On Post: In My Place

Date: January 9, 2013

I’ll be honest. This is one of my favorite offerings of this round of January Project posts. It is short but I think it directly hits the target I was going for: lunch hour—and let’s be honest here, hour is really half hour, if that, for all of us—as a dystopian nightmare.

Of course, the Coldplay song has nothing to do with what happens here. Sometimes to get something interesting in the Project, I have to completely ignore the actual point of a song and, to repurpose a cliché, miss the forest for the trees. In this, I pulled out the reoccurring use of “lines,” “wait,” and “pay” which just screamed commerce to me.

The safety of “My Place,” which I recast as the unhealthy attitude of “I’m not safe here but I know this place so it’s better than trying to move to somewhere that might be safer or better for me” gives us our narrator’s perspective.

While I don’t think my version of it works in this way, I imagined an adaptation of this entry would have a sort of classic Twilight Zone tone. We start with the horrible chaos in tight focus and then slowly open the iris until we hit the O. Henry ending that this is just a scene from a mall food court (or the like). So, Hollywood, get on that. I’ve already did the heavy lifting for you.

These executives are busy ignoring ALL my suggestions for film projects. (handcreditsolutions.com)