L'Avventura

[Laurels]

((Claire Monaghan continued from Something Something Movie Reference))

Claire sighed and leaned back in the old chair. It had been over a day since she left the grotto, and she still had no sign of finding any of the people Corey asked her to find. She didn't get much sleep the previous night, hoping that more people would be moving about in the night instead of the day. That didn't seem to be the case, and so Claire found that she had no luck finding any living person. Finding corpses was much easier, and that wasn't something she was happy about. She had to turn away and dash away from any dead person she found.

Now she was resting in one of the apartments. The sun had just set, and she was too tired. She was drenched with sweat from being outside for so long, and her shoulders were sore from carrying her bag for so long. She took the time to plop down in a chair in the apartment when she could, after she used another chair to block the door to the room. She wasn't ready to die yet, and she wanted to be sure she was safe in the apartment after searching it through.

Claire removed her glasses and set them on the nearby end table, rubbing her eyes. She was sleepy, she was hungry, she was bored, she was too many things at once, and it was killing her.

"I guess I can't do anything," she muttered. "That's pretty sad."

Claire looked up at the ceiling. If death by exhaustion wasn't an option, she would have gone outside and kept looking. Her body was telling her to give up for now. Claire rolled her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes.

God, I'm just never going to get anything done right. This is just like The Missing One all over again.

The Missing One was a script Claire tried writing earlier in the school year. She had just gotten a Linklater kick, and wanted to try writing a really experimental drama. The idea of the movie sounded interesting in theory: follow a couple as they spend a day or two at a movie marathon. Show the couple before the movies, establishing their relationship and their characters, then go to the marathon, where their reactions to the films would cause conflict and later affect if they could last as a couple or not.

Claire and her sister spent some time thinking about that movie. Claire thought it would be a good idea for the movies they were watching to parallel the couple somehow. She read an article about how The Double Life of Veronique nearly had seventeen unique cuts, and she thought it would be a fun idea to try and make that the kind of movie the couple was watching. Jessica did have a few concerns about that, asking how people could stand to watch multiple versions of the same film with slight changes. Claire continued to throw out words like "subtext" and "arthouse surrealism" to try and weigh down Jessica's concerns.

Unfortunately, while Claire was writing the movie, she did find an issue: no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't come up with the right movie for the couple to be watching. She wanted the film to tie into a part of the couple's relationship troubles, but creating the film within the film proved to be more difficult than she thought. She had a few ideas, one of which was a reference to Veronique, but it proved to be useless, and no idea she thought of worked as well as she wanted it to. Claire decided to abandon the project for a while, instead choosing to try and write a movie called Corral.

Huh. Guess I never am going to finish Corral either. That's a real shame. I guess I could face the cameras and tell Jessica how to end it. Nah, that's dumb. She can finish it on her own if she wants to.

Claire opened her eyes, facing the dirty ceiling above her. She was going to have a lot of regrets after dying here. It was time she accepted that.

I guess I should take a short nap. Then I can resume searching.

Claire got out of the chair, picking up the glasses from the table and putting them back on. She grabbed her bag and walked into the bedroom. There was a bathroom in there, so she could clean herself up and put on fresh clothes. She still had sand in her hair and clothes, so it would be good to try putting on something fresh. Claire sighed as she made her way into the bedroom. She was wearing too many regrets, and hoped she could relieve herself of some.

((Claire Monaghan continued in The Society of the Spectacle))