Grandiosity

Horror movies, aging berserkers, ambition, and the shadow of doubt.

I’d like to tell you about a screenplay I recently wrote, and what it’s about, and how I wrote it. The script, its subject and its method all share a similar willfulness and a similar personal distortion. This is a personal distortion - though you may recognize it - and I’ll try to write about it as clearly as I can.

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Since I was a kid, I’d loved horror movies (see April’s “Freddie Krueger & Peek a Boo”). And I’ve always been an ambitious writer. About a year ago, spurred by an unwelcome discovery while doing some unrelated research, I started making notes that would lead to Grandiosity, a screenplay for a feature-length horror film.

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The logline for Grandiosity is: Following the murder-suicide of his mentor, a psychologist discovers he’s inherited something far more sinister than a therapeutic method.

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Grandiosity tells the story of a slow-building demonic possession that infects the protagonist, his organization, and the larger power structures of society, ultimately taking over completely, in plain sight, to no small amount of applause.

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By placing the horror film in the realm of talk therapy, the audience is invited to maintain wakefulness, even as they’re steadily encroached upon by conditions inimical to it.

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Horror as a genre tells a very specific kind of truth. The unknown is all around us. And we are largely unknown to ourselves. The jury is still out on whether the unknown is friend or foe. In a horror movie, the unknown toys with us, seduces us. Sometimes it seems to offer something, or seems like it can be negotiated with. But no. The unknown is trying to devour us.

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Compared with the universe, we’re small. We’re vulnerable to all manner of sickness and disorder, and soon undone by time. Even when well, we’re prone to self-destruction. Survival depends on confidence, and confidence depends on the standards and hierarchies we live within. In such a situation, who wouldn’t want to spend their days serving an omnipotent god, or contributing to a centuries-old intellectual tradition, or administering an empire?

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To do anything - like write a screenplay - you need confidence. You may need to psyche yourself up to go out alone and do something public, for which you may have to answer. Whether genuinely felt, or artificially induced, you need this confidence.

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Getting psyched up is a distortion that comes with a cost. The Vikings had warriors they called berserkers, who would work themselves into an inhuman fury before going off to battle. A berserker isn’t a great general, and probably not a great friend. But to do something great, you may need to draw on energy that’s only available to a berserker.

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Like many writers, I’m a former athlete. And I spent a lot of my younger years psyching myself up. It is necessary if you’re going to stand still and try to hit a ball thrown - as hard as the other guy can manage - maybe at your face, or to run headfirst into another person’s body, or to go and lift a heavier barbell than you’ve ever lifted.

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I wrote most of Grandiosity in a hotel room in Upstate New York. Once or twice a year, I get away from my family for two days to write, and this was one of these trips, during a freezing-cold weekend before Christmas. The hotel room had no table to write at, so the proprietor brought up an outdoor cafe table he’d stored for the season. I leaned it against a windowsill to limit the wobble, then walked up a hill past an old stone church to a liquor store, then stopped into an antique shop to buy a proper glass. The street below was white with road salt. Cars came and went only occasionally on the main drag. With no distractions, nowhere to go, and a little Dutch courage, I set to it.

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Greatness exists. It may be accessible to you. It may be easy for you. More likely, you can’t reach it casually, or even methodically. You can’t escape ordinary reality one rational step at a time. You have to commit yourself to a leap.

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Psyching oneself up comes with many costs. One of my favorite sports films is 1988’s Bull Durham, about an aging catcher on the downside of a disappointing career. Throughout the film, he refers to pitchers - whose pitches he has to both hit and catch, and whom he must also manage - as meat. There’s no other way to think of them while still doing what he has to do.

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Among writers, some are berserkers, while others are courtiers. Some are first-draft-best-draft writers and others are relentless tinkerers. It comes down to their eagerness or disgust when it comes time to revisit the scene of the crime.

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So much blind confidence goes into writing a book or a long script that even the slightest doubt can crumble the entire edifice. If the book isn’t good, then why finish it? If you don’t finish it, then you were never serious. If you’re not serious, then why even bother talking to yourself? Writers are prone to these all-or-nothing staring matches with themselves. And we possess abundant vocabularies for doubt.

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The other day, I was on the phone with an old friend of mine, a writer. He was driving to do a reading at a small rural library three hours away. Six hours in the car, he said, what am I doing? He was very animated about the shortcomings of the publishing industry, a new book on submission, the dwindling prospects for fiction writers, then the call cut out. No cell reception on the back roads.

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Berserkers grew up in a culture that had a well-developed ideology and cosmology that celebrated dying in battle. Death was easier to imagine than doubt or regret. Death was easier to imagine than the comedown.

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In Grandiosity, the story begins and ends at lifetime-achievement award ceremonies. One inspires the main character to imagine a promise of something more than just living and dying, the other fulfills the worst possible truth of that promise.

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After New Year’s, my mother began to die. The decline accelerated rapidly after the first week of the year - hospice, social worker, sticking Life Alert buttons around her apartment. The end was coming, but not yet. I knew I had to finish Grandiosity before this bomb went off in my life, and my mind was changed. I focused on the final rewrite. Five days before she died, I sent the screenplay off to a slew of contests. It wasn’t cheap, but I needed some kind of anchor in the future, some plausible happy outcome beyond what was becoming clearer with each passing day.

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Later that winter, Grandiosity started getting selected for festivals and even winning a few awards. But I’d been down this road before. There was no call from a manager, or an agent or a producer, no response from the ones I contacted. I shrugged and moved along. Unproduced screenplays are common. No need to get upset. An unproduced screenplay felt like an unfulfilled promise. Unfulfilled promises are common.

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My daughter doesn’t want to live on campus, she says, planning for college at the age of nine. My daughter often asks me what I had planned for my life as a younger man. And I never have an answer. Now that I’m older, I find it funny how little I thought about the future, or planned for it.

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A berserker who lives too long finds himself in an unexpected world. It’s not surprising to him, or even strange. It’s just something he hadn’t bothered to imagine. Each day delivers another outrage he’s aged out of. What’s left awaits in the last place he looked, the thing he never wanted to consider - to be a grown-up man.

Selected bibliography

A list of some of the awards Grandiosity won

Freddy Krueger & Peek-a-Boo

Hollywood or Bust

Networking with the Dead

But Let’s Not Talk About Work

Robert L. Moore’s Facing the Dragon