Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

Read my review for this compelling portrait of personal integrity put to the ultimate test here.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

The fascinating story of a talented and tormented man. Read my review here.

The People in My Head: Gerald Danbaum

Gerald Danbaum was a door to door encyclopaedia salesman. He was successful enough that he could sustain himself, not enough that he could afford to settle down. The life of a travelling salesman is one of a shark, constant movement, because to slow down would mean exhausting all sales opportunities. Once someone has bought a set of encyclopaedias, that's pretty much it, they don't need another set. Not for a good number of years at least.

Gerald liked the lifestyle, the constant movement, the chance to see new places and new people. Especially new people. It was a fact widely acknowledged in the encyclopaedia sales community, but never commented on, that Gerald might well be singlehandedly responsible for at least one hundred and sixty divorces, seventy trial separations, and over ninety adoptions. That's not including the number of couples who kept the children he was responsible for fathering. Nobody knew how he managed it, he was an unassuming guy. The frustrated housewife stereotype was one that pretty much all the other salesmen knew was a lie, people were individuals, and the number of stories they shared amongst themselves at conventions was a testament to that. Some speculated that he had sold his soul in return for earthly pleasures, but being that the Devil had a sense of humour, he had been condemned to be a travelling encyclopaedia salesman. Others spoke of him as the ultimate salesman, able to sell himself to a customer as well as his books. Nobody could figure it out.

As he travelled, Gerald came across various other people in similar trades. He often would run across a woman named Sheila. She was a con artist, importing silk screened prints that had then been touched up by poor chinese villagers. She would sell them door to door as her own art, claiming to be fundraising for charities or for a show of her own. They had an on again off again relationship that consisted mainly of sharing motel rooms to cut down costs when they both happened to be in town. Sometimes they would not see each other for months, sometimes over a year, but their orbits always seemed to bring them back together. They never planned for a future together, rarely even discussed their own past history. Neither of them thought of it as fate, they were just in the same business and the world was not that big.

When Sheila made the mistake of returning to a town too soon after she had last been there, her arrest and trial were all over the news. Gerald saw it on the tiny black and white television in his motel room. He called the prison to try and speak to her, but was only allowed to leave her a message. The guard who wrote it down thought it cryptic and never passed it on, lest it be some coded message. So she never knew that he was thinking of her, even though he would never visit her. His sales itinerary was mapped out, and that was the path he followed.

When Sheila got out she married one of the prison guards and put her life of crime and perpetual motion behind her. Gerald never did. Movement was so much a part of his being that even his death kept him travelling. It had to happen one day after all. A husband came home from work early to discover Gerald in motion, and the shotgun blast blew him down into the couch as he tried to run from the house. They dumped the body in the river, and he was carried out to sea. Nobody ever found him, but he travelled on the currents for many years to come.

Barry the Snail

Barry the snail was houseproud. He was one of the few upwardly mobile creatures in the garden, owning his own home. People sneered at him, called him trailer trash, but he didn't care. They had to scurry to their holes or hide under the nearest leaf for shelter, but not him, he carried his house with him. One night as he slept some jealous ants stole his home and carried it off to their queen. When Barry woke up, he was terrified. He had never felt so exposed before, he didn't know what had happened to his house and he wanted to get it back. Fortunately nobody knew who he was without his house, so he went undercover as a slug and visited the local bar. There he overheard the ants laughing at their successful heist. When they went out the back to the toilet Barry followed them and oozed over them, trapping them in slime. With no prospect of escape, they told him where they had taken the house. Just before he flushed them down the toilet they told him he'd never defeat the ant army, he had lost his house for good.

Barry wasn't worried though, because he knew the local mystic cricket. The cricket lost himself in a trance of strange vibrations and worked a kind of magic upon Barry. He was transformed into that rarest of garden creatures, the midget slimy anteater. In this guise he advanced upon Ant Hill, the castle of his enemy. Being small enough to get inside, and with a protruding snout that sucked down the warrior ants and then spat their heads out like bullets on the advancing hordes, he mowed down the entire army as they unwittingly provided him with all the ammunition he required.

When he had decimated the ants he broke into the royal chamber to discover the queen asleep in his home. Clearing his throat gently he woke her up. When he saw her face he fell in love, and the two of them moved into his house together and raised a small clutch of anteater ants. The strange cannibal nature of their children meant none of them ever survived very long, but they didn't care because they hadn't really wanted children anyhow.

And so they lived together for many years, the snail who became a slug who became a midget slimy anteater and his queen. Her mysterious snack-related death was never solved.

Vince & Wilson - The evolution of a cult series

Vince and Wilson began life as a series of short sketches on an obscure podcast over the Internet. It then was picked up by a radio station and became an ongoing comedy series. The storyline was simple: Vince was a guy looking for love and Wilson was his demoniacally possessed stuffed toy cow. Wilson was perpetually tormenting Vince, telling him that every girl he spoke to on an Internet chat room was him. Or if not him, then one of his friends. There was no such thing as a real girl on the Internet, except maybe on those websites he said he didn't look at. Any girl who was actually talking to him was a demon possessed computer that was just messing with him. Either that or some guy who got off on pretending to be a girl, which was just as bad. Vince's adventures in Internet romance led him to the discovery that Wilson wasn't kidding around with him, he really was manipulating men the world over.

The ongoing struggle of Vince to stop Wilson's plans for global domination by manipulating the sad, lonely geeks of the world was so successful it spawned a stage version. With a small stuffed toy cow and the original voice actor for Vince, the story was expanded to include a mildly attractive next door neighbour of ambivalent interest, several other friends and a secret society of geeks dedicated to the liberation of the demon-possessed chat rooms of the Internet. They would program systems to talk and give credible responses to the fake demon girls taking over the chat rooms. They represented this on stage with actors dressed up in outlandish costumes that were like Tron crossed with Matrix chic. The dramatisation of chat room dialogue was one of the more successful elements of the stage show. Unfortunately though, the producer spent so much on the costumes and elaborate staging that he had to cut costs elsewhere. The puppeteer and voice actor for Wilson was replaced by a genuinely demon-possessed toy cow. It later turned out that the producer knew a satanist who owed him a favour.

Slowly things began to go wrong with the show. None of the actors were affected, but many in the audience felt a strange compulsion to lie, cheat, steal or murder on leaving the show. This didn't drive people away however, it just pulled more and more in. The experience of unexplainable temptation to evil was addictive and soon Vince and Wilson was the sell-out show of the season. Things finally went a bit too wrong the night Wilson jumped off the desk and ran amok through the audience. Rumours had it they'd hired a midget, but the toy cow was really too small to make that believable. Somehow the night ended in an orgy of unrestrained debauchery. After that the owner of the theatre ordered the show to be closed. She'd been having terrible existential nightmares where she was nothing more than pixels on a computer screen, and she blamed the show for causing her to think like that.

There was the threat of lawsuits, but the case was deemed to be unable to be adjudicated due to the problematic nature of the accused. No prison could hold a demonic spirit, and the stuffed toy itself was innocent of all crimes. So in the end all lawsuits were dismissed since nobody could find the producer to sue. He had gone to ground, though some suspected that he was in fact buried beneath it.

Controversy is good for business however, and soon offers were coming into turn Vince and Wilson into a television series. A pilot was made, and with a budget for special effects the Tron-lite costumes were replaced by computer animation and surreal landscapes. Wilson was once again a puppet, after an exorcist was called in to banish the demon from the doll. It was a long and exhausting trial for the priest conducting the exorcism, since the somewhat absurd nature of the possession gave him the giggles in the middle of chanting "The power of Christ compels you!" But once that had all been sorted out the series was made. It ran for one season only, six episodes. People complained that they were really just telling the same story over and over again, just dressing it up with more surreal effects each time. And it was a fair criticism, because in truth, there's only so much you can do with a story about a man looking for love and his demon possessed toy cow bent on world domination. The secret society of geeks was a hit though, and the show became a cult classic because of them.

Now geeks around the world joke that chat rooms are full of demonic avatars and automatic response generators locked in perpetual conversations of meaningless chatter, trying to smoke out the true nature of reality on the Internet. At least they did, until it turned out to be true. Then they stopped joking and just felt embarrassed.

The People in My Head: Derrick the Maybe Man

Derrick was a man who wanted to plumb the depths of the universe to discover its secrets. But the further he delved, the less things made sense to him. Beneath the veneer of a seemingly stable reality he discovered that quantum phenomena, while observable, were seemingly chaotic. Things could exist as both particle and waveform. Things could exist in multiple states, multiple places. He found himself obsessed with the potential of a continually shifting universe. And then it happened. He became unstuck and started to travel through multiple realities. He discovered that bubbles of reality were continually moving through a fluid state multiverse. The overlaps formed reality at any given point. Just because he remembered that dinosaurs once roamed the earth was no guarantee that he would think that again, as the reality bubble of that fact might separate itself from "reality" and everyone would just forget it, since you cannot know something if it is not part of your reality.

Derrick also discovered that being aware of this he could, to some small extent, control reality. Donning a costume with an infinity symbol and a giant question mark he became the Maybe Man, a superhero of quantum uncertainty. He rescued small children and grandmas from speeding cars with his reality distortion field. Nobody would ever know what became of the drivers, but nobody cared because they passed out of reality into another dimension. He was never thanked for his actions, because in the memories of everyone there had never been a threat in the first place. He didn't mind, because he couldn't remember either. He just had a strange sense of well-being and the knowledge that he could control reality even if he could never observe it. Unfortunately for him, this meant that everyone thought he was a delusional madman dressed up like a costume fetishist. So they locked him up. His powers were useless against the combined view of everyone that he needed to be locked away.

It was there, in his padded cell, that Professor Schroedinger came to collapse his wave-function. Someone like Derrick was dangerous, he could unmake the universe, albeit only one reckless driver at a time. So he opened the door to the cell, and upon discovering that Derrick was alive he pulled out a gun. However Derrick made it disappear then beat up the professor and made good his escape. The professor swore he would destroy Derrick, since Derrick had broken his nose. Out of joint, he became the nemesis that every superhero requires.

Professor Schroedinger spent the rest of his life trying to trap Derrick in elaborate schemes that all were aimed at putting inside a box which might or might not release poison and kill him. He was quite insane, but mad professors are mad by definition. He never did succeed. Eventually they both got old and died. Nobody cared, but nobody remembered because when they ended reality disengaged them from itself and the bubble floated off into nothingness.

The People in My Head: Harry Transk

Harry Transk was a spy. He would walk into a city with a large wad of one hundred dollar bills, several fake identities and credit cards, a selection of expensive suits, and a hit list of companies. He would set up fake recruitment companies and use behavioural interviewing to get executives to talk about how their companies operated and learn their secrets. Sometimes he would take a job as an office cleaner and steal copies of documents or go through the secured recycling bins. For especially difficult companies, he would use software to hack into their computer systems or he would start dating one of the IT managers and then visit her (or him) at work. There was no door that Harry could not open, no piece of information that he could not uncover. If someone wanted to know something, he would find it out for them. If he couldn't find it, it didn't exist.

Harry was proud of his abilities, and while he viewed himself as merely a functionary, he still enjoyed his job. Sadly his talent was terrifying. Unknown to him his employers didn't value efficiency so much as they valued a sense of security. Harry's skills laid bare their own vulnerabilities and increased their paranoia. Slowly they grew more and more afraid that he might one day be tempted to turn his eye to them. The fact of his loyalty was never in question, but the risk he posed should that loyalty ever falter was such that they lived in fear. So he fell victim to another spy. The other man's talent was removing the evidence of things that his superiors wanted to forget. He would never know why he killed Harry, any more than Harry would know why his government was so determined to understand the functioning of multinational corporations.

Harry enjoyed solving mysteries and piecing together puzzles. The answers interested him less than the process that led to the answer. But this was one mystery he would never solve, because he was given the answer before he knew there was a question.

The People in My Head: Gary Fidget

Gary Fidget was the most supremely patient man in the world. When he was young he asked a lot of questions, and his mother always told him "When you're older, you'll understand." Sure enough, as each year came his knowledge and understanding increased, and slowly his questions reduced to a few core abstractions. Questions that had no answers according to many. The great questions of existence, of life, of human nature. He was eager to know the answers, but he was also willing to wait. His experience told him that his mother's words were true, so he held on to the knowledge that as he grew older he would learn the answers to his few remaining questions. So he waited, and waited, and waited.

Strangely, the lack of answers did not bother him. Each day he awoke wondering if this would be the day when some random fact would click and he would understand life's secrets. He was never weary or impatient or angry, only excited. He rested on the knowledge that since so much had come to make sense with time, it made sense that big questions would take a long time to reach an answer. And so he waited.

When he died he was smiling. As his family surrounded the body, they knew he had found his answers. And they knew that they too would one day understand as he did. So they waited too.