Round 6.2 [Reminiscence v. Time To Die]

Reminiscence (Shockah rank: #13, Burley rank: #3)

v.

Time to Die (Shockah rank: #6, Burley rank: #10)

EN GARDE!

Reminiscence
In a world where genetic and social engineering have eliminated violent crime and other offenses, there is only one punishable infraction: Nostalgia. In order to keep the populace in line, the past must be eliminated, keeping everyone in a blissful present-tense existence. But some insist on remembering, collecting and hoarding pieces of the past to keep it alive. Tom was the greatest of all them, blessed and cursed with an eidetic memory. But when he's betrayed to the authorities, Tom finds himself on the prison planet, forced to find a way to survive, all alone on a harsh -- yet beautiful -- landscape. Can his knowlege of the past help him, or even save him? Or will he be prey to the predators on the planet, both alien and human?

Con
Oh yes, this one. I remember when I was at the library, staring at that picture of the Robinson Crusoe guy, trying to come up with some kind of idea to fill out my quota. I'd written only the first sentence, except for that last word. So I sat there and let the first absurd thing I could think of pop into my head, and that's what came out. The rest of it followed, piece by piece, until it looked like there was enough there to call it complete.

I'm not sure why I'm sharing this anecdote, other than to get across the Frankensteinian nature of this idea, and my relative coolness towards it. It's interesting to me that it's struck a chord with both you and our only fan. Hopefully I'll be able to see it from your eyes, but right now, it's kind of a unwieldy, over-conceptualized mess, with a strange break in the middle: it starts out as a kind of abstract, thinky kind of piece, and then it turns into something physical and brutal. (There's probably some kind of thematic relevance that can be hashed out of those two halves -- in fact, I can see it exciting the Tropical Malady fan -- but it's just incongruous to me right now.)

And Burley, in his opening pro paragraph, outlines for me some of the severe problems of this idea. How the hell would this world work? And how the hell did it even get to this point, where technology to enforce something so unenforceable was created and a government was able to use it without destroying itself and the country?

Pro
And yet, at the same time, I think those last questions are resolvable by simply not answering them -- just throwing them out completely. How did the dystopia of THX-1138 come into being? Who the fuck cares? It's clearly so far into the future that it may as well be a fantasy world of dragons and orcs -- it has its own rules, which need to be understood, but how those rules came into being are not necessary for the story to work. So I see this not as "in the distant future" but "in the far, far, really far future", and taking certain considerations of realism out of the equation entirely.

Another note: Part of this was inspired by my reading of Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars. One of the chapters is about a guy who, in the late 60s, became a Buddhist and joined a temple -- and his family discovered too late that he had a brain tumor that a) rendered him blind, b) destroyed his ability to form memories of the present, and c) damaged his metabolism so that he got very fat. He lived in a blissful state of perpetual present, always smiling and happy, and -- get this -- the tumor also damaged his ability to recognize that he was blind -- he thought he could see, even though he clearly couldn't. So for awhile, he lived in this temple, and the other Buddhists thought (and who can really blame them?) that this young American had attained true nirvana. When he made it to Sacks' hospital, Sacks figured out that he still had memories of up until the 60s, but anything he was told would fade away, Memento-like, a few minutes later. (There's a few amazing moments in the account dealing with the passing of the man's father and a trip to see the Grateful Dead, the man's favorite group.)

So I was imagining that in this SF world, the population, probably through some kind of technology, is subjected to the something kind of similar, but flip-flopped -- there would be a focus on the present (and the future), and the past, anything that would give their lives meaning (apart from the meaning given by the government or whoever) and distract them has to be suppressed. Obviously, this technology or whatever it is isn't perfect (or is somewhat voluntary), else there wouldn't be a protagonist nor a story. (I'm thinking of Fahrenheit 451, where the populace seems so quelled that the Firemen don't seem as necessary.)

I dunno -- pretty heady stuff. Too heady?

(And yet, I have no problem with the whole "how do we visualize this" thing. Not because I have the solution -- ha! -- but because Kubrick once said that he could literally film any written sentence, and if that's not something worthy of emulation, I don't know what is.)

Time to Die
In a World where death itself is beaten by genetic regeneration, a guard is killed during a riot on the prison planet. One woman--his wife--faces sure death to retrieve his body in time to bring him back to life. It's a race against time, with one nearly resourcesless woman willfully fighting like a juggernaut against the prisoners who are holding his body hostage, and the powers that be that think she should just give up. All to simply save the man she loves from eternal death.

Pro
Oh -- clarity, clarity, clarity. The clarity of it gets me high as a freakin' kite. As Burley knows (and as I'll probably talk about when I write up a post about the sequence method), structure is my big bugaboo, so if I can find an idea with a straightforward structure, I jump all over it. I figure if I can find something with a strong foundation, with plenty of conflict and rising stakes and blah de blah, then I can leave it alone and focus on the cool stuff: characters, atmosphere, visual rhymes, jokes, contrapuntal thematic devices, etc.

(That's right, when it comes to screenwriting, I'm not a carpenter, I'm an interior decorator. And that applies to regular life as well -- anyone who knows me knows I've never lifted a hammer in my whole goddam life. But I'm committed to working on that, though. Uh, the screenwriting, that is. Fuck that wood shop shit.)

And I don't think it needs a villain, either -- at least, I don't think it needs a single villainous "muwah ha ha " character. Seems like there's enough neutral, incompatible wants resulting in conflict to keep it going: the woman wants her husband's body back, the prisoners want to escape and probably want to keep the body as a bargaining chip, the prison authorities want to stomp out the riot any way possible. (And that right there, if I may apply a bit of amateur theory, is what makes for a good script. We usually think of stories as having two conflicting forces, the protag and the antag, and they fight. And there's a lot of examples of that. But this has three antagonistic forces, each against the other, but with the possibility of two aligning against the other, maybe permanently, probably only temporarily. And it would be interesting to use the structure to explore the various three-way permutations.)

(Heh. I said "three-way".)

Con
There is the possibility that, if we're not careful, this could devolve into a pedestrian action flick. (I think we are careful, and having people, er, one thoughtful, caring, considerate person vetting our work helps, but it's still something to look out for.) And yes, because it's so straightforward, it probably isn't as sexy as some of our more outré ideas. But that's the key for this story idea: embrace it for what it is. This is a "B" Western, no doubt about it. It's kind of ordinary. We've seen it before. It's mythic, sure, but it borders on cliché. The question is: Will we make it a Boetticher or Mann "B" Western, or will it be one of those forgettable programmers that make up the bulk of the Encore Western channel?