Stay Tuned: Sequels, Serials, Adaptations and Reboots

1 year ago

Stay Tuned: Sequels, Serials, Adaptations and Reboots

by Sarah Malone

We might as well join a story in progress.

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We’re outside a house, looking in. A spring evening, bursting with leaves. Inside, a small group is around a table, laughing, drinking and smoking. One of the women and one of the men step outside. Fresh air. A stretch. With a needling look, he leads her out of sight of the house.

The house, of course, is Howards End, from Merchant Ivory’s 1992 production. “Hothouse nostalgia,” The New York Times’ Stephen Holden calls the Merchant Ivory aesthetic:

a refined sensibility shaped by Chekhov, Henry James and [Howards End author] E. M. Forster, in which privileged people with time on their hands fret about money, endlessly chew over the past and allow their minds to eat themselves.

Indeed they do, but for all its rich furnishingsHowards End has a fleet-footed screenplay that only dips into scenes that determine characters’ fates. Scenes in parlors, dining rooms and department stores seem to be daily life but quickly become pivotal. Months at a time are skipped, acres of Forster’s reflections chopped to a few lines of dialogue and Beethoven. Henry and Charles Wilcox don’t explain why they are laissez-faire capitalists; Margaret and Helen Schlegel don’t explain their support for suffrage or why they remain unmarried. Instead, we see them act. They’re so consistent and distinctive, so much themselves, that it becomes easy to feel we’re overhearing real people, not movie characters adapted from characters in a hundred-year-old novel.

“I do nothing but steal umbrellas,” Helen Schlegel tells Leonard Bast, after he’s followed her home through a downpour. Only then does she notice how drenched he is, but by then she’s invited him in.

When the movie does explain, the explanations feel natural for the characters at those moments, the scenes necessary, natural, and inevitable—not arranged for our benefit. The screenplay compresses four hundred pages into two hours. I’d argue—politely, at a lectern with restored Edwardian details—that it leaves out little that we miss.

Though a standalone movie, Howards End is, in a way, an installment in the Merchant Ivory franchise—one of three E.M. Forster novels they adapted, along with novels by authors such as Henry James and Kazuo Ishiguro. The characters are mostly well-to-do, or under the wing of the well-to-do. If you’ve seen one movie, you know the cosmos to expect, the aesthetics, the tone. Maybe it’s why you watch.

Studios love franchises: Harry Potter, the Bourne trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, Sex and the City, Pirates of the Caribbean, Iron Man, Batman, X-Men, Spiderman, Terminator, James Bond, Star Wars, Star Trek, Paul Newman teamed with Robert Redford, and many long-running television series. Each new installment (it’s assumed) can count on an existing audience. No need to develop characters from scratch or market new worlds. But we watch franchise dramas differently than we do standalone stories that are over when they’re over. Nine seasons could not solve The X-Files, and in Lost any detail could become a puzzle, but how many episodes did we need before we learned what to expect? Once we begin watching for mysteries, what resolution could be satisfying?

Franchises train us how to watch them. Each week new patients were wheeled into ER, but we knew what to do—stat!—when they arrived. Eventually it becomes difficult to watch a installment without fitting it into the franchise. We feel ownership. Is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire better than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? Is Daniel Craig a better Bond than Pierce Brosnan? If you’ve seen one Agatha Christie mystery, you know the only question is whodunit. It’s the difference between a coloring book and a blank sheet of paper. Only so many possibilities remain.

Serial dramas often become concerned with their own origins, with explaining why things are the way they are, why characters behave a certain way, instead of showing them behaving that way. Sometimes this carries the story forward, develops it. The Bourne trilogy explains the mysteries of Bourne’s background as he retrieves the memories; explanations are integrated with his amnesia, and the revelations inform action that’s still pending, so they feel present. But, while beautiful to look at, what do the Star Wars prequels give us in the way of story that we didn’t get in a few sentences from Obi Wan in 1977?

With ‘reboots’ and ‘re-imaginings,’ explanation can fill entire movies. Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood gets billed as “the story of how the man became a legend.” We get how the X-men became X-men. How Batman came to fight crime. Origin stories make sense for comic book heroes: of course we want to know why Bruce Wayne wears a rubber suit! And origin stories do tie into something elemental. Who isn’t curious about where we came from?

But where do explanations take us? J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot destroys the planet Vulcan (and looks terrific), but in the larger arc of the franchise, the entire movie only serves to get us to the bridge of the Enterprise, where every Star Trek episode begins.

Instead of opening with the crew assembled, and having his alternate timeline begin from there, Abrams shows where the crew came from, particularly Kirk and Spock, explaining their personalities in terms of childhood experiences, and creating a lot of logistical problems: how do we get the various characters on board, in the ‘right’ places? Solving them occupies screen time, but if you don’t already know Star Trek, are such moments satisfying? And if you do know Star Trek, doesn’t it feel a little like checking off the appropriate boxes?

For most of Abrams’s reboot, Spock is Kirk’s superior officer (and we know that can’t happen!) At one point, young Kirk provokes young Spock to the point of getting himself thrown off the ship. Spock maroons him on a moon, which conveniently has a breathable atmosphere and a backwater Starfleet base. Scotty just happens to have been assigned there after falling out of favor for his iconoclastic ideas. And Nero, the movie’s villain, just happens to have marooned Spock Prime (old, Leonard Nimoy Spock) there as well, to witness the destruction of Vulcan.

Convenient! Spock Prime is able to fill Kirk in on Nero’s entire plot! And on Vulcan psychology! Young Kirk is returned to the Enterprise (via Scotty Prime’s tech wizardry, in a bit of hacking by Spock prime). Following Spock Prime’s instructions, Young Kirk provokes Young Spock to lose his cool. Kirk is promoted (restored) to captain—as we always knew he would be—and Star Trek ends as Howards End begins, with everyone in place.

I doubt anyone has ever asked about the further adventures of the Schlegels and Wilcoxes. Their storyline is complete. Some characters are dead, others not so much changed as revealed by their actions and by events. None can go back to life as it was; nor can we view them as we did.

In franchises’ pull to avoid or delay that, they turn inward, and back. Ending at the beginning may feel like watching a lot for a little, but in our next installment…

Sarah Malone writes fiction and teaches composition. She tumbls here.