EVERYONE HAS ALWAYS HAD NOTES

The tools to reboot are at hand

THE FIRST GRUNTING CAVEMEN to tell tales surely managed demands to change endings. Battles over biblical apocrypha —which books to include in canonical scripture; new tales, if not new endings—smoldered for centuries. At the dawn of the 20th century, children wrote L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, asking things like, “Please have Dorothy go to the land of Oz again” or, “Why don’t you make Ozma and Dorothy meet and have a good time together?” By the end of the century, some fans of Stephen King probably saw themselves in Misery’s Annie Wilkes: If only they could get their favorite author alone, isolated, and vulnerable enough to redo a shitty ending or two (or thirty).

The urge to reboot works differently in this decade. For the most popular stories, there are no lone authors, only the shadowy corporate forces that hold intellectual property rights. Thus, the very 21st century phenomenon of fan petitions. Go to Change.org and search the word ‘canon.’ You’ll find hundreds upon hundreds of petitions beseeching the corporate holders of IP rights the way medieval supplicants once petitioned their local lord, pleading to have characters, episodes, seasons, or even entire batches of film—Declare the Sequel Trilogy Non-Canon!—excluded from their respective continuities and banished to the lesser ranks of fan fiction. Tentpole fandoms can easily sour on the corporate studios that created and nurtured them. Occasionally the studios relent; it only took three years for consumer outcry to compel Warner Brothers to reboot the $300 million Justice League.

This power dynamic is quickly changing. As of this writing, computing has reached the point that people—individuals—are redoing some of their favorite film scenes from the privacy of their laptops. A great shift is underway, moving control of content from creators to audience. In just the last ten years, fan edits have progressed from found-footage collages to full-scale CGI reinventions of equal or superior value to the original. It’s no coincidence that many of the largest science fiction franchises have embraced alternate universes—the ultimate continuity workaround—in the same decade that audiences have realized their growing technological power.

Take this revised lightsaber fight from the original Star Wars. I hadn’t realized, as a child, that the sword fight between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader had been playful sparring as an excuse for hammy dialogue. In this nearly flawlessly reimagined scene, the duel is a murder battle, splendidly choregraphed, expertly photographed, a visceral brawl between two wizards with supernatural skills and deep, unresolved fury. At one point, Vader hulks over his quarry as the saber-light reflects onto his helmet as scowling eyebrows; he wants to disembowel Obi-Wan and wear his face as a codpiece.When I first saw this film in a theater, the idea that anyone could improve one of its scenes would have been just as fantastical as the worlds of the film itself. Yet it took only 36 people to redo this particular scene four years ago; that number would inevitably be lower today. In all but the best CGI, the brain spots flaws. And there are still small moments of falsity in this video. Does it matter? For those who can recite it verbatim, Star Wars is a work of myriad janky visual effects that everyone long ago agreed to overlook. My childhood love of this film forgave every Spirit-Halloween-store cantina alien. If I’d seen this revised scene as a child, it would have rooted itself in my emotional makeup as effectively as the unaltered film did.

DURING THE 2020 ELECTION, Fox News was the first network to call Arizona for Biden, a preview of his national win. Fox viewers had notes. They wanted the ending retold, only this time Trump should pull an AZ squeaker and, also, the Clintons and George Soros and the deceased Hugo Chávez should have hacked the voting machines. Newsmax told this version of the ending. Fox quickly pivoted to similar fan service, pushing the alternate ending of the 2020 election as canon and relegating the current administration to fiction. Internally, the move toward fantasy as news was considered respect for their fanbase.

One can easily see a near-future in which Fox News simply abandons news the same way MTV abandoned music. Imagine news shows that assert their right to depict fiction in the same way that Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson currently insist (on different and often contradictory levels) that their shows are commentary rather than news. It’s trolling the audience as brand management, except soon we will be witnessing industrial-strength trolling that brings us seamless execution and photorealistic VFX, all in the service of expanding the Fox cut of the 2024 election into the Murdoch Cinematic Universe.