{"id":1170,"date":"2019-10-04T20:29:26","date_gmt":"2019-10-04T20:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/?p=1170"},"modified":"2019-10-05T01:22:26","modified_gmt":"2019-10-05T01:22:26","slug":"desperate-living","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/2019\/10\/04\/desperate-living\/","title":{"rendered":"Desperate Living"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I talked to Jim Goad<\/a> recently, and we joked a bit about some of the characters on America\u2019s political fringe, as we\u2019re both well acquainted with \u201cboth\u201d sides. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019ve never read Goad, you should. He\u2019s a phenomenally witty writer possessed by a compulsion to mock hypocrisy wherever he sees it. It\u2019s a sketchy racket but you never run out of material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After we ended the call, I thought about the absurdity of it all, and texted him back to say that John Waters<\/a> ought to make a film about the desperate goofballs and weirdos who populate both the far left and far right. Their comic antics are taken far too seriously by the normal people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an unlikely character myself, if I step back from the worlds I\u2019ve traveled in \u2014 from NYC nightclubs filled with gender-bending \u201cperformance artists\u201d in giant sneakers huffing nitrous oxide to secret meetings of geriatric white nationalists held in Chinese restaurants \u2014 man there is a lot of wacky material you just couldn\u2019t make up. Maybe someday I\u2019ll write an autobiography. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The movie idea stuck with me, so I came up with a pitch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

UNTITLED FILM PITCH<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The story revolves around the ongoing conflicts between two camps of desperate ne\u2019er-do-wells, both intent on changing the world through extreme political activism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Left Camp <\/strong>– <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(They\u2019re both named Sam, so you can\u2019t assume their genders. Their birth names were Jennifer and Peter.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SAM 1<\/strong> – A white, morbidly obese purple-haired lesbian feminist who occasionally sidelines as a body-positive burlesque dancer.  She runs  her own XXX webcam business  to support her pizza problem. She\u2019s addicted to prescription painkillers, \u201calmost\u201d commits suicide frequently, and is officially living on disability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

SAM 2<\/strong> – A skinny white asexual vegan punk rocker who is always between bands but really concerned about \u201cthe scene.\u201d He has a trust fund, which allows him to do a lot of cocaine and keep his dreadlocks well-maintained. He\u2019s bipolar, naturally, and sees several therapists. A perpetual student and campus organizer, he\u2019s never worked a day in his life, but is a staunch union activist and imagines himself a heroic defender of the working class.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right Camp –<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve –<\/strong> There is only one character in the Right camp, because this guy has no friends at all. He works at a series of menial and retail jobs, and is extremely polite. He is middlingly chunky, perceptibly chinless, and has extremely tiny, delicate fingers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At night (and on his lunch breaks on his phone) he spends his time denouncing people who he perceives to be \u201cdegenerates\u201d \u2014 which includes almost everyone. He has a giant white board in his trailer park \u201cwar room\u201d to keep track of his constantly changing pseudonyms and handles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the film, he cycles through a series of extreme religious and political positions. He begins as a simple Southern Evangelical race realist, but abandons Christianity because it is \u201ctoo Semitic\u201d and becomes a staunch Odinist. After several violent encounters with former meth addicts who found Odin in prison, he studies Orthodox Christianity and starts posting \u201cOrthodoxy or Death\u201d online and papering the town with posters. He attempts to join an Orthodox church, but is disgusted to find that they still accept blacks. He resigns himself to an inventive combination of 14\/88 esoteric Hitlerism and the private practice “Opus Dei” Catholicism. His practice consists mostly of posting memes about the true Catholic Church, the Jews, and the death of the West. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PLOT<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The running gag of the movie is the constant conflict between the right camp and the left camp, as the characters on the left camp doxx the right camp\u2019s trailer park address and harass his employers via phone. He gets fired from Target, then Best Buy, then ends up at Walmart until the Left Camp shows up to steal boxes of Whip Its from the kitchenwares department, and Steve catches them and reports them to Loss Prevention. As they are escorted out of the store, they scream \u201cNazi\u201d and \u201cFascist\u201d hysterically. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sam1 and Sam2 are quickly released and never charged, but vow to fight the fascist corporate pigs at Walmart. They set up another campaign to get Steve fired. This works, and Steve is forced to seek employment at a Chinese-owned convenience store because they are the only people who will hire him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His online tirades shift to address the growing \u201cChinese threat\u201d to the \u201cAmerican Way of Life,\u201d and the film abruptly ends when the store is robbed and he is shot point-blank by a white Odinist who has relapsed and gone on a meth-fueled crime spree. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After his death is reported on the local news, Sam1 and Sam2 picket the Chinese-owned convenience store for hiring a “known racist.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

– cut. roll credits –<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think this project has real potential. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you make it, you should hire me as a consultant. I\u2019m also up for a cameo — ideally in a difficult-to-film double role where I play both<\/em> a Rob Halford-style leather dude and a militant Neo-Nazi who face off in a savage no-holds-barred underground amateur wrestling match. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think this would make a lot of people happy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I talked to Jim Goad recently, and we joked a bit about some of the characters on America\u2019s political fringe, as we\u2019re both well acquainted with \u201cboth\u201d sides.  If you\u2019ve…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1171,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[111,110,112,116,109,108,87,117,114,115,113],"class_list":["post-1170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-journal","tag-absurdity","tag-comedy","tag-extremism","tag-hypocrisy","tag-jim-goad","tag-john-waters","tag-left","tag-orthodoxy","tag-racism","tag-racist","tag-right"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/DSC00615-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1187,"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions\/1187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jack-donovan.com\/sowilo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}