Can we get back...to the future?

One of the first things I learned in screenwriting class was about backstory. The metaphor used was that of an iceberg. Imagine an iceberg in the water. The ten percent that you can see, above the water, represents what shows up in your screenplay - the story, characters, etc, that the audience experiences. The other ninety percent is below the surface, unseen, left in the depths. That ninety percent of all the history you put into the tale and its heroes never gets used. However, the leap of faith you have to take is that by you having come up with that other ninety percent, and the knowledge you gained from it shaped those characters, and your story, in such a way that a greater depth and realism is there, one the audience can feel, one that brings the story to life and makes the viewers sense that history, even if it's not spelled out for them.

But there are reasons why all that backstory you spent your time on can't be in your screenplay. One, you could never fit it all in to a two-hour movie. There's not a lot of time in a murder mystery tale to chronicle the high school experiences of the lead detective. But more importantly, it doesn't belong there. Storytelling is about the here and now. Even if you're telling a story set in the past, that story is, for the viewers/readers, NOW. Backstory, as fascinating as it might be, is there to serve your story, not to be your story. Stories are about immediacy, and they're about moving forward.

This is why the prequel movement of the last couple of decades is really starting to grate on me. They make sense - if there's a particular world or character(s) that we ended up loving, then it follows that we'd want to know more about it/them. If the writer did their job right, we could feel all that delicious history buried in the story, and it made us hungry for more. The thing is, I can love chocolate cake, and after finishing a piece can be so pleased with the experience that my mind (and stomach) tell me that I want more, more, more! However, if I follow that impulse and start devouring more and more pieces, the experience is going to change to something completely different, and one not so pleasing. I'll get so bloated and miserable that I may completely forget why I loved that first piece so much, and may decide I never want another piece again.

Not all prequels are bad, or are a bad idea. They can be quite a treat, if done right. Stepping out of the realm of film and into novels, an example that comes to mind is Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series. In the first three books, we got teased with bits and pieces of what the world of the Gunslinger was like before "the world moved on", and it was a fascinating place that just screamed for more exploration and explanation. In the fourth book, the bulk of the tale was a novel-length flashback into that world, and it was fantastic. It could have been done wrong, but it in this case, it became the best part of the series.

But Hollywood and television have taken the prequel, and the flashback, to ridiculous heights (or depths). They've become obsessed with milking more money out of us by looking backward in popular properties, to the point where the word "prequel" causes me to roll my eyes. The most painful example of this is the Star Wars prequel trilogy. We ALL wanted more Star Wars, and we obviously weren't going to get all those actors back to make more sequels. They were all (or at least most of them) so sick of Star Wars themselves by the end of the first trilogy that they were relieved to move on (though not all of them did. Seen a Mark Hamill film that didn't go straight to video lately?). So this seemed like a good idea. It ended up, however, souring many fans on Star Wars forever, leaving them bitter and feeling betrayed. And why? Because it committed many of the sins of the prequel/flashback method.

1) BAD RET-CON. "Ret-con" is a term common to TV/movie nerds like myself. It stands for "retroactive continuity". This is where a writer creates the backstory after the fact, inventing a history and forcing it to fit into the original "present" story. This method is filled with possibilities for lazy, cliched storytelling. Darth Vader built C3PO! Huh? Darth Vader grew up on Tatooine, like Luke! And yet never thought to look for Luke there later? Obi-Wan Kenobi was a young Jedi Knight in the prequel era! Uh...why was he in his sixties twenty years later in the first Star Wars film? Square pegs get jammed into round holes because the ideas seem "neat". Which leads right to problem #2:

2) CRAPPY RESEARCH. Come on, there were only three Star Wars movies. That's six hours, at most, of research to do. Yet writers of prequel material seem unwilling to take the time, coming off like they read plot summaries only. How does Leia have memories of her mother when her mother died at birth? How did all knowledge of the Jedi - when there were thousands of them - disappear from the galaxy after only two decades? Why doesn't R2D2 ever tell the mind-wiped C3PO that they used to be buddies in the old days? Why does Obi-Wan say he was trained by Yoda when he was trained by the never-before-mentioned Qui-Gon? Why is there a beach on Kashyyyk when the whole planet is one big forest (okay, that fact came out in the novels, I guess, so that could slide). Why did the first Death Star take twenty years to complete, but the second one seemed to be nearly done in like a month? If you're going to go back and build a history for an established property, continuity is your first a most sacred responsibility. Everything has to fit. Why, then, do so few writers seem to pay it any mind? This happens in TV show flashbacks as well as film. I remember an episode of "Angel" that flashed back to Angel and Spike running into each other on a submarine during World War II. Uh...no one saw the Buffy episode where Spike first appeared, and said that he and Angel hadn't seen each other in a couple hundred years? These are things the fans all know...so why are the writers so oblivious to them? Errors like this pull the viewer right out of the story, and make the story lose all its credibility. Don't even get me started on Highlander 2.

3) RIDICULOUS OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF CHARACTER ORIGINS. Human beings are very complex, with a lifetime of experiences and lessons shaping the people that they become. Prequels and flashbacks boil these down to simple, and often silly, shortcuts. The best example of this for me comes from another Lucas property - Indiana Jones. In the opening flashback of The Last Crusade, most of all the character quirks of Indy are explained in events of the course of one day. In one sequence, he learns how to use a whip, learns to hate snakes, gets his fetish for the fedora and jacket look and develops a bromance with a roguish carbon-copy of his future self, defining the persona he'll later take. Oh, and he was named after the dog! Ha ha! Ugh. In Star Wars, the mysterious, mystical means of Jedi fading away lost all its intrigue when it was boiled down to a quick scene of Yoda telling Obi-Wan, "Oh, by the way - Qui-Gon found a way to come back from the dead. Why don't you study that method for the next twenty years so you can pull the disappearing act in the next film? Don't worry - I'll learn it, too. I'll have plenty of time to do so, as I'll be abandoning the fight against the Emperor and the dark side and going to hide in a swamp like a little bitch."

4) NO SUSPENSE. The greatest problem with the prequel is that, assuming we saw the "original" story, we know how it's going to end. We know what's going to happen to the characters we know. We know Vader's going to become evil, we know the Emperor wins, we know Yoda's going to move to a cabin in the swamp, we know that all these other Jedi are going to die. There are no surprises (except Jar Jar, which was quite a surprise for everyone...). While it's interesting to see these histories play out, there's no "what will happen?", no drama, no suspense. This makes them, by definition, less engaging. There's no forward movement. These tales are stuck in the past with their endings already written.

The movement has grown, and continues, and is there to create profit instead of serving the viewer. We got an unnecessary remake of "Manhunter" in the film "Red Dragon", just so a new "prequel" to the infinitely more popular "Silence of the Lambs" could cash in. We then got the don't-know-anyone-who-saw-it pre-prequel called "Hannibal Rising". We've gotten "Halloween" prequels. "Exorcist" prequels. By and large, these have been crap, as will most endeavors motivated by money and not by passion.

One of the biggest franchises, like Star Wars, to fall victim to this is Star Trek. Time has stopped in Star Trek. This began when the last Trek series, "Enterprise", was set in the past. Now there's a new prequel film coming out in about a month, tracing the origins of the original cast. I'll admit, this is one, after seeing the trailer, that I'm very excited about, but my first response to the idea was to sigh. There's no reason why the Star Trek universe can't continue on in "real time". It's really big universe they've created, one that doesn't rely on a set collection of characters played by existing actors. There are limitless stories than can be told there, but the studios seem convinced that it's all over, and that the past is the only fertile ground for new adventures. Star Wars, too, has many places to go. One could easily jump into the future and do an ongoing story of, say, the children of Han and Leia, or other characters. Yet, the current animated series out there is stuck in the Clone Wars era (telling us of a war that we know the outcome of already - and one that's a prequel TO a prequel, for crying out loud), and the forthcoming live action Star Wars TV series is set between the two trilogies. Why not look ahead? Why not give us something new?

Battlestar Galactica just ended a few nights ago. There's a story with a (very) definite end. A sequel would be impossibly silly. A new series is coming, though - "Caprica". You guessed it - a prequel series. While there's the part of me hungry for more Galactica tales, the other parts has that same sinking prequel feeling of knowing nothing "new" will come of it. Galactica, at least, has the excuse of a completed tale. Things like Star Wars and Trek do not. There are places to go in both cases - but the men behind the curtain refuse to take us there.

Perhaps the solution to all of this is to simply to stop going over old ground - stop with sequels, and stop, too, with sequels (yeah, THAT's going to happen), and with remakes. There's a whole new generation of writers out there inspired by these past properties, with exciting new ideas of their own. Maybe our love for these worlds has blinded us to the idea of demanding new stories, new characters, new ideas. We, as fans, are as much to blame for the beating of dead franchise horses as the studios. Maybe instead of demanding more of the same, we need to be exploring the new, creations that take us out of our comfort zones and treat us to new epic journeys of imagination. Maybe we, too, need to force ourselves to look forward (and outward) instead of always looking back. Maybe the web revolution, which is starting to give modern storytellers a voice outside of the established studio/publishing system, will open those doors for both them and for us.

Or maybe "Breakin' 3: The Beginning", will soon be coming to a theater near you.