Sloppy seconds

If you really,really loved a book or movie,a sequel will inevitably disappoint you. Not necessarily because it’s not as good as the first,but because you’re vainly trying to recapture the pleasure of encountering the original work. The more things are the same,the more keenly you notice that it doesn’t live up to the experience of the first. So why create sequels? Because they’re not there. You want to know what happens next to the people you now know so well,you can’t just have the doors slammed on you. And then,aur phir,like three-year-olds ask — you want the story to snake on endlessly. As literary critic Marjorie Garber has written,the sequel also “‘corrects’ and amplifies,gratifying a desire not only for continuation but also for happy endings”.

But the sequel is not strictly an extension,it is a fresh start on a similar expedition. It has to reintroduce you to the first work,quote heavily from it,and stay close enough to its spirit. So the Odyssey is not a sequel to the Iliad,because it takes a new,different path. And unlike an epilogue,which jump-cuts to the future,telling you how it all turned out,a sequel is not trying to solve and satisfy anything. Rather,sequels and prequels are an attempt to wring out the success of the first. I should have known that at 13,when I was horrified at how Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett willfully mangled Gone With the Wind,transplanted it to Ireland,gave Rhett out-of-character lines and disfigured Scarlett’s whole personality.

But in a few rare cases,you have to watch the sequel to know you were waiting for it. My favourite is Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset,that followed up on the 1994 movie Before Sunrise,of two intense young people wandering around in Vienna,talking,falling in love,promising to meet again. The sequel,played out in real time,came nine years later to show us Jesse and Celine just that much older. If it says anything about relationships,it is that there are all kinds of love in the world,but never the same love twice. Both films have open endings,but they are not intended to set up a sequel (though if there is a follow-up to Before Sunset,that would be an unexpected gift).

Other times,the primary text leaves some tantalising gaps,minor characters demand your attention. No matter how cosily and conclusively Jane Eyre ended,how can you not want to follow the madwoman in the attic,as Jean Rhys did in Wide Sargasso Sea? Then there are palimpsests,books and movies that owe an artistic debt to another,but are entirely their own beasts,like,say,Ulysses.

The sense that a sequel invokes the pleasurable memory of the first,but can’t repeat it,obviously doesn’t apply to book series and movie franchises that are spread across several installments,where one only whets your appetite for the next. So with Harry Potter or Twilight,which are huge trans-media projects,the wait between one book and the next can be agonising. That’s why some fans didn’t wait for J K Rowling or Stephanie Meyer to take the story forward,they went ahead and wrote their own versions,pulling the material in all kinds of surprising directions. Slash fiction,when fans create romantic connections between characters of the same sex,started with Star Trek,but thrives online now (imagine Harry’s secret passion for Draco Malfoy,or a Jacob-Edward romance). Rowling and Meyer,in fact,have accepted the fertile world of fan fiction as a tribute to their work.

So there is a difference between wanting the story to go on longer,and wanting to intervene and take it somewhere else. Either way,it indicates that when it comes to a beloved artistic work,we can’t quite share in the sense of an ending.

amulya.gopalakrishnan@expressindia.com