Bad-Guy Dynamic Range Rescaling

(BGDRR)

Bad Guy Dynamic Range Rescaling (BGDRR) is a mismatch between the perceived power of a villain or monster of Episode One versus the power of the same monster in Episode Two of a series of stories.  Writers need to escalate in sequels, something more evil, more powerful, more challenging than before and if not handled carefully the viewer is struck with a strange feeling of incongruity between the episodes.  The problem occurs most acutely when the first episode goes to great lengths to create a very menacing and evil creature and succeeds.  By doing so they implicitly offer a monster that is a "10" on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst monster you can imagine in the setting they offer.  However when Episode Two is due they discover that there is a problem:  the monster is already maxed out in "bad-ness."  In technical terms "the Episode One monster is already at the edge of the audience 'bad-o-meter' dynamic range."  

In the world of experimental science this means that your ability to measure is limited by your instrument.  If you have an earthquake detector that can only measure up to a 6.0 earthquake and an 8.0 earthquake comes along, all you can know is that the quake was "greater than 6.0".  What happened in Episode One is that the director created a monster at the 10 level, exploiting our full capacity to understand evil, power, badness, whatever, and now in Episode Two he must go beyond.  Unfortunately almost any attempt to do so forces the audience into a position of incongruity because people have a hard time adjusting their scales.  A few examples can help.

Consider "Alien," the first movie of the Alien series, a remarkable and magnificent science fiction drama.  In the first episode we can  not imagine anything more horrible than an alien creature that bursts forth from your chest and grows up into and acid-blooded horrible, nearly indestructible monster (see still photo above for the young version).  However in "Aliens," the second part of the series, these guys die like flies.  The rescaling was attempted by sheer numbers, as the title alludes.  If ONE monster is a bad as you can imagine, think about a HUNDRED OF THEM!  Well, the problem is that we can't really think about a hundred of them because our scale has been set by the brilliantly done first movie to consider only one as the most horrible thing we can think of.   Piling multipliers only means this situation is "beyond the worst" and that is more or less emotionally meaningless. What was an incredibly horrific creature in small numbers (namely "one") in the first episode becomes a rather weak creature in large numbers in the second episode, and this incongruity is a case of failed BGDRR and the attendant feeling of having seen it all before is delivered to the audience.  Ultimately we meet the Queen (see picture on left) but Ripley's battle with the queen is essentially the same ferocity as her battle with the original drone in the first movie.  How could it not be?  Our dynamic range of ferocity was already maxed out and any attempt we make to consider this battle "even worse" is not possible.  In other words, the story is very much a repeat at several critical points.

Another good example is the recent movie "Blade II", where we are introduced to a type of vampire that is far worse that the original type (original on right, version two upgrade below) we met in Blade I.  Unfortunately we now perceive the "normal vampire" as a more or less weak and pathetic creature where in Blade I the director did a great job of convincing us of the OPPOSITE!.  The incongruous feeling the viewer gets when he realizes this is due to BGDRR.  Killing the new vampires is just like killing the old ones except for a few details that are beyond our dynamic range to appreciate.  We certainly understand that the new vampires are worse on an intellectual level, but it is not really possible to emotionally understand how bad they are because they are off scale.   The Blade series shows how evil is best portrayed by good acting, not makeup.  However the BGDRR was attempted via pure makeup and special effects.  For some reason that is just never enough.  Lastly Blade I had the additional error of the "Prophecy Problem" because the metaphysics of vampirism are extremely complex and interesting yet not well addressed.

A final unrelated example was the utter pathos of Bill Cosby when he tried to sell us "New Coke".  For several years he convinced us that Coke was as good a drink as one could ever imagine.  He saturated our dynamic range regarding how good Coke must be.  When he came back to claim that New Coke was better, we all said "How is that possible?  Coke is the best possible thing, you told us so yourself."

So how is BGDRR supposed to be done?  It seems to me that it must be done by simultaneous planning of Episode Two and Episode One.  Note that Star Wars did not have to shrink the evil of Darth Vader in order to make the Emperor look even more evil in Episode Three.  This is because  the Emperor was always behind the scenes and the viewers saved a margin of evil for him on their dynamic range scale.  Alternatively the sequel can be done in such a way that the essence of the story changes and subsequent episodes  just exploit the audience's prior relationship with the characters.  In this case writer must generate  a fundamentally different but not any more evil villain.   This is of course how the James Bond series works.  Oddjob was no less evil than Jaws, just different.

Another good example of a failed BGDRR is the Mummy and the Mummy Returns.  Imanhotep was actually demoted to mortal status in the "Mummy Returns" in order to help us scale the Scorpion King up to "as bad as bad can be".  This is a tacit acknowledgement that BGDRR is barely possible at all.  What the director was forced to do here was essentially concede that there is no way to truly be any worse than the mummy of the first episode so the obvious solution was to dethrone that mummy and put a new one in its place.