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How to Stay Friends

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Spotlight down left, fade in from black. There’s a woman standing at a podium, down left. She’s wearing comfortable clothes, nothing that’s too fancy, but could probably be called business casual. She might have notecards or a script, something to make it evident that she has prepared for this presentation, like an official speech. Her voice shakes as she gives her first lines, but she gains strength throughout her delivery. PRESENTER: Go to dinner. Stage lights fade in from black. They should be a comfortable, warm white. A backing track of crowd noise fades in from silence. A restaurant booth sits at center stage. The rest of the stage is empty. MINERVA enters, wearing an orange dress and a jacket. It should be evident that this woman and the PRESENTER are the same person, through the way their hair is done or a similar indicator. She is collected, but looks around as if she’s waiting for someone as she takes her seat. A WAITER passes from stage left to bring two glasses of water, ...
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The Body's Defenses Against the Mind

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In The Body's Defenses Against Itself , Fatima has an obsession with the perfection of her body, both in the original narration and in her frequent flashbacks to adolescence. In her retelling of those teenage memories, this means she is preoccupied with being thin, especially in contrast with Christinia: "Her stomach made her one of the heftier girls in the class, and when I got up the courage to look down on her, I made a point of flaunting my thinness—the only desirable thing about my body—over her tendency towards chubby" (Thompson-Spires, 54). Fatima feels a loss of control because of her experience with hyperhidrosis and the constant competition between herself and Christinia, so she uses the perfection of her body as a coping mechanism, giving her some semblance of confidence while also gaining her an edge over Christinia. Fatima's obsession with her body expands beyond her looks, and into the issues of her everyday bodily function. In the flashbacks, she narrat...
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Bloodchild, Today

In my first read-through of Octavia Butler's Bloodchild , I was horrified. Initially, my reaction was just to the graphic descriptions of alien maggots and humans' bodily harm, but it quickly turned into horror at the societal systems that Butler illustrates. The main character, Gan, is chosen before his birth by an alien, T'Gatoi, who helps raise him for the sole purpose of laying eggs in him — eggs that will eventually tear him apart in the process of "birthing." She seeks to keep the truth of the birthing process from him, and manipulates him by threatening his family when he expresses doubt about being a vessel for her maggots. Upon further reflection, I realized that this story reminds me disturbingly much of the current regulations on women's bodily autonomy. My horror at the physical suffering that Bram Lomas and so many other humans have to endure under Tlic rule effectively turned into sadness and disappointment at how easily I could project our repro...
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The Machine Stops: Coming Soon!

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If I were to turn any story from our class so far into a movie, I would have to pick The Machine Stops , by E. M. Forster. There have been a few short film or skit adaptations of this movie, and even a play, but I would love to reimagine it as a feature-length film. The reason I think that this story would make such a compelling movie is because of its distinct and unusual setting, and also because I love post-apocalyptic, science-fiction-ish parables such as this one. Science fiction narratives allow for a wider sort of world-building than those that are set in the present day or with our present technological restraints, and it would be fun to explore all of the proprietary technology and environments in  The Machine Stops. One of the greatest considerations that would have to be made in this movie is how to translate the idea of the podlike rooms that Vashti and the rest of the human race occupy to a concrete form. The rooms are said to be "hexagonal in shape, like the cell of ...
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