‘Climate Change’ cold open
The inciting idea of a feature-length screenplay
Here I sample the first thirteen pages of my screenplay Climate Change, originally written in a three-week span from August to September 2021. Incidentally it was during this time in my life that I started watching Jonathan Pageau’s YouTube channel. I would spend all day hammering out all these ideas that had long been building up in me, and then in the evenings I would break by shotgunning Pageau videos in double time. Relatedly, I have a new Symbolic World article out this week that readers here will be naturally interested in: “What Counts as Symbolic Thinking?”
From here the script follows Cate as the protagonist in an underdog struggle against the ascendant symbolic worldview represented in the opening by her erstwhile partner Max, but revealed to be a much larger political movement. It is “a story of ideas” after a Dostoevskian model, heavy on satire, with a tone of dread borrowed from the horror genre. This uncanny feeling of fear, even amidst the humorous satire, ultimately is sourced from the spirit of schism that never leaves the script’s eye. The content is deliberately polarized and polarizing, unavoidably disturbing for audiences of any ideological persuasion. I myself feel mighty uncomfortable with its contents and don’t know what to do about it. I personally adhere to a beauty-first perspective, or at least strive to, but this screenplay is my attempt at communicating with those who, on the left and on the right, in favor of dialectical stimulation and polarized personalities, rather have rejected beauty. That’s a schism that perhaps just can’t be mended, a communication doomed to fall into the abyss. In a sense that was always the idea, to stage a rescue mission in the belly of the leviathan. But there’s no sign of it ever returning to the surface.