Frye was Right

     Damn you, Northrop Frye!  You were right, as usual.  I keep trying to find a way around it, but I cannot deny what seems to ring true as a constant, that the immature, hackneyed premise of reducing everything to the simplest of terms is exactly the best way to understand romance, or more suitably, to understand why people like romance.  I keep finding assurance of this in each of my attempts to dissent Frye's opinion, but I find it closer to fact with each mistrial.  I loathe a sequel whose existence needs not be.  I've been trying to understand the unending cacophony of films begetting bastardized versions of themselves time and time again, other than the demand from the audience for entertainment void of any demand for the redundancy of surplus thinking.  I don't want to relearn new characters and shit, just give me the old story with a new setting, please.  I am reluctantly finding that the very reason we go to see sequels is the promise of simplicity.  We know we're being catered to as if children, but we still cheer inside when the main character doesn't die from a dramatic situation from which there is no drama because we know they are safe, not because the character had a handle on the danger, but because we feel no drama for someone we know, simply because the franchise can't kill them, are safe from any lasting harm.  It's bullshit and we know it, but we love it so.  Sequels stoop down and spoon-feed us the lowest common denominator because not only do we actually enjoy it in a guilty sense of pleasure, but we have come to actually expect it.  Sequels are there in the simplest terms for us to enjoy the movie's event, the explosion of sound and movement, something distracting us from ourselves, it's just a sad reality that we have reduced and oversimplified our distractions to be as focused and predictable as modern sequels or remakes have gotten.