I was never one for the story arc. While well-structured rising action, climax and denouement are certainly to be admired, the essence of story has little to do with craft.
Part Three of The Buzz Trilogy follows the rapid dissolution of the eponymous character.
The problem with much of story-telling is a blind adherence to the clever raconteur. In other words, it isn’t what the story is about as much as how it is told. “Stories” on social media have brought that to the fore, demonstrating that immediate gratification isn’t that gratifying in the end.
It’s the characters and dialogue, the little glimpses of what’s what, a truth of sorts, that makes a story worth anything. So what if the start is all wrong, the sequence of memories of the dead father askew, there is no flow and Davis is a jerk?
Davis and Baz bag up in the pre-dawn light; the horizon is purple and green. They both ingest mushrooms and take a long drink of water before going up to plant the burned ground together. Clouds of ash rise up as they begin to work. A montage series offers close-ups of the shovel blades going into the ground, the trees gripped in their hands, boots tramping over the burned-out ground, interspersed with helicopter shots of them, tiny figures in the massive dominating landscape of mountains and valleys.
DAVIS (Not stopping): Feeling it?
BAZ: Feeling it.
DAVIS: It’s good.
Montage of close-ups continues, including extreme close-up of the bright blue tape tied off on a branch, beetles scampering along the edge of a burn-out twisted stump, an abandoned chainsaw blade twisted among the weeds, a woodpecker perched on a tree at the edge of the block, sweat dripping off the nose and chin of Davis, a mosquito landing and stinging Baz on the shoulder, ending with a hard slap. They stop, look at each other, drink water, move their trees from the back bag to the side, and continue planting.
DISSOLVE TO:
EXT. DAY.
Davis and Baz continue to plant. The sound of their heavy breathing, scuffing boots and cicadas are the only sounds. They reach the back edge of the block and a band of shade, planting the very edge of the road like experts, the trees rapidly dropped in. They pause in the shadows, each eating nuts and dried fruit, drinking in heavy gulps that spill down their necks.
DAVIS: I almost like this.
BAZ: Almost.
DAVIS: There’s something….
BAZ: Being an animal.
DAVIS: A burrowing creature, like a…badger.
BAZ: Digging.
DAVIS: Bringers
of life.
BAZ: At 11 cents a tree.
They both laugh stupidly,
looking at each other, and then go back to planting.
BAZ: I could never work at a desk.
DAVIS: Why would anyone do that? Insane.
BAZ: Look at my arm.
DAVIS (Looking at his dirty, ash-stained arm): I see it.
BAZ: Why is that part of me?
DAVIS: It’s crooked.
BAZ (Examining it): No, it isn’t.
DAVIS: I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing.
BAZ: It isn’t crooked.
DAVIS (Holding his arm out): Mine is too!
BAZ: You’re right. Your arm’s fucked up.
DAVIS: It isn’t fucked up.
BAZ (Taking a tree, rubbing the needles gently through his hand): My point is that this arm is mine. It’s
a part of who I am supposed to be.
DAVIS: Extremities.
BAZ: My brain commands, the electric impulses obey.
DAVIS: You’re just in your head? The master commander.
BAZ: Not even that. It’s a tiny point in the back. Or just outside, floating in the darkness.
DAVIS: That’s you?
BAZ (Planting again): Yes.
DAVIS (Following him, planting too): What about your nose?
BAZ: I don’t have a problem with my nose.
BAZ (Throwing his shovel in hard): That makes sense to me.
DAVIS: Your nipples.
BAZ: Nipples. Yeah.
DAVIS: What the fuck are you doing with nipples?
BAZ: I like nipples.
DAVIS: Your nipples?
BAZ: Yes.
DAVIS: You find that erotic.
BAZ: And my throat.
DAVIS: I don’t like that word.
BAZ: Throat. Man, I love a chick’s throat.
DAVIS: You mean her neck.
BAZ: No. Throat. That’s erotic.
They plant in silence, the sound of their shovels pronounced against the stillness of the day.
DAVIS (Reciting Hamlet, II, II, 228-331):What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in… Something or other. I forget… in apprehension how like a god… and yet to me, this quintessence of dust.
There is a long pause, the
shovels once again the only sound.
BAZ (Reciting lines from Ginsberg’s Howl in a deep and booming voice):Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch in whom I dream angels!Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! Invincible mad houses! Granite cocks!
There is another long pause.
DAVIS (Unwrapping packets of trees): Granite cocks?
Davis starts planting again
and joins in the chant, done in chorus with their boot steps, the shovels in
the ground, the tree dropped in. They suddenly hear another noise, almost the
same grunting, but deeper and louder. They look up together and see a Grizzly Bear
standing right in front of them, massive, only 30 feet away. The giant creature
considers them, chewing on something methodically. Baz and Davis notice a bear
cub on the other side of her. They waver and then, in unison, continue to plant,
Baz makes a grunting noise that almost sounds like he is continuing the chant. They
plant a number of trees in succession and look up again. The bear and cub have both
vanished.
DAVIS: Jesus. We just had a fucking vision.
BAZ: Both of us? At the same time?
DAVIS: What did you see?
The Grizzly and cub come out
from behind the slash, walking away, and crashing into the forest.
BAZ: I saw that.
Davis goes back to planting.
DAVIS (Looking back up): What?
BAZ: I think I just saw your cat. (Pause) Riding the cub’s back, guiding it by the ears.
DAVIS: What was that noise you were making?
BAZ: What noise?
DAVIS: You were grunting or something.
BAZ: I was asserting my presence.
DAVIS: You sounded like you were having a seizure.
BAZ: It’s what the mountain gorillas do.
DAVIS: When’s the last time you think this bear ran into a fucking mountain gorilla?
BAZ: That stuff’s universal.
DAVIS (Laughing to himself): Joint. (Pause) Universal joint, remember? The van?
They continue to plant toward
the road.
DAVIS (Planting his last tree): Last one. How many you got?
BAZ (Looking in his bag): Same, man. The exact same.
Baz plants his last tree and
they walk slowly, languidly down.
DAVIS: What are your numbers?
They walk for a few moments in
silence.
BAZ: I don’t know.
DAVIS: Me either.
BAZ: Oh, shit. One more. (Pulling a tree out and planting it)
Davis stood in the back corner of the convenience store, nervously eyeing the owner. She was old, an Asian woman, who probably didn’t care. Or maybe she did. Maybe she would lecture him and call his step-mother.
Heart pounding, he snapped the Penthouse from the rack and approached. The woman took the magazine, slid it into a paper bag and waited to be paid. He walked outside, pausing at the corner of the parking lot to slide the magazine into his pant leg.
“Hey.” His step-brother, Flynn, appeared behind him. “Can I see that after you’re done?”
Davis redid his shoelace. “Huh?”
“That Penthouse.”
Davis couldn’t understand how he had appeared, where he had come from. “Yeah, okay.”
It was a good issue, four pictorials, lipstick lesbians, the centerfold Pet leaning back with a cigarette in her hand. He took the magazine to Flynn and went back to his room, laying uneasily on his bed. He never spoke with Flynn. They had nothing to say to each other. And now this. Was this some kind of turning point? Would they talk about the naked women? Which was best? What they liked? What they did as they looked at them? What were they supposed to say? There was a knock. Davis sat up abruptly, crossing the room and opening the door to find the magazine, face down on the beige carpet, Flynn’s door closing down the hall.
Part One: So? Another? Three old friends sit at a bar. Davis finishes his drink and asks, “So? Another?” They nod.
Part Two: Not Drunk. Davis, alone at a bar with empty glasses all around, orders a drink. The bartender asks if he is all right. His reply is simply: “Not drunk.”
Part Three: Just One More. Davis stands at a bar. A remote wilderness can be seen out the window behind him. He calls out to the bartender, “Just one more.” He is refused.
Davis leaves behind his easy-going university lifestyle to journey into the Canadian wilderness and a summer job of planting trees.
The learning curve is painful; the mosquitoes and black flies are a constant plague, the weather is by turns baking hot and miserably wet, and the specter of snakes, bears and cougars lurk at every turn. Davis is barely able to make $5 a day at the outset, while his pot-smoking pal Max concedes immediate defeat, hiding in his tent. The sole respite to the torturous work is the communal hot tub where everyone strips naked to drink, pontificate and listen to killer music, all the while dreaming of a better day.
Davis toils on, slowly discovering an inner strength. The repetitive routine of planting trees puts him into a meditative state where he can consider his place in the world, made all the more poignant as he surveys the stripped and burned hillside juxtaposed against the stunning beauty of the surrounding mountains. The crew finally gets a day off and celebrates their brief freedom in town with drunken antics, after which things take a number of turns for the worse, including Davis’ van getting wrecked. Davis grinds through his angst and exhaustion and, after a late-night rendezvous with the foreman’s girlfriend, goes back to town and gets into a conflict with a group of locals who accuse him of stealing their jobs. Elmer, a mysterious and spiritual planter Davis had only seen from afar, comes to the rescue by defeating their burly leader in an arm-wrestling duel.
Davis returns to work, relentlessly planting, breaking the camp’s record, shortly after which a forest fire appears on the horizon. The foreman insists that the crew stay to make as much money as possible, but Davis and his friends escape this madness by driving directly through the smoke and onto a music festival.
Davis, atop an extension ladder as he scrapes paint from a gas station sign, loses his balance in a gust of wind. Hanging on for his life, he tries to reflect on the loss of his recently deceased father but just curses to himself instead until finally rescued. He drives off with a co-worker to the next job and they talk idly, neither one of them approaching the topic of the death of Davis’ father. Instead they banter on about to getting drugs and beer for that evening’s frat party.
They arrive at an office building and Davis zones out while he paints a back hallway, daydreaming in vivid detail the moment he arrived at the hospital to find his father dead. Davis races off from his work, through campus, getting to his student radio show on time, while Ellen, a girl who Davis has had a crush on from afar, arrives as an intern. Davis blunders all attempts at communications, returns to his radio booth and drifts off again, remembering his final, painful visits with his father at the hospital. He finishes the radio show and shows up, already half drunk, at the frat party where his step-brother tells him that he is not wanted at their father’s funeral the next day.
High on mushrooms, Davis dissolves into a mess, blacking out and then wandering off until he runs into Ellen. He awkwardly blathers on about her beauty and then finally about his father, impulsively inviting her to the funeral before falling asleep on her couch. He wakes up late, and running across campus again, gets to the funeral at last moment where he sits in the back. Mr. Heaney, an old friend of his father’s, gives Davis life advice while sharing a bottle of scotch whiskey. Davis falls asleep, dreaming of his father, to wake as his step-family is leaving the church.
Davis returns to the gas station, back to the drudgery of scraping paint, when Ellen appears and offers to help.
Expelled from boarding school, Davis moves in with his father and step-family. His step-brother, a world-class swimmer, is indifferent to his presence while his step-mother and step-sister treat him with outright disdain. His new school, a strict all-boys institution, is no refuge, but rather a breeding ground for bullies and malcontents. Davis learns of a compulsory public speaking competition from a pair of misfits, Eugene and Erdley, both of whom he befriends over hashish and an obsession with music lyrics.
Davis joins a film club, led by a stunning young film teacher, Ms. Geisner, and shortly after takes a job delivering newspapers in her neighborhood. Davis gets into a series of problems – including an evening of pyromania ending in Erdley getting badly burned – until, in an ironic turn, Martha is fired from her job for smoking pot, leading her parents to take her with them to her brother’s swim meet in Northern Ontario.
Left alone in the house, Davis sneaks into a party at Ms. Geisner’s house where he gets drunk and, after watching Ms. Geisner dance to The B-52’s Rock Lobster, confesses his love for her. It ends badly. He wakes, miserably hungover, realizing the public speaking contest is in today’s assembly. Instead of his practiced speech, he decides to recite Rock Lobster. Initially unsure, he gains confidence and ends up screaming the final lines, which is received with great enthusiasm by the student body and outrage by the administration. It appears that Davis is to be expelled yet again, until his father meets with the head of school and promises to help finance a new swimming pool.
Just finishing the third draft of Paint, the second part of a trilogy of coming-of-age screenplays, and this scene had to be switched out: DAVIS, coming down off a bad mushroom trip, is sitting with his crush, ELLEN.
DAVIS: Let’s watch Swiss Family Robinson.
ELLEN: Really? It’s the Disney film, right?
DAVIS: I love that film.
ELLEN: You watch it with your father?
DAVIS: No. (Pause) I don’t know. He read us the book. I remember that. He sat in his old rocking chair. It creaked as he stretched back, the light over his shoulder.
ELLEN inserts the tape and sits on the other side of the couch.
DAVIS: He had a deep voice. It was good for the book.
Dramatic orchestral music plays on the television. A ship drifts across the screen in a hurricane winds and high seas.
DAVIS: (Watching the film intently) I had my first existential moment watching this film.
ELLEN: (Sleepy) Yeah?
DAVIS: When they finish the tree house and they take the mother upstairs. (Pause) It was so amazing, so perfect. It looked like a perfect place. DAVIS: (Looking at ELLEN, who sleepily looks back) And then it wasn’t. It was the opposite. It was fake or something. I don’t know. I had to the leave the room. My step-mother made me go to bed because she thought I was sick.
The Swiss Family Robinson is revealed trapped below decks, yelling for help but still looking orderly and respectable. The ship grounds out on a rock.
DAVIS: (Pause, sighing deeply) You don’t remember doing something amazing as a kid – your absolute favorite thing in the world – and then feeling like it was pointless? You thought it was this thing. And then it isn’t.
DAVIS continues to watch the film.
MR. ROBINSON (On Television): Hans, help your mother!
HANS: If I had been captain, I would have fought the pirates instead of running into storm. The Swiss Family Robinson climbs to the top of the ship’s decks and sees that the ship is grounded near an island.
Close up on DAVIS as he watches intently.
MR. ROBINSON (On Television): At least we’re not too far from land.
MRS. ROBINSON: Then there’s hope.
FRITZ: Maybe we could build a raft. There’s enough wood.
DAVIS: Of course they can build a raft! Of course they can.
Smiling, DAVIS looks over at ELLEN and sees that she is asleep. He stares at her naked shoulder, moves forward and looks as if he is about to kiss it when she opens her eyes.
ELLEN: Just watch your movie.
DAVIS awkwardly looks back at the television screen.
KEVIN ROBINSON: Look what I found! The captain’s dogs! Are they glad to see me!
The Robinson Family begins to cut barrels and wood and construct a raft to go to shore.
DAVIS looks around at ELLEN again, who looks angelic in her sleep, and considers touching her shoulder again, but pulls the blanket over her instead. He turns back to the film and watches as a raft is built and lowered into the ocean from the ship. DAVIS falls asleep.
