The argument over whether George Lucas can/should change his original movies is one that, it seems to me, strikes the very heart of the debate over literature and art and whatnot.
To what extent does the creator own his creation once it is released?
The very idea of “retroactive continuity” seems kinda silly in the first place. The ability to say “that thing that I told you happened? Well, I didn’t give you *ALL* of the details. When I said that so-and-so died, I meant that it sure looked like he was dead to everybody standing around. They *THOUGHT* he was dead. And so did I. We were ALL WRONG!!!” about a story seems to be… dishonest.
I mean, sure. In real life, we get 10 different interpretations of a lunch table conversation or a dance (think junior high or high school). Why *SHOULDN’T* we expect that the first version of a made-up story about made-up characters involving events that were equally made-up have details changed in later retellings? How many different versions of how you and your significant other met have you told? If I gave you an actuarial table, would we be able to extrapolate how many more different stories would you go on to tell?
This, of course, brings us to an interesting point made by Density Duck where he asks about an alternate Casablanca with more Nazis, an alternate 1984 with a much more badass Winston, an alternate steampunk Dostoevsky.
There is a very important sense in which we can say “but that’s not what happened” about these alternate fictions… but, there’s yet another where we can say “OH GOOD! Those other stories were downers. Except for Casablanca. They should have had those two get together. We should be able to change what didn’t happen into something else that didn’t happen. Something better.”
Which brings me to The Book of Sequels
This is a book that runs with the whole “why should the last story have ended there? (and like that?)” idea with an absolutely divine amount of humor. There’s “Judaism and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, there’s “The Big Fat Balding Prince”, and numerous takes on Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” (I think that I shall never learn a poem as lovely as a fern… and there are, like, fifty of those… they just keep going).
The more of these you’ve read, the more you’ll laugh, of course… but you’ve read at least a third of the books they’re lampooning. You should grab this the second you stumble across it in one of your local used book stores. You’ll snort and hand it to your loved one to read and they’ll just look at you blankly.
So that’s my recommendation for you this week.
In the first edition of The Hobbit, The Ring was just another magic ring. Gollum gave it up freely after Bilbo won the riddle-game, and even wished Bilbo a friendly farewell after showing him the way through the mountain.
In the second and later editions, of course, the ring is The Ring, and Gollum wouldn’t give it up in (quite literally) a million years. Bilbo, under its evil influence, hides it and tells the dwarves lies about his escape which are remarkably close the the events of the first edition. Tolkien might (I don’t recall) even have justified the retcon by saying that he had at first believed Bilbo’s story but had since learned the truth.
This might count as the most successful retcon in history. (Other than the one about how the Messiah was going to get killed instead of bringing about the end of days.)
*snerk* surprised it actually got published like that. After all, the Hobbit was published after the Lord of the Rings.
Gerrold wrote a cool story with two endings (he finished the book years after publication). It’s cool that he notes where the original story ended, because the rest makes it an entirely different book
The Hobbit was published in 1937, LoTR in 1954.
Tolkien always claimed that The Hobbit was There And Back Again, which was written by Bilbo and therefore unreliable fvs. the LoTR proper (9it is in the title, after all).
I think the idea of an unreliable narrator is an acceptable access point for retcon, but you have to be already working within a frame with the unreliable narrator.
Most movies and comic books aren’t built within such a frame, they’re nearly all omniscient narratives, so you can’t use the ‘telephone’ version of events without seeming like a bit of a twit.
> Why *SHOULDN’T* we expect that the first version of a made-up story about made-up characters involving events that were equally made-up have details changed in later retellings?
Lucas’s mistake was having the story change within the lifetime of people who saw the original film. Nobody knows in the original Odyssey, originally titled Cap’n Hardluck and his Merry Crew, Odysseus returned home to find his wife already happily married after being assaulted by his senile dog then joining Heracles at the divine bar.
In Spider-Man, they’ve retconned Spidey’s origin. It’s no longer a radioactive spider. It’s a genetically modified spider.
That happened in living memory too.
This change works. (I think it’s a brilliant adaptation… and I’m pretty sure that in another 50 years, we’ll find out that they were injecting spiders with quantum particles or something… which, also, won’t be that troublesome).
I think that there’s more to it than just remembering what “really” happened the first time.
He’s Peter Parker and Spider-Man at the same time because they’re in a superposition and only crime collapses the waveform!
If he wants to change stuff, that’s fine, but it’s kind of a pain that the originals are not available. That’s less “this was clumsy or badly-done and I fixed it”, and more “two plus two equals five”.
I’d be interested in knowing how many people that think it border-line criminal for Lucas to have changed his work after they had already gotten used to it a certain way feel about the “director’s cut” version of Blade Runner. I’m guessing here, but I bet all those arguments about how you just can’t do that suddenly go out the window.
It’s not that you just can’t do that.
It’s that just doing that *THAT* clumsily indicates a problem.
If they set Batman in 2025 and showed a young Bruce Wayne watch his parents murdered after they all went to see a movie, that would be okay.
If they spent time talking about how the movie was The Smurfs rather than a re-release of Zorro, then we’d have a problem.