The value of sequels today and in BCE
EDITORS NOTE: May contain spoilers to Spiderman: Brand New Day
A week ago, I spent 45 minutes bawling my eyes out with my friends and 30 strangers. Spiderman: Brand New Day was spectacular, despite having not watched the Spiderman franchise since Tom Holland was a fresh 21-year-old, oblivious to all the heartbreaking Zendaya-brainwiping context. Spiderman: Brand New Day stood out as a sequel – complex, thoughtful, and well-made, as if it was the filmmakers’ only child. In a cultural world inundated with sequels, why do some feel lazy and stale, while others draw us in, compelling as a whole new world (or rather, a Brand New Day)? Analyzing the original sequel, The Odyssey, may help answer this question. The Odyssey follows Odysseus after he has won his battle and faced his enemy. So, what makes the epic so fascinating, so worth spending ten years of the protagonist journeying home over? What makes The Odyssey arguably more significant than The Iliad?
The answer may lie in the fact The Odyssey was always meant to exist. It wasn’t a tack on just to extract more money by recycling recognizable characters. The classical world took it for granted that both tales were composed by Homer, interpreting stylistic improvements as a result of his progress as a storyteller over time. However, scholars today hypothesize on the answer to the so-called ‘Homeric Question’ that both Trojan-War-themed stories arose independently through oral tradition, supported by the fact that they follow different characters.
The answer to why a chronicle of what follows the climax of events in the Trojan War can still feel as significant as the conflict itself isn’t so easily answered. The Odyssey is about ‘nostos,’ or home-coming, after Odysseus has already been battle-hardened and character-developed. In The Odyssey the hero’s journey doesn’t start in the ordinary, it starts after he has already proven himself an extraordinary hero at Troy. Yet, it is precisely because the expected character arc has been realized before the events of The Odyssey that what remains — an exploration of the protagonist’s emotional complexity — has allured us for 2000 years.
The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus’ human relationships, identity, and who he is a person (evidently, a pretty bad husband). Maybe the Trojan War was a dramatic conclusion, a victory to provide closure? But in reality, no one event lasts forever, no rush of energy halts at the climax, frozen in an image of glory. Life continues on, there is never a true culmination, and losing oneself in action is infinitely easier than finding one’s way home.
Therefore, it is just as enthralling to see how Peter Parker adjusts to his life without MJ as it is to find out how he got there. It is not only the events, but their impact on the psyche that we are drawn to in stories. These well-crafted sequels stand out amongst the plethora of sequels that don’t really need to be there, not because they introduce another battle, but because they give meaning to the fight.