A New Version of Homo Superior, Composing, 17/06/2015

Of course, I'm influenced by a poetic phrase of David
Bowie. Who isn't, even indirectly, today?

That won’t be the name of the film. Honestly, I’m having trouble coming up with a name for this project, a screenplay I’m beginning to write for Lee Skinner. I’ve been pretty busy on the job hunting front lately, so I haven’t had time to dive into the script itself, but I have a solid outline together.

From one perspective, it’s a detective movie. Elias Farkas is a university professor whose colleague Herman Klein suddenly appears like a confident human being for the first time in his life, and shows up at a faculty function with an absurdly hot younger wife, Alice. Elias lives his life by the old stereotype, “I keep getting older, but the women always stay the same age.”

So Elias sets out to discover what the deal is, how a man with the personality of a mouse could attract the type of woman that Elias has always wanted. Did I mention that Elias is an asshole?

See, the first we see of him is when he wakes up one Saturday morning with his girlfriend, who is about 20 years younger than he is. Even though it’s clear that they’ve been together for several months at least, he still talks to her like a pick-up artist, casual negs and manipulation. Elias also gets a phone call from his daughter – from his first marriage – who is clearly in the same age bracket as his current girlfriend.

Because this is also a stalker movie, told from the perspective of the stalker. And the stalker is a man, a man who grows increasingly obsessed with the one woman (other than his own daughter) whose confidence he’s never able to break. Every time Elias talks with Alice, he’s amazed that he can’t control this one incredible woman.

The practice of men jockeying for dominance and control over women is so ingrained in human gender relations across the planet that it’s practically become our essence. Alice signifies such a radical departure from that behaviour that I felt it was more plausible to make her a literally inhuman creature. 

It’s just one of the ways that I’m thinking through the character right now. Before I sit down to write a script (or any other kind of story), scene to scene, line to line, I have to find an idea to be its core. It’s my target, the attractor point for the entire narrative, all the plots, characters, and settings, to reflect.

All I need do to explain the character of
Elias Farkas is to tell you what I'd say to a
casting director: get me someone who could
conceivably do Charlie Sheen, after the
breakdown.

There can be plenty of other ideas floating around in the film. There usually are in all the best art. 

The best art, to me, is the kind that can become a person’s favourite art, a particular kind of favourite art. Across media, in whatever format you find it. It could be painting, literature, philosophy, film or television drama, comic, Twitter personality. I think the best art are the works that reveal or inspire something new about it in every experience of it. The best art is inexhaustible art.

Maybe that’s just all my favourite art.

Anyway, the film will be good. The viewers can put whatever other meanings they want into their experience of it, and they’ll be perfectly valid. But when I’m writing this thing, here’s the idea that’ll keep me on the straight and narrow. It’ll keep me from drifting the scenes themselves away from an immediate purpose.

Here’s that idea. The demands necessary for complete and total equality among genders call for such radical cultural change that success would transform us philosophically into what might as well be a different species. And it would be a better species than the one we have now.

Homo Superior as Feminist.