Imagine a trailer of a movie that went like this:

Cafe Society
1

What kind of a movie would you think this was? Have you seen a movie like this?

Tall claims requires tall proof. But what happens if what you go through in life is so wild…and feels so far fetched to others that you know that they would refuse to believe it, unless you gave them enough proof. But your tale is so wild that you struggle to come up with the vocabulary that would allow you to communicate this tale with the vividity that would do the tale justice.

So years go by and you realize that you have not communicated your tale. And the longer time passes by, the more and more you have difficulty believing that your tale was true. The more and more far fetched it seems even to you. And you find yourself struggling to believe in yourself. You are struggling to believe in your own story. The world has moved on from the time your story happened. But you haven’t because your tale never received the legitimacy that you sought. To reject your story would be to lie to yourself. You have too much pride to do that. But, you still don’t have the vocabulary to be able to communicate your story the way you would like to–the way it would do your tale justice.

The more time passes, Would you slowly stop believing in your own truth? Would you slowly change your own version of reality in language that others would understand?
What happens when you feel that your belief in your own truth is so far fetched that you come across as arrogant to yourself to hold unto the truth of your own life that few understood? And you slowly find yourself telling yourself, “No one accepts my version of reality, so how could I have the arrogance to believe it? How dare I be so arrogant?”

And what happens if you abhor arrogance as a quality? What happens then? What happens to your truth? What happens to your belief in your self? What happens to your self-esteem? How can the truth of your story still survive within you now? Which one gets crushed so that the other may survive?

You are someone who believes in others. You believe that people rational creatures that believe in true things. You believe that the world accepts that which is true and rejects that which is false. What happens to your self-image in light of your opinion of other people and where they stand when they can’t accept your truth? Do you reject yourself? Do you minimize the truth that you have lived? Do you reject them? Who takes the hit?

What happens to how much them believing in your truth matters to you before you can allow yourself to believe in your own wild tale? Will you continue to value their opinion? What happens to your self-esteem? What happens to your opinion of others? What happens to your truth? Which one changes? How do you justify which one wins and which one loses?

The problem is that…you can’t find the vocabulary to communicate your tale to the world in a way the world would understand it. And the more time passes and you can’t communicate your tale to the world in vocabulary that they can empathize and understand in, the longer and longer they don’t give you the legitimacy to include your tale amongst the priviledged who can claim that their story is true, and not a figment of your imagination.
But you have too much pride. You find it insulting to have your story in the fiction section, when you know in your heart that it is a true story.

And you die thinking that your own tale was a figment of your own imagination and that it wasn’t true. And you died accepting the lie that the world painted of who you are and what your story truly was. And the reason you did this was you didn’t feel the world was ever ready to be to truly accept who you were deep inside your heart. And you couldn’t reveal to the world what they would reject of you. You never found the vocabulary to be able to tell your story in a way that you knew the world would accept you.

What a quandry that would be, eh?

What would this kind of movie look like, do you think? How would such a movie be?

2

It’s not exactly the same, but David Bowie is quite good in The Man Who Fell To Earth: he’s an alien, altered in appearance and sent here to save his world (which we see his occasional memory of, though he never really describes it to anyone; we also get to see him view our world with an eerily inhuman sensory perception, but he doesn’t actually mention that either). The one time he tries to open up to someone about his past, it freaks her out before he can go into any detail.

Anyhow, for a good long while he lives an ordinary life – passing for one of us until he’s almost finished his project – only to then get captured and studied by the government, who in the course of their investigation fuse his disguise in place and otherwise screw up his weird anatomy, such that he now can’t not pass as normal.

They eventually let him go, and there’s nothing left for him but to live like a weird and eccentric musician: drowning his sorrows with alcohol in between recording albums with messages he knows none of us can actually understand. We’re pretty much left with the image of him living out his life as if he simply is David Bowie, thin and odd and maybe starring in a movie about someone who only ever acts like a strange artist doing avant-garde stuff and drinking rather a lot.

3

In the thread on Training Day the OPmentioned that English is not his native language. With that in mind…

As a voice over for a trailer (preview, coming attraction, whatever) the text would be amazingly wordy. Show, don’t tell.

As an “idea” for a movie plot, it’s okay, but who’s playing the girl? Which is to say, a movie’s idea is rarely as important as the characters, personal conflicts, the setting and the dialog.

4

See also Twelve Monkeys, where our hero gets treated like any other injured naked man who hears voices in his head and rants about being from the future and insists he’s not crazy: he’s promptly locked up and sedated in a mental hospital.

He eventually realizes that, if he truly is crazy – if the coming apocalypse is just a delusion, and not something he lived through – then (a) the world is going to be okay, and (b) instead of getting hassled by various and sundry psychiatrists, he can get down to the serious business of enjoying life in general and maybe sleeping with a beautiful woman in particular.

“Never mind; you wouldn’t believe me anyway,” he says at one point, breaking off an oh-so-brief description of his experiences in another time – but after his epiphany, he no longer believes it either.

5

I basically wanted to write a story about the lead character in the movie “Contact.” My story would begin where the movie “Contact” ends.

I wanted to capture the conflicts and contradictions that someone like Jodi Foster’s character ( Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway) would suffer from for the rest of her life because she went through a unique experience that she couldn’t “prove.”

I’m not sure if going through a unique experience would be a gift or a curse if it was an experience that was so different from what other people considered “normal” that your sanity would be questioned in the course of you trying to explain your experience to the world.
I’m not sure how many of us would want to experience what she did about any experience, including Extra-terrestrial life. But the only catch would be that we would die with that experience without being able to communicate it to a “serious audience.” Would we accept to be privy to such a unique experience?

Especially for a scientist like her, that would be pretty harsh. Her reputation would go up in flames. She would lose everything, while experiencing that which she sought to prove…that there is Extra-terrestrial life. But would never be able to ‘objectively’ prove it to others. I have been trying to understand what such a person like her would feel. What emotions would they go through? How would they deal with it? How do they cope with it? It’s wild.

6

Just wanted to add mention of Jumanji, where it’s a bit of a running gag for one of the supporting characters: the kid magically got sucked into a board game right in front of her, and it ruined her life; no one believed her, everyone in town called her crazy, she was all alone, folks simply thought his dad murdered him and hid the body – and she apparently came to accept that he was mundanely dead, moving on with her life after spending a lot of time and energy visualizing him as a radiant spirit.

7

Horrible.

A movie takes characters through an arc defined by dialog and visuals. Movies are traditionally a really poor medium for conveying thoughts and emotions unless there is some way to express those thoughts and emotions through speech or action.

A movie about someone who agonizes a lot, but dies without ever saying or doing anything wouldn’t work very well.

However, as a novel, it could be fascinating … .

8

Generally true, although that was pretty much the story line of Remains of the Day (Anthony Hopkins putting his job as a servant before Emma Thompson and personal fulfillment.) I didn’t much like the film, but it got good reviews.

9

When I say, movie, I mean more in terms of a story. I thought it would be fascinating trying to capture the desperation that Jodi Foster’s character would feel in trying to connect her truth with others with a certain level of legitimacy, but utterly failing to do so. How frustrating that would be.
How invalidating that would be. She couldn’t reach them because they didn’t subscribe to the same paradigm that she subscribed to. And they didn’t subscribe to her paradigm because they never experienced what she did. How would someone emotionally come to terms with that?

Like someone pointed out about the girl in the Jumanji movie. The girl character in that movie goes through therapy for years in trying to deal with the trauma of Robin Williams character disappearing. She’s in a quandry. She can’t deny the reality that she experiences with the boy dissappearing. And society around her won’t let her accept that it was a true experience. So she goes through therapy so that she can lie to herself about the nature of her experience. “It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen,” she tells herself.

The story gets all the more traumatic because she had finally convinced herself that the whole experience was a figment of her imagination…and then Robin Williams character comes back to tell her that everything that happened was real.
Now that has got to be very emotionally traumatic. She has to undo the story of her life and everything she believed.
Having to switch between such extremes of denial and acceptance of what is real and what is not is filled with emotional extremes. And I suppose that is what good movies/stories are made of.

10

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen deals with the subject but with a very different world view. There is no definite reality, and indeed the whole story is set in “The Age of Reason” with logic and reason as an enemy. The main character has had extraordinary, fantastic experiences. Which might be entirely made up by him.
It’s possible to consider the Baron as someone who really has had fantastic events happen in his life, but reacts to them by treating them like fiction. Or he deliberately mixes fiction with “reality” in order to present his stories the only way he can – as entertainment. There are moments it seems that even he doesn’t want to consider them true if nobody else does.

That last bit is also a part of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which has a similar old man who tires of presenting an incredible true experience that most will treat as false.

I have a feeling whatever it’s like, it ought to be directed by Terry Gilliam.