Not A Blog™

This only came to mind after a moment of desperation. There I was: sitting in front of my computer, a blank virtual page needing to be filled, and my brain full of thoughts—but not anything codified or relevant as a post. Here’s what I’ll do, I told myself—myself already not liking the idea as I was telling it to me. I’ll spin around toward my bookshelves and write about the first thing I lay eyes on. It was a lousy idea at best, but I figured if it didn’t work out, I would think a little harder and do something else.

I spun. The first thing I saw? Max Payne 2.

Max Payne was a great series. I think the only complaint I had about the second one was how they got a different voice actor to do Payne. I know the guy in the first one didn’t seem like the most serious voice actor, but he gave the character a quirkiness that I found very personable. The new guy was a little too serious.

Supposedly they were going to make a third Max Payne, but I’m not sure that’s still in the works. This got me to thinking about the larger issue which I want to talk about: the proliferation of sequels.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth accompanying this topic is nothing new. I’ve been lamenting the creation of sequels since at least the release of When Inanimate Objects Attack. The only thing that’s changed between then and now is probably my resignation to it happening. If nothing else, it’s been happening more.

I can’t even really complain about this anymore, because I do it, too. If we start considering the parts—characters and archetypes—to be equivalent to entire movies and their titles, then I do it even more. Despite us killing off so many characters in From Beyond and starting with a clean slate, how many times have I subsequently brought back “new” characters? Arthur Pendergrass has essentially become my go-to guy for music industry mockery.

There are a few stock answers at to why this happens: laziness, dollar signs (in the case where dollars are a factor), comedy value. These are all legitimate reasons, but I think there’s an underlying factor that ties them all together.

First of all, my reasons: laziness and comedy. When I sat down and actually thought this out, I came to the conclusion that laziness really isn’t a factor, here. I make up plenty of one-off characters for my various news parodies—characters that have little depth and only exist to move the plot along. But even among substantial characters, I don’t reuse most of them. And aside from When Inanimate Objects Attack, I’ve never even written a sequel to anything I’ve done. Not yet, anyway.

The humor factor certainly plays into it. I get a kick out of how Pendergrass can show up a hundred years ago, or now, or in the future (three generations of music industry apologists, perhaps?) always fighting for the same cause and so on. I’ve had a lot of fun playing Richard Pratt, recently, too, and I find myself in much the same situation as the heyday of The TTT. It’s just more fun to have these characters keep popping up. Indeed, it expands them into a goofy, if eclectic, whole.

Money is obviously a drive when it comes to the big budget productions. A successful formula is worth milking, artistic integrity be damned. It’s a business, so this isn’t unexpected—but this is hardly the only justification because like I mentioned, I do it, too, and money is most certainly not a factor right now.

In one sense, it’s similar to branding. You don’t change your marketing message every six months because then nobody sees it before the next one comes along. Companies periodically come up with new branding campaigns. Sometimes it was a bad branding effort in the first place. Sometimes they need to drop the negative connotations tied to an old brand following a series of poor business management decisions. But often the company is just performing poorly, and a new message is often thought to be one good way to revitalize the brand. This is not true if it happens too often because then the message changes faster than the consumer’s impression of the brand, and it ends up meaning nothing. The smartest companies find a tag that works and stick with it. Geico does a fantastic job of changing the pitch without changing the message.

What does that have to do with Arthur Pendergrass? Well, in the same way that brands grow more powerful with repetition, it makes sense to strengthen the “brand” of the character by using him wherever appropriate. One connotation associated with Pendergrass (if you’re a regular reader), are his haughty yet absurd justifications for continuing the music industry’s old business model in light of a changing market. This grows stronger each time I use the character. The “brand” of Richard Pratt is his simultaneous interest in and disdain for various types of art and media: a trait which is more than a little autobiographical.

But why should this be so important? Why should this be important to people like me, especially, considering there’s really no reason for me to perpetuate character and situational branding in this way? I believe it’s due to a shift in the collective view of the importance of intellectual property.

In the past, ideas weren’t really considered property. Today the idea itself—the thought—is still not considered property, and you can’t copyright or sue over an idea; you have to have some physically manifested proof that the infringing idea was actually stolen from yours. But we now recognize something else as property which is a direct result of the “property-ization” of concepts: products which are a result of these ideas—by extension, products which are the result of the mind.

The distinction never mattered before, because products of the mind were inexorably tied to their physical forms. A song was “embodied” in its substrate: the record. Each advancement of technology broke down a little bit of that wall. We’re maybe one-third or one-half of the way through this process. Much art has been released from its substrate, but there are still many things which are not so easily copied, like manufactured goods. Of course, anyone who doesn’t think we’ll eventually be able to copy flatware or chairs almost as easily as we copy music is just refusing to see.

But currently we see a breakdown in the ease of duplicating more ethereal “property” which forces us to reevaluate what that property actually is. If the manufactured record is the property, then we could share music freely over the internet and it wouldn’t be a legal issue at all. But obviously you’re not buying the container, you’re buying the music. The record (or CD, tape, digital file, etc) just holds if for you until you’re ready to listen.

So here’s the lynchpin that ties everything together: I believe it is the conceptual shift of property from “thing” to “idea” that is driving the proliferation of sequels.

Sequels existed in the past, of course, but never have we seen their widespread and continued use across so many different types of publishers. Previously, the physical thing that held the idea was the property, and it had staying power. Book burning used to be such a huge deal because you couldn’t just pop out books at the snap of a finger. Well, you can now: digitally, of course, but it’s not terribly difficult to get an actual book, either. If someone released a bootlegged recording, it made sense to go after them and confiscate all their discs because that’s all there was. It was prohibitively expensive (not to mention legally dangerous) to set up shop and forge someone’s phonograph cylinders—not to mention the recordings would sound terrible. Now you click a button and literally before you can blink your eye you have a perfect reproduction. No skin off your back, and all from the privacy of your own home.

Staying power meant that once you got your work out there, it stayed out there. A wildly successful book might have a series, but often the sequels were planned from the beginning. Just as many popular books were released with no intention of having a sequel, they sold, colloquially, like hotcakes, and no sequels were made. There was no particular need for reinforcement of those ideas.

But today there is. We recognize that the book that you hold in your hand is not the property, but the concepts transferred into your head, via the words. The disc is not the property, the noises interpreted by your brain are. The ease of copying means these things get shared, and in so being shared, deconstructed. Remixes give new life—and new interpretations—to old, forgotten ideas. A copy is destroyed as easily as it’s created, and market and genre fragmentation means it grows harder each year to reach an uberlarge audience. More and more people cultivate the cult following.

One result of all this is the desire (unconscious, I think) to reinforce one’s ideas to the greatest extent possible. If your idea doesn’t have staying power due to the fleeting nature of its “property”, give it healthier genes by injecting it into more and more work. If the song alone isn’t going to carry your message to the world, put the same message in the song, the book, and the art—and do it five times in each medium. Brand that sucker.

If anything, it appears the sequelization of things is only going to grow more prominent. The more we recognize that the idea is the important thing, the more we’re going to try to make sure that idea has staying power. Since the physical representation of the idea no longer has the staying power it once did, we’re going to see the same ideas being repeated again and again in less tangible media, in an effort to keep them in the collective consciousness. You could argue the futileness of this effort, given how easily digital data is deleted—but the fact of the matter is that the more brains one can reach, the more staying power their idea has, and the more staying power, the more successful they’ve been.

The only caveat to this is realizing when an idea has been sufficiently exploited. Sometimes it might get new life from someone else’s remix. (Anyone see the zombie version of “Shoes“? Oh, my God. Brains.) But sometimes you just have to suck it up and come up with some new ideas. A few lucky people rode their careers on a single groundbreaking idea—but for an idea to have that kind of staying power, it has to be truly revolutionary. The rest of us resort to the sequel.

-Ted