I saw an excellent play a few weeks ago-an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Like anyone in response to any good thing, my automatic response to it was wishing I could experience it again. But given the limitations of theater, I can’t, and that’s for the best.
We can’t experience anything we love forever, and we shouldn’t try. We can’t even perfectly preserve the original experience we had, because science seems to be increasingly finding that our memories are flawed and constantly shifting, and a lot of our remembrances of treasured moments are exaggerations, copies of copies.
Our strange discomfort with time, decay, and mortality makes us find it strange that the things that bring us joy aren’t always present. We can try to make them stay anyway, though, and these days technology and corporate interests are only too happy to help us access fake eternities. Are you a Star Wars fan? Now, you won't have to re-watch the original trilogy over and over again to access your favorite fictional landscape, or dive into its “expanded universe” of novelizations-it looks like you’ll be getting at least one new Star Wars movie a year for the foreseeable future, because Marvel has shown movie studios that treating movies like episodic TV or serialized comics can make them billions.
Our love of endlessness, and the problems that turn up when entertainment companies try to make money off it, are perhaps nowhere clearer than with comic books. To deal with the burden of demand for more content featuring these characters, the writers who work on these endless life stories have to keep putting Batman and Superman through absurd situations like repeatedly turning evil, going insane, dying and being resurrected, retiring and being replaced by younger counterparts only to return again, et cetera. The status quo can't ever change, at least not forever, and that's not good for storytelling. Alan Moore, the snake-worshipping da Vinci of comics, sees the cheapness and boringness of “wanting your favorite characters on tap forever.” He once wrote a major-character-death-filled apocalypse story for the DC Universe, arguing that it, like the world of Norse mythology with its Ragnarok and destruction of the gods, would be better with a definitive ending. His story went unpublished. Maybe through some kind of cultural natural selection we’ll only remember the interesting stories these iconic comic characters have featured in, the way we only remember the good rock from the 60’s, but in the meantime they’re absurd consumer products.
It scratches the same kind of itch as a lot of TV. The comfort some get from the endlessness of comics is a lot like the comfort others get from sitcoms and soap operas, of watching another 30 minutes of characters they’re familiar with say and do familiar things like they did last week. Despite this, and the fact that many of the stories in comics aren’t necessarily more sophisticated or thought-provoking than soap operas, a lot of the people who read comics are able to turn up their noses at network television because comics are associated with “nerdiness’” and, therefore, with intelligence and intellectuality.
Ditto for fantasy and sci-fi. Tolkien’s works are rich myths full of a sense of loss, melancholy, the fragility of beauty and goodness, and the often high cost of overcoming evil, but even if some readers were originally drawn to the stories for these reasons, a lot of them prefer to engage with the world of Middle Earth as a huge warehouse of facts about city names and genealogies to collect. This is part of why, despite the “nerd” aesthetic becoming trendy during the last decade, and the mainstream success of Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings movies, and Game of Thrones, comics, science fiction, and fantasy are often not taken that seriously as art. Too many fans and writers of these genres are more interested in facts about “extended universes” than in character and story.
Like tuning in to the new adventures of predictable and unchanging characters every week, hoarding useless information about a huge fictional universe the way Smaug the dragon hoards gold is comforting, even if it’s boring.
Repetition is the most horrifying thing in the world, because it destroys meaning. When you were a kid, did you ever repeat your name, or another word, over and over again until it sounded like nonsense? Anything becomes dull and meaningless if you can experience it whenever you want, forever. We need to accept this about any kind of pleasure, and about life in general. We especially need to accept this about stories, characters, and the special kind of magic they provide if we want to, as a culture, produce and experience better art.
