Here's another short film idea. It came about because Dan and I were talking about Star Wars and I was trying to abstract the qualities of Episode IV. In other words, what makes Star Wars, Star Wars? This was my solution. It doesn't quite solve the problem but actually I like it.
* * *
We hear the rumble of what sound like B-17s in the distance. A boy runs up to the camera craning his neck toward the sky. We look overhead and see a small group of rocket planes in formation slowly flying into the distance. Fade to black.
It's morning and the boy is running. He passes a man with a strange metal frame attached to his head. There is an eyepiece over one eye. The boy passes another man who appears to have a bloody organ in a clear plastic sack attached to his body. The boy runs into a small school room in a dusty desert-like area with a low horizon. The boy is late to class. The class is watching a projection. We see faces of men who look familiar. We see strange newsreel-like footage. It has a garbled quality. Images of strange aircraft and maps flash by. We do not quite understand them.
Class is over now. The other kids seem to be walking home and no one except the boy seems to notice the thin wisp of smoke in the distance in the scrubby desert. Now the boy is walking toward the smoke. It appears to be a small sputnik-like satellite that has plunged into the ground. He is able to remove a small device from the satellite.
It's night. The boy is looking at the device. It looks like some kind of strange receiver that picks up noisy sounds and images. He spends some time looking at a poster of a rocket ship with a human heart in a plastic bubble. As the sounds of the device fill the room we peer out the window at the night sky.
We now crane down to a young man. It is the boy grown-up. He embraces his mother. Then he walks into a rocket plane. The rocket plane takes off and joins a squadron of other planes flying off into the distance.
THE END
Notes:
I've suggested to Dan that Ep IV is qualitatively different from the other Star Wars films. One of the things that makes it unique is its sense of adolescent longing and the feeling of being trapped in the middle of nowhere and that something is happening far, far away. Like there are rumbles of wars in the distance and only in tiny filtered ways does news about what's happening reach us. So this story is about what it's like to be a child. Adults try to keep information away from you, yet you know something is happening yet you don't know what. And it seems simultaneously wonderful yet frightening. And it seems very American... to have news of faraway wars carried through the airwaves. For me it was Vietnam. For today's kids it's Iraq. And fighting a war is less about immediate violence than he effects of war. Casualties. Strange programs like Victory Gardens that seem hopelessly removed from the cause yet enable you to "do your part" (or support the troops).
In the beginning we see these gruesome figures, perhaps injured in the faraway war. The idea comes from the beginning of Chariots of Fire. At the beginning we see images of men injured in WWI. They're more window-dressing than anything else. They never appear again.
Then the classroom images. These are like newsreels, like propaganda. But you're not sure what they're about, like when I was a kid watching cartoons that were leftover from WWII. You'd see cartoon people with flashlights saying, "lights out" and you'd have no idea what they were talking about. Or you'd watch out-of-context cartoons that showed Bugs Bunny talking to an audience in a theater. Or you'd see cartoons that adults thought would make it easier to understand difficult concepts. But anthropomorphizing everything just made it all seem weirder. It's about the way adults tell you about forbidden topics like child molesters. Parents try to tell you the specifics of what to do (don't talk to strangers) in order to avoid talking about the larger issue of pedophilia. So you have these weird decontextualized rules that evoke something larger and forbidden.
The satellite comes right out of Star Wars of course. It is the event that intrudes on the hero and promises to change his life. The radio receiver idea is the Princess Leia videotape, a secret message. Give it the "me" treatment and now we have a static-y noisy radio-like device.
The poster on the wall is about the way children don't understand metaphors. I was at the shooting range once with my friend and his father shooting 22s. There was a poster that said "Guns and alcohol don't mix." I always wondered what would happen if you DID mix the two together: would you get some kind of explosion? Years later I realized that the statement wasn't meant to be literal. So we wonder about the rocket poster. Is the rocket really a rocket with a heart in it? Or is it some kind of metaphor? And there's some kind of slogan. Like "a slip of the lip sinks a ship." That's one I heard as a kid and I had no idea what it meant.
I call this ending the "Gattaca" ending because it's similar in tone. There are a lot of other possible endings. In the Star Wars ending, we actually see our hero defeat the enemy. In the Republicans-are-evil ending we find out that there's no war—it's just a scheme to keep the public under control. In the Democrats-are-evil ending, the war comes to us and destroys the schoolhouse. In the Explorers ending, we discover that the spaceships were really just garbage scows... a really disappointing ending. In the "telephone game/conspiracy" ending we discover that there was no war; we just pieced that idea together. In fact, those rocket ships were just going on routine flights.
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