The Red House on Grey Road (and similar ideas)

This story is inspired by the poem, "Casas enfiladas" by Alfonsina Storni:

Casas enfiladas, casas enfiladas,

casas enfiladas.

Cuadrados, cuadrados, cuadrados.

Casas enfiladas.

Las gentes ya tienen el alma cuadrada,

ideas enfila

y angulo en la espalda.

Yo misma he vertido ayer una lágrima,

Dios mio, cuadrada.

Translated as:

Houses in a line, in a line,

In a line there,

Squares, squares, squares,

Even people now have square souls,

Ideas in file, I declare,

And on their shoulders, angles wear.

Just yesterday I shed a tear and it

Oh, God, was square!

Literature scholar Sidonia Rosenbaum refers to the poem as a forceful and poignant interpretation of modern city life, with its piercing loneliness, its chilling indifference, its soulless uniformity and maddening monotony, its spiritual vacuity, its unending vulgarity…which rots and perplexes the soul…The same mathematical impersonality of the houses in rows, in angles, in squares, is reflected in their souls, in their ideas, in their very physical outlines and even…in her own tears

As a HUGE oversimplification, the poem, to me, is about conformity. Obviously my idea needs further development--the narrative is pretty weak as is--but the poem lends itself to some exciting visual interpretations that should be teased out. Here is my knee jerk reaction:

(verses of the poem are heard at appropriate times throughout the short film)

Inside a modern home a man is watching TV. From a point of view from behind the TV set, we see him flipping through channels listlessly. We catch snipits of audio clips of what he hears. "…now there’s a quick and easy way to lose 50 pounds in just two weeks!.." "gas prices reached an all time high today…" "want to look like your favorite celebrity? Now you can…"etc. (the point here is to convey that he is saturated in pop culture BS and news spin).

Frustrated, the man gets up and walks out his door. The streets are lined with many different colored, two-story houses (think suburbia). No one is around, but the sound and glow of a television can be seen coming from the windows of each home he passes. He continues to walk, passing one empty yard after another, when something causes him to stop. We see him from a profile shot. He is standing in the middle of the street. A house is behind him. The focus is on him, and the house behind is blurrily out of focus. As he stands there, the focus shifts to the house. It suddenly—instantly—loses its color and becomes stark grey. Shocked, he looks around. Another house loses its color. A pause. Then another. Pause. Another.

A great camera pan from the sky shows the street lined with houses. Many are colored. Some are nothing but grey. Another of the houses suddenly loses its color, becoming a dull grey in an instant. Shortly thereafter, another house does the same thing. Then another. And another. All the while the time between houses losing their color is getting shorter and shorter. Cutting to a street level view facing only one side of the street, we zoom quickly down the road. Our character is running back to his home, trying to outrun the chain reaction of homes losing their color; as he runs, houses whiz by in the background, losing their color one by one. He finally reaches his house and dives inside, slamming the door. The rush of color loss skips his house, but the chain reaction continues down the row with the next house beside him and so on.

Zooming out we see this red house is the lone splash of color in our suburban hell. Cutting to a close up shot of our character looking desperately out his window, a tear begins to well up in his eye. As it is about to fall, his home instantly loses its color. We still hear the TV droning in the background and see its flashing lights illuminate the room behind him. His tear drops, but it falls to the ground as a cube

******************************************************************************************************************

I was looking through some of my old writings and found this piece of freewriting from years ago. Another seed for a story.

Every man needs some sort of inspiration. A muse, if you will. I am a firm believer that we all have it embedded somewhere inside of us. It is the genius, however, that is able to bring it out, to turn himself inside out and give us that unique view from within. And even then, we cannot comprehend it. The genius exposes himself for us to see. But we can only postulate, make guesses at the true meaning of their art. Our minds can only see things in three dimensions while the levels of their imaginations are infinite. So we look on in wonder, but are never truly aware of the real significance of the work. That secret knowledge lies locked away in the mind of the creator, the genius, while we, the humble masses are left confused and dumbfounded.

Conformity, I felt, would become self-expression, and complacency, inspiration. With this knowledge, I felt I could restore inspiration back into this otherwise bland world.

Our world is quite uninspired. Quite boring.

They arrested me once for sculpting. Twice for painting, and four times for creative writing. My work was seized and destroyed on the spot. Thankfully they didn’t find my hidden gallery in the cellar. I was put in prison for a total of twelve years where I sat in a cell and almost withered away. They air in their prison seemed to suck the life out of me. The walls were cold and gray. The walkways were formed in a perfect grid of parallel lines. The people there were removed and complacent, never showing any signs of identity. Our uniforms were white. The guards dressed in all black. Everyone’s head was shaved taking away from us the only luxury of self expression allowed to us in the outside world.

Understand that the anguish you experience in a place like that isn’t physical. It’s mental torture. They whittle you away with idleness until you’re nothing. They rot your brain away with disuse so that when you get out you fit back into the system without any resistance. They bend your will to theirs and force it upon you until the day you die. You might as well be dead. You concede life and accept existence.

But I got out. I did not concede.