I never gave much thought to the many thousands of RCTC alumni who comprise the student body of the past, let alone what kind of impact these kids had sixty, seventy or eighty years ago. What happens after we walk off stage at graduation isn’t really subject matter brought up during lecture, and it’s not a huge focus of the industrial education apparatus through which we all navigate. With that said, it’s fascinating to think that more than a few Rochester Junior College alumni went on to achieve extraordinary success in their professional and personal lives. One such example that comes to mind for me is Warren Skaaren, who, as a friend and faculty member pointed out a while ago, wrote the Batman 1989 screenplay and Beetlejuice. Both of these films were keystone projects of Tim Burton’s early work and went on to attain both critical and cultural success and form cult followings. Beetlejuice was so successful in the late 80s that Burton revisited the film 35 years later with a sequel that once again rocketed the intellectual property into the stratosphere, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars for Warner Brothers. The film remained incredibly faithful to its source material and I feel a quiet pride being one of the aforementioned cultists who had seen the original film more than two dozen times. Despite Skaaren’s noticeable absence from the Burton sequel, the film was a brilliant achievement and landed itself amongst my favorite Burton films. The visuals and cinematography were striking, the casting was fantastic and the story was beautiful, relatable and endearing. Finally, I have a followup film to watch after my annual Beetlejuice binge. I am ecstatic to have another Burton film, but this latest 2024 blockbuster release leads me to reflect on another vital aspect of American culture: why the hell do we keep getting sequels in theaters?
Obviously, it feels a little disingenuous to bemoan the frequently repeated presence of such beloved intellectual properties as Star Wars and Marvel’s Avengers, especially when these films and universes have gone on to influence such a crucial part of a young person’s moral complex and world view in this day and age. But the question still remains, why is so much of our film industry plagued with a repetition of the same content? Superheroes in capes, flaunting extravagant, technologically advanced accoutrements and vehicles, spaceships, wizards wielding wands and staffs, elves and orcs and dragons, many elements of high fantasy, science fiction; once the domain of the greatest imaginations, these are all as commonplace now as steam engines and horse drawn carriages were 100 years ago. And perhaps it’s beneficial to our society that spaceships and wizards are every part as common to our imaginations as motor vehicles and airplanes, giving us a place where we can escape the vacuous horror of reality. With social media’s impending collapse, the tropes of talking heads on cable access news, the bloated, bilgewater egos of overpaid politicians and the misdeeds of generals and proxy wars and the generally unfettered chaos unfolding in our daily lives that slowly seek to encapsulate us all in a pay to play, hyper-capitalistic oligarchical maelstrom of misery and debt, seems to me we need a ready made form of escapism. But therein lies my qualm with contemporary television shows and Hollywood blockbuster films: it’s all quickly becoming the same washed out stuff we’ve seen a dozen times before. Our grandparents loved Star Wars and Star Trek when they were our age, and our great grandparents had wizards and dragons and magical creatures running rampant through their imaginations with the unprecedented releases of Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. And while the release of Star Trek motivated millions to pursue space travel and technological progression as a net good for humanity, the most recent films were also violent, sexualized, overtly graphic cash grabs that fed off of the social pre fascination with reinventing and rebooting every available big ticket intellectual property that money hungry, Wall Street investors gobbled up while amassing entertainment empires since the dawn of the videocassette recorder and the digital video disc. And I fear I may date myself here with references to these technologies as many of you reading this may not even know what a VCR is, nonetheless, the films, television shows and video games you play all arose out of calculated power plays from elitist, money hungry investors who could care less what their entertainment companies do to our societal good or collective well being, just so long as we line their coffers and fill their pockets with a few more shekels. A monument to the bored business man.
And that’s the genesis of my question: why do we keep allowing for the same things to appear in our colosseums? If film and television have become our modern gladiator games, why have we allowed these circuses to devolve into a repetitive carousel of monotonous high fantasy and science fiction? When Skaaren was writing Hollywood legends like Top Gun and Batman, he was as creative and enthusiastic as Orson Welles with Citizen Kane, and he allowed himself the agency to world build and character build so as to give depth and life to his script. Skaaren has his name affiliated with half a dozen blockbuster hits and he walked through the halls of this very school, entertained by shows like Odd Couple, Dick van Dyke, Gilligan’s Island and Andy Griffith; and while I personally take no issue with any of these television greats, some of you readers may feel a little under-stimulated if all you had to escape from the horrors of college life was a simple show about a small-town sheriff and his comically incompetent deputy.
And that leads to my disdain for sequel culture, the repetitiousness of Hollywood and the need for escapism: I grew up with Star Wars, and I fell in love with heroes like Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker when I was in high school; in a lot of ways, Star Wars helped facilitate survival strategies for me to endure the education system as a neurodivergent weirdo who couldn’t stand the lunchroom and spent every morning hiding in a locker bay. The depths of the world building, the arc of the storylines, the inconceivable vastness of the universe and the near infinite complexity of technologies, politics and characters allowed me a vital break from the insufferable reality of my high school education, bullies, mean kids and clueless teachers, woefully disconnected from the grim realities of adolescence. I was unimaginably ecstatic when I heard of Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm and Star Wars, and closely followed release news of the upcoming sequel trilogy and waited with bated breath to see the premier of The Force Awakens a week before Christmas Day in 2015. I had been deployed to Kuwait and waited in line alongside two thousand other soldiers, Marines and Airmen who were just as excited to see the epic battle between good and evil unfold once again on the big screen I was crushed when I realized it was nothing like what I had fawned over in high school, and the nearly 40 years of world building that had taken place since