For a book chapter on sequels in the digital era I have been working on....some thoughts:
The word sequel itself first appears in the fifteenth century, derived from the Latin sequi, “to follow,” while the first use of the term to mean “story that follows or continues another” was recorded in 1513. These early meanings literally depended on a notion of a before and after. It is perhaps no surprise that cinema emerged as physics was coming to understand that, at least in theory, there is no reason why time unfolds in a sequential, one-way direction. Physicist Brian Greene (in The Fabric of the Cosmos) writes that “the laws of physics that have been articulated from Newton through Maxwell and Einstein, and up until today, show a complete symmetry between past and future. No where in any of these laws do we find a stipulation that they apply one way in time but not in the other” (144-45). In this light, the so-called flattening of history that is supposedly a marker of postmodernism is less an unfortunate dehistorisizing gesture than a confirmation of the deepest structures of the material world. Digital media and its randomly accessible archive is a metaphor for a universe that quantum physics is gradually revealing to be more fluid and uncertain than previously known.
In truth, film sequels are becoming ghosts in the digital era; in the increasingly globalized cinematic marketplace, films are remembered more for being “remakes of” rather than “sequels to.” Like a virus, the binary code of the digital spreads, replicating itself, spreading new versions of itself in new languages. In the novel Loop (1998), by Koji Suzuki (who also wrote the novel Ring), we learn that the entire setting of the novel Ring might have been in a virtual reality loop: “Ring would be a book, then a movie, a video game, an internet site—it would saturate the world through every branch of the media” (191). Ring was originally published in Japan as Ringu in 1991, followed by the Japanese film Ringu in 1998, and the American version in 2002. In the world of the Ring, there is an eternal loop, not a straight line. As in the digital era with its ever-increasing archive storage capacities and larger and larger memory, nothing ever really goes away. Instead, information (in the forms of images, text, music, etc.) is recycled, sampled, mashed-up, reformatted, until distinctions between past and future disappear.
And in the more recent--and more remarkable--novel The Raw Shark Texts (by Steven Hall, 2007), one plot strand involves a character who, seeking immortality, devises a process of imprinting himself onto others, who serve as hosts of his soul and personality. However, early on in the process, he introduces information into the formula that encourages the urge for self-preservation. What he doesn't realize is that this urge gets stuck in a sort of feedback loop that intensifies with each "update," thereby growing in unexpected and terrifying ways: "The strong preservation urge Ward had built into his new system also began to have an effect he hadn't foreseen, a terrible effect; the every-Saturday repetition of the standardizing process turned Ward's preservation command into a feedback loop. Every week, the system would deliver the preservation urge into Ward, who, with this urge in him increased, would amend the system accordingly, just slightly, in line with what he now thought to be a wise and suitable survival precaution. The now increased urge would feed back into him again the following week, making him increase its presence in the system again. Once it had begun, there was no way to stop the loop gathering momentum" (203).
The digital era is marked by the loss of conceptual linearity: the old analog devices (vinyl records, videotape) at least gave the physical illusion of chronology: watching a record spin on the turntable, or a VHS tape rewinding, there was the sense of time passing. The needle moved across the record. The tape collected on the right or the left-hand side of the VHS cassette.
This is reinforced on a material
level where a viewer’s experience with the interface of a film no
longer provides even the illusion of linearity. Film, since its
birth, has suggested what we might term a “linear materialism”:
literally, the film moved forward through the projector. As the story
world of the film advanced forward through time (with the exception
of flashbacks and other conventional temporal disruptions) so to the
film advanced through the projector through time. There was a
beginning (leader), middle, and end. During the analog era, videotape
remediated this structure, as movies on VHS tapes also had materially
identifiable beginning, middle, and end that required time to pass
during the rewinding or fast forwarding process. In the West, the
temporal imaginary has time flowing from left to right (i.e.,
timelines), a structure echoed in audio and VHS tapes, which spooled
forward from left to right. But in the digital era, the link between
a film’s internal, story-time and its external, material time has
been broken. DVDs—as physical objects—have no clear beginning
middle or end. And downloaded movies that are stored as a series of
ones and zeroes are even more abstracted from so-called real-time.
In
which direction does time flow inside a computer?
This has permeated the way that some movies are made, as well. The three Lord of the Rings films were shot simultaneously, even though the films were released years apart. In what sense is a film a sequel if it is produced at the same time as the “original”?
Postmodernism's most enduring (and perhaps final) triumph lies in the realm of displaced time. Once time became detached, symbolically, from its material representations (a spinning record, an unspooling film, a rewinding videotape) a wavering uncertainty set in. To cut to the heart of the matter: the current insecurity of the West is a deeper insecurity, metaphysical in nature: we have lost the before and after that characterized our understanding of time. The displacement of linear concepts by the concept of the loop and endless replication opens the door for new ways of thinking. The linear flow has been diverted out of the riverbed: we are into new, uncharted territory.
A few images from The Raw Shark Texts:
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