by Ben Elton
For a moment, Plastic Tolstoy seemed to be far away.
‘It’s an extraordinary idea,’ he said finally. ‘You told anybody else about it?’
‘Have I, hell! There are more plagiarists in this town than at an Elvis convention.’
Maybe it was the mention of the name Elvis, that hallowed and imperial American name upon which his mother’s fortune had been based, that decided Plastic. He seemed to snap out of his reverie all at once and make a decision.
‘OK. We’ll run with it. It’s a good idea. It’s a great idea. Go write the script.’
Factory town.
Nathan virtually floated out of Tolstoy’s mansion. Even the thought of Flossie could not puncture his delight. He nearly sang to himself as he touched his sports coupé into action. His idea had been accepted! He was going to be allowed to write the initial script for a genuine fully-fledged feature. He knew it would only be the initial script, for it is a foregone conclusion in Hollywood that any feature will be written by more than one person. It has to be this way … so that the producer may remain in control.
Many artists working in Hollywood resent what they see as the factory mentality of the town. They consider it crass and wicked that their creative juices are seen as merely one ingredient in a cocktail which somebody else is mixing. They forget that Hollywood is a factory, and pretends to be nothing else. It has no sponsors, it receives no government money. Like a producer of canned food, it exists solely on the income it can generate in the marketplace. The Royal National Theatre of Great Britain may proudly commission plays that people don’t like, written by tired old playwrights who don’t like people, because it is generally considered to be a function of government to subsidise national culture. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art may be in a position to purchase an obscure arrangement of wire and pebbles from a talentless drug addict because some rich industrialist wants to cloak his brutal legacy with a veneer of culture. This is all well and good and no doubt much to be encouraged, but Hollywood can count on no such indulgences.
When somebody commissions a film in Hollywood they are spending money that somebody else has invested in order to make a profit, and, unless the artist is a committed Marxist, then he or she has no real grounds for complaint. They may moan about artistic freedom, financial censorship, making room for ideas to grow, but in other industries the creative elements do not expect such indulgences. The chefs at Heinz do not consider it outrageous that their bosses aren’t interested in a fascinating new recipe they are working on for anchovy-flavoured baked beans.
The Director Monster.
Some film writers accept these financial arguments, but still plead with producers to be given a chance to see a script right through to production. They promise that they will make the end product even more profitable than if the script were produced by committee. They are wasting their breath. If scripts written by individuals rather than a succession of hired hands were ever accepted, the writer’s vision would be seen to have at least partially shaped the movie.
This can never be. For the ego of the Director Monster must be fed.
It is this gargantuan appetite that has come to shape the pecking order of the film industry. The self-esteem of the writer must be sacrificed, along with that of everybody else involved (barring that of the star, if very big) to satisfy the Director Monster’s insatiable gluttony for credit and control.
The Director Monster, or Director as they were once called, is the bloated Queen Bee at the centre of an army of drones. It was directors who invented probably the most arrogant billing in the annals of human endeavour. It is they who, not content with the mere words ‘directed by so and so’ at the end of a film, decided to insist on the phrase ‘a so and so picture’ at the beginning of the film. The beginning of a film, it must be remembered, which will have involved the artistic commitment of literally hundreds of people. No other command figure feels the need to grab credit in this all-encompassing way. The President of the United States does not insist upon the words ‘a so and so country’ prefixing any mention of the USA. The battle of El Alamein is not remembered as ‘a Rommel and Montgomery battle’.
Clearly there have been many great film directors of vision and ability. Some, perhaps, who actually deserve the credit they get. That said, a film must of course have a script. It also requires actors, who will wear costumes that must be designed and made. Those actors will perform within selected locations and on specially designed and constructed sets. The film will require a cinematographer to shape the pictures and lighting designers to provide the atmosphere. There will be sound engineers, special effects wizards, also an editor, the person who actually pieces together the thousands of disconnected shots to create the whole.
Of course, the director is in charge of all these things, but he or she does not actually do any of them. The director does not even have to ensure that the actors exit through the right door and look to the correct side of camera during their close-ups. They have a continuity person to do that.
None of this is to run down the director’s contribution. He or she is the boss, and since movies began the director has been rightly respected as the principal auteur of any picture. But the cult has got out of hand. Ask some directors what they would like to be written on their gravestone, and the answer will be, ‘A so and so life’. What else?
Happiness is a temporary thing.
None the less, despite the knowledge that his script, when finished, would be handed on to other writers, Nathan was happy. Even though his self-respect would eventually be forcibly taken from him, he was thrilled. Yes, his vision would be pulverised and distorted… yet he was deliriously happy, for he had been green-lighted to write a script, and for a writer in Hollywood, breaks do not come any better than that.
‘Yes,’ Nathan thought, ‘I am happy.’
Then, of course, he remembered Flossie, and realised that he could not be happy because he was unhappy. The little demons inside him re-inserted the lead weights into the pit of his stomach and reminded him that to pretend that one was happy when one was, in fact, unhappy was a contradiction in terms.
Pulling herself together.
As it happened, Flossie was thinking of Nathan. She had just had a very unpleasant experience and it had led her to ponder her life somewhat.
For Flossie had just lived through the day of the Rat Run. The day on which the peoples of the world had acknowledged that normal life on Earth had finally become unsustainable and had hence retreated to their Claustrospheres. Although on this occasion it had not actually been the people of the world that had acknowledged this horror, but merely the people of Great Pew, a tiny village in Oxfordshire. A village in which Nathan and Flossie had once lived, and in which Flossie now lived alone, her brief, post-Nathan affair having ended some time before.
Flossie had awoken that morning with no suspicion of the momentous events which were about to unfold. What she had awoken with, however, was something of a hangover. Her supper on the previous night had consisted of a bottle and a half of red wine and an entire packet of chocolate biscuits. She was definitely feeling a bit rough as she staggered into the kitchen, still dressed in her night clothes… a big nightie, baggie tracksuit pants and large furry slippers. The half-full bottle of wine stood on the kitchen table where she had left it but Flossie resisted the temptation to take a slug, and instead made herself a cup of tea.
The kitchen was a bit of a mess. The kitchen was, in fact, a lot of a mess. There was a huge pile of used tea-bags on the edge of the sink, which had some mandarin peel in it. There were old newspapers and old tea-towels. Empty frozen food cartons, frozen food cartons with a bit of lasagne still left in them, frozen food cartons with a bit of lasagne and also a couple of old tea-bags, some mandarin peel and a cigarette end in them. On the floor, beside the bulging kitchen bin, there was a pile of pizza boxes. These would stay on the floor for ever, because they would not fit in the bin, even had it not been bulging. There were
some mouldy crumpets and a ketchup bottle which had all its ketchup on the outside. The floor needed sweeping and the washing-up needed washing up.
It was not merely because she now lived alone that Flossie was living this dissolute existence. She had always been completely slack, domestically. But fag-ends in the lasagne? A whole packet of choccie biccies for supper? Still in your nightie at eleven in the morning? Flossie feared that she was becoming a touch gross.
Sitting down with her cuppa, Flossie decided that she really had to pull herself together. Of course, if Nathan were still around, he would have told her that. What is more, she would have been infuriated by his prissy attitude. She would have told him that the world would not come to an end just because a girl did not put her socks in the dirty clothes basket. Sometimes she had wanted to throttle him, the way his whole body had twitched with agony if she so much as made a ring with her coffee cup, or left the newspaper folded inside out, the way he seemed to follow her about with a damp cloth.
Now she felt differently, now she would have rather liked Nathan to have been around to tell her what a state she looked. After all, it was not much fun looking a state if there was nobody there to tell you how beautiful you were, even when your hair was greasy. The bitter truth was that nobody was bothered whether Flossie looked a state or not. She could scum around the house all day in yesterday’s knickers and an old nightie and nobody would care. She could go naked if she wished, daubed only in cold lasagne and fat scraped from the bottom of the grill-pan. Flossie had only herself to please, and she hated it.
She decided that she needed to inject a little dynamism into her life. She would pull herself together. She resolved to have a bath, put on some proper clothes, eat a proper breakfast, including fruit, and then do some work, which in her case was dressmaking.
Just then, just at the very moment when Flossie had definitely decided to get her life in order, pull herself together and damn well get things sorted, the world came to an end.
Midnight.
The Rat Run had started. That moment which had been talked about for so many decades, around so many dinner-tables and on so many talk-shows had arrived. The doomsday clock which scientists had long used to illustrate the Earth’s close proximity with Eco-Armageddon had finally struck midnight.
Flossie first heard about it from her radio. People still listened to the radio, despite the numerous technical innovations which, it was regularly announced, would supersede it. Radio, despite being well into its second century, remained the only medium which one could enjoy whilst doing other things. At the moment the Rat Run started, the other thing which Flossie was doing was pouring another cup of tea. This being the first part of the process of prevaricating by which she would put off the moment when she would begin getting her life in order, pulling herself together and damn well getting things sorted.
The music that had been playing on the radio suddenly stopped and a stern voice announced an urgent newsflash, adding that all listeners should stand by for information of the utmost importance. Momentarily Flossie was pleased. Here was justification indeed to put off pulling herself together.
The radio had actually told her to, and you couldn’t get a much more official excuse than that. She sat down with her tea. Almost immediately the announcement came and any sense of wellbeing which Flossie may have been harbouring instantly left her. The news was truly and hugely terrible. The unthinkable had happened. The Rat Run was beginning.
It seemed that the mosquito infestations which had become such a familiar feature of the British summer had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Years of exceptionally hot and wet weather, combined with ever-expanding swamplands and increasingly ineffective insecticides had produced breeds of mozzie with jaws like tigers, who could suck the sap out of a tree, massive, body-building insects who drank DDT for breakfast and which one did not so much swat as wrestle. It used to be said that you could not get blood out of a stone, the truth was that these terrible airborne vampires probably could.
Now it seemed that they had decided to take over the Earth. The radio informed Flossie that there had been a sudden and catastrophic explosion in the insect population and that they had swarmed. Vast clouds of virtually invulnerable blood-sucking monsters had appeared all over the Northern hemisphere. It was a plague, similar in many ways to the plagues of locusts which crop up so regularly in the Bible, except whereas the locusts ate only crops, these mosquitoes ate people, a few drops at a time.
Within an hour or so, the announcement said, the Home Counties would belong to the insect world, soon all Britain and Europe. Therefore, it was suggested that everyone should get inside their Claustrospheres immediately and not come out until the following year, when the mosquitoes would have been destroyed by their own weight of numbers.
Flossie sat for a second as the message was repeated. She could not move, it was all too much. One second she was thinking about having a bath, the next, it’s get in your Claustrosphere for a year or have all the blood sucked out of your body by billions of fist-sized mosquitoes. A siren outside in the street jolted Flossie into action. She went to her front door and saw an army half-track beside which stood an officer with a megaphone.
‘Get in your Claustrospheres! Get in your Claustrospheres!’ he shouted, as soldiers in protective suits rushed from door to door. One of them ran up the garden path of Flossie’s little cottage.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ the soldier shouted through his mask.
‘Yes, but—’ Flossie responded weakly.
‘Then get in your bloody ‘Sphere, you stupid cow! Quick! They’ll be here in an hour! Norfolk’s black with them, carpeted from the sea to the broads.’
Flossie’s next-door neighbour was at her door, nearly hysterical.
‘But my husband’s at the office!’ she cried.
‘Can’t help that, madam,’ the soldier shouted. ‘He’ll find a place in a municipal shelter all right. It’s only a year, you can find each other then! Now get in your Claustrosphere!’
With that, the soldier ran on to the next house, where some of his comrades were helping an infirm old couple.
Feeling completely stunned, Flossie went back into her cottage, took up the half bottle of wine and made her way into the back garden. She did not need the booze, there were plenty of drugs and dehydro wine in the ‘Sphere, but she took it anyway. She tried to think of something else she might like to take, but couldn’t. What was the point? The Claustrosphere was fully equipped, that was what it was for. The urgent commotion in the street was getting louder. Flossie could hear it even standing in the back garden.
‘This is the last warning,’ the commotion said. ‘This environment will be lethal in approximately fifty-five minutes!’
Dressed in her nightie and slippers Flossie went inside the Claustrosphere and closed the BioLock.
The black hole of Great Pew.
The geodesic shell of Flossie’s Claustrosphere was non-transparent. All Claustrospheres were like that, the reason being that the outer surface of the dome was its energy source. Sunlight so dangerous that it could kill people was still a valuable source of solar power, and it was this solar fuel which made the BioCycle viable. There were not even any windows. So delicate were the ecological rhythms of existence within the dome, it was thought that the intrusion of a natural light cycle might imbalance the process. Besides which, no transparent material had yet been developed which could be guaranteed to filter all the harmful elements of naked sunlight. Many Claustrosphere psychologists argued that windows would be a bad thing anyway. They felt that, to the occupant, their Claustrosphere was their world and to be able to look out at another might lead to them denying their new reality and failing to come to terms with their own world.
Therefore, once inside, Flossie was completely alone. Claustrospheres had no phones. The very fact of BioSphere technology was based on the presumption that all life outside was over. Therefore, any factor which required maintenance, power or organisation
from outside the Claustrosphere was, by its very nature, untenable. Some richer people had invested in expensive radio and solid state land-line networks between small groups of friends, but any intrusion into the structure of the geodesic shell was frowned upon by the manufacturers. The whole principle worked on complete enclosure. A world apart. They refused to guarantee shelters in which the dome had been punctured. ‘Once you’re in, you’re in’ was the cheerful slogan employed by the companies marketing the numerous Claustrosphere accessories that ranged from Virtual Reality sex-suits to worry beads. Flossie was in.
Now she knew how much she missed Nathan. She missed him, to coin a phrase, with all her heart. In fact, with all her heart and all of the rest of her body. She shook with how much she missed him. She wept and she wept. She was weeping when she realised that a light was flashing and a recorded voice was speaking to her.
‘Please activate LifeCycle immediately, please activate Life-Cycle immediately.’
Flossie knew what that meant. She had to start the damn thing up. Claustrospheres produced their own oxygen and if the occupant did not start the generation process within approximately half an hour of closing the BioLock, the available natural oxygen would be exhausted and the occupant would suffocate.
Flossie seriously thought about ignoring the warning. Why not? She was alone in a Claustrosphere! Alone, without Nathan, in the Claustrosphere that they had built together after endless debate and hand-wringing. True, it was only for a year, but a year alone in a Claustrosphere? Could she hack it? She looked around at the big TV screen and the miniature rain forest which would be her only companions. She could not even turn the lights off because she and Nathan had decided that they couldn’t afford a night-time cycle.