Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

Plots You Can Have is an ongoing series of posts where I suggest storylines for stories that came out of my head but that I have given up for adoption. If any of these strike your fancy, please take them! And if you do write anything from this I would love to read it. For more posts, see: tag/plots-you-can-have

This Plots You Can Have is about things I imagine would make good low-budget indie films.

A SICK WORLD

“You have dreamt up a sick world.” (Variations on it are repeated throughout the movie like arc words.)

A person (who is really some form of deity but has repressed it) believes ze is experiencing psychosis and gets worried about it. First scene is where the deity explains to a psychoanalyst – the best in the field – that ze wants the psychoanalyst to follow hir around for a whole year and then come to a conclusion. The therapist protests, of course, but the deity presents hir with a lot of money, up-front, and gives hir a month to finish hir business before ze will come to pick hir up. When the money does not convince the therapist, the deity offers salvation instead.

It transpires that the deity is working as a world-class motivational speaker. The month passes quite quickly; the psychoanalyst lies to hir patients a bit and apologizes profusely but can’t say no to the deity’s offer. They travel the world a bit and things seem to be really quite bad wherever the deity goes. The psychoanalyst starts questioning hir own sanity, and at a conference for downtrodden psychopaths in business-clothes, ze decides the deity is the one who is making things bad. Now ze just needs to prove it.

In the climax – at another one of the big conferences the motivational speaker deity travels to – the therapist proves the deity is a deity and therefore a cause of everything bad, and as promised, the deity grants hir salvation. Ze expires, leaving only a smoking pair of boots behind or something.

~

EXACT CHANGE

Set against a backdrop where other people have got funky superpowers like influencing continental drift and oxygenating things by touch.

A gloomy but brilliant Scottish teenager is granted the superpower of always having exact change, and the implications of this are tested to the limit. A group of friends support the endeavour. Strictly scientific trial-and-error, hypothesis forming, etc. The first hypothesis is that the coins are manufactured from a magical wallet the teenager just happens to have; this is proven wrong. Then they ask maybe it is just really good hypnosis of both the buyer and the seller but they don’t know a way to test this. Then they believe the price of a thing changes according to how much money the teenager has, and this is a bit more difficult to prove since it might mean that they’re messing with quantum or causality problems. But nope, it is not that. Some more theories are put forth and the group of teenagers decide that screw whatever’s causing it, they should all go buy really fancy motorcycles with some pennies. So they do, and one of them gets into an accident and a coma.

The teenagers (especially the main character) hesitates to buy the best doctor available for their friend with a few quid, because that doctor is probably a very good fraud, and sticks with the NHS instead. The idea that it is actually hypnosis is thought upon further and they start recording everything they do, and they find that there is in fact a moment in every purchase where there is some kind of telepathy where they push every mental button of the person who receives the money. They train this ability up, and then abuse the telepathy to talk to the friend in a coma, trying to get them to wake up.

From interviews conducted with people they’ve bought things from before, they find out that no-one remembers them.

~

MILDRED

A story about two stalkers and one girl. One of the stalkers believes he is in a classic triangle drama and acts accordingly (very creepily of course) and the other believes Mildred is ‘testing’ him with this new guy. Things escalate. The stalkers inveigle themselves in her routines, in her life, until she decides she needs to stop hiding. She starts playing them against each other, and it all culminates in a knife fight between the two stalkers where she has announced that she will marry whoever survives. She is planning to shoot him though.