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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Saturday Night at the Movies...


I'm going to become a film director. I'm going to change my name to Gustav Klankenheimer and make a seven hour meditation on suffering. Either the film will be in black and white or only feature washed out varieties of beige mixed with jaundiced yellows. It will be bleak.

The film will begin with a shot of ominous rolling clouds. We hear a clap of thunder. Cut to drizzle against a window pane. Beyond the glass we see a sparsely decorated room with peeling wallpaper and a garish sacred heart picture upon the wall. A fluorescent light bulb crackles and flickers, as they do. A narrow bed with coarse horsehair blankets contains an emaciated old man. He is wheezing heavily and staring at water dripping through the ceiling and landing on the stiff body of a dead cat. The old man is dying of cancer and he frequently moans in pain because he has no medication. Occasionally he calls out in a Scandinavian accent. He calls out the name 'Elizabet'. We see a woman in late middle age sitting at a kitchen table. She hears the old man's calls but ignores them. She chain smokes and stares into the middle-distance. Her face is a road map to regret. She listens to the sound of weeping children being broadcast over a battered wireless.

A clock hangs above the old man's head. Its face is cracked. It ticks portentously. It tocks with even greater menace. A large bluebottle fly buzzes around the room. It lands on the old man's nose. He attempts to lift his hand and swat it away but he hasn't the strength. He is helpless to do anything about it. 'Elizaaaaaaaaabet', he croaks, 'Elizaaaaaaaabet'. Elizabet ignores him.

In the final moments of this film, the old man's eyes will roll back in his head. He will convulse and choke. As he breathes his last, he will gasp these words: ...'I see a great ugly mouth with jagged teeth, gaping open, miles wide. I smell its stinking carcass breath. This is the mouth of God and he is laughing, ...laughing at us all.'... The old man will then die. We hear his death rattle. Elizabet will then enter the room. She will regard the old man's corpse. She will smirk and then jump out of the window. The end credits will roll to the sound of the clock ticking, the children weeping and the water dripping on the dead cat. I'm going to call the film Transformers 3.

3 comments:

John Robbins said...

Might be better off calling it 'Antichrist 2' - at least then you get to be crap controversially.

Anonymous said...

Name me one thing you see in Antichrist that you didn't see in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. One thing! Talking foxes, genital mutilation, it's all there.

John Robbins said...

Apparently, had budgetary constraints not restricted Antichrist to a single wheel and an axle, the attempted vehicularisation of Defoe's character was to result in a fully-fuctioning, sentient car. No lie: the film's working title was 'Von Trier Goes Bananas'. (Hell, the word 'antichrist' is an anagram of 'herbie'!)