© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 147
I scheduled leave for this week, an exercise in futility. I spent so much time trying to get work done on the one hand that all the other work that I had to neglect to clear time caught up with me during the time I was supposed to be on leave. I managed to set aside time for my daughter and a few hours for myself one evening, but the computer game I have been waiting for so long to play, Half Life 2, Episode 1, defeated my computer’s creaky old motherboard, so I filled the idle time with work anyway. Life is twisted, albeit in a productive way.
My next projected time off is Friday, 20 July, when the last Harry Potter arrives. I will take the morning off to read it and then sleep. Will he die or not? My head, some of the elements in the book and several statements I have read seem to say yes. My gut says no. Time will tell. And the fact that my phone will be off, should guarantee tat I know by lunchtime on that special Friday. If there is a crisis and you are not a member of my immediate family, please don’t hesitate not to call me.
In a way I am relieved that Harry Potter is coming to an end. Reading the last of those books is one less ambition with which I have to contend. It was the same with the Star Wars movies. At least I knew what distorted Darth Vader, even if it wasn’t a high point in the series. And you can add Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels to the list of completed reading, almost. (I am not sure where ‘Sandman: Endless Nights’ fits in, so I haven’t bought it yet or looked it up on Wikipedia.)
Now I just have to finish the new Tolkein compilation, the remaining umpteen volumes of Dave Sim’s ‘Cerebus the Aardvark’ and everything that Terry Pratchett writes. Once I have made it through all of that, my list of major cultural phenomena and cultural diversions to absorb should be pretty much complete…
Well, almost. That’s just the books, not the movies and the games. My creaky motherboard hasn’t managed to get to grips with Oblivion either, the sequel to the Elder Scrolls game called Morrowind, and I hear that Half Life 2, Episode 2 is also in production. Then there is the small matter of Johnny Depp’s announcement that he would not be averse to appearing in Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. And, as sure as God made little apples, there will be another James Bond movie.
I started writing this column wanting to say something fun about the culture of sequels, and how I keep myself amused in the twenty minutes before I nod off, but as I have been writing it, I have realised that sequels extend far deeper than cultural phenomena.
As I think about it, there have been sequels to everything, with the exception of the wheel, probably because the triangle didn’t go down to well, and possibly because engineering types are still trying.
Every war seems to have at least one sequel. Politicians always seem to selflessly try for second terms. Outbreaks of disease are followed by outbreaks of similar or other diseases. Gods and many legendary figures are expected to make second appearances as a matter of course, and so on.
How you cope with life probably has something to do with your approach to sequels. Do you expect everything to improve? Or do you expect the worst?
This might just be an interesting way of unifying philosophy and psychology, two fields that have more in common than academics are prepared to admit. Think about it this way… with a unified theory of sequels you could probably work out what to expect and how to feel about it, before it even happens. You would know, for instance, that a successful movie would be followed by a sequel, roughly what the sequel’s storyline would be, whether it would be good or bad, and how you would feel about it. Actually seeing the movie would be beside the point.
Imagine what this sort of thinking could do for global political negotiations.
There’s far more to sequels than not reinventing the wheel. I just haven’t worked it all out yet.
