Teenage Mutant Binging Americans
I recently came back from seeing the new James Cameron movie Avatar, and aside from the freaky-fun CGI roller-coaster ride, the blunt end of the story, with its parallels to American imperialism in the name of saving the world from terrorism, could have only been outdone by a musical interlude with hooded men from an Abu Ghraib-like prison, doing a can-can dance to distract the enemy, thus saving the paraplegic Marine.
As I have watched the tragic global events unfold over the last few years, I am continuously amazed at how successful the corporate mega-establishments and consumer media have been at keeping Americans so deliriously anesthetized that they just sit back and allow all of this nonsense to continue despite overpowering messages form Hollywood that come from box office hits like Avatar, Good Luck Good Night, Sirana and countless others.
Maybe Americans are feeling too guilty for all of the over indulgence they’ve participated in, living and spending beyond their means like teenagers on a shopping spree at the local mall with the credit card they stole from Mom’s purse. They know damn well that it’s wrong, but in the back of their minds they also know that after the scolding, Mom and Dad will manage to take care the debt... somehow, and they can enjoy the post shopping high of living large, if even for a little while, and the entitlement they feel is theirs. Because after all “everyone else has a PS2, Ikea bedroom set, iPhone, Lexus, Prius Hummer hybrid with GPS, Kitchen Aid Mixer, Pergo floor lifestyle in the burbs” and to pass up these luxuries of life would be like leaving fruit to rot on a tree that will never bare fruit again.
I guess the average "illusional" middle class American would feel too hypocritical admonishing the money-drunk Banksters, Federal Reserve, Wall Street Derivative Pushers, Hedge Fund Managers, Oil Companies, Auto Companies and Military Industrial Complex for grabbing unreasonably ginormous, pieces of pie from the family table and scarfing them down before the kids noticed.
This parallel of teens from a degenerate home, going on a spending spree brought me the idea of writing my own Tim Burton-ish dark parody of American current affairs for a Hollywood movie. One that I will likely never complete, but for amusements sake have flushed out below as a treatment that any of you can pitch to a movie studio and confidentially call your own.
INT. AMERICAN HOME- TODAY
A dysfunctional family is gathered around a table after the parents and their drunken friends have devastated a meal. Their overweight teens are still picking at the scraps, looking sheepishly at the cold humble pie that they still have not eaten. The silence is broken by Dads forced grin and everyone joins in with smiles, pretending that they still live in the best house on the street. The kids look at their parents with confidence that it can all be fixed if Mom and Dad (Democrats and Republicans, for those who need a little help with the vision here) would just stop inviting those rich alcoholics over for dinner. After all it’s their responsibility to fix the problem since they are in charge, and they are the ones who invited these belligerent guests into the house in the first place.
It is not yet apparent to the kids that this situation is not going to get better because Mom and Dad are enablers, they have their own addiction, co-dependency and abuse issues that are only going to get worse unless someone calls the out-of-state relatives or social services for an intervention, or someone convinces in the neighborhood to run the parents and their overeating, kleptomaniac friends out of the house so that the teens can live in peace.
Well, none of that is ever going to happen because it’s not the neighbors business and there is a good reason the relatives moved so far away. To make things worse, the bill collector is knocking at the door every day, and the Home Owners Association is not happy with the complaints of cars parked on lawns, dripping oil, and the security flood lights left on all night. The teens won’t likely do anything as they don’t want to lose what little sense of security they feel they have with a roof overhead, and no money to repair it when it the shit storm really hits.
When dinner is over the teens distract themselves from the reality of their miserable situation by watching a broken TV set, where the parents and their delinquent friends perform a Punch & Judy puppet show that passes as network news and entertainment. The same stories are performed over and over each night with different plots to help make the teens feel like they are watching something new and exciting.
The parents are eager to put on these little shows because they know that each night a fight will eventually ensue between sister Ann and brother George over the puppet show. Too angry and afraid to admit the TV set is broken, George will have an emotional outburst, insisting that Punch is the winner of the show, and Ann will make up lies about past shows to prove that Judy has been unjustly maligned.
Meanwhile little Bobby tries to explain to his siblings that it’s just a puppet show designed cause conflict so they will be separated and sent to their rooms without ever getting to see enlightened Lamb-chops perform. Little Bobby is quickly reprimanded as everyone turns and screams at him for being full of “conspiracies!”. (In case you are still a faithful “my vote counts” believer, this is a reference to the rigged Presidential Debates which are owned and operated by both parties, who eliminate any open debates from a 3rd party with help from the complicit networks and Federal Debate Commission). So Bobby sits quietly in the corner hoping that he will not be further exorcised from the family.
Eventually the house has fallen into serious disrepair, on its last leg with windows boarded up and brown sludge dripping from the faucets. The teens, manipulated and mistreated for so long, have become detached from the outside world. They are missing from school and their curiosity and enthusiasm have been squashed by incompetent parents who feed them genetically modified fast food, and treat the symptoms of their poor mental and nutritional conditions with meds bought from their friends, who get rich selling their multi-level marketing wonder cures to everyone they know.
As the teen’s resistance weakens, they are convinced to work all day in the basement because the parents have led them to believe that the family will lose the house if they don’t work to help pay the back-taxes due. They motivate the children by telling them, the neighbors, who hate them because their last name is Christiansen, will buy the house and turn it into a temple for satanic rituals. The kids labor away, 60, sometimes 70 hours per week, filling bottles of medicine for their parents rich friends. Ann is given the title, Executive of Red Pill Operations, and George is Executive of Blue Pill Operations. While Little Bobby is put in control of printing counterfeit money, and told that if he works hard, he will eventually be Dad’s first choice for head of the house. Bobby cautiously agrees because he is not old enough to understand his parents complicated explanation of how money works and every little boy wants to be like his father.
The doors of the house now stay locked all day except for the coming and going of the parents friends who now have a key and carry concealed guns, whispering generalities about the dangers outside, but the kids still feel as if they are free because they can go upstairs and to the bathroom whenever they want, and they can choose between Taco Bell and Applebee’s to be delivered for dinner. They ignore the surveillance cameras that Mom and Dad have installed inside and outside the house to make sure the teens won’t try to escape while they are out murdering and robbing houses in the next town. When the kids ask why their friends and family in the next town had to be killed. The parents reply, “Why don’t you know, they also hate us because our name is Christiansen... We found their weapons stash of water balloons and toilet paper that they were going to use against us.”
In the end the teens realize their lives are in peril if they continue with this charade, Ann and George struggle to free themselves from the malaise caused by years taking red and blue pills, and the mind-numbing effects of watching hundreds of Punch & Judy shows. They decide that they have only two choices left in their lives. The first is to stay in the house, accepting the terms and conditions their parents have created from them, and to pass along the same insanity to their inbred children, or to attempt an escape by overpowering their parents and their unwelcome visitors, who will be tied and held accountable until the justice arrives and a trial weighs their crimes.
Which one will they choose, or will little Bobby convince them that simply laying down and doing nothing will cause Mom and Dad to panic so much that they will submit to the kids demands if they want to continue living in the house.
Sorry, no spoiler ending. You’ll have to see the movie or live the experience for yourself to find out.
As I have watched the tragic global events unfold over the last few years, I am continuously amazed at how successful the corporate mega-establishments and consumer media have been at keeping Americans so deliriously anesthetized that they just sit back and allow all of this nonsense to continue despite overpowering messages form Hollywood that come from box office hits like Avatar, Good Luck Good Night, Sirana and countless others.
Maybe Americans are feeling too guilty for all of the over indulgence they’ve participated in, living and spending beyond their means like teenagers on a shopping spree at the local mall with the credit card they stole from Mom’s purse. They know damn well that it’s wrong, but in the back of their minds they also know that after the scolding, Mom and Dad will manage to take care the debt... somehow, and they can enjoy the post shopping high of living large, if even for a little while, and the entitlement they feel is theirs. Because after all “everyone else has a PS2, Ikea bedroom set, iPhone, Lexus, Prius Hummer hybrid with GPS, Kitchen Aid Mixer, Pergo floor lifestyle in the burbs” and to pass up these luxuries of life would be like leaving fruit to rot on a tree that will never bare fruit again.
I guess the average "illusional" middle class American would feel too hypocritical admonishing the money-drunk Banksters, Federal Reserve, Wall Street Derivative Pushers, Hedge Fund Managers, Oil Companies, Auto Companies and Military Industrial Complex for grabbing unreasonably ginormous, pieces of pie from the family table and scarfing them down before the kids noticed.
This parallel of teens from a degenerate home, going on a spending spree brought me the idea of writing my own Tim Burton-ish dark parody of American current affairs for a Hollywood movie. One that I will likely never complete, but for amusements sake have flushed out below as a treatment that any of you can pitch to a movie studio and confidentially call your own.
INT. AMERICAN HOME- TODAY
A dysfunctional family is gathered around a table after the parents and their drunken friends have devastated a meal. Their overweight teens are still picking at the scraps, looking sheepishly at the cold humble pie that they still have not eaten. The silence is broken by Dads forced grin and everyone joins in with smiles, pretending that they still live in the best house on the street. The kids look at their parents with confidence that it can all be fixed if Mom and Dad (Democrats and Republicans, for those who need a little help with the vision here) would just stop inviting those rich alcoholics over for dinner. After all it’s their responsibility to fix the problem since they are in charge, and they are the ones who invited these belligerent guests into the house in the first place.
It is not yet apparent to the kids that this situation is not going to get better because Mom and Dad are enablers, they have their own addiction, co-dependency and abuse issues that are only going to get worse unless someone calls the out-of-state relatives or social services for an intervention, or someone convinces in the neighborhood to run the parents and their overeating, kleptomaniac friends out of the house so that the teens can live in peace.
Well, none of that is ever going to happen because it’s not the neighbors business and there is a good reason the relatives moved so far away. To make things worse, the bill collector is knocking at the door every day, and the Home Owners Association is not happy with the complaints of cars parked on lawns, dripping oil, and the security flood lights left on all night. The teens won’t likely do anything as they don’t want to lose what little sense of security they feel they have with a roof overhead, and no money to repair it when it the shit storm really hits.
When dinner is over the teens distract themselves from the reality of their miserable situation by watching a broken TV set, where the parents and their delinquent friends perform a Punch & Judy puppet show that passes as network news and entertainment. The same stories are performed over and over each night with different plots to help make the teens feel like they are watching something new and exciting.
The parents are eager to put on these little shows because they know that each night a fight will eventually ensue between sister Ann and brother George over the puppet show. Too angry and afraid to admit the TV set is broken, George will have an emotional outburst, insisting that Punch is the winner of the show, and Ann will make up lies about past shows to prove that Judy has been unjustly maligned.
Meanwhile little Bobby tries to explain to his siblings that it’s just a puppet show designed cause conflict so they will be separated and sent to their rooms without ever getting to see enlightened Lamb-chops perform. Little Bobby is quickly reprimanded as everyone turns and screams at him for being full of “conspiracies!”. (In case you are still a faithful “my vote counts” believer, this is a reference to the rigged Presidential Debates which are owned and operated by both parties, who eliminate any open debates from a 3rd party with help from the complicit networks and Federal Debate Commission). So Bobby sits quietly in the corner hoping that he will not be further exorcised from the family.
Eventually the house has fallen into serious disrepair, on its last leg with windows boarded up and brown sludge dripping from the faucets. The teens, manipulated and mistreated for so long, have become detached from the outside world. They are missing from school and their curiosity and enthusiasm have been squashed by incompetent parents who feed them genetically modified fast food, and treat the symptoms of their poor mental and nutritional conditions with meds bought from their friends, who get rich selling their multi-level marketing wonder cures to everyone they know.
As the teen’s resistance weakens, they are convinced to work all day in the basement because the parents have led them to believe that the family will lose the house if they don’t work to help pay the back-taxes due. They motivate the children by telling them, the neighbors, who hate them because their last name is Christiansen, will buy the house and turn it into a temple for satanic rituals. The kids labor away, 60, sometimes 70 hours per week, filling bottles of medicine for their parents rich friends. Ann is given the title, Executive of Red Pill Operations, and George is Executive of Blue Pill Operations. While Little Bobby is put in control of printing counterfeit money, and told that if he works hard, he will eventually be Dad’s first choice for head of the house. Bobby cautiously agrees because he is not old enough to understand his parents complicated explanation of how money works and every little boy wants to be like his father.
The doors of the house now stay locked all day except for the coming and going of the parents friends who now have a key and carry concealed guns, whispering generalities about the dangers outside, but the kids still feel as if they are free because they can go upstairs and to the bathroom whenever they want, and they can choose between Taco Bell and Applebee’s to be delivered for dinner. They ignore the surveillance cameras that Mom and Dad have installed inside and outside the house to make sure the teens won’t try to escape while they are out murdering and robbing houses in the next town. When the kids ask why their friends and family in the next town had to be killed. The parents reply, “Why don’t you know, they also hate us because our name is Christiansen... We found their weapons stash of water balloons and toilet paper that they were going to use against us.”
In the end the teens realize their lives are in peril if they continue with this charade, Ann and George struggle to free themselves from the malaise caused by years taking red and blue pills, and the mind-numbing effects of watching hundreds of Punch & Judy shows. They decide that they have only two choices left in their lives. The first is to stay in the house, accepting the terms and conditions their parents have created from them, and to pass along the same insanity to their inbred children, or to attempt an escape by overpowering their parents and their unwelcome visitors, who will be tied and held accountable until the justice arrives and a trial weighs their crimes.
Which one will they choose, or will little Bobby convince them that simply laying down and doing nothing will cause Mom and Dad to panic so much that they will submit to the kids demands if they want to continue living in the house.
Sorry, no spoiler ending. You’ll have to see the movie or live the experience for yourself to find out.
posted by Me at 7:14 AM
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