in
their categories for the first film). As for the actors, if one takes Priscilla
Lane’s motion pictures as an example, the actress appeared in two other
Warner Brothers films with May Robson, who played her aunt in the
Four Daughters films. The studio paired several promising male A-list
stars with her as well: she appeared on the same bill with her Four
Daughters films costar Jeffrey Lynn in eight films from 1938 to 1941,
with Wayne Morris in four films from 1938 to 1940, and, in an effort to
repeat the magnetism between her and John Garfield in Four Daughters,
Daughters Courageous, and Four Wives (despite the death of his character
in the first film), she was paired with the latter in Dust Be My Destiny
(Lewis Seiler, 1939). While in this respect, A-unit and B-unit production
by core teams are mirror images of one another, the important differ-
ence is that in whatever the pairing, and consequently, whatever film in
which she figured, the “film star” Priscilla Lane was never eclipsed by the
characters she played. The poster for Dust Be My Destiny advertised in
its boldest letters the names of its stars, Priscilla Lane and John Garfield,
and not those of Ann Lemp and Mickey Borden (the characters that
they portrayed in the Four Daughters films): in proclaiming that they
are “Together Again!” the poster deliberately incorporates Ann Lemp’s
and Mickey Borden’s character traits into the overall persona of movie
stars Priscilla Lane and John Garfield. Even Four Wives, the second of
the Four Daughters movies, emphasized the stars over the characters by
inviting the spectator to “Join the Honeymoon Lanes [not the Honey-
moon Lemps] as they start out on their happiest adventure.”7
In contrast, as an example of the different mindset involved in the
forming of a studio’s minor series actors, MGM treated Ann Sothern
overall as a B talent, even after her successful supporting role as Jean
Livingstone in Tay Garnett’s Trade Winds (1938). Precisely because of her
popularity as Jean, B-unit producer J. Walter Ruben looked for a suitable B
series fit for her, especially one between her and a male costar. In the same
year that she starred in Maisie (Edwin L. Marin, 1939), Ruben also had
her play Garda Sloane against Franchot Tone in what was to be the third
and final entry of the Joel and Garda Sloane mysteries—Fast and Furious
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(Busby Berkeley, 1939)—and Ethel Turp against William Gargan in Joel

40 Jennifer Forrest

and Ethel Turp Call on the President (Robert B. Sinclair, 1939), the first film
in a planned series that never materialized. Maisie was the character that
really clicked with audiences. Unlike Priscilla Lane, whose star personality
shaped the characters that she played, Ann Sothern became synonymous
with Maisie, so much so that, as the series wore on, she struggled to shake
the character’s hold on her. Although actors no longer technically need
fear such fates in the poststudio era—Harrison Ford has played in several
series without suffering any repercussions to his status as a major star (the
Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, and two Jack Ryan entries)—the super-
stition still runs strong. One reads on the Internet Movie Database, for
example, that Kevin Costner has become more the exception than the rule:
he has “purposely avoided doing sequels to his films. So far, he is one of
the few blockbuster stars to never come back for a sequel” (“Biography”).
Regarding Ann Sothern, MGM’s publicity department deliberately encour-
aged the confusion between actress and role, designing posters in which
the boldest letters announced the newest Maisie movie, for example, with
the actress’s name in demonstrably smaller print in the bottom corner.8
In this instance, the character clearly dominated her star persona. For this
reason, ostensibly any given Classic Hollywood studio’s prominent actors
were with rare exception associated with series’ roles.
The calculated weighting of publicity toward the star in the Four
Daughters movies and toward the lead character in series movies works
to identify the former as A-movies and the latter as B-movies. This does
not, however, lead us to reject classifying the Four Daughters movies as
a series, because after all, the Thin Man movies were an A-class series.
However, according to the class of the Thin Man films, instead of high-
lighting the characters Nick and Nora Charles, posters advertised its stars
just as studios did nonseries star vehicles: at the top of the poster for
The Thin Man Goes Home (Richard Thorpe, 1944), the fifth entry in the
six-film series, one reads: “Together again in MGM’s riotous comedy!”
Directly underneath in the boldest letters, one finds the names of its
stars, William Powell and Myrna Loy. In addition, MGM staggered the
release of Thin Man episodes so that (1) a new entry appeared only every
two to three years; and (2) there was enough product differentiation in
the film roles between the Thin Man movies to maintain William Powell
and Myrna Loy’s star ranking. Similarly, the Four Daughters films were
issued roughly every two years. In contrast, in 1940 alone, Twentieth
Century-Fox issued four installments in the B-class Charlie Chan series.9
Clearly, the studio philosophy was to milk a B series for as long as pos-
sible. This does not resolve, however, the issue of identifying the category
to which the Four Daughters films belong because, according to the logic
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of the Thin Man series, they technically qualify as an A series.

Of “True” Sequels 41

Continuity distinguishes the Thin Man series from the Four Daugh-
ters films. Continuity refers here to (1) the thread of one story being
picked up in the film that follows (indicative of the sequel), as well as to
(2) the virtual ability to invent indefinitely new adventures for a charac-
ter or characters (indicative of the series). As stated earlier, in contrast
to the period’s serial productions (sequential episodes of a single story
with each episode usually ending in a cliffhanger, as in the Flash Gordon
Conquers the Universe serial that was divided into twelve episodes [Ford
Beebe and Ray Taylor, 1940]), which targeted the underage patrons of
Saturday matinees, Classic Hollywood series films generally had little to
no narrative continuity between episodes. Aimed at adult audiences, the
Four Daughters films were not serials, yet possessed the serial’s continu-
ing storyline (without, of course, the cliffhanger). Nugent clearly treated
these films as an A-series, commenting that Four Wives, “is a singularly
happy film, well-written, well-directed and well-played, and it reconciles
us tranquilly to the vista it has opened of a ‘Four Mothers’ (although part
of that already has been realized), a ‘Four Grandmothers’ and possibly
a ‘Four Granddaughters’ ” (“ ‘Four Wives’ ”). Nugent’s list of potential
future entries in the “series,” while positing multiple installments, at the
same time reveals the impossibility of the realization of such a series:
series, whether in film, popular literature, comic books, or radio plays,
deny the passage of time, focusing on an eternal present; sequels, how-
ever, are anchored in the beginnings and endings of life cycles. The Four
Daughters films exhausted the premise that grounded them with Four
Mothers and could go no further, regardless of Hollywood’s ability to age
actors beyond their years. Indeed, Four Mothers was perhaps the result
of singular studio misjudgment, if not outright error: while the qualities
that assured the success of the first sequel (first-rate production, direc-
tion, writing, and acting) had dropped a notch in the final film (although
director William Keighley and screenwriter Stephen Morehouse Avery
were hardly B-unit personnel), the latter could not logically spawn new
adventures for the Lemp sisters. Similar temporal restrictions on the
narrative are evident in Vincente Minnelli’s Father of the Bride (1950) and
its sequel Father’s Little Dividend (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) and, more
recently, in Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995) and its sequel Before
Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004). In particular, the latter film’s reunion
of Jesse and Céline nine years later plays itself out not only in the real
time of the characters but also in that of the spectators as well.
To determine whether Four Wives is a “true” sequel, given its place
in between the first and the third film, it is perhaps useful to work
backward by identifying what is not a sequel. George Seitz’s A Family
copyright law.

Affair (1937) featuring the Hardy family was followed by You’re Only
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42 Jennifer Forrest

Young Once (George Seitz, 1937), which is often referred to as its sequel.
Any further additions would constitute a series, henceforth marked by
minimal sequential and maximal episodic development. Accordingly, the
fourteen pictures that followed You’re Only Young Once would ostensibly
have established the Hardy family series, had not the “sequel” declared
itself a series from the outset: the film opened with Lewis Stone “directly
addressing and informing the public of the new Hardy family series”
(DeCroix 154). You’re Only Young Once, therefore, is not a “true” sequel.
In another example, audiences enjoyed the supporting characters of the
The Egg and I (Chester Erskine, 1947) so much that Universal issued
Ma and Pa Kettle (Charles Lamont, 1949), “The hilarious sequel to ‘The
Egg and I,’ ” two years later. Both You’re Only Young Once and Ma and
Pa Kettle were series entries and could be read as such by the drop in
production values and headliners. Because neither cast nor production
values changed, Four Wives (and to a limited degree, Four Mothers) can
provisionally qualify as “true” sequels.
The second film grouped among the Four Daughters films, Daugh-
ters Courageous, too, is neither a sequel nor a pseudosequel, but, for differ-
ent reasons: as noted earlier, it was based on an entirely different source
text and was advertised as such. Its poster boasted both a modicum of
sequel status to capitalize on the critical and popular success of Four
Daughters—“It’s another ‘Four Daughter’s’ hit!”—as well as emphasizing
difference—“Only the stars are the same. The story, characters, romances
are all different.” The poster continued to alternate between invoking
fond memories of the previous film—“If you liked ‘Four Daughters’ (and
who didn’t), we wholeheartedly recommend for you and all your family
‘Daughters Courageous’ ”—and bringing both reel and real lives into
play: the movie starred the “Four Daughters,” listed, not as the Lemps,
but as Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane, and Gale Page. The
melding of reel and real personas accounted for the greater illusion of
reality in the performances of this A production. With Daughters Coura-
geous, Nugent emphasized the fullness of the characters as one of the
qualities endowing it with as legitimate a claim to distinction as Four
Daughters: “They [the characters] are not simply creations of the cam-
era, but men and women whose lives began, and will continue, beyond
the camera’s range of vision.” The message to the new film’s potential
audience was clear, even if Nugent hesitated to classify it: “Not exactly
a sequel, yet not exactly a brand-new theme either.” Notable in his dis-
cussion of the film, Nugent did not use terminology generally associ-
ated with series entries (“routine,” “formulaic,” and so on), an important
consideration no doubt being the high production values associated with
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the film and, most important, the stature of the production team and
the actors involved. The latter were important players in the Warner
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Of “True” Sequels 43

Brothers stable, and the studio was careful to treat them like luxury com-
modities and not squander them indiscriminately in lower quality pro-
ductions. Studios carefully handled their top talents and the productions
in which they appeared because, as Cathy Klaprat has shown, neither a
particular studio nor its film narratives ultimately attracted spectators;
stars did (353–54). The presence of a star in a film minimized the risks
involved in production, maximized the rental fees that could be charged
to distributors and exhibitors, and drew audiences to first-run theaters,
which were owned by the studios and whose tickets were top dollar. The
importance of selling high-price tickets in first-run theaters is revealed
in that, although “they comprised only 25 percent of the total exhibition
seats, they returned over 50 percent of the box office receipts” (355).
These studios’ theaters possessed greater luxury and aesthetic appeal than
second-run theaters, and catered to the class-consciousness and sense of
distinction of those patrons capable of buying more expensive tickets.
In contrast, a New York Times reviewer of the Maisie series entry found
questionable the decision to show Ringside Maisie (Edwin L. Marin, 1941)
in a first-run theater such as the Capitol because the Capitol was “strictly
a class joint. It was a little too classy, in fact, because Maisie is a sweet
girl with a heart as big as a pumpkin, but her refinements are limited”
(T. S. “ ‘Ringside Maisie’ ”). Studios generally knew that the patron of
the Capitol possessed those refinements that Maisie lacked and that he
or she expected the theater experience to reflect his or her sensibili-
ties: comfortable and attractive surroundings, patrons possessing similar
cultural capital, a star vehicle, a quality production, and a film that in
varying degrees was one (or in the case of sequels, two) of a kind. One
did not generally show series films at the Capitol: a notable exception,
of course, was the Thin Man series, which could and did play at the
Capitol. One would, however, show “true” sequels. Both follow-up Four
Daughters movies played at a first-run house, the Strand.
Among the definitions offered for series and serials in Ephraim
Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia, one finds no category for the sequel. This
absence perpetuates the indiscriminate use of the term by film scholars,
critics, and the industry to refer to any revisited material rather than
to a particular industry practice that continues to this day. Isolating the
“true” sequel in the confusing trail of the Four Daughters movies—the
sequels that were not a series—is useful for an understanding of the
rationalization behind the Classic Hollywood industry practice among
the major five film studios of grouping film production into A- and
B-pictures, with the former aiming for a spectator of a certain cultural
capital, and the latter for popular audiences. Budgets determined not
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only the core production values that went into a film, but also affected
every facet of production, important considerations of which, we have
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

44 Jennifer Forrest

seen, were how, and how often, and which actors were assigned roles,
and how, and how often a property was reused. Isolating and defining
these practices may seem trivial (that is, the basic motivation behind
all groupings of films, A- and B-class, is the minimizing of production
costs with the maximizing of returns), especially because the industry
itself often seems little interested in such taxonomies. Although studios’
attempt to appeal to the widest spectrum of tastes, the core audience of
“true” sequels clearly was and still is the more sophisticated spectator
trained to consume only originals.

Notes
1. One generally refers to a group of nonseries films possessing two sequels
as a trilogy, as in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Like most trilogies, these films
resemble somewhat the serials of the silent and Classic Hollywood period in that,
while not ending in the characteristic cliffhanger, each installment leaves the tale
nevertheless incomplete, awaiting the final film for narrative resolution.
2. When a proposed series never gets beyond two films, one generally
speaks of a failed series, not of an original and its sequel. An example of this was
the unrealized series that was based on P. J. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, starring
David Niven as the clueless Bertie Wooster and Arthur Treacher as his all too
competent butler Jeeves.
3. As an indication of the tendency of the “false” sequel to become part of a
more complex family of films, the Internet Movie Database lists among its results in
a keyword search all those sequels that led to something else: “sequel-to-remake,”
“prequel-to-sequel,” “prequel-to-sequel-of-remake,” and so on.
4. Regarding Daughters Courageous, “reworking” is a more appropriate term
than “spin-off,” because the latter is technically a film that takes popular support-
ing characters from an earlier film and gives them adventures usually unrelated
to those of the earlier film’s main characters. A good example is the Ma and Pa
Kettle series, which was a spin-off of The Egg and I (Chester Erskine, 1947).
The principal actors of the first film, Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert,
and the characters that they played never appeared in the series. Daughters Cou-
rageous does not technically apply to this category because no recurring lead or
supporting characters appear from the earlier film.
5. My argument is based on Cathy Klaprat’s discussion of the econom-
ics of the star system in “The Star as Market Strategy: Bette Davis in Another
Light.”
6. Interestingly, the Nowlan’s Cinema Sequels and Remakes lists the Gold
Diggers movies as remakes.
7. The irony, of course, is that one of the four actresses, Gale Page, was
not even a Lane.
8. A glance at posters for any B series replicates the same practice.
9. The series usually averaged two to three releases per year. This average
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holds for most Classic Hollywood era series.

3
THOMAS LEITCH

Sequel-Ready Fiction
After Austen’s Happily Ever After

T
HESE ARE HEADY TIMES FOR connoisseurs of intertextuality. Beeban
Kidron’s film adaptation of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,
not exactly the most complicated release of 2004, is a sequel
to an adaptation that is also an adaptation of a sequel. The 1999 Helen
Fielding novel that provided its avowed source had already contribut-
ed materially to Sharon Anderson’s 2001 film adaptation Bridget Jones’s
Diary, which was based more directly on Fielding’s 1996 novel of the
same title, which was in turn rooted in a weekly column Fielding had
been writing for The Independent (and later for the Daily Telegraph before
returning to The Independent). Encouraged by the Jane Austen frenzy
sweeping the nation in the wake of the 1995 BBC miniseries Pride and
Prejudice, Fielding based the character of Bridget’s stiff beau Mark Darcy
in the Independent column on Colin Firth’s portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet’s
stiff beau Mr. Darcy in the miniseries. Invited to turn her column into
a novel, Fielding lifted the plot of Pride and Prejudice, and later claimed
to have used the plot of Persuasion as a basis for Bridget Jones: The Edge
of Reason. When Bridget Jones’s Diary was filmed, Fielding insisted that
the adaptation be directed by her friend Sharon Maguire, a television
copyright law.

director who had been the model for Bridget’s friend Shazzer, and that

45
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

46 Thomas Leitch

Figure 3.1. Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maquire, 2001). Courtesy Miramax/
Universal/The Kobal Collection/Bailey, Alex.

Darcy be played by none other than Colin Firth, whom Fielding wrote
into her sequel in propria persona in an episode in which Bridget flies
to Rome to interview him about his new film, Fever Pitch, but ends up
fixating on his emergence from the lake at Pemberley with a wet shirt
as Mr. Darcy. On top of the vast web of intertextual references movie
audiences expect as their due in even the most artless films, Fielding’s
novels and their film adaptations provide still more, more, more.
The resulting heteroglossic stew has already been subjected to clos-
er intertextual analysis than most romantic comedies can ever hope or
fear to attract. This chapter does not retrace the steps of Bridget Jones’s
legion of analysts, beginning of course with Bridget herself, but rather
considers Bridget’s success in a broader context, broader even than the
chick-lit phenomenon with which Fielding is so often identified. Numer-
ous contemporary authors have undertaken sequels to Austen’s novels,
but the novels do nothing to encourage any speculation about what
happened next, and many of Austen’s readers have treated the modern
sequels as excrescences or travesties.1 Although Bridget Jones’s Diary had
concluded with the same sort of romantic rapprochement as Pride and
Prejudice, however, nothing seemed more natural and inevitable than the
swift arrival of a sequel that would be eagerly embraced by both hundreds
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of thousands of eager readers and millions of filmgoers. What features

Sequel-Ready Fiction 47

of Bridget Jones’s Diary make it so hospitable to a sequel that even audi-

ences who professed their disappointment in Bridget Jones: The Edge of
Reason acknowledged that its appearance as book and film was perfectly
consonant with Fielding’s original? Or is the widespread appetite for such
a sequel less a function of any particular features of Fielding’s novel than
of more general changes in audiences’ dispositions since Austen’s time?
This chapter considers both the specific qualities of Fielding’s heroine
that made her so ripe for a sequel and the ways in which the two films to
feature her exaggerate her sequel-ready status still further by undermin-
ing the teleological import of her adventures. But it begins by placing
the films, the novels, and the weekly newspaper column that gave birth
to them all as the latest arrivals in a long tradition of sequels Fielding’s
work both continues and transforms.
Present-day Hollywood is so dominated by the rush to franchis-
ing that even apparent stand-alones such as Gone with the Wind, Psy-
cho, and The Silence of the Lambs have delivered sequels (the second and
third spawning prequels as well) whose success, according to the market
research that drives commercial filmmaking, will be assured by presold
brand names. But simply arguing that Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
represents a reflexive Hollywoodization of its heroine is not enough. For
one thing, the film sequel, although it did not duplicate the record of
Bridget Jones’s Diary in becoming the highest grossing film yet released in
Great Britain, was eagerly awaited and economically successful.2 Clearly
it fed a mass-audience hunger as palpable, if perhaps as adventitious,
as Bridget’s own investment in Pride and Prejudice and Princess Diana.
For another, the sales figures for Fielding’s second novel were just as
impressive in the world of publishing as those of its film adaptation
in the more stratospheric heights of commercial filmmaking. Bridget,
unlike Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet, evidently left a vast audience
clamoring for more. The power of Fielding’s heroine to arouse and fulfill
such an appetite raises questions about why it seemed so logical for any
contemporary fictional success, this one in particular, to generate the
kind of transmedia franchise that had eluded Austen for 200 years.
Part of the answer clearly has to do with the explosive growth
of new media unavailable to Austen. Yet sequels of several kinds were
already well-established when Austen wrote. Indeed the rise of the novel
marked in some ways not only what Ian Watt has identified as a new
emphasis on “truth to individual experience” (13) rather than adher-
ence to some traditional literary formula but a new movement toward
self-contained stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which, as
Aristotle ruled, “naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity,
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or as a rule, but has nothing following it” (31).

48 Thomas Leitch

My claim that the novel represented a relatively new emphasis on

self-contained stories may seem perverse in view of Aristotelian tragedy’s
emphasis on a decisive end that is “the chief thing of all” (Watt 27).
Even Athenian tragedy, however, offers two obvious models for sequels.
Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 BC) provides the only surviving example of the
planned dramatic trilogy, the sequence of three plays designed expressly
to be staged on the same day, each presenting a cohesive episode in the
ongoing story of the house of Atreus, each connected to the others by
the continuing search for vengeance that made the trilogy more coherent
and penetrating than the sum of its three individual parts. And Sophocles’s
Theban plays provide an example of an unplanned trilogy, its three plays
written out of sequence (Antigone around 441 BC, Oedipus the King at an
unknown date some years later, and Oedipus at Colonus, which makes only
sporadic attempts to reconcile apparent contradictions between the other
two, shortly before Sophocles’s death in 406 BC), yet still frequently read,
although never staged, as chapters in a single story. Both these models
resurface in Shakespeare, the first in the two historical tetralogies (espe-
cially the second, from Richard II to Henry V, which Alvin B. Kernan has
dubbed the Henriad because of its Aristotelian emphasis on “a large-scale,
heroic action” [245]), the second in the unplanned Merry Wives of Windsor,
which brings Falstaff back from the grave in response to Queen Eliza-
beth’s wish to see Sir John in love. The most important unplanned sequel
by a Shakespearean contemporary is Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part
II (1590). This model has endured in the second part of John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress (1684), Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872),
and the unplanned sequels to films such as The Godfather (1972, 1974,
1990) and The Matrix (1999, 2003, 2003)—and perhaps in Austen’s own
Persuasion (1818), whose second-chance-at-love story makes it read like
an informal sequel to an unwritten Austen novel.
In addition, the publication of a novel in multiple volumes rather
than its staging on a single day meant that novels such as Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), unencumbered by a strong sense
of Aristotelian teleology or even a consecutive storyline, could in prin-
ciple go on forever. The tropism toward endless narrative persists in
eighteenth-century contemporaries such as Denis Diderot’s Jacques le
fataliste et son maître (c. 1778), nineteenth-century sagas such as Honoré
de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (1830-1848), Eugene Sue’s Les Mystéres
de Paris (1842-1843), Anthony Trollope’s cycles of six Barsetshire novels
(1855-1867) and six Palliser novels (1864-1880)—the second set inci-
dentally incorporating the more closely related albeit unplanned pair of
Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1873)—and the multiple-authored
copyright law.

twenty-first century narrative blogs made possible by the Web and pre-
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Sequel-Ready Fiction 49

figured by Fielding’s Independent columns. Such endless narratives have

their basis in the prenovelistic tradition of picaros such as Lazarillo de
Tormes, who go from place to place enjoying a string of self-contained
adventures with no apparent end, and Robin Hood, whose merry men
are capable of having essentially the same adventure over and over indefi-
nitely. The rich oral gestes of Troy, Araby, and Camelot—each a stockpile
of adventure-worthy characters and typological conflicts—represent still
an older tradition of stories without end. The most distinguished sequel
in this mode is the Odyssey.
Finally, there is the metasequel: the sequel that not only contin-
ues but also comments explicitly on a specific predecessor. The obvi-
ous example is the second part of Don Quixote (1615), in which the
Knight of the Dolorous Countenance and his squire, although no more
self-conscious themselves than they were in Part One, have become
public paragons of delusion, frequently recognized as such and occa-
sionally feted as celebrities or confronted with doubles striving to live
up to the chivalric models they presented ten years earlier. The most
ambitious of all metasequels is the New Testament, which, by offering
itself as a completion of the Hebrew Bible, recasts all earlier scripture,
not just prophetic books such as Isaiah and Ecclesiastes, as a series of
prophecies fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus. Paradise Regained
(1671) retraces this narrative trajectory while reversing its scope because
Milton’s brief epic stands more as a postlude to than as a completion
of the more ambitious Paradise Lost (1667). But the tradition survives in
a form much closer to Bridget Jones in a series of novels by Stephanie
Barron beginning with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor
(1996) that recast Jane Austen as a fictionalized sleuth undergoing a series
of adventures complete with faux-scholarly footnotes that place it both
inside and outside Austen’s universe, and a subgenre of quasi-biographical
films from Shakespeare in Love (1998) to Becoming Jane (2007) that invent
fictional romantic intrigues on which their authors are alleged to have
drawn in creating their most memorable works. Apart from the doubt-
ful example of Persuasion, Austen apparently never indulged in writing
sequels. But there were many models for such continuations available
to her, beginning with Daniel Defoe’s two sequels to Robinson Crusoe
(1719, 1719, 1720) and the two-volume sequel Samuel Richardson wrote
to Pamela (1740, 1741) to preserve his legal rights in the story in the
face of John Kelly’s unauthorized sequel Pamela’s Conduct in High Life
(1741). When Austen was producing her novels, single, highly wrought,
self-contained narratives such as Tom Jones (1749) whose end defined not
only the limit of the characters’ adventures but also the capstone of the
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tale’s formal structure were the exception rather than the rule.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

50 Thomas Leitch

What changes between Austen and Helen Fielding is not the pos-
sibility or acceptability of sequels, which were already in wide currency
when Austen wrote, but the emergence of different kinds of sequels that
reflected both new technologies and a fundamentally new attitude toward
the originality of original stories and the value of Aristotelian ends and
endings. The most distinctive, although the least numerous, of these
is the nonce sequel arising when a film originally designed as a single
story is split into multiple parts because it runs inconveniently long.
Leading examples include Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973)
and The Four Musketeers (1974) and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volumes
1 and 2 (2003, 2004). Peter Jackson first envisioned Lord of the Rings
as a two-part film, then considered squeezing J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic of
Middle-earth into a single feature before following Tolkien’s lead and
casting the story in three parts (2001, 2002, 2003), although insisting,
as Tolkien had done before him, that it was a single work in multiple
installments, not a trilogy.
A second new kind of sequel, almost equally uncommon, takes its
cue from the title of Alexandre Dumas’s Twenty Years After (Vingt ans
après, 1845). The impetus behind these sequels is to develop a character
or group of characters originally conceived to carry the burden of a single
story and revisit them grown older in an adventure that will display them
in a new light. Examples include Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima
(1886), designed in part as a platform for Christina Light, the equivo-
cal heroine of Roderick Hudson (1876); Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976),
based on a rarely filmed strain of legends recounting the outlaw’s death;
and stories by divers hands of Sherlock Holmes’s retirement, from H.
F. Heard’s A Taste for Honey (1941) to Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s
Apprentice (1994) and its own sequels. Interestingly, none of the Hol-
lywood films based on Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1939, 1989,
1998), an 1847 sequel to The Three Musketeers, emphasizes its status as
sequel, presumably because only the first of them, Allen Dwan’s 1929
The Iron Mask starring Douglas Fairbanks, is produced by a company
that had released a recent adaptation of The Three Musketeers or cast
with the same performers as those earlier adaptations.
The death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes marks a crucial
turn in both Holmes’s own career and the history of sequels generally.
For seven years after Arthur Conan Doyle’s impatience with the detective
hero who had brought him fame led him to send Holmes and his nemesis
Professor Moriarty over a cliff and into the Reichenbach Falls in “The
Final Problem” (1894), Doyle resisted all entreaties to bring Holmes back
for further sequels. He returned to him in 1901 to write Holmes into The
copyright law.

Hound of the Baskervilles, a tale originally conceived without him by setting

Sequel-Ready Fiction 51

the story before Holmes’s ostensible death.3 Unlike Elizabeth I, who had
apparently accepted Falstaff’s unexplained return from his death between
Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V to assume the leading role in a very dif-
ferent kind of play, Holmes’s fans, although eagerly devouring The Hound,
demanded not simply more retrospective installments of his adventures
but the assurance that he had not died in the first place. Two years later,
Doyle capitulated in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” a sequel to
“The Final Problem” that naturalized Holmes’s resurrection by providing
a rational, if not especially convincing, explanation of how Dr. Watson
had mistakenly come to believe him dead and anchoring his return in a
specific historic time (the spring of 1894) after his apparent death.
Several differences are found between the specific demands Doyle
had to accommodate to secure Holmes’s resurrection and Shakespeare’s
more casual resurrection of Falstaff. One is the difference in the hero’s
relation to his world. Although both Falstaff and Holmes were already
veterans of sequels when they died, both Holmes’s relative durability
(two brief novels and twenty-three short stories before his alleged death)
and his relative abstraction from his world (through his status as a con-
sulting detective whom readers might reasonably have expected to be
professionally available indefinitely until they were brought up short
by the title and the opening sentence of “The Final Problem”) must
have made his death seem more shocking and less acceptable. In addi-
tion, the narrative mode of the magazine story that had made Holmes
famous was more naturalistic and continuous than that of a Shakespeare
play, which, presented as a discrete entertainment experience, most likely
would have explained the peculiarity of Falstaff’s resurrection only in a
framing prologue or ignored it entirely. No wonder Doyle, as quoted
by his biographer Andrew Lycett, claimed to have invented something
radically new in devising the fictional form of linked but independent
adventures starring a single durable hero: “I was a revolutionist, and I
think I may fairly claim . . . the credit of being the inaugurator of a sys-
tem which has since been worked by others with no little success” (164).
Finally, Doyle’s relation to his public was different from Shakespeare’s
because he no doubt learned when his initial attempt at a retrospective
sequel failed to still the demand for a resurrected Holmes. Shakespeare
needed to suit only the whim of a single fan, however powerful; Doyle
had the pressure of thousands.
The case of Sherlock Holmes opens the doors to a far more vast
category: the hero, almost always male, who can be endlessly recycled
because he remains sufficiently unchanged by, or remote from, the action
of any given story to be available in unaltered form for further nonde-
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velopment. Such characters trace their ancestry to Robin Hood, King

52 Thomas Leitch

Arthur’s knights of the Round Table, and picaros such as Lazarillo de

Tormes. But their relation to their adventures is more complex because
they are not really adventurers. The pivotal example is the nameless mon-
ster Victor Frankenstein created who is conceived in terms of a tragic
teleology that can be overridden by the simple expedient of bringing
him back to life. His progeny include heroes who cannot die because
they are superheroes (Superman and his DC and Marvel counterparts,
and the evergreen, if not literally immortal, James Bond), villains who
cannot be killed because they are immortal or undead (Dracula and the
legion of vampires that followed him, along with such franchise movie
monsters as the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, Michael
Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees), and heroes such as Tar-
zan whom audiences can imagine enduring forever because their world
seems so remote. Despite the early-blooming example of Frankenstein’s
monster, the vogue of these franchise heroes corresponds roughly to the
rise of twentieth-century technologies such as comic strips, movie serials,
radio, and television that favor indefinitely continuing episodic stories
over self-contained Aristotelian actions. Even when these stories move
each toward a preordained ending, that ending is a reluctant contrivance
such as the coming of dawn that interrupts each of Scheherazade’s stories.
Each ending provides an excuse for the storyteller to break off a tale
both the teller and the audience wish could continue forever.
Although Scheherazade specializes in stories of action heroes such
as Ali Baba, Aladdin, and Sinbad the Sailor, the female counterpart to this
mainly male-oriented series of endless adventures can be found alongside
Superman’s comic-strip adventures in the increasingly female-dominated
franchises of Little Orphan Annie, Mary Worth, and Apartment 3–G. If the
eternal returns of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, and Frankenstein’s monster
depend largely on the cinema, these female franchises have their paral-
lels in genres fueled by other post–Austen technologies: television and
radio soap operas and magazine serials. These stories owe less to the
repeated death and resurrection of Hollywood heroes and monsters than
to what Henry James called the “adventure” of Bessie Alden’s rejection
of Lord Lambeth in “An International Episode” (1878) for the kind
of “psychological reason” James found “adorably pictorial” (“The Art
of Fiction” 61). Instead of staging physical conflict in public exterior
spaces, these stories of psychological conflict and self-conflict threaten
to break with Aristotelian teleology by their refusal to end at all. The
quintessential example is The Guiding Light, which first aired on radio
in 1937 and went on to survive hundreds of plot twists, the departures
or deaths of dozens of performers, a change of medium from radio to
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television in 1952, and numerous format changes thereafter (the move

Sequel-Ready Fiction 53

from black and white to color in 1967, the lengthening of individual

episodes from half an hour to a full hour in 1977) to continue until
2009. Guiding Light, as it had been called since 1976, seemed likely
to continue indefinitely because its format had demonstrated the abil-
ity to adapt to new media—it would be a natural for webcasting—and
because its employees, producers, sponsors, and viewers were united in
their desire to keep it afloat. Because the format of the series implied a
promise that it would tie up individual subplots but never come to an
end, it could be ended only by an unforeseen production catastrophe, a
deliberate change of plans occasioned presumably by competition from
a stronger story, or by declining ratings, not by its own natural tropism
toward ending.
A final model of the sequel generated by radio and popularized by
television shows how differently contemporary sequels treat the notion of
teleology from the kinds of sequels Austen knew. Since the mid-1950s,
the principal alternative television has offered to continued stories
indefinitely is not self-contained dramas of the sort that once flour-
ished on Kraft Television Theatre (1947–58) or Playhouse 90 (1956–61),
but the series that immerses a continuing cast of characters in a new but
generically similar adventure every week. In sitcoms such as I Love Lucy
(1951–57), Gilligan’s Island (1964–67), and Seinfeld (1990–98) or dramatic
series such as Law and Order (1990–) and ER (1994–2009), every episode
is self-contained, readily intelligible to viewers who have not seen the
preceding episode. Yet the continuity provided by the strongly estab-
lished characters who anchor the series means that each episode covers
such similar ground, even in Seinfeld, that it is a remake in the guise
of a sequel to the earlier episodes. This tendency has been complicated
in recent years by programs as diverse as The Mary Tyler Moore Show
(1970–77), which introduced longer narrative arcs that changed several of
the characters irreversibly over the life of the series; 24 (2001–), in which
each hour-long episode, filmed to simulate a congruence of dramatic and
real time, builds inexorably on the preceding episode while introducing
new complications of its own; and The Simpsons (1989–), whose every
episode is a feast of heteroglossia that refers both to the program’s own
world and to the broader world of cultural references outside. Yet the
impetus toward sequels that provide the pleasures of remakes continues
not only in the ensemble casts and predictably conflicting agendas of
such programs but also in the recent rise of reality-based programming,
quiz shows, and even news broadcasts that have emphasized indefinitely
continuing stories ever since the 1979–81 Iran hostage crisis, whose
444-day duration, faithfully memorialized day by numbered day on the
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nightly news, went far to establish a pattern of subordinating inciden-

54 Thomas Leitch

tal developments to the presentation of a distinctive narrative universe

guaranteed to remain identical week after week.
This overview of sequels before Bridget Jones emphasizes two dis-
tinctive features of Fielding’s heroine. The first is simple. Influential as
cinema may have been in fostering a mass culture receptive to sequels,
Bridget’s roots are not in the movies but the popular press. Once a thriv-
ing periodical industry had created “a huge, open mouth which has to
be fed” by new book reviews, for example, it was only a matter of time
before Henry James would compare the reviews to “dummies” designed
to make it look as if a long train is fully occupied, each dummy readily
recycled: “The guard attends to it when the train is shunted, blows the
cinders from its wooden face and gives a different crook to its elbow, so
that it may serve for another run” (“The Science of Criticism” 95). The
tendency James notes of even nonnarrative forms such as book reviews
to generate their own well-nigh indistinguishable sequels produces not
only continuing magazine serials but also publishing heroes such as Buf-
falo Bill, Nick Carter, and Nancy Drew, as well as endless streams of
paperback fantasies, romances and Choose-Your-Own Adventures. This
model of the sequel as a virtual remake has given the world the Police
Academy franchise (seven feature films from 1984 through 1994, fol-
lowed in 1997 by a short-lived television series), the three Matrix films,
and Bridget Jones.
The second, altogether less simple, feature that makes Bridget
so distinctive is her alliance of several thematic elements drawn from
twentieth-century technologies whose stories are typically directed to
female audiences—magazine serials, continuing comic strips, and soap
operas—with an approach to teleology best illustrated by the resurrec-
tions of Frankenstein’s monster and Sherlock Holmes. Because each of
Holmes’s stories comes to a definitive end for his clients while leaving
him available for further adventures, their teleology might be described
as both open and closed. “The Final Problem,” however, promises an
ending that is apparently irreversible. However rapturously fans may have
greeted “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes’s resurrection is
a fictional scandal on a par with a fictionalized Mary Shelley’s revelation,
at the beginning of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), that her monster
had not died in the blaze that apparently consumed him at the end of
Frankenstein (1931). It is as if Austen had written a sequel in which Mr.
Darcy had decided that despite his unstinting and apparently incontro-
vertible pledge of love at the end of Pride and Prejudice, he did not wish
to marry Elizabeth Bennet after all. When Fielding brings Bridget back
in The Edge of Reason, she is not so much continuing her heroine’s story as
copyright law.

shattering the teleology of her earlier novel, indicating that the true love
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Sequel-Ready Fiction 55

Bridget had found at the end of that novel did not carry the teleological
power that it once had in Austen, and that many of Fielding’s readers
had presumably assumed it would this time as well.
As it turns out, Bridget, a child of The Independent, is only a distant
relation of Elizabeth Bennet. She was designed from the first not as a
character that implied an Aristotelian action but as a voice that could
amusingly dramatize contradictions facing educated, romantically minded
career women of the 1990s. Although Fielding acknowledged pressing
the plot of Pride and Prejudice into service for Bridget Jones’s Diary, practi-
cally everything that made Bridget appealing came from other sources,
as a look at the opening page of Bridget’s New Year’s resolutions, based
on Fielding’s Independent column for 3 January 1996, makes clear:

I WILL NOT

Drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week.

Smoke.

Waste money on: pasta makers, ice-cream machines or other culi-

nary devices which will never use; books by unreadable literary
authors to put impressively on shelves; exotic underwear, since
pointless as have no boyfriend.

Behave sluttishly around the house, but instead imagine others are
watching.

Spend more than earn.

Allow in-tray to rage out of control.

Fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment

phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megaloma-
niacs, chauvinists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts. (2)

The voice is inflected by journalistic canons of telegraphic brev-

ity (“pointless as have no boyfriend”), the rhetoric of diet and self-help
books (“alcohol units”), and the dialogized voices of Bridget’s mother
(“but instead imagine others are watching”) and her friend Sharon (“emo-
tional fuckwits”). What makes it both funnier and more desperate than
any of its sources is its indiscriminately mechanical internalizing of their
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norms (the word Bridget most frequently omits from her diary entries
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56 Thomas Leitch

in the interests of brevity is “I”), its hopeless attempt to incorporate the

contrary ideals behind them all, and its transparently misguided faith in
both the need for and the efficacy of self-improvement regimens. Every
day is New Year’s for Bridget, who emerges from even her most disas-
trous misadventures resolved that although she can never forgive herself
or anyone else for the debacle du jour, she will do better next time. The
contradictions in Bridget’s voice thus guarantee endless tribulations but
no teleology.
In rooting her heroine in a voice whose naïve faith in individual
agency mocks her potential for agency, Fielding was following in the
venerable tradition of the skaz, or sketch, a form Boris Tomashevsky
had identified as an alternative to the well-plotted short story as early as
1925 (67). The sketch, typically designed to display the attractions of a
distinctive place or the dynamics of a self-conscious voice, was peculiarly
suited to journalism because it flourished on the frontier between fiction
and nonfiction, as Fielding realized when she adopted the persona of
Bridget instead of writing the column, as she had originally been asked
to do, as herself. Half a century earlier, many writers from The New
Yorker—Dorothy Parker, Richard Lockridge, Eric Partridge, and most
notably John O’Hara—had graduated from the humorous sketch about
a particular group, situation, or subculture to short stories or novels on
the same subjects. For Fielding to make a similar transition with a novel
that incorporated many people and situations she had already invented
for her column was only natural: Bridget’s neurotic fretting about her
weight; her smoking and drinking; her anxiety about whether she should
sleep with her boss Daniel Cleaver; the dangers of carrying on an office
romance; her distaste with her philandering mother; her dread of her
inquisitive relatives and the Smug Marrieds; her humiliation when she
is the only guest to arrive in costume at the Vicars and Sluts party; her
discomfort with the relentless coarseness of Richard Finch, her new boss
at Wake Up Britain (which became Sit Up Britain in the films); and her
obvious unsuitability as a television correspondent. The humor Field-
ing spins out of her earliest columns for The Independent depends on
Bridget’s self-perceived inadequacies, her inability to enjoy everything,
or anything, that her friends, her relatives, and her library of self-help
books assure her is rightfully hers. The implicit promise of these col-
umns is precisely the opposite to the promise of the genre romances that
take their cue from Austen: that Bridget will never grow, never change,
never fulfill a single one of her self-therapeutic promises, so that like
her friends, we will always love her just as she is.
Even Bridget’s yearning for romance originates as a contradictory
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series of negative impulses that engender sketch comedy rather than the
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Sequel-Ready Fiction 57

sort of teleology associated with consummation. When the BBC Pride

and Prejudice captivates her along with the rest of the nation—a fact she
first mentions in Fielding’s 18 October 1995 column as a counterweight
to her apprehensive preparation for her interview with Richard Finch—
her ruminations are couched in terms not only of a neurotic addiction to
Elizabeth and Darcy’s idealized romance but also of a neurotic resistance
to the teleology of romance generally:

8.55. Just nipped out for fags ready for Pride and Prejudice. Hard
to believe there are so many cars out on the roads. Shouldn’t they
be at home getting ready? Love the nation being so addicted. The
basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for
Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. The football guru Nick Hornby
states in his book Fever Pitch that men not wish themselves on the
pitch, claims Hornby. Instead they see their team as their chosen
representatives, rather like Parliament. That is precisely my feeling
about Darcy and Elizabeth. They are my chosen representatives in
the field of shagging, or rather courtship. I do not, however, wish to
see any actual goals. I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed
smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong
and I would quickly lose interest. . . . That is not to say, however,
I would not delight in sleeping with the actor Colin Firth.

When she goes to the interview with Richard Finch, “who has merged
bewilderingly with Mr. Darcy in my mind,” Bridget answers his sto-
ry-baiting question, “What do lesbians actually do in bed?” by replying,
“I think we should be doing the off-screen romance between Darcy and
Elizabeth”—a non sequitur that instantly wins her the job.
Two weeks later, as Bridget is preparing for her first day in her
new position, she records her profound disappointment with “the Eliza-
beth and Darcy wedding episode.” Her criticism prompts her mother’s
response: “Oh, don’t be silly, darling, no one’s the slightest bit interested
in love once the pursuit is over. As my father used to say, ‘You don’t
run after the bus when you’ve caught it, do you?’ ” But just as Pamela
Jones is still interested in love once the pursuit is over—just not that
of the boring, affectionate husband who no longer pursues her—so is
Bridget. In fact, Bridget, who continues to confuse Austen’s Darcy with
Colin Firth (“there are no such men as Mr. Darcy any more. Even Mr.
Darcy himself—who would never do anything so flighty as to be an
actor—is, in fact, an actor”), not only persists in running after the bus
once the pursuit is over; she is incapable of seeing that she has caught
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it. Although she is slotted into the role of the romantic-comedy heroine
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58 Thomas Leitch

with the arrival of Mark Darcy at her parents’ New Year’s party in the
Independent entry for 3 January 1996—a scene Fielding created some ten
months after beginning her column, but one that became the opening
scene in both the novel and film Bridget Jones’s Diary—she is endlessly
available for sequels even after Darcy vanquishes the unsuitable Daniel
Cleaver and declares his love because she is too invested in her neuroses
ever to be cured. Bridget’s first entry in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
begins with an obvious set-up line (“Hurrah! The wilderness years are
over”) whose punch line arrives promptly at the end of the paragraph
(“Ooh. Mark Darcy just moved. Maybe he will wake up and talk to me
about my opinions” [3]). The moony voiceover that introduces Kidron’s
film (“I’ve found my happy ending at last, and nothing in the world
can spoil it”), which would seem to carry decisive teleological force if
only it were deferred until the end of the film, is instantly followed by
a deflating segue (“Well, almost nothing”) to Bridget’s farcically terrified
skydive into a pigpen for Sit Up Britain.
For all the parallels Fielding draws between Bridget and Elizabeth
Bennet, whose romance strongly implies a resolution from its beginning,
the foundation of Bridget’s humorous appeal is a neurotically self-critical
voice that would be silenced forever by such a resolution. Unlike Emma
Woodhouse’s discovery of the capacity for corrective self-criticism, which
promises to end her story by making her a suitable mate for Mr. Knight-
ley, Bridget’s neurotic and hopelessly unconstructive self-criticism can
have no such teleological force because she is stuck with it from the
beginning. As the cure of Don Quixote at the end of Cervantes’s second
volume means the end of his life, the promise of enduring happiness
in love would be the death of everything that makes Bridget Bridget.
Elizabeth Bennet, her ostensible model, is a heroine divided by her desire
for love and acceptance by her equals and her forthright sense of inde-
pendence. In the case of Bridget, both these warring impulses are put
on one side of the scale as Bridget’s yearning for professional success,
romantic validation, respectable parents, and a steady diet of shagging.
The other side is occupied by an insatiable impulse toward self-criticism
that makes her altogether more unstable than any Austen heroine. To be
more precise, Elizabeth is unstable—torn between Darcy and Wickham,
between her loyalty to her parents and her recognition of their failings,
between her attraction to Darcy and her repulsion from his contempt
for her family and his own love—only until her instability is resolved by
Darcy’s unconditional second confession of love, which makes her whole
by uniting her in a couple that spells the end of both her instability
and her story. Bridget, by contrast, is stable in her instability. Nothing
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can complete her or dull her self-lacerating edge: not romantic pursuit,
professional achievement, satisfying sex, even marriage and children.
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Sequel-Ready Fiction 59

Throughout the novel Fielding drew from her newspaper columns

and the sequel inspired by them, Bridget is much more resistant to tele-
ology than Elizabeth because Fielding’s world, even when it is enshrined
between the covers of a single volume, offers men and especially women
so many fewer teleological options. In Pride and Prejudice, matrimony may
or may not provide the opportunity to consummate a grand passion or a
marriage of true minds, but even at its worst it is an honorable estate with
due rewards for Charlotte Lucas, who clear-sightedly accepts the odious
Mr. Collins for the advantages it will give her over being a dependent spin-
ster, and Lydia Bennet, who purrs with contentment after Darcy succeeds
in getting the unscrupulous seducer Wickham to marry her. As early as
Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (1885), the possibility of divorce loosens the
teleological force of marriage, opening the way for the question Bridget
asks in voiceover as she is skydiving into the pigpen at the beginning
of The Edge of Reason: “What happens after you walk off into the sun-
set?”—prompting Richard’s unwitting but gorgeously deflating response,
“Close-up of the porker,” and a tight close-up of Bridget’s rump.
This opening sequence, whose most direct source in Fielding is
the episode in Bridget Jones’s Diary (194–95) in which her plan to slide
down a firehouse pole and interview a firefighter is scotched when she
begins to slide too soon and the camera catches her scrabbling to climb
back up, shows how Bridget’s resistance to teleology becomes still greater
when she is transferred from novel to screen. Once Richard hires Bridget
as a correspondent for Sit Up Britain, she is obviously available for any
number of on-air pratfalls. The logic of the film sequel demands that
she at least endure a pratfall more elaborate and humiliating than the
episode of the firehouse pole. The result is an inflated remake in the
guise of a sequel, something that covers the same ground as the first film
but at greater length, with a bigger budget, and with apparently higher
stakes. If Bridget fails to pull her ripcord, she will be killed rather than
simply humiliated. But of course she eventually pulls the cord, and of
course her humiliation, though intense, has no lasting impact on her. In
fact, her “crap skydiving report,” which logically ought to get her fired,
has no effect on her future because, as Richard tells her, “they loved
it upstairs.” No matter what happens to Bridget, good or bad, she will
always be available for further dreams, adventures, and ridicule.
Because Fielding had already published her second novel when
Bridget Jones’s Diary went into production, the film felt free to lay
much more methodical groundwork for a sequel. Its main technique
for doing so is to soften the teleological impact of every plot develop-
ment in its final scenes that would normally herald a definitive ending.
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Refusing Daniel’s tepid blandishments, she tells him, “I’m still looking
for something more extraordinary than that,” intimating that she is an
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60 Thomas Leitch

eternal seeker who can never be satisfied. When her philandering mother
returns in remorse to her father pleading to be taken back, he replies:
“I just don’t know,” before adding, “I’m joking, you daft cow.” The
film echoes Austen’s Darcy-Wickham rivalry in revealing that Daniel
has seduced Mark’s wife rather than learning that Mark has slept with
his girlfriend. But instead of allowing Bridget to fly into Mark’s arms,
it introduces the threat of his engagement to his legal colleague Nata-
sha and packs them off to New York, from which Mark must abruptly
return for the film’s final sequence. Even after he tells Bridget that he
loves her, the film has one last-minute complication—his discovery of the
diary in which she has described him so recently and unflatteringly—that
could torpedo the ending. The implication of all these sudden obstacles
and changes of course is that nothing is ever certain because things can
always change, and “The End” of the film’s credits can be crossed off
and replaced with “The Beginning.”
If the leading strategy Maguire’s film adopts is to weaken the teleo-
logical force of the romance plot it borrows from Austen, the leading
strategy of Kidron’s film is to transform every incident from a potentially
developmental stage in a teleologically oriented plot into an endlessly
repeatable spectacle. Bridget’s prophetic quarrel with Mark over the
upbringing of their nonexistent son culminates in a moment when Mark,
returning from the loo, says even more prophetically: “Oh, Christ, now
what?” The quarrel, as Mark subliminally recognizes, will lead nowhere
except to a reconciliation, followed by more quarrels. Pam Jones, emerg-
ing from a dressing room swathed in violet, announces, “Daddy and I are
going to get married!” When her daughter protests, “But you’re already
married!” Pam crows, “We’re going to do it again!”
Marriage vows are far from the only apparently definitive ritual
the sequel needs to renew. Bridget, about to fall into bed with Daniel,
tells him, “If I stay with you tonight, it’s definitely the end of something
important.” He asks her, “Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?”
Her reply—“Except Hitler”—both indicates her susceptibility to him and
puts an anticlimactic spin on the question of whether Daniel can ever
change. Moments later, when she is confronted by the full-body mas-
seuse he has hired for the evening, she rages: “I can’t believe I fell for
it again!” But of course the audience can believe it. They have been
prepared for this moment by the inflation of Daniel’s role in the film so
that he is not an incidental temptation but a symmetrical alternative to
Mark and by the endless soundtrack of pop tunes, from “The Sound of
Music” and “Nobody Does It Better” to “Material Girl” and “I Believe in
a Thing Called Love,” that turn every action, from skydiving to kissing,
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Sequel-Ready Fiction 61

into a timeless, self-contained spectacle that floats free of the context that
moors it to the film’s story into a more broadly romantic and satirical
context in which it can be endlessly repeated.
Hence Lizzie Skurnick’s observation that chick-lit has “grown up”
to “mom lit” (1) with the arrival of babies in the neighborhoods of
Sophie Kinsella, Jill Kargman, Carrie Karasyov, and Fielding herself,
adroitly traces the latest development in a genre that “is now seen to
have run its course” (2) while overlooking a more fundamental point: that
even as a mother and grandmother, Bridget will never grow up because
she can never settle down. Snagging the rich boyfriend her mother had
been urging on her for a year, Bridget realizes, does not resolve Pamela
Jones’s tendency to nag but simply makes her switch gears and preach
chastity, and Bridget’s friends, having urged her for years to get a steady
boyfriend, now urge her to dump him. When the final page of The
Edge of Reason promised that Bridget would follow Mark to Los Angeles,
seasoned fans knew that the move would merely provide a new arena
for neuroses that had already been staged in Bridget’s parents’ home, a
publishing office, a television program, and a Thai prison. When Field-
ing celebrated Darcy’s return from Los Angeles, Bridget evidently not
having accompanied him after all, in a 2001 story, “Bridget Jones: This
Time I Really Have Changed,” the story’s leading joke was telegraphed
not only by the opening entry from Bridget’s diary (“This is my chance
to prove to him that life with me can be tranquil and orderly”) but also
by its title. And when Fielding resumed her weekly Bridget Jones column
for The Independent on 4 August 2005, seven years after ending her final
column for the Daily Telegraph, like her novel The Edge of Reason, with
Bridget’s impending departure for Los Angeles, the very first thing she
did was to have Bridget get pregnant.
The promise of motherhood did not mark the end of Bridg-
et’s adventures in the way Skurnick’s remarks suggest. Instead, in the
time-honored tradition of The Guiding Light, she found that the father
of her baby was not Mark Darcy but Daniel Cleaver, whom she had
“accidentally” shagged after fortifying herself with Chardonnay during an
unsought meeting with him. Fielding suspended Bridget’s weekly diary
entries on 15 June 2006 with Daniel bringing Bridget and her newborn
baby home to his flat. But the final lines of that entry make it clear that
motherhood has not provided any closure for her heroine:

Whole world seems too dangerous for baby—even Daniel’s flat.

What if I accidentally drop him in the toilet and flush it? Or put
him in the tumble-dryer? What if Daniel and I split up, then I
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62 Thomas Leitch

die and there’s no one to care for him? What if am alone with
baby when die and no one realises and he’s left just crying for his
mummy?
Oh, God, thought all neurosis and anxiety would end when
had baby, but realise has opened up a lifetime of fears for him.
Have to stop worrying. Anyway, given way he lunges at me like a
little snuffle-pig, he would probably survive by eating me.
And truth is, although scary, I like this worrying re being
eaten by own child so much better than years of worrying that
would die alone, as tragic barren spinster, and be found weeks later
half-eaten by an Alsatian.

This last observation is as close as Bridget ever comes to admit-

ting how invested she is in her sempiternal neuroses and how resistant
she is to the therapies of love, marriage, and motherhood traditionally
prescribed for the weaker sex. Nor do her readers want her to respond
to therapy. It is a truth universally acknowledged that neurosis is funny
only until it is cured, and a vast audience agrees with Bridget that it
would be better for her to be neurotic than content. One might argue,
as Fielding does in the 15 November 1997 column introducing Bridget’s
move to the Daily Telegraph, that Bridget’s neuroses are simply reflec-
tions of her audience’s: “If Bridget is popular . . . it’s because she lives
in a state of nameless dread, thinking everyone knows how to live their
life except her. What she doesn’t realise is that lots of other people feel
the same way.” Bridget’s distinctively neurotic voice is representative of
a large audience not only because they feel as insecure and alienated as
she does but because, despite the well-publicized clamoring for “closure”
reported by every crime victim ever to address a television camera, they
recognize subliminally that closure would be death.
Yet this resistance to closure, this preference for more adventures
rather than any definitive resolution, seems neurotic only when it is mea-
sured against an Aristotelian norm. E. M. Forster makes his resistance
to Aristotle explicit in his defense of character as a constitutive trope of
the modern novel, which Forster sets against Athenian tragedy: “ ‘All
human happiness and misery,’ says Aristotle, ‘take the form of action.’
We know better. We believe that happiness and misery exist in the secret
life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the
novelist has access” (83). In a world peopled entirely by Prince Hamlets
whose pride or shame is that they have that within which passes show,
the resistance to teleology Bridget and her audience share may be a
sign that even if chick-lit’s day has passed, the problems it raises so poi-
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Sequel-Ready Fiction 63

gnantly have not. It may well be the nature of contemporary heroines

and their audiences to remain increasingly unfulfilled not because they
are neurotically alienated from a functional society that calls forth their
most authentic selves in public action but because contemporary social
norms both alienate and colonize the individual consciousness so irre-
sistibly that its most representative heroes and heroines are those least
inclined toward closure. An important implication of Hillel Schwartz’s
argument that we live in “a culture of the copy in which repetition is
psychologically, physiologically, cinematically, and commercially compel-
ling” (300) is that every adventure invites a sequel that is tantamount to
a remake. In such a world, it makes perfect sense, as Paul Budra points
out, that “the perfect postmodern monster” has “no personality” but is
“possessed of the charisma that comes with stability through sequeliza-
tion” (198). Bridget’s overpowering personality, directed in part toward
the indefinite deferral of teleology and in part toward the systematic
undermining of the teleological cues in whatever narrative model her
creators adapt, suggests that the definitive accord Aristotle saw between
psychology and action, between private self and public world, may have
been nothing more than a bump in the road, a temporary blockage of
the desire to desire.
In the end, Bridget is not a reducto ad absurdum, but more fit-
tingly a step on the road to something else. After all, a female-oriented
franchise spanning two newspaper columns, two novels, and two movies
pales beyond the media conglomerates of action heroes such as Superman
and James Bond. Although Kidron’s film puts a new spin on Bridget’s
romantic rivalries by making her apparent rival Rebecca Gillies a les-
bian who actually fancies Bridget rather than Mark, that twist has an air
of finality (what sort of rival could Bridget possibly be more mistaken
about?) rather than a promise of endless iterations in sequels still to
come. Even the extras included in the DVD of Bridget Jones: The Edge
of Reason—an alternate opening sequence, a filming of Bridget’s interview
with Colin Firth adapted from a chapter in Fielding’s novel (136–42) that
was not used in the feature, and a featurette entitled “Mark and Bridget
Forever?”—have a disconcerting air of definitiveness. Sequel-ready hero-
ines such as Bridget may be no more than transitional figures pointing
toward female leads who can play as endlessly at romantic consumma-
tion as male leads such as Bond can play at definitive world destruction
and redemption. The closest approach so far to this ideal of endless
romance is not Bridget’s adventures but Apartment 3–G and Sex and the
City. Bridget’s perch on the very edge of reason suggests that there is a
still further path for other heroines to follow.
copyright law.
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64 Thomas Leitch

Notes
1. Even the Republic of Pemberley, a Web site at www.pemberley.com that
includes in a section called “Bits of Ivory,” brief Austen pastiches and sequels
by Pemberleians, reflects this distaste in its description of Austen sequels as
“Austenuations.”
2. It would have been even more successful had it not been budgeted at
an estimated $70 million, nearly three times the $26 million budget of Bridget
Jones’s Diary.
3. Although Dr. Watson sets The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1889, Sher-
lockians do not agree when the events of the novel take place. Only three of the
fourteen scholars whose opinions Leslie S. Klinger summarizes in his edition of
the four Holmes novels (3: 626–27) agree with Watson on the date, and more
than one-third of them date it after Holmes’s resurrection in 1894.
copyright law.
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4
R. BARTON PALMER

Before and After,

Before Before and After
Godfather I, II, and III

T
“ HE GODFATHER FILMS,” cinema historian Nick Browne declares, “are
monuments on the landscape of American cinema” (1). Browne
concedes that this judgment of excellence does not indicate that,
aesthetically speaking, the three films are the same: “there are, of course,
differences of intention and achievement among the three” (1). The par-
enthetical qualifier “of course” means, I suppose, that we should suspect
these marks of individuality to be present, and indeed it does seem an
unarguable point. All monuments, we might agree, are not created equal,
and the plurality of these particular films in terms of “intention and
achievement” is a well-supported critical commonplace too evident to
deny. The Godfather films (1972, 1974, 1990) are three productions
released at different times as the result of divergent “makings,” as well
as three texts that can be evaluated separately with regard to the con-
trasting intentions that can be read from them. Such a critical opera-
tion, naturally enough, depends on the fact that these texts continue to
present themselves in some sense as individual objects whose meaning is
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self-contained. But (pun intended) is this the whole story?

65
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66 R. Barton Palmer

Figure 4.1. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974). Courtesy
Paramount/The Kobal Collection.

Despite the evident plurality of the series at the most basic levels
of production and what we might term “textual ontology” (their mode
of being in film culture), the three films also constitute a larger unity
in Browne’s view, or at least they can be seen that way: “it is natural to
regard these films as a trilogy to deal with the continuity of a directo-
rial vision of the century-long working through of economic crime and
punishment in the inner sanctum of an American dynasty” (1). Several
points here of interest reflect familiar critical protocols about textual
“unity” and its importance within established traditions of evaluation.
The Godfather films constitute a trilogy because (an invocation here of
classic auteurist thinking) they are unified by “a directorial vision.” The
reflex of that vision is that they share the same theme (“economic crime
and punishment”) and the same subject matter (“the inner sanctum of an
American dynasty”). Finally, for practical reasons they became a trilogy
because their narrative “reach” is of an extent hardly containable within
the boundaries of a single film (a “century-long working through”). Iden-
tifying these films as a “trilogy” does seem a critical move to contain
and reorient their previously acknowledged singularity, easing the sense
in which they can be understood as belonging to their presumed author.
copyright law.

And yet more than auteurist protocols can be seen at work here. Most
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Before and After, Before Before and After 67

critics would agree that in some sense the three films do “naturally”
constitute a collectivity.
At the same time, the conception of a collectivity seems problematic
and hardly self-evident. The title of Browne’s very useful collection of
essays is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Trilogy, even though no
text bears this name. If this designation is perhaps unconvincingly ten-
dentious, it reflects two widespread notions: first, that while they remain
singular in some important senses, a relation exists among the Godfa-
ther films that makes considering any one in absolute isolation from the
others impossible; second, that this relation (somehow, if incompletely)
elides the fact of singularity because the two films that follow the original
not only continue its diegetic world but also the chronological unfolding
of a web of events first recounted in The Godfather. Yet thinking of the
series as a trilogy is not the only way, or even the most useful or accurate
way, to account for what connects them to one another.
Significantly the term “sequel” does not occur in Browne’s auteurist
account of the series, although certainly those who produced the second
and third films, as well as the audiences around the world, thought of
them in this way. Indeed the titling scheme chosen for the two later pro-
ductions, which was retrospectively imposed on the first, reflects industry
wisdom that sequels should be marketed, often if not always, by alert-
ing viewers to their connection to a well-loved and “presold” original
(or, also in this case, originals). Recycling the exact title of the original
(with Roman numerals somewhat grandly indicating production/release
order) is perhaps the most obvious, but certainly not the only, way to
do this. The marketing ingenuity of the industry is admirable, perhaps
unlimited in this regard: compare, among many other less artful exam-
ples, the case of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and Aliens (James Cameron,
1986), and Grumpy Old Men (Donald Petrie, 1993) and Grumpier Old
Men (Howard Deutch, 1995). Because of its associations with the art-
less extension of commercially successful originals, most familiar these
days in those groups of continuations designated by the damning term
“franchise,” such as the Rocky or Jurassic Park series, the concept of
the sequel, which it is the avowed object of this volume to elucidate, is
perhaps perceived to be incompatible with, or at least inconvenient to
conceptions of, authorship.
But good reasons exist to respect the actual history of the making
and distribution of these three films, seeing, like filmgoers at the time,
the second film as a sequel to the first, and the third a sequel to the first
two. At least this is what this chapter demonstrates. Seeing the suite as
connected by the concept of the sequel is fundamental to the understand-
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ing of the Godfather films, but it is ignored completely in the otherwise

68 R. Barton Palmer

fine essays in the Browne collection. To be fair, of course, textual singu-

larity as such means little to an auteurist account of a directorial oeuvre,
even if the acknowledged focus is limited to three texts. However, as
literary critic J. A. Burrow rightly points out, considering the role that
context plays in determining the nature of the critical act: “One cannot
interpret or evaluate a text without identifying what kind of text it is”
(17). We know perfectly well what kinds of texts Godfather I, II, and III
are, considered separately. But what are they exactly when considered
together? How can we define their relation and its components?
The films certainly do not constitute a trilogy in the way Browne
suggests, that is, a coherent, step-by-step unfolding of a foundational
artistic vision. No one involved in the production of what was at the
time simply called The Godfather (including Mario Puzo, author of the
source novel) contemplated a “century-long working through” of themes
and subject matter conceived broadly enough to merit such a treatment.
Once again, as is well known, only the phenomenal box-office success of
the film once identified only as The Godfather led to the decision on the
part of those involved in the production (particularly the executives at
Paramount Studios, including the dynamic Frank Yablans) to begin work
almost immediately on a sequel. If a “directorial vision” can be seen legiti-
mately as the major shaping force of the Godfather “trilogy,” it can be seen
first to operate in a superordinate fashion only in the planning and execu-
tion of the second film. The Godfather was marked by substantial disagree-
ments between its director and the producer (Robert Evans), who strongly
insisted, for example, that Coppola’s final cut be drastically revised (it was);
as a result, the film in many ways belongs not only to the director, but
also to the author of the original property and its producer. For the second
film, in contrast, the director was given much more control, as Jon Lewis
reports: “The production of The Godfather: Part II was significantly less
contentious than the production of the first film, largely because Coppola
was contracted not only to co-write but to produce the film himself. . . .
Coppola seemed to have had a free hand” (“If History” 40).
Because of circumstances too complicated to review here, when
Coppola was finally persuaded by the studio to direct yet another sequel
(a sequel, in effect, to the first two films) at the end of the 1980s, he
was allowed to make many important creative decisions (including hir-
ing his daughter Sofia to play the part of Mary Corleone, Michael’s
daughter, when Winona Ryder suddenly dropped out of the project), but
proved unable to influence others. Producer Frank Mancuso refused to
pay Robert Duvall’s asking price to reprise his role as Tom Hagen from
the two previous films, even though Mancuso had previously agreed to
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a significantly higher figure to re-sign Diane Keaton as Michael’s ex-wife

Before and After, Before Before and After 69

Kay. This casting decision not only forced Coppola to do significant

rewriting of the script, eventually introducing a new lawyer character,
B. J. Harrison, played by George Hamilton, who came much cheaper; it
also decisively, and unfortunately, altered the carefully established con-
tinuity of the principal “family” characters that had tied the first film
to the second and was to have provided the same linking function from
them to the third (see Lewis, “If History” 43–52, and Biskind, Godfather
Companion 131–81).

Authorship in Installments

It is beyond argument, in any event, that the three films were conceived
and produced separately, not as three parts of a whole predetermined by
some creative urge we can, with neoromantic elegance, term “directorial
vision.” Auteurism demands commonality and connection. And there is
no reason to deny that such qualities could be found in the three films,
an obvious point explored later in this chapter. As a critical protocol,
however, authorship cannot be allowed to blind us to inalterable facts of
structure, including and especially textual boundaries. These boundaries
make a difference. And I do not mean something along the lines of the
distinction (theoretically and hermeneutically interesting, but formally
irrelevant) that narratologists make between “story” and “discourse.” For
if the story can, with the textual unfolding at an end, be conceived as a
whole, it is only because it is a construct (not a textual element as such),
based on information and inference, from the way in which the events
of the plot have been presented in linear fashion by the discourse. Put
simply, a narrative is always already both story and discourse. In contrast,
the Godfather films must be either a trilogy (three parts of a whole) or a
succession consisting of a foundational text plus two sequels (a three-part
series rather than a whole).
Consider the evidence. Who would be bold enough to defend the
proposition that the merging of what were then the only two parts of The
Godfather into a single text for exhibition on network television called,
variously, The Godfather Saga or The Godfather 1902–1959: The Complete
Epic (1977), did not create an artifact qualitatively different from its two
constituent films, even if these are considered two parts of a superordi-
nate structure then thought complete? And that difference resides only
partly in the fact that the narrative line of what could then be identi-
fied as the history of the Corleone crime family from 1902 to 1959 has
been, as it were, straightened out, with The Godfather: Part I becoming
the “medias res” of the story whose beginning and ending sections were
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derived from the 1902 and 1959 sections of The Godfather: Part II.
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70 R. Barton Palmer

Most important for our purpose here, the process of amalgamation

involved in remanufacturing the first two Godfather films into something
like a television miniseries also eliminated those relations that we cus-
tomarily consider as resulting from the process of “sequelization.” Put
another way, the amalgamation completed a process of incorporation
that had been left intriguingly unfinished with the release of the sec-
ond film. For the television version, two texts that had been connected
to one another, yet hitherto had remained separate, became one. The
connections between what, after amalgamation, were parts of a singular
whole lost the decisive element of textual boundaries. No transforming
amalgamation, however, has produced a new, and unitary, critical object
from the three Godfather films. From the point of view of production,
distribution, and exhibition, there is no “whole” as such containing three
parts. Thus there is no Godfather trilogy. Any sense we might have of an
overarching structure emerged only after its “parts” came into existence
and when, because of the death of Michael Corleone, the main character,
in the concluding scene of The Godfather: Part III, it became likely, if not
inevitable, that no more such parts would be forthcoming.1 The films
are singular, though subordinate to one another; they are complete, yet
unfinished in themselves. Parts II and III begin with an ending, I and II
end with a beginning. The trajectory of the series hardly runs smoothly:
a diegetic world begins and ends, begins and ends again, only a third
time to begin and then end (if perhaps only provisionally). The films
were produced singularly, and this is how they were exhibited.
I am not concerned here with the fact of the three films’ singularity
as such. Belaboring the obvious serves no purpose because it is a point
even conceded in advance by those such as Browne who would prefer
seeing the series of films as a trilogy. Even Browne does not insist that
what he calls the three parts of The Godfather are (to invoke a theologi-
cal metaphor) separate only in the sense of being identifiable persons
that share a single substance. Instead, the ineradicable singularity of the
three films serve here as the starting point for an examination of the
particular fashion in which “sequeling” plays itself out in the constitu-
tion of the series.
But first, some further light must be shed on the notion of the
sequel. An important concept in film studies that has, from a theoretical
standpoint at least, received far too little attention, the sequel has been
mistakenly seen for the most part only as the material result of a certain
practice within commercial filmmaking (exploiting the evident popularity
of a previous release). But it is also a crucial aspect of textual ontology,
which can be easily summarized. Sequelization reorients (while reinforc-
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ing rather than eliminating) the singularity of the texts thus connected,
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Before and After, Before Before and After 71

precluding the possibility of a boundary-eliminating collective. Consider

the following: After the release of The Godfather: Part II, The Godfather
became The Godfather: Part I. From a “text in itself” it became the “text
that will be followed.” For ease of reference here, I will use the Latin
term sequendum (“that which must or will be followed”) to designate a
text that finds itself succeeded by a sequel. The resulting reorientation,
of course, is not a textual feature as such, but a contextually imposed
strategy of nomenclature and reading.
The renaming of The Godfather recognizes that the film must now
be understood differently (that is, as suffused by the qualities of “before”
and “incompleteness”), but it points to no formal change per se. The
extratextual knowledge that a text is followed by another becomes a pro-
tocol of reading that conditions how we understand both the text (now
connected to another just as individual) and also its various features,
for these can, perhaps even ask to, be read in a context wider than the
boundaries of their generating text, which continues to strive, but must
fail in the final instance, to contain them absolutely. Sequels are often
designed to minimize, even eliminate, this backward/forward-looking
mode of appreciation. U.S. Marshals (Stuart Baird, 1998), for example,
carefully recycles the most commercially successful elements of The Fugi-
tive (Andrew Davis, 1993), including a major character and star (played
by Tommy Lee Jones) and a narrative pattern (the exciting pursuit of
a fugitive who turns out to be innocent), but no attempt is otherwise
made to link the narratives, which remain resolutely singular, making
the productions self-contained and hence more easily marketable, or so
industry wisdom suggests. Titling did not encourage viewers to consider
U.S. Marshals as a sequel (apparently something along the lines of Another
Fugitive was rejected), suggesting that what comes after The Fugitive is
simply the close repetition of a formula proved successful by that film’s
excellent box office; the sequel in this instance then does not reorient or
redefine the nature of its sequendum, which functions instead as a more
or less disposable pretext.
In contrast, the Godfather films offer an instructive example of the
opposite tendency. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of this
series is what Browne terms a “directorial vision,” which can be seen at
work in its overall architectonics as these were worked out during almost
two decades of intermittent production activity.2 Far from merely a can-
ny recycling of elements that had proved popular, this authorial design
encourages viewers to read the elements of The Godfather in relation to
similar elements in the two sequels. Interestingly, the one study devoted
to the first two Godfather films as a series of an original film and its
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sequel (Tom Berliner’s “The Pleasures of Disappointment”) approaches

72 R. Barton Palmer

them only from the point of view of how such remakings always fail to
be as appealing as the original. Berliner remarks: “The almost inescap-
able failure of sequels results from the fact that, at the same time a
sequel calls to mind the charismatic original, it also recalls its absence,
fostering a futile, nostalgic desire to reexperience the original aesthetic
moment as though it had never happened” (109). True enough, perhaps,
but this sense of looking backward (for what else is nostalgia?) can be
used effectively as theme. A source of aesthetic pleasure, if we must use
this kind of language, in the Godfather series is the pervasive sense of
loss over time, as Michael fails to be his father, and as his father’s world
disappears forever. That the sequels fail somehow by virtue of the fact
that they are sequels provides the viewer with an emotion that reflects
that of Michael himself. In fact, this chapter argues, the ending of God-
father III spectacularly fails to be the ending of The Godfather, and that
seems to be Coppola’s point.
Coppola seems clearly to have recognized the authorial aspect of
sequeling and, interested in establishing a particularly rich menu of paral-
lels that reached across the series, designed the endings and beginnings of
the second and third films as variations on themes announced in the first:
curtain-raising ceremonies that express family solidarity while hinting at
its potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities; the concluding elimination of
these threats through skillfully managed assassinations of enemies both
outside and inside the family. The techniques that express these themes
play with notions of unity and singularity, much as the sequelized series
of films does the same more globally. For the openings, Coppola frag-
ments a collective event taking place in a single setting into a series of
mininarratives, in the style of Robert Altman; for the all-resolving ven-
detta, he deploys elaborate patterns of crosscutting to confer representa-
tional unity on events occurring simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously,
in a series of disconnected spaces.
These moments in each film are privileged set pieces, calling atten-
tion to the ways in which the narrative beginning, spectacularly initiated,
is given a spectacularly fashioned conclusion. In designing the suite of
films in this fashion, Coppola devises an aesthetic that perfectly suits
the nature of the sequel, which is defined by a perhaps unexpectedly
complex treatment of beginnings and endings, which come to bear the
burden of expressing the ideas of before and after. That there is only an
apparent difference between before and after becomes a central theme in
this narrative of a family’s rise to prominence and wealth. This success is
thoroughly unstable, the result of an only partial assimilation that makes
either escaping the past (in order to embrace thoroughly a promising
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Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Before and After, Before Before and After 73

future) or reliving its fullness (and so forestall the fading or loss of what
renders it so worthy of preservation) impossible for the Corleones.
The aesthetic experience of the series is not flow, but rather inter-
mittency and reorientation. From the point of view of succession, God-
father I has become a sequendum, followed by the sequel, Godfather II,
which in turn also becomes a sequendum, along with Godfather I, with
the appearance of Godfather III, a text that is, at least currently, only a
sequel. The three texts do not form a whole, but a series of singulari-
ties connected by notions of before and after. What had ended has been
prolonged and that prolonging has produced a second ending, which,
itself prolonged, has eventually resulted in a third and, at the moment,
final ending. Not parts filling their appointed slots, one after another,
in a foreseen whole, the Godfather films deploy a series of endings that
begin again, prolonging (and in consequence providing the opportunity
for a profound meditation on) the notion and form of closure, the end-
ing that problematically marks the boundary and thereby establishes the
distinct and singular identity of the text.
Distinct singularity is a definitive feature of the sequel. Superficially
resembling two other, related processes of textual succession, adapta-
tion, and remaking, sequelization differs fundamentally from both in its
rejection of a shared identity for the texts in question. The adaptation
is another version of what it adapts, defined by what it stands in for, by
what it replaces; adaptations can, and often are, given the same title as the
works they adapt. Similarly, the remake is another version of an existing
text, with which (however problematically) it shares an identity. Once
again, the two texts often share exactly the same name. The remake is
defined by what it offers an alternative to (but does not stand for). The
sequel, in contrast, repeats in some sense, but does not stand in for its
sequendum, not being identical with it. The sequel does not replace but
redefines what it follows, revealing its unfinished nature. In the process,
the sequel demonstrates that its own singularity is not a self-sufficiency
because the later text owes its form and content in some fashion to
the one that preceded it. The title Godfather II refers backward to its
sequendum (expressing the notion that here is more of the same) even
as it somewhat paradoxically indicates that this text is not the same as
what it follows.
The nature of the redefinition effected by the sequel is, as one
might expect, different in every case. Any literary text may generate an
unlimited number of cinematic adaptations, uniquely shaped by what
features of the source are selected for transformation.3 Similarly, any
text, literary or cinematic, may generate an unlimited number of sequels.
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74 R. Barton Palmer

The zero degree of connection between the two texts may simply be
an indication that “there is more” in the sense of yet another narra-
tive movement to be completed. In taking a close look at the Godfather
series, we will see what “there is more” means in a particular example.
But the fact of more, as well as the sense of after, always imply the sense
of what came before and of what has been left behind. Like adaptation
and remaking, sequelization identifies relations (or, perhaps better, ties)
that connect texts with one another. It is to such considerations of what,
following the lead of theorist Gérard Genette, I will term transtextual
connections that we must now turn, framing sequeling within a wider
field of similar, yet distinct, processes.

Transtextuality, Hypertextuality, and the Sequel

Like others of his critical generation, Gérard Genette would have us

believe that texts do not exist in splendid isolation, their borders imper-
meable to connections with other texts, their meaning deriving strictly
in se and per se. This perspective on what has most often (and some-
what confusingly) been termed “intertextuality” is usefully summed up
by Graham Allen:

Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by mod-

ern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. . . .
The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of
textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, is
to trace those relations. . . . Meaning becomes something which
exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and
relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of
textual relations. (1)

For poststructuralists such as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, “inter-

textuality,” a concept that finds its origins in the work of Russian theo-
rist Mikhail Bakhtin, refers to a general condition of language, already
“pre-owned,” as in Barthes’s oft-quoted formulation: “The text is a tissue
of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. . . . The
writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original”
(“Death” 13).
Barthes, Kristeva, and their followers offer what Allen terms a more
foundational and global account of “the semiotic processes of cultural
and textual signification” (1). In contrast, Genette concerns himself with,
to quote Allen’s characterization, “a very pragmatic and determinable
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intertextual relationship between specific elements of individual texts”

Before and After, Before Before and After 75

(101). If texts themselves are “webs” (to unpack the metaphor implicit
in this Latin term), Genette argues that they also find themselves fixed
within larger yet particular and unique webs of production and discourse.
This peculiar ontology he denominates transtextualité (transtextuality), a
term that importantly includes both the notion of a self-defined object
one productively might designate as a text and also the “textual tran-
scendence of textuality,” the way in which text-ness itself, somewhat
paradoxically, is made (if only partly) dispensable by the web of other
texts. Such transcendence is multifarious and can only be understood
in the most general of terms, perhaps best summarized by its result, as
“all that establishes a relation, open or hidden, between a text and other
texts.”4 The most important subcategory of the transtextual is the relation
hypotexte/hypertexte, which would be, taking the widest view possible of
the phenomenon, “every text derived from an earlier text by means of
either a simple or indirect transformation” (7).
If this transformation is global, resulting in two quite similar texts,
these two categories of transformation might be roughly summarized as
“remaking” and “imitation,” to be differentiated by the degree of resem-
blance that characterizes the relation between the first text or hypotext
and the one that follows it in order of production, the hypertext, which
can for that reason always be understood as “of the second degree.”5
Naturally, the terms “remake” and “imitation” do not indicate distinct
categories as such, but constitute the end points of a continuum. It seems
fairly clear that Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) is an imitation of
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), while Jeff Bleckner’s Rear Win-
dow (1998) is a remake of the original. But is Blow Out (Brian De Palma,
1981) a remake or an imitation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up
(1966)? One could offer evidence for either position, but perhaps there
is no point in attempting to make distinctions of this kind. It is impor-
tant to emphasize a further point Genette makes. He acknowledges that
hypertextuality in a global sense does not describe a restricted category
of texts but is instead a “universal aspect” of textuality, for “all works
are hyptertextual.”6 That being the case, he suggests that discussion of
the phenomenon be confined to those instances that are “most in the
light . . . [being] at once extensive . . . and declared, in a fashion that is
more or less official.”7 A theoretical position that could easily become
embroiled in unproductive discussions of categories thus becomes trans-
formed into a critical approach useful for the analysis of individual texts.
It can, as Genette suggests, take as its object “every connection joining a
text B to a text A anterior to it” (emphasis added).8
Not discussed by Genette as such, the phenomenon of the cinemat-
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ic sequel is an exemplary category of hypertextuality. As not in the case

76 R. Barton Palmer

of remakes and adaptations, however, the resemblance between the two

objects is not very close. In fact, sequels, we might say, are determined
by a productive, because unstable, dialectic of similarity and difference.
Because they must offer “something more,” they cannot reproduce the
hypotext precisely, and yet there must be enough that is repeated in
the hypertext to signal their connection. Sequels are all by definition
texts of the “second degree,” connected to others that, in terms of pro-
duction, have preceded them. The connection between hypotexts and
hypertexts of this type is always, once again by definition, “extensive”
and “declared.” The question of “joining” (unissant) will require further
nuancing because it involves the issue of textual borders. To anticipate,
these are clearly both acknowledged and transcended by transtextual con-
nections, turning the work into something that is simultaneously itself
and not the whole of the larger entity in which it participates.
Although he does not use the term, Genette makes several impor-
tant points about sequels, one of which is of particular interest here.
Genette distinguishes between two categories, the suite (etymologically,
that which follows and connects) and the continuation, both of which
“designate the connection between something and something else that
preceded it.” For Genette, if a hypertext is a “continuation,” that means
that its hypotext had ended “at a certain place that did not conclude it.”
A “suite,” in contrast, is not a textual response in the second degree to a
work that finds itself unfinished, but fulfills a completely different func-
tion: “. . . in general to exploit the success of a work, often considered in
its own moment as finished, by making it come to life again with new
elements of plot.”9 A suite, not a continuation, is what we conventionally
mean by the term sequel.
But the relation between these two forms of transtextuality is more
complex than might at first appear to be the case. A continuation is a
hypertext whose purpose is amalgamation with what precedes it (which
is not, because unfinished, a text as such, but a text in potentia); the
continuation completes what is anterior to it, constituting it as text, not
as a transtextual series. Although it may be explained, as Genette does,
simply by reference to context (the desire to add to a previous success),
the suite may also be conceived in terms of its rhetorical effect, which is
considerable. For if not a response to incompleteness, the suite renders
incomplete what was thought finished, problematizing the very sense of
completeness.
Yet the two relations Genette terms “suite” and “continuation” des-
ignate not discrete categories as such, but the end points of a continu-
um of possibilities. He warns: “one cannot bring to completion without
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beginning by continuing, and by dint of prolonging one often ends up

Before and After, Before Before and After 77

bringing to completion.”10 To put this in a way relevant to the issue at

hand, the sequel makes “come to life again” something that appeared “in
its own moment as finished,” turning the end into yet another beginning.
But then the suite becomes in effect a continuation, moving inexorably
toward its own end, inevitably replicating the finished structure it has
opened by closing it yet again. Sequels reject an ending that they must,
in whatever altered form, reimpose. They finish what they first strive to
render unfinished.

In the Ends Are the Beginnings

Thematically, the succession of sequels is ideally suited for the drama-

tization of intentions whose goal, although approached again and again,
is never reached. This seems in large measure, in fact, the “directorial
vision” evident in the Godfather series: a perfect marriage of the essen-
tially unfinished qualities of a transtextual suite and the gloomy view of
human nature and striving characteristically adopted in the films of the
Hollywood Renaissance. This was that initial period of poststudio film-
making in the 1970s that historian Robert Kolker appropriately calls a
“cinema of loneliness.” Kolker’s view is that the Renaissance films “carry
on an ideological debate with the culture that breeds them, [but] never
confront that culture with another ideology, with other ways of seeing
itself” (9). Because they are unable to conceive of any way to challenge
dominant beliefs and practices, “too many [of these films] only per-
petuate the passivity and aloneness that has become their central image”
(10). Can we ignore, however, the antipolitical politics of this percep-
tion about the human condition? Spiritual exhaustion and existential
refusal constitute a potent challenge to the official American narrative
of self-fashioning. In the Godfather series, Coppola dismantles this nar-
rative piece by piece. One might argue that the Godfather films offer
a devastating critique of two cardinal elements of the national mythol-
ogy: that hard work, dedication to principles, respect for the values of
moral probity, and commitment to the family, offers a sure formula for
worldly success; and that the assimilation figured by the metaphor of
the “melting pot” provides a certain path to full, legitimate participation
in the national public life.
The three Godfather films conclude with increasingly desperate
images of their protagonist Michael Corleone, who is indeed finally
reduced to “passivity and aloneness”: first shutting himself off from
family connections, especially his wife Kay; then finding memory the
only salvation for an unbearable present that sees him commit fratricide,
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destroying the moral integrity of the family with a gesture meant to

78 R. Barton Palmer

make it safe; and finally, his hopes for reconciliation with his estranged
wife and children aroused only to be horrifyingly dashed (in a tragedy
for which Michael is responsible and that prompts a silent scream of
complete spiritual devastation). Michael then endures the worst of human
destinies, dying alone and seemingly forgotten. Yet the three films also
end by presenting the elaborately choreographed evidence that Michael
has triumphed. In each instance, the godfather (in the end malgré lui)
proves able to eliminate those who would thwart or kill him, signaling
his power to impose his will on the world by showing how he can, far
and wide, violently shape events to his design. That power, however, is
shown to be desperately empty and useless when, at the end of Godfather
III, he must pay for it with the life of his innocent daughter, Mary.
Like the other productions in this cinematic tradition, the Godfa-
ther films follow the Hollywood model in dramatizing the ability of their
protagonist to act, but they also simultaneously speak, in Kolker’s apt for-
mulation, to a “continual impotence in the world, an inability to change
and to create change” (9). In Coppola’s artful handling of sequeling, the
“end” is emptied of its power to impose stasis. Its closure is no longer
projected. The finale is not a reassuring indication that the protagonist
can cease his efforts to retain his power. The suite of sequels becomes
the perfect form to express the bitter illusion of accomplishment that
is always failure, a theme characteristic of Coppola’s oeuvre (compare
The Conversation [1974], Apocalypse Now [1979], and even his script for
Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton [1970]). In all these films, while the main
character succeeds against all odds in his appointed mission, his accom-
plishments are shadowed by a larger, complementary sense of failure and
the inescapable threat of entrapment or destruction. His career a complex
intersection of success and failure, of ends that inevitably make way for
new and increasingly disastrous beginnings, Michael Corleone becomes
the very embodiment of the sequel of which he is the main character.
This pattern is set from the very beginning, providing a template
for expansion and elaboration even before a sequel seemed a possibility.
Just before his death in The Godfather, of natural causes, while pretend-
ing for his grandson’s amusement to be the monster the film has deci-
sively shown him not to be, Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) confesses
to his young son and heir Michael (Al Pacino) that he is both satisfied
with and disappointed by his life. Although he never let big shots deter
him from his path toward success, he is disappointed that Michael has
joined the family business instead of living out the immigrant dream of
second-generation success. Despite his Ivy League education and a war
record that establishes him as 100 percent American, Michael has not
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become a senator, that is, a power broker who bestows offices and ben-
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Before and After, Before Before and After 79

efits, the legitimate reflex of the padrone role that Vito came to play in his
own, restricted community, deriving influence and wealth from exploiting
the mild social evils of gambling, sexual vice, and union racketeering.
As the film’s opening sequence dramatizes, this shadow government
came into existence because the Italian community, lacking established
roots and hence political strength, could not otherwise protect itself from
injustice or use the legal system to gain legitimate social ends such as
naturalization papers for an eager immigrant. At the beginning of the
film, Michael is the outsider. But even before Vito’s death, loyalty to
the family, especially his admirable desire to keep his father from being
finished off after a botched assassination attempt, has pushed Michael
into taking over as head of the Corleone crime family in the fact of
his father’s proud disapproval. Although he has sired one heir with the
character and brains to continue the criminal empire he has built from
nothing, Vito fails to launch that favored son into a daylight world of
legitimate business and respectable society, entrance to which was always
denied him (bought by the godfather’s money, the senators invited to
Connie’s wedding do not attend, fearful to be associated with Vito in
public; his power always finds this limit). Generational change ironically
endorses not only the value of tradition (the son inheriting the father’s
virtues, dedicating himself to continuing his moyen de vivre), but also its
discontents (an inability to escape the limiting past, which is another way
of regarding tradition, so that a new start may be made).
If The Godfather concludes with Michael’s masterful and triumphant
assassination of his Mafia rivals, an uncooperative Las Vegas business
partner, and his traitorous brother-in-law, he pays the considerable price
of his sister’s hatred and his wife’s distrust. Michael finds it impossible
to live, as his father did, through the expansive metaphor of the family,
which can no longer designate the seamless connection between blood
relatives and criminal henchmen, between running illegitimate businesses
and offering friendship and assistance to those in need. The film ends
with the famous shot of the office door shut on his orders in the face of
his wife Kay, banishing her, as the acknowledged center of one family,
from witnessing or understanding the role that, as godfather, her husband
Michael plays in its now-closeted counterpart, as plans are finalized for
moving to Nevada, where his business will, Michael improbably declares,
become entirely legitimate.
The second film refuses the easy temptation to simply continue
this action, offering instead a beginning that deconstructs the ending of
the first, revealing as unexpectedly problematic Michael’s assumption of
Vito’s role as both head of the family business and spiritual father of an
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extended family. Godfather II exploits to the fullest the capacity of the

80 R. Barton Palmer

sequel to redefine its sequendum. In The Godfather, father and son move
together to occupy the same diegetic and moral space, forming a bond
that is only strengthened until the don’s idyllic death. In the sequel,
Vito and Michael are shown to inhabit social universes of related but
increasingly divergent values. The second film repeats in its initial nar-
rative movement the form of the first, but with a radical change of tone.
Again Coppola begins with a public, family ceremony. But this time it
is not a wedding party.
In The Godfather, the marriage between Carlo and Connie allows
Vito to celebrate success in raising a family and seeing them off into adult
life in the proper style. Offering the hospitality of his home to others,
including business rivals, provides Vito with a legitimate opportunity to
display his wealth and influence, which can be made manifest, among
other ways, by the number of guests and the generosity of their bridal
presents. During the festivities, moreover, the proud father, following
tradition, enables others within the community to enjoy the benefits of
his power to dispense justice and well-deserved favors (including mak-
ing arrangements for someone else’s daughter to marry the man of her
choice). Attempting to locate the origins of its story in the impoverished
Sicilian countryside, Godfather II opens instead with not only a funeral
that memorializes the death of the father, who appears only as a corpse,
but also the playing out of a vendetta that threatens to destroy the family
completely and nearly does.
In a movement that reverses the idealized vision of the benevolent
padrone in the earlier film, Vito’s older brother is killed by a brutal and
unforgiving Mafia don. Beseeched by the anguished mother to spare her
younger son, the don refuses, has the mother killed, and attempts to do
the same to Vito, who escapes. Grown to manhood, Vito will assassinate
this man, extracting a righteous vengeance, ironically demonstrating that
the don was correct in seeing the child as an eventual threat to his safety.
But in his own assumption of the padrone role, Vito otherwise refuses
to emulate this early model. Orphaned, Vito makes his way to America,
where his desire for a new life comes to an unexpected, if temporary
end, with a period of quarantine on Ellis Island.
But the dream of success, Coppola suggests, must be seen as ful-
filled across a series of generations. From the image of the lonely, impov-
erished Vito, a stranger in a strange land singing plaintively in his cell a
song from his now faraway home, the film cuts suddenly and startlingly
to an image of his grandson, Michael’s son Anthony, as he receives his
First Communion. This cut evokes the relative rapidity of assimilation,
the fulfillment of the American promise to reward hard work and inge-
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nuity, the possibility of escaping a threatening or degrading past for a

Before and After, Before Before and After 81

present that permits the preservation of some traditions (especially reli-

gion). The First Communion ceremony celebrates the entrance into full
spiritual life, including both the increased responsibility for avoiding sin
and the greater possibility of receiving a salvific grace. Anthony appar-
ently enters the life from which Vito was excluded. The transition from
the immigrant desperate to avoid annihilation to the second generation
born to prosper in America enacts the national myth of assimilation
and self-fashioning, dramatizing how full participation in communal life
does not require the surrender of originary traditions (participating in a
ceremony that his grandfather also passed through, Anthony enacts an
unchanged pattern).
And yet the rest of the film demonstrates, in distressing, heartbreak-
ing detail, how in the present this dream of transcendent success for
Michael and his family has been thwarted, even as in the past Vito over-
comes in true Horatio Alger fashion, his initial utter lack of resources,
making a secure place for himself in the New World. Perhaps favored
by his reception into the community of those who can be blessed by the
body and blood of the Savior, Anthony luckily survives that same day,
along with his parents, a vicious attack, as his house is riddled with bul-
lets by two hired assassins. The walls and guards have not kept enemies
out. A traitor lurks within, aiding those who wish the Corleones harm,
and giving the lie to Michael’s reiterated promise to Kay that the Cor-
leone business would soon be completely legitimate. Michael must return
east from Las Vegas to settle problems in the world he had ostensibly
left behind for the Anglo-Saxon purity of Nevada, far from New York’s
Lower East Side where he grew up. Now a prominent figure in the world
of American business, Michael also finds himself under investigation by
the Kefauver Commission. He is forced to lie and blackmail foe and
friend alike to ensure that the full extent of his criminal activities is not
revealed to public gaze, but, inevitably, his reputation is besmirched in
a way his father’s never was.
If it traces the convergence, but then divergence, of the paths of
Vito and Michael (in a sense recapitulating the first film), Godfather II
problematizes generational change in another way as well. The passing
on of the role of godfather, seemingly so natural and unchallengeable
in the first film after the death of eldest son Sonny (James Caan), is
seen as the root of a deadly jealousy that helps destroy the spiritual
well-being of the Corleone family. Michael’s older brother Fredo (John
Cazale) is revealed as resentful that Vito favored Michael over him, and
family enemies used this jealousy to plot Michael’s assassination, which,
although it fails, undermines Michael’s claim to be heir to his father’s
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power and influence. Disgusted to find herself married to an unrepentant

82 R. Barton Palmer

gangster, Kay aborts Michael’s child, and the couple separates. A further
deal to legitimate the Corleone Empire by investing in the casinos and
hotels of Battista’s Cuba comes to nothing as Castro’s revolution topples
the corrupt regime. The potent metaphor of the family loses its ability
to coordinate, and yet keep strictly partitioned, domestic and business
life. Michael asks his mother if losing your family is possible even as
you attempt to be “strong” enough to save it. She cannot understand
the question, which is answer enough.
Michael finds himself trapped by a contradiction that his father,
living in an immigrant culture only barely Americanized, never had to
face. The past cannot be escaped for the full version of the new life that
America promises, and yet at the same time the social structure that had
given the past its vitality and value has crumbled. In the film’s closing
spectacle, Michael once again organizes an impressive destruction of the
family’s enemies. If at the end of The Godfather one of those who must
pay for disloyalty and treason is Michael’s brother-in-law, then at the end
of Godfather II, Michael’s brother Fredo has forfeited his life. Driven,
so he thinks, to kill his brother to keep his family safe, Michael forces
himself to watch as his henchman carries out the murder, assuming, like
his father would (but for something his father would never have been
in a position to contemplate), the moral responsibility for his actions.
Now safe, yet (because?) isolated in his beautiful house, Michael turns
his thoughts back to the family past.
The moment that memory chooses for Michael is a family dinner
on 8 December 1941. On that day, the world of the Corleone family
had changed, seemingly irrevocably, with the announcement of Michael’s
enlistment in the Marines, but this act of independence (joining main-
stream America in a gesture reflecting Vito’s hopes for his son’s future)
proved an illusion. The scene is the old family home (in New York), and
those at the dinner, including Carlo, Sonny, and Tessio, all subsequently
killed or executed in the Corleones’ vendetta with the other families,
recall the beginning of The Godfather. Attending, but not participating in,
Connie’s wedding, Michael firmly states his independence to the young
woman, not an Italian, who he intends to marry (“That’s my family, Kay.
That’s not me”). But The Godfather ends with the reinforcement, not the
attenuation of family ties, as Michael is drawn into the family business in
order to save his father’s life and, afterward, to preserve his legacy. For
Michael at the end of Godfather II, the December 1941 dinner surely
represents the treasured past, with its poignant sense of irremediable
loss, because Vito is not present and the family lacks its head. Tellingly,
however, the scene also marks the road to independence subsequently not
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Before and After, Before Before and After 83

taken, the path that would have led to the living of a different life than
the one that for Michael in 1959 has lost its center and meaning.
The film’s viewer, perhaps, also looks back to a different past,
because Fredo is present at that long-past dinner. In the scene evoked
at the opening of Godfather II, Vito makes his way to America not because
of a desire to begin a new life, but because the murder of father, moth-
er, and older brother forces him to seek safety there. Having made a
fortune both in a legitimate business (selling olive oil) and also in its
illegal counterpart, Vito returns to Sicily accompanied by a very young
Michael to take vengeance on someone who can now do him no harm.
Godfather II ends with the climax of a horrifying vendetta, as Michael
revenges, like Vito, a failed assassination on an enemy who no longer
poses a threat. But this enemy is also his brother. The Godfather ends
with the just elimination of a traitorous brother-in-law. But its sequel
concludes with the more morally problematic execution of the brother
who, Michael confesses, “broke my heart” when he loosed assassins on
his own family.
Michael’s spiritual distress at the end of Godfather II could be read
as a form of stasis (a condition of suffering that precludes further moral
development), but it might also be seen as the first step (contrition) along
the road to spiritual rehabilitation. When, for business reasons, Coppola
had to accept after many years of refusing an offer from Paramount to
make a second sequel, he declined to consider numerous alternatives for
continuation that avoided working out what might happen with Michael
if he sought forgiveness and reconciliation. Godfather III begins with a
sequence that images the failure of Michael’s intention to join the larger
American community and preserve his family: the Lake Tahoe compound
is deserted and in ruins (its cemetery-like desolation presided over by an
abandoned statue of the Blessed Virgin).
The first two films open with celebrations of significant events in
family life staged at home: a wedding, a First Communion. The third
shows that the home, located far from the community that supported
it, has ceased to exist as anything but the distressing reflex of a fam-
ily split apart. It is also, of course, the scene of the crime: the place
where Michael and Kay, along with their children, were almost cut to
pieces by machine gun fire and where the traitor was subsequently put to
death for his complicity in the plot. The opening sequence of Godfather
III emphasizes the boat house and the lake where Fredo was executed
by Michael’s bodyguard as they fished together. What plays over these
images of loss and desolation is Michael’s plea, in voice-over, that Kay
and his estranged children attend the ceremony in New York where
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84 R. Barton Palmer

Michael will be awarded papal honors for his work for and contributions
to charity. During the ceremony, full of praise for his virtue, Michael
thinks back to the day of Fredo’s death. Later at the celebration he
hosts in his own honor, his son Anthony makes clear that he will have
nothing to do with his father’s business and intends to pursue a career
as an opera singer instead. Michael attempts to reconcile with Kay, but
she accuses him of his brother’s murder, and he has no answer for her.
Only with Mary (Sofia Coppola) does Michael succeed, convincing her to
remain the head of the charitable foundation he has created to manage
the family’s considerable wealth.
The remainder of the film traces Michael’s futile attempt to find an
heir, as the powerful criminal empire he had built from what his father
had bequeathed to him forces him to return to the gangster role he is
desperate to leave behind in his search for spiritual healing and complete
legitimacy. But threat appears not only in the form of upstart wiseguy
Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna), who, although the inheritor of Corleone inter-
ests in New York, is resentful of Michael’s business success in Las Vegas.
To clear the field of competitors, Zasa plans the spectacular murder of
Michael and his criminal associates, gathered, ironically enough, to mark
the end of the Corleones’ involvement with illegal business. Michael
survives thanks to the courage and resourcefulness of the brutal young
man who is his spiritual son, Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), bastard
child of his brother Sonny. But more powerful enemies lurk in the back-
ground, who attempt to thwart Michael’s attempt to invest the bulk of
his funds in a real estate holding company the Vatican owns. In the end,
with Vincent’s help, Michael destroys those who oppose him, but not
before they almost kill him and shoot his daughter Mary by mistake.
As at the end of Godfather III, Michael retreats into the past, finding
the insufficient comfort of haunting memories: dancing with Mary at
the award ceremony, and in years gone by with his two wives, Kay and
Apollonia, nurturing female figures who are all now denied him by death
or rejection.
Glenn Man comments: “Try as he may, Michael cannot extricate
himself and the family from the web of destruction woven into the past”
(126). What Man does not recognize is that way in which the three
Godfather films, reflecting the insufficient singularity of texts connected
by the relation of sequel to sequendum, intermittently and incrementally
dramatize Michael’s failure to sever his connection to the environment
that both nurtures and traps him, makes him rich and deprives him
of the comforts of family life, provides the theater in which his cour-
age and cunning can be usefully dramatized while destroying his soul.
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Michael’s failure to disconnect is reflected in the textual form his story

Before and After, Before Before and After 85

takes: a series of beginnings that lead to endings that are always already
beginnings, limning the viciously circular outlines of the existential trap
in which he discovers again and again the impossibility of change, the
always receding remoteness of his object of desire.

Notes
1. But consider what Peter Biskind has to say under the heading “The
Godfather: Part IV”: “Why not? Maybe this was what Coppola was put on earth
to do. He is reportedly thinking about it. It might be a look at the thirties and
forties. . . . If the film were to be set in this period, De Niro could well play
the lead, Vito Corleone redivivus. Rumor has it that a script is already finished”
(Godfather Companion 181).
2. The script development for the final sequel was a contentious battle
that lasted many years between Coppola, Puzo, and a series of writers the stu-
dio hired. Most of the proposed treatments did not connect closely to the main
narrative line of the first two films. As Biskind remarks, “One of the mistakes
made by the screenwriters who worked on scripts for III was abandoning the
Corleone family and ignoring characters and clues provided by the first two
films” (Godfather Companion 136). Coppola and Puzo designed the third film as
a “close” sequel to the first two.
3. In a study with great relevance, mutatis mutandis, for the theorization
of the sequel, Pour une théorie de l’adaptation filmique, Patrick Cattrysse discusses
this principle of irreversibility (see esp. 2–15).
4. “. . . transcendence textuelle du texte . . . tout ce qui le met en relation, mani-
feste ou secrète, avec d’autres textes” (Genette 7). All translations in this chapter
are my own.
5. “. . . tout texte dérivé d’un texte antérieur par transformation simple . . . ou par
transformation indirecte” and “. . . de texte au second degré” (14, 12). For an intriguing
and informative discussion of remaking that approaches the phenomenon from
another theoretical perspective, see Verevis, Film Remakes (esp. 81–104).
6. “. . . un aspect universel . . . toutes les oeuvres sont hypertextuelles” (16).
7. “le plus ensoleillé . . . à la fois massive”. . . et declaré, d’une manière plus ou
mois officielle” (16).
8. “. . . toute relation unissant un texte B . . . à un texte antérieur A”
(11).
9. “. . . désignent la liaison d’une chose avec ce qui la precede . . . restée à un
certain point qui ne la terminait pas . . . en general d’exploiter le succès d’une oeuvre,
souvent considérée en son temps comme achevée, en la faisant rebondir sur de nouvelles
péripéties” (182).
10. “. . . on ne peut terminer sans commencer par continuer, et à force de prolonger
on finit souvent par achever.” (182).
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5
CLAIRE PERKINS

Sequelizing Hollywood
The American “Smart” Film

I
N HIS INTRODUCTION TO a collection of essays originally written
around a retrospective of 1970s American films at the 1995 Vienna
Film Festival, Alexander Horwath suggests, “if you have come of
age as a cinemagoer during the heyday of New Hollywood cinema—
sometime between Bonnie and Clyde [1967] and Taxi Driver [1976]—
you’ve probably experienced the main brands of post-1970s American
cinema by necessity as less rich, less intelligent, less political, as retro-
grade” (9). Horwath here typifies the widely held position that regards
the birth of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a
“Renaissance” in American filmmaking. Expressed most consistently by
Noel King and Thomas Elsaesser, this critical position understands the
historical period as “a brief window of opportunity when an adventurous
new cinema emerged, linking the traditions of classical Hollywood genre
filmmaking with the stylistic innovations of European art cinema” (King
qtd. in Neale 91). Generally regarded as an interim between the decline
of the classical Hollywood studio system and the reassertion of a similarly
conservative system the new formulaic blockbuster form of films such
as Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
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enabled, the Hollywood Renaissance is approached as a unique time

87
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88 Claire Perkins

Figure 5.1. Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971). Courtesy Warner Bros/

The Kobal Collection.

by its supporters insofar as its experimentation and dissident ethos was

underwritten by a Hollywood keen to hit on a new formula for success
(see Schatz; Hillier; Balio, American). The cinema of “alienation, anomie,
anarchy and absurdism” (King 20) associated with directors including
Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Monte Hellman, and Peter Bogdanovich
represented not just a change in filmmaking, but a radical transformation
of commercial filmmaking.
Insofar as it understands this era as a type of finite Golden Age—
“the last good time we ever had,” in King’s estimation1—the Renaissance
position has an unmistakably pessimistic undertone. In a recent article,
Steve Neale has challenged the dominance of the position in discourse
on contemporary American cinema, arguing that it produces “a partial
and misleading picture” of history (91). Citing the box-office success
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of musicals (Funny Girl, William Wyler, 1968), war films (Tora! Tora!
Tora! Richard Fleischer and Kinji Fukasaku, 1970), and family-oriented
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Sequelizing Hollywood 89

films (The Jungle Book, Roman Davidov, 1967) during the late 1960s and
early 1970s alongside films such as Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
and M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970), Neale challenges the perception
that audiences were solely endorsing the violent and formally innova-
tive Renaissance films. Furthermore, Neale attempts to diffuse the view
that this era marked a revolutionary break with traditional ideological
values by looking back to the breaches generally acknowledged to have
been made by earlier American films such as Anatomy of a Murder (Otto
Preminger, 1959) and Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960; 106–7). In this
latter way, Neale combats the culturally pessimistic perception of the
Renaissance as a finite and singular impulse. This particular challenge
can be supported by a perspective that looks not back but forward to
evidence of the impulse in later American cinema.
In recent years, several commentators have echoed the enthusiastic
claims of the Renaissance theorists in their discussion of the changes in
Hollywood during the 1990s and the emergence of a new group of inno-
vative American filmmakers during this decade. Peter Biskind’s Down and
Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (2004),
Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How
They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (2006), and James Mottram’s
The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood (2006) all,
from their titles, take an interest in the emergence of a critically and
popularly successful “commercial-independent” strain of 1990s Ameri-
can cinema.2 Focusing on directors including Quentin Tarantino, Steven
Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Wes
Anderson, Alexander Payne, and David O. Russell, these works reca-
pitulate the broad critical interest that has been taken in these directors
and their influence on American filmmaking over the last decade or so.
With a common focus on the Sundance Film Festival as a platform, each
book is broadly concerned with the way in which the popularly favor-
able reception of the formal and thematic innovations of these directors
offered a perceived challenge to the dominance of the New Hollywood
blockbuster form, effectively forcing the studio system to accommodate
them via the establishment of “mini-major” arms such as (Disney’s) Mira-
max, (Universal’s) Focus Features, and (Warner’s) Warner Independent
(Mottram xxix).
Peter Biskind openly describes his account of this period as “a
sequel, of sorts, to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, my history of that exuberant,
fecund decade, the 1970s, that gave us the so-called New Hollywood”
(Down and Dirty 1). For Biskind, the key aspect of the 1970s legacy is the
emergence of directors such as those mentioned earlier: “a loose collec-
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tion of spiritual and aesthetic heirs.” Mottram opens his book similarly,
describing the “Pizza Knights”—a monthly film group comprised of a
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90 Claire Perkins

representative sample of these directors—as the “spiritual descendents

of the so-called maverick filmmakers of 1970s Hollywood” (xv), and
claiming that his book centers on the question: “are we returning to
an age where formerly independent directors are using studio funds to
further their own idiosyncratic vision? In other words, is this the dawn
of New Hollywood Part II?” (xv). Furthermore, Horwath suggests in
the piece already quoted that “during the past fifteen years many of
the (few) important American films still had their reference points . . .
in the culture of the Seventies” (10), and gestures toward a handful of
these directors—Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Richard Lin-
klater—along with some crossovers from the earlier generation—Robert
Altman, Martin Scorsese, and John Sayles.
The concept of sequelization that Biskind and Mottram elaborate
is largely founded in industrial terms. Both—particularly Biskind—are
essentially concerned with the position of these directors in relation to
Hollywood and in how they triggered a transformation of the 1980s
studio model. Horwath, by contrast, is more interested in textual issues
of transposition. The “reference points” he refers to in the 1990s films
include personnel, aesthetics, and attitudes from the 1970s: New Hol-
lywood as style and subject matter, he argues, is still locatable in films
made after 1977. Biskind and Mottram’s sweep of contemporary directors
is also necessarily broad with a focus to the “larger” figures—Tarantino,
Soderbergh, and David Fincher—whose films have been at the fore-
front of the industrial transformations. With an eye to Horwath’s tex-
tual conceptualization, this chapter is concerned with the contemporary
American “smart” film as a narrower and somewhat nebulous tendency
within Biskind’s broad “Sundance” generation on which to trace interests
sequelized—continued, transformed—from the 1970s. Coined by Jeffrey
Sconce in 2002 as a term to group several tonally ironic 1990s Ameri-
can films sharing a loose set of stylistic and thematic characteristics, the
“smart” sensibility can be identified in many but not all of the films Bis-
kind and Mottram are interested in (“Irony” 349–69). A distinctive type
of stylistic “blankness” is the smart film’s key formal trait, and the politics
of the white, middle-class American family a major thematic concern.
Considering this, it is perhaps Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz—direc-
tors who Biskind and Mottram respectively passed over—who best dem-
onstrate the sensibility.3

“The Pathos of Failure”: Crisis 1

In his 1975 article “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s,”
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Thomas Elsaesser gave what is still regarded as the definitive account

Sequelizing Hollywood 91

of the transformations films such as Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hell-

man, 1971), California Split (Robert Altman, 1974), and The Conversation
(Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) effected on Hollywood filmmaking in the
1967–75 era. One of the most enduring aspects of Elsaesser’s piece is
the way in which his summation of the unmotivated heroes and direc-
tionless journeys of these films anticipates what Gilles Deleuze describes
as “the crisis of the action-image” in his Cinema 1, published in France
eight years later. Elsaesser sees in these films aspects of metacinema
familiar from the cinematically self-conscious European directors with
which Deleuze is principally concerned. As a key characteristic, the wan-
ing of physical action is, for Elsaesser, the result of a search for a new
form of narrative free from “the parasitic and synthetic causality of a
dramaturgy of external conflict,” the search “for a mise-en-scène that can
take a critical stance” (283). The new form arises from the way in which
the conventional, external motif of the journey is complicated by the
protagonist lacking a corresponding internal drive. Elsaesser comments
on how, in Two-Lane Blacktop, the journey is introduced in an offhand
way—the potential goal of the race to Washington is “[toyed] with,”
inciting no real interest for either the characters or the film narrative.
Intrigue is played down in other dimensions as well, most notably in
the way action avoids the potential conflict between the male characters
over the single female. As Elsaesser notes, all the points at which the
spectator could potentially become absorbed by a plot are played down,
resulting in an “anti-action” film (281).
This lack of drive infiltrates practically all of the Renaissance films
as a stylization of despair or helplessness (Elsaesser, “Pathos” 287). Atti-
tudes of obsession, guilt, and anxiety recur across their various scenarios,
emanating from figures who are neither psychologically nor emotionally
motivated. Unlike the protagonists of classical Hollywood, these figures
have no “case to investigate . . . name to clear . . . woman (or man) to
love [or] goal to reach” (281). For Robert Kolker, loneliness defines the
era. The bitterness of a film such as Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975), he
suggests, “comes from anxiety rather than anger, from a loneliness that
exists as a given, rather than a loneliness fought against . . .” (19). Trac-
ing images of paranoia, isolation, oppression, and claustrophobia in films
including The Parallax View (Alan Pakula, 1974), The Wild Bunch (Sam
Peckinpah, 1969), and The Conversation, Kolker describes the 1960s and
1970s as a type of noir revival, where these favorite themes of the 1940s
cycle resurface after the more reassuring films of the 1950s (22–23). The
emotional paralysis that permeates a film such as Night Moves renders
any attention to details of an investigative plot useless: “the plotting
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becomes less important than the searching itself” (65). Other commen-
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92 Claire Perkins

tators also attend to this formal and thematic paralysis. For Christian
Keathley, the Renaissance films are an explicit response to the Vietnam
War: he describes them as a “post-traumatic” cycle that replays the war
experience’s defining realization of powerlessness. Themes of disaffection,
alienation, and demoralization encode the “opening up of the interval
between perception and action as a traumatic event” (296). The crisis of
the action-image in these films is described for Keathley by the repeated
fate whereby a character is left “not dead, but wounded and helpless”
(297). The ending of both Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) and The
Candidate (Michael Ritchie, 1972) clearly represent the frozen state in
which so many Renaissance figures are caught: between perception and
action, or action and reaction; trapped, as Keathley describes it, “in the
affection-image.”
For Elsaesser, the rejection of personal motive in the 1960s and
1970s cycle of American films, along with their liberal outlook and
unsentimental approach to American society, reflect a larger ideological
rejection. By “essentially . . . manag[ing] to transform spatial and tem-
poral sequence into consequence, into a continuum of cause and effect”
(“Pathos” 280), classical Hollywood form posits a fundamentally affir-
mative attitude to the world based on faith in “the usefulness of posi-
tive action” (281). What Elsaesser witnesses in the Renaissance films’
rejection of personal motive is a loss of this confidence, and thereby a
larger rejection of purposive affirmation and moral pragmatism (281).
Beyond issues of industrial similarity, it is the transposition of this tex-
tual and ideological effect to the contemporary smart film which is of
interest here. As the model of “realism” which the Renaissance films put
under erasure, the classical action-image is, for Deleuze, defined not by
recourse to real events, but by a relation between milieus and behavior, or
situation and action (Cinema 141). The key point of continuity between
the two cycles is that both put this particular model of realism under
erasure, and thereby mark two disparate points in the breakdown of the
American cinema as a universal and triumphant model. Before examining
how this sequelization takes place, however, we need to establish how
the first Renaissance cycle achieves this breakdown.
Jerry Schatzberg’s 1973 film Scarecrow is representative in many
ways of the formal and thematic concerns of the Renaissance cycle. The
film traces the journey of two drifters who meet in the opening scene
while attempting to hitch a ride: Max (Gene Hackman) and Francis (Al
Pacino), a sailor. Max, who has just gotten out of prison, is initially hos-
tile to Francis—whom he calls Lion, after his middle name, Lionel—but
soon asks him to be his partner in a car-wash business he is heading to
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Pittsburgh to establish. The film demonstrates the classic Renaissance

Sequelizing Hollywood 93

journey insofar as this destination is vague and somewhat absurdly envis-

aged; the movement itself is the dramatic focus, marked out by three
understated narrative developments. First, the two visit Max’s sister Coley
and, after getting into a fight while out with her and a friend one night,
spend a brief time in prison. After they get out, they travel to Detroit en
route to Pittsburgh so Lion can visit the five-year-old son he has never
seen. When they reach the house he decides to telephone first and his
former partner lies to him, telling him the child was stillborn. Soon after,
Lion suffers a type of fit, descends into a catatonic state, and is hospi-
talized. In the final scene, Max buys a round-trip ticket to Pittsburgh,
apparently intending to return and look after his friend.
In both the Renaissance and smart cycles, the crisis of the action-im-
age is identifiable as a specific type of exaggeration, whereby the logic of
the respective images is no longer simply a narrative device, but struc-
tures the characters’ very reality. The crisis-image that emerges is not a
straight subordination of the old sensory-motor schema, but a systematic
deformation that simultaneously evokes and transcends its connective
principles. Deleuze describes two forms of the action-image, the Large
Form and the Small Form. The large form image is structured by the
schema of Situation, Action, Modified Situation (SAS') that, very broadly,
organizes the manner in which a situation (milieu) provokes respon-
sive action that eventually modifies—or restores—the original situation.4
The sensory-motor capacity of the small form image is, by contrast,
founded on a reversed schema of Action, Situation, Modified Action
(ASA'), whereby the situation must be deduced from initial action. The
small form image is less stable insofar as the situation is “not given as
an in-itself . . . [it] always refer[s] back to struggles and modes of behav-
iour always in action or in transformation” (Deleuze, Cinema 163–64).5
Insofar as its journey structure displays some fidelity to this differential
logic, the model of realism that Scarecrow “erases” is that of the small
form action-image.
A film concerned principally with a journey will almost always
reject the large form SAS' model by refusing the primacy of a milieu.
A character may be forced out of a situation and onto the road by certain
milieu forces but, once into the journey, action is the defining element: it
is movement and transformation from which each new situation along the
way appears, and not vice versa. Typifying Renaissance form, Scarecrow
transposes this structural “index of lack”6 to its narrative, which is not
developed in close detail. Relying on the spectator’s deduction of infor-
mation, the action on screen is elliptical, with no clear establishment of
where the characters are at any one moment, where they are heading,
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or what they are thinking or feeling. Each new location emerges from
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94 Claire Perkins

their movement in an unheralded way and eventually gives rise to the

action of new movement as they continue on. Their movement itself is
depicted in dialogue-free montage sequences that show Max and Lion
clambering up or down the sides of trains, picking fruit at sunset, distrib-
uting notices on the windshields of parked cars, eating over a campfire.
The sequences are temporally indistinct: they form ellipses in the film
insofar as we are held at a distance from the narrative, not granted access
to the details of the situations, in much the same way as we know little
about either of the main protagonists, and where their various quirks
and attitudes emerge from.
The analogies Deleuze draws on to describe the classical type of the
small form image include a knotted rope, a broken line, and a skeleton,
each one describing how the action is still structurally encompassed,
but in an unpredictable way (Cinema 168). Insofar as each sequence in
Scarecrow appears discrete—the action cannot be determined by and in a
preceding scene—the film’s fidelity to the small form image can begin to
describe the idiosyncratic character of its journey-form. However, only
with its distortion of the classical image is this new form fully realized.
For Elsaesser, the new journey-form represents American filmmaking
attempting to deal with the technical problem of just how to depict the
unmotivated hero as a new type of ideological protagonist (“Pathos”
287). Scarecrow’s opening scene offers a remarkably pure example of the
formal qualities of this type of journey. Like all road movies, the film
alternates between sequences of travel and periods of relative stasis in
the destinations reached. The opening scene confuses these sequences
in a way typical of the narrative as a whole: we meet Max and Lion in
action—on the road trying to hitch a ride—but this action consists of
nothing but waiting—the two characters merely pass time, Max almost
motionless and Lion clowning around on the spot in an effort to win
him over. As is typical in the small form image, action functions as an
index of lack insofar as it discloses a situation the film does not explicitly
establish (Max and Lion hitching). But stretching a handful of shots over
at least five minutes, action emerges as a more literal index of lack: it
functions not only as the suppression of a narrative situation, but also as
the suppression of the whole dimension of character motivation.
In contrast to the journeying heroes of the classical Hollywood
genre films, neither Max nor Lion have any real goals beyond getting
a ride. Their (indirect) movement toward Pittsburgh functions to dis-
guise their real lack of motivation, as do the peculiar façades of commit-
ment both display, such as Lion obsessively carrying with him the lamp
intended for his child and Max keeping compulsive track of his funds.
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Sequelizing Hollywood 95

Their arbitrary destination is propped up by Max with a combination

of clichéd dreams (the car wash will have a deep freezer full of steaks
and a radio playing the hit parade) and absurd fixation (it has to be in
Pittsburgh because his money is in a bank there). Their forward move-
ment is neutralized, consistently failing to bring about situations that
challenge and eventually realize character desire. Action is, in this way,
ineffectual: an independent variable that seems to exist quite apart from
the journey itself. Action loses all ability to link logically to a situation:
each new situation is not disclosed as somehow preexistent but is created
anew in each instant, existing only in and of itself as a continuous type
of action. As Deleuze suggests on the specific crisis of the small form
action-image: “ellipsis ceases to be a mode of the tale . . . it belongs to
the situation itself, and reality is lacunary as much as dispersive” (Cinema
207). When Scarecrow literalizes the crisis of the form by having Max
purchase a round-trip ticket in the last scene, committing to a perfectly
circular form of movement, we can see the “necessary and rigorous”
line that anchors the sensory-motor dimension of the small form image
severed altogether.

“Joint Custody Blows”: Crisis 2

In A Cinema of Loneliness, Kolker (asking the reader to suppress chro-

nology for the sake of imagining the relation of the fictions) observes
how Gene Hackman as Harry Moseby survives Night Moves only to
emerge “older, more frightened, and even more lonely, as Harry Caul
in . . . The Conversation” (68). Although these attitudes are represented
in a fundamentally different way, our interest in finding a specifically
textual type of sequelization to films such as Scarecrow and those Kolker
refers to can be supported by observing the way that Hackman emerges
older, more frightened, and lonelier again twenty-six years later, as Royal
Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001). This coin-
cidence in Hackman’s performances gestures toward the way in which
the anxiety-based attitudes that are largely stamped out of studio-based
filmmaking in the late 1970s and through the 1980s reemerge in the
1990s smart film. Sconce encapsulates the transposition by which this
occurs when he suggests that the critique of bourgeois taste and culture
that the anxiety in both cycles represents is borne out in essentially
different terms: in his estimation, the shift is from an activist emphasis
on the social politics of power in 1960s and 1970s “art cinema” to an
ironic concentration on the personal politics of power, communication
and emotional dysfunction in the later, smart cycle (“Irony” 352).
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96 Claire Perkins

Both thematically and formally, this shift is clearest in the respec-

tive approaches of each cycle to characterization and genre. Where the
Renaissance films tend to cast their apathetic protagonists as unattached
drifters or obsessive loners, the similarly anxious figures of the smart
film are securely tethered to a family, house, and career: generically, the
shift can be broadly determined as a move from the road movie to the
family (melo)drama. The fear and loneliness no longer belongs to the
outlaw or drifter but to alienated professionals, suffocated housewives
and disaffected teenagers, and the violent outbursts and escape motifs
of the first cycle are translated into the smothered, insular themes of
adultery, divorce, and abuse. This generic movement indicates how the
formal crisis of action in the smart film is enacted on a fundamental-
ly different image from that of the Renaissance crisis. Both cycles are
more concerned with the observation of character behavior than with a
strongly attenuated plot, but the family setting of the smart film means
the characters are less likely to be thrown together in an attempt at flight
and transformation than to be struggling with a configuration that is
eternal and familiar. As we have seen, the small form inclinations of the
Renaissance image stem principally from the fact that the earlier films do
not begin with meaningfully constructed milieus: the story comes from
the forces implicit in the action we see, not in the history we do not. By
contrast, the portraits of dysfunctional American families that the smart
film depict evoke the Large Form action-image (SAS') insofar as they
rely heavily on its initial step of establishing a milieu as a situation whose
forces bear down on the protagonists (Deleuze, Cinema 141).
Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005) can be described
as a “fast-moving series of short, pointed vignettes” (Scott) depicting the
immediate aftermath of parental separation in an intellectual Brooklyn
family in 1986. Based on his own childhood experience, Baumbach’s film
examines how each member of the Berkman family—Bernard (Jeff Dan-
iels); Joan (Laura Linney); Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), 16; and Frank (Owen
Kline), 12—deals with the change to his or her life. The internal ten-
sion with which the film is essentially concerned is established from the
competitiveness of the family tennis match that opens the film, where
Bernard and Walt play Joan and Frank. Postseparation, these battle lines
are maintained, with Walt supporting his father’s new life “across the
park” and taking on Bernard’s pompous literary attitudes as a way of
dealing with other people, and Frank siding with Joan, who has had
affairs, and quickly begins dating his admired tennis coach, Ivan (William
Baldwin). Grounded by a pedantic joint custody arrangement whereby
the boys spend exactly half their time with each parent, The Squid and
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the Whale traces, among other things, Walt’s doubtful relationship with
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Sequelizing Hollywood 97

Figure 5.2. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach 2005). Courtesy Samuel
Goldwyn Films/The Kobal

his classmate Sophie and crush on his father’s student Lili, who Bernard
himself starts dating when she moves into his spare room; Frank’s “act-
ing out” by drinking, swearing, and masturbating in public; Bernard’s
slight, rejected attempt to reconnect with Joan; Walt’s plagiarism of a
Pink Floyd song and subsequent trip to an educational psychologist; and
Bernard’s eventual collapse and hospitalization from alleged exhaustion.
The film ends with Walt rejecting his father for the first time, leaving
him alone in hospital and claiming he wants to “even things out” and
stay with Joan some more.
The Squid and the Whale expresses the very essence of smart narra-
tive action in that its story consists of a series of moments that appear
at once dense and incidental, and which succeed one another quickly
and unpredictably. Similarly to the Renaissance films, the smart cycle
is not concerned with a traditional three-act structure tracking the pur-
posive development of a plot. Conversely to the earlier cycle, however,
the smart film does not suppress information about its characters and
context; techniques including voice-over, montage, titles, and music are
commonly used throughout the narrative to often exaggerated effect,
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establishing and embellishing details in a swift and detailed way. This

98 Claire Perkins

information-heavy approach indicates the cycle’s reliance on the Situa-

tion or milieu of the Large Form action-image. The trappings so easily
rejected by the Renaissance characters—job, home, school, parents—in
favor of obsessive flight (literal or figural) are the very substance of the
milieus sketched in the opening sequences of the smart film. Characters
are introduced not in terms of their individual quirks—as Max and Lion
are—but in terms of their milieu: the smart protagonists are inherently
connected, part of a situation that restricts their movement and, cinemati-
cally, recasts the possibility of action.
The first three sequences of The Squid and the Whale all involve
all four members of the Berkman family: they play tennis, drive home
through the leafy streets of their Park Slope neighborhood, and eat
dinner together. In each sequence, the forces implicit in their family
milieu become more visible. The effect of this in the dinner sequence
gives some insight into why Sconce describes the “awkward dining
shot” as one of smart cinema’s stock techniques (“Irony” 364). These
sequences—and expressive examples can be found in The Royal Tenen-
baums, The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997), Storytelling (Todd Solondz, 2001),
Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998), Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz,
1995), Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), The Safety of Objects (Rose
Troche, 2001), Your Friends and Neighbours (Neil LaBute, 1998), Punch
Drunk Love, (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002), and Magnolia (Paul Thomas
Anderson, 1998)—establish the milieu and its pressures by expressing
the dynamic of the family unit, where everyone has a role to play and
there is usually an undercurrent of conflict. Demonstrating a significant
insularity, the conversation usually involves issues internal to the milieu:
work, school, family interaction. When external issues are raised it is
principally to illustrate the dynamics of the unit. In The Squid and the
Whale’s own example, the relative quality of Charles Dickens’s works
comes up as dinner discussion, but primarily to articulate, with tremen-
dous economy, the relationship between the teenage Walt, his arrogant
father, and his candid mother. As one review describes, this scene is an
early sign of how Walt is morphing into his father, and Linney nicely
underplays Joan’s horror at watching her son become the enemy (Long-
worth). Meanwhile, Frank—the younger son—is distracted by the cashew
he has just put up his nose.
In his discussion of the Large Form action-image, Deleuze illus-
trates the SAS' schema by exclusive reference to American genres, includ-
ing the documentary, the psychosocial film, film noir, and the Western
(Cinema 143–46). In each example, the image develops slightly differ-
ently, but each genre is nonetheless “solidly anchored” in a milieu that
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acts as the “Encompasser”: “the milieu and its forces incurve on them-
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Sequelizing Hollywood 99

selves, they act on the character, throw him a challenge, and constitute a
situation in which he is caught” (141). In the genres Deleuze mentioned,
the milieu often has a quality of openness: the situational forces of the
Fordian milieu, for instance, are framed by the constant presence of the
land and the immanence of the sky. Gesturing back to the genre of the
family melodrama, the smart film presents a converse and exaggerated
Encompasser in that, as Douglas Sirk has commented on the earlier
genre, everything “happens inside” (Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury”
52); the milieu is peculiarly stifling. The smart film amplifies this effect
again by squaring its closed family units into clearly separate entities. The
titles of The Safety of Objects introduce the various families as tiny, titled
groups depicted inside their fenced premises. And, like other films deal-
ing with numerous proximate and interconnected families—Happiness,
The Ice Storm, The Chumscrubber (Arie Posin, 2005)—the film expresses
the relation between these separate units in terms of suspicion, hostility,
and open competitiveness. The families of the smart film tend to regard
themselves as individually empowered units—something simultaneously
encouraging and encouraged by their carefully divided proximity.
Baumbach literally described this specific type of empowerment in
a conversation with Phillip Lopate, where he suggests that the sense of
separation and insularity conveyed in the Brooklyn location of his film
reflects that felt by the Berkmans, who tend to regard themselves as
“somehow smarter and better” than other families. In The Squid and the
Whale this quality is most overtly articulated in the faux intellectualism
of Bernard and Walt—who divide the world into philistine and nonphi-
listine—but Baumbach claims he is trying to represent the way that all
families regard themselves as somehow smarter and better than others,
and the way that this has less to do with education per se than with a
quality created by the insular family unit. The smart film’s articulation
of this attitude is one element that affects its treatment of the classical
action-image. Insofar as the family unit puts itself into a type of exile
from the neighbors it regards itself as superior to, the family shifts from
being an entity that is simply closed to being, in Baumbach’s words,
an outsider. As Elsaesser has commented on the family melodrama, the
characters are each other’s sole referents (“Tales of Sound and Fury” 56),
and their sense of self is inevitably understood in terms of the unit. The
smart family milieu expresses a curious force that, typically against their
will, casts its members as quasi-aristocratic types: the Tenenbaums, the
Berkmans. These milieus make limited claims to universality: they are
hyperbolically local and obsessively detailed, and it is as though the sheer
weight of their history and detail is more powerful than the characters,
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who are finally unable, or unwilling, to effectively modify them.

100 Claire Perkins

As an amplified Encompasser, then, the family milieu functions as

a stifling situation from which its characters cannot extricate themselves.
In Deleuze’s specification, the action (A) in the SAS' structure of the
Large Form image consists of the characters’ responses to the milieu
forces that bear down on them. This action, however, cannot happen
before they become capable of it: a “big gap” necessarily exists between
the initial situation and the action that finally modifies it (Cinema 154).
Action, when it occurs, is driven by the power of actualization through
which the character(s) “acquire a new mode of being” (141), and the
sensory-motor advance of the form hinges on the condition that it is
only at this point that they are able to effectively modify or restore the
initial situation. In the smart film, the hypermilieu impacts severely on
the characters’ potential for this type of purposive actualization.
The divorce theme of The Squid and the Whale offers a literal
example of how this proceeds. The film’s vignettes can be read almost
entirely in terms of contrasts between the new and old situations, where
the characters’ navigation of the postdivorce situation is meted out in
small, and larger, discrepancies from the historical family milieu. Bernard
struggles to replicate the family home—claiming that getting a place like
Joan’s was important for him and that he is going to cook and run the
house as the boys are used to—but, initially, both sons can focus only
on differences: the further distance from school, what will happen to the
cat, their father’s unwelcome “surprises” of a ping pong table, a poster
of a tennis pro who Frank dismisses as an “asshole,” and a tiny, absurd
writing desk designed for a “leftie.” Some discrepancies are confronted
(Bernard feeding the cat generic food instead of Purina) and some we
merely observe (the ease with which Bernard always finds a park directly
outside his new house rather than having to search endlessly as he does
in Park Slope). The physical restriction of the family—represented most
fully in the figure of Bernard, who is constantly driving back and forth
between houses with the boys, loitering on Joan’s doorstep while waiting
for them or double-parking in the street—poignantly expresses the man-
ner in which all four Berkmans are inhibited in their potential to develop
a new mode of being. Joan is most active in her efforts to establish
this, but her attempt has shadows of the historical milieu cast all over
it: her relationship with Ivan is belittled by a jealous Bernard (“why is
your mother dating all these jocks? Very uninteresting men,” he com-
ments to Frank) and her publishing success palpably traversed by both
Bernard’s and Walt’s resentment. Walt’s own effort to establish a rela-
tionship with Sophie develops entirely in “Berkman” terms: he seduces
her with empty literary clichés and promptly breaks up with her on his
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father’s advice that it is good to “play the field” at his age. Even Frank’s
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Sequelizing Hollywood 101

desperately anti-Berkman, philistine-like behavior (drinking, masturbat-

ing) cannot avoid a precocious self-awareness: “do you think that you
and I are philistines?” he matter-of-factly asks a visibly taken-aback Ivan,
after a conversation with his father.
This restricted potential for character actualization necessarily
impacts on the causal schema of the Large Form action-image. The
textual sequelization we are tracing here between the Renaissance and
smart cycles rests on a conception of the erasure of a classical model of
realism by way of an exaggeration or amplification of its indices. In the
Renaissance cycle, the structural index of lack is transposed from a nar-
rative device to the suppression of motivation. As suggested, this broadly
amounts to a stretching-out of sensory motor form: action slows down
to the point where it can no longer link or disclose situations. In the
smart cycle, the milieu is amplified to the point where it inhibits rather
than triggers character actualization. In an inverse experimentation to
the Renaissance cycle, the effect of this can be characterized as a certain
acceleration of sensory-motor form.
In his own discussion of the breakdown of the action-image in
the American Renaissance cycle, Deleuze comments on how chance
becomes the sole guiding thread in these narratives, meaning “some-
times the event delays and is lost in idle periods, sometimes it is there
too quickly” (Cinema 207). This schema offers a fitting description of the
differing forms of experimentation between the Renaissance and smart
cycles. A film such as Scarecrow is clearly dominated by “idle periods,”
which obscure its “events”—the fight which lands Max and Lion in
prison, Lion’s fit—adding up to the impression that little really occurs.
By the film’s end, however, organic change has unmistakably occurred
in the characters, who have effectively acquired a new mode of being:
Max, most clearly, has learned the importance of human contact and
made a friend whom he plans to look after, tempering his early-stated
position that he does not love or trust anybody. The smart cycle exhibits
little of the Renaissance idleness: as the suggested swift-moving series of
vignettes, the films are marked by the rapid and detailed introduction
of several characters who are almost immediately involved in a disparate
series of events. In a precise inversion of the earlier cycle, much appears
to happen to the characters, but these encounters do little to change,
or actualize, them.
In the smart film, then, the “event” is “there too quickly.” This
phenomenon is clearest in the films that are founded on the cycle’s gen-
eral interest in issues of chance and coincidence—Donnie Darko, Mag-
nolia, The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)—where the event is not
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impelled by the protagonists at all but happens to them, and tends to

102 Claire Perkins

occur early: a falling jet engine, a bus crashing into a lake. The “coinci-
dence” films highlight the way in which action in the smart film is never
something the protagonists really become capable of. Insofar as these
narratives do not trace the actualization of hero’s power, no “big gap”
exists between the initial situation and a form of definitive action that
will modify it. Rather, the gap exists between the action—or series of
actions—and the modified situation, and the defining characteristic of the
form is that the degree to which this gap is filled at all is always ambigu-
ous. In classical terms, the action (A) occurs too early, and the majority
of the narrative is an examination of a modified situation that has not
been purposively or adequately built toward. In The Squid and the Whale,
character action attempts to respond to the claustrophobic milieu forces
early in the narrative, with the “family conference” at which the separa-
tion is announced and Bernard’s subsequent move happening within the
first ten minutes of the film. The accelerated schema is described by
Walt—at least from his perspective—in the scene immediately follow-
ing the conference. He confronts his mother in the bathroom, asserting
that “this is a great family” (Situation) and “I don’t know why you’re
screwing it up” (Action). Within this logic, the overwhelming part of
Baumbach’s film is concerned with the physically modified situation as
a discrete series of examples; it is, in the terms of the film’s tagline, an
examination of how “joint custody blows” (Situation').
By altering the distances implicit in the classical Large Form sche-
ma, The Squid and the Whale comments on the implausibility of the form
as a model of realism. The absence of any one, definitive point of action
promotes an anticausal conception of life as an unpredictable and con-
tinuous flow, with several small moments building one on another rather
than moving forward. Insofar as the outcome of one vignette rarely leads
logically into the premise of the next, the smart characters seem to run
in place, and the end scenarios of the films suggest that, while some
characters may find redemption, many do not. Varying directorial styles
and critical interpretations cast this in different ways. The interpretation
of The Squid and the Whale as Walt’s recognition of his parents as “nei-
ther gods nor monsters but as screwed-up, very foolish adults” (Denby)
suggests that the film’s collection of disparate experiences does produce
a certain sense of insight, for Walt at least. Part of the reason this is
so marked, however, is that it is starkly contrasted to the concurrent
lack of change in his father, who responds to Walt’s attempts to break
away with typical blustering pomposity, promising that he will put some
new posters up in his son’s room, and lend him his first edition of The
Naked and the Dead “as a present.” This type of character blindness and
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superficiality is a signature effect of smart directors such as Solondz

Sequelizing Hollywood 103

and LaBute, whose protagonists never achieve any level of recognition

through their experiences, and simply continue on in their willful and
destructive patterns.
For characters such as Walt, the effect is more complex. After he
leaves his father in the hospital, he runs through the streets of New
York to the Museum of Natural History, and the film ends on his silent
contemplation of the squid and whale diorama, which an earlier sequence
has revealed terrified him as a child. His stare could be interpreted as
a triumphant conquering, but this possibility is rendered ambiguous by
the sequence, which cuts from a close-up of his blank look to a long
shot from behind, which dwarfs him in relation to the enormous display.
Recalling in some ways the blank, paralyzed stare that ends many of the
Renaissance films, this moment again refers The Squid and the Whale back
to the family melodrama, which, as Elsaesser notes, most often “records
the failure of the protagonist to act in a way that could shape the events
and influence the emotional environment, let alone change the stifling
social milieu” (“Tales of Sound and Fury” 55). Without the catharsis
of direct, externalized action, the conflict, and even the redemption, of
smart characters necessarily turns inward, where it cannot escape the
terms of their situation. Elsaesser suggests that the protagonists of the
family melodrama “emerge as lesser human beings for having become
wise and acquiescent to the ways of the world” (55). Walt’s stare indicates
how the smart film also confers a negative identity on its characters: if
they recognize anything, it is typically merely their powerlessness in the
face of their world.
In his work on the smart film, Sconce alludes to the cycle as a
generational phenomenon, observing how many of the directors at the
heart of this type of filmmaking belong to Generation X. For Sconce,
this marks the cycle as one tendency within the broader 1990s “iro-
ny epidemic,” where the strategies of disengagement exhibited in the
films are an explicit response against the earlier generation: “a means of
non-participatory engagement with [baby] boomers and their domination
of the cultural and political landscape” (“Irony” 355). Sconce’s position
can go some way toward illuminating the concept of sequelization that
this chapter has attempted to advance. Whereas the Renaissance and
smart cycles have been likened on the basis of broad industrial and criti-
cal similarities, the textual dimension of their sequelization, once closely
examined, is clearly borne out in entirely transpositional terms. Indeed,
in this analysis, “sequelization” takes a precisely reversed form: the crisis
of sensory-motor style is enacted on two converse images by way of
two broadly opposed movements. These patterns of difference belie the
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generalized idea of “continuation” on which sequelization tends to be

104 Claire Perkins

founded in the discourse of cinema studies. If the smart film, as a facet

of the “Sundance” generation, offers something like “New Hollywood
Part II,” then its “secondness” and its sequelization are necessarily highly
differential ideas.

Notes
1. King’s introduction to The Last Great American Picture Show is titled,
“ ‘The Last Good Time We Ever Had’: Remembering the New Hollywood
Cinema.”
2. The term “commercial/independent” comes from R. Barton Palmer.
In an article on Blood Simple (Joel Coen, 1985), Palmer describes two notions
of “independence”: those unwillingly marginalized by market forces, and those
seeking the ground of creative freedom. A text such as the Coens’, he suggests,
appeals complexly and simultaneously to both “[their] makers, by exploiting
their independence and producing a “different” product, often paradoxically
strive thereby for a more central place within the institutions of commercial
filmmaking” (6).
3. Biskind makes only two brief references to Anderson (Down and Dirty
21, 387). Mottram defines his “Sundance Kids” as a uniquely West Coast phe-
nomenon, excluding directors such as Solondz and Hal Hartley because “they
have remained camped out on the East Coast, largely avoiding entanglements
with the studios” (xxii).
4. For full detail on the five laws that define the Large Form action-image
see Deleuze, Cinema 141–59.
5. For full detail on the two laws (indices) defining the Small Form
action-image see Deleuze, Cinema 160–77.
6. Deleuze uses this term to describe how an action discloses a situation
that is not given because “the situation is not given for itself, the index here is
an index of lack; it implies a gap in the narrative, and corresponds to the first
sense of the French word ellipse” (Cinema 160).
copyright law.
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6
JOYCE GOGGIN

From Remake to Sequel

Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve

I
N OCEAN’S TWELVE (Steven Soderbergh, 2004), the sequel to Ocean’s
Eleven (Soderbergh, 2001), one of the cast members remarks: “I want
the last check I write to bounce.” This one line sums up much of the
economic and, by extension, aesthetic dynamics that drive the initial
Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone, 1960), as well as its remake and sequels,
including Ocean’s Thirteen (Soderbergh, 2007).1 Although the notion of a
bouncing check may appear, at first glance, to have little to do with the
economics and poetics of remaking and sequelization, this chapter shows
that the two may be related in important if surprising ways, suggesting
significant parallels and contradictions.
Perhaps the most obvious connection between a bouncing check,
the Ocean’s films and this segment of the Hollywood film industry is
their mutual connection to money, seriality, and goods that are infinitely
reproducible and whose value is taken to be particularly low. As contem-
porary filmgoers and film scholars know, remakes and sequels remain a
much-maligned category, invariably criticized as a form of lassitude on
the part of directors and producers who opt out for a known commodity,
banking on viewer familiarity with the “original” to guarantee a presold
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product. Summarily then, the remake is often understood as “evidence of

105
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106 Joyce Goggin

Figure 6.1. Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001). Courtesy Warner Bros/
The Kobal Collection/Marshak, Bob.

Hollywood being an ‘aesthetic copy-cat,’. . . of ‘cultural imperialism’ and

‘terroristic marketing practices’ designed to block an original’s competi-
tion in the U.S. market” (Verevis 3).
Before proceeding to a discussion of these received notions of
remakes and sequels, and how the Ocean’s films both reinforce and cri-
tique such limited views, I would like to rehearse briefly where such
arguments come from. The notion that remakes and sequels are always
primarily about money rather than aesthetics reposes on pessimistic,
postlapsarian ideas about art, rife with the suggestion that there was
once a Golden Age when artistic production was “original” and free from
vulgar commercial motives. Current cultural output, therefore, necessar-
ily pales by comparison, being nothing more than watered-down drivel,
mass-produced with the basest of profit motives in mind. This view of
popular culture confirms Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s worst
nightmare—that films no longer even pretend to be art and that “busi-
ness is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they [the cultural
industries] intentionally produce” (95)—to draw the obvious conclusion
that we are destined to regret our lamentable plight while gobbling up
inane remakes of old movies, as investors increase their profits.
copyright law.

Has artistic production not always—to a greater or lesser extent—

been caught up in the problematics just outlined? Certainly, as Marc
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From Remake to Sequel 107

Shell so eloquently demonstrates in Art & Money, economics and aes-

thetics have been intimately connected at least since coins have been
stamped with portraits of emperors, and the Holy Spirit was represented
in Byzantine paintings in gold leaf (6–56). Money played an obvious
role in the Renaissance, where artists’ careers were made possible by
wealthy patrons, and money was the prime motivator in the robust seven-
teenth-century Dutch art market, where paintings of gamblers and mon-
ey changers were popular items, often sold to finance important careers.
Such genre paintings, like movies, were collective efforts in which several
studio artists undertook various figures or still life elements in the same
paintings, which were then sold to down-market customers (see Goggin,
“Making Meaning Happen” 43–52; Israel 548–49).
The novel, an aesthetic genre that once provided a social pleasure
that film would later supply, likewise emerged through the market which
it narrated, and in which it was sold as a product for mass consump-
tion. Daniel Defoe, author of the first modern novel, was an economist
whose works such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) made it abundantly clear that
he was sensitive to the relation of literature to money. This important,
founding connection between the novel, economics, and profit came to
its fullest expression in the serialized novels of the nineteenth century,
most of which were vehicles for peripatetic marriage romances, many of
which were remarkably similar, and constituted remakes and sequels of
themselves. The result was a booming market in serialized, sequelized fic-
tion that instrumentalized branding, product placement, and the profes-
sionalization of writing, through which writers such as Charles Dickens
turned an enormous profit (see Hughes and Lund; Patten 122–42).
Although the separation of art and money is arguably a constructed
binary that has been enthusiastically and repeatedly deconstructed since
the early 1980s, postromantic ideas about the absolute value of “original-
ity,” and the importance of keeping aesthetics unsullied by finance still
hold considerable sway. Given the persistence of objections to remakes
and sequels as soulless commercial artifacts, perversely lacking in “origi-
nality,” the only effective response is one that takes into account the cul-
tural, industrial, historical, and narrative concerns at the heart of remake
and sequel production. Only by stepping back and asking how we got this
way can we hope to reevaluate cinematic remakes and sequels in any way
that makes sense of them for what they are, as opposed to everything they
are not. This is especially important because the unabashed remake and its
close cousin, the sequel, have constituted the dominant mode of artistic
production since the late twentieth century, a trend that got underway,
along with Andy Warhol’s soup cans, in the 1960s (see Dryer).
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What is arguably new about the market in remakes and the pro-
duction of sequels that got started at the end of the twentieth century is
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108 Joyce Goggin

that these cultural products showcase themselves as such. Moreover, they

are generally uninterested in aligning themselves with “literariness” or
some other manifestation of “high culture,” but rather take their “inspi-
ration” from other movies and television shows, hence films such as
Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980); The Brady Bunch Movie (Betty Thomas,
1995); Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991); Mission: Impossible (Brian De
Palma, 1996); and Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen. This is important
because, as Pamela Falkenberg has argued, in the past filmmakers and
marketers emphasized a film’s “art” status in an attempt to hide its com-
mercial strategies because, “under capitalism, art is precisely that com-
modity whose exchange value depends upon its denial of its status of a
commodity” (qtd. in Forrest and Koos 16). Clearly, because Falkenberg
wrote these words two decades ago, things have changed. My task here
will be to get at what has changed and why, by studying the Ocean’s
films as a prime example of the kind of cinematic remakes and sequels
that have been made since the beginning of this century, and which flaunt
their status as one more product in a specific line or brand, rather than
attempting to conceal it.
My argument makes these observations a key component of my
underlying premise: namely, that romantic and postromantic notions of
originality and commercial innocence are no longer relevant. Original-
ity is, and has always been, a construct, and aesthetic production (be it
in painting, sculpture, theater, or literature) has always been intimately
linked to mercantilism, commerce, the market, and, more recently, the
financial market. Given their preoccupation with finance in both plot
and location, the Ocean’s films are appropriate texts through which to
consider Hollywood self-appropriation and self-promotion as a product
line. These films are, moreover, of particular interest because they boldly
thematize both their lack of originality and their interest in money and
the market as cultural phenomena—indeed, as their very subject matter.
In terms of their plot, for example, all of the Ocean’s films center on a
heist in which an enormous sum of money is stolen from a casino or, in
the last two films, from a casino owner. But while the motor that drives
the slim plot behind all of the Ocean’s films is stealing money, these films
also represent how the market has worked in tandem with Hollywood
since the 1960s when the first Ocean’s film was made, and particularly
where the circulation and investment of money is concerned.
Significantly, the “original” Ocean’s Eleven is based on a short story
by Hollywood writers George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell,
who had the city of Las Vegas and Vegas entertainers—Frank Sinatra,
Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford—in
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mind when they wrote it. Since that time, George Nolfi, Brian Kop-
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From Remake to Sequel 109

pelman, and David Levien have written Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen as
vehicles for the Clooney Rat Pack, fully (self-) conscious of all the nos-
talgia, as well as the economic and cultural issues, such a gesture implied.
In other words, the Ocean’s Eleven remake, and the sequels it now spawns,
openly serve to publicize popular stars rather than as adaptations of some
revered, high-culture antecedent. What this means is that autoreflexivity
in these films, which is ultimately the promotion of the famous stars who
act in them, becomes nothing less than their aesthetic texture, architec-
ture, and function. Perhaps the most blatant example is Julia Roberts’s
redoubling role in Ocean’s Twelve as Tess Ocean, who is now called on
in the narrative to pretend to be Julia Roberts.

Hollywood and Vegas

The Ocean’s films have their Las Vegas location to thank for the better
part of glamour, and Hollywood producers know that they can bank on
this eccentric and specialized urban center to provide instant visual and
visceral excitement.2 In fact, Hollywood discovered early on that the
bright lights of Las Vegas instantly spelled money and excitement, hence,
for more than half a century now, the two cities have been engaged in
what might be called a positive feedback loop based on copromotion.
Importantly, the lucrative relation in which these two highly specialized
centers are engaged is also influenced by a managerial peculiarity that
Las Vegas shares with few other gambling centers. This unique feature is
the city’s propensity to mirror, at any given time, the vision of an entre-
preneurial genius who, for the duration of his tenure as Vegas kingpin,
imparts a particular shape to this former desert outpost, while structuring
the messages it broadcasts, particularly through Hollywood film.
The first of these Las Vegas visionaries was Bugsy Siegel, who
turned Vegas into a desert resort and getaway spot where the general
public could rub shoulders with Hollywood stars. During Siegel’s reign,
Ria Langham went to Las Vegas to divorce Clark Gable and appeared in
the press gambling and romping as she waited out her six-week Nevada
residency requirement. The ensuing publicity turned Vegas into the
“Divorce Capital of the World,” and in 1941 Las Vegas Nights (Ralph
Murphy) became the first film to capitalize on this kind of glamour and
invest in Vegas-Hollywood synergy. This low-budget production her-
alded a decade in which the town went from being a playground to the
stars and a glamorous setting for press photos, to a popular location for a
new kind of romance, involving the cinematic manipulation of a complex
galaxy of cultural signs such as cowboys, gangsters, hoods, streetwalkers,
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show girls, and compulsive gamblers.

110 Joyce Goggin

Just as Bugsy Siegel left his mark on the 1930s and 1940s, Las Vegas
of the 1960s was stamped with the style of Howard Hughes, who owned
the Silver Slipper, the Desert Inn, and the Frontier. Hughes produced
The Las Vegas Story (Robert Stevenson, 1952), specifically to flaunt the
town’s heavy investment in neon, which made Vegas a “naturally” sensa-
tional setting. It was also in the 1960s, under Hughes’s direction, that the
production show policy took off, and the Sands, also owned by Hughes,
became the favorite haunt of Dean, Sammy, Joey, and Peter—the mem-
bers of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. The Sands became the setting for the
first Ocean’s Eleven, a virtually plot-free heist film expressly created to
showcase the Rat Pack and about which there was nothing particularly
“original.” According to one critic, Ocean’s Eleven “functioned as a celeb-
rity travelogue that provided Las Vegas with the cachet and glamour of
Hollywood as a playground for the rich and famous, focusing primarily
on the aura of Frank Sinatra and his cronies” (Gottdiener, Collins, and
Dickens 71).
Hardly flaunting itself as a culturally significant production, the
first film in the Ocean’s series served as a sort of remake of the Rat
Pack’s own production shows. Given that the members of the Rat Pack
also performed in casinos on the strip while making the movie, filmgo-
ers were treated to an early frisson of postmodern self-consciousness
and the fictionalization of “real life,” as in the last segment of the film
where Sammy Davis sings into the camera. The camera departs from the
Hollywood norm by breaking down the fourth wall, with Davis, filmed
in front of the Sand’s marquee, announcing a performance of the Rat
Pack, and uncannily conflating the cinematic with the real. In keeping
with a trend to narrative aesthetic production that would increasingly and
unabashedly flaunt its own means of production (in this case, Hollywood
and the economics of promoting the stars it created), the first Ocean’s
film stood at the cutting edge. The film’s characteristic self-conscious
humor was supplemented with cameos by stars such as Red Skelton,
who appeared as himself, and Shirley MacLaine, whose ad-libbed line
to Dean Martin—“I’m so drunk I don’t think I could lie down without
holding on”—was a typical Dean Martinism at the time.
The Hughes decades were followed by a drab, faceless corporate
period in the late 1970s and 1980s, in which the town was known almost
exclusively as the world center for bad taste. About this time Steve Wynn,
then a young slot and keno manager, showed up determined to give
Las Vegas a facelift by developing casino-hotels in themed family parks,
such as Treasure Island and the Excalibur. Wynn was also determined
to give the place a little class, which he did by building casinos as simu-
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lacra, or remakes, of culture capitals such as Paris, New York, Venice,

From Remake to Sequel 111

and Bellagio. To make space for his megalomaniacal dreams, Wynn

also devised a plan to clear the path for progress and make money at
the same time. The magnate’s strategy for accomplishing both is what
reporter Jeff Simpson has called “one of Las Vegas’ most impressive
spectacles—[the] hotel implosion.” Since Wynn’s entrepreneurial debut,
an impressive list of casinos has been imploded and captured on videos
sold everywhere in Vegas. His greatest hits include the Dunes (1993),
the Hacienda (1996), the Old Aladdin (1998), El Rancho (2000), the
Desert Inn (2004), and most importantly, in 1996, the forty-four-year-old
Sands, which had opened in 1952 and was once home to Frankie, Dean,
Sammy, Joey and Peter.3
Wynn’s entrepreneurial profile appears in Ocean’s Eleven (2001), and
its sequels Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen, as the Terry Benedict character
(Andy Garcia). Like Steve Wynn, Benedict comes from humble begin-
nings, collects art, is obsessed with security and surveillance, and, most
importantly, he implodes casinos and makes events out of the implo-
sions. The fictional vault in Ocean’s Eleven hints at Wynn’s obsession with
heightening security measures. In his latest hotel-casino, Wynn Las Vegas,
players are issued radio frequency identity (RFID) chips, which make it
easier to “identify counterfeit chips, keep track of markers, rate players for
comps, and deter casino cheats” (see Goggin, “Casinos and Sure Bets”).
Wynn’s explosive approach to economic management is also dramatized
in Ocean’s Eleven in a pivotal scene in which Benedict detonates an old
casino, replicating Wynn’s now famous implosion events. More signifi-
cantly, this acknowledgment of the film’s “real-life” setting and character
(Las Vegas and Steve Wynn) and its constructed self (as remake of the
first Ocean’s Eleven), recalls the self-conscious positioning of Sammy Davis
in the first film, thereby effectively adding a further dimension to the
process that the initial Ocean’s Eleven set in motion. Interestingly enough,
the Ocean’s Eleven remake also contains an embedded narrated segment,
which itself contains embedded narratives of attempted heists in Las Vegas
in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s: the mafia years, the Hughes era, and the
corporate strip, respectively. The mise en abyme structure of this segment
again self-consciously draws attention to the “real” Las Vegas, its legal
and criminal economies, and its close ties to Hollywood. In other words,
this is a Hollywood film that remakes Las Vegas in three microsequences
that hint at the structure of the Ocean’s films as a whole.

Gambling, Speculation, and Aesthetics

While Ocean’s Eleven (1960), the remake, and its sequels market Las Vegas
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and Hollywood stars, they also adapt and represent particular aspects of
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112 Joyce Goggin

the postproduction economy in which they were made, namely specula-

tion, finance, and gambling. This is to say that as these films were being
made the ostensible divisions between speculation, finance, and gambling
were rapidly eroding, and these closely related economic practices began
circulating wealth, risk, and chance in similar ways. One example of this
is the boom in the casino industry and, of course, flimflamming casinos
is the comic plot device that drives these Vegas films. This section, then,
investigates the relation between the financial economy, often described as
a casino economy, and how it relates to the Ocean’s films as well as to Hol-
lywood and the economic practice of producing remakes and sequels.
To establish the groundwork for this investigation, we need to
return briefly to recent monetary and financial history. Money, the medi-
um in which the financial market is visualized, underwent a significant
change in 1933, when the United States severed paper money from the
gold standard for domestic trade. In 1971, Richard Nixon drove through
a policy that constitutes one of the most significant monetary transfor-
mations in history by cutting money loose from the gold standard for
international trade within the United States. At this point, paper money
began to circulate definitively, and on its own, without the indexical
safety net of specie to back it. Hence, as Brian Rotman has pointed out,
paper money no longer makes any pretence of being redeemable for the
amount of precious metal that it would formerly have guaranteed, so that
“a dollar bill presented to the U.S. Treasury entitles the holder [only]
to an identical replacement of itself” (89). This is to say that money no
longer represents the supposedly more stable gold standard, but rather
serves as a remake of itself without the pretence of referring to a more
material antecedent.
In a similar vein, Jean Baudrillard argued that the Twin Towers at
the World Trade Center in New York City were the perfect icon of the
US financial economy because the towers reflected the role that paper
money took on in 1971, at roughly the same time as the towers were
being built (Baudrillard, Simulacra 75–79; see also Rotman 88–97). Like
paper money, the towers referred to and reflected nothing save their own
identical twin. “The most interesting thing about them,” writes Gary
Percesepe, “was that there were two of them, and the way they were
positioned, not exactly next to each other, but north and south [each] at
the perfect angle in relation to the other [. . .] they seemed to echo one
another other, an exercise in architectural repetition.”
Parallels to what Baudrillard would call duplication without rep-
resentation, of which money and postmodern architecture are examples,
abound in the Ocean’s films precisely because they are all, in some way,
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a remake or a sequel. To develop just one example, the deregulation of

From Remake to Sequel 113

money has made possible a deregulated financial market, in which such

economic constructions as derivatives and notoriously risky junk bonds
are traded (incidentally, Wynn financed the construction of the Mirage
casino in 1989 with junk bonds, bringing together gambling and finance
in seemingly perfect symmetry). If money, and instruments of credit such
as those just mentioned, always inform and even dictate aesthetics, argues
Mark C. Taylor, then understanding manifestations of contemporary cul-
ture such as the remake and sequel is impossible without taking into
consideration current developments in the financial markets. Understood
in this way, the Ocean’s films are all more or less explicitly a commentary
on the economy that spawned them, and they make no attempt to rep-
resent anything outside of themselves, but rather endlessly duplicate Las
Vegas and famous stars, who frequently play themselves, such as Bruce
Willis in Ocean’s Twelve. This accounts for many similar scenes in Ocean’s
Eleven, such as the one in which George Clooney asks Brad Pitt if his
delivery was too fast, or the closing scene of Ocean’s Thirteen in which
Clooney advises Pitt to settle down and have a few kids. In other words,
these films are openly self-reflexive and expect that audiences will enjoy
moments at which this self-consciousness is foregrounded.
Moreover, part of how the market informs contemporary culture
is the growth of a strong relation between Las Vegas and Wall Street,
which both serve as metonymies of the financial practices that take place
in them. This also applies to the mode in which these two centers rep-
resent themselves, which constitutes an aesthetics of finance, including
digital displays of “derivatives, virtual currencies, and e-money” (Taylor
8). While the visual aesthetic of money was still in the process of becom-
ing evermore prominent in our daily lives, “financial markets began to
resemble a postmodern play of signs indistinguishable from the digital
signs on display along the Vegas Strip” (8). According to Taylor, this is
why one cannot “understand the Wall Street of the 1970s and 1980s”
without Las Vegas, and particularly the period since then, wherein “play-
ing the market [has become] a new form of mass entertainment,” much
like a trip to the desert gambling capital (184, 207).
The logic of the “real world” market likewise asserts itself in Ocean’s
Eleven in several ways. First, it remakes the supposed “original” 1960
film that, as explained earlier, is no more original or authentic than the
gold standard ever was. The only thing that is perhaps in some sense
“authentic,” is the pretence under which this logic operates. However,
even in the film, Danny Ocean and his friends are no dupes to specious
logic and know that robbing a casino is better than a bank because (as
Ocean explains), unlike banks, casinos are required by law “to hold in
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reserve enough cash to cover every chip played on the floor” at any given
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114 Joyce Goggin

time. What this ostensibly means is that casinos are now more effective
in producing the illusion of security than banks, while the faster moving,
more risky, and exciting Wall Street threatens to supersede Las Vegas as
a financial entertainment capital.
The idea that the “real” economy has become more risk-based than
a casino is also hinted at in Ocean’s Twelve. In this sequel, Terry Benedict
puts the finger on Ocean and his band of thieves for the $160 million
they originally stole from him, plus interest over three years bringing
the balance—“assuming that Benedict gives prime plus one”—up to $190
million. This is a calculation of which we are repeatedly reminded in
the film along with the “fact” that the money is being held “in escrow”
until the Ocean’s crew (each of whom owes precisely $17.34 million: as
Linus, played by Matt Damon, quips “the interest just kills you”) can
compete with François Toulour, played by Vincent Cassel, to steal a
priceless Faberge egg. By talking about stolen casino money in financial
jargon and assuming that it accrues interest like any other money, the
characters assume that bankers, casino owners, and thieves are all more
or less in the same business—they just have different offices.

Signs and Things

The value of sequelization and remaking—or rather the hierarchical

assumptions underpinning their contemporary production—is further
played out in the Ocean’s films in terms of architecture. I therefore
turn briefly to the question of architecture and how it expresses the
financial systems that underwrite it in order to look at a broader semiotic
issue, which is also at stake in the Ocean’s films. The explicitly finan-
cial architecture that gives Vegas its unique style, and which likewise
gives the former desert watering hole its distinctive Hollywood appeal,
is also powerfully present in the architecture of Times Square. Here at
the epicenter of the financial economy, the Reuters building is covered
eight stories deep in a digital NASDAQ sign displaying real-time market
activity, revolving and hovering on “a semblance of the only headquarters
that NASDAQ has” (Taylor 190).
While this trend in contemporary architecture certainly has a lot
of glitz, it is also a high-water mark in the history of commercial design
as it turns buildings into giant surfaces on which to advertise. Signs,
therefore, become all-consuming and buildings more or less disappear
behind signage that signifies the market, itself part of an illusory, self-re-
flexive economy that endlessly trades on, and inflates, itself. Therefore,
the buildings at Times Square have become signs, much in the semiotic
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sense of the term, and take their place in a market that is based on the
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From Remake to Sequel 115

play and manipulation of other signs, so that the signifier is, in effect,
temporarily fused with the signified, in a potentially endless process of
self-reflexive redoubling.
But the merging of architecture with signage is an innovation
that Las Vegas pioneered long before architects such as Frank Gehry
were designing buildings for Time Square. By the mid-1940s the Young
Electric Sign Company, known as Yesco in Vegas, had created the city’s
trademark Vegas Vic, an enormous cowboy who would later be joined
by Vegas Vickie. However, the real boom in Las Vegas sign architecture
got underway in the 1950s as a means of pulling motorists into casi-
nos from the city’s strip, itself an innovation in the drive-through urban
planning that would come to define the postmodern city. As architects
Venturi, Brown, and Izenour explained in Learning from Las Vegas, the
city chose not to follow but to transcend the Universalist principles of
modernist architecture, in terms both of the buildings, which became
giant signs of themselves as well as of the city. Las Vegas therefore
adopted the symbolic, the particular, and the presentational, a trend that
relinquishes “any pretence of representing reality, instead presenting pos-
sibility” (Firat 115). And this of course, is the perfect setting for the
Ocean’s remakes and sequels that celebrate gambling and the financial
market by way of an aesthetic practice that mobilizes stars such as Brad
Pitt as semiotic markers, always referring back to themselves, rather than
representing any form of external reality. One excellent example of this
is the scene in Ocean’s Eleven in which Pitt is introduced. Here Pitt
is implicitly playing the role of Ricky Jay, a “real life” cardsharp and
magician-cum-movie star, who began in Hollywood by coaching stars in
poker moves for gambling films. While fans in the know will immediately
get this self-conscious nod to Ricky Jay and his unique persona, the scene
also serves to authenticate Pitt’s stardom because he is set off against
the “real life” celebrity of the (lesser) television stars—Joshua Jackson,
Topher Grace, Holly Marie Combs—whom he is attempting to teach just
enough poker skills for them to be believable in a Hollywood movie.
This trend to promoting signs for things naturally impacted on cul-
tural production outside of architecture as well. As early as the 1956 film
Meet Me in Las Vegas (Roy Roland), viewers are explicitly invited to enjoy
MGM’s “Goldmine of Entertainment,” that is, not the representation of
a love story, but rather a spectacle of wealth and MGM’s advertisement
thereof. In other words, at this juncture, with the help of Hollywood, Las
Vegas began representing itself through a blatant manipulation of signs
of itself, which viewers were expected to enjoy for the simple reason that
it made a lot of money. This same trend also manifests itself in the city’s
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relation with Elvis Presley whereby, according to one author, Las Vegas
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116 Joyce Goggin

in the 1990s “had merged with Elvis into a double sign, with the enter-
tainer posthumously multiplied as the definitive Las Vegas entertainer by
hundreds of impersonators” (Gottdiener et al. 73). In this case, the dead
performer who, ironically enough, electrified audiences in Viva Las Vegas
(George Sidney, 1964), becomes more important as a sign than as a per-
son, and continues to proliferate and circulate in the bizarre play of signs
that constitutes the postmodern financial economy of which Las Vegas
is a part (see Anderton and Chase 5–13). Not to be left out of the loop,
Ocean’s Eleven featured Elvis impersonators and the film’s end credits roll
to a remixed version of Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation.”
More generally speaking, this kind of self-consciousness, predicated
on constant autoreflexivity, is the logic that informs all of the Ocean’s
films throughout: it constitutes their form, style, function, and continued
production. Hence, what began as one narcissistic, self-promotional Las
Vegas movie that banked on the popularity of the town’s own Rat Pack,
became a vehicle for the promotion of a gang of stars whose leader,
George Clooney, was (in 2006) reportedly set to invest in a casino (Las
Ramblas) in Vegas. In broader terms, therefore, the Ocean’s sequels pres-
ent themselves at first glance as signs of an “original” that turns out not to
be an originating narrative in any traditional sense. Moreover, although
one might say that the new films in the series are actually bizarrely faith-
ful to the promotional intention of the original Ocean’s Eleven, what they
represent at the macrolevel is the capitalist logic of Hollywood, and the
financial machinery that drives contemporary mainstream film.

Taylorizing Leisure
As described earlier, the Ocean’s movies were, and continue to be, pro-
duced as the gambling industry, and particularly Las Vegas, became
increasingly important to the greater economy. Along with Las Vegas,
economic developments such as deregulation, privatization, and a deraci-
nated dollar, have resulted in a financial market that is progressively more
abstract and is increasingly understood as a part of the entertainment
industry, along with Vegas and gambling. In short, we are now living
in what economists have referred to as casino capitalism, a “system”
in which gambling is a major industry, and wherein governments and
economists have long given up the pretence that a line exists between
speculation and gambling.4 This is significant because gambling—like the
remake and sequel—serializes leisure time as the gambler engages in a
continuum of wagers, over and over again.
Serialized leisure is, moreover, Taylorized leisure: that is, time
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that has been parceled out, mass-produced, and rendered uniform (see
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From Remake to Sequel 117

Garite). As such, leisure comes to form the complement of the Tay-

lorized labor performed by factory workers and, in a postproduction
economy, by anyone employed in the information, entertainment, and
countless other industries that deal in nontangibles. Although the term
comes into being with the management theory of Taylor, the thinking
that it instrumentalized began much earlier with mercantilism and the
development of the art market and the inexpensive copy in the seven-
teenth century (see Giesz). In terms of narrative, the novel form, divided
into convenient chapters designed to fill the limited leisure time of those
who work, got underway in the eighteenth century and is followed by the
serialized novel of the nineteenth century. These novels were expansive
and meant to stretch out over readily affordable episodes that ended in
cliff-hangers, producing a needy, if not addictive, audience (see Goggin,
“Nigella”). This publication strategy shaped buyer habits, desires, and
needs to meet the production cycle of an industrialized society, and one
that was increasingly becoming Taylorized. Serial publication, as sug-
gested earlier, favored the remake and the sequel as popular romantic
plots were reproduced in varied settings, and generations of novelistic
characters followed one another into the reader’s experience and enjoy-
ment of fictional worlds. This is, of course, precisely how the Ocean’s
films work, as a remake of one mindless 1960s movie is followed by
what threatens to be an endless series of brilliantly packaged sequels
of approximately the same length, in which the same actors return to
pick up the last cliff-hanger where it was left, and entertain us with an
ongoing Vegas story that occasionally changes setting.
The Taylorization of labor and leisure also coincides with Sig-
mund Freud’s discovery of what he called the pleasure principle, which
he characterized as “an economic point of view” on the human psyche
(“Beyond” 1). For Freud, the human psyche is regulated by the pleasure
principle, which strives to reduce “unpleasurable tension,” and this it
accomplishes through the “avoidance of unpleasure or the production
of pleasure” (1). From this postulate Freud goes on to explain psychic
responses to the frequent failure of pleasure to dominate experience and
how we are driven to reenact these experiences in a manageable form,
thereby gleaning pleasure from the sensation of having corrected an
unpleasurable experience from the past. We remake such painful lacks
and experiences in fantasy form, repeating them endlessly until the pain
and its pleasurable resolutions begin to form recognizable sequels in our
lives (see Goggin, “Gaming/Gambling”).
The drive to remake and create sequels is directly related to certain
aspects of economic practice that developed alongside of industrializa-
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tion. In a society that has grown up with Freud’s economic model of

118 Joyce Goggin

the human psyche, we now expect cultural products such as narratives,

films, video games, and television shows to reach a (partial) conclusion
and begin again, like a hand of cards in an evening of poker. Moreover,
as Georg Simmel (612–42), Walter Benjamin (481–503), and Gerda Reith
(138–55) have shown, the experience of gambling itself is distinguished
by sustained, serial gestures and episodes, which begin again as soon as
bets are placed. As a form of Taylorized entertainment, gambling, which
involves repeating sequences, is an entirely fitting topic to adapt to other
forms of serialized entertainment such as the Ocean’s movies. What is
more, the Ocean’s films not only mimic Las Vegas in the way that they,
as remakes and sequels, belong to the production modes of both indus-
trial and postindustrial capitalism, but also in the way that Vegas remakes
other cities such as Paris and Venice, as well as Hollywood themes as in
the MGM Grand casino.
Furthermore, as previously explained, as Las Vegas was becoming
a regular location for Hollywood cinema, the world economy was grow-
ing ever more complex as a result of industrialization, while transactions
became increasingly abstract and risk based. The result is that the pres-
ent, postproduction, finance-based economy is now virtually indistin-
guishable from the workings of a casino. This development is evidenced
in the way that the economy expresses itself through a particular flashy
aesthetic style, reflected in the signage that financial institutions have
borrowed from Vegas casino culture. Appropriately then, the market
also communicates through Las Vegas, and films about Vegas, which
are among some of the economy’s most eloquent expressions.
These films also remake the velocity and the futurity that David
Harvey associated with modern economics, based on the speed at which
transactions can be completed, and the concomitant need to predict
future market scenarios (285–307). This kind of futurity is also shared
by gambling, an activity that is very much about present-ness, as the past
and future coincide in the turn of a card. In other words, because of the
excitement of anticipation, the gambler’s attention is always fixed on what
will happen, rather than what has happened. Similarly, the Ocean’s films
reproduce the in-the-moment-ness of gambling both thematically as each
film implies the next and in terms of trademark self-conscious humor
predicated on stars’ awareness of their own time-contingent popularity
and how the films function as a vehicle thereof. And while they construct
this kind of “nowness” through the hype of Las Vegas, gambling, and
popular culture icons, these films also return repeatedly into themselves
for source material, bringing the past repeatedly into the present, hence
the cameo roles Henry Silva and Angie Dickinson play from the original
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Ocean’s Eleven in the remake. The “nowness” that the Ocean’s series proj-
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From Remake to Sequel 119

ects and on which it banks is, in this way, a reflection of the temporality
of the gambler and the related futurity that the market demands.

Sequels and Conclusions

This closing addresses an issue that has been suspended to this point,
namely, what a sequel is and whether we can safely say that Ocean’s
Eleven is a remake, and whether all of the supernumerated films that
follow are also sequels? For Linda Hutcheon, sequels are tantamount
to “never wanting a story to end,” whereas remakes are about “want-
ing to retell the same story over and over in different ways,” and this
logic seems to apply nicely to the Ocean’s sequels, which are numbered
to imply that each film is yet another installment of the same story
(9). According to Thomas Leitch, a sequel continues “the story of an
earlier film by bringing a new set of characters” to the serialized story
line, or by “inventing new adventures for characters established by an
earlier film,” and in “the age of the VCR” a big part of this is directed
toward “creat[ing] an appetite for the original film” (41). By Hutcheon’s
definition, then, sequels are about never wanting the fun to end, while
for Leitch part of the fun is creating a market both for the sequels and
for what he calls “the original film.”
In her Sight and Sound review of Ocean’s Twelve, Liese Spenser sug-
gests that the trouble with the film is that it is a “knowing sequel to [a]
remake.” She hastens to add, however, that by “flashing sparkle at the
audience like an expert conman, Soderbergh makes the hardest job of
all—following a hit film with a probable hit sequel” look easy (64). By
this I take her to mean that, although impressively glitzy, Ocean’s Twelve
is somehow one step too far removed from the “original,” and that the
director knows this and does not care because he is a con man who is
only after making a “hit sequel.” Here again, the notion of an “original”
and the genuineness that originals are supposed to guarantee still persists,
much as the collective memory of the gold standard still unconsciously
informs our view of money. But what Ocean’s Twelve as a sequel also
seems to suggest is that, like finance, the films have gone global, and
so what was formerly thought to be a binary opposition between Las
Vegas and the rest of the world, has been deconstructed and can be felt
equally in the glamour capitals of old Europe. In other words, no longer
does any place exist where notions such as “authenticity,” “originality,”
and “genius” have been left untouched by late capitalism’s propensity to
create simulacra.
To return to the metaphor of a bouncing check that began this
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chapter, a check that bounces is one that has no funds to back it and,
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120 Joyce Goggin

if one may draw an analogy between funds and plot, then one could
say that the Ocean’s movies, and the stars in them, bounce endlessly
from one meaningless caper to the next in a potentially endless progres-
sion of sequels. But this would hardly do these films justice. Although
the Ocean’s films are Hollywood vehicles for stars, they are also prime
examples of the dominant mode of aesthetic production that informs con-
temporary culture. In other words, these films rehearse themselves in an
endless catalog of cute self-conscious gestures, each one being an infinite
texture of the same, so as to perfectly mirror the lead up, beginning in
1960, to the current postproduction economy with which the producers
threaten to keep step as they discuss Ocean’s Fourteen. More important,
the Ocean’s movies provide a rich archive of contemporary styles, tastes,
culture, and, of course, financial practices—in short an archive of those
things that make us who and what we are. Simply writing these films off,
to stay with the metaphor, as fluffy sequels with no content, intended
only to make money, is to miss the point entirely. The significance of
these movies as aesthetic products is that they typify the culture and
history that produced them and have, therefore, a great deal to tell us
about the way we live now.

Notes
1. Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) was in production at the time of writing.
2. Although Ocean’s Twelve includes segments in Las Vegas, it was, of course,
shot in various locations including Amsterdam, a city that tolerates soft drugs
and has an extensive red light district that illuminates postcards and tourist Web
sites. As such, Amsterdam is another Sin City and signals much of the same kind
of excitement as Vegas, while lending the sequel an international and “global”
feel. In Ocean’s Thirteen, George Clooney and his stable of actors return to Las
Vegas along with Toulour, the French thief from Ocean’s Twelve.
3. As a sentimental gesture, Warner Brothers now includes documentary
information and footage of the Sand’s implosion with the DVD as a tribute to
the casino that served as the location of Ocean’s Eleven (1960).
4. I use the term “system” here in the loosest, most schizophrenic and
deconstructed sense of the term possible. With Casino Capitalism, Susan Strange
popularized the expression and the notion that the economy works like a casino.
More recently, Kurt Anderson has argued that the US government has “in effect,
turned the US into a winner-take-all casino economy.”
copyright law.
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7
INA RAE HARK

Decent Burial or
Miraculous Resurrection
Serenity, Mourning, and Sequels
to Dead Television Shows

I
N GALAXY QUEST (Dean Parisot, 1999), the extremely knowing parody/
paean to aficionados of science fiction television, the fans within the
text receive proof that their show’s fictional world has been made
flesh, so to speak, and their aid is solicited to help the heroes accom-
plish their mission and defeat the enemy; said enemy is ultimately dis-
patched onstage at a science fiction convention in full view of the adoring
throngs. What more could the most devoted follower of a long-cancelled
television program ask for? The filmmakers have the answer: they want
their show back. So the film concludes with the credit sequence of the
resurrected “Galaxy Quest,” revealing that all the original characters are
back after their eighteen-year absence, Chen’s real-life alien girl friend is
playing herself, and once-dead “redshirt” Guy is playing a new character,
the security officer who provides comic relief.
How should we refer to this reincarnated version of the show? Is it a
spin-off, a sequel, a continuation? Indeed, how do follow-ups to cancelled
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121
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122 Ina Rae Hark

Figure 7.1. Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005). Courtesy Universal Studios/The

Kobal Collection.

television shows relate to the concept of sequels at all because television

series are just that, serial narratives expected optimally to provide sequels
every week for one season and several seasons after that. Most moderately
successful, hour-long dramatic television shows have far surpassed even
the longest-running film franchises, such as the twenty-plus James Bond
movies, in duration. As the film industry becomes ever more interested
in cranking out multiple installments, this distinction begins to blur, as
a recent article in Time on the third Shrek, Spider-Man, and Pirates of
the Caribbean films pointed out:

[Money]—rather than the itch of some gifted writer or director to

make an original statement—is the reason these movies get made.
Audiences don’t demand art here, just terrific entertainment. The
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first Shrek served that up in style; so did the first Pirates. But the
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Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection 123

second and third time around, the studio’s need for a sure thing
is matched by the moviegoer’s desire for a familiar one. For all
the skills on display, sequels are made primarily to satisfy the consumer’s
addiction for the same old, some new. Isn’t that called TV? (Corliss,
emphasis added)

Richard Corliss’s comments raise the question of whether we can

even speak of a sequel to a television program when television series
by their very nature are sequelized. Is renewal for another season the
equivalent of a film gaining a sequel? Are “spin-offs” with at least some
members of the original cast a sequel? What about “reunion” television
movies many years after the program has been cancelled, or one-shot
television movies or miniseries made to wrap up dangling storylines left
by an abrupt cancellation, as in the case of Farscape: Peacekeeper Wars
(Brian Henson, 2004) or the five Alien Nation television movies that ran
from 1994 to 1997 as a follow-up to the series that was cancelled after
one season from 1989 to 1990? Defunct series also live on in licensed
tie-in novels and more recently in graphic novels sometimes written by
the original showrunners, such as the “season 8” of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, Joss Whedon is writing for Dark Horse comics. And, of course,
fans keep their favorite characters alive in fan fiction and fan videos.
The questions become even more complex when a television show
jumps to the medium of commercial cinema for its continuation (see
Hark). The vast number of television-inspired films, we may safely say,
are not sequels but remakes for the big screen with different actors play-
ing the original characters. The past two decades has seen myriad of
these, most forgettable, but some fine movies in their own right, such
as The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993) and The Addams Family (Barry
Sonnenfeld, 1991). Often a film remake of a long-dead series goes on to
have its own filmic sequels, such as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (McG,
2003). (For an extensive discussion of these films, see Verevis 37–57.)
Far less common, however, is for an established series to make a
feature film with its regular cast during the television run. A somewhat
frequent practice for low-budget filmmaking in the 1960s, producing
such gems as McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force (Edward Montagne, 1965),
it has virtually ceased in recent years, usually relegating such projects to
made-for-television movie specials or direct-to-DVD releases. Still, there
are exceptions, such as the X-Files movie (Rob Bowman, 1998) or South
Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (Trey Parker, 1999). Rarer still are feature
films with the program’s original cast made a considerable time after the
show’s cancellation, and it is these that we can perhaps most confidently
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describe as sequels. The most celebrated and successful examples, of

124 Ina Rae Hark

course, are the six films featuring the cast of the original Star Trek and
the four featuring the cast of its spin-off Star Trek: the Next Generation.
An example of a series of movie sequels far more prominent than the
television original are the three Naked Gun comedies from 1988 to 1994,
based on the little-seen Police Squad series that was cancelled after just
six episodes in 1982.
What this proliferation of various sorts of continuations of cancelled
television shows demonstrates is that as an open-ended, recurring form of
storytelling, television programs never seem conclusively finished. That
is why they are not just shows or programs, but series. Audiences often
may highly desire and anticipate the sequel to a film, but such sequels
more often than not are received as surplus, as more of a good thing that
has, however, reached a satisfying conclusion, should no sequel follow.1
By contrast, more episodes of a departed television show are received as
natural, making up for a deficit that its cancellation has brought about.
Indeed, if a television show leaves the airways unexpectedly, or in mid-
season, or with a cliffhanger unresolved, viewers often react not only as
if they have suffered a loss, but as if they have suffered a bereavement.
Viewer and entertainment media discourse surrounding such cancella-
tions frequently evokes paradigms of death and resurrection. Moreover,
this is experienced not as a quiet death in fullness of years, surrounded
by loved ones, but as a sudden violent extinction of someone in his or
her prime. Behavior of the most devoted fans will closely resemble that of
people who are working through the process of mourning, often match-
ing point-by-point the famous Elisabeth Kübler-Ross “Grief Cycle”—of
shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and testing—although many
fans never quite get around to the final phase, acceptance.
This chapter explores how the sequel to a “dead” television show
can either facilitate acceptance or trigger more unresolved cycling through
the stages. For some viewers, if a sequel wraps up dangling plotlines and
serves as the characters’ valedictory to them, it can function similarly to
the final funeral rites for a loved one whose death contains ambiguous
elements, its causes uncertain. In other words, the sequel brings closure.
For other viewers, closure is the opposite of what they desire or are
willing to accept. Because television shows, unlike living beings, can in
rare circumstances come back from the dead, they will settle for nothing
less than resurrection and depend on the sequel as the first step in the
return of the show and its characters to renewed, serial life.2
My case study here is the Joss Whedon–produced “space west-
ern” Firefly. Running on the FOX network from September through
December 2002 and cancelled due to poor ratings after fourteen episodes
copyright law.

(including the two-hour pilot) had been shot and eleven broadcast, Firefly
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Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection 125

certainly looked about as dead as a television show can be. However,

Whedon was obsessed with continuing it in some form, confessing, “I
don’t deal with grief very well and I don’t deal with loss” (“Relighting”).
Coupled with strong DVD sales of the complete series and the desire
of Universal Pictures to sign him to a movie deal, Whedon’s persistence
resulted in a feature film sequel, Serenity, which reunited the entire cast
and was released in the fall of 2005. This chapter looks at the dual func-
tion of Serenity as decent burial and miraculous resurrection by examin-
ing fan discourse about it on the Internet, especially on the dedicated
Firefly fan site, fireflyfans.net. I read the narrative of the cancellation and
return of the Firefly universe as industry practice against the themes of
the series and film themselves because Firefly/Serenity happens, ironically,
to be obsessed with death, burial, and resurrection.

“Can’t more be done? It cannot die.”

—Poster at fireflyfans.net

The grieving process for dying television shows has a certain consistency
across fan communities. A chronological look at some thread titles on the
general discussion board at fireflyfans.net from October 2002 through
January 2003 illustrates it well:

Any hope for Firefly? 10/14

Well, here comes a fatal blow . . . 10/19

Save the Show! 11/2

Anybody know any Nielsen families they can bribe? 11/15

How many of you have written FOX? 11/26

So much for a great show. Firefly gets the axe. 12/13

I just can’t believe it. 12/13

Savefirefly.com 12/14

Remember Babylon 5 . . . keep pestering them 12/15

Pissing off FOX may make things worse 12/15

copyright law.
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126 Ina Rae Hark

SIGN THE ONLINE PETITION TO SAVE FIREFLY 12/18

Boycott FOX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12/20

UPN has passed on Firefly 1/11

How about HBO? 1/15

Firefly on the big screen? 1/15

FIREFLY: THE VIRTUAL SEASON 1/26 (“Archive”)

One brave poster even offers up a four-part “Necropsy” for the show,
but he is reaching the acceptance stage far too quickly for most on the
board members, who attack him roundly. As ratings fall and rumors of
cancellation appear, fans insist that such a high-quality show could not
be cancelled on the basis of mere numbers. (The hardest point to make
to a grieving television aficionado is that it is a business, and failure to
make a profit will doom even the greatest work of televisual art.) Many
launch attacks on the Nielsen rating system, claiming that it underrepre-
sents viewers of cult shows and fails to account for Tivo/DVR viewings,
while at the same time even the smallest upward spike in those despised
ratings is seized as evidence that the show’s death is not inevitable.
But the shock and denial phases pass quickly in fandom. Most
characteristic of fan grieving is the cycling between anger and bargain-
ing. To the dedicated viewer, no show’s demise occurred because it was
“sick.” There are no coroner verdicts of death by natural causes here;
beloved shows are always murdered, with network executives as the usual
suspects. Fans speculate wildly about network motivations to cause a
show—in which the network has after all invested quite a lot of mon-
ey—to fail. Accusations of sabotage abound. And in the case of Firefly,
circumstances provided more fodder for such conclusions than usual.
It was known that after FOX saw the two-hour pilot, “Serenity,” they
almost decided not to pick up the show and instead asked Whedon to
write a new, one-hour first episode over a weekend. The result, “The
Train Job,” convinced FOX to put the show on the air, but the buzz
of failure was already attached to it. By not airing “Serenity” first, the
network did not allow viewers a proper introduction to the characters and
the overall story arc that Serenity the film would resolve. Furthermore,
for several reasons, not least its hasty composition, “The Train Job,” as
Keith R. A. DeCandido observes, “didn’t do the job” a first episode must:
copyright law.

“Give the show an opportunity to make that good first impression [and]
give viewers sufficient reason to tune in the following week” (56).
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Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection 127

Other causes for fan anger may have resulted from bad business
decisions or unavoidable circumstances rather than malice. Friday at 8.00
P.M. was not the ideal timeslot for a show appealing to the young, cult
crowd and the fact that all FOX’s shows are disrupted during the fall
premiere season because they carry the Major League Baseball playoffs
also did not help the ratings. But even Whedon felt that he had not been
given a real shot for success: “Second of all, don’t think for a second that
I have given up on this show. I think it has been mistreated shamefully,
but the FOX network has indicated that they would not stand in the way
(which they can) of my finding a new home for the show,” he posted on
the Official Firefly Board after the cancellation (qtd. in “Haken”). Anger
against the network was a prevalent theme of Internet conversation in
the days and weeks that followed the cancellation, epitomized by a fan
coinage adopted by many: to rename the network FUX.
Energies were directed more positively into bargaining, as fans
brainstormed the various ways that Whedon might indeed keep the
Serenity flying. Cancelled series are occasionally picked up by another
network or given an extra season. Because fan efforts at saving the show
inevitably accompany such decisions, there is easy slippage in the minds
of devotees to fan efforts causing the show to be given a second chance.
Some of this can be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, but displays of
support surely do not hurt. An ad in Variety was purchased in support
of Firefly, online petitions were created and signed, various networks
emailed and snail mailed, but in the end none offered Firefly a new home
and a second season.
Yet even after going off the airwaves, Firefly survived in the DVD
sets, and a 2004 post by “Sidaris,” someone who had just finished view-
ing the series, recapitulated the entire grief cycle that the board had
undergone two years earlier:

I have not felt so right about something in a long time, as I have

in watching Firefly. This was something special, something never
done before. This is something that should not have died so young,
but have lived to a ripe old age. I don’t understand why more
options haven’t been explored. Why has Joss not brought the show
to UPN or the WB, SCI-FI or ABC/CBS/NBC? Any of them. . . .
Why not even HBO, where anything could go on this show. I don’t
understand it. FOX is obviously not the right place to be with this
show, so let’s go somewhere else! Joss isn’t some newbie director,
he created Buffy and Angel two of the biggest shows in history! I
don’t understand why everyone gave up.
copyright law.

I know some people, some people who may be able to help,

I am not giving up on this show. All of you want to help, so let’s
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128 Ina Rae Hark

do it. This show was something more then [sic] just another great
show that was cancelled, and I think not only we know that, but
the entire cast and crew of Firefly know this. With all the piss-poor
reality shows clogging our airwaves, and the mildly satisfying sit-
coms, we need a show like this in our lineup. Anyone with half a
brain would know this show is not just a half-assed attempt, but
this is something bigger then [sic] all of us.
Watch the show, watch the special features, you’ll see that no
one wants this show to die. We have to bring it back, and do more
then [sic] just sign a petition. Let’s work with people we know, and
figure out a way to bring this back to life in any way we can.
Life is too short to let an opportunity like this pass us by.
Joss, if you see this, please, pull some strings, do something, any-
thing to bring this show back to us. Firefly is not just a show, but
a way of life.

Board veteran “SergeantX” updated “Sidaris” in a rueful post that

acknowledged the triumph of the upcoming film but mourned the lack
of full resurrection as a television series:

Everyone involved knows how good it was and that’s why, despite
being turned down by every single broadcast outlet, they’ve refused
to give up. So we’ve got a movie being made, and the potential
for a trilogy. To pull that off required a deal with the devil (Fox)
that, reportedly, precludes any televised version for at least five
years (Jewel Staite was quoted as saying that the stipulation was
for ten years). It’s bittersweet inspiration to see an artist in Joss’s
position putting so much on the line for a work he clearly loves.
It’s equally disheartening to know that it won’t be in the format it
was designed for. The movies will be wonderful, I have no doubt,
but they won’t be the same as getting a weekly fix for the many,
many seasons Firefly deserved. (See “Archive”)

“At what point does this stop being

CPR and become necrophilia?”
—Whedon on the Serenity DVD

In crafting a movie sequel to Firefly that could serve both as decent

burial and springboard for possible miraculous resurrection in the form
of more films, Whedon had the advantage of working with an original
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whose “ ’verse” replayed that cycle over and over. Set 500 years in the
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Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection 129

future, the television series posited that the Earth had become “used up”
(or as the teacher in Serenity explains it, “Earth that was could no longer
sustain our numbers, we were so many”), compelling humanity to create
new Earths by terraforming uninhabited planets and moons in a distant
solar system and colonizing them. Central planets occupied by the rich
and powerful became gleaming futuristic techno-utopias; the less affluent
were shipped off to scrubby, desert-like moons on the outer rim, adopt-
ing the lifestyles, dialect, and dress of the Old West. But many found
that the independence and self-determination of life on the outer worlds
was a satisfactory trade-off for the hard-scrabble living conditions. Then
the central planets decided that they wanted to have governing author-
ity over the entire human population and suggested that all worlds join
into one giant Alliance. The Independents resisted and future humanity
restaged America’s Civil War, keeping the states’ rights issue but remov-
ing the issue of slavery.
Firefly’s protagonist, Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), fought on
the side of the Independents and was one of the few survivors of the
two-month siege of Serenity Valley, the battle that forced the Indepen-
dents to negotiate surrender after half a million total deaths on both sides.
Stranded for a week amid the dead and dying, Mal and his right-hand
Zoe (Gina Torres) were the only ones of their original platoon to escape.
Now a man without faith or forgiveness, he seeks the only independence
he can still muster, captaining a Firefly-class cargo spaceship for legal
and illegal transport, focused only on the mantra “keep flying” because,
as the show’s theme song declares, “I don’t care / I’m still free / You
can’t take the sky from me.” The ship, like the pilot episode and the film
sequel, is named Serenity. In a scene deleted from the pilot, when curious
passenger Dr. Simon Tam (Sean Maher) asks Zoe, now first officer for
Captain Reynolds, why he would name his vessel after such a horrible
experience, she replies that once you have been in Serenity Valley, you
never leave, you only learn how to live there. Physically alive, Mal is dead
in his soul, and the overall plot arc of the series was to have shown his
spiritual resurrection, a task that Serenity the movie accomplishes.
The catalyst for Mal’s redemption takes the form of another sym-
bolic rising from the dead. In the pilot “Serenity,” Simon smuggles his
sister River (Summer Glau) aboard in suspended animation, naked in a
box that simultaneously suggests womb and coffin. A prodigy who has
been the subject of terrible medical experiments on her brain, River was
to have been part of a cadre of psychic supersoldiers available to the
Alliance. One of the side effects, however, has been to make her highly
unstable mentally, and her protectors aboard the Serenity always have to
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be wary of dangerous psychotic outbursts. The plot of the film centers

130 Ina Rae Hark

on the efforts of the Alliance to reclaim River through the skills of a

ruthless, deep-undercover agent known only as the Operative (Chiwetel
Eijofor). It turns out that River’s condition is not due solely to the pro-
cedures she endured but also to classified information she read from the
minds of an audience of high officials brought to admire the scientists’
results. That is why the Alliance will stop at nothing to retrieve her and
why only coming to terms with the confusing welter of thoughts she
gleaned will cure her insanity.
The mystery is solved when Mal and his colleagues undertake a
dangerous journey to the planet Miranda, whose name has surfaced in
River’s vexed brain. Although the official story has it that this was a
failure of terraforming that resulted in a few hundred casualties, Miranda
turns out to be full of advanced cities that would rival any on the central
planets. Millions of people had clearly settled there, but the crew arrives
on a world that is one vast graveyard, full of decomposing bodies. When
they discover a recording made by the exploratory team sent to find out
why Miranda had fallen silent, they learn that it was the site of an Alli-
ance attempt at social engineering, utopian in purpose but gone horribly
wrong. Have-nots from the outer planets had been lured there with the
promise of advanced technology to rival that of the gleaming cityscapes
of Alliance stronghold Ariel—the matching allusions to The Tempest are
no accident. To ensure that their rough-and-ready ways did not disrupt
communal order, however, the Alliance covertly flooded the ventilation
systems with the gas Pax, designed to inhibit aggression and, implicitly,
rugged individualism. But Pax instead turns into a recipe for requiescat in
pace. It shuts down all initiative whatsoever, and the people die en masse
of thirst and hunger, sitting in chairs or lying in beds they cannot quite
motivate themselves to get out of. Only one in a thousand survive, but
that is because on them the gas has the opposite effect, turning them
into mindless beasts motivated only by aggression: these are the fearsome
rapist-cannibal-flay-you-alive Reavers who savage a planet from which
the crew members of Serenity barely escape at the opening of the film
and hold the space between Miranda and the rest of the inhabited worlds.
Posited on the television series as men who lost their minds from living
for too long in “the black,” semimythical bogeymen the Alliance feigns
not to believe in (and nonracist equivalents of the marauding Indians of
the classic Westerns Whedon is invoking), they turn out to be a direct
result of Alliance governance. Psychic River has picked up images of this
charnel house from the government bigwigs brought in to view her part
in yet another ill-advised Alliance science project. They are what have
driven her mad and the Alliance will do anything to stop her before she
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reveals the truth of the Miranda disaster.

Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection 131

The parallels between Miranda and Serenity Valley are instructive.

The Pax experiments were run prior to the idea of Unification being
advanced by the central planets and can be seen as an attempt to fore-
stall the resistance that the Independents would put up, leading to the
civil war. Both places become vast landscapes of the unburied dead, and
if Mal and his fellow survivors of the battle do not turn into monsters,
they are bitter, crushed, and broken—“the people history stepped on,”
as Whedon called them. While neither the Reavers nor the surviving
Independents have technically been resurrected, their former selves have
died to be replaced by beings whose humanity has been compromised.
Sometimes, the film is telling us, decent burials may be preferable to
existence as one of the living dead.
Other dead worlds surface in Serenity when the Operative destroys
any and all who might provide Mal and his friends with sanctuary, most
devastatingly Haven, where former Serenity denizen Shepherd Book (Ron
Glass) is discovered dying. With his final words he urges Mal to regain
his lost faith, not necessarily in God and Christianity, but to believe
in something once more. Mal’s body survived Serenity Valley, but his
spirit is trapped there. The last act of the film allows for its resurrection
and the ability for him no longer to be stuck there as if in purgatory.
Mal resolves to go, and the crew members agree to accompany him,
to the massive guerrilla communications station run by “Mr. Universe”
(David Krumholtz) and broadcast the incriminating video made by the
last Alliance survivor on Miranda throughout the solar system. After a
fierce battle with pursuing Reavers and the Operative, and helped by
words from beyond the grave that Mr. Universe has programmed into his
android “companion,” Mal launches the signal. The Operative realizes
that the cause he has served so ruthlessly was unworthy of the damnation
he has incurred by believing in it; he spares the Serenity and her crew
and the need to silence River becomes moot.
Within its diegetic world, Serenity offers both decent burials and
miraculous resurrections. Besides Book and Mr. Universe, Wash (Alan
Tudyk), the ship’s pilot and Zoe’s husband, dies during the film. Whedon
includes a quiet funeral ceremony and shots of each of their graves
back on Haven. Mourning rituals have always figured prominently in
his works, the most notable example being “The Body,” the episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer that dealt with the death and burial of Buffy’s
mother Joyce. Two of the last Firefly episodes, “Heart of Gold” and
“The Message,” shot as the inevitability of cancellation loomed, conclude
with funerals.
River, on the other hand, is restored to sanity and takes over Wash’s
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duties as pilot, completing her journey from corpse-like girl in a box to

132 Ina Rae Hark

whole human being. After being “violated” to pass as a Reaver vessel,

Serenity itself is nearly destroyed during the final battle and its own repair
and rebirth conclude the film. The final exchange between Mal and River
in the cockpit contains images of life emerging from trouble and despair.
The first rule of flying, the captain confides, is love, which keeps a ship
in the air when it ought to fall. River notes the worsening storm they
see around them. “We’ll pass through it soon enough,” he replies.
As a sequel, Serenity serves the same double function. It wraps up
most of the major hanging plot threads from the television series, giv-
ing viewers a sense of closure after the show’s abrupt midseason demise.
It also clears the way for further stories featuring the surviving crew, a
possibility because Whedon and the cast had all signed options for a
three-picture deal if box-office revenues dictate.

“Take me out, to the black /

Tell them I’m not coming back”
—Lyrics to Firefly Theme

As with the launch of Firefly, the release of Serenity was not smooth.
Universal had originally scheduled it to premiere in April 2005, a few
weeks ahead of the last Star Wars prequel, Revenge of the Sith (George
Lucas, 2005), but they were unsure how to market the space-western
hybrid with no established stars that was a sequel to a cancelled televi-
sion program with which the general movie audience was unfamiliar. So
they instead decided on marketing the film via word-of-mouth from its
small but fiercely dedicated fan base of Browncoats (the name given to
the Independent Faction who fought against the Alliance in Firefly, and
subsequently adopted by dedicated followers of the series). To that end,
they previewed it on several days throughout the summer all over the
United States and in the United Kingdom, ahead of a 30 September
release. Most screenings sold out, and the Internet was abuzz with chatter
about obtaining tickets, meeting fellow fans at the theater, and evaluat-
ing the film’s rough cut. “Whedon flock ready for ‘Firefly’ resurrection”
wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s Anne Thompson after the massive turnout
for the sneak previews.
But, as spoilers about the cast deaths started to filter out, the
marketing plan developed a downside. More so than Book, Wash was
a central character on Firefly with a huge fan following. He was the
deadpan joker in Hawaiian shirts who played with plastic dinosaurs, the
everyman who also happened to be a whiz as a pilot and the ordinary
guy the beautiful woman warrior Zoe had fallen for and married. Some
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fans became so upset by his random death just after he had miraculous-
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Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection 133

ly landed the severely damaged ship that they said they would boycott
the movie. One review thread that berated Whedon for this choice had
the title “Joss, I’m Calling You Out” (“Archive”). Other fans began a
letter-writing campaign urging Universal to recut the film so that Wash
lived. Just as there had been denial about the reality of cancellation, so
Wash’s death was transformed into something that might not really hap-
pen. As poster “Auraptor” wrote:

But I wanna just add that I don’t think Wash’s death was a good
move . . . period. I’m more than bit annoyed at the whole idea.
It made no sense. It leaves Serenity w/out a pilot, Zoe w/out a
husband and leaves a huge hole in the make up [sic] of the crew.
His comedic ability and antics will make any future projects greatly
lacking. Part of me hopes this has been a cruel plot twist by Joss
just to see how fans would react, and that when the BDM [big
damn movie] premiers [sic], Wash really doesn’t die. Well, one can
wish, right?

Having gotten their miraculous resurrection against all odds, many fans
were in no mood to leaven their joy with Whedon’s patented sudden
character deaths and rituals of mourning.
Critics outside the fan community had generally positive reactions
to the film; it currently has an aggregate 81 percent “fresh” on the
Web site rottentomatoes.com. More than a few pronounced it superior
to Star Wars: Episode Three—Revenge of the Sith. Others thought that it
would indeed fulfill the fans’ dream of even more sequels. Tom Long
of the Detroit News made both claims. Headlined “Energized ‘Serenity’
screams franchise,” his review’s first paragraph says: “A blast of sci-fi
energy that makes you realize how good the ‘Star Wars’ movies could
have been, ‘Serenity’ mixes space cowboy hijinks, Big Brother paranoia,
meteor-fast quips and slamming action sequences into an absolute feast
for fantasy lovers.”
But resurrection into a franchise to succeed Star Wars and Star Trek
was not to be. Serenity opened with a disappointing $10 million weekend
and faded fast. In its six week run in US theaters, it grossed only $25.3
million, well below its $40 million budget and nowhere near the $80
million domestic gross Universal required before considering a sequel.
Although fans again complained about studio mishandling of marketing
and advertising, the fact was that the film drew in virtually no one who
was not already a part of the Firefly fan base. Whedon’s “post-Civil War
Western in space” premise, no matter how skillfully executed, did not
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speak to a broad, mainstream audience, either on television or in theaters.

134 Ina Rae Hark

Box-office admissions are countable without using representative samples

from which to extrapolate, so the argument that the television ratings
underestimated the Firefly audience could not be made in respect to the
anemic grosses. Indeed, the 4 million or so viewers Nielsen credited as
Firefly’s 2002 viewership looked to be just about the same number of
people who bought tickets to Serenity.
In the end, the outcome of Firefly’s miraculous resurrection into the
sequel film Serenity had been predicted by the television episode the cast
was filming when they got the cancellation notice. In “The Message”
(never aired on FOX but included on the DVD set and broadcast when
Firefly was shown on the Sci Fi channel during the summer of 2005) a
feckless young man named Tracey, who had served in the war with Mal
and Zoe, has his body shipped to them, requesting that they return it to
his home world for burial. It turns out that Tracey is in fact not dead,
only in a drug-induced state that mimics death. He has agreed to be a
“mule” for some revolutionary new, experimental human organs, with his
own to be reimplanted when they reach the buyer. He double-crosses
his employers to make more money from a rival cabal, but he is found
out and has to flee. The crew members come up with a ruse to save him
from the deadly pursuers, but Tracey thinks they have betrayed him, too,
and his reckless actions thereafter force Mal to shoot him. The episode
ends with Serenity delivering the now really dead Tracey to his family
for a decent burial. The causes of the apparent and actual deaths are
different, but the fate of Tracey and the fate of the Firefly ’verse end up
being the same.
Although many of the fans accepted the closure they received from
the film and moved on, the bargaining stage for the twice-dead Firefly/
Serenity still lives on at sites all over the Internet. In August 2006 fan
“11th Hour” began a message board just for discussing ways to revive
the show. The initial post proclaims:

If there’s money to be made, a studio will make a production. It’s

true that the box office returns for Serenity were lower than hoped
for. (There are several legitimate arguments regarding the promo-
tion, or perhaps insufficiency thereof, which can be made in that
regard . . . but that’s another thread topic.) The thing is that there
are now far more Firefly/Serenity fans now than there were last
year when Serenity was released. Serenity itself created those new
fan[s] . . . plus the word of mouth of existing fans and very real Fire-
fly and Serenity DVD sales that continue quite well on Amazon.
The reason why fans have a legitimate hope for sequels is that
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the cast all signed 3 picture contracts with Universal for Serenity.
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Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection 135

Their contracts all have a built-in clause for a trilogy.

Joss wants to tell more stories of the ’Verse, he has stated
that he has hundreds of yet untold stories. The cast love playing
their roles, and they genuinely enjoy working together. The fans
of course will respond immediately to more incarnations of the
’Verse. Though Serenity did not make huge profits when it was
released, and low numbers were the story for all movies released
during that same time, Serenity did receive overwhelmingly great
reviews and many awards.
So here’s where it’s at:
• Joss wants to do more.
• The cast want to do more.
• The fans are aching to have more.
• The production itself was widely acclaimed.
The ONLY thing missing from the above formula for green
lighting a sequel is “Great box office returns.” That’s it. Just comes
down to getting bigger audience numbers . . . connecting more
with main stream audiences. A studio wants to make money. They
are not going to say “no” to a profitable franchise. The thing is,
Serenity’s profits weren’t that bad, and the movie has climbed into
profit with the DVD sales. But the returns weren’t in the block-
buster range, and Universal has to think how best to utilize their
wonderful new acquisition: Joss Whedon.
Universal is most likely biding its time and seeing how things
develop after the release of Serenity. If the fan base keeps growing,
if the DVD sales stay strong, if the merchandise keeps selling, then
there will be good reason for them to mount another production
in the future. Again, they are a business and they want to make
money.
Once they see that the audience numbers justify another
investment, Universal will be glad to press that green light.

New ideas continue to be posted toward this end, wistful magical

thinking undeterred by the realities of the economic structure and profit
requirements of huge media conglomerates. As I complete this chapter
on 13 April 2007, poster “MartinT,” having just finished his first view-
ing of the series on DVD, writes: “And if we do a list of signatures and
show them how much we want it back I think we have a big possibility
to affect. If we have thousands of names they can’t just ignore us.”
Other fans convince themselves that the only way to ensure a return
of the ’verse is for them to finance more sequels themselves. A poll on the
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fireflyfans.net home page asks “How much are you willing to contribute
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136 Ina Rae Hark

annually to produce the ‘Firefly’ series or have another movie made?”

The amounts range from $10 to “over $100,” with 27,000 pledges, 40
percent in the latter category. New models for media dissemination have
also caught the eye of Firefly resurrection entrepreneurs. A Web site
for “Firefly Season 2: On Demand—Seeking Independence from the
Network Alliance” claims to represent “an independent production com-
pany and core group of Browncoats . . . currently pursuing the rights to
continue the series from FOX and make it available to the fans, either
directly or via another broadcaster.” Its business prospectus reads:

The Firefly Season 2 Project:

Captain Mal and the crew of Serenity need your help to stay
flying.
We are looking to push the envelope of episodic television
by offering Season Two of Firefly in a groundbreaking new format.
Each episode (or the entire season) would be made available for
purchase in Standard or Hi-Definition.
It’s possible that subscribers may choose one of three play-
back options; monthly DVD deliveries, TV On-Demand using
your cable or satellite provider, or computer viewing via Stream-
ing Download.
It’s also possible that a box set of DVDs would be available
at the end of the season.
In order for our plan to be successful, we need to take stock
of the Browncoat recruits that support our cause. It will only take
a minute, is strictly confidential, and each profile will take us one
step closer to victory!

If the notion of obtaining the rights is naïve, and the profiling could
indicate some sort of scam, the business model probably would make
sense to many fans still holding out hope for another iteration of the
’verse. In the future, dead television shows may well come back to life
in this manner.
The example of Firefly fans demonstrates the broader truth that
television series become part of people’s quotidian reality, and losing
them can set off emotions very similar to those that accompany grief
and mourning. Depending on the individual viewer, this loss can be felt
as similar to a good friend moving to another city, or losing a job, and
to the more intensely devoted, it feels like the death of a loved one.
And because television shows have on rare occasions been resurrected,
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getting stuck in cycling back and forth among the stages of mourning
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Decent Burial or Miraculous Resurrection 137

than to reach acceptance and closure is even easier. That Firefly did not
stay dead the first time, but rose again in its sequel, leaves cruel hope
lingering that striking the right bargain will revive it once more, despite
all empirical evidence that it is now really dead and buried. If the fan
posts I have quoted seem at times to be from people suffering from seri-
ous delusions, I can only point out what Freud himself said about the
work of mourning: “It is almost remarkable that it never occurs to us
to consider mourning as a pathological condition and present it to the
doctor for treatment, despite the fact that it produces severe deviations
from normal behavior. We rely on it being overcome after a certain
period of time, and consider interfering with it to be pointless, or even
damaging” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 203–4).

Notes
1. Movie series conceived of from the beginning as multipart narratives, such
as the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter films, are exceptions.
2. Examples of both sorts of coping mechanisms occurred recently on the
message board, “ExIsle,” devoted to general media discussion with a bias toward
science fiction and fantasy. One thread, started by “Drew,” “Cancelled Shows that
Need Closure,” asked members to list programs that belonged to that category.
Another, begun by “ScottEVill,” titled “Straight-to-DVD Movies of Cancelled
(and Living) TV Shows,” asked “What other shows, live or dead, would be good
candidates for straight-to-DVD releases?” Both lists included Firefly.
copyright law.
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8
PAUL SUTTON

Prequel
The “Afterwardsness” of the Sequel

I
N A REVIEW ARTICLE OF Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005),
published to coincide with the film’s U.K. release, film critic Kim
Newman begins by noting the fact that “of course Batman, the iconic
comic-book character, has ‘begun’ many times” (“Cape Fear” 18). He
then proceeds to detail the various ways in which Nolan’s film bor-
rows from a whole range of earlier sources, reproducing, despite his
opening comments, a traditional trajectory of legitimization and origin;
ultimately, he suggests, the article is “an attempt to give credit where it’s
due.”1 It is unsurprising that many of the reviews of Batman Begins are
similarly concerned with these questions of foundation, derivation, and
legitimacy, as are many of the principal figures involved in the produc-
tion of the film. Critic David Grove, for example, proposes that “as the
name suggests, it represents a new beginning in the film franchise, not
another sequel” (“Christian Bale” 198). And Christian Bale, who plays
Batman, comments, “this is an origin story, not a sequel,” adding, “You
could say it’s a prequel—it feels like a prequel—because we don’t have
the pressure of following anything that’s already been created” (qtd. in
Grove, “Christian Bale” 202). The film’s status as a possible prequel is
contested too, however, with Christopher Nolan himself explaining, “I
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don’t see this film as either a sequel or a prequel to the other films. It

139
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140 Paul Sutton

Figure 8.1. Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005). Courtesy Warner Bros./
D.C. Comics/The Kobal Collection/James, David.

just sort of exists in its own very different universe” (qtd. in Jordan and
Gross 23).
Despite Nolan’s attempt to separate the film from its precursors—as
much a question of economic prudence and shrewd or careful market-
ing after the critical and commercial failure of Joel Schumacher’s final
Batman outing, Batman and Robin (1997)—for many commentators it is
nonetheless seen as the fifth film in the franchise that began with Tim
Burton’s Batman in 1989. Burton’s sequel, Batman Returns (1992), was
followed in 1995 by Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, which produced
its own sequel, Batman and Robin, two years later. Certainly the critical
response to Batman Begins defines it in opposition to this earlier cycle
of films: “Eight years after Batman and Robin buried a once-booming
franchise under a deadly avalanche of fan backlash, toy-dictated story
lines, nippled Batsuits, and director Joel Schumacher’s relentlessly campy
aesthetic, Warner Bros. and Batman Begins director-co-writer Christo-
pher Nolan are betting $180 million that audiences are ready for more.
Or ready to start fresh, at any rate, with a total reboot that essentially
ignores the four previous installments” (Russo 68).
The “originary” status of Batman Begins in relation to the previous
four films is repeatedly stressed, “ ‘There are fans of the other movies,
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but we’re not going for that,’ Bale says. ‘In my mind, this is the first
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Prequel 141

one’ ” (qtd. in Russo 68). Burton’s 1989 film, as Will Brooker explains,
introduced a “new Batman [. . .] clearly defined as other than the TV
series and [. . .] akin [. . .] to the better-known graphic novels of the
mid-1980s” (191), both of which had been preceded by a feature in the
1960s, Batman (Leslie Martinson, 1966), and two cinematic serials dur-
ing the 1940s, leading back to Batman’s moment of comic strip origin in
May 1939 (see Brooker; Kempster; Newman, “Cape Fear”). As Brooker
stresses, however, Batman began as the amalgam of several earlier cin-
ematic sources such as The Bat Whispers (Roland West, 1931) and Dracula
(Tod Browning, 1931). That this should be so is in no way surprising
given that cinema has always “adapted, copied, plagiarised, and been
inspired by other works” (Mazdon 47). In exploring the “many faces” of
Batman, Brooker makes a similar point, arguing that “Batman has [. . .] a
cultural existence which has to a large extent been freed from its roots in
an original text” (185). The question of the origin of Batman Begins lies
at the heart of the film, not only in relation to its diegetic concerns with
cause and effect, evidenced in the traumatic triggers contained within it,
but also in relation to the film’s own position as variously, a sequel, a
prequel, or a stand-alone film.
The definition the Oxford English Dictionary gives for “prequel”
is straightforward: “a book, film, etc., portraying events which precede
those of an existing work.” On this basis Batman Begins may be consid-
ered a prequel because it describes events that come before any of the
four previous Batman films in the current cycle; however, it is also, to a
degree, a remake, because it remakes aspects of the Batman origin story
contained in Burton’s 1989 Batman, although it is also true that Bat-
man Begins ends by returning the spectator full circle to this same film,
either closing the series perhaps or establishing the possibility of a direct
remake of Burton’s “original” Batman. Importantly, all of the principals in
Batman Begins have signed for two or three possible sequels (see Grove,
“What the Butler Saw” and “Writing Batman”; Jordan and Gross). Of
course given the previous incarnations of Batman on film, in some senses
any film is always at one level a remake of those earlier films. Given that
Batman Begins has as an explicit aim the goal of renewing the franchise
begun with Burton’s 1989 film one could even argue that at one level it
is remaking the franchise itself.
The status of Batman Begins—as variously prequel, sequel, or
stand-alone film—is clearly something of a vexed question, and this dif-
ficulty of designation interests me here. Thus this chapter argues, as a
means of theorizing the significance of the prequel specifically (although
within the broader context of the remake), that it is structured by the
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logic of “afterwardsness,” that it possesses a peculiar dual temporality that

142 Paul Sutton

enables it to both precede and follow the film or films to which it is a

prequel. The prequel, then, despite its precedence, is able to effectively
remake the film or films to which it is in fact structurally and narra-
tively anterior. Not insignificantly, Christopher Nolan, the director of
this high-profile prequel, had previously directed a Hollywood remake,
Insomnia (2002), and he is perhaps most well known for the film Memento
(2000), arguably a theoretical meditation on, and practical exposition
of, the very notion of “afterwardsness.” However, before addressing the
question of “afterwardsness,” a brief account of the Batman Begins’ nar-
rative is first required.

Batman Begins
Batman Begins opens with a young Bruce Wayne (Gus Lewis) playing
Finders Keepers with childhood sweetheart (and subsequently Gotham
City’s assistant district attorney), Rachel Dawes (Emma Lockhart). As
they play, Bruce falls into a dry well shaft, disturbing the bats that dwell
in the adjacent cave, who swarm past the terrified boy. As he screams in
terror the film cuts to the adult Wayne (Christian Bale), awakening from
a nightmare into the equally nightmarish world of a remote Chinese pris-
on. In a series of flashbacks that recall the temporal dexterity of Nolan’s
Memento, the prologue to Batman Begins shifts the viewer back and forth
between Wayne’s childhood, the defining moment of his parents’ murder
and his foiled attempt at revenge, as well as his self-imposed incarceration
and his training at the hands of the crime fighting League of Shadows,
led by the mysterious Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). This introduction
establishes both the motives behind Wayne’s becoming Batman and the
means by which he is physically and mentally able to do so. The advice
of his trainer and mentor Ducard (Liam Neeson) that “theatricality and
deception are powerful agents; you must become more than just a man in
the mind of your opponent” points to the direction that Wayne will take
in his construction of the Batman while also signaling the importance of
the mythic, the symbolic (when Commissioner Gordon asks, “Who are
you?” Wayne, as Batman, replies, “Watch for my sign”) and of course
the cinematic. Identity, the film stresses, is ultimately performative.
On his return to Gotham City, Bruce Wayne begins to explore
the operation of the criminal underworld, headed by Carmine Falcone
(Tom Wilkinson) and supported by a largely corrupt police force. A
chance encounter with a trapped bat leads Bruce back to the well that
he tumbled into as a boy. The cave that he discovers, and in which he
finally purges his fear of bats, becomes the Bat Cave, the “unconscious”
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beneath the “conscious” Wayne Manor. Working in “Applied Sciences”

Prequel 143

for Wayne Enterprises allows Bruce to conceive and develop, with sci-
entist and former board member Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), the
equipment that the previous four films in the recent Batman franchise
have taken for granted. As Batman begins to emerge, his adversaries
begin to come into sharper focus too. It becomes evident that while
Falcone stands for all that is corrupt in Gotham City, Dr. Jonathan Crane
(Cillian Murphy) and Ra’s Al Ghul represent Batman’s real foes. Dis-
rupting the receipt of a shipment of drugs, Batman serves up Falcone
for arrest by Commissioner Gordon; he also discovers that part of the
shipment, a fear-inducing hallucinogen, is being diverted to Dr. Crane.
Batman’s nocturnal crime fighting begins to affect Bruce Wayne’s life,
and after Fox advises him to devise some kind of “cover” to account for
his activities, Wayne adopts the second of his “theatrical” deceptions,
playing the role of billionaire playboy. In the meantime Rachel Dawes
has also become suspicious of Dr. Crane and while investigating him is
kidnapped and drugged. Batman rescues her from Dr. Crane’s Arkham
Asylum base and discovers that Crane has pumped the hallucinogen into
Gotham City’s water supply. Discovering that the League of Shadows,
under Ducard’s leadership, plans to drug the entire population of Gotham
City by vaporizing the spiked water supply and sending them into a
frenzy of fear induced self-destruction, Batman succeeds in overpowering
Ducard (after the partial release of the drug in the depressed “Narrows”),
and so prevents the citywide release of the toxin. With Wayne Manor
destroyed in the “purging” fire the League of Shadows set, the film ends
with discussion of its reconstruction—“improving the foundations in the
South-East corner”—and the further construction of Batman himself, as
Commissioner Gordon discusses with him the dangers of escalation and
the emergence of a new criminal mastermind, the Joker: “Now take this
guy: armed robbery, double homicide, has a taste for the theatrical like
you; leaves a calling card.”
As this descriptive account of Batman Begins demonstrates, the
question of Batman’s origin (as an effect of traumas suffered by the
young Wayne) makes up a large proportion of the film, prompting one
reviewer to suggest that “with its bildungsroman-like focus on the early life
of Batman’s unmasked alter-ego, it could happily be called Bruce Wayne
Begins” (Lawrenson 40). As the film makes abundantly evident Bruce
Wayne is, of course, as much a masked figure as Batman, a development
in character that renders both Wayne and Batman far more complex than
in previous versions (for an exploration of the various masks in play in
Batman Begins, see Mugleston). This concern with identity in relation
to memory and trauma is certainly one that Nolan himself is adept at
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exploring, with much of his earlier work, most notably Memento exploring
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144 Paul Sutton

precisely these issues; as Newman remarks, “The Nolan of Memento and

Insomnia is at home with extreme psychological states—this might com-
plete a Three Colours of Neurosis trilogy by following memory loss
and sleeplessness with phobia” (Rev. of Batman Begins). This concern
with “extreme psychological states” is what makes Batman Begins such
an unusual blockbuster, marrying the independent intelligence of Nolan’s
smaller scale projects—Following (1999) and Memento—with the big-bud-
get Hollywood summer blockbuster. Trauma and memory are central to
the articulation of the psychoanalytic concept of “afterwardsness” and to
the theory of cinematic spectatorship that has been developed in relation
to it. Before looking specifically at the prequel, the following section
offers a brief account of “afterwardsness” and the spectatorial paradigm
based on it, referred to elsewhere as “afterwardsness in film.”2

“Afterwardsness”
That a sequel should follow on from or be the continuation of an ear-
lier film seems self-evident; however, from a psychoanalytic perspective
such fidelity to the logical niceties of causality and linear temporality is
frequently brought into question. Grappling with (and ultimately reject-
ing) the seduction theory, Sigmund Freud used the term Nachträglich-
keit, generally translated into English as “deferred action,” to describe
a temporal structure that involved the rewriting of past events in the
light of subsequent experience. Although never explicitly theorized in
Freud’s writing, this notion gradually came to underpin the mechanics
of trauma and its symptomatic representations. The delay in the appear-
ance of a traumatic illness was an effect of the temporality of deferred
action: an event becomes traumatic not at the moment of its occurrence
but only afterward, later, once additional knowledge or understanding
precipitates a recognition of that earlier event as traumatic. This tem-
poral structure effectively undermines traditional causality, repositioning
an originary event as secondary, as “after the fact,” so to speak. As one
critic has noted, “in place of the quest for the truth of an event, and the
history of its causes, Nachträglichkeit proposes, rather, that the analysis
of memory’s tropes can reveal not the truth of the past, but a particular
revision prompted by later events, thus pitting psychical contingency
against historical truth” (Radstone 86).
The term “afterwardsness” derives from the psychoanalyst Jean
Laplanche’s reworking and retranslation of Freud’s term and as Laplanche
himself has argued it is through the effects of a certain kind of “after-
wardsness” that the term has come to take on contemporary signifi-
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cance (it was Jacques Lacan’s interest in the term that provoked others
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Prequel 145

to reinvestigate and to rearticulate or retranslate it). “Afterwardsness” for

Laplanche is a profoundly significant psychoanalytic concept because it
“is not simply one mode of temporality among others (the temporality of
the causality of the trauma), but [. . .] the temporal structure which deter-
mines the emergence of temporality itself” (Osborne 90). In his account
of psychoanalytic subjectivity, Laplanche argues that identity comes from
the other, results from “a primal ‘communication situation’ between adult
and child” (101); it is an ongoing encounter in which the child receives
messages (or signifiers) from the adult other which it is unable to decode
or translate. Because these messages derive, in part at least, from the
adult’s unconscious they are, Laplanche suggests, inherently enigmatic
(to both the adult and the child). Furthermore, the imbalance between
the adult and the child, in terms of development and knowledge, and
the enigmatic quality of these messages produces “a primal [demand]
‘to-be-translated’ ” (Laplanche 259). This, for Laplanche, sets in motion
the formation of the child’s own unconscious, which emerges “out of the
untranslated (indeed, untranslatable) elements of the message[s] which
inevitably remain” (Osborne 106). These untranslated elements are, how-
ever, “endlessly retranslated as they enter into new contexts of signifi-
cance, encounter new signifiers” (106); they are in effect subject to the
temporal logic of “afterwardsness.” As is especially evident in the case of
Bruce Wayne/Batman, which will become clear later, the emergence of
the child’s subjectivity occurs, then, through a process of what Laplanche
refers to as “autotranslation,” the continual de- and retranslation of these
enigmatic messages. The temporality of “afterwardsness” makes it ide-
ally suited to explorations of narrative causality and to considering how
stories are recounted and the past remembered. Having articulated the
basic structure of “afterwardsness,” we now consider the importance of
memory for cinema and to stress its particular importance for sequels
and prequels.

Cinematic Memory and “Afterwardsness”

The cinematic apparatus itself relies on memory for its effects. Describ-
ing childhood memories in cinematic terms, one critic has noted, “Psy-
chologists tell us that reported early childhood memories usually take
a camera’s-eye view. We don’t remember scenes from the perspective
of a child: we visualise a movie with the child/self as actor. We recall a
memory that has been reworked, polished, burnished, edited, and yet we
continue to feel its authenticity” (McCarthy 22).
In technical terms our capacity to watch a film was originally
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believed to rely on what one might almost call a kind of memory: retinal
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146 Paul Sutton

persistence. This describes a process in which the reaction of the eyes

to transitory stimulation is prolonged beyond the moment of stimula-
tion. Cinema, as a mechanical system based on the projection of lumi-
nous images and designed to represent movement, was believed to be
subject to the exigencies of this theory. Recent theories of perception
have sought to disprove or at least reposition this account of cinematic
continuity, proposing instead that the spectator is also subject to the phi
effect. Nonetheless, the notion of persistence endures in accounts of
cinematic perception. Current research, for example, posits the “après
coup effect” (literally, the “afterwardsness” effect) to explain how apparent
movement can be attributed to static objects, “If one looks for some time
(say, one minute) at a regular movement—the classic example is that of
a waterfall—and then moves the gaze to a static object, that static object
will seem to be moving in the opposite direction” (Aumont 29).
The perception of movement in film is clearly the result of several
complex unconscious and instantaneous processes. Reference to research
in this area demonstrates the importance for cinematic perception of
some kind of persistence of effect beyond an initial stimulus. Thus some
have argued that perception is simply an “occasion for remembering
[. . .]. There is for us nothing that is instantaneous. In all that goes by
that name there is already some work of our memory” (Bergson qtd.
in Doane, “Technology’s Body” 10). As such some have suggested that
the “human experience of perception hence pivots upon a temporal lag,
a superimposition of images, an inextricability of past and present. To
that extent it is a perverse temporality, a non-linear temporality” (Doane,
“Technology’s Body” 10). I refer to this research because the notion of
a stimulus producing a prolonged after effect (après coup effect) invokes
the terms used by Freud to describe the structure of Nachträglichkeit
or, in Laplanchean terms, the effect of “afterwardsness.” However, it
is also, “Undeniable that memory [. . .] plays an important role in the
act of spectating (the act of watching a film). For example, in order to
construct a narrative form and comprehend the characters’s [sic] actions,
the spectator must be able to recall faces, places and situations from one
segment of a film to another” (Lefebvre 479).
Memory is an active function of cinematic spectatorship, a neces-
sary process if a film is to be viewed in “narrative” terms (regardless of
whether the film itself is a narrative film). Spectators generally impose
some form of narrative onto a film in order to comprehend it. Even a
nonnarrative film will be narrativized by its spectator in terms of a tech-
nical narrative. Thus, for example, a film might be described in terms of
rhythmic editing or graphical matching even if no narrative is apparent
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or immediate, and frequently such a response will be retrospective, ana-

Prequel 147

lytical. In the case of sequels and prequels, which extend a preexisting

narrative, memory is undeniably central to their effects. As one com-
mentator has suggested, “Memory is essentially a process that constitutes
the composition of the film’s events during its projection, never ceasing
to rearrange these events, relating them to each other, giving them their
entire perspective” (Esquenazi 18, my translation).
This process of reconstitution is subject to the temporal logic of
“afterwardsness,” demonstrating also the absolute centrality of memory
for the cinema. But memory is also as we have seen always a retrospec-
tive construction that is produced by deferred action, afterward. As Sarah
Kofman argues, “In memory, the past only emerges as a distortion [a
misrepresentation]. The meaning of our experience always emerges by
“deferred action.” . . . Memory is always already imagination. Meaning
does not become in the present but is constructed afterwards” (96, my
translation; emphasis in original).
The sequel invokes the spectator’s memory on two levels, first in
the context of the film being viewed and second in relation to the film
that the prequel follows. While one could argue that all film because of
its fundamental intertextuality produces similar effects, I maintain that
the sequel represents a conscious and therefore more immediate and
direct instance of this. The prequel operates in a broadly comparable
fashion but the temporal relation between cause and effect is rendered
more complex. Prequels and sequels demonstrate the paradox that “only
in a culture of the copy do we assign [. . .] motive force to the Origi-
nal” (Schwartz 141). The original is only significant as an original in its
relation to a copy, just as an originary trauma only becomes a trauma
through the temporal logic of “afterwardsness.”

“Afterwardsness” in Film
To return to Laplanche’s proposition that identity formation is the prod-
uct of an attempt to de- and retranslate traumatic enigmatic messages
or signifiers that come from the other one might well contend that this
process extends to the domain of the cinematic. Thus one may argue
that a similar process occurs during cinematic spectatorship, produc-
ing an active, performative spectatorship that is also constitutive of a
performative cinematic identity. These (traumatic) memories, enigmatic
signifiers, the de-translated remnants of one’s cinema history are perhaps
retranslated and remade, engendering a remaking of oneself around these
fragments in a process of “autotranslation.”
One might surmise that the cinematic spectator develops a spe-
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cifically cinematic unconscious on the basis of the “repression” of the

148 Paul Sutton

(enigmatic) messages received via the screen (enigmatic because interpre-

tation, understanding may not be immediate but subject rather to delay
or deferral). This “repression” occurs as a result of the sheer volume and
traumatic intensity of the visual and aural stimuli encountered, which
cannot be immediately ordered, understood, de- and retranslated. These
enigmatic messages, structured by the temporality of “afterwardsness,”
provoke the spectator into a process of reconstruction or retranslation
what might be described as a form of remaking.
The effect of the sequel is to produce a similar process of recon-
struction; however, in the case of the sequel the messages are anything
but enigmatic because the sequel is designed precisely to provoke the
spectator into recollection and retranslation while at the same time
providing pleasurable repetition. The sequel repeatedly reminds the
spectator that repetition is a fact of everyday (cinematic) life; indeed it
celebrates this fact through visual reminders and often comic dialogue.
John McClane (Bruce Willis) memorably lamented in Die Hard 2: Die
Harder (Renny Harlin, 1990), one of the earliest of the contemporary
blockbuster sequels, “another basement, another elevator; how can the
same thing happen to the same guy twice?” While the notion of ori-
gin (the “original” film) is a presence within the sequel, its significance
is perhaps even more overt in the case of the prequel. The apparent
temporal complexity the prequel appears to bring into play foregrounds
the question of origin to a greater degree. The prequel claims originary
status for itself while at the same time remaining a literal sequel. Hol-
lywood has produced several high-profile, big-budget prequels in recent
years, films such as Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006) and Casino
Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006), which operate at one level as sequels
while at the same time proclaiming themselves to be franchise-renewing
originals. These films reveal, in their very assertion of originality, the
impossibility of such a contention. The sequel may be seen to produce
a conscious “afterwardsness” effect for its spectator but the prequel is
the effect, in a cinematic context, of “afterwardsness” itself.
The idea of a spectatorship of “afterwardsness” or of “afterward-
sness” in film, is then to express the very dynamism of the spectatorial
experience, to speak of the reconstructive and creative aspect of spec-
tatorship. My proposition is therefore that the adoption of the causal
and temporal structure of “afterwardsness” gives rise to a spectatorial
paradigm whereby spectatorship does not involve passive reception and
subject positioning, but is seen, rather, as a fluid process in which iden-
tity may be performed, enacted. In this account, (cinematic) identity is
destabilized, becoming a continually de- and reconstructed performance,
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Prequel 149

a kind of remaking. This process of spectatorship recreates or remakes

the films it “remembers,” while at the same time enabling the “auto-
translation” of the spectating subject (see Sutton, “Afterwardsness in
Film”). The sequel and the prequel are perhaps privileged examples of
this process because such a mode of spectatorship is almost a structural
necessity, an effect of their temporal relationship to each other and to
any perceived original or originals.
“Afterwardsness” and the cinema both share a common concern
with temporality. They also share a common interest in memory and
are both bound to a particularly Laplanchean notion of translation. Film
has always been thoroughly intertextual and has always sought to remake
or (re)translate itself for differing generations and different nations. My
proposition, then, is that spectators remake films as part of the very
process of spectatorship and that beyond the actual cinematic experi-
ence they carry a remade and remembered “film” with them. This view
of spectatorship takes “afterwardsness” as its motivating force. Not only
is the spectator left with memories from, and of, the film after it has
ended, but any number of (frequently traumatic) enigmatic signifiers or
messages may have been unconsciously recorded, requiring subsequent
de- and retranslation, demonstrating a prospective as well as retrospective
dimension to spectatorship. The final section of this chapter now turns
to the prequel and returns once again to Batman Begins.

Batman Begins, Again . . .

As a prequel then, Nolan’s Batman Begins returns the spectator to the

period in Bruce Wayne’s life before he becomes Batman, to his child-
hood and the locus classicus of Freudian psychoanalysis. “Afterwardsness”
is central to this return, not only as that which describes the tempo-
rality of trauma, but also as that which accounts for Wayne/Batman’s
subjectivity. Thus Batman emerges as Wayne’s “autotheorization,” the
result perhaps of the bats, that as enigmatic, untranslatable signifiers,
first “implanted” when Bruce Wayne encounters them as a child, are
subsequently de- and retranslated (remaining occasionally untranslated,
repressed) at various moments in the film. This happens in China when
training with Ra’s Al Ghul and at Wayne Manor when he reencounters
first the single bat and then a swarm of them in the cave, the point at
which he is finally able to retranslate them for himself, into the persona
Batman. As Osborne notes, “these untranslatable (or ‘de-translated’) frag-
ments, are, however, endlessly retranslated as they enter into new con-
texts of significance, encounter new signifiers. It is through this process
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150 Paul Sutton

of de-translation and re-translation that temporality enters the picture,

as the movement of a process of translation which is ‘at once a taking
up and a leaving behind’ ” (106).
As Wayne negotiates this process of “autotranslation,” he “takes up”
the identity of Batman and “leaves behind” a version of Bruce Wayne.
Wayne’s unconscious in this account is formed, in part, as a result of his
encounter with the bats as a child; they represent the repressed “enigmatic
message,” which requires continual de- and retranslation (around which
his identity coalesces). When he becomes Batman, Wayne finally achieves
a retranslation that fits its context; perhaps the context of Wayne’s return
to a corrupt Gotham City produces this retranslation, preceded by the
various retranslations that have been leading up to it. The question of
origins, explored earlier, is especially important here because “origin”
ultimately comes from the other. The translation of enigmatic messages
is ultimately the de- and retranslation of messages without origin.
This process of de- and retranslation describes both the remaking
within the film but also the temporal in terms of the logic of “after-
wardsness” that is at work, the same “afterwardsness” that the specta-
tor perhaps experienced in his or her encounter with the film. For the
spectator Batman Begins renders the untranslatable of the earlier films
translatable; it provides a new context of significance for the emergence
of Batman while at the same time retranslating or remaking the four
previous films of the Batman cycle. Thus Batman Begins, which charts
the before of these earlier films, afterward effectively remakes them.
To conclude, these films ultimately complicate the textual relation
that exists between the various incarnations of Batman, whether between
the graphic novels and their film adaptations, the singular adaptation and
its sequel, the filmic “original” and its remake, or the prequel and its
sequel, while at the same time foregrounding the fundamentally inter-
textual nature of film. The mutability of these texts and their shift-
ing relations produces for the spectator an encounter that is marked by
temporal confusion and instability but which requires of that spectator
a level of engagement that is productively reconstitutive in its effects.
In conclusion and in the spirit of the bidirectionality of the temporal-
ity of “afterwardsness,” I reference the latest extension to the existing
Batman “series,” the sequel to Batman Begins, which was released in the
summer of 2008. Directed once again by Christopher Nolan, The Dark
Knight (2008)3 continues on more or less directly from the final scenes
of Batman Begins, reintroducing the figure of the Joker and providing
an experience of literal “afterwardsness” for the spectator that involves
not only a sense of temporal continuity, but also produces inevitable
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comparison with Burton’s Batman and its sequel Batman Returns. The
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Prequel 151

spectator of The Dark Knight is once again drawn into a multifaceted

filmic relationship that plays repeatedly with the temporal complexities of
the film form, in the context of a film that is arguably not only a sequel
but also an adaptation and a remake, yet retains its own singular identity.
Ultimately, the effect of the sequel on Batman Begins is to secure further
its originary status, to reconstitute its “afterwardsness,” and, as Schwartz
has reminded us, its singularity.

Notes
1. That Newman’s article, titled “Cape Fear” and published in the July
2005 issue of Sight and Sound, reproduces the title from a June Premiere article,
“Caped Fear,” is somewhat ironic; the pun that both articles use refers of course
to a film that was itself remade: Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) and Cape
Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991).
2. See Paul Sutton, “Afterwardsness in Film,” “Afterwardsness in Film:
Patrice Leconte’s Le Mari de la Coiffeuse,” “Cinematic Spectatorship as Procras-
tinatory Practice,” and “Remaking the Remake.”
3. One should note that the graphic novel from which the latest Bat-
man film is almost certainly adapted is entitled The Dark Knight Returns; the
“return” stressing the temporal dimension rather more explicitly than the film
title allows for.
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9
DANIEL HERBERT

Circulations
Technology and Discourse
in The Ring Intertext

T
HE RING. THESE WORDS EVOKE numerous metaphors. The Ring as
a circle, as a system of circularity, of cycling, and of recycling.
Hence the Japanese film Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) is derived
from the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki.1 A series of film sequels and prequels
followed Ringu, including Rasen (Jôji Iida, 1999), Ringu 2 (Hideo Nakata,
1999), and Ringu 0: Birthday (Norio Tsuruta, 2000). In 1999, Ringu was
remade in South Korea under the title Ring and known in English as
Ring Virus (Dong-bin Kim). Hollywood also remade Ringu, in English
and with an international cast in 2002 as The Ring (Gore Verbinski).
Further still along the circle, a sequel to the Hollywood version followed
in 2005, directed by Ringu director Hideo Nakata, yet it held almost no
direct intertextual connection to the Japanese Ringu series.
As a system of recycling, The Ring evokes the entire wave of Hol-
lywood remakes of Asian films, which has become a significant trend
within the global cultural industries. Following the enormous success of
The Ring at the US box office ($129 million) and across the globe ($120
million), Hollywood apprehended a steady stream of Asian films and
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153
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154 Daniel Herbert

Figure 9.1. Ringu/Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998). Courtesy Omega/Kadokawa/

The Kobal Collection.

remade them, a process largely orchestrated by Roy Lee at Vertigo Enter-

tainment. However, The Ring not only indicates new levels of interaction
among Japanese and Hollywood players; but it is also vital to remember
that the South Korean Ring Virus followed Ringu by merely a year. After
years of troubled relations between Japan and South Korea, this remake
marks an important instance of cultural exchange. Furthermore, new
connections have also appeared between Hollywood and South Korea.
Hollywood reacted to the recent boom of South Korean blockbusters by
initiating remakes of a number of hits, such as Il Mare (Hyun-seung Lee,
2000), My Wife is a Gangster (Jin-gyu Cho, 2001), and Oldboy (Chan-wook
Park, 2003). Since 2001, more than twenty Hollywood remakes of East
Asian–produced films have been made or are currently in production.2
In combination, Ringu, Ring Virus, and The Ring thus constitute a cir-
cuit of economic, semiotic, and cultural exchange, however imbalanced,
among players across the Pacific. This constellation of texts, this “Ring
Intertext,” maps a transnational and macroregional space. This composes
another metaphor, geographic as well as economic and cultural—The
Ring Intertext as the Pacific Rim.
Considered this broadly, The Ring Intertext literally and figura-
tively illuminates forces of transnationalism and globalization, specifically
through communications technologies. As Arjun Appadurai argues, elec-
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tronic media serve as a primary component of globalization, transforming

the geographies of culture and imagination (3–4). Similarly, David Mor-
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Circulations 155

ley and Kevin Robins argue that new global media transcend national
borders and realign cultural identities (1–2). In this respect, The Ring
Intertext is overdetermined by mammoth social forces, even as it rep-
resents these forces within specific narrative and aesthetic parameters.
Moreover, for the purposes of analysis in this chapter, the compound
term “communications technologies” may be productively divided into
constitutive parts, discourse and technology. These terms signify the taut
lines of connection and contestation throughout The Ring Intertext,
articulating a new Pacific Rim cultural configuration and revealing the
struggle for power within it.
This struggle for power manifests itself in two polarities that per-
vade The Ring Intertext as well as its broader economic, cultural, and
discursive circumstances. First, the Intertext reveals tensions between
technophilia and technophobia. The fluctuation between these poles
finds a basis in the historically circumscribed economic and political rela-
tions among Japan, Korea, and the United States. The different modes
of technophilia and technophobia these films exhibit demonstrate the
asymmetrical power relations that inflect this cultural formation, specifi-
cally as the texts reveal anxieties about history and identity.
The second polarity that pervades The Ring Intertext is a dichotomy
between logophilia and logophobia, terms Michel Foucault described in
his essay “The Discourse on Language.” There he posits that the appar-
ent love for discourse in Western culture covers a deeper fear of discourse
(228–29). This logophobia is a fear of the uncontainable proliferation of
discourse; it is a fear of inarticulation. It manifests itself in the desire
to censor, to monitor, to delimit, and/or to halt discursive proliferation.
Alternatively, logophilia refers to a predilection for and a taking pleasure
in the creation of texts, textual proliferation, and textual dissemination;
it is the joy of putting into discourse. The polarity between logophilia
and logophobia seen in The Ring Intertext pervades the relations among
East Asian and Hollywood players as well as the contemporary institu-
tional conditions of transnational remakes more generally. The dialectic
between these two polarities, between technophilia/technophobia and
logophilia/logophobia, gives shape to The Ring Intertext and significantly
inflects the contemporary transnational-transtextual space of Hollywood
and East Asian cinema.

Ghost in the Shell:

An Economy of Technology in The Ring Intertext
Ringu begins with a horror film cliché. Two teenage girls, home alone
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at night, gossip about an urban legend. Rather than a tale of ghosts or

murderers escaped from prison, however, their story is about a killer
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156 Daniel Herbert

videotape. The premise is simple—anyone who views this videotape dies

seven days later. One girl admits she has seen the tape and now fears
for her life, and as the scene plays out the girl dies mysteriously. This
dramatic device—the killer videotape—derives from the novel Ringu, by
Koji Suzuki, and the premise runs throughout the filmic versions of the
narrative. Here in the first film, the narrative follows Reiko Asakawa,
a female reporter, as she watches the tape and tracks the video to its
source in an attempt to save her own life. She discovers that the tape is
cursed and houses the malevolent soul of a dead psychic girl. Ringu thus
locates terror in technology by conflating the spiritual and the mechani-
cal. Similarly, the film Pulse (Kairo, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001) depicts a
world where computers house malevolent spirits and the South Korean
film Phone (Byeong-ki Ahn, 2002) features a haunted, killer cell-phone.
This method of denigrating media technologies is not new. Jeffrey
Sconce has observed the spiritualization of media since the mid-1800s, as
in the case of the “spiritual telegraph” through which the living attempted
to communicate with the dead (Haunted 12–13). Analogously, Geoffrey
Batchen notes that the invention of photography was attended by rumina-
tions about its close relationship with death (166–67). These early senti-
ments of “haunted media” resonate directly with Ringu and its remakes. As
these films portray the ghostly inhabitation of a videotape, they articulate
different temporalities in relation to technology and in the context of
horror, combining “modern” rationalism and “premodern” superstition.
This characterization resonates with the differential histories of
technological exchange among Japan, South Korea, and the United
States. Of course, these relations are infinitely complex and fraught by
intense struggles for power that continue to raise anxieties. Indeed, for
Japan and Korea, modernization and technological progress was, and in
some respects remains, associated with Westernization and the imperial
power of the United States. Furthermore, Korean industrialization was
associated not only with Western incursion but rather Japanese colonial
domination, as Japan forcefully corralled Korea into its national/imperial
economic infrastructure (Cumings 148–54, 162–75). However, technology
also provided the means for Japan and South Korea to exert power across
the globe during the second half of the twentieth century as both nations
underwent economic “miracles” based predominantly on technological
development. In these respects, the relational development of technology
across the Pacific Rim is marked by the uneven spatial deployment of
modernity and evokes an intense struggle for cultural power.
These tensions are intricately connected with constructions of cul-
tural identities, as can be seen across a wide variety of Japanese films. As
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a prominent example, Gojira (Ishirô Honda, 1954) articulates these issues

Circulations 157

within its historical frame. The film fluctuates ambivalently between

technophilia and technophobia in ways that correspond with tensions
between the United States and Japan around nuclear technology. Because
this film downplayed the issue of nuclear testing when it was “remade” as
Godzilla (1956) for theatrical release in the United States, it demonstrates
further how asymmetries of power inform cultural characterizations of
technology across the Pacific Rim. More recently, the processes of glo-
balization have transformed the lines of connection across the region and
realigned the associative relations between technology and identity. Ian
Conrich argues that Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1988) and
its sequel, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1992), illustrate a
“new wave of Japanese horror cinema” that dramatizes “postindustrial”
fantasies (95, 100). The protagonist in this film obliterates traditional
boundaries between human and machine in fantastic fashion, and he
ultimately forms a cybernetic synthesis of the two categories. Further-
more, Eric Cazdyn reads the cyborg narratives of both Tetsuo and Ghost
in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995) as allegories for the transition from
national sovereignty to globalization (242–43). He argues that the films’
representation of fluid relations between human and machine evokes the
mobility of a transnational identity.
These associations, transformations, and tensions among temporali-
ties, technology, and identities pervade the greater cultural configuration.
Morley and Robins describe how the West distinguished itself from Japa-
nese technological modernity through a discourse of “techno-oriental-
ism,” which denigrated the Japanese as overly mechanized and inhuman
(168–73). They illuminate the discursive chain of associations that posits
“if the future is technological, and if technology has become ‘Japanised,’
then the syllogism would suggest that the future is now Japanese too”
(168). Alternatively, Koichi Iwabuchi argues that Japan’s immense global
cultural impact has been largely through culturally “odorless” consumer
technologies that do not necessarily bear associations of “Japaneseness”
(27–28). As examples, Iwabuchi mentions “VCRs, computer games, kara-
oke machines, and the Walkman” (24). Furthermore, Paul du Gay et
al., show how Sony as a company and the Walkman as a technology
fluctuated between signifying Japan and the global (69–74, 77–80). These
characterizations mark important tensions between national specificity
and transnational abstraction and indicate how technology and its rep-
resentations interact within a struggle for cultural power and identity
across the Pacific Rim.
The Ring Intertext reworks this matrix of forces within its narra-
tive and aesthetic strategies. These texts depict the “haunting” of imag-
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ing technologies, specifically dramatizing technospiritual threats to the

158 Daniel Herbert

human subject. This occurs within an apparent polarity between premo-

dernity and (post)modernity. Just as importantly, this crisis raises ques-
tions about the relation of the individual subject to a transnational space
of technological flows. Negotiating the split between technophilia and
technophobia, the characters combat threats to their identities, between
differential temporalities and from external domination, through the
mastery over technology.
Early in the narrative of Ringu, the film associates imaging technol-
ogy with terror and the erasure of identity. The female reporter Reiko
discovers that, a week before their deaths, her niece and several of her
classmates snuck away to a cabin. During her investigation, Reiko finds
Polaroid photographs they took during their trip. In some photos the
teenagers appear happy as they stand near the cabin. Yet other photo-
graphs depict the teens with their faces distorted, warped out of legibility.
The Korean and Hollywood remakes of the film replicate this device, and
it also recurs in one of the Japanese sequels, Ringu 2. Within the logic
of the narrative, this warping occurs because the teenagers watched the
videotape. As visualized in the photographs, the teens’ identities were dis-
torted by their experience with another imaging technology, the cursed
videotape. Later, the protagonists, Rieko in Ringu, Sun-ju in Ringu Virus,
and Rachel in The Ring, verify that they too have been cursed after
watching the videotape by photographing themselves, and indeed these
images depict their smeared faces. The characters become monstrous as
a result of technology as seen through technology.
This effacement corresponds with another device in the films, the
hair that covers the female ghost’s face. Within each of the films, the
ghost is rendered particularly creepy by the long, oily black hair that
drapes over her face and obscures her features, making her unknown and
perhaps unknowable. As both the photographic warping and the drap-
ing hair remove clear markers of individuality, these devices both raise
anxieties about identity. Moreover, when contrasted with one another,
these tropes mark a temporal divergence between premodernity and
modernity. As a convention, long black hair covering the faces of female
ghosts has a long history in East Asian visual culture. More recently,
the ghost-story masterpiece Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964), among
others, features this device prominently in one of its folkloric narratives.
As the ghosts throughout The Ring Intertext feature this inky hair, they
similarly evoke premodern East Asian culture.3 This association is rein-
forced by the ghosts’ originating from a distant rural area where cultural
traditions presumably remain “untainted” by modern city life.
However, rather than immutably aligning Ringu and the others with
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“tradition,” the past, and with Asia, saying that The Ring Intertext negoti-
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Circulations 159

ates divergent historical temporalities and cultural spheres, which threat-

en stable conditions of identity, is more accurate. The films manifest this
negotiation by conflating the videotape and the vengeful female ghost by
haunting a modern technology with a terror of the past. Furthermore,
as the Hollywood remake of Ringu faithfully retains the iconography of
the dark-haired female ghost seen in Ringu and Ring Virus, the Holly-
wood film repositions this visual trope within the context of transnational
culture. In The Ring, the girl who eventually becomes the antagonist
was adopted by unsuspecting parents before she became a malevolent
spirit. Where her adoptive parents got her remains a mystery, but the
film insinuates that she came from some distant place, from “elsewhere.”
However, although The Ring maintains the sense of the ghost’s distance
from contemporary culture, the film disassociates the iconography of the
dark-haired female ghost from premodernity and East Asia. Replicated
across the Pacific Rim and between East and West, the ghost’s lack of
identity marks her transnational legibility. She becomes a transnational
figure, a figure of transnationalism.
A scene from Ringu 2 reinforces the connection between the hair
and imaging technologies as threats to identity. As a male reporter
reviews footage of an interview with a girl who died from the videotape
curse, her head shakes back and forth. The videotape player slips out
of the reporter’s control and the girl’s head shakes ever more violently
on the screen. The girl’s face disappears, covered by her black hair and
obscured by the videographic blurring, combining premodern and post-
modern visual conventions in one cinematic moment. As with the warped
photographs, this scene suspends the identity of the individual through
her relation to technology. This presents a picture of transnational iden-
tity inasmuch as it displaces, suspends, and abstracts the surface mark-
ings of identity while contending with diverse historical experiences with
technological modernity.
The Ring Intertext also dramatizes media technologies penetrating
the human psyche. The Ring explains that the killer videotape resulted
from the ghost exercising her psychic will on the technology, a concept
appearing previously in Ringu 2.4 The film shows the child Samara as
she is tested in a mental institution. Because she is known for having
psychic abilities, doctors seek to record Samara’s extrasensory talents,
which appear as bizarre images on sheets of plastic film that resemble
X-rays. The protagonist finds that the cursed tape was produced in the
same way, as imprints made by the child’s mind on the imaging technol-
ogy. The Ringu novel presents the inverse of this situation. When the
protagonist views the cursed videotape, the tape inserts itself directly into
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his mind. The novel describes the experience as “strange—something

160 Daniel Herbert

Figure 9.2. The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002). Courtesy Dreamworks/The

Kobal Collection/Morton, Merrick.

was stimulating his five senses, some medium besides the sounds and
visions that appeared as if he were suddenly recalling them” (Suzuki, Ring
80). Earlier in the viewing, the male reporter watches “concepts in the
abstract, etched vividly into his brain,” as if no technology or medium
were involved at all (77).
Such characterizations demonstrate a deep concern with the rela-
tion between technology and subjectivity. The Ring Intertext presents the
possibility for psychic projection on technology, making it malleable to
the will of the subject, a direct reflection of the subject. Yet, the texts also
warn of technology overcoming the subject, erasing his or her subjective
individuality. This corresponds with the ambivalent split between tech-
nophilia and technophobia because it proposes that human and machine
might interact in some transcendent fashion, yet one that threatens to
erase the human entirely.
Situated firmly within the horror genre, The Ring Intertext tends
toward technophobia. The association of technology with terror reaches
its peak when the cursed tape kills the protagonists’ male companion, the
Ryuji Takayama—Choi Yeol—Noah Clay character. In the Ringu novel,
Takayama dies as a result of terrible hallucinations in a mirror (Suzuki
264–65). In all the film versions, however, the television flickers to life
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on its own and gains the man’s attention. The screen shows the top of
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Circulations 161

the well where the psychic girl died, and shockingly, the video shows
her crawling from this rim. She walks with uncanny jerks and twitches
toward the screen; in fact, in Ring Virus and The Ring her movements
align with the videographic technology, as flickers on the tape displace
her closer to the screen’s edge. When she reaches the lip of the screen
she crawls into the “real world.” Inexplicably, she kills the man with her
sheer frightfulness. The girl is made present from the past, making the
past present; she is ghostly and yet manifested through technology into
the space of reality. Unable to reconcile the apparent contradictions of
this figure, the man dies in a state of horror.
However, The Ring Intertext intersperses technophobia with tech-
nophilia, and the horror of these films is countered by the protago-
nists’ positive engagement with technology. Paul Young notes that the
reporter Rachel regularly and productively uses the Internet during her
investigation throughout The Ring (229). Likewise, as part of her exami-
nation of the cursed video, Rachel and her ex-husband Noah review it
in a professional video editing booth. As Rachel looks over the tape
frame-by-frame with Noah’s assistance, the camera languishes over the
machine’s many knobs and buttons. Noah demonstrates his technical
mastery as he adjusts the controls and glides over the images, through
them, and rests on them. Ultimately, his technological savvy allows the
characters to ponder the meaning of the video’s content. Nevertheless,
he succumbs to the curse of the videotape at the end of the film whereas
Rachel does not; she manages to survive through the technological tricks
Noah taught her. Earlier, the characters believed they would escape the
curse by recovering the girl’s bones from the well in which she died.
However, this laying to rest does not assuage the evil in the girl’s soul
and her perpetual wrath kills the man. Rachel escapes this fate through
her use of technology; she survives because she made a copy of the tape
and showed it to Noah. Moreover, at the end of the film she makes yet
another copy to proliferate in order to save her son who had also viewed
the tape. In this regard, technology provides the resolution to the film’s
central crisis about technology. Here, The Ring Intertext depicts a certain
technophilia that counters the pervasive representations of technophobia.
Fundamentally important is that the technological solution that the films
offer facilitates the mechanical reproduction of a text.

Signs of Empire? Discursive Proliferation

and Constraint across The Ring Intertext
The cinematic remake constitutes a split subject. Jennifer Forrest
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describes how, at the beginnings of cinema, a conflation of two types

162 Daniel Herbert

of filmic repetition existed, the dupe and the remake, a conflation of

mechanical and textual repetition (92–93). The two types were not legally
distinguished until 1905, and both were derided at the time as forms of
economic and/or artistic theft (Forrest 93, 99–100). The integration of
film into the US copyright apparatus made the remake possible because
laws eventually associated film narratives with copyrighted, written
sources (110). This troubled origin reveals the close relation between
cinematic remaking and film distribution as related but distinct forms of
filmic repetition and dissemination. This also indicates how the remake
functions textually and intertextually; torn from its basis in a technology
of mechanical reproduction, the cinematic remake exists as a mode of
textual reproduction.
Issues of textual repetition and dissemination resonate with great
intensity across the Pacific Rim, as a polarity between logophilia and
logophobia shapes the discursive interactions across the region. These
tensions manifest themselves overtly in negotiations around textual com-
mensurability and incommensurability, a division that consistently threat-
ens to reinforce oppositions between East and West and hierarchies of
cultural power. In fact, this inflects the very definition of logophobia, as
Foucault states: “there is undoubtedly in our society, and I would not be
surprised to see it in others, though taking different forms and modes, a
profound logophobia” (228–29; emphasis added). Foucault invokes the
notion that discursive patterns and tendencies find a limit at civilizational
boundaries. Indeed, these boundaries might help to define one another.
Situated in this way, the lingual/civilizational other poses one of the
greatest agitators of logophobia, as it arises from the potential meaning-
lessness of discourse, the “violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered
even and perilous in [discourse]” (229).
Roland Barthes provides a pronounced example of this issue in
Empire of Signs, stating, “The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language
and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without
that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of dis-
course, communication or vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a
new language, the impossibilities of our own . . . in a word, to descend
into the untranslatable” (6). Japan serves as the basis of this fantasy, but,
as Barthes readily admits, he apprehends Japan not in reality but rather
as “an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our
own” (3). This epitomizes a semiotic Orientalism inasmuch as the total-
ized difference of the discursive other provides a better understanding
of the native language. Analogously, Noël Burch draws upon Barthes’s
approach in his analysis of Japanese cinema (13–14). Deriving part of his
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argument from characteristics of the Japanese language, Burch argues

Circulations 163

that the narrative and aesthetic tendencies of Japanese cinema purpose-

fully deconstruct those of Western cinemas (37, 89). For both Barthes
and Burch, Japan constitutes a coherent discursive entity, the alterity of
which underpins their respective clarifications of discourse in general. In
these cases, the division between logophobia and logophilia corresponds
with the delimitation of discursive/cultural boundaries; the logophobic
fear of meaninglessness, embodied in the discursive other, propels the
logophilic drive for meaning and the greater resolution of discourse.
In creating such dualities, Barthes and Burch engage in what Naoki
Sakai calls a “schema of cofiguration” (34–35, 50–59). As a tendency of
translation, cofiguration entails the clarification of one’s native or familiar
language in the process of learning another, foreign language (34–35, 51).
Such a practice has the pitfall of constructing or augmenting problematic
alignments between language and nation as well as language and ethnici-
ty, an issue that troubles constructions of “Japan” in particular (16, 43–44,
60–61). As a corrective, Sakai argues that understanding translation as a
heterolingual mode of address undermines constructions of supposedly
homogenous lingual, ethnic, and national communities (3–10). Hetero-
lingual address “assumes that every utterance can fail to communicate
because heterogeneity is inherent in any medium, linguistic or otherwise”
(8). Thus Sakai maintains a productive tension between logophobia and
logophilia, yet in such a way that it transcends boundaries between lan-
guages and cultural groups. This intervention is particularly important
to understanding The Ring Intertext, as it fluctuates between logophobia
and logophilia and obscures divisions between East and West as well as
among Japanese cinema, South Korean cinema, and Hollywood.
The narratives within The Ring Intertext dramatize this vacilla-
tion between logophobia and logophilia. The Ringu novel emphasizes
the textuality of the cursed tape by characterizing its content as a form
of writing. It describes “a frayed bundle of lights, crawling around like
worms, which finally formed themselves into words. Not the kind of
captions one normally saw on film, though. These were poorly written,
as if scrawled by a white brush on jet-black paper” (Suzuki 76). This
description evokes an experimental film that has been hand-painted with
India ink. More important, it situates the tape as a legible text, yet one
emerging from an undifferentiated mass of illegible nonsigns.
In the films, the videotape serves as the visual enigma that the
narrative works to resolve. In Ringu, the images on the tape defy imme-
diate comprehensibility; characters float across the screen and spell out
“eruption,” a woman combs her hair in a mirror, and the top of a well
stands isolated among trees. These images bear no explicit meaning and
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no logic clearly connects them. Nevertheless, in this film, as in Ring Virus

164 Daniel Herbert

and The Ring, the protagonist deciphers the meaning of the images in
order to trace the tape to its source. Reiko and her ex-husband research
newspapers to find that the woman in the mirror died by throwing her-
self into a volcano. They trace her to an island where they uncover
the woman’s personal history (she had a child who was later killed and
thrown into a well). The images on the tape thus connect directly with
historical reality and in deciphering the tape’s code the characters draw
these connections.
In The Ring, the tape similarly recodifies and represents reality
through operations of condensation and displacement. The tape depicts
disparate images of situations that the characters cannot interpret yet
which they encounter later in reality. For instance, it shows a high-con-
trast black-and-white image of a ladder leaning against a white wall.
Later, Rachel and Noah’s investigation leads them to a farmhouse on
an island. They find that the girl Samara was held in a loft in the roof
of a barn and that an extremely tall ladder provides the only means of
accessing this bizarre prison. As they climb, the images of The Ring
clearly reference the image from the cursed videotape.
As seen in these cases, The Ring Intertext dramatizes acts of inter-
pretation. The characters’ movement through the narratives requires
their making sense of visual texts. They learn the meanings behind
images; they learn to read them. Initially, these texts appear as non-
sensical nonsigns and raise the specter of logophobia. This drives the
characters’ logophilic search for meaning, and thus The Ring Intertext
vacillates between these poles to propel the movement of its narratives.
Just as important, when considered intertextually, these narratives also
resonate with Sakai’s notion of heterolingual translation. As transcultural
remakes, Ring Virus and The Ring function as literal and figurative acts of
translation. The production of these films demanded the literal transla-
tion of Ringu’s script and dialogue. Furthermore, Constantine Verevis
argues that the process of repetition and transformation that occurs in
cinematic remaking resembles that of translation (82–84). In this light,
the alterations that the South Korean and Hollywood films made to
Ringu’s narrative can also be viewed as translations. Notably, the trope of
the cursed videotape occurs within each of these films and spans across
them. Each of the films translate differing visions of the potentially mean-
ingless and untranslatable, and in this respect The Ring Intertext offers
dramatizations of heterolingual address across linguistic, national, and
cultural zones. These dramatic renderings of logophobia and logophilia
efface rather than reinforce these traditional boundaries, realigning a
transnational cultural formation across the Pacific Rim.
copyright law.
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Circulations 165

Yet in addition to dramatizing acts of interpretation, The Ring Inter-

text also illustrates tensions regarding discursive control and containment.
Through the trope of the cursed videotape, the narratives map logophilia
and logophobia onto divisions between local and global, domestic and
exotic. In the Ringu novel, the protagonist finds the cursed videotape in
the lobby of a resort, on a shelf alongside numerous other videos. All the
titles mentioned are Hollywood films, including Raiders of the Lost Ark
(Steven Spielberg, 1981), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Back to the
Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunning-
ham, 1980; Suzuki 64–65). Here, the nonlabeled cursed tape becomes
associated with foreign or global media. Similarly, as noted earlier, the
films associate the tape with a geographic “elsewhere.” Yet Ringu, Ring
Virus, and The Ring more strikingly associate the foreign with logophobia
by dramatizing the vulnerability of the domestic sphere, when, in all
three films, the reporter’s child views the cursed tape. Ringu, for example,
depicts Reiko woken from her sleep by a vision of her dead niece. The
room is dark with shadows that play across the paper walls. After the
vision dissipates, Reiko rushes from her room to check on her son. She
shrieks in horror when she finds him bathed in the blue light of the
television, watching the last frames of the cursed video. She gathers him
in her arms and covers his eyes, but she is too late. He viewed the tape
and now bears the curse. Ring Virus and The Ring depict similar scenes,
and in this manner all three films add intensity to their narratives.
As they dramatize a parent’s efforts to protect a child from danger-
ous images, a domestic logophobia pervades all three films. The potential
meaninglessness of the tape, making it a site of heterolingualism across
the films, simultaneously takes on strong associations with the nondo-
mestic and the exotic. The tape is not entirely meaningless, then, but
rather represents the danger of uncontrolled foreign images entering
and endangering the home. In this respect, The Ring Intertext presents
a complex structure of logophobia; it demonstrates radical discursive het-
erogeneity within and across cultural formations and yet also maintains
an abstract division between home and away. This makes the logophilic
drive of the narratives an attempt to reconcile these zones, and indeed
the protagonists journey far and wide as they search for answers. In their
effort to delimit the force of the cursed tape and resolve its enigmas, the
characters interconnect the domestic and the distant, making the exotic
conform to the meanings of the local.
The polarity between logophilia and logophobia not only shapes The
Ring Intertext and its transnational flow, but also strikingly characterizes
the surrounding discursive and political-economic context. For instance,
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166 Daniel Herbert

Ring Virus indicates remarkable patterns of discourse between Japan and

South Korea. Traditionally, these relations have been fraught by the his-
tory of Japanese imperialism on the Korean peninsula. As Michael Rob-
inson notes, Japan’s colonial project prompted the restriction of all forms
of Korean culture, including bans on the Korean language (19–21; see
Cumings 141). Conversely, South Korea prohibited the distribution or
exhibition of Japanese cultural products following the Japanese defeat in
World War II. Both these cases demonstrate the institutional deployment
of logophobia with aims of national and cultural autonomy.
This changed in the late 1990s, and Ring Virus stands centrally
within this transnational discursive shift. In 1998, South Korea began
incorporating Japanese films into its market and Japanese capital into its
domestic media industry (Chung and Diffrient 208 n. 5; Paquet “Jap-
anese Films in Korea”). This process proceeded in stages from 1998
until 2004 and eventually South Korea eliminated the ban on Japanese
cultural products. This coincided with Ringu’s overwhelming success in
Japanese theaters. However, in 1998 institutional barriers remained that
curtailed the direct distribution of Ringu in South Korea. Thus Ringu
could only legitimately enter the country as a remake, and indeed, Ring
Virus appeared a year after Ringu and succeeded in the South Korean
domestic market (“1999”). Yet the production of Ring Virus reveals an
even more complex picture of cultural migration. The Japanese company
Omega Project, one of the firms that produced Ringu, cofinanced the
film’s production along with AFDF Korea and Hanmac films, making
Ring Virus an international coproduction at the level of financing (Ich-
ise; Paquet, email to author). However, the South Korean producers
never paid for the remake rights for the film, making the film an illegal
international coproduction (Ichise). In these ways, Ring Virus articu-
lates changing conditions in Japanese–South Korean interactions. The
film creates a cultural and discursive bridge between the nations and
yet simultaneously demonstrates the lingering constraints on discursive
exchange; it originates from a tension between logophilia and logophobia
that conforms partially to national boundaries and yet also transforms
and transcends them.
The Hollywood remake demonstrates a realignment of discursive
flows that threatens to reinforce certain cultural boundaries and relations
of power. The imbalanced trade in distribution rights versus remake rights
makes this most apparent. Following the domestic success of Ringu in
1998, DreamWorks bought the film’s remake rights in 2001 (Brodesser
and Lyons). Notably, DreamWorks paid $1.3 million for these rights,
which actually exceeded Ringu’s production budget of $1.2 million (“Proj-
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ect: The Ring”). This provided a valuable revenue stream for the Japanese
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Circulations 167

producers, which is particularly important given the extreme difficulty

“foreign” films have entering the US market. However, this contrasts dra-
matically with The Ring’s production budget of $48 million (“Project: The
Ring”), and the film’s eventual global earnings of $249 million (Brodesser).
The Hollywood film quickly exceeded the earnings of Ringu in Japan (Xu;
Friend). Furthermore, when DreamWorks bought the remake rights to
Ringu, it also purchased its distribution rights for the US theatrical and
video markets, as part of its deal for all worldwide rights (Brodesser and
Lyons). Rather than releasing Ringu in theaters or on video, however,
DreamWorks withheld the film while they produced their remake (Lee).5
This exclusion caused some popular consternation; on the release of The
Ring, American audiences who attempted to view Ringu were upset to find
it unavailable in any format (Arnold). Ringu eventually reached the US
market when DreamWorks simultaneously released The Ring and Ringu
on video in early 2003 (Sporich; “Corrections”).
This interaction articulates the asymmetrical relations of cultural
power across the region. The remaking of Ringu as The Ring engen-
dered a new pattern of discourse through the subsequent proliferation
of Hollywood remakes of East Asian films. The exact expression of this
transnational exchange accords with the economic imbalance among the
players; Hollywood’s economic superiority allows it to pay for remake
rights in sums that exceed the budgets of Japanese film producers so
extremely that they benefit from the influx of money. Gang Gary Xu
signals the spatial component of this extreme disparity of power when
he calls this phenomenon “Hollywood’s way of outsourcing.”
Furthermore, the case of The Ring demonstrates a transnationally
imbalanced deployment of logophilia and logophobia, which maintains
and augments these asymmetries of power. In some sense the transnation-
al film remake is always overdetermined by its conflated articulation of
logophilia and logophobia, as it disseminates through revision. The Ring
makes this more conspicuous, however, by revealing the relative impen-
etrability of the US media market to non-Hollywood films as well as
Hollywood’s transnational mobility. This represents a severe trade imbal-
ance in cultural goods and demonstrates how Hollywood strategically
navigates national and transnational cultural arenas. Hollywood’s selective
association with the United States quite literally renders non-Hollywood
films “foreign” within the US media market and thereby exerts a cultural
logophobia along national lines. However, as it simultaneously dominates
many media markets around the globe, Hollywood attempts to render its
own films transnationally legible; in effect, Hollywood inscribes a trans-
national logophilia everywhere it can except the United States. Thus,
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the transnational operation of logophilia and logophobia in the political

168 Daniel Herbert

economy of The Ring Intertext diverges from the heterolingualism found

in its narrative and aesthetic strategies, marking an important point of
contradiction between text and context.

Ø: Transnational Technologorrhea

Yet The Ring is not a circle but rather forms a spiral, tracing expansive
lines that move ever-outward. The similar narrative resolutions of Ringu,
Ring Virus, and The Ring insinuate the perpetual dissemination of the
cursed videotape. To curtail its effects, it must be duplicated and viewed
by others.6 Here, the productive tension between logophilia and logopho-
bia becomes overly productive, ceaselessly so, creating an endless flow of
discourse, a logorrhea. Yet this process is only possible through the powers
of duplication inherent in the VCR. In this respect, the films dramatize
tendencies particular to the media technology, suggesting the indivisibil-
ity of discourse and technology under the category of “communications
technologies.” Thus The Ring Intertext presents a pattern of simulta-
neous, synergistic, and ceaseless proliferation of discourse—through a
technology of discourse—a technologorrhea.
In their depictions of continual yet constrained proliferations of
discourse, these films appear to give allegorical expression to their own
material conditions. The logophobia of the protagonists, who try to con-
tain the spread of the cursed video only to later aid in its duplication
and distribution, matches that of DreamWorks, who halted the spread
of Ringu into the United States but later disseminated this text as The
Ring. Yet this equation has limited allegorical value. The Ring Intertext
depicts the spread of cursed images through mechanical reproduction,
not through a kind of textual repetition and revision comparable to cin-
ematic remaking. Rather, the films evoke tensions around the remake’s
disavowed “other,” the dupe, the copy. The films thus recall Forrest’s
elucidation of the close relation between cinematic remaking and film
distribution, categories distinguished as much by law as by their different
modes of repetition. In this regard, the films do connect to their objective
circumstances because DreamWorks coordinated their power over film
distribution with their remaking of Ringu, deftly navigating and exploit-
ing conventional divisions between mechanical and textual reproduction
across a vast transnational space.
Yet the technologorrhea depicted in the films contrasts markedly
with this corporate consolidation of rights. They depict furtive, unsanc-
tioned, even illicit acts of dubbing and circulation, tainted by generic
trappings of horror. An underground, dangerous circuit of media dis-
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tribution, this is a nightmare of media piracy. Shujen Wang, for one,

Circulations 169

examines piracy in East Asia as the criminalized counterpart to legitimate

media distribution. Facilitated and sustained by communications tech-
nologies such as VCRs, VCDs, DVDs, and personal computers, piracy
networks disseminate media with speed and efficiency that largely cir-
cumvents, outperforms, and subverts Hollywood and other legitimate
distributors (2). Wang suggests that piracy poses a resistance to legiti-
mate distribution, a counterdistribution (187–88, 191); it constitutes a
form of counterpower within the overall dynamic of technologorrhea.
Viewed from this vantage, the allegory of piracy seen in The Ring Inter-
text duplicitously inverts the films’ objective material conditions. A hege-
monic expression of resistance, The Ring Intertext in fact opposes piracy;
the transnational remake as counterpiracy.
The synergistic forces of media discourses and technologies propel
these struggles for power according to a complex transnational geog-
raphy, revealing a broader pattern of technologorrhea. Thus the Hol-
lywood studios attempted to thwart Sony and Matsushita, themselves
competitors, from distributing VCRs in the US market (Wasko, Holly-
wood 126–130; Wasser 83–85, 88–91). Yet as Harold Vogel notes, home
video quickly became Hollywood’s single largest source of revenue (103).
Likewise, we have seen numerous interpenetrations among media tech-
nology manufacturers and cultural producers across the Pacific: Sony
bought Columbia Pictures in 1989 in “the largest-ever Japanese take-
over of a US company” (Castro et al. 70); Matsushita acquired MCA
in 1990, only to resell it in 1995 (Pollack); South Korean chaebol Cheil
Jedang invested $300 million in DreamWorks (“DreamWorks East”). Yet
the same logic of mutual/perpetual technological dissemination drives
global media piracy: Sony and Matsushita introduced and continue to
distribute VCD players throughout Asia, helping to sustain an interde-
pendent market for VCD manufacturers and media pirates in the region
(Wang 50–51, 54–57). Here, technologorrhea drives a dynamic interac-
tion between domination and resistance across the Pacific.
The Ring Intertext is remarkable for its complex relation with these
forces. Comprised not only of a constellation of texts but also their indus-
trial and cultural connections, it navigates disparate temporalities, spaces,
and identities in a distinctly transnational formation. The films reveal
tensions about technology and discourse, each of which fracture into
technophilia and technophobia, logophilia and logophobia. These divi-
sions occur throughout the films’ narratives and aesthetic strategies and
resonate with greater cultural struggles among Japan, South Korea, and
the United States. Yet, these forces do not operate in a system of static
binaries, but rather dialectically, producing new forms and conditions in
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a continual process of struggle and change. As a powerful component of

170 Daniel Herbert

globalization, communications technologies help to transform radically

existing relations of geography, representation, and imagination, and The
Ring Intertext is firmly enmeshed in this process. Seen in combination,
in relation, and in their circulations, the films of The Ring Intertext draw
lines of connection across apparent cultural divides and reveal the het-
erogeneous forces that pull these lines in a struggle for cultural power.

Notes
1. In this chapter, I refer to the English translation of the novel.
2. The following films have either been remade or are in some stage of
production: Addicted (2003), Antarctica (1983), Hi Dharma (2001), Infernal Affairs
(2002), Ju-on (2003), My Sassy Girl (2001), One Missed Call (2003), Pulse (2001),
Shall We Dance (1996), and A Tale of Two Sisters (2003).
3. Ringu appears to have given new life to this convention, as it strikingly
occurs in A Tale of Two Sisters and Ju-on.
4. In the novel, the curse is caused by a virus; the ghost literally infects a
videotape, and this pseudoscientific ghostly/viral explanation also occurs in Rasen
and is obliquely implicated in Ring Virus.
5. “Holdback provisions” are standard practice in deals for remaking films,
which state that the original cannot enter a media market for a certain period
before the release of its remake (Lee qtd. in Herbert 98).
6. In Rasen the curse of the videotape makes its way into a written
account of the videotape’s contents. The end of the film implies that this writ-
ten description will be published and curse all the customers who buy and read
this “novelization.” Cure (1997), a film soon to be remade by Hollywood, also
features a similarly generative conclusion. The film tracks a serial killer who
compels others to murder by mesmerizing them through speech. At the end
of the film, the investigating detective appears to have caught the antagonist’s
“condition,” and he proceeds to compel other people to kill, continuing the cycle
of murderous discourse.
copyright law.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

10
SIMON MCENTEGGART

Sequelizing the Superhero

Postmillennial Anxiety and Cultural “Need”

T
HE RECENT RESURGENCE IN contemporary US cinema of the super-
hero film has indeed been prolific, featuring an extremely broad
range of heroic characters that not only battle “evil” but have
also been subjected to various spin-offs and sequels. Discussing the
notion of sequelization and its relation to the superhero is a particu-
larly interesting prospect because the superhero is, essentially, a fan-
tastical extension of the Western frontier hero. With the interplay of
the outsider-redeemer figure combined with themes of extralegal vio-
lence and the community under siege, the Westerner-come-superhero
thus embodies features of American cultural and religious heritage. Such
themes originated in the founding of the United States itself and are,
therefore, acutely ideologically and culturally specific. Indeed, “whereas
the classical monomyth seemed to reflect rites of initiation, the American
monomyth derives from tales of redemption” (Lawrence and Jewett 6).
As such, superhero narratives are concerned with the perpetuation of
American frontier cultural rhetoric, engaging in ideologically motivated
adventures to “tame” civilization with morality tales in conjunction with
righteous powers. Employed in this fashion, the appearance (and recur-
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rence) of superhero films during periods of sociocultural destabilization

172 Simon McEnteggart

Figure 10.1. Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006). Courtesy Warner Bros/
D.C. Comics/The Kobal Collection.

and unrest fulfill what can only be described as a cultural “need.” Using
superhero films in this way assuages anxieties of identity and reassembles
cultural traditions and values that are seemingly under threat from exter-
nal forces. Through the repetition sequelization induced, such fears are
continually allayed to indoctrinate a sense of sociocultural “calm” and
stability through patriotic confidence. The superhero sequel, therefore,
operates in several ideologically interwoven realms including identity,
repetition, memory, nostalgia, and cultural/religious frameworks that
function as an ideological support system, albeit an “ideological mystifi-
cation” allegorized in a fantastical context (Žižek 28).
This chapter explores, as Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg
describe it: “the repetition-with-variation” (Introduction 17) within the
postmillennial superhero sequel, with particular reference to the Blade,
Spider-Man, Superman, and X-Men films. The saturation of superhero
narratives and sequels at the box office is unprecedented, encapsulating a
variety of ideologically motivated discourses in response to events involv-
ing and surrounding the millennium itself. Such discourses are inherent
within the postmodernist cultural conventions that permeate the narra-
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tives, and additionally highlight the ideological reassembly in the wake

Sequelizing the Superhero 173

of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the subsequent sociocultural

upheaval that followed. The cinematic endeavors of the superhero sequel
are ultimately constructed to incorporate and re-present such historical
trauma, yet this postmodern philosophy is not without complexity.

Re-Presenting Historical Trauma

As Andreas Huyssen has acutely noted, “the past has become part of
the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries. As a result,
temporal boundaries have weakened” (1). This is particularly relevant
with regard to the superhero on film because the figure functions as a
form of “semipalimpsest” due to the adaptation process from page to
screen. The origin of each superhero reflects a dimension of the socio-
cultural destabilization of the era of inception (Wright 24), and because
this is core to characterization cannot be compromised without rewriting
the philosophies intrinsic to the hero. Yet while such previous historical
anxieties are addressed through this function, the cinematic superhero
must be continually adapted and modified to incorporate and exhibit
reflections from the ever-evolving American cultural climate. Issues of
memory and nostalgia are therefore immediately present, and indeed
re-presented, within the challenges each respective hero must face and
defeat, with victory further reinforced through the continual repetition
of sequelization.
The X-Men trilogy—X-Men (Bryan Singer, 2000), X-Men 2 (Bryan
Singer, 2003), and X-Men 3: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006)—repeat-
edly re-presents such temporal transitions. The X-Men films collapse a
variety of historical trauma within the narrative structures, which use
notions of memory and nostalgia to engage with and represent cultural
persecution in myriad forms. While the comic books themselves were
produced during the civil rights era, with the philosophical dichotomy
between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X allegorized through
Professor Charles Xavier and Magneto, the sequels also continually
reinforce the holocaust. The experiences of Magneto as a young Jewish
boy re-present the horrific trauma of the concentration camp, and as an
adult reference is repeatedly focused on his “brand” or tattoo that he
received while imprisoned (Trushell). The historical trauma of both the
holocaust and the civil rights movement are thus temporally amalgam-
ated and reinforced throughout the X-Men sequels, serving to ideologi-
cally align the “otherness” enforced on mutants as akin to the trauma of
prior atrocities. Through this alignment, the disgust and outrage at the
ignorance of such areas of international history are channeled into the
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mutant discourses, thus enforcing a more penetrative resonance among

174 Simon McEnteggart

spectators. Anti-Semitism and racism debates are therefore extended into

the antimutant hysteria within the sequels, using memory simultane-
ously to broaden and deepen empathy with the plight—and potential
future—of those with mutation.
Additionally, such usage casts Magneto not in a simplified context
of “evil” but as a misguided antihero of sorts. The awareness of his hor-
rific experiences, emphasized through re-presentation and the repetition
of sequelization, contend that his intent and motivations are virtuous, but
undermined through extremism. Similar to Malcolm X, Magneto rejects
the peaceful coexistence Professor Xavier sought after for more proactive
and extremist methods that ultimately result in a re-enactment of his
fascist past. Indeed, Magneto is seemingly unaware that his trauma has
fashioned him into a dictator figure, most starkly represented through
his costume that employs motifs from Hitler and the Nazi military. In a
more contemporary context, Magneto’s threatening televisual broadcasts
and incitement for mutant violence also displays connotations of Osama
bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. His vehement belief and extremist actions in
his goal for supremacy contribute to such a reading, and as a more recent
re-presentation of historical trauma, invite outrage. Historical trauma is
central to Magneto, with his victimization during the holocaust intrin-
sic to his morality. However, such trauma is countered by alternative
memory politics exemplifying fascism and extremism that position him
as a simultaneously misguided and ruthless villain.
Through the distinctly postmodern amalgamation of temporal
space and memory politics, “the reflexive past of representation” informs
cultural and ideological meanings ascribed within the superhero sequel
(Deleuze, Difference 71). As such, the sequels employ a wealth of histori-
cal connotations that fundamentally permeate the narrative in order to
address the ideological destabilization of the moment. With the postmil-
lennial superhero sequel, the reassembly of national identity has been
invoked by anxieties including the millennium itself, the events of 9/11
and the concept of terrorism. With both X-Men and Blade (Stephen
Norrington, 1998), the confrontations that occur are internal conflicts
between the heroes and villains that transpire within the United States.
Yet the subsequent sequels, X-Men 2 and Blade II (Guillermo del Toro,
2002), produced after 9/11, reveal an external ideological threat that
forces both factions to set aside their differences to engage with a greater
menace, a narrative trait emblematic of the cultural rhetoric following
the attack on the Twin Towers. However, the superhero sequel does not
merely reflect such contemporary (and seemingly controversial) cultural
discourses, it actively engages with them: re-presenting motifs based on
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9/11 itself with the superhero—the embodiment of traditional American

Sequelizing the Superhero 175

cultural values—attempting to save the populace from an event that has

already transpired. As Pam Cook argues, “rather than being seen as a
reactionary, regressive condition imbued with sentimentality, it can be
perceived as a way of coming to terms with the past. . . . In other words,
while not necessarily progressive in itself, nostalgia can form part of a
transition to progress and modernity” (4).
Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006) incorporates nostalgia
throughout the respective narrative, in particular through allegorized
forms of 9/11, to achieve such a transition. In Superman Returns, during
an inaugural flight mission that propels a space shuttle to launch via a
plane, an accident occurs causing the craft to spiral out of control, fall-
ing toward an explosive finale on US soil. While no public monument
resembling the Twin Towers as such exists, the plane is on a collision
course with a baseball stadium, a venue associated with a beloved area of
American cultural heritage. While a direct re-presentation of an aircraft
colliding with a culturally iconic building (something like the Twin Tow-
ers) would have been an extremely controversial scenario (one viewed in
poor taste), the postmillennial superhero sequel deftly avoids this through
its selection and allegorical rendering of the target. Superman Returns
can, therefore, incorporate the plane-as-missile circumstances of 9/11
yet allegorize the cultural importance of the target.
While “the death’s head, that elusive sign of allegorical history” of
9/11 is re-presented in the postmillennial superhero sequel, the significant
departure from historical fact, and subsequently memory of the event,
is derived through the intervention of the superhero figure (Lowenstein
76). As the superhero functions as representative of traditional American
religious and cultural values, his or her presence within the narrative
informs the reassembly of national identity following 9/11. Thus when
Superman halts the plane from colliding, anxiety is assuaged and identity
restored, even if this restoration is illusory. The repetition of superheroic
intervention, induced through sequelization, additionally contributes to
such ideological reformation by repeatedly allaying distress and anguish.
The re-presentation of the historical trauma of 9/11 uses memory of the
event to heighten the intensity of the cinematic interpretation; yet with
the intervention of the outsider-redeemer superhero, history is cinemati-
cally rewritten to allay the post-traumatic symptoms of the US populace.
The postmillennial superhero sequel is ideologically concerned with rees-
tablishing American national identity by allegorically re-presenting the
historical trauma of 9/11 and adapting events that allow the superhero
(and American cultural values) to triumph. Cultural victory is continually
reaffirmed and perpetuated through the repetition of the patriotic images
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contained within each superhero film and each sequel.

176 Simon McEnteggart

The re-presentation of historical reality is an extremely postmodern

dialectic, what Jean Baudrillard critically refers to as “substituting signs of
the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process
by its operational double . . . which provides all the signs of the real and
short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (Simulacra 4). In the symbolic re-pre-
sentation of historical trauma, the intentions of the superhero sequel
are cultural compensation; just as Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P.
Cosmatos, 1985) re-presented “victory” in the Vietnam War and Rocky
IV (Sylvester Stallone, 1985) re-presented the cold war “triumph” allego-
rized in a boxing match, the superhero sequel ultimately achieves simi-
lar ideological ends. Such “prosthetic memories” thus inform cultural
rehabilitation during social upheaval (Cook 2). As Ian Gordon states,
“by tying popular memory to marketable figures, nostalgia has become
a way of owning the past” (192). Yet it is the primary function of such
an ownership through the superhero sequel that national identity crises
are addressed and catered for, therefore performing a pivotal role in the
reconstruction of a cinematic ideological consensus.
The postmillennial superhero sequel contributes to the reassembly
of ideological stability not only through explicit 9/11 allegories, but also
by using alternative representations of cultural conflict. In Blade Trinity
(David S. Goyer, 2004), for example, the mythology surrounding Dracula
is dramatically altered. The traditional history of the character Bram
Stoker established is jettisoned, replacing Dracula’s aristocratic Euro-
pean origins in Transylvania with warlord status and deity worship in
the Middle East. Dracula’s pyramid-like tomb is also located in Syria
(with additional direct reference to Iraq), and Dracula is much more
violent and bloodthirsty than his nineteenth-century counterpart. He was
“born perfect” as the ultimate embodiment of pure evil without any
weaknesses. Such a mythological overhaul ultimately posits the region
as the origin of all evil because it was there that Dracula emerged as
the source of vampirism. Without him, there would be no vampires
at all, and thus no enemies for Blade to fight. That Dracula was wor-
shipped in the Middle East thousands of years earlier also denounces
religious beliefs from that region because to worship Dracula is to wor-
ship death and war. While Blade Trinity does not directly allegorize the
events of 9/11 itself, the reassembly of US national identity is conveyed
through cultural dichotomy and oppositional discourses. In this regard,
the history and culture of the Middle East is re-presented as barbaric,
violent, and fascist, as opposed to the civilization, peace, and freedom
the United States represents. Notably, the dichotomy also incorporates
religion within this framework. Because the Middle East is aligned with
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such negative traits and because Dracula was previously revered as a

Sequelizing the Superhero 177

deity, Islamic faith is also by extension subjected to the same negative

connotations. As such, Islamic faith is represented in opposition to the
positive discourses aligned with the United States, and in this context,
in opposition to Christianity. Employing this divisive ideological device
in this manner is, as Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies attest, “an
adversarial vision of the world described in sharply moralist terms with
clear imperial meaning” (143). The battle between Blade and Dracula
is not simply a conflict of hero and villain, therefore, but of various
ideological binary discourses:

Middle East America

Barbarism Civilization
Fascism Democracy
Islam Christianity
Vampire Human
Bloodthirsty violence Righteous violence
Hedonism Restraint
Evil Good
Dracula Blade
“Them” “Us”

In representing ideological conflict in this fashion, Blade Trinity emphasiz-

es American cultural values as undoubtedly righteous ones. Furthermore,
these binary divisions ensure that Blade—one of the few African-Ameri-
can superheroes, and something of a blaxploitation antihero—automati-
cally adopts a position always available to his Caucasian counterparts.
This ensures the triumph of American cultural values and the stabili-
zation of identity, even while (as argued later) maintaining racial and
religious points of demarcation.
X-Men 3: The Last Stand also exhibits such ideological traits, yet
the fundamental source on which the narrative is predicated—notions of
“otherness” and the acceptance thereof—allows for an interesting devia-
tion. Rather than pure ideological reformation, the narrative simulta-
neously reinforces and criticizes post–9/11 US cultural rhetoric. While
the long-established opposition of freedom versus fascism is prevalent
through the confrontations between the X-Men and the extremist Broth-
erhood, the premise of a “mutant cure” is introduced that allows con-
formity with regular humans. The procedure is a choice, however the
bigotry toward those with the mutant gene, combined with the weapon-
ization of the “cure,” insinuate otherwise. Of particular note is that the
manufacturing of the drug is also located at the detention center on the
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island of Alcatraz where the mutants are held captive. Thus, with the
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

178 Simon McEnteggart

Figure 10.2. X-Men: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006). Courtesy 20th
Century Fox/The Kobal Collection.

themes of detention and conformity on an island close to the US main-

land, allegories of Guantánamo Bay, where the suspected Islamic mili-
tants that are detained and questioned—perhaps indefinitely—arise and
find metaphoric characterization in the mutant detainees. The mutant,
code-named Leech, whose ability suppresses the mutant gene and is the
source of the “cure,” is detained within a white padded cell, which is
monitored and subjected to experimentation. The information derived
from Leech halts the progress of the extremist Brotherhood, and as such
Leech adopts the position of a political prisoner, much in the same way
an Islamic informant may influence contemporary conflict. Leech’s status
as a political prisoner, and the weaponization of his information, incites
the mutant population into violence via the Brotherhood, or alternatively
to seek sanctuary (and integration) with the X-Men. This philosophical
division allegorizes the contemporary Islamic religious division, and as
the X-Men emerge victorious, so too does co-existence and US values.
Interestingly, however, only through the extremist actions of the Broth-
erhood is Leech freed from his detention and the very concept of the
“cure” revoked. Because the focus of the narrative is concerned with the
extremist oppression of freedom, the sequel foregrounds the restoration
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of US identity and cultural values through such ideological instigation.

Sequelizing the Superhero 179

The postmillennial superhero sequel re-presents revised historical

events amalgamated with traditional American value systems, attempting,
through the repetition of cinematic devices and the perpetual cycle of
sequelization itself, to allay the sociopolitical concerns of the populace
post–9/11. Gilles Deleuze explains: “repetition is essentially inscribed
in need, since need rests upon an instance which essentially involves
repetition: which forms the for-itself of repetition and the for-itself of
a certain duration” (Difference 77). As such, superhero sequels operate a
cultural need to reestablish identity through the repetition of a revised
memory and nostalgia until an equilibrium has been restored. However,
the anxiety and social malaise exhibited in post–9/11 US culture is intrin-
sically tied with theories of apocalypse, notions that had already incited
fear at the turn of the millennium, fears that the superhero sequel also
attempts to allay.

Halting the (Religious) Apocalypse

As Huyssen acknowledges: “at stake in the current history/memory debate

is not only a disturbance of our notions of the past, but a fundamental
crisis in our imagination of alternative futures” (2). Such bleak, dystopian
visions of the future were heightened at the turn of the millennium,
exemplified by films such as Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995), End of
Days (Peter Hyams, 1999), and The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski,
1999). The events of 9/11, and the subsequent trauma, intensified the
impending sense of angst, instigating additional apocalyptic premonitions
throughout much of Western popular culture. The apocalyptic future is
an ideological and theological concern due to its biblical origins, arous-
ing both social anxiety as well as religious fundamentalism. Lee Quinby
argues, “Americans have been taught to reside in apocalyptic terror
and count on millennial perfection. For a substantial number, this is an
intense Bible-based fundamentalism. For a larger majority, these fears
and hopes are more nebulous, a loose blend of religious symbols and
secular expression. In the United States, this imprecise yet overpowering
belief system is a way of life” (5).
Apocalyptic visions, and the Judeo-Christian theology intrinsic
in its prevalence, are repeatedly represented within the postmillennial
superhero sequel, a form of cinematic “biblical sequelization.” Religious
allegories amalgamated with cultural rhetoric are frequently used, and
incorporated with the intervention of the outsider-redeemer, in the reas-
sembly of national identity. Although many texts regarding the religious
philosophy are inherent within the superhero narrative, the dystopic
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visualization represented by the millennial superhero sequel(s) highlights

180 Simon McEnteggart

contemporary ideological and theological upheaval (see Garrett; Oro-

peza; Skelton).
Superman Returns initially represents the apocalypse in miniaturized
form, as Lex Luthor verifies his intentions of dominating real estate. In
a fully functioning model village, Luthor experiments with a fragment of
kryptonian crystal to assess the implications and potential benefits. The
results destroy the model “capitalist” and “natural” landscapes within
the village, devastate the highly intricate transport systems, explode oil
rigs, and cause the “death” of scores of the population. This apoca-
lyptic premonition exhibits the religious and cultural angst fundamental
throughout US history, due to the biblical connotations ascribed to the
very land itself. The utopian idealism and Christian fervor that existed
during the “founding” of the United States extended into the land as
paradise, as a substitute Eden. As this religious ideology has perpetuated
through time, notions of apocalypse are inherently tied to the destruction
of the United States/Eden. “The obvious model for this monomythic
Eden,” Lawrence and Jewett attest, “is the Midwestern small town as
seen through the lens of pastoralism” (23). Superman’s hometown of
Smallville, and model village decimated in the apocalyptic portent, exem-
plify the Edenic landscape under threat, which Luthor intensifies through
kryptonian experimentation. The experiment is also responsible for the
occurrence (and re-presentation) of 9/11 allegories, insinuating that the
two events are not mutually exclusive but inherently tied. In doing so,
the link between 9/11 and the apocalypse is made explicit, serving to
heighten doomsday anxieties and increase the need for superheroic, and
messianic, intervention.
When Luthor attempts to administer his scheme and the apoca-
lypse achieves fruition, the sequel uses memory and nostalgia from the
Bible and prior Superman films to reconstitute national identity and alle-
viate anxiety. As the dystopic land mass rises from the depths threat-
ening the Edenic landscape of the United States, Superman intervenes
and removes the hellish terrain through his explicit Christ-like allegories
and his alignment with Judeo-Christian themes of enlightenment. Thus
Superman, as the messianic embodiment of US cultural and religious
heritage, simultaneously fulfils the role of averting the apocalypse and
the prophesized Second Coming, displacing anxiety with religious and
national faith. “In a paradoxical sort of way,” argues Capps, “religion pro-
duces fears that result in the anxieties that religion then seeks either to
eliminate or assuage” (141). As an allegory of Christ, Superman adheres
to the voice of his omniscient father, ascends to the (metaphoric) heav-
ens, and knowingly “sacrifices” himself—in crucifixion posture—for the
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sins of the planet in preventing Judgment Day. Although the apocalyp-

Sequelizing the Superhero 181

tic fears represented through the model town achieve (limited) fruition,
the re-presented repetition of biblical narratives, amalgamated with the
intervention of the redemptive superpowers of Superman, serve to allay
apocalyptic and theological angst.
Similarly, Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) and its sequels—Spi-
der-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2004, 2007)—contain such
ideological reinforcement. Christian allegories abound, such as the Green
Goblin and Spider-Man reenact scenes from the Bible and quote scrip-
ture during confrontations (Richardson). The Green Goblin even inter-
rupts Aunt May’s prayers to posit himself explicitly as the epitome of
religious evil. In the sequel, Spider-Man saves a train of civilians while
in a crucifixion posture, and he is then lifted and carried above the heads
of those he has saved, with a prominent injury in his side evoking the
wound caused by the Holy Spear. The entire event re-presents the bib-
lical narrative surrounding Christ’s crucifixion, as Spider-Man sacrifices
himself, due to the greed and wrath of his enemies, to save innocent
civilians. With Spider-Man’s capture by Venom and the Sandman in the
third installment, Spider-Man is again forced into the crucifixion posture
while his proposed “sins” are recounted. The only way in which the hero
escapes an untimely demise is through the continual reference to biblical
themes of forgiveness and his benevolent use toward his enemies. Thus
when representations of an apocalyptic nature arise, Spider-Man’s align-
ment with Judeo-Christian morality plays connotes religious righteous-
ness as he vanquishes his nemeses. As with Superman, such righteousness
is represented as inherently American through the continual presence
of the US flag and the iconography of Spider-Man’s costume, with the
monomythic Eden present in his suburban origins. As such, when the
climatic battle with the Green Goblin occurs in an extremely dystopic,
hazardous landscape, the Goblin melds with the mise-en-scène seam-
lessly, cementing his satanic association. Spider-Man protrudes from the
dystopian milieu, rejecting alignment, and is tormented both physically
and psychologically until his virtuous retaliation defeats his foe, remov-
ing the apocalyptic premonition from its potential fulfillment. Similarly,
Dr. Octopus, in his attempts to create sustainable fusion, forges a hellish
apocalyptic sphere that threatens to engulf New York City by assimilating
and vaporizing the Edenic landscape. Again, Spider-Man’s intervention
halts the apocalypse therefore restoring religious and national identity
once more.
The sequelization process uses the repetition of memory and
nostalgia to allay religious anxieties, re-presenting Christian iconogra-
phy and narrative devices in conjunction with national identity. This
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simultaneously alleviates fears of apocalypse and enforces Christian

182 Simon McEnteggart

fundamentalism as a superior, righteous ideology. However, the rep-

etition evokes postmodernist concerns regarding the dissolution of the
“real” as divinity is reproduced through icons (Baudrillard, Simulacra 8).
In this context, replicating biblical narratives with superhuman agen-
cies dilutes the meanings pertaining to Christianity while still fulfilling
the cultural “need.” While Superman Returns and the Spider-Man tril-
ogy exemplify the reproduction of the “real” through abilities of the
body, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Tim Story, 2007) takes an
alternative approach. The Silver Surfer traverses space acting as a her-
ald for the cosmic entity known as Galactus, a being that absorbs, or
rather consumes, the life energies from planets. biblical parallels are clear,
with Earth as Eden, Galactus as (an unmerciful) God, and the Surfer
as “created” son. Indeed, the Silver Surfer functions as celestial divin-
ity by halting the apocalypse, and seemingly sacrificing himself for the
people of Earth, despite the greed, wrath, and envy Dr. Doom exhibits.
What differentiates the Messianic Surfer from other superheroes is the
derivation of his powers. Cosmic energies are channeled through his
surfboard and, as such, the source of his celestial divinity lies within the
relation between them. The surfboard operates much like the crucifix,
in that the crucifix and its relation with Jesus Christ is fundamental
to Christian theology, and it is arguably the image on which the faith
continually bases itself. The “real” icon of Christian divinity is Christ’s
crucifixion, where the resonance and power of the relation between Jesus
and the crucifix, and the sacrifice made, are focused. In a postmodern
dialectic, the Surfer’s relation with his surfboard, and the power derived
from their union, allegorizes the icon of divinity into an existentialist
form. In doing so, the halting of the apocalypse and the sacrifice of the
superhero extend beyond that of the more physical heroes into an acutely
postmodern, celestial, and existentialist conception.
This redemptive function is, however, not available to all. As an
African-American hero, the character of Blade is limited in the extent to
which Christian allegorical meanings are produced. Like Superman and
Spider-Man, the titular hero in Blade is forced to adopt the crucifixion
posture, but in this case he is drained of blood for his nemesis Deacon
Frost to inaugurate a “vampire apocalypse.” Blade returns from the brink
of death by drinking the blood of his love interest in a highly sexu-
alized—and Oedipal—sequence, reborn not through the righteousness
attributed his white peers but through “perverse” fleshly desires. The
animalistic context in which Blade’s rebirth occurs, in conjunction with
the antihero/blaxploitation themes permeating the narrative, reduces the
connotations derived from the religious allegories. In doing so, Blade has
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limited access to divine meanings, and is instead associated with fleshly

Sequelizing the Superhero 183

sins and barbarism, and as such is denied Messianic status. Indeed, the
vampire apocalypse is only possible due to the very existence of Blade,
who becomes indirectly responsible for the atrocity. Additionally, Blade
uses his redemptive abilities in extreme violence against his enemies,
resulting in a variety of explicit fatalities, a feature inadmissible for his
white counterparts. Blade II incorporates similar biblical and apocalyptic
narrative devices as Blade is again graphically crucified and drained of
life. Yet his subsequent rebirth in a waterfall of blood simultaneously reju-
venates and baptizes him, allowing his violent eradication of vampires to
continue. The Blade trilogy incorporates severely restricted biblical alle-
gories, allowing Blade’s redemptive abilities to fulfill the cultural “need”
during postmillennial anxiety, yet concurrently reinforcing racial stereo-
types. Therefore, while Blade immobilizes one apocalypse after another,
he is categorized as an antihero and a “lesser” superhero than his white
peers. Blade, as an African-American superhero, is never allowed into
the spiritual and sacrificial realm of allegorical meaning pertaining to
Christ’s crucifixion, allegories his white counterparts readily embody; he
is continually reborn in a barbaric, animalistic context that is predicated
on sexual and bodily indulgences of the flesh, which he subsequently
articulates into extreme, fatal violence against his oppressors. While the
Blade sequels adhere to reconstituting national and religious identity
by averting the apocalypse and vanquishing the enemy, the films also
arguably inform another cultural function of reestablishing the dominant
social (and racial) hierarchy.
Despite increasing secularization, such apocalyptic anxieties and
re-presented biblical narratives are still prevalent in Western popular
culture. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett acknowledge that:
“the connection of these superhero materials with the American religious
heritage illustrates the displacement of the story of redemption. Only in
a culture preoccupied for centuries with the question of salvation is the
appearance of redemption through superheroes comprehensible” (44).
Therefore the anxieties, as well as their allayment, are attributed to the
nostalgia of biblical texts that are re-presented throughout the postmil-
lennial superhero sequels. They perform a cultural function in alleviat-
ing sociocultural and theological concerns, by representing apocalyptic
premonitions and using the superhero to halt the impending doom. This
collapsing of temporal space and cultural narratives reflects the disso-
lution of postmodern boundaries that additionally contributes to post-
millennial social unrest. Various motifs, and consequently the meanings
derived from them, are intertwined to re-present alternative ideological
interpretations and resolutions in support of American cultural rhetoric.
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These cinematic devices within the superhero sequel extend beyond the
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184 Simon McEnteggart

re-presented sociocultural events that reside within the narrative and into
the very modernist boundaries of life and death, and psychology.

“Don’t you people ever die?!”

—X-Men

The postmodern destabilization of the postmillennial superhero’s—and

villain’s—body and mind is indicative of cultural uncertainty and anxiety,
as once-previous thresholds, considered absolutes, dissipate. The pre-
millennial superhero films (and sequels) witnessed the death or perma-
nent removal of the vast majority of villains preventing their appearance
in future sequels, the only notable deviation being Lex Luthor within
the Superman series. Paul Budra argues that “a specifically postmodern
unease is generated, not by encroaching threats, but by the perception
that the world is increasingly one in which borders have collapsed, in
which preconceptions, hierarchies, absolutes, and perhaps reason itself
are being abandoned” (191). While in this context the superhero film
rather obviously involves superpowers, the postmodern use of the body
and mind, and the erosion of traditional notions of life and death, reflects
contemporary ideological unrest.
The villains in the Spider-Man sequels are extremely postmodern
creations, becoming even more culturally iconic through their fluctua-
tions between various, and previously regarded stable, realms. When
Norman Osborn volunteers as the preliminary test subject in experi-
mental procedures he becomes the Green Goblin but is completely
unaware of his transformation. As well as his augmented musculature
and reflexes, Norman also develops a form of dual personality. As such,
this allows him to traverse both the professional (capitalist) realm and
the personal (Goblin) realm at ease in consolidating power and maintain-
ing his empire. In doing so, the Freudian boundary between the id and
the ego has become permeable, allowing Norman to at times adhere to
patriarchal law, and at others subvert it completely, all at the discretion of
his unconscious. Yet Norman’s complete unawareness of his dual person-
ality disorder insinuates that, although a questionable husband and father
figure, he is not so much the “villain,” but helpless to his neurosis. Nor-
man does eventually understand and conflate both arenas in his desire
for self-aggrandizement, conversing maniacally with himself in a mirror
as he schemes against Spider-Man. This representation of mental illness,
with two distinct personalities within one mind, incorporates postmodern
anxiety as the sheer unpredictability of Norman’s mental illness inspires
fear, suspicion, and paranoia. Indeed, in the final confrontation between
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the Green Goblin and Spider-Man, Norman attempts to reconcile by

Sequelizing the Superhero 185

attempting to explain his circumstances, yet the distrust, combined with

the continual erosion of the id/ego boundary, ends in death. The dis-
solution of modernist boundaries, and the anxieties caused, requires
allayment in the superhero film, and as such the resolution can only be
achieved through Norman’s removal; a psychiatric unit could unwittingly
release him to menace society once more, thus death appears the per-
manent solution. Norman’s death itself is of particular interest because
it functions as a suicide, commonly associated with the mentally ill while
also regarded by Christianity as a sin. What constructs the Green Goblin
as distinctly villainous is not so much his physical empowerment, but a
mental illness that has become increasingly renowned in contemporary
popular culture, one that has the ability to afflict any individual and as
such instigates social unrest.
This postmodern polemic continues in Spider-Man 2 as Norman’s
son Harry, so embittered with a hatred for Spider-Man, actually witnesses
and converses with his deceased father. Believing Spider-Man murdered
Norman, and following the shock of revelation that his supposed enemy’s
true identity is his best friend, Peter Parker, Harry’s mind succumbs to
the same illness that ensnared his father. Harry’s dual personality takes
the form of Norman rather than an idealized maniacal version of him-
self; this simultaneously resumes the anxieties involving mental illness and
emotional trauma, and additionally reveals that Norman can never truly
“die” because he is incapable of death. Norman’s physical body may be
destroyed, but as a psychological condition he can live forever, and as
such his villainous machinations will continue. As Harry also dons the
mantle of the Goblin in Spider-Man 3, the sequelized repetition of dual
personality mental disorder reinforces the anxieties involving the dissolu-
tion of the boundaries of death and the mind. In doing so, the films asso-
ciate the danger and violence of the villains with the illnesses themselves,
rather than purely on the basis of evil intent. Such themes are solidified
further with the temporary amnesia Harry develops after battle because
he is continually susceptible to personality alterations, and is therefore an
unpredictable threat. Harry frequently changes between faithful ally and
Machiavellian adversary, repetitively instigating conflict and distress with
his almost-whimsical play with the traditional boundaries of the id and ego,
and the conscious and unconscious. As with his father, only through death
does Harry’s torment end, and sociocultural apprehension is appeased;
yet similarly, this is not to say that they or their goals will not resurface
through other potential villains. Despite the interventions of Spider-Man,
his actions are a temporary respite; mental illness has the ability to afflict
any individual, and as such social unrest is perpetuated, with villains and
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their neuroses potentially recurring within any future sequels.

186 Simon McEnteggart

Spider-Man’s other villains similarly disturb the boundaries of both

body and mind. Dr. Octopus attaches four robotic limbs to his spinal
column, and with the destruction of the neural inhibitor microchip also
allows the artificial intelligence to become amalgamated with his mind.
Dr. Octopus converts into a hybrid of man and machine, while also des-
ignated as an animal, blurring the boundaries between oppositional areas
that have been a (post)modern paranoia in science fiction for decades,
from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) to The Matrix. Octavius is seemingly
punished for ambitiously defying scientific limitations and attempting
self-exaltation to obtain, as he describes it, “the power of the sun in the
palm of [his] hand.” The Sandman meanwhile has the ability to alter
his body into any size, shape, and mass, with his namesake derivative
of not only his capabilities, but also the fairy-tale character that permits
and enters dreams. Lastly, Venom is a hybrid of human and alien, with
a sentient-yet-symbiotic costume that has duplicated Spider-Man’s abili-
ties. In each case, the villain is an amalgamation, or anthropomorphic, of
a variety of generally oppositional discourses: science and nature, body
and mind, human and alien, reality and mythology, and so forth. While
Spider-Man himself permeates similar boundaries, his access to American
religious and cultural heritage halts any potential anxiety involving his
powers. As his nemeses reject such an alignment, they are construed as
perverse violations of the natural order, and therefore monstrous.
The X-Men sequels disrupt postmodern boundaries in an alterna-
tive context due to the focus on “otherness” and cultural acceptance.
“The mutant body is oxymoronic,” argues Scott Bukatman, “rigidly
protected but dangerously unstable. In its infinite malleability and over-
determined adolescent iconography, the mutant superhero is a locus of
bodily ritual” (96). Because mutation is genetic in nature rather than
acquired, potentially anyone could be afflicted and develop superpow-
ers, be cast as a mutant, and persecuted as “other.” The more obvious
allegory is that of pubescent angst, yet X-Men 2 also aligns the victim-
ization of mutants with homophobia, as Iceman amusingly “comes out”
to his parents to which they rather ignorantly remark, “Have you tried
not being a mutant?” The sequels repeatedly represent such prejudice
at governmental and social levels. Because the alignment is with those
persecuted however, the sequels attempt to allay the postmodern anxiety
that potentially anyone could be a mutant, or different, from the domi-
nant aspects of Western culture that could be construed as ideologically
threatening.
Many of the characters also return from death. Jean Grey is killed
in the finale of X-Men 2 yet, “there is a definite allusion to a great
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leap forward in evolution beyond physical death,” due to the response

Sequelizing the Superhero 187

of Professor Xavier and the shadow of the Phoenix (Housel 85). Jean
is reborn as the Phoenix in X-Men 3 due to her telekinetic abilities in
which she not only displays power of unlimited capacity but also has
a dual personality disorder. This mental illness is again predicated on
the dissolution between the id and ego, between restraint and abandon,
and as such “good” and “evil” personalities. The abilities “Dark” Jean
exhibits can alter matter at the molecular level and reshape reality at a
whim, resulting in a massacre that includes the “death” of her mentor
Professor Xavier. Jean dissolves postmodern boundaries of death, the
mind, and more profoundly her evolved state, as each area is never an
absolute; Jean is unlimited in her capacity to alter anything in reality, and
in doing so destroys any and all preconceived boundaries of modernity.
Even her “death” at the hands of Wolverine cannot be considered abso-
lute because reality is susceptible only to her unbridled desires. Professor
Xavier meanwhile is subsequently revealed to have survived his “death”
as well, transplanting his consciousness into that of a comatose patient
that simultaneously disrupts postmodern boundaries and opens debates
regarding the ethical use of superpowers.
The premise of X-Men 3 resides in the creation of a “cure” for
the mutant gene that is gratuitously applied on the mutant population,
most notably on the extremist Brotherhood coalition. By the end of the
sequel, scores of mutants, including Magneto, have been “cured” of their
abilities and thus the postmodern threat is alleviated. However, after the
climatic battle on Alcatraz, Magneto demonstrates that the nullification
of his abilities was temporary, and as such it is implied that every mutant
affected should, in time, reacquire his or her abilities. Therefore the
postmodern threats, and the option for further sequels, is a viable com-
modity as all the heroes and villains previously considered incapacitated
can return to engage in further sociocultural re-presentations.
The sequelization of such postmodern themes in the Blade sequels
uses different conventions due to the horror motifs within the narra-
tive. Budra claims that in “postmodern horror films the interplay of
meanings that has arisen from the postmodern rejection of certitude is
itself presented . . . as a collective madness which is completely homicidal,
monstrous, because it kills established orders and values, slashes moral
certainties, and stomps on ontological assumptions” (191). In Blade, the
vampires represented are in accordance with the cultural mythology in
which they have become accustomed. Yet in Blade II a new “race” of vam-
pires has been genetically designed. They drink blood not through fangs,
but through a mandible jaw that horrifically separates and paralyses prey,
while a “tongue” extracts blood and plasma to feed. The genetic modifi-
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cations also create a new set of “rules” with regard to their destruction
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188 Simon McEnteggart

because the modified vampires are now immune to garlic and silver, and
they have an impenetrable bone chassis around the heart. Additionally,
their prey is the vampire because it provides lasting sustenance, rather
than the traditional human opponent. As the mythology of the traditional
vampire has become standardized in Western culture, the resurgence
of such postmodern techniques intensifies the anxiety of the unknown
vampiric monster, escalating anguish and horror. Blade Trinity destabilizes
such boundaries even further with the introduction of a physically mal-
leable Dracula and vampire dogs, both in the traditional form as well
as genetically modified examples. In representing vampirism and genetic
manipulation in such a fashion, the threat becomes more widespread,
more imposing, and above all, more evil. When Blade defeats his new
postmodern enemies, he restores the narrative to the traditional status of
human and vampire. In doing so, he returns the equilibrium to the more
culturally “known,” and therefore removes the uncertainty and paranoia
of those that ignore the boundaries of modernity. Yet even this premise
is problematic because the traditional vampires are also deviant. They
snort powdered blood in the fashion of cocaine, and they can be returned
to human state with a viral detox once bitten. The nature of vampirism
in the Blade series is constantly in flux and generates anxiety due to this
refusal of stability.
The anxieties prevalent within the dissolution of postmodern
boundaries are explicitly ideological, inscribed in the theological and cul-
tural unrest throughout Western culture at the turn of the millennium.
Postmillennial superhero sequels portray such paranoia, predominantly
aligning the angst with the villains that perpetuate the narratives, serving
to connote the erosions as evil. However this also provides an additional
function. In associating postmodern motifs with the nemesis, the villains
become iconic in status and can be continually used through further
sequelization due to their popularity, and as such superheroes can repeat-
edly battle with the evolving sociocultural fears these threats embody.
Superheroes are not subject to the same regulations as their counterparts:
“whether [because of] a ‘miraculous’ return from seeming death, or a
return to the right path, the values they embody are too strong to quell
or kill” (Fingeroth 167). It is in embodying and re-presenting such tra-
ditional cultural and religious heritage that the cinematic superhero can
never die or retire because he or she is continually sequelized to engage
with the sociocultural unrest as valued by villainous nemeses.
Sequelizing the postmillennial superhero employs myriad postmod-
ern techniques. As Michael Zeitlin attests, “postmodern sequels tend less
to follow, serve, and continue than to select, incorporate, and transform
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their precursor texts” (161). The precursor texts in question not only
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Sequelizing the Superhero 189

include the previous comic book influences and cinematic interpretations,

but also the cultural and political discourses that have evolved over time.
The millennium and the events of 9/11 have ushered unprecedented
levels of sociocultural anxiety, which are, in turn, reflected and re-pre-
sented. The postmillennial superhero sequel incorporates such unrest
within the narrative in the attempted reassembly of national identity,
eroding postmodern boundaries of memory and nostalgia, historical
trauma, theological angst, and Cartesian discourses. In amalgamating
such temporal, philosophical, and cultural themes, the postmillennial
superhero sequel informs an ideological “need.” Anxieties in the popular
consciousness are repeatedly re-presented allegorically in order for the
superhero, the embodiment of traditional American religious and cultural
values, to vanquish such anguish from the public sphere. The “divergence
between so-called reality and our distorted representation” (Žižek 28) is
indeed problematic with regard to the use of signs as simulacra of the
real, using re-presentations within the sequels to allay social unrest and
simultaneously construct a new collective “memory” and by extension a
new cultural equilibrium. The postmillennial superhero sequel is a highly
complex cinematic text, predicated on the confrontation and alleviation
of sociocultural anxieties that permeate American culture. As such, super-
heroes will continually re-emerge during periods of upheaval and unrest,
to battle allegorically the evolving social, cultural, and theological threats
that spread angst throughout the United States.
copyright law.
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11
NICHOLAS ROMBES

Before and After and Right Now

Sequels in the Digital Era

T
HIS CHAPTER ASKS QUESTIONS about the relation between sequels
and digital media that, in its database structure, highlights and
transforms the process of rearranging time to tell stories, a
process that, always fundamental to cinema, was often concealed. Rather
than unfold in a linear, analytical fashion, the chapter borrows from
our contemporary understanding of the archive in the digital era, where
information seems never to disappear, but remains stored in vast data-
bases. As Jacques Derrida has reminded us, the “archivization produces
as much as it records the event” (17), and this chapter is the product
of a certain slant of thinking about digital archives, a slant of thinking
no doubt infected by the very structures of archiving that it describes.
Going on to think about the processes by which human presence is both
perpetuated and rendered unnecessary by new digital effects, this chapter
challenges conceptualizations of reality within this milieu of “before” and
“after,” and therefore to notions of originality.
As the ever-growing digital archive makes the past evermore acces-
sible, how do we speak of “before” and “after” in cinema? Imagining
the linear temporality that for so long characterized narrative cinema is
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increasingly difficult in part because the ubiquity of media and media

192 Nicholas Rombes

Figure 11.1. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986). Courtesy 20th Century Fox/The
Kobal Collection.

interfaces means that stories are continually in a “present” state. During

the classical cinema era—roughly from the 1930s through the 1950s—
viewers had very little control over physical interaction with the screen.
Sequels were released and viewed according to the economic imperatives
of the studios. In the twenty-first century, however, what does releasing
a sequel mean when audiences exercise a much greater degree of control
over not only the film cycle that includes sequels, but over the temporal
dimensions of individual films themselves? In what ways do the numer-
ous bonus features, added material, and alternate endings and footage
included on DVDs contribute to the conceptualization of the sequel in
contemporary film production?
Temporal disorder is a key figure of the digital era, which is further
characterized by what Fredric Jameson has called a “crisis in historicity”
whereby the past, present, and future meld into a vaguely ahistorical,
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floating present (“Postmodernism” 118; see also Cubitt, Mulvey). And

Before and After and Right Now 193

yet—at the same time—audiences are perhaps more literate about film
and cinema history and the material conditions of film production than
ever before. Sequels sit at the heart of this contradiction because they
foreground some of the most complex gestures associated with the dis-
solution of temporal distinctness in the digital era.
The entire notion of sequels suggests a familiarity with the “origi-
nal.” For instance, Aliens (James Cameron)—the 1986 sequel to Alien
(Ridley Scott, 1979)—assumes some knowledge of the basic Alien story-
line, but reiterates the basic plot of the first movie during an early scene
when Ripley is questioned by a Board of Inquiry about the circumstances
that led her to destroy the ship in this exchange:

VAN LEUWEN
Look at it from our perspective. You freely admit to detonating
the engines of, and thereby destroying, an M–Class star-freighter.
A rather expensive piece of hardware. . . .

INSURANCE INVESTIGATOR (dryly)

Forty-two million in adjusted dollars. That’s minus payload, of
course.

VAN LEUWEN
The shuttle’s flight recorder corroborates some elements of your
account. That the Nostromo set down on LV–426, an unsurveyed
planet, at that time. That repairs were made. That it resumed
its course and was subsequently set for self-destruct. By you. For
reasons unknown.

RIPLEY
Look, I told you. . . .

VAN LEUWEN
It did not, however, contain any entries concerning the hostile life
form you allegedly picked up.

Traditionally, sequels have reminded viewers who may not have seen
or may have forgotten plot details from the original movie, generally,
as illustrated in the previous exchange, while advancing the plot of the
sequel itself. In the Aliens example, we not only learn the basic plot
contours of the original Alien, but also something about the film’s anti-
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corporate ideological positioning.

194 Nicholas Rombes

Modern cinema emerged during an era when physics was challeng-

ing previous conceptions of time as constant, universal, and ceaselessly
forward-moving. As Stephen Kern has noted, Albert Einstein’s “general
theory of relativity had the effect, figuratively, of placing a clock in every
gravitational field in the universe, each moving at a rate determined by
both the intensity of the gravitational field at that point and the relative
motion of the object observed” (19). As cinema during the first decades
of the twentieth-century developed parallel editing or cross-cutting that
required viewers to follow enormous leaps across time (for example, flash-
backs) and space (cross-cutting between two or more separate physical
spaces), audiences began to internalize the logic of what was to become
standard editing techniques. Scholars such as Anne Friedberg and Mary
Ann Doane have suggested that viewers were prepared and conditioned
for accepting such spatial leaps because they were increasingly immersed
in everyday technologies that themselves cut across space. Doane sug-
gests that “editing borrowed the authority of the telephone to rational-
ize the instantaneous movement from site to site effected by the cut”
(Emergence 194).
In the twenty-first century, the question is not parallel editing with-
in movies, but rather between them. And just as spectators were prepared
for temporal shifts within movies during the early 1900s due, in part,
to peripheral technologies such as the telegraph and telephones, today’s
spectators are prepared for temporal shifts between movies by the rapid
splicing of time and space through digital-era technologies such as the
web, cell phones, and MP3 players, which render the before and after of
movies an anachronism. Lev Manovich has written, “contrary to popular
images of computer media as collapsing all human culture into a single
giant library (which implies the existence of some ordering system), or
a single giant book (which implies a narrative progression), it is perhaps
more accurate to think of the new media culture as an infinite flat surface
where individual texts are placed in no particular order” (77). Movies are
historical insomuch as they are made at a particular point in time, but
for audiences viewing them they always unfold in the present tense.
On a smaller scale, this is evident in the bonus and supplementary
materials routinely available on DVDs. DVD box sets for films such
as the Lord of the Rings series (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003) now
offer the entire sequence of films in one package, both reinforcing and
eroding the historical materialism of the films themselves. Viewer choice
and time-shifting—introduced by the Sony home video recorder in the
1970s—now means that sequels are aesthetic, rather than temporal, mat-
ters. The “no particular order” that Manovich describes is indeed a fea-
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ture of the digital era, when the past-ness of movies is flattened as they
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Before and After and Right Now 195

are digitally remastered and repacked for home viewing in ways that
render them digital—and hence contemporary—narratives. Audiences
have access to vast amounts of paratextual data. Features incorporated
within such DVD packages provide an extensive source of information
pertaining to production and the historical milieu of a film. In other
words, at the same time that films become ahistorically ever-present,
they also are deeply enmeshed in historical contexts.
So many sequels now are franchises that viewers are encouraged to
see them as components of a greater whole, rather than as single units.
Indeed, the very interface itself—such as the DVD menu—encourages
what Roland Barthes called, in relation to reading, tmesis, a skimming
or skipping around in the text: “a rhythm is established, casual, uncon-
cerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge
impels us to skim or skip certain passages (anticipated as ‘boring’) in
order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote . . .”
(Pleasure 11). The migration of movies in the digital era onto multiple
screens—televisions, computers, cell phones, and so on—sanctions a
form of skimming that throws into question the very notion of a stable,
primary, coherent text. How does one “watch” a DVD, for instance,
with the ability to jump to specific chapters, or to navigate with ease
forward and backward through a film? Against these larger technologi-
cal changes, sequels are losing their historicity, their temporal status
not so much because viewers no longer care which movie came “first,”
but rather because the entire paradigm of before and after is being sup-
planted with a continual present because archives are readily available
for recall. And yet, paradoxically, tmesis is countered by an ever-deeper
investigation of films, as the pause and step-frame function on many
DVD player interfaces allows for an investigation of a film’s images
with unprecedented closeness for the lay viewer.
We are perhaps at the beginning of a period when historical media
is ever present, available for recall after a few keystrokes. Consider the
availability of a film such as Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), which in
the 1950s and 1960s was available for viewing in limited venues, such as
art-house revivals, museum showings, retrospectives, and perhaps occa-
sionally on television. Today, a film is widely available—in fragments or
in whole—within seconds at the earliest, or days at the latest. Clips of a
production are readily and freely accessible online, while the film itself
can be purchased in numerous retail outlets, or purchased or rented
via the Internet (for example, Netflix, Amazon, and so on). In the near
future, Citizen Kane might well be available as a pay-for-download file,
streaming directly into a computer or a television. The availability of
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a film such as Citizen Kane across so many platforms and in so many

196 Nicholas Rombes

mediums suggests that it exists not so much as an artifact from the past,
but rather as something very much of the present.
The word “sequel” itself first appears in the fifteenth century,
derived from the Latin sequi, “to follow,” while the first use of the term
to mean “story that follows or continues another” was recorded in 1513.
These early meanings literally depended on a notion of a before and
after. We should not be surprised, then, that cinema emerged as phys-
ics was coming to understand that, at least in theory, no reason exists
why time unfolds in a sequential, one-way direction. Physicist Brian
Greene has noted that “the laws of physics that have been articulated
from Newton through Maxwell and Einstein, and up until today, show
a complete symmetry between past and future. No where in any of these
laws do we find a stipulation that they apply one way in time but not
in the other” (144–45). In this light, the so-called flattening of history
that is supposedly a marker of postmodernism is less an unfortunate
dehistorisizing gesture than a confirmation of the deepest structures of
the material world. Digital media and its randomly accessible archive is
a metaphor for a universe that quantum physics is gradually revealing
to be more fluid and uncertain than previously known. Physicist Michio
Kaku reminds us that one of Einstein’s great breakthroughs was to dem-
onstrate that “time is not an absolute, as Newton once thought” (33).
Of course, movies have always represented the passage of time in ways
that were not purely linear, as in the standard flashback sequences, or
by skipping ahead in the story by days, weeks, or even longer periods.
However, the emergence of more openly self-conscious disruptions of
linear time in movies such as Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994),
Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) occurred in the same historical period as
the emergence of digital media with its binary codes and access interfaces
that make concepts such as “before” and “after” seem arbitrary. One
could say that the migration of temporally disruptive films from the
avant-garde (for example, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon [1943],
with its repeating loops of action) to the mainstream (for example, Run
Lola Run [Tom Tykwer, 1998]) roughly coincided with the emergence of
relatively affordable consumer digital cameras and desktop video editing
systems, such as iMovie or Avid, and the availability of affordable non-
linear editing systems in the 1990s.
Sequels are becoming ghosts in the digital era; in the increasingly
globalized cinematic marketplace, films are remembered more for being
“remakes of” rather than “sequels to.” Like a virus, the binary code of
the digital spreads, replicating itself, spreading new versions of itself in
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new languages. Sean Cubitt has written that the “digital corresponds so
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Before and After and Right Now 197

closely to the emergent loss of an ideological structure to social mean-

ing because it no longer pretends to represent the world” (250). In the
novel Loop (1998), Koji Suzuki’s sequel to Ring and Spiral, we learn that
the entire setting of the novel Ring might have been in a virtual reality
loop: “Ring would be a book, then a movie, a video game, an Internet
site—it would saturate the world through every branch of the media”
(191). Ring was originally published in Japan as Ringu in 1991, followed
by the Japanese film Ringu (Hideo Nakata) in 1998, and the American
version, The Ring (Gore Verbinski) in 2002. The logic of Ring—both
in terms of its plot and its various media manifestations—suggests a
disruption of the linearity. The world of the Ring is an eternal loop,
not a straight line. As in the digital era with its ever-increasing archive
storage capacities and larger and larger memory, nothing ever really goes
away. Instead, information (in the form of images, text, music, and so
on) is recycled, sampled, mashed-up, and reformatted, until distinctions
between past and future disappear.
This is reinforced on a material level where a viewer’s experience
with the interface of a film no longer provides even the illusion of lin-
earity. Film has persistently suggested what we might term a “linear
materialism”: literally, the film has traditionally moved forward through
the projector. As the story world of the film advances forward through
time (with the exception of flashbacks and other conventional temporal
disruptions), so too the film advances through the projector through
time. Traditional projection methods involve a beginning (leader), mid-
dle, and end. During the analog era, videotape remediated this structure
because movies on VHS tapes also had a materially identifiable begin-
ning, middle, and end that required time to pass during the rewinding
or fast-forwarding process. In the West, the temporal imaginary has time
flowing from left to right (as in timelines), a structure echoed in audio
and VHS tapes, which spooled forward from left to right. But in the
digital era, the link between a film’s internal, story time and its external,
material time has been broken. DVDs—as physical objects—have no
clear beginning, middle, or end. And downloaded movies that are stored
as a series of ones and zeroes are even more abstracted from so-called
real time. In which direction does time flow inside a computer? This has
permeated the way that some movies are made as well. All three Lord
of the Rings films were shot simultaneously, even though each of the
films was released a year apart. In what sense is a film a sequel if it is
produced at the same time as the “original”?
The proliferation of moving images today and their easy accessibil-
ity across many enormous archives suggests that the very flow of time
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that made distinctions between “original” and “sequel” possible is, in

198 Nicholas Rombes

fact, impossible. As Manovich has noted, as “a cultural form, the data-

base represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this
list” (225). We should, perhaps, not be surprised that we are attuned to
movies that are temporally confused, such as Pulp Fiction, Memento, or
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Films such as these, made at the
dawn of the digital era, are artifacts of a way of thinking that renders
strict notions of sequels obsolete: what would a sequel of Memento (a
film whose narrative is revealed in reverse chronology) look like? In
Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer wrote of the surrealist film Entr’acte
(René Clair, 1924) that one of its more startling sequences “depicts a
special mode of reality—reality as perceived by those who are moving at
extreme speed” (183). Our own “special mode of reality” today suggests
a flattening of time not necessarily because everything is accelerated,
but rather because its instant availability suggests the illusion of speed.
True, time passes between the making of movies—such as such as Ter-
minator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1984, 1991),
or Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, and Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2002, 2004,
2007)—but the ease with which they can be viewed (rented, purchased,
and so on) renders the temporal distance between them as anachronis-
tic. Furthermore, as subsequent “deluxe” or “special edition” film ver-
sions are released—often with extra footage, cleaned-up transfers, and
sometimes updated effects—the movies remain artifacts of the present.
In other words, cleansed of the imperfections that characterized their
original releases, rereleased films further erode the gaps that made differ-
ences between “original” and “sequel” meaningful. When George Lucas
digitally altered the DVD release of Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) to
include computer-generated imagery (CGI)–enhanced scenes and bits of
new footage woven into the film, he created something that was a prod-
uct of 2004 rather than 1977. Such retrofitting effectively destroys the
possibilities of prequels and sequels, as the depth of time collapses into
the flatness of a continuous present. Even “old” films are “restored” not
to their original state, but to a remastered, clean, enhanced state that
bears all the visual markers of the present.
In “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” a short story about an amuse-
ment park that “re-creates” the American Civil War era, George Saun-
ders wrote:

When visitors first come in there’s this cornball part where they
sit in this kind of spaceship and supposedly get blasted into space
and travel faster than the speed of light and end up in 1865. The
unit’s dated. The helmets we distribute look like bowls and all the
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paint’s peeling off. I’ve argued and argued that we need to update.
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Before and After and Right Now 199

But in the midst of a budget crunch one can’t necessarily hang the
moon. When the tape of space sounds is over and the walls stop
shaking, we pass out the period costumes. We try not to offend
anyone, liability law being what it is. We distribute the slave and
Native American roles equitably among racial groups. Anyone is
free to request a different identity at any time. (10)

The passage is both funny and scary, suggesting a mixing-up of time

not unlike our own present. It is not that history itself has become a
franchise, but rather that our reproduction of that history now takes the
form of unprecedented spectacle, and that that spectacle is not bound by
time. Instead, it is always already available for recall on our computer
or cell phone screens.
The dissolution of sequels is part of a larger reconfiguration of tra-
ditional cinematic categories. Indeed, those responsible for some of the
most radical images and sequences in films today are probably not readily
familiar by name. Unlike the stars of the auteur theory, popularized in
the United States by film critic Andrew Sarris in 1962, today’s auteur
experimentalists are not film directors. Instead, those most responsible
for the relentless absurdity of images on the screen work for companies
with names such as Lola Visual Effects, Persistence of Vision, Double
Negative, Asylum Visual Effects, and Animal Logic. And although the
demands of conventional genre films—action, science fiction, fantasy,
natural disaster—give rise to these sequences, the sequences themselves
frequently transcend these limits and enter the realm of Art.
In all likelihood these names are not familiar: Zareh Nalbandian,
managing director and co-founder of Animal Logic; or Chris Godfrey,
director of visual effects; or Andy Brown and Kirsty Millar, who were
the visual effects supervisors for House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou,
2004). Here—from the Animal Logic Web site—is a brief description of
their work on The Matrix Reloaded (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003):
“For Reloaded the team completed ten sequences, which included build-
ing entire 3D characters the Twins, who are able to fully interact with
the live action stars when in their CG phasing states” (Animal Logic
3). What is astounding is not the sentence itself, but rather that we no
longer find sentences like this astounding. The invisible hand of the CGI
avant-gardists is everywhere. Persistence of Vision—which has worked
on Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002), Titan
A. E. (Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, 2000), and others—describes its
work this way: “POV works with the direction to conceive shots, solve
story-telling problems, edit the sequence, and even add music, dialogue
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and sound effects. When complete, the animatic will communicate the
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200 Nicholas Rombes

composition, style, and elements of every frame in the sequence. It

removes guesswork, aides in communication and budgeting, and, we’ve
found, increases the morale of the crew before and during shooting”
(“Pre-Visualization” 1). But is “guesswork” not fundamental to the messy
nature of the creative process?
Lola Visual Effects: digital cosmetic enhancements, a visual effects
company based in Santa Monica, California, specializes in making people
look younger and fitter on the screen, digitally. This is not the “soft focus”
filmmaking of Hitchcock’s era; this is digital lies using cold binary logic
of ones and zeros. If you happened to see the latest X-Men and wondered
about the youthful Patrick Stewart—who looked younger and fresher
than in movies he made when he actually was younger and fresher—it
is because of companies such as Lola VFX. Here is what they do: “We
remove scars, facial hair, pimples, wrinkles, dimples and blotches. We
make bodies firmer, legs longer, faces younger, breasts fuller, cheekbones
higher, eyes bluer, and skin smoother. We achieve this while ensuring
that all the effects are realistic and convincing” (“Who We Are” 1). This
is the image logic of the digital era, a form of self-reenactment. It is a
system of radical filmmaking that goes largely unnoticed by scholars and
theorists because film theory is still bound by a way of reading films that
emerged in response to the classic era.
Consider this statement: “Our work has far-reaching implications
from extending an actor’s career for one more sequel to overall suc-
cess at the box office. We allow actors and studios to create one more
blockbuster sequel (with the actor’s fan base) by making the actor look
as good (or better) than they [sic] did in their [sic] first movie” (“What
We Do” 1). What is there to say about such a brash and unapologetic
thing as this statement? The statement was not written by Aldous Huxley,
nor was it a darkly funny dystopian story by George Saunders. This is
a real, true, and sincere statement by a company that digitally alters the
faces and bodies of the actors we see on the screen, a special effect so
seamless, so natural that its very surrealism lies in the fact that it disguises
itself as reality. The corporate executives of the new “image realization”
companies have become today’s theorists of the image. Gareth Edwards,
founder and chief technical officer at Image Metrics, has written that
“human faces in games have rarely seemed ‘authentic.’ Authenticity is
not just about the ‘realism’ of the base mesh—it is certainly possible to
present a single image of a 3D head which looks great, but expression is
more about detailed, subtle movements and tiny nuances” (1). And what
is it that Image Metrics does? According to Andy Wood, the company’s
CEO, “Image Metrics’s core technology automatically transfers a human
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being’s facial performance onto a digitally-created character. We capture

an actor’s facial performance directly from a camera or an existing record-
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Before and After and Right Now 201

ing—there’s no motion capture studio, no special equipment or metal

markers. Whatever the actor does, the computer character does” (1).
What does it mean to be real in a movie in the digital era? What
is a movie’s historical place in time when it exists in numerous “restored”
versions? What happens when a restored version of the original movie
is released for home viewing after the sequel? What happens when we
create a realism that outstrips the detail of reality itself, when we achieve
and then go beyond a one-to-one correspondence with the real world?
Jean Baudrillard has spoken and written about the pointlessness, the
banality of Art ever since it “liberated” itself from its High Status as
art and became coterminous with everyday reality. “At the end of this
history,” according to Baudrillard, “the banality of art is mixed up with
the banality of the real world” (Conspiracy 90). In a cruel paradox, the
deconstruction of Art was completely successful: it no longer exists. Mov-
ies, too, have always depended on a boundary, however fluid, between
natural reality and our manipulations of that reality. In fact, our entire
taxonomy of cinematic genres—science fiction, historical epic, comedy,
thriller, mystery, avant-garde—depended not only on these distinctions,
but on a sort of baseline realism against which they were measured. After
all, fantasy is a genre, but is realism? What happens in the digital age
when the very conditions of the realism against which not only genre,
but aesthetics, are measured no longer exist?
“We could put Marilyn Monroe alongside Jack Nicholson, or Jack
Black, or Jack White,” says Andy Wood. “If we want John Wayne to
act alongside Angelina Jolie, we can do that. We can directly mimic the
performance of a human being on a model. We can create new scenes
for old films, or old scenes for new films” (qtd. in Waxman, “Cyberface”).
What is significant here is not that movies are devising new ways of
compositing the real, but rather that the real itself is the product of this
composition. What Andy Wood and others are doing is really an exer-
cise in philosophy, forcing us to rethink not only our relation to reality,
but also the fundamental nature of reality itself. And it seems—looking
at these developments now, in the wake of postmodernism—perfectly
natural that our cinematic technologies are finally fulfilling the promise
and logic of deconstruction. Ironically, while the so-called postmodern
rejection of capital “T” Truth and “Reality” itself used to be associated
with the Radical Chic Professoriate, today its logic permeates popular
culture and political discourse, even from the Right. Ron Suskind recalls
being told by a senior advisor to George W. Bush in 2002:

Guys like me [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based

community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solu-

tions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. . . .
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202 Nicholas Rombes

That’s not the way the world really works any more. . . . We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And
while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll
act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too,
and that’s how things will sort out.”

You can imagine this sort of thing being said in a graduate seminar in
literary theory in 1988 and being understood as a statement of high
theory: reality is not “objective,” out there waiting to be found, but
rather something that is constructed, the product of social, economic,
cultural, and political forces.
When, in the New York Times article, Andy Wood uses the phrase
“soul transference” to describe the process of a computer mapping an
actor’s face “onto any character virtual or human, living or dead,” and
then goes on to say that “the model has the actress’s soul. It shows
through” (qtd. in Waxman, “Cyberface”), you know you have reached
the point where Philip K. Dick’s paranoid fictions of the 1960s and
1970s no longer serve as prescient harbingers of the future, but rather
as bits of nostalgia for a time when such a future could be imagined.
“The Kalbfleisch simulacrum stopped,” we read in Dick’s 1964 novel
The Simulacra, a story about a president of the United States who is a
simulacrum. “Its arms stuck out, rigid in their final gesture, the withered
face vacuous. The simulacrum said nothing and automatically the TV
cameras also shut off, one by one; there was no longer anything for
them to transmit” (32).
In her pioneering book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine
Hayles noted that “one of the striking differences between researchers
who work with flesh and those who work with computers is how nuanced
the sense of the body’s complexity is for those who are directly engaged
with it” (244). This human complexity is precisely what companies such
as Image Metrics (does this not sound like the name of a company out of
a Philip K. Dick novel?) hope to capture for the screen. Under the sign
of such companies, human beings become models for reality, mannequins
on which an even greater real is layered. “When people see what we can
do with this system—for example, making Marilyn Monroe say words
she never spoke—they see how they can use it to make better games and
films,” Andy Wood has said. “Our technology will ensure we achieve our
goals . . . it can’t fail to” (“Andy Wood Goes to Hollywood”). The place
of human beings in digital cinema is not secure; technologies that were
once used to create “special effects” now create human beings as special
effects. Companies such as Image Metrics are not interested in creating
copyright law.
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Before and After and Right Now 203

realistic looking explosions, tidal waves, fires, and so on, but rather in
creating human beings who look more real than we do.
And so we find ourselves as the subjects of our own vision machines,
which we created to penetrate and capture reality. The reversal is nearly
complete. In Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), a girl with blonde hair stares
into the eerie static of the television, listening to ghosts. In The Ring a girl
with black hair—a ghost herself—crawls out of the television, across the
floor, and toward another screen, the one that separates us from her. The
virus at the heart of the Koji Suzuki novels that include Ring is not really
the videotape, but rather the screens that make the display of the tape
possible. In the same way, sequels during the classical era depended on
boundaries, on the temporal distance between the release dates of movies.
Sequels were defined as much by the inaccessibility of the original as by
the sequel itself. But today, as the boundaries of space and time collapse,
and as actors (such as Patrick Stewart) can be digitally modified so that
they appear to age “correctly” from one sequel to another, the very
limitations that made “before” and “after” meaningful have eroded. More
significantly, the hypervisible digital archive—which makes increasingly
greater amounts of data available on screens far from the actual physical
embodiment of the archives—further erodes distinctions between before
and after. The proliferation of “originals” and “sequels” in the digital
era, and the easy navigation forward and backward through those texts
suggests nothing more than a growing tyranny of the present.
copyright law.
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12
CAROLYN JESS-COOKE

Sequelizing Spectatorship and

Building Up the Kingdom
The Case of Pirates of the Caribbean, Or,
How a Theme-Park Attraction Spawned a
Multibillion-Dollar Film Franchise

“There’s never a guarantee of coming back, but passing on—that’s

certain.”
—Captain Hector Barbossa,
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

A
T THE BEGINNING OF Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
(Gore Verbinski, 2006), the action-adventure sequel to Pirates of
the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003),
Pirate Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) enters the story by shoot-
ing his way out of a coffin-at-sea. Literally returning from the dead,
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Sparrow soon gets caught up with the dilemmas of the afterlife as he is

206 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Figure 12.1. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbin-
ski, 2003). Courtesy Walt Disney Pictures/The Kobal Collection.

forced to pay back a blood debt to another undead pirate captain (Davy
Jones, played by Bill Nighy). Buoyed by Depp’s charismatic performance
as the incarnation of Rolling Stones’ rocker Keith Richards’s imagined
pirate son, the film’s soggy storyline and gimmicky gags nonetheless
enjoyed the most successful opening weekend in box-office history, reap-
ing in excess of $235 million worldwide in just ten days (“Pirates of
the Caribbean”). A blitzkrieg of merchandizing, tie-ins, and associated
events ensued, such as a world ocean race in a boat named Black Pearl;
a real sunken treasure hunt; an updated version of the opera Pirates of
Penzance; an entirely new musical, The Pirate Queen, by the creators of
Les Misérables; a theatrical production, The Last Pirate, by Charles Way;
several video games; a mobile phone game; high street fashion tie-ins;
and revamped versions of the original theme park ride where the Pirates
adventure originally began.
As the third (and purportedly final) Pirates film installment, Pirates
of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Gore Verbinski, 2007), hits the screens
as I write in May 2007 to even greater box office success—$401 million
worldwide in just six days (“ ‘Pirates 3’ ”)—and with an additional gamut
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of tie-ins and promotional activities, audience activity is apparently fast

Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 207

becoming redefined by such franchises and their associated events and

commodities with significant investments in the concerns and processes
of sequelization. This chapter argues that the synergistic activities propa-
gated by film franchises use the structure of the sequel as a contextual-
izing framework by which spectators understand and participate with
a film’s range of associated products and events as continuations of a
narrative and by which the spectatorial experience is continued across a
variety of associated texts, products, and events. Although numerous fran-
chises and “event movies” could provide effective case studies of global
reception activities, the textual history of the Pirates of the Caribbean,
in concert with its transposition of a spatial source to a textual “world”
and commercial franchise, this franchise’s reiteration of Disney values,
and its mechanisms of rewriting and sequelization provoke more urgent
consideration in an environment of escalating consumer participation
and media synergy.
Throughout the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, spectatorship
is continually constructed as the starting point of a long list of interre-
lated, secondary spectatorial experiences, all of which involve repetition,
immersion, familiarity, role-playing or secondary performance, memory,
and interaction between generations. The trope of the sequel—already
an important part of the franchise’s structure, made up of a film sequel
to a theme park ride and two sequels to that sequel—is considered in
this light as a useful framework within which to begin to comprehend
the ways in which spectatorship is (re)figured in the Pirates of the Carib-
bean franchise as an increasingly sequential activity across multiple media
platforms.
As indicated earlier, the “original” on which the Pirates of the
Caribbean franchise is based is not a text; it is a theme park ride, which
Walt Disney personally devised and executed over the three years prior
to his death in 1966. A cutting edge display of animation and techno-
logical prowess, the Pirates ride was among the first to use Audio-An-
imatronics in its creation of moving, life-size pirate figures. It was also
markedly cinematic from the outset, guiding Disneyland “guests” on a
boat through several “scenes” from a sequentially staged pirate narrative.
One of Disneyland’s most popular rides, the Pirates of the Caribbean
attraction has been adapted numerous times before Verbinski’s trilogy:
for example, as an interactive theme park ride, Pirates of the Caribbean:
Battle for Buccaneer Gold (2005), which allows up to five players to enter
a virtual pirate reality and reenact the (loose) narrative established by the
original Pirates ride. The emphasis of this game/ride is less on virtuality
than recreating “real experiences” (Schell and Shochet 11). Designed
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to be an “immersive adventure,” Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for

208 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Buccaneer Gold extends the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride by

building on the experience of that ride, and by creating a heightened
interactive environment in which participants not only view the story in
3-D, animatronic form, but also get to adopt the role of pirate (12).
Similarly, Gore Verbinski’s film trilogy, commencing in 2003 with
the first installment, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,
extends the original theme park “experience.” In keeping with the val-
ues of that experience, the trilogy is predicated on nostalgia, memory,
and the concept of entering and participating with a fictional “world.”
As the trilogy develops, the values underpinning the Pirates’ experience
are reiterated and heightened. The meshing of film viewing, consumer
activities, and media events that surround the Pirates films underlines
spectatorship as experiential, but always in the sense that something is
being reexperienced—or in other words, that the varied forms of interac-
tivity consistently engage with a past that can be technologically revisited.
Just as Captain Jack Sparrow emerges from the “dead” at the beginning
of the second Pirates film and by the end of it is “alive” and well in the
afterlife, so too does the entire Pirates franchise organize spectatorial
engagement as a navigation of beginnings, endings, and aftermaths, all of
which are underlined and facilitated by interaction and participation.
By looking to some of the ways in which the Pirates franchise
spreads across multimedia platforms, generates “post-performance recep-
tion” activities (Bennett 164), and extends the diegesis to create a Pirates
“world,” this chapter argues that the kind of relation that is forged
between consumers/spectators and the film franchise is a sequelized spec-
tatorship, or a set of personalized spectatorial experiences and encoun-
ters in which repetition, reenactment, and collective memory-making are
organizing principles. A long list of buzzwords has recently emerged to
discuss similar ideas, such as virtual reality (VR), immersive aesthetics,
pervasive play, intertextual matrices, and convergence. Each one of these
terms and definitions identifies new kinds of relations that have evolved
between the spectator and screen media as more and more developing
technologies emerge. As Henry Jenkins urges us, convergence, or “the
flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between
multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences
who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment
experiences they want” dramatically impacts “the relationship between
existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences” (Jenkins,
Convergence Culture 2; “Cultural Logic” 34). What Jenkins makes clear,
and as the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise shows us, is that not just
technology is responsible for the creation of immersive and virtual spec-
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tatorial experiences, but also those methods of extending a film across

Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 209

several mediums, commodities, texts, and cultural events that expand the
narrative into a kind of “world,” or hypertextual environment, within
which spectators are invited to become active participants.
My discussion of sequelized spectatorship involves a consideration
of three key conceptual areas: immersion, control, and merchandizing.
Each of these areas describes a specific kind of relation between film
and spectator, particularly one in which affect and effect are important.
Sequelized spectatorship is identified specifically as the effects created by
an affective environment, or the process by which spectators reengage
with and continue a visual narrative throughout social and material spaces
through a range of consumer and performative activities.
A starting point for such a study is immersive environments. Edwi-
na Bartlem defines these in terms of the process by which “one is drawn
into an intimate and embodied relationship with a virtual and physical
architecture.” Notably, immersive spectatorship not only creates an “inti-
mate” relation between spectator and screen, but also involves elements
of spectatorial control. In this regard, note Walt Disney’s comments to his
Disneyland developers: “I don’t want the public to see the world they live
in while they’re in the park” (qtd. in Bryman 95). The dedication plaque
at Disneyland suggests Disney’s desire to cordon off both the real world
and real time, as it reads: “Here you leave Today and enter the world
of Yesterday, Tomorrow, and Fantasy.” Allan Bryman also notes Disney’s
control spreading to linguistic reinventions within the parks, turning a
simple “queue” into a “pre-entertainment area,” while the area outside
the park became “backstage” and the internal vicinity “onstage” (108).
The tendency for control intensified after Walt Disney’s death, evidenced
by Team Disney’s motto: “Talk tough, talk cheap, and keep total control”
(qtd. in Lewis, “Disney” 94). As a completely immersive and meticulously
controlled environment, Disneyland serves as a physical model for many
of Disney’s virtual and multimedia platforms, all of which control experi-
ence through immersive mechanisms. Consistently drawing on notions
of territory, destination, and pilgrimage (for example, Magic Kingdom,
Disney World, and Lafitte’s Landing), Disney’s clearly defined physical
boundaries lends the Pirates ride, and subsequently the Pirates franchise,
a distinctly touristic experience (see Adams 98; Bryman 95–98; Fjellman
10). More important is the kind of touristic experience that is offered;
by consistently eclipsing physical, historical, textual, cultural, experien-
tial, and interactive territories, the Disney “tourist” engages with the
company’s range of synergistic activities and outputs with the knowledge
that each territory merges with the others and, therefore, that the Disney
experience is a uniquely synergistic encounter. With this in mind, the
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Pirates franchise operates as a sequel to Disney’s world-making activities

210 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

by creating a massive range of methods of engagement, consumerism,

and entertainment from a host of interrelated narratives. Close read-
ings of the films evidence the sequel as an organizing, internal principle
that establishes dialogues between the experience of the film franchise
and the reception activities that have followed. The Pirates franchise is
not simply aware of its own merchandizing and intertextualization, but
is arguably a self-reflexive component of a larger Pirates “world.” The
stakes of this argument, therefore, lie in the effects of reconstituting the
film text as its own paratext—or what Gérard Genette defines as the
relation between a text and the “accessory messages and commentaries
which come to surround the main body of text” (Palimpsests 86)—and
how this affects our engagement with that text as, in essence, a sequel
of itself.
Piracy’s popularization through the channels of literary, filmic, and
multimedia formats have contributed entirely to its symbolic reworking.
From as far back as the thirteenth century BC, tales abound of notable
historical figures that were purportedly captured by pirates—Julius Cae-
sar and Saint Patrick among them—thus enlivening historical data with
narratives of bravery, adventure and revenge. In 1724, the book A Gen-
eral History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates by
Captain Charles Johnson1 helped to romanticize the pirate further by
assembling several purportedly factual biographies of eighteenth-cen-
tury rogues. Persistently embodying ideals of liberty, rebellion against
bureaucracy, and masculine prowess, piracy gradually made its way onto
the map of popular culture in the form of well-defined stereotypes—for
instance, a bearded, middle-aged man with a black eye-patch, a wooden
leg and/or hook prosthetic, parrot, and distinctive growl—and eventually
in the form of a comic operetta (Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance,
1879), casinos (Las Vegas’s Treasure Island Hotel and Casino), festivals,
magazines, theme parties, fashion accessories, board and video games,
online and mobile phone games, and a theme park ride at Disneyland
(see Land).
Film played a key role in piracy’s popularization. From cinema’s
early days a pirate “genre” emerged from a steady stream of pirate adven-
tures, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and its
adaptations by Victor Fleming (1934) and Byron Haskin (1950), Sir J.
M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) and its 1953 Disney animation directed by
Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, as well as Cap-
tain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935), The Crimson Pirate (Robert Siodmak,
1952), Pirates of Penzance (Wilford Leach, 1983) and, more recently, Cut-
throat Island (Renny Harlin, 2002) and the animated Treasure Planet (Ron
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Clements and John Musker, 2002), all of which marked the conventions
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Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 211

of the pirate genre and imagined the pirate as more comparable to a

latter-day rock star than a scurvy early modern rogue.
Walt Disney’s plans for his Pirates of the Caribbean theme park
attraction built on piracy’s retextualizations throughout popular culture
and the ride was designed, like the rest of Disneyland, to be a “three-di-
mensional movie” (Watts 390). Pirates was the final attraction that Dis-
ney personally supervised from inception to installation, and plans for
the ride evolved swiftly from original conceptions of a walk-through wax
museum to an indoor boat ride through which Disneyland guests witness
moving automatons in various tableaux that collectively construct a nar-
rative (along with a soundtrack, “Yo Ho! [A Pirate’s Life for Me!]”)—a
turning point in using cutting-edge technology to create lifelike anima-
tions. The ride was to be experienced as a portal through piracy’s textual
and social networks with which guests were most likely already familiar;
likewise, the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise offers more than
the traditional film narrative, with critics finding it more “an experience
rather than a story” (Stevens). The Pirates franchise operates as a rather
proactive kind of rewriting of the original Pirates experience, symboli-
cally implicated by the revision and updating of the theme-park ride to
correspond with each new film installment. In other words, the Pirates
films are not simply a remake of the original ride and the texts on which
that ride was based, but they are part of a conversation between an “origi-
nal” and sequel with which the spectator takes part. As spectators, this
kind of rewriting is in terms of writing ourselves into the textual “world”
that is organized by the franchise, at the same time as we are called on
to negotiate and engage in a variety of rewriting activities throughout
the series of extrafilmic events and multimedia tie-ins as extensions of
the films’ textuality.
The texts associated with piracy’s popularization have contribut-
ed to a contemporary understanding of piracy as an intertextual event,
and—as the original Pirates theme-park ride exploited to its advan-
tage—participation with textual networks that usually culminated in an
immersive readership, whether in the form of trying out versions of
“Aaaargh!” during the “International Talk Like a Pirate Day,”2 or as an
active participant in a variety of adaptational methods proffered by the
numerous interactive games and textual spin-offs that have emerged in
the franchise’s wake. Each of the associated Pirates features—the Jolly
Roger flag, the song “Yo Ho! (A Pirates Life for Me!),” catchphrases
such as “Drink up me hearties, yo ho!” or “Shiver me timbers!” as well
as the drunken, witty, and cunning characteristics Captain Jack Sparrow
embodies—find their way into the films from numerous textual sources.
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But rather than mark the spot of its textual origins, Pirates operates on
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212 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

the understanding that the franchise is part of a larger process of textual

reception and that our engagement with the film is part of responding
to and rewriting the Pirates narrative in complicity with the films’ own
forms of rewriting and response.
With these kinds of textual interactions the Pirates franchise defines
our engagement with it as a spectatorial “sequel” to an “original” event.
But not only through its source texts is this engagement constructed;
indeed, the swathe of related Pirates merchandize and offshoots informs
and shapes our engagement with the film to the point where sequelized
spectatorship comes to mean the act of negotiating adaptation and rewrit-
ing processes of original texts at the same time as repeating, “rewriting,”
and reexperiencing a text that is constructed by its own reception and
textualization.
From the outset the Pirates ride operated as an extension of the
logic of Disneyland. Contextualized within the “totally controlled envi-
ronment” of Disneyland in which visitors find “themselves immersed
in a fantasy world where unique images and experiences evoked laugh-
ter, wonder, curiosity, and emotional warmth,” the Pirates ride guides
guests seated in a boat through an underground cavern featuring 3-D
scenes—prescribing, therefore, the order and pace by which the scenes
are experienced and preventing guests from straying into the sets (Watts
390, 389). Although the Pirates ride is organized as a sequential “ride,”
with one scene following on from the next, the “narrative” is not linear,
but designed as a repetitively circular experience that one can repeat
and enjoy as many times as desired. This is entirely in keeping with the
Walt Disney Company’s tendency to rerelease its films in cinemas and on
television, video and DVD, which are, for the most part, remakes of fairy
tales and narratives that had previously enjoyed circulation throughout
popular culture (Brockus 198–99).3 In both cases, repetition is a crucial
aspect of the overall experience. Both activities reflect the dichotomy of
repetition and circularity underscoring Disneyland. Although Walt Dis-
ney famously crafted what he termed “weenies,” or attractions that lure
the eye, then the feet, thereby guiding visitors in a carefully organized
sequence of attractions, from one ride to the next, and so on, Disneyland
is a maze of interconnecting sequences in which one can find a variety
of journeys, destinations, and experiences (see Bryman 99). The ways
in which such sequences are interconnected precisely establishes such
journeys and experiences as collaborative, synergistic, and necessarily col-
lective, thereby perpetuating the sense of a “world” in which the textual
meets the spatial and in which participation, appropriation, and the cir-
culation of meanings across fan communities are central dynamics.
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Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 213

The “world” of the Pirates franchise is constructed primarily by

retextualizations of Captain Jack Sparrow. Popularized by a gamut of fan
endorsements and, subsequently, commercial and media tie-ins, Sparrow
operates across the franchise as a source of (inter)textual unity across
the films and as a paratextual agent beyond the filmic narrative. As a
film character, Sparrow invokes Paul Budra’s notion of the “charismatic”
sequel protagonist, who, usually the subject of horror films, enables and
sustains numerous sequels precisely because he or she frequently evades
death. In the Pirates films, Sparrow avoids death because he is already
dead, and his charisma is largely the result of Depp’s quirky and rigor-
ously researched performance, which originally caused studio execs to
lament, “He’s ruining the film!” (qtd. in Williams, “Interview”). Sparrow
also sustains the Pirates sequels and the sequelization of the franchise in
the forms of Sparrow merchandize, media tie-ins, and cultural events
because of character traits that specifically endorse his celebrity. Repeat-
edly referring to his own infamy, part of Sparrow’s filmic characterization
is to construct his own mythology and to add to and comment on his
reputation. Insistent on being addressed as “Captain” Jack Sparrow, one
of Sparrow’s characterizations is this repeated salute: “You will always
remember this as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow”—a

Figure 12.2 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Gore Verbinski, 2007).
Courtesy Walt Disney/The Kobal Collection/Mountain, Peter.
copyright law.
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214 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

notable refrain across all three films and the subject of repeated comedy.
Another characterizing refrain is the repeated scene of Sparrow (or his
messengers) being slapped across the face by a (different) scorned for-
mer lover, suggesting his promiscuity and, perhaps more important, his
notoriety. Surprisingly chuffed by Captain Norrington’s (Jack Davenport)
comment that Sparrow is “the worst pirate I have ever heard of,” Spar-
row retorts proudly, “but you have heard of me.” Both the first and last
film installment show Sparrow dreaming of being “the immortal Captain
Jack Sparrow.”
His charismatic characterization notwithstanding, Sparrow is not
the films’ main character. According to the screenwriters, Ted Elliott and
Terry Rossio, Elizabeth (Kiera Knightly) is the protagonist (Holleran).
Yet a massive public response to the first film saw Sparrow highlighted
as the most popular character for audience interaction and participation,
and apparently the person most children want to be when they grow up
(see Land 169). Betty Jo Tucker, for instance, declared Depp’s character
one of “filmdom’s most memorable rogues” (“Keeping an Eye”), and
Emanuel Levy hailed Sparrow as “the only truly iconic screen character
to have yet come out of this new millennium.” Notably, Depp’s perfor-
mance kept critics and audiences in hot anticipation of the sequels. In
her review of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Tessa Strasser
minces no words: “Few sequels are ever quite as good as the original, but
if Depp’s role in the third Pirates movie is any bit as large as it was in
this, there are only good things on the horizon.” At the very least, film
reviews applauded Depp’s performance for keeping the franchise afloat
(Catsoulis; Rechtshaffen). Film execs felt the same way; gushed producer
Jerry Bruckheimer at the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s
Chest, “None of us would be back if Johnny Depp had not wanted to
play this character again” (qtd. in Tucker, “How to Steal a Movie”).
Sparrow’s popularization has perceivably impacted his character-
ization in the two Pirates sequels. Chosen by critics and fans as a key
figure of popular culture—and apparently the most popular Halloween
costume in the United States in 2006—Sparrow quickly garnered his
own MySpace profile (“Captain Jack Sparrow”), a dedicated fan-listing
Web site called Savvy? (“Captain Jack Sparrow Fan Listed”), a Wikipedia
entry (“Jack Sparrow”), and a parodic recharacterization as Captain Jack
Swallows (Darrell Hammond) in metaparody Epic Movie (Jason Friedberg
and Aaron Seltzer, 2007; McConahay). The discourse surrounding
the Sparrow character perceivably creates a community of participa-
tion, at the same time as the sheer scale of interactive contexts tai-
lored for Sparrow rewrites the character as an “intertextual commodity”
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(Marshall). In other words, Sparrow’s numerous retextualizations used

Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 215

the character as an organizing textual framework for a variety of com-

munity events and collective experiences, and this framework inevitably
corresponded to and magnified the overarching Pirates “world.”
Sparrow’s community of response found its way into the final Pirates
installment in the form of a community of Sparrows. Here, Sparrow is
depicted in Davy Jones’s Locker as on the receiving end of a postmortem
punishment in the form of multiple hallucinations. In full self-reflexive
mode, these hallucinations are Sparrow’s narcissistic multiplications of
himself—that is, Sparrow imagines himself as both captain and crew
members of the Black Pearl (including a goat and hen), reminiscent
of the identical Agent Smiths that multiplied in Matrix Reloaded and
Matrix Revolutions (Andy and Larry Wachowski, both 2003). Effectively
rewriting himself in a variety of imagined contexts, Sparrow registers the
discourse surrounding this character (and, more generally, the Pirates
franchise) as paratextual, or what Genette describes as a text’s “second-
ary signal” (Palimpsests 3). As a method of reading and engaging with
the franchise, Sparrow’s textual secondariness underscores the ways in
which the franchise responds to its own reception—for example, allow-
ing players to perform the character of Captain Jack Sparrow in the
Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG (or massively multiplayer online
role-playing game) that features Depp’s voice or updating the original
Disneyland Pirates ride by installing a new Sparrow automaton in Depp’s
likeness in replacement of the “original” Sparrow. Our engagement with
Sparrow as a film character and throughout each of the related media
tie-ins involves navigating Sparrow’s intertexts and his rewriting as the
paratext of Pirates’ larger textual domain. The result of this is that the
Pirates franchise becomes an “original” or source, insofar as Sparrow’s
relation to the franchise becomes defined as a secondary textualization
of an originating work.
Sparrow’s retextualization persistently expands the Pirates “world”
in terms of the discursive activity surrounding this character, which is
continually and necessarily collaborative. As spectators of the Pirates
films, we never engage with a “source” text, or within an isolated diegetic
terrain, but rather with what Matt Hills refers to as a “hyperdiegesis,” a
“vast and detailed narrative space” in which “only a fraction [. . .] is ever
directly seen or encountered” within a given text, “but which nevertheless
appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension”
(137). This extension is facilitated by the strictly collaborative exercises
generated by Sparrow’s rewriting and the Pirates “experience.” These
exercises involve discussing the film with friends, family, and strangers
in online chat rooms and web blogs, engaging in Volvo’s online hunt
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for a treasure chest filled with $50,000 in gold doubloons and keys to a
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216 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

brand spanking new Volvo XC90 by answering online weekly Pirates-re-

lated riddles, and, as other Disney films have engineered, engaging in
a memorable experience by which family and cultural relationships can
be defined, strengthened, and continually recalled through the Pirates
of the Caribbean. Like the Disney “world” from which it departs, the
Pirates “world” is founded on a concept instead of a narrative, using the
structure of the sequel as a strategy that underlines the crossover between
media. As Espen Aarseth notes of recent developments in multimedia
concepts—citing Death Jr. as a primary example—“concept licenses, rath-
er than content, move between media platforms” (204; see also “Death
Jr.”). In the case of the Pirates franchise, this move between platforms
extends into the realm of audience engagement, as suggested by the
advertising slogan for the MMORPG: “The most notorious pirate in
the Caribbean . . . is you” (see “Pirate’s Legend”).
Such community-building exercises not only expand the Pirates
“world” but inevitably lead back to its source texts. Piracy’s textual history
furnished the Pirates ride with the values of teamwork and community
building. In many historical accounts piracy emerges as the construction
of a new social order that, despite the violence and danger that faced
every pirate, was purportedly desirable to many “legitimate” seafarers in
terms of the forms of belonging, trust, and self-governance on which
piracy was predicated (see Land 174–80). Such descriptions of piracy’s
social organization bear striking parallels to Disney’s corporate structure.
Markus Rediker describes the typical pirate ship as “a little kingdom”
(206), whereas Chris Land observes that piracy during its “golden age”
operates as a “transnational brotherhood” (179). Such descriptions would
sit equally well within most of Disney’s ventures. Note the following
examples: “Team Disney” is the term given to Disney’s management team,
and the name “Imagineer”—with its evocations of Alexandre Dumas’
band-of-brothers novel, The Three Musketeers, which features the motto
“One for all, and all for one”—is attributed to every Disney employee
involved in research and development. Even the employees who enact
Disney characters in full costume at Disneyland bear the job description
“Teamster,” being part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
By reconstructing piracy’s textual history as a ride at Disneyland, Walt
Disney couched the social resonances of piracy within the physical, com-
mercial, and ideological boundaries of his corporate domain. Effectively
acting as a paratext to the Walt Disney Company, the Pirates ride sub-
stantiated the particular emphases on community, belonging, and synergy
that underscore the Disney ethos.
Portraits of community and teamwork abound in the Pirates films,
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but for different purposes than those outlined earlier. In Pirates of the
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Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 217

Caribbean: At World’s End, the opening scene features a portrait of the

kind of mass hangings that Captain Charles Johnson detailed in his book,
during which a young boy sings a pirate “anthem” immediately before
his execution, but not before the whole siege of convicts has joined in.
Not only does the song spread quickly throughout the execution court
but also, the film informs us, resonates through the pieces of eight that
are held by all nine lords of the Pirate World, who must then gather
at Brethren Court. In addition, Brethren Court is the fourth Brethren
Court, and is thus underscored by its serial nature. The film’s opening
scene quickly marks the interconnectivity and scale of a “world” com-
prising smaller collectives, communities, and codes. The film’s structure
is accordingly composed of interconnected narratives and communities,
and as such the spectatorial engagement involves a negotiation of collec-
tives and codes that deliberately facilitates and provokes engagement with
extrafilmic collectives and codes, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean
MMORPG, which, as its name suggests, is a specifically collaborative
game, designed to connect players with “thousands of other players”
with whom the player can “forge alliances.”4 The diegesis, in other
words, is composed of “real” opponents and figures. As Larry Shapiro,
executive vice president of the Walt Disney Internet Group’s business
development and operations, observed, the Pirates mobile phone game
“allows players to interact across multiple carriers” (qtd. in Marchetti).
Describing the game as “an exciting new universe,” Shapiro’s words are
echoed by franchise contributors, who are at pains to call each separate
textual offshoot a “world” or, at the very least, a means by which “play-
ers” and participants can enter the Pirates “world.” Such ventures in
world creation involve patterns of continuation and end-deferral within
a community context. By operating within an interactive community, the
narrative is continually extended across the interactions and contributions
of its players. And of course, these interactions and contributions extend
far beyond the game: a Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG web forum
is available at www.plundertheport.com, the express purpose of which is
to facilitate discussions with other players.
By creating numerous “worlds” and communities that—more
important—are connected to and interactive with a larger textual domain,
the Pirates franchise generates an immersive landscape that attempts to
make everything related to the Pirates text. Indeed, the chief impera-
tive of immersive media is to make everything—even the most arbitrary
aspects of the quotidian—a part of media reality. As Jane McGonigal
writes of gaming, “a good immersive game will show you game patterns
in non-game places; those patterns reveal opportunities for interaction
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and intervention.” At once immersive and prescriptive with regard to the

218 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

kind of experience one is to expect and enjoy while inside that “world,”
worlds such as Magic Kingdom, Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, and
Disneyland Paris construct consumer experiences that reach far beyond
their time inside the park’s walls. Suggesting cinema as an early “immer-
sive art form,” McGonigal describes immersive gaming as a subgenre
of the larger activity of pervasive play, which “consists of ‘mixed reality’
games that use mobile, ubiquitous and embedded digital technologies to
create virtual playing fields in everyday spaces.” The distinction between
immersive gaming and pervasive play, she claims, is made by a rhetorical
element of the subgenre that appears to underscore the franchise ethos
in contemporary cinema: “This is not a game.” This disclaimer operates
somewhat antithetically to its initial presupposition: it operates to eschew
the game-status of an actual game and, thus, embed the concept of gam-
ing into every reality. Among the outcomes of McGonigal’s research in
this area is the suggestion that both pervasive play and immersive gaming
involve extending the game play. In effect, pervasive play becomes an
experience of sequelization and convergence, in that the gaming reality
is not only transferred to every scenario, but that every scenario becomes
an opportunity for the game to continue, and therefore defer any kind
of ending.
Sequelized spectatorship is comparable to the type of gaming
outlined in McGonigal’s thesis. The Pirates franchise included, such
immersive “worlds” are nothing more than perpetually deferred narra-
tives. More specifically, participation and interaction within immersive
environments is predicated on and contributes to the continuation of
a narrative beyond its cinematic encounter. Notably, the structure of
the sequel is reiterated throughout such continuations. Drawing on the
spectator-consumers’ knowledge of its textual predecessor, the “sequel”—
whether in the form of a mobile phone game, online game, merchandize,
or any of the cultural events noted earlier—rewards that knowledge by
offering spectator-consumers’ rewriting capabilities or the ability to use
their memories, knowledge, and engagements with a textual predecessor
in the creation of their own “personal” sequel. The sense of “commu-
nity” that Disney increasingly constructs among its fan base, and which
is reinstated by the Pirates franchise, is a territory within which social
interaction is defined by sequelization.
The list of merchandizing tactics and gimmicks generated from the
Pirates franchise underlines and (of course) capitalizes upon this idea.
Here an observation by Steve McBeth, vice president of consumer prod-
ucts for Disney, is significant: the policy of providing “movie memen-
toes,” he states, “extends the entertainment experience [. . .]—it’s a way of
copyright law.

letting the fun of the movie continue” (qtd. in Twitchell 142). Like their
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 219

media intertexts, the morass of Pirates merchandize enables the experi-

ence of the movie to continue in the form of toys, fake pirate flags, plastic
pieces of eight, and so on. Merchandizing also operates as an important
“memory-making” tool (see Brockus 198), whereby the experience of the
film and its media events and tie-ins can be recalled and reexperienced
through a physical object. But in the case of the Pirates films, merchan-
dize not only continues and recalls the Pirates narrative, but also remedi-
ates the vast range of intertexts beneath the Disney umbrella.
Importantly, we should note briefly just how big this range is.
Dubbed “the foremost merchandizing company in Hollywood” (Wasko,
Understanding 50), Disney was among the first transnational media cor-
porations to identify the importance of merchandizing, and it remains at
the forefront of synergistic innovations between media and commercial
vehicles. When Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937,
Disney had followed the trend of film serials in cinema’s early years by
creating a literary tie-in in the form of serial comics, produced weekly,
two months before the film’s release. With the comic serial reaching the
point of the story at which the dwarfs are returning home to find an
unexpected guest, marketing executives intended the film as an extension
of the comic, with readers rushing to cinemas to find out what happened
next. In the early 1980s, Disney formed an alliance with fast-food empire
McDonalds resulting in the McDonald’s Happy Meal venture, which
included small toys based on characters from Disney films. In May 1996,
a contract was signed that allowed McDonald’s exclusive rights to produce
fluffy toy figurines of Disney characters to accompany its Happy Meals.
Such toys contributed enormously to the success of Happy Meals, which,
by 2002, made up 20 percent of the annual sales of McDonald’s, totaling
approximately $3.5 billion. With Pirates, celebrated by the company as
“our biggest cross-platform franchise ever,” Disney has reached a mer-
chandizing apex (see “Walt Disney Q3 2006”). As reported in Disney’s
Earnings Conference Call Transcript for the third quarter of 2006, the
Disney Consumer Products division’s income increased by 70 percent
over the previous year to $105 million, much of which was due to sales
of Pirates-themed merchandize (see “CARU Asks Disney to Stop”).
Contextualized within the specifically interactive and experiential
“world” of the Pirates franchise, Pirates merchandize offers more than
recall and continuation; like the textualization, popularization, and ram-
pant performance of the Captain Jack Sparrow character, Pirates mer-
chandize for the most part operates as a paratextual “tool” by which
the “original” can be rewritten and “reread” by fans. This is not to
suggest, however, that memory-making does not figure in Pirates mer-
copyright law.

chandize. More exactly, the forms of memory-making at large across

220 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Disney merchandizing involve forms of collaboration and community

building additional to those created by the strategies outlined earlier.
Indeed, Disney’s merchandizing creates generational communities, perpet-
uating experiences and memories not just across geographical locations,
but also from one generation to another, so that the act of engaging in
a Disney film or venture becomes heavily invested with emotional ties.
For instance, I have distinct (and especially fond) memories of watch-
ing the 1983 rerelease of The Sword in the Stone (Wolfgang Reitherman,
1963) at age five with my mother at our local cinema; I now own this
film in DVD format and look forward to enjoying it with my daughter
when she is old enough specifically because of the memories it contains
of me and my mother enjoying time together. Such emotional investment
additionally makes my endorsing any products associated with this film
much more likely. As Susan Brockus states, “Disney’s dedication to the
production of family-friendly entertainment means that such selection
may be inextricably entwined with perceptions of family and the creation
and retention of family memories” (199).
The persistent rerelease of Disney’s films facilitates generational
memory-making and transference, at the same time as each rerelease
generates memories in the form of additional features, merchandizing
gimmicks, and continual citations of the film’s heritage. In the case of
the Pirates franchise, the act of rereleasing the films is replaced by the
structure of the sequel—of which there are two—and, as I suggested
earlier, by framing all related Pirates products and activities through
the notion of creating a sequel in the form of an experience that may
be shared by scores of other participants. But the importance of such
sharing across generations creates a loyalty and much more emotional
participation with the franchise that, essentially, contributes beyond any
other strategy to the construction of an immersive “world.”
Disney’s status as cultural heritage brings to our engagement with
the Pirates franchise a connection not only with the vast number of
intertexts and paratexts generated by its synergistic textualizations, but
also a connection to the family experience and, beyond that, to the par-
ticular culture to which Disney has subscribed as a souvenir and signi-
fier. This is a key component of the Pirates franchise in terms of the
specifically “souvenir” kinds of merchandize (pirate weapons, flags, maps,
and outfits), which evoke a sense of heritage and retrieving history, and
also in terms of the specifically generational nature of piracy embedded
within the films. With Keith Richards making headlines in a cameo role
as Sparrow’s father—and all the connotations this brings to Sparrow’s
retextualization in popular culture—the film franchise also grapples with
copyright law.

the issue of Will Turner’s father in terms of his emotional debt to “Boot-
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Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 221

strap” Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgård) and Will’s (vain) wish to escape the
family tradition of piracy. The franchise ends on the suggestion of a con-
tinuation of the adventure in the form of a second generation, featuring
an after-credits shot of Will’s son (Dominic Scott Kay) waiting for him
on the horizon. In its double exploitation of souvenirs and generational
ties—both of which are Disney hallmarks—the franchise concludes with
the sentiment that, to paraphrase Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), passing on
the Pirates cultural heritage is certain if the “worlds” propagated by
Disney are to survive.
Each of the paratexts and paratextual activities noted earlier evidence
what Toby Miller et al. describe as “marketing modules,” which “serve
more than an economic function, for when they penetrate public space,
they also affect the aesthetic experience of filmgoing” (264). Similarly,
sequelized spectatorship involves the affect of the sequel as an organiz-
ing framework through which the franchise can be experienced, while
the commercial imperatives of the sequel are part of the overall effect.
The types of affect and effect outlined in this chapter are complicit with
models of interactivity and participation explored elsewhere,5 particularly
in terms of the suggestion that, in immersive environments and VR sce-
narios, the spectator directs his or her own experience. As my discussion
of sequelized spectatorship indicates, such agency always subscribes to a
carefully mapped geography of control. Yet describing this encounter as
passive is not enough; as a Pirates spectator, for instance, I witness and
participate with my own spectatorial encounter. Part of that encounter
is the construction, or rewriting, of the Pirates franchise as a sequel to
my reception. The rather reflexive correspondences between writing and
rewriting, as well as paratext and source text, underscore the notion of
sequelized spectatorship. At the same time as it proffers various scenarios
and systems of “secondariness” as an informing ingredient for our engage-
ment with the films, the Pirates franchise is constructed as its own paratext,
its own reception, or its own system of sequelization. In addition, the
host of products and experiences comprising the franchise suggest that the
concepts of “original” and “sequel” are in place, but not fixed: it is the
spectator that generates the sequelization of a conceptual “original.”
In its creation of synergistic modes, activities, and “worlds,” the
Pirates franchise reworks the traditional original-sequel trajectory into
a horizontal pattern of participation. What is the result for the Walt
Disney Company? More money, of course; as box-office figures show,
audiences are not simply keen on familiarity but on cross-media activi-
ties and tie-ins deriving from a source-text. Another outcome is that,
following the Pirates franchise, Disney is trimming the fat off its film
copyright law.

production output to less than half (from 18 films a year to approximately

222 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

8), with a specific focus on Disney-branded productions instead of films

produced by subsidiary studios (Ryssdal). The idea behind this move is to
concentrate on spending more money on films with merchandizing and
franchise value, and arguably on building up the Disney “kingdom” so
that each new venture recalls and continues the cultural heritage that the
Walt Disney Company has come to evoke. But beyond these industrial
measures, the specific methods of spectatorial sequelization created by
film franchises perpetuate and will no doubt continue to perpetuate such
a cultural heritage and propel Disney’s momentum.
In closing, I draw on a scene from Pirates of the Caribbean: At
World’s End as a final metaphor for the kind of spectator-franchise rela-
tion for which I have been arguing. Stranded on his ship in the barren
desert of the afterlife, Captain Jack Sparrow resorts to single-hand-
edly pulling the Black Pearl back to the ocean by a rope through the
sand—getting, of course, absolutely nowhere. Aided by one, two, and
finally millions of Tia Dalma’s (Naomie Harries) crabs, Sparrow and his
ship are carouseled over the dunes to open waters, back to the land of
the living. The sequelizing mechanisms surrounding the Pirates films
operate in a manner similar to Dalma’s crabs, carrying the concept of
the Pirates of the Caribbean to the vast, interactive spaces afforded by
the Internet, mobile phones, and indeed the range of innovative tie-ins
launched by the franchise. What this means for me, the single specta-
tor, is that my engagement with the film is inherently collaborative,
mediated, and part of a process of exchange and continuation: from the
subject of conversation with friends and family to playing the mobile
phone game during long commutes. And, just maybe, sharing the film’s
rerelease with future generations.

Notes
1. According to John Robert Moore, this is a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe,
but like much of the historical data surrounding piracy, Moore’s claim is impos-
sible to verify. See Moore, and also Furbank and Owens for a counterargument
to this claim.
2. Yes, this exists. See <http://www.talklikeapirate.com/>. N.d. Accessed
17 May 2007.
3. For instance, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937 after
a three-year production period, costing upward of $1.5 million. Earning $8 mil-
lion on its release, the film has been released no less than nine times, continuing
to earn $40 million in less than eight weeks on its relaunch fifty years after its
original release (see Wasko, Understanding 129).
4. See <http://disney.go.com/disneymobile/mdisney/pirates/about.html>.
copyright law.

Accessed 14 June 2007.

Sequelizing Spectatorship and Building Up the Kingdom 223

5. Matt Hills describes affect as “the attachments, emotions and passions of

those who self-identify as ‘fans,’ but who may also contest the description” (xi),
whereas Henry Jenkins talks about “impressions” and “expressions” in terms of
how audiences react and respond to content (Convergence Culture 63). Hills also
talks about “the serialisation of the audience” in similar yet clearly distinct terms
to my argument in this chapter, and his comments are helpful and provocative
for further study: focusing on “online fandoms,” Hill considers fan activities as
synthesizing with a text to the point where the text “perform[s] its fan audience-
hood, knowing that other fans will act as a readership for speculations, obser-
vations and commentaries” (177). The forms of rewriting, reperformance, and
retextualization outlined in his work complement the investigations of affect and
effect in the context of sequelized spectatorship raised in this chapter.
copyright law.
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copyright law.

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Contributors

Jennifer Forrest is professor of French at Texas State University, San

Marcos. She is the editor of The Legend Returns and Dies Harder Another
Day: Essays on Film Series (McFarland, 2008), the coeditor of Dead Ring-
ers: The Remake in Theory and Practice (SUNY Press, 2002), and author of
articles on late-nineteenth-century French literature and popular culture.
She is working on a book-length study of the late-nineteenth-century
circus in French literature, art, and popular culture.

Joyce Goggin is associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, with

an interdisciplinary appointment in literature, film, and new media. She
is also head of studies for the humanities and computing at Amsterdam
University College. Her recent publications include “Gaming/Gambling:
Addiction and the Videogame Experience,” “Jane Austen Reloaded: Por-
traits and Adaptations,” and “Architectural Space, Cyber Bodies and the
Literary Text: A Voyage through Neuromancer.” She has also published
articles on gambling, money, play, and magic and is currently editing a
book on comics and graphic novels.
Ina Rae Hark is distinguished professor emerita of English and Film
Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of the
volume on Star Trek in the BFI Television Classics series and the editor
or coeditor of Screening the Male, The Road Movie Book, Exhibition: the
Film Reader, and American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations. She
has published more than thirty articles and chapters on film and media
studies, concentrating in recent years on the films of Alfred Hitchcock
and on science-fiction films and television.

Daniel Herbert is assistant professor in Screen Arts and Cultures at the

University of Michigan. His essays appear in several edited collections
and journals, including Film Quarterly, Millennium Film Journal, and
copyright law.

Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

244 Contributors

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is senior lecturer in Film Studies at the Univer-

sity of Sunderland. She is author of Shakespeare on Film: Such Things as
Dreams Are Made Of (Wallflower Press, 2007), Film Sequels: Theory and
Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood (Edinburgh University Press, 2008),
and coeditor with Melissa Croteau of Apocalyptic Shakespeares (McFarland,
2009). She is also an award-winning poet.

Thomas Leitch teaches English and directs the Film Studies program
at the University of Delaware. His most recent books are Perry Mason
(Wayne State UP, 2005) and Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Johns
Hopkins UP, 2007).
Simon McEnteggart teaches at the Media and Culture Department at
the University of Sunderland. His research interests include the super-
hero film and questions of ideology and the body in film.

R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson

University. He has published extensively on literature and film. Recently
published and forthcoming books include Joel and Ethan Coen (U of Illi-
nois P, 2004); with Linda Badley, Traditions in World Cinema (Edinburgh
UP 2005); Hollywood’s Dark Cinema, 2nd rev. ed (U of Illinois P); with
Linda Badley, American Commercial-Independent Cinema (Edinburgh UP);
with David Boyd, After Hitchcock: Imitation, Influence, Intertextuality (U of
Texas P), David Cronenberg (U of Illinois P).

Claire Perkins is assistant lecturer in Film and Television Studies at

Monash University, Melbourne. Her book on US “smart” cinema is
forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.
Paul Sutton is principal lecturer in Film at Roehampton University
in London. He has interests in Italian and French cinema, film theory,
and critical theory, and he has written extensively on the idea of after-
wardsness in film. He has published articles in journals such as Screen,
Parallax, Angelaki, and the Journal for Cultural Research as well as book
chapters on a range of subjects, including the remake and film directors
Nanni Moretti and Olivier Assayas. He is currently writing the book
Remaking Film: In History, In Theory (Blackwell, forthcoming).

Constantine Verevis teaches Film and Television Studies in the School

of English, Communications & Performance Studies at Monash Uni-
versity, Melbourne. He is the author of Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP,
2006).
copyright law.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Index

9/11 (see also World Trade Center), autotranslation, 7, 145, 147, 150
8, 174–75, 179–80, 189
Bale, Christian, 139, 140, 142
Aarseth, Espen, 216 Barron, Stephanie, 49
Academy Award, 35 Barthes, Roland, 74, 162, 163, 195
Adaptation, 2, 6–7, 9, 13, 34, 36–37, Bat Whispers, The, 141
45–57, 50, 73–74, 76, 109, 150– Batman, 7, 140, 139–45, 149–50
51, 173, 210–12 Batman Begins, 7, 140–51
Addams Family, The, 123 Batman Forever, 140
Adventures of Robin Hood, The, 37 Batman and Robin, 140
afterwardsness, 7, 139, 141–51 Batman Returns, 140, 150
Alien Nation, 123 Dark Knight, The, 150–51
allegory, 13, 18, 21, 26, 169, 180, 186 Baudrillard, Jean, 112, 176, 182, 201
Allen, Graham, 74 Baumbach, Noah, 8, 96, 99, 102
Alien, 67, 193 BBC (see British Broadcasting
Aliens, 67, 193 Corporation)
Altman, Robert, 72, 88–91, 108 beforeness, 7
Always in My Heart, 33 Bel-Ami, 59
Anderson, Paul Thomas, 25, 89–90, Bennett, Susan, 208
98 Big Daddy, 26, 27
Anderson, Wes, 8, 89, 90, 95 Biskind, Peter, 85 n. 1&2, 89, 90,
apocalypse, 13, 179–83 104 n. 3
Apocalypse Now, 78 Blade series, 8, 172, 174, 176–77,
Appadurai, Arjun, 154 182–83, 187–88
appropriation, 5, 6, 9, 108, 212 blockbusters, 8, 33, 40, 87, 89, 144,
architecture, 10, 112, 114–15, 209 148, 154, 20
Argento, Dario, 23–24 Bogdanovich, Peter, 88
Astaire, Fred, 38 Bonnie and Clyde, 87, 89
Austen, Jane, 45–50, 53–58, 60, 64 Brando, Marlon, 78
Auteurism, 66–69, 199 Bride of Frankenstein, The, 54
authenticity, 63, 113, 115, 119, 145, Bridget Jones, 6, 45, 46, 54–64
copyright law.

200 Fielding, Helen, 6, 45–47, 55–63

246 Index

British Broadcasting Corporation Die Hard films, 2–3, 148

(BBC), 45, 57 Dickens, Charles, 98, 107
Browne, Nick, 65–67, 68, 70 Disney (see also Walt Disney Company,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 123, 131 The), 10, 89, 207, 209–12,
Burton, Tim, 140, 150 215–22
Disneyland, 207, 209–12, 215–18
California Split, 91 Donnie Darko, 98, 101
Capitalism, 4, 22, 108, 114, 118–19, Doyle, Arthur Conan, 50
180, 184 Sherlock Holmes, 35, 38, 50–52, 54
Captain Jack Sparrow (see also Depp, The Hound of the Baskervilles,
Johnny), 205, 208, 211, 213–15, 64 n. 3
222 Dracula (see also Bram Stoker), 52,
Casino Royale, 148 141, 176, 177, 188
Chan, Charlie, 35, 38, 40 DreamWorks SKG (see also
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, 123 Spielberg, Steven), 166, 167–69
Chicago Sun-Times, 14 Duping, 162, 168
Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Dust Be My Destiny, 39
Things, 15 DVD, 9, 10, 28 n. 3, 29 n. 4, 63,
Christianity (see also religion), 131, 120 n. 3, 123, 125, 136, 134–35,
177, 182, 185 137 n. 2, 169, 192, 194, 195,
Citizen Kane, 195 197, 198, 212, 220
commercial filmmaking (see also
merchandise), 4–5, 7–9, 11, 12, Eco, Umberto, 11
14, 16, 23–25, 33, 47, 63, 67, 71, Egg and I, The, 42, 44 n. 4
88, 104 n. 2, 106, 108, 140, 207, Elsaesser, Thomas, 87, 90, 91, 92, 94,
213, 244 99, 103
Conversation, The, 78, 91, 95 Elvis, 115, 116
Coppola, Francis Ford, 68–69, 72, Epic Movie, 214
77–78, 80, 83, 85 n. 1&2 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
Coppola, Sofia, 84 196, 198
copyright, 14, 162
Corliss, Richard, 123 Falkenberg, Pamela, 108
cultural imperialism, 106, 166 Fan activity, 3, 8–9, 52, 54, 61, 115,
Curtiz, Michael, 39 121, 123–25, 126–27, 132–36,
137, 140, 200, 211 n. 5, 212–14,
Daily Telegraph, 45, 61–62 218–19
Damon, Matt, 114 Farewell my lovely, 36
Daughters Courageous, 33–37, 39, 42, Father’s Little Dividend, 41
44 n. 4 Fever Pitch, 46, 57
Davenport, Jack, 214 Fillion, Nathan, 129
Death Jr., 216 Fincher, David, 90
Deleuze, Gilles, 91–95, 98, 99–101, Firefly, 9, 124–37
104 n. 4–6, 179 Firth, Colin, 45, 46, 57, 63
Depp, Johnny, 195 Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, 41
Derrida, Jacques, 197 Flynn, Errol, 37
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Index 247

Ford, Harrison, 40 Godzilla, 157

Forrest, Jennifer, 6, 161, 168 Gomery, Douglas, 32
Foucault, Michel, 155, 162 Gone with the Wind, 47
Four Daughters, 6, 34–37, 39–43 Gordon, Ian, 176
Four Wives, 6, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, 42, Grumpy Old Men, 67
55 Grumpier Old Men, 67
Four Mothers, 6, 33, 34, 35, 37, 41,
42 Hackman, Gene, 92, 95
FOX network, 9, 124, 125, 126, 127, Hamilton, George, 69
136 Harry Potter series, 1, 3, 137 n. 1
Foy, Bryan, 32 Harvey, David, 118
franchises, 5, 7, 10, 23, 25, 33, 47, Hayles, N. Katherine, 202
52, 54, 63, 67, 122, 133, 135, Hellman, Monte, 88
139–41, 143, 148, 195, 199, 205, Hepburn, Katherine, 38
207–22 Hills, Matt, 215, 223 n. 5
Frankenstein, 21, 52, 54 Hollywood Reporter, The, 132
Freeman, Morgan, 155 Hollywood Renaissance, 77, 87–103,
Freud, Sigmund 107
id and ego, 184 Horkheimer, Max, 104
Nachträglichkeit, 144, 149 Huyssen, Andreas, 173, 179
pleasure principle, The, 117 hypertextuality, 74–76, 85 n. 6, 209
trauma, 137
Fugitive, The, 71, 123 I Am Legend (Matheson), 13, 28 n. 2
I Walked with a Zombie, 12, 13, 24
Galaxy Quest, 121 imitation, 5, 11, 34, 75, 163, 186,
du Gay, Paul, 157 203
Gehry, Frank, 115 immersive gaming, 217–20
Genette, Gérard, 3, 74–76, 85 n. 4, Insomnia, 142, 144
210, 215 intertextuality, 3, 11, 45, 46, 74, 147,
Generation X, 103 149, 153, 162, 164, 208, 210,
genre 211, 214
American, 96, 98–99 iPod, 9
conventions, 14, 201 Iwabuchi, Koichi, 157
films, 14, 17, 27, 31, 87, 94, 107,
199 James Bond series, 52, 67, 80, 122
horror, 160 Jameson, Fredric, 192
romance, 56, 61 Jane and the Unpleasantness at
pirate, 208–11 Scargrave Manor, 49
subgenres, 38, 49, 218 Jaws, 87
superhero, 8 Jedang, Cheil, 169
zombie, 13, 18, 24, 27–28, 52 Jenkins, Henry, 208, 223 n. 5
Gilligan’s Island, 53 Jurassic Park series, 67
globalization, 154, 157, 170
Godfather, The series, 6, 48, 65–84, 85 Katz, Ephraim, 43
n. 1&2 Keaton, Diane, 68
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248 Index

Kern, Stephen, 194 Melbourne International Film Festival

Kidron, Beeban, 45, 58, 60, 63 (MIFF), 4
King, Noel, 75, 87, 88, 104 n. 1 Memento, 142–44, 196, 198
Klaprat, Cathy, 43, 44 memory, 77, 98, 149
Kofman, Sarah, 147 cinematic, 145–47
Kolker, Robert, 77, 78, 94, 95 collective, 119, 179, 189, 197, 207,
Kracauer, Siegfried, 198 208
Kraft Television Theatre, 53 and ideology, 172–73, 175–76, 179,
Kristeva, Julia, 74 181, 189
Kwaidan, 158 politics, 174, 219
and sequels, 180, 220
Lacan, Jacques, 144 and trauma, 143–44, 175
Lane, Priscilla, 34, 39–42 merchandise (see also commercial
Laplanche, Jean, 144–47, 149 filmmaking), 135
Las Vegas, 9, 79, 81, 108–20, 210 Metropolis, 186
Leitch, Thomas, 6, 45–52, 119 MGM, 38–40, 115, 118
Lemp, Ann, 39 Mikami, Shinji, 25
Levy, Emanuel, 214 Millennialism, 179, 183
Lewis, Jon, 68 Mirage casino, 113
Limbacher, James L., 34 mise en abyme, 111
linearity, 69, 144, 146, 191, 196, 197, Mottram, James, 89–90, 104 n. 3
212 Murder my Sweet, 36
Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, mythology, 12, 13, 176, 186, 188, 213
The, 15
logophilia, 155, 162–69 Naked and the Dead, The, 102
logophobia, 155, 162–69 Naked Gun, The series, 124
Los Angeles, 61 Neale, Steve, 88, 89
Lost in Translation, 8 Necropsy, 126
Loy, Myrna, 38, 40 Newman, Kim, 14, 20, 139, 144, 151
Lucas, George, 198 n. 1
Lycett, Andrew, 51 New Testament, 49
Lynn, Jeffrey, 39 New York City, 60, 81, 82, 83, 84,
103, 110, 112, 181, 202
McGonigal, Jane, 217, 218 New York Times, 35, 43, 202
McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force, 123 Night of Anubis, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 28
Magnolia, 98 Night of the Flesh Eaters, 16
Mancuso, Frank, 68 Night of the Living Dead, 5, 12–29
Man, Glenn, 84 Night Moves, 91, 95
Manovich, Lev, 194, 198 Nixon, Richard, 112
Martin, Dean, 108, 110 Nolan, Christopher, 139–40, 142–44,
masculinity, 8, 17, 18, 22, 23, 210 149–50
M*A*S*H, 89 nostalgia, 8, 72, 172, 173, 175, 176,
Matrix, The series, 48, 54, 179, 186, 179–81, 183, 189, 202, 208
199, 215 novelization, 16, 170 n. 6
Meet Me in Las Vegas, 115 Nugent, Frank S., 34, 41, 42
copyright law.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Index 249

Ocean’s Eleven ((Lewis Milestone), 9, Pride and Prejudice, 45–47, 54–55, 57,
105–20 59
Ocean’s Eleven (Steve Soderburgh), 9, Princess Casamassima, The, 50
105–20 projection methods, 146, 147, 160,
Ocean’s Twelve, 9, 105–20 197
Odyssey, 49 Psycho, 89
Oldboy, 49 Pulp Fiction, 196, 198
Orientalism, 162 Pulse, 156, 170 n. 2
originality, 2–4, 50, 108, 119, 148,
191 Rambo series, 176
Rasen, 7, 153, 170 n. 4&6
Parallax View, The, 91 Rat Pack, 109, 110, 116
Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, 49 Realism, 92, 93, 101, 102, 200–1
Paramount Studios, 33, 68, 83 Rear Window, 75
paratextuality, 5, 195, 213, 215, 219, recycling, 3, 31, 33, 36, 67, 71, 153
221 religion (see also Christianity), 176,
parody, 121, 214 180
Patton, 78 remakes, 5, 7, 11, 23, 31, 32, 34, 36,
Payne, Alexander, 89 44 n. 6, 53, 76, 105–8, 110–13,
Penn, Arthur, 88 115, 118–19, 123, 141, 149, 150,
Percesepe, Gary, 112 153–56, 158, 164, 167, 196
Phone, 156 reorientation, 6, 34, 66, 70, 71, 73
Piracy (media), 168–69 Resident Evil series, 25, 27
Piracy (at sea), 10, 210–11, 216, franchise, 25
221–22 PlayStation video game, 25
Pirates of the Caribbean, 3, 10, 12, 13, retextualization, 211, 213–15, 220,
23, 24, 122, 205–22 223 n. 5
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s Return of the Living Dead, 16, 17, 24,
End, 3, 206, 213, 217, 222 25
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Ring, The, 7, 153–70, 197, 203
Black Pearl, The, 1, 206, 208 Ringside Maisie, 43
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s RKO, 36
Chest, 205, 214 Robson, May, 39
Massively-Multiplayer Mobile Roberts, Julia, 109
Game, 206 Rocky series, 67, 176
Massively Multiplayer Online Role- Rogers, Ginger, 38
Playing Game, 215 Romero, George A., 5, 12–29
plagiarism, 97 Rotman, Brian, 112
Playhouse 90, 53 Ruben, J. Walter, 39
Poltergeist, 203 Run Lola Run, 196
popularization, 201–11, 214, 219 Russell, David O., 89
postmodernism, 110, 112, 113, 115, Ryder, Winona, 68
116, 172–74, 176, 182–88, 192,
196, 201 Sakai, Naoki, 163, 164
Powell, William, 38–40 Sarris, Andrew, 199
copyright law.
Copyright © 2010. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

250 Index

Scarecrow, 8, 92–95, 101 Sword in the Stone, The, 220

Schellenberg, Betty, 10 n. 4, 172
secondariness, 215, 221 Tamburlaine the Great, Part II, 48
Seinfeld, 53 Tarantino, Quentin, 50, 89, 90
Serenity, 9, 121, 125–36 Taxi Driver, 87
Serials, 6, 41, 43, 44 n. 1, 52, 54, Taylorization, 117
141, 219 Technophilia, 15, 157, 158, 161, 169
serialization, 5, 6, 14, 16–19, 21–24, Temporality, 7, 9, 119, 141, 144, 145,
26, 28, 107, 116–19 146, 148–51
Shakespeare, William, 48, 49, 51 Terminator 2: Judgment Day,
Shaviro, Steven, 20 198
Scheherazade, 52 Thin Man series, 35, 38, 40, 41, 43
Shapiro, Larry, 217 Through the Looking-Glass, 48
Shell, Marc, 107 Tiger Shark, 32
Shrek, 3, 122 Times Square, 114
Siegel, Bugsy, 109–10 Tom Jones, 49
Silence of the Lambs, The, 47 Tora! Tora! Tora!, 88
Sinatra, Frank, 108, 110 Tracy, Spencer, 38
Skelton, Red, 110 transnational media corporations, 219
Skurnick, Lizzie, 61 transtextuality, 3, 74–77, 155
smart cycle, 8, 87, 90, 92–104 Treasure Island, 110
Solondz, Todd, 90, 102, 104 trilogies, 3–5, 12, 14–19, 22–28, 44 n.
Soderbergh, Steven, 9, 89, 90, 119 1, 48, 50, 66–70, 128, 135, 144,
Sony, 157, 169, 194 173, 183, 207–8
Sothern, Ann, 39, 40 Tristram Shandy, 48
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, Twin Towers (see also World Trade
123 Center), 112, 173, 175
Souvenirs, 220, 221 Two-Lane Blacktop, 91
Spaced, 28
spectatorship, 5, 7, 10, 144, 146–49, Universal Studios, 9, 13, 26, 34, 42,
205–23 125, 132–35
Spenser, Liese, 119 U.S. Marshals, 71
spin-offs, 31, 123, 171, 211
Spider-Man series, 2, 8, 181–86, 198 Variety, 127
Squid and the Whale, The, 8, 96–103 Verbinski, Gore, 207–8
Star Wars, 40, 87, 132, 133, 137 n. 1, Vertigo Entertainment, 154
165, 198, 199 Vienna Film Festival, 87
Strange Days, 179 Vietnam, 22, 92, 176
Stoker, Bram (see also Dracula), 176 Videotape, 156, 158–59, 161, 163–65,
Strasser, Tessa, 214 168, 170 n. 4&6, 197, 203
Sundance Film Festival, 89 Virtual Reality (VR), 197, 202, 207,
Superheroes, 52, 177, 182, 183, 188 208, 209, 218
Superman series, 8, 35, 52, 63, 148, Viva Las Vegas, 116
172, 175, 180, 181, 182, 184
Suzuki, Koji, 7, 153, 197, 203 Walt Disney Company, The, 10, 89,
copyright law.

Sweet Hereafter, The, 101 207–23

Index 251

Wang, Shujen, 168–69 X-Men 2 films, 8, 172–78, 184,

Warhol, Andy, 107 186–87, 200
Wall Street, 113, 114
Warner Brothers, 7, 32, 34–36, 38– Yesco, 115
39, 42, 89, 106, 120 n. 3 You’re Only Young Once, 42
Whedon, Joss, 9, 123–35
White Zombie, 12, 13 Zombi, 2, 15, 23, 24, 25
Wild Bunch, The, 91 Zombies, 13–28
Willis, Bruce, 2, 3, 113 Zombification, 13
Wood, Andy, 200–2 Zombies of Mora Tau (aka The Dead
World Trade Center, 112 that Walk), 13
Wynn, Steve, 110, 111, 113 Zombies in the White House, 21
copyright law.
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This page intentionally left blank.

FILM STUDIES

Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very
beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive
variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case
studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise,
Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels and their
aftermaths, proposing new critical approaches to what has become a dominant

Second Takes
industrial mode of Hollywood cinema. The contributors explore the sequel’s
investments in repetition, difference, continuation, and retroactivity, and particularly
those attitudes and approaches toward the sequel that hold it up as a kind of
figurehead of Hollywood’s commercial imperatives. An invaluable resource to the
film student, critic, and fan, Second Takes offers new ways of looking at the film
sequel’s industrial, aesthetic, cultural, political, and theoretical contexts.

“A comprehensive and adventurous exploration of a timely topic.”

—Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Northumbria

University in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Shakespeare on Film: Such
Things as Dreams Are Made Of and Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from
Hollywood to Bollywood, and the coeditor (with Melissa Croteau) of Apocalyptic
Shakespeare: Essays on Visions of Destruction and Revelation in Recent Film
Adaptations. Constantine Verevis is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies
at Monash University, Melbourne, and the author of Film Remakes.

to the Film Sequel

Critical Approaches
applicable copyright law.

State University of
New York Press
www.sunypress.edu

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 3/11/2021 7:47 AM via CASE WESTERN
RESERVE UNIV

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