When to Shut Up: Why Prequels Usually Suck

Don't complete your own revolution.
--- Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo

I know that I promised I would return with a blog continuing my attack on the American monetary system, but I find that post-Christmas, my desire to talk about finances is at an all-time low. Since yours probably is too, I shall lay turn away from the windmill that is the Federal Reserve, and, like Don Quixote, tilt again at it later. God knows it will still be there. In the mean time I've decided to tackle a more approachable subject: Hollywood. Or, specifically, Hollywood's recent obsession with what are known as “origin stories.”

The name “origin story” is a little deceptive and needs fast explaining. It denotes a story which details the origin of a character, but it connotes a story which is written after the character's debut in a book, movie or television series. (In “The Godfather” we are introduced to Vito Corleone, but only in “The Godfather, Part II,” we learn the circumstances by which he came to power – his childhood and early life.) However, an origin story is not limited to explaining the backstory of characters; it can also explain the backstory of a universe, or focus on a set of events which led to the circumstances obtaining later in a story's timeline. (For example, the third film in the Kate Beckinsale series Underworld, called Rise of the Lycans, is actually set before the previous two films.)

Origin stories, which in movies are usually called prequels, have always been with us, and I am not opposed to them per se, but I've found that unless they are very skilfilly done (see the afformentioned “The Godfather, Part II”), they tend to do more harm than good. And in most cases they can only be skilfully handled if the writer's motivation is passion rather than profit – if he or she feels a need, not just a want but a need, to expand upon the character or the story. In recent years there has been a veritable orgy of backstory in film which has spilled over into the literary world as well; but the motivation for writing it seems to be the opposite of ideal: profit rather than passion. Of course money is not always the reasoning behind such excursions into prequel; in some instances it is simply sentimentality or bad judgement; but regardless of the reason, the outcome tends to be either forgettable, regrettable, or just plain awful.

To understand the core of my grudge against origin stories, it is necessary to understand the so-called “iceberg theory” of Ernest Hemingway, also known as “the theory of omission.” As Hemingway himself said: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” This theory, that less is more, that what is implied is often stronger than what is explicitly stated, is implicit in most great storytelling. The fact is, what we do not know about our characters and universe is often the source of our greatest pleasure, since, as Stephen King told us in Danse Macabre, our minds tend to fill in gaps in information with details far more imaginative and satisfying than anything even the best writers could conceive. If you have been moved by a series of any kind, be it film, television or written word, you've probably speculated a great deal about the characters and universe of that series; you may have also experienced the peculiar emotion which occurs when some cherished theory of yours, possibly held for years, gets smashed to bits by a new storyline that makes nonsense of it.

When I was growing up – and today, for that matter – one of my favorite films was “Alien.” What I loved most about the story was its underlying sense of mystery. Our heroes are hauling mineral ore across the galaxy when diverted to an obscure, uninhabited planet by a mysterious distress signal. They set down and find, upon its barren surface, a huge, derelict alien spacecraft. Within that spacecraft are multitudes of eggs, one of which hatches, with very unfortunate result. For “Alien” the central plot point is the hatching, but for me, a tiny part of the audience, the appeal lay in wondering about these things:

1. Where did the alien ship come from?
2. Why did it land on this barren planet?
3. How long was it there?
4. Are the eggs native to the planet, were they cargo on the ship, or were they lain after the ship's crew was dead?
5. What was the exact text of the “SOS” which turned out to be a warning?

“Alien” presents us with a huge mystery which it never even attempts to solve, and the result is a far more effective and terrifying story than if these questions had been answered, because one of the central themes of the movie is primal fear – and our strongest primal fear is probably fear of the unknown. Ignorance and mystery inspire horror, because horror is the anticipation of a terrifying outcome, and humans, by virtue of the hard experience we call instinct or race memory, tend to fear the worst. Also, by some perversity of nature, we tend to enjoy the feeling of being intrigued, teased, titillated, even. As with certain hobbies and activities, the fun lies in the process and not in its completion – the riddle, and not its answer. Well, the unanswered riddles from this film haunted and intrigued and delighted me...for about 30 years. Then one day Ridley Scott & Co. decided to make a prequel, called “Prometheus,” and I felt my heart sink. On the one hand, the movie might supply these long-craved answers; on the other hand, well...they might supply those long-craved answers. It was a case of be careful what you wish for. As it happens, “Prometheus” tells, or rather begins to tell, the story of how the derelict spacecraft came to be resting on that haunted-looking planet. It answers two of the questions above, and sets up the answer to at least two more...and, I find, it disappoints the living shit out of me every time I think about it. The writers were unable to provide steak equal to the sizzle of the questions posed by the original film; all they did was demystify something most cinephiles consider sacred. It turns out that King was right: what's in the dark is all the more frightening because we can't see it. “Alien,” to me, is so much more effective if you pretend that “Prometheus” never existed, because it re-enshrines the story in darkness and conundrum, and leaves that uneasy question mark hanging in space. Where no one can hear you scream.

Speaking of sacred, let's talk for a moment about The Force. It is one of the cornerstone-concepts of the “Star Wars” universe, yet in the first two movies of that series the total explanations we get of it boil down to a handful of short sentences, such as: “The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together." And indeed, we neither need nor want deeper explanations than this: the unifying theory of the original “Star Wars” films is simplicity. The story is almost pathetically simple, and the central theme as old as King Arthur, but this is in large part why it works. Just as we accept Merlin's magic as being part of the world of Camelot without experiencing any desire to know where magical power comes from, we accept these fortune-cookie explanations of The Force because it is just magic by another name, and magic is self-justifying. A world that possesses magic, like Middle Earth or the Harry Potter universe, does not as a rule question the source of that magic – it's simply a fait accompli at page one, a deus ex machina we swallow smoothly and whole. And yet George Lucas didn't see it that way when, in 1999, he decided to pin a scientific explanation on The Force. The Force, he tells us in “The Phantom Menace,” is actually caused by microscopic life-forms called midi-chlorians that reside within the cells of all living things, but it some things more than others. When I heard Liam Neeson utter this line in a small-town Pennsylvania theater all those years ago, I recall the immediate sound from the audience was groans of unbelief, as if they had just seen something holy recklessly profaned. And it is hard not to see the midi-chlorians as anything but profanation, given the deliberately mystical tone The Force occupies in the original S.W. trilogy. What Lucas accomplished here was as vulgar as explaining how a magic trick works to a nine year-old; it cheapens what should be a wondrous experience. And this is a hallmark of bad writing -- refusal to give the audience credit for making the leap with you.

The iceberg theory as it applies to film had a fine exemplar in John Carptenter's horror classic “Halloween,” a film which, in a very real if extremely simplified sense, is simply the Book of Job updated to 1979. As with “Alien,” one of the central strengths of the movie is in the unanswered mystery shrouding its antagonist, Michael Meyers. In “Halloween,” we see a young Meyers stalk and murder his older sister at the opening of the film, but we never get an explanation as to why he did it, or what he was like before he committed the murder, or why he escapes from the nut-hatch 13 years later and tries to relive the crime with a new set of victims. The only explanation we get is from Michael's psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, who identifies Myers as “purely and simply evil” and, therefore, not really human at all (he often refers to Meyers as "it" rather than "him"). Loomis has a few different speeches on his favorite ex-patient, but nothing he says is really scientific. Science, to Loomis, breaks down at the point of contact with Meyers' skin, and beyond that we're in the devil's country, where you don't need fancy talk and theories, you need a freaking gun. Indeed, at the end of the movie, when Michael's would-be victim, Laurie, sobs to Loomis, “Was that the boogeyman?” the little Englishman dryly replies, “As a matter of fact...it was.”

The Boogeyman! Think to your own first experience with that dread name. Your older brother or sister said to you one night when you were six, “Don't let the Boogeyman get you!” to which you fearfully replied, “What's the Boogeyman?” And they said with a leer, “He comes and gets little kids!” And this ended the conversation – your mind did not require any further knowledge. The origin of the Boogeyman and his motives for wanting to “get” you were both irrelevant; knowledge of his existence was sufficient to be afraid of him, and the fact that he came with no physical description or known method of “getting” merely provoked your brain to supplying the grisly details. This sense of restraint is the genius of Carpenter's film. The less we know about Myers and his motivations, the more frightening they are; the less we know about why this is happening, the more terrifying the moral is -- that no one is safe, that bad things can happen to good people, that the answer to the question “Why is this happening to me?” is, horribly, “Because! Just because!” to the tune of a plunging kitchen knife.

And yet – ! A few years ago Rob Zombie took it upon himself to “re-imagine” Halloween in a two-part explosion of violence by the same name. In addition to showing more gore and graphic violence in any given thirty seconds than the original film did in its whole two hours, Zombie's films take the precisely opposite tack that Carpenter's did, and attempt, almost from their first frame, to break down Michael's motivations and influences and let us know exactly who he is and why he is doing what he's doing. Michael, we are shown, is the son of a (very) broken and (very) abusive home, and there is a direct emotional-psychological cause for his eventual transformation into a mouth-breathing spree-killer; indeed, his psychiatrist laments, “I failed you!” to his homicidal ex-patient, which is, again, the polar-opposite reaction of the original Loomis, who realized that no psychological technique would have availed him anything against The Boogeyman. The Boogeyman is too elemental, too much a force of nature, to be reasoned with or "reached." By playing down this force of nature and turning it into a mere set of causes, A + B = C, we once again rob it of its most valuable element, which is mystery. Why? is so much more devastating a question when left unanswered!

Lest you think I'm picking on the celluloid set, it's not only in film that we find our needless origin stories of late. On the contrary, they have quite a place in literature of all kinds, including the “Hannibal Lecter” series by Thomas Harris. In the first of these four novels the Lecter character is introduced to us in a way very similar to Michael Meyers, in that while we know something about his crimes, we do not really understand his motivations or their root cause. In the second book we are told a little more, given a more extended tease, as it were; but the larger questions are, once again, deliberately unanswered. Lecter jeers his curious interrogator; “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling – I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.” And indeed, Harris is wise enough not to try here. He's content to leave Lecter somewhere just beyond the comforting frontiers of scientific understanding, an existential question with no definite answer. Unfortunately, this is a course he abandoned completely with the fourth book, “Hannibal Rising.” In this unfortunate tome, Harris does indeed “reduce to a set of influences” the hitherto enigmatic and mysterious doctor. By the end of the book we know everything about him and how he came to be the way he is, down to the last dull detail. The macabre vista of atrocities which were implied by chilling little half-sentences jabbed here and there like slivers of ice in the first two books (“And how is Officer Stewart? I heard he retired after he saw my basement.”) was blotted out by an avalanche of minutiae. The mystery, having been solved, ceased to be interesting.

Origin stories are everywhere and coming in increasingly unusual forms. “Rogue One,” the latest Star Wars story, is just that, “A Star Wars story,” skived off from the fatty tissue surrounding the original film, “A New Hope.” In essence, this film exists to an answer to a question no one asked, specifically, what did those lines (“Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory over the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR.”) really entail? The answer wasn't necessary to the integrity of the original trilogy or the prequels, it was supplied because there is money in exploiting the nostalgia surrounding the S.W. franchise. However you liked or disliked the result, the fact remains that the story didn't need to be told, and at the same time it filled in details which were, perhaps anyway, better left to the audience's imagination. I know that most people liked “Rogue One,” and I certainly didn't hate it (I preferred it to “The Force Awakens” by a wide margin), but again, I question the necessity of filling in every nook and cranny in a story -- of, as it were, mapping out the exact size of the iceberg. Let the idea retain some mystery, some borderlands beyond which the rest is unexplored and left to our imaginations. As a friend of mine who is passionate about fantasy games told me recently, “What sells fantasy is the same thing that turns a lot of people off of it – the deep lore.” But it's important to note that “the deep lore” in fantasy is always thickest where it is unwritten. Most of the concepts which underpinned Frank Herbert's DUNE series were either left out of, or only very lightly touched upon, in the first book in the series, and a similar thing could be said of Tolkien's Middle Earth saga, George R.R. Martin's “Game of Thrones” series and Rowling's Harry Potter books. In each instance, the author left large quantities of information about their respective universes out of the stories themselves, which they then published separately in supplementary texts -- the literary equivalent of “DVD special features” you do not have to watch to enjoy the film.

Now, it so happens that I too am a writer, and that one of my principal flaws as a young one was precisely the sin I am castigating here -- over-explanations of story brought about, in part, by lack of trust in the readership's intelligence. (My brother is enormously fond of pointing out that, at the age of 12, I felt it necessary to explain to those in the theater around me during Return of the Jedi that Darth Vader was being sarcastic when he uttered the line, "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.") It was not until many years later that a tough lesson drove home what it means to run into iceberg theory Titanic style. I had written a huge backstory for a character and decided to use it to introduce him to the audience. My editor said, "Very fine writing -- now cut all of it." He went on to explain that the subsequent actions of the character made his backstory plain; there was no need to elucidate it. "Show don't tell" is an old rule for novelists but it is, I admit, also very difficult to follow, especially when your readership (or viewership) is hungry for details. The lesson, however, was plain: keeping the audience a little hungry is better than feeding them too much. The hungry come back for more.

At the beginning of this blog I quoted a line from Irving Stone's epic novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” In that memorable sequence, Leonardo da Vinci scolds Michelangelo for taking his new style of painting to such unreachable levels of expertise and mastery that he had, in effect, left nowhere for any other artist to go – including, we are to suppose, Michelangelo himself. He had “completed his own revolution,” and as I write these lines, it seems to me that is the trend nowadays. At every turn, we see a lantern lighting the way, but somehow this does not suit our nature. Our minds seem to crave dark corners in which to project our fears and fantasies and to unleash our imaginations– we don't always want or need a damned lantern. But this frenzy for origin stories continues, here as elsewhere: “Game of Thrones” is in negotiations for a prequel series set when the Targeryans ruled Westeros, there are origin-movies about Han Solo and Boba Fett already in pre-production, and one of the most popular detective series in Europe, “Detective Montalbano” (which has run for 16 years), recently spun off an origin series called simply “Young Montalbano,” which delves deeply into the hitherto undiscussed past of the eponymous Sicilian hero. So on and on – and on, so that now there are several "origin stories" in print about The Godfather, too.

As I said before, I am not actually opposed to origin stories as a rule. They are tempting targets for a reason: they seem to shine with infinite possibility, and in some cases I believe they can add a great deal to the canon of a series; but in those instances their author usually had something definite to say, and a powerful reason for wanting to say it. “Grendel” is a prequel to “Beowulf” but adds rather than subtracts to the lore of its inspiration by giving us an epic from the perspective of its villain: it infringes very little, if at all, on its predecessor. On the other hand, stories that are told simply because there is space left over to tell them, or for purely financial reasons, tend not merely to debase their own selves but to damage the integrity of the originals upon which they are founded. A friend of mine, criticizing the Metallica album “St. Anger,” said to me, “This is the sort of music that, if you're in a band, you don't want people to hear – it's garage practice, jam session stuff. It's cutting-room floor, out-takes, blooper reel shit. It's a 'you at six in the morning with no coffee and no makeup' type of deal.” In other words, the album's crime was not in existing but rather being shown in public. Well, it seems to me many of these origin stories fall into just that category – their crime lies not in the fact that someone dreamed them up (quite the contrary!), but in the fact that they were made canonical, and so “closed off” yet another avenue for our individual imaginations. If some of the joy of the journey is in the journey itself, then it seems to me that some of the joy of the story is in the wider world that story inhabits and implies. It is a beautiful thing to start a revolution, and to maintain it; but its completion is perhaps best left in the hands of its audience and not its author.