Blue Arrangements

This elongated elevator pitch is about a rough draft of a screenplay idling in a folder on my desktop, Atmospheric Disturbances (working title only), a conflated adaptation of Rivka Galchen’s 2008 debut novel (of the same name with Buñuel’s 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire—itself an adaptation (one among many) from the 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louÿs. The idea I have is to make a comedic psychodrama about obsession, deception, psychosis, validation, and compromise. In terms of genre, think Buñuel meets Tarkovsky’s Solaris meets Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers meets Kasdan’s Body Heat meets Frears’s High Fidelity meets Goulding’s 1947 version of Nightmare Alley.

After it was all said and done, but before it was really over— canned, kaput, complete, dead as a doornail, as they say, and empty of everything we’d found there: gobstoppers and galoshes, globetrotter hand-me-downs, hula hoops and fancy old hat boxes— I wanted to ask one simple question. (Just a matter of pride, I guess.) “Know who I am?” I asked the folks around, lawyers and tax people, a few professional movers.