Who wants to buy ‘Frankenstein’ retold as a high school farce?Photo by: Peter Stevens
Call this a movie treatment. I’ll flesh it out and make it farcical fiction when somebody’s check clears the bank. For now, the bare bones:
Act I: Donald Trump is looking for a way too goose his reality TV franchise when Ted Cruz comes to him with a bold plan: Trump is to run for President as Cruz’ stalking horse, yielding his support to him before the GOP Convention. Trump agrees on the condition that he can later repackage his campaign as television: Presidential Apprentice.
Act II: Trump clowns it up – since he’s making television – and Cruz clamps it down, acting like the Captain of the football team indulging his goofy kid brother. But where both expect the clowning to flame out in short order, instead it grows to a conflagration. And since Trump is built to believe nothing but his own bullshit…
Act III: Life will be what it turns out to be be, but imagination is what you want to have happen. That’s masturbatory, if all you’re doing is indulging yourself. But fiction can present a simulated future that spares you the pain of living through that reality.
So: Trump cannot prevail in this story, since he is an inherently tragic figure, the unloved love child of Aeschylus and Oscar Wilde.
Cruz should win in the end, given the idea of benedy, but since he is being creepily crafty in Act I, I will want to see him prevail by means of the moral improvement he masters in Act II.
That’s benedy as farce, and I can think of a dozen different ways to write it – with my favorite being as a high school comedy of manners.
Do send that check if you’d like to see more, but, in the mean time consider this:
What if this scenario is not fiction?
