In The Guardian on Saturday they run a kind of Proust questionnaire feature for celebrities where one of the questions is “What would your superpower be?” and celebrities say things like “flying” or “invisibility”. Mine would be the capacity for another person to be inside my head for the day. Note: not the opposite; they are in my head, not me in theirs. I even sometimes put famous people from history into my head. Shakespeare, for example. I am curious to see what people would make of my day, my thoughts. They are travelling along on a side-car to my consciousness. accompanying it, seeing what I see, overhearing my gloss on the day. A commonplace fantasy I used to have was to attend my own funeral. I am trying to jettison this one now, as in my mind it is becoming an increasingly disappointing event.
My habit of being sceptical about other people’s capacity to fulfil their hopes and dreams led me to thinking of myself yesterday as a hired assassin in people’s fantasy lives. You let me loose on your aspirations and I shoot them down, one by one, leaving you with the bare bones of your true life, all the glamour murdered. What does that make me? A therapist? A life coach? A kill joy? A miserable bugger?
Has this already been done in a Hollywood fantasy film? The therapist as hired assassin in the fantasy life of others. Maybe tangentially it has, but not as comedy. You could do a wonderful serious comedy where the fantasy lives of different people collide and get mixed up. A kind of multi-dimensional farce. The hero would be the therapist to the great and the good who administers a drug to his clients which gives him access to their fantasy world. He would go in and clean them up. For security reasons you wouldn’t want the fantasy life of the US President to be pathological. There would need to be controls on the therapist, of course. Hence a therapist 2.0 whose mission would be to terminate the therapist. Then they could go back in time to pre-terminate something in an early presidential fantasy, in Freudian thrall that is the pre-requisite to anything out of Hollywood. The possibilities for prequels and sequels are endless.
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