This popped into my head on the bus ride home.

Oh, fair warning. This is satire. But it’s not funny.

(SCENE : An interview room in a prison. Seated opposite one another are RICK PETRIE, a mild mannered middle class middle management type, and ROSCO “ROCK” TELLURIDE, a tall, thickly muscled prisoner. )

PETRIE (P) : First off, I want to thank you for agreeing to talk with me. I have said some pretty hateful things about you in the media, and I pretty much expected you to tell me to go to hell. But I had to task. My faith compels me to work towards forgiveness, and I thought talking to you, one human being to another, would help me along that path. So I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

TELLURIDE (T) : Time is the one luxury the government affords us detainees in great abundance, Mister Petrie. I am happy to share some of it with you.

P : Good….. good. Now, the first question I want to ask is…. what was going through your mind the night you shot my wife?

T : When I what now?

P : When you shot my wife. Shot her dead. Dead before she even hit the ground. What were you thinking that night?

T : Are you referring to the incident where the jackbooted thugs of the federal government stormed into my private residence, threw me to the ground and cuffed me in front of my innocent and God-fearing family, then dragged me off like a common criminal in front of a neighborhood full of my peers, all to punish me for exercising my Second Amendment rights?

P : Um…. yeah…. I guess. The night they arrested you. For shooting my wife…. earlier that day.

T : How could I forget the night when the heavy hand of reached out to silence me for being a true patriot and standing up for my constitutional rights?

P : That’s not…. listen, you admit you killed my wife, right?

T : I may have discharged my lawfully acquired and owned firearm in her direction.

P : May have? The cops have video of you doing it! From three different angles! You definitely shot my wife!

T : If you say so, then I believe you. I have no specific recollection of the event. It was, after all, a long time ago.

P : But…. but you remember murdering my wife, right?

T : Murder is just another liberal buzzword used to deny law-abiding Americans their freedom, Mister Petrie. All I did was exercise my right to bear firearms.

P : And I fully support that right. I’ve been an NRA member all my life. But that right doesn’t give you the right to kill my wife! It doesn’t give you the right to murder?

T : Is that so? Where in the Second Amendment does it say that? Surely you are not one of those gun-hating liberals who thinks we get to pick and choose what parts of the Constitution we obey. The Constitution is a perfect document, Mister Petrie. Or are you saying the Founding Fathers made a mistake?

P : Well, no, of course not. But surely they didn’t mean….

T : There you go, thinking you know the minds of the greatest and wisest men ever known. Men who create America, the greatest country there has ever been and will ever be. You are just like all those activist judges who think it’s their job to decide what the Constitution says this week. Their only job is to follow the Constitution, and there is nothing in the Constitution that says I can’t shoot people.

P : But what about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?

T : That’s just the preamble. The courts are clear on that. The preamble doesn’t count.

P : Oh, so now you listen to the courts?

T : Of course! I am, after all, a law-abiding citizen.

P : But you broke the law when you killed my wife!

T : It is no crime to defy an unjust law, Mister Petrie. That’s what I told the judge who imprisoned me here just because my opinions aren’t “politically correct”. And after all, doesn’t the tree of liberty need to be watered with blood now and then in order to stay healthy and strong?

P : But that’s supposed to be your own blood!

T : Tell that to the heroes of the American Revolution. They were not afraid to shed the blood of the British in order to shed the chains of tyranny.

P : But all you did was kill my wife?

T : I disagree. You are, of course, entitled to your own opinion.

P : This isn’t a matter of opinion. You killed my wife! It’s a fact!

T : That’s what you liberals always say when someone dares to disagree with your socialist dogma. You liberals think you have the monopoly on truth just because you twist people’s words and make them mean whatever you want. I, for one, am not fooled.

P : Things are true whether or not you believe them!

T : I totally agree. No matter what you or I believe, I didn’t kill your wife for wearing a Jesus pin.

P : What’s wrong with wearing a Jesus pin? Don’t you love Jesus?

T : That dirty socialist hippie? Of course not. All he did was go around telling people about sharing and loving and tolerance with all his unemployed hippie friends. Going and talking about how people should be selling everything and giving it to the poor…. that’s redistribution of wealth! Talk like that has no place in a good Christian nation like the United States of America.

(P gets up angrily)

P : I’ve had all I can take of this bullshit! You killed my wife, you bastard, and I look forward to seeing you rot in hell for what you did!

T : That might happen sooner than you think.

(SFX : Walls of room ignite like paper when a lit match is applied, revealing that they are, in fact, in Hell. )

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No, not this guy :

But the movie starring Michael Keaton that came out in 2014.

I watched it recently via Netflix. I watched it in my usual piecemeal fashion, a half hour at a time, while eating. But I don’t think that makes much of a difference.

I quite liked it. It’s shot in this over-the-shoulder documentary fashion that I find extremely compelling. But it is more than the usual “shot documentary style to make it seem more real” schtick that we are all tired of. It’s shot as if it was one long continuous shot, even though it takes places over several days. So it gives you a feeling of watching things happen in realtime. And there are no cuts. None. If the story moves from one place in the theater to another, it is accomplished by following a character to the new place.

It sounds complicated when I explain it like that, but it’s actually extraordinarily fluid and naturalistic. It’s very interesting to me artistically to see what happens when you take away the artificiality of something we all learn to accept as little children : cuts. For me, it made the movie extremely engrossing. It made me feel like I was really there.

I have two warnings about the movie, though : it is definitely arty, and it definitely an actors’ movie.

This is clearly a movie made by and for actors. Every scene is filled with the sorts of things actors and actresses love : complex emotion, relationship conveyance, emotional peaks (and lulls), a broad mood spectrum, complex-yet-simple dialogue you can really act the fuck out of…. and probably a lot of other things I can’t think of at the moment.

I don’t mind this, except in the occasional moment where you can sense the artificiality of it because the scene doesn’t quite seem connected to the plot, or the dialogue is a little artificial. At those moments, it reminds me of the sort of thing a gaggle of acting students would come up with, which is no horrible thing. I have a great fondness for actors and acting, and the various lovable foibles of their profession, and so it doesn’t confront me much to have the occasional moment where their metaphorical slip is showing.

And for the vast majority of the time, the scenes flow into one another and the whole thing makes sense. Telling a story from multiple points of view as this movie does – the camera is not always following Michael Keaton – always draws me in. It lets a movie tell more of the story than just one character’s arc, and I love the density that allows.

The buzz on this movie was that people were asking what really happened and what does it all mean and so on. I see why, but for me, it was not very mysterious. Even the quite weird aspects, like (spoiler) Michael Keaton’s character’ apparent superpowers, made sense to me. There have been times in my life where I have felt such mental intensity that it felt like I was about to have Carrie level telekinesis.

I guess that, despite not being in any sense a media snob (I like David Lynch AND the A-team), I have watched enough allegorical and symbolic film that the relatively straightforward devices used in this movie (like (SPOILER) the angry, cutting voice in Michael Keaton’s head) don’t challenge me at all. It’s just part of the scenery to me.

But for others, I can see there being some need for answers. Heck, if the 22 year old me watched it, he’d be pretty mad about the lack of explanations for things and the movie not giving us definitive answers about anything or making it clear what is “real” or not.

But I am forty-two, and a writer, and I accept that some stories don’t have an ending, they just end. No climax, no final showdown, nothing. It still irritates me when it happens because of bad writing (or, if it’s TV or a movie, bad editing), but I accept that it’s not a bad thing in and of itself.

Same with the lack of explanations or definitives. I am totally down with deliberate acts of vagueness. It’s a valid artistic choice. Sometimes, explanations just plain don’t fit the narrative or the tone of what you are going for. Some stories are best simply experienced, without explanation or definition, just like real life. Others operate on some version of dream logic (again, David Lynch) and things are as real as they seem in dreams.

And in some cases, explanations would only serve to distract the audience and pull focus away from the plot.

The movie has quite the cast, no doubt due to the actor’s feast of a script. Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone, Zach Galifinakis…. and those are just the ones I’ve heard of. I particularly liked Galifinakis’ performance as the highly put-upon second banana of the stage production that is the main plot of the film. He does a bang up job of making us feel the high level of stress the guy is under even when he is putting on his happy face because he has to cajole temperamental actors into behaving like adults.

I have always identified with that role, whether it’s Zach Galifinakis or Kermit the Frog. It seems like the sort of role I could easily find myself in, being both the sort of person who wants things to get done and the sort of person who seems to be destined to be the sparkplug that keeps everything going. I can completely imagine myself as the one guy who knows what is going on because I am the one in charge of the big picture.

I’m the one driving the bus full of wacky people, and taking care of boring stuff so that they can shine.

Then again, I want to shine too. Conflict!

Can you be behind the camera and in front of it at the same time?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.