CUT TO:
INT. MOSH’S APARTMENT — DAY
MONA, Celan’s cute skinny nineteen-year-old girlfriend who works at Sam Goody, is naked, standing next to an unfolded off-white futon in a meagerly furnished bedroom/living room. She holds out a pair of sexy lace panties in her right hand. Mona’s skin is extraordinarily pale, breasts pert, pudendum depilated, shoe-polish black hair atop her head spiked and streaked with pink wisps. Ear, nose, and nipple piercings.
On the futon lies MOSH, also nineteen, skinny, naked, right knee raised bashfully to protect his privates. He looks confused. Lead guitarist for Plato’s Deathmetal Tumors, an alternative Seattle band recently moved to the Twin Cities in search of a recording contract, Mosh has shaved his head and tattooed it with dark green circuitry patterns.
Mona is cheating on Celan, scamming him for money in an elaborate scheme she has devised with Mosh, with whom she is in crazy love. While both the scheme and the fact of it will become clear later on, the awareness of it should be palpable in this scene.
CUT TO:
INT. AMC THEATER NUMBER TEN — DAY
CLOSE-UP: Celan’s right eye watching.
CUT TO:
INT. MOSH’S APARTMENT — DAY
Mona offering Mash her sexy lace panties.
MONA
Don’t be a dick. Come on. It’ll be fun. Seriously. Do it. Come on. Do it.
MOSH
What? You’re saying you want…?
MONA
(Jumping up and down, little-girlish.)
Do it. DO IT. Do it do it do it. Do it.
CUT TO:
INT. AMC THEATER NUMBER TEN — DAY
CLOSE-UP: Celan’s right eye watching.
ZOOM IN and through his right eye, into a new reality…
CUT TO:
INT. MALL OF AMERICA: CAMP SNOOPY — DAY
SLO-MO: Kite-Eating Tree, a huge fake-bark telescoping metal pole with a huge forest-green mushroomoidal metal umbrella on top, off of which dangle scores of swing-chairs on long chains that spin scores of riders around fifty feet in the air.
ZOOM IN on one in which sits a prim SCANDINAVIAN
WOMAN in her early sixties, grandchildren revolving willy-nilly around her like a flock of towheaded birds.
ZOOM IN CLOSER. Scandinavian woman’s body fills the screen. She is dressed in a pastel plaid blouse and pink pants. Her seat has accidentally and uncomfortably twisted her sideways so she is looking directly into the camera lens. Her hands are palms-down on her knees. It almost appears as if she has been carved out of wood, she is so stiff. She plainly does not relish this moment in her life.
SLO-MO TRACKING SHOT: following her on her circular journey. Her stoic grimace. There is a dead horse, it seems to be saying. There is a fence. The horse needs to be on the other side of the fence. What else can you do except pick it up, throw it over your shoulder, and begin to climb?
ZOOM IN and through her right eye, into a new reality…
CUT TO:
INT. CELAN’S INTERNAL ANATOMY
SPECIAL EFFECTS equivalent of SKYCAM SHOT from earlier, only instead of appearing to swim through the mall, now the camera appears to be swimming through someone’s body as if on some amusement-park ride — up the taut red thread of his optic nerve; through the toboggan run of veins swirling with blood cells; into the sloshy thunderous cavern of the heart; up through the torrent of carotid artery; into the moist sparking matrix of the brain, white lightning flashing in the overcast synaptic distance.
During this voyage, CELAN’S RESPIRATION diminishes into background soundtrack. In the aural foreground:
CELAN (Voice Over)
Here’s the really cool thing? While you can trace the origin of film all the way back to those shadows playing on the walls of Plato’s cave, maybe even to the prehistoric cave paintings preceding them, contemporary cinema actually started barely a hundred years ago on December 28, 1895, in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, when the Lumiére brothers showed the first projected movies to a paying audience. Ten shorts, each about fifty seconds in length, comprised of scenes out of everyday life — a train pulling into a station, factory workers arriving at a plant, parents goofing with their kids. Initially, film embraced the Poetics of the Stage. The camera thought it was a spectator fixed in the audience watching a drama called the world. Contemplating the act of moving somehow seemed rude. The camera thought it was nothing more than a kind of localized consciousness…
CUT TO:
INT. MOSH’S APARTMENT — DAY
Mona, still naked, is now the one lying on the unfolded futon. Mash is on his knees between her spread legs. He is wearing her sexy lace panties. He bends forward.
CLOSE-UP: Mona’s right eye watching.
ZOOM IN and through her right eye, into a new reality…
CUT TO:
INT. NINETEENTH-CENTURY PLAYHOUSE — DAY
FLICKERY, SCRATCHED, SEPIA FAUX-SONOCHROME FOOTAGE. Camera fixed in the audience. MALE ACTOR looking very much (but not quite) like Mash and FEMALE ACTOR looking very much (but not quite) like Mona on large divan on stage in exactly the same positions Mash and Mona have assumed in Mash’s apartment: ersatzMash on his knees between ersatz-Mana’s spread legs. He is wearing her sexy lace panties. He bends forward. They start kissing.
CLOSE-UP: wet eelish lingual play.
FADE TO CLOSE-UP: ersatz-Mona’s right eye watching.
CELAN (Voice Over)
Only there was this problem: space in film is elastic while space in theater is rigid. They’re two completely different things. Plus the basic unit of film isn’t scene, but shot (with five hundred to a thousand per your standard flick), and shots can be from any number of weird angles and joined together in any number of weird combinations. You just can’t do that in theater. So really what early cinematic directors discovered was theater is all about life as something relatively static, modular, linear, and by necessity over-acted. By contrast, they discovered film is all about life as permutation, nonlinearity, and nuance. The form of film is really a philosophy of disruptive movement…
CUT TO:
INT. MOSH’S APARTMENT — DAY
CLOSE-UP of Mona’s right eye watching.
CUT TO:
INT. AMC THEATER NUMBER TEN — DAY
MORPH into CLOSE-UP of Celan’s right eye watching.
CELAN (Voice Over)
So I…um… I guess what I’m trying to say here is I sometimes sort of think of my life, basically, as a movie I can’t direct…
00:05:36:26
THIRTY FEET ABOVE Celan Solen skitters a mouse through the warm darkness flooding the ventilation system. Tucked into the mouse’s breast immediately behind its heart is the soul of Remedios the Beauty a young woman from a small village in Colombia. When she was alive, Remedios the Beauty used to drive men mad with the sweetness of her scent, part orange, part cinnamon. Sometimes she wandered her house unclothed and sometimes she shaved her head because deciding which dress to wear or how to comb her hair seemed too much trouble. One day while hanging sheets, Remedios the Beauty began rising into the air. Her feet simply left the ground and she lifted away from earth. She became smaller and smaller until she was the size of a pearl. Then she disappeared altogether. No one ever saw her again. The chronicler who originally told her tale claimed she had ascended to heaven, but in reality she had ascended into a minute rip in the fabric of space and time that appeared that morning as an unmoving white smear of cloud in the otherwise flawless sky, and she ended up here. Remedios the Beauty will spend eternity scrambling through a lightless void that, depending on the season, is sometimes too warm and sometimes too cold, believing this is what paradise must feel like.