write the movies you want to see.
you are the only audience that matters.
make it and they will come.
all advice to encourage you find your original voice and tell the stories that move you, not the masses. but what if you want to appeal to a broad audience? or if you want to mobilize a very specific audience? you scream out into the void but are unsure whether the waves will reach them. i feel this way about subcultures. there are several that i pride myself in being a part of, but not all of them ought be films or television shows.
in save the cat writes for television, one practical piece of advice from the author is to list all the different worlds that you exist in that may create unique settings or characters for television shows. do you work for a specific company? you could create the next the office! there is one subculture that i discovered this year that has stuck with me. like an earworm, except visual.
let me bring you into the world, mystery and intrigue of the red grid mark phenomenon.
i came home from a workout one morning and after exiting the shower, noticed a grid pattern on my back. about the size of a half dollar, in a perfectly uniform grid on my back. immediate shivers. i took to the one place that could calm my mind, google. because my head immediately went to bed bugs or venomous spider. what i discovered through google was that no one had an answer. and every corner of the internet i turned to yielded a similar conclusion: aliens.
i was apparently lucky to have been visited and marked. naysayers would chalk it up to sleeping on a strange pattern but i never bought that because why in just one spot? and why so uniform? i naysayed the naysayers. in these forums, even dermatologists didn’t have answers. simply, no one knows how these emerge or where these come from. to make matters stranger, i had just watched jordan peele’s nope the night before…
i was allowed into the facebook group and the narrative continued. alien talk but seeing it as less bizarre and more of a privilege. my mom even did a search in chinese and stumbled upon similar results, detailing the same symptoms with no answers, merely more questions. no bumps, no itching, no pain, just uniform red grid. the group fascinates me because they come from all walks of life and are all united under one mystery. they seem unafraid of the possibilities but are still moved by a deep curiosity. they obsess over the narrative that they have now cemented into their consciousness and the what ifs are built upon the foundation that this is beyond our planet. and yet, when you ask any random person off the street whether they have heard of red grid, chances are they haven’t and even if you show them a photograph, they likely won’t believe it to be real. in a world of deep fakes and prank videos, i don’t blame the skepticism. but i had it on my back, and now i’ve forever taken the red pill.
the fact that this subculture goes unnoticed also fascinates me and represents a fragment of what exists in our society. we now have many small mountains and big kings perched upon them. i’m drawn to these communities, all with their own set of memes that govern them. somehow, thinking about this facebook group reminds me of the biggest youtube influencers or twitch streamers, the king and queens of millions of followers, wielding the power to make or break any product. but many “normies” will never have heard of them. but to me, this minority will soon overtake and become the mainstream. i felt this with kpop, i felt this with esports, and some day i may witness this with the red grid mark.
this year i’ve struggled to find the motivation to want to go to the movie theater to watch the films that i would’ve lined up for in the past. i catch myself more interested in throwing a live stream on and multitasking something else to unwind. i find it difficult to commit to two hours of darkness, the same darkness i would exploit to escape from my reality. there has been much spun about our decreasing attention spans but i also believe in a yearning to return to live programming on television. when i listen to spotify and am given a choice, i miss the limited choice and being in the hands of a radio station. i can throw on a radio station on spotify but having the power to skip to the next song, without ads, is perhaps too much power and more than i deserve. watching movies, frames of light edited together perhaps appears more fake than the latest tiktok trend. we as a society that consumes so much media have developed a seventh sense to spot what feels fake, what feels contrived and elicit an allergic reaction. movie trailers fail to hype up audiences and simply i don’t think i’m alone in no longer caring. the pandemic may have changed my behavior, my age may be contributing to my preferences, or movies are simply dying.
there are truth and lies in any performance. it is an actor’s job to lie. but in 4k resolution and hd, perhaps the tells become easier to spot, the poker faces harder to disguise. we are sensitive to it, and so any semblance of truth, regardless of how fabricated or curated, may give us a stronger dopamine hit than any escapist movie that we could watch in a theater. but for now, i still write these movies. because i’m still hopeful. i recently stumbled upon the idea of the white pill and black pill. the black pill subscribes to a cynical view where you know everything is doomed. the white pill is cut from the same cloth, where you are fully aware, but you are still hopeful. i like to believe i’ve taken the white pill. so i write movies to better understand myself and also to make people feel less alone. i want to write movies for these subcultures that have created a story to understand themselves and the world around them better. others may scoff when they think red grid mark phenomenon members believe they were visited by aliens, but perhaps their truth is more real than the aliens on screen that the naysayers might worship as fantasy.