“She won’t wake up.” It is important to take the temperature of the tone immediately. Is it panicked, with a worst-case-scenario rising of pitch, a dad shouting down the stairs that something’s wrong, or is it compressed frustration, coal on the way to diamonds, a parent wagging a finger w/r/t a lazy daughter? It’s the latter. “I told her that we’re leaving in a half-hour.” The voice comes back from the home office, Mom, distracted: “Sleeping teenagers can’t tell time.” And then Dad again, put upon, though he’s put it upon himself, transferring his frustration from daughter to wife, “You’re not helping.” Pull the camera up, quickly, not even by crane but by spring-loaded launch, vertically along the pole that’s rises along the southeast edge of the cutaway bedroom, to an altitude where it reveals that on the other side of the daughter’s night table there’s a figure, crouching, dressed in all black, a knife in his hand that catches the key light and produce a visible glint that won’t need to be digitally enhanced later on, and the camera then swings slightly northwest so it’s over the figure, which stands and stretches so that the blade hangs down like a descender from the end of the arm. Anyone who was pretending to sleep is not pretending now. “Why?” says the daughter, and the actress playing the daughter, and the audience watching the actress play the daughter. “She won’t wake up,” the figure repeats, in a voice the audience recognizes as that of the mayor. Title card, in dripping red: “Election Day.”
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Idea
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