Sequels suck

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Well, well, Creator. Here we are… again. Hey.

Have you ever noticed how bad sequels tend to be? I mean, can you remember the last time you saw a continuation of a story that you actually thought was better than the original? Only a few examples immediately come to mind:

What do all these have in common? Well, none of these stories got caught in the trap of trying to replicate the past. The second film in the Star Wars franchise veered significantly off course from its campy predecessor. It had a new director, a completely different mood in terms of cinematography, and a story that caused more than a few fans to protest.

These are the hallmarks of a successful sequel: one that completely disregards the rules of the form, almost disdaining what has come before it. Think of a sequel as the annoyed second sibling who is determined to outwork their predecessor. The Godfather Part II does something similar in that it takes the antihero model of Vito Corleone’s endearing gangster figure and turns it upside down, making Michael into a downright monster. All the things that work in Part I don’t work in Part II.

And this teaches us something about work that endures: whether it be a certain kind of a vocation or an actual sequel, the work that follows what came before must avoid the temptation to be derivative, to give people exactly what they’re expecting.

This is true of life, too. What once was will never be again, at least not in the way it came before. You can never grab the river, only handfuls of water that cease to flow as soon as you scoop them up. And you can never relive the past, in spite of what Jay Gatsby might insist.

A truly great sequel finds a way to take the form of the original work and somehow turn it into a prequel, an opening act for the main event. In literature, this may have not been done any better than J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Few, if any, would consider LOTR a sequel to The Hobbit; and yet, that’s exactly what it was. Published in 1937, The Hobbit was an immediate success, and Tolkien’s publisher promptly demanded a follow-up.

Being the perfectionist that he was, Tolkien struggled to meet the demands of the publisher and found himself, like many successful creators, stuck in the doldrums of trying to recreate a previously successful work. This led to a lunch with his friend C.S. Lewis, who gave Tolkien some clear advice on what to do with his state of stuckness:

“The problem,” Lewis told his friend, “is that hobbits are only interesting when they’re in un­hobbit-­like situations.”

And of course, that was enough to get the maker of Middle Earth out of his creative rut. It would be many years before he’d actually finish what, at the time, he was calling The New Hobbit; but part of what made this new book better than the original is that it took the form is the original and then proceeded to break almost every rule it had previously established.

Think about it:

The Hobbit is a short, fun novel meant for young adults and older children. I myself read a beautifully illustrated version of it from my middle school library; I must have been twelve or thirteen. It’s an excellent book, especially for a young boy dreaming of adventure. It has all the things one would want: gold, a fire-breathing dragon, a wizard, and a dozen or so delightfully grumpy dwarves who like to sing after dinner. Even the 1977 animated film carries with it a tone of playfulness and mirth. Compare that same feel to the Peter Jackson trilogy of films that started in 2001, or even to the story itself of The Lord of the Rings. That story deals with malevolent spiritual forces of darkness, the fate of the whole world, and the selfish nature of all created beings.

It’s not necessarily light bedtime reading.

The Lord of the Rings is inarguably a more mature, deeper work of fiction that endures in a way that its prequel does not. Granted, Tolkien apparently spent years building his world, working on the languages that would be the basis for it. Yet, as far as we know, he did not have some grand plan for how it would all come together.

I think that’s how our work is, as well: we do our best to prepare for the magic, but in the end, our best bet is to be present to whatever wants to be made in the moment. In the case of Tolkien, he wrote a great story about a little person with fuzzy feet and an appetite for good times—then he put that person into an unlikely scenario that forced him to be a hero. Several years later, he repeated the pattern, seemingly giving in to the typical sequel copycat nonsense but in actuality subverting the whole thing entirely. Almost everything about Tolkien’s second contribution to his oeuvre was intended to outdo and even undo what came before.

This is how it has to be; it is the way of life—and therefore the way of art. No child wants to live in the shadow of their parent, and no great work of art wants to be compared to its predecessor. We must always be starting over; the artist is never done but constantly beginning. This is the state of children and that of creators. As soon as we start to match what we, or others, have done before, we lose. We are no longer creating; we are copying. Replicating. Not quite a remix, per se; just a cheap photocopy of the real thing. And even Warhol knew that was not enough—you have to at least add some color.

So when we look at our lives, and at our creative work, we have to aspire to do something other than a sequel. We must always be doing something new, something we’ve never done before, something worthy of our own respect.

Otherwise, we just might be reducing one of the greatest potential works of literature to, well, a “new” hobbit. And who wants that?

I am reminded of how brazenly committed to sculpture the Renaissance artist Michelangelo was when he first began his career. I spent a long time reading about the life of this master for my last book, Real Artists Don’t Starve, and what has struck me most about his career is how much he changed. In fact, Michelangelo was somewhat duped into painting due to an argument he had with Leonardo da Vinci. He ended up losing the contest, but was now known as a painter; shortly after that, he was commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel. Imagine that. A moment of failure and embarrassment in which he was goaded by an opponent into doing something outside of his wheelhouse eventually led to one of the most famous paintings in the world.

We do not know what we are capable of. What we could create. And what we could live. All that’s holding us back is an old story of what we used to be or of what we once did. And that’s not who we are anymore. The river has continued to flow. The hobbits have left the shire. And a brand-new adventure, almost unrecognizable to the one that brought us here, has begun.

Best,

Jeff

“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien

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