SONGS ABOUT DRIFTERS
Two young men are in a vehicle driving down a narrow alley. The driver is Parker, his passenger is Brody. Their names are inconsequential. We join them in their moving vehicle mid-conversation.
BRODY: …But he didn’t develop his powers in a freak accident or a genetic experiment gone awry. His father, as a child, he discovered of this ancient, magical, hidden city called K‘un L‘un, he grew up there for a period actually, but he left eventually and went to New York and became some billionaire industrialist, which, I realize is a common plot device, the independently wealthy father, but whatever it‘s a comic book.. Time goes on, married with children, and apparently being the responsible adult that he is, he takes his wife and his 9-year-old kid with him on a perilous journey to find this legendary city of his youth. The old man falls off the edge of a mountain and plunges to his death, the mother is eaten by wolves, but somehow the inhabitants of the hidden city find the kid and raise him to be their own, train him to be a badass for a decade or so, and eventually the kid becomes such a badass that they give him a chance to battle this dragon named Shou-Lao the Undying. Now, they call him the dragon Shou-Lao the Undying because at some point his heart was ripped from his body but the dragon continued to live; so they give him that name and now the dragon basically chills in his palatial dragon‘ lair, and he spends his days killing intruders guarding his molten heart.
PARKER: Molten? Molten like liquefied by heat molten? The dragon had a molten heart?
BRODY: Yeah, molten heart. Comic book physics. A fire-breathing dragon has smoldering physiology. I don’t know, I guess it seemed logical enough at the time. It was 1974, so who knows what they were smoking. It doesn’t matter. Shut up.
PARKER: I’m parking here, you think it’s far enough?
BRODY: This is fine here. Anyway, this American kid, son of a billionaire, he trains by punching buckets of sand and rocks, gets a chance to battle this dragon armed with nothing but his fists, and somehow manages to, you know, he defeats the dragon or slays it or whatever, and he treks deeper into its lair and finds the heart, and he plunges his toughened fists into the dragons molten heart, and that grants him the power… he becomes the next Iron Fist.
(They exit the car and begin to walk around to the trunk)
PARKER: What do you mean the he’s the next one?
BRODY: I mean it’s a legacy thing, there were 60-something Iron Fists before Danny Rand, which is why he dresses in their ceremonial garb, or at least the costume is a variation of his predecessors a reasonable facsimile. It doesn’t really matter the point is that he didn’t just sit in his room and sew that costume and say “I’m going to call myself the Iron Fist;” he’s the son of a billionaire who was raised by martial artists and inherited the equivalent of a superpower because he became a badass.
(Parker opens the trunk of the car, Tarantino-style trunk shot, the pair begins to stuff unseen items into unseen duffel bags.)
PARKER: Well, it’s still a stupid costume.
BRODY: I’m not going to argue with you, it’s not the most aesthetically satisfying, I was just trying to paint a better picture of the situation, so that you could kind of visualize the costume in a different context, perhaps not judge it so harshly is all.
PARKER: Oh, I get it, the whole martial artist, “chosen one” lineage, but you could give me the annotated history of the complete Marvel Universe and it would still be a stupid costume. I don’t care if it was designed by Reed Richards or the Kree Empire or by Stan Lee himself, it’s a lame ass costume, and that’s all I was trying to convey, before you took the comment personally and got all defensive and decided to give me an oral history of Iron Fist’s mystical origin, that’s all I was saying. It’s gaudy yellow and green and has that tall pointed collar and exposed chest and his sleeves are only 3/4s length. It’s a terrible costume and that’s my opinion.
(Parker and Brody pull the two aforementioned duffel bags from the trunk. Parker leans against the bumper and pulls off his sneakers, replacing them with snakeskin cowboy boots)
BRODY: Hey, you’re entitled to your opinion…(A beat.) But Stan Lee was a writer, not an artist… so he didn’t really play an integral part in character design.
(Parker and Brody begin walking away from the car, across a one-lane side street and through a narrow alley, painted with jazz-style murals.)
PARKER: I wasn‘t trying to claim that Stan Lee was necessarily involved, I was just trying to pepper the sentence with appropriate references to bolster my credibility. But that’s another thing that’s always bothered me: Stan Lee is probably the most recognizable name in American comics, but he was only ever a writer. Now, sequential art is a visual medium, I mean it’s obviously more about the art than the words, so I wonder how a writer becomes the name above names, you know, the first person that comes to mind when you think comics, while these other guys who are drawing Spider-man and The X-Men and other iconic figures, those are the guys who are getting second billing.
(Parker and Brody unzip their duffel bags. Brody fishes a pirate’s eye patch, Parker pulls out a tan leather vest.)
BRODY: Because it’s not primarily a visual medium. Anyone with a little sense will tell you that sequential art is an amalgam of art and writing, split down the middle 50/50. If there wasn’t a writer behind the scenes telling the artist to draw a teenager getting bit by a radioactive spider and his geriatric aunt, then it would just be panel after panel of monsters and chicks with big boobs and no sense of purpose or direction.
PARKER: That would kind of be awesome.
BRODY: If there were no writers there would be no comics. Writing comic books or even movies or television is like making an éclair; the story line, you know, the cohesive narrative that everything else hinges on is the flaky dough that holds everything together, the characters and their arcs are like the frosting on the outside, and then the cool action scenes and superpowers and epic battles are the cream filling, which, while it is the most delicious part, the icing on the cake to use a separate baking metaphor, that stuff is the least important to the overall pastry.
(Parker applies a thick fake mustache, speckled with gray, Brody pulls on a pirate bandana that covers his head with jewelry and fake dreadlocks. The pair start to look more ridiculous.)
PARKER: Okay, I see what you’re saying, but I don’t know if you’re metaphor is entirely accurate.
BRODY: How do you mean? Do you not agree with me using the éclair as a visual aid or do you not agree with my dissection of the éclair?
PARKER: Oh no, the éclair was very apt, but I think you broke it down the wrong way. I think the characters are the flaky pastry part because the characters are really what hold it all together I think, the characters drive the story, then the action and excitement is the visually appealing frosting on top, and the basic premise of the story is the creamy deliciousness on the inside, because you don’t really have a taste for what that is until you bite down into it.
BRODY: No, you’re way off base with that. You’re saying that in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the trip to the Art Museum and Wrigley Field and the parade is the chocolate frosting, and that the Ferris’ truancy and misbehavior is the cream filling, and that works to a certain degree, but you’re also saying that Cameron, with his neuroticism and anger management issues, is the glue holding it all together, and that’s just a poorly-conceived metaphor.
PARKER: Cameron alone does not support the movie, all the characters work together to support the movie. I’m not saying that one person alone can be the cohesion, but that the enduring ideas of any written entertainment are usually presented through the characters and the changes they undergo during the course of the story, not the story itself.
BRODY: Well what about Fight Club? I think that in Fight Club, the prevailing sense of disenfranchisement and isolation that the main character is enduring are what drive the film and act as the dough, the characters that the viewer engages and relates to are the chocolate frosting that makes the whole thing look appealing in the first place, while the corporate mischief and basement brawls are the creamy center.
PARKER: This is going to get us nowhere.
BRODY: It is a solid metaphor, it’s just to flexible to be definitive.
(Brody is pulling on a ruffled, long-sleeved, button-up white shirt. The Seinfeld shirt. Over that, he slips into a black vest, which he also buttons.)
PARKER: Oh, but speaking of Fight Club, I had an afternoon to myself last week, so I picked a couple flicks from my DVD library and I had a dystopian future double feature, and--
BRODY: Dystopian future double feature, like you watched two movies in a row--
PARKER: That occur in a dark, alternate future universe.
BRODY: What two movies did you watch.
PARKER: I was getting to that. I watched Minority Report and Blade Runner. And I was watching Blade Runner and-- (Parker pulls a thick leather belt from his duffel bag. It has a heavy silver buckle and two gun holsters that carry fake six-shooters.)
BRODY: I would have picked A.I. and Children of Men.
PARKER: Minority report is the better Spielberg film.
BRODY: (Chuckling arrogantly to himself) A.I. is not a Spielberg film.
PARKER: Of course it is, do you not know anything?
BRODY: A.I. was Stanley Kubrick’s dream project, and he put so much work into adapting the Philip K. Dick short story into a movie before he passed away, and Kubrick’s wife asked Spielberg to make it as a favor, or something like that.
(From his bag, he places a 17th century sea-faring hat firmly atop his braided head.)
PARKER: Right. And so Steven Spielberg directed the movie, not the recently deceased Kubrick.
BRODY: I know but Spielberg was totally channeling Kubrick in that picture. Spielberg was a medium for Stanley Kubrick during the production of A.I., because that is not a film Steven Spielberg would make.
PARKER: But he clearly threw in plenty of Spielberg-ian elements. The whole Blue Fairy, Pinocchio angle, the walking, talking teddy bear toy--
BRODY: Actually, Teddy was lifted right out of the original short story.
PARKER: V for Vendetta would have been a good one, too.
BRODY: A good what?
PARKER: A good option for the dystopian future double feature.
BRODY: Oh yeah, good call.
PARKER: Hey would you want to play some poker tonight?
BRODY Poker? I don’t know, I’m not huge on poker. What’s the buy-in?
PARKER: I don’t know yet, probably not much. Fifty bucks.
BRODY: No way.
PARKER: Why not?
BRODY: I’m not going to devote an entire night to playing poker if all we’re playing for is fifty bucks.
(Parker and Brody pull tight leather driving gloves from their bags and put them on. Their duffel bags still hang heavy on their shoulders.)
PARKER: Okay, you’d rather find the high-rollers table and have some shark gobble you up.
BRODY: I’m not trying to act like a baller, or that I’m condescending, but if I’m going to commit to playing a game of poker, I’m basically giving up an entire night of my life, a night I’ll spend fighting my incredibly short attention span, so I’d like to reward that night of diligence with something a little more mouth-watering than a fifty dollar buy-in.
PARKER: If you spent an entire evening playing poker, it would probably be the most productive evening you've had all month. But suit yourself.
(Parker is now dressed vaguely like a cowboy, and Brody like a scurvy pirate. They pause in front of a glass double door and hesitate briefly before entering and pulling shotguns from the bottom of their duffel bags. The costumed pair start shouting, barking orders at receptionists behind desks and white-collared office workers standing at copy machines. Black title card appears reading: SONGS ABOUT DRIFTERS After title card, shock cut to Parker bursting from glass double doors, unarmed and shedding garments as he sprints away. Brody is nowhere to be seen.)
-Back to the top- Enjoy.
-Josh Houchin
This is a work in progress and as such, is not finished. Check back frequently for updates and revisions.