Science-Fiction Movie Proposal:
The Revenge of the Dog Shit
It all started innocently enough. What
could be more innocent than a two-year-old miniature schnoodle? Just look at
its face; no jury anywhere could possibly find a two-year-old miniature schnoodle
guilty of anything.
The boy walking him around the park
had a certain angelic innocence about him, too, and when Colman, the schnoodle,
paused to poo beside a large tree, the boy did the legal thing and scooped it
up with a plastic bag.
He tied the neck of the plastic bag
tightly into a knot, walked Colman to the nearest bin, and deposited the
tied-up bag appropriately before continuing on with his boy-and-dog shared
expedition around the park’s circumferential footpath.
At the usual time the usual Council
employee, an easy-going bloke named Gav who enjoyed watching sport on Sky TV –
any sport, the hell with the cost – drove up in his little, yellow,
purpose-built vehicle, removed the bin’s black plastic liner, which was almost
full, and replaced it with a fresh one. At the end of his rounds Gav
transferred all the black plastic rubbish sacks to a jumbo diesel refuse truck
that the Council leased.
The refuse truck’s driver, Gail, then
drove the 75 minutes to the landfill and dumped its cargo there. Other workers,
driving front-end loaders, covered the load with dirt, burying Colman’s
plastic-sealed shit.
The years groan by, the rubbish
workers repeating their jobs until their retirement and replacement by new
workers until that civilisation ends, as all human empires do, with Colman’s
shit buried beneath hundreds of metres of rubbish, sealed off by the
non-permeable, non-decomposable plastic of its bag, subjected to extreme
pressure and temperature.
Meanwhile,
the bacteria in Colman’s shit begins to mutate to survive in their inhospitable
environment. Then, a few hundred years later, abiogenesis – the process of life
coming into being from non-life – occurs, just as it first had on Earth 4
billion or so years ago, new life emerging in the chemical soup of the mutated
bacteria’s excrement and what remains of the other, well-decomposed, contents
of Colman’s shit.
The new life-form, differing in many
ways from DNA-based life, gradually cross-breeds with certain strains of the
mutant bacteria. Over the years this new organism becomes multicellular and eats
its way through the plastic of its bag, its form of eating being to extend a
pseudopod from its central blob and enveloping its food before absorbing it.
Brown, slimy, and amorphous, it seems
to be able to eat anything that exists deep under the landfill. It begins to
reproduce asexually, single beings dividing into new ones. Eventually the
creatures grow in size as they slither their pulsating, blobular bodies to the
surface, eating everything in their path, growing to more than a metre in ever-fluctuating
diameters of loathsomely gloopy formlessness.
Shit incarnate.
At the surface this new life-form
encounters a dystopian post-apocalyptic human society populated by small tribes
and clans and village-states. These of course try to fight off the advance of Colman’s
shit’s progeny with all the usual combat tools and alliances and backstabbing
and pathetic drama that the screenwriters’ meetings can come up with.
The exact details, of course, would
depend on the budget, available locations, who’s financing it, and the target
market. Obviously, a New
Zealand New Zealand
Chinese money would mean changing
everybody’s name, of course, coming up with a dystopian future agreeable to the
Chinese authorities, and other peculiarities of the Chinese market. American
financing would provide ample ambient dystopian locations, as that country’s
current political environment could very well produce plenty in the way of
public group violence by the time shooting begins, but that same instability
might end up putting conflicting pressures on various story lines, especially
the consequences of climate change.
But hell, I’m nothing if not flexible.
Let’s do lunch.
Some place pricey. You can write the
tab off on taxes.
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