The Trance

A film director begins to suspect he's under someone's hypnotic influence.

The Trance

It was 18 months before Doniel began to suspect something was amiss. His wife had said it off-handedly. A throwaway line that hit him harder than it should have.

“It’s like you’ve been hypnotized.”

It was over dinner. Nell made the soup he had once told her tasted like SpaghettiOs^®. She’d been deeply offended. It was a celebrity-endorsed recipe that required expensive, exotic ingredients from an over-the-top health store in Beverlywood. She’d spent hours painstakingly preparing it. She’d even purchased a $280 mini-blow torch to sear the mini-meatballs. But it tasted exactly like SpaghettiOs^®, and he’d made the mistake of saying so. Then he slowly backed into a lie that SpaghettiOs^® were his favorite childhood meal and the comparison was actually a tremendous compliment.

An even graver mistake. From then on, she began making the meal every month. And each time she would say, “I made your favorite!” There was a non-trivial chance that she knew he actually hated the soup. But he couldn’t be sure. So he kept his silence.

Nell asked him how his day was. Though it was really more along the lines of, “You look terrible. What did you do all day?”

While he would normally settle for a generalized account of his day, he felt strangely compelled to launch into a beat-by-beat breakdown. It didn’t last long. “I got to the studio early. Waited for the commissary to open. Got my coffee and bagel. Went to the editing bay… I got drinks with Bill, you remember Bill-”

“You got drinks in the middle of the day?”

“No. At six.”

“You were editing for 10 hours?”

He felt his typical knee-jerk reaction bubbling up. Ten hours editing was not unheard of. It was practically par for the course at this stage of post-production. The movie had to be finished. But something about her question disturbed him.

When they’d first met, she’d been curious– never fascinated–with how the entertainment industry worked. She couldn’t believe how many people it took working thousands of hours to produce what was, on the whole, pretty mediocre content. The curiosity had turned to resentment after the birth of their first two children. But there was no resentment now, over the clinking spoons and slurping of SpaghettiOs^®. She was clearly just concerned. There were bags under his eyes. It looked like he hadn’t slept for days. He understood her concern. He’d seen his reflection. Couldn’t explain it, honestly.

She probed further. “Did you at least get lunch?”

He couldn’t remember getting lunch. He must have skipped lunch. They were working on a particularly important sequence. Which sequence was it? What had they actually done today? What had they done yesterday?

“I think I skipped lunch. I don’t really remember.”

“They’re working you too hard. It’s like you’ve been hypnotized.”

And there it was. The tingling hairs on the back of his neck. The delicate unfolding of a newborn revelation, just beginning to blossom.

His son Jordan spoiled the moment. “Mom. I need $600. Ray’s family is going to the Iron Giant musical and tickets are $500. Plus concessions. I need to go.”

“Did they invite you?”

“No. But I told them I was going. If I don’t, I’ll look like a liar.”

A smaller voice from across the table: “But you are a liar.”

“Jenna, be nice to your brother.”

“I’m being nice.”

“Calling someone a liar is not nice.”

“Neither is being a liar.”

The conversation never came back to Doniel. He was relieved.

That night he dreamt of being locked in a dark box. He had captors, but they weren’t there. It was just him. Trapped, alone. The dream was feverish and unending. He woke to find himself huddled over a toilet, vomiting. He didn’t remember going to the bathroom. Had he started sleepwalking? How long had that been happening?

He peeled himself off the floor, drank a glass of water, and went into his study. He didn’t dare go back to bed. He just kept hearing Nell say those words. Over and over.

It’s like you’ve been hypnotized.

The visceral agony of late-night nausea seemed to seal it. The missing time. The murky memories. The unexamined compulsions. His revelation unfolded fully. He was not himself. He was sure of it now. He was under somebody else’s spell.

He didn’t know the why, where, when, or how of it. But he knew exactly who. He knew the man responsible for what was happening to him.

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Paradise Five

They’d first met ten years earlier on the set of Paradise Five. Doniel’s brother Cooper had warned him not to take the job. It was the kind of picture they made all too often. Based on tenuous intellectual property and with an eye-watering budget large enough to doom the project to commercial failure under anything less than the most ideal circumstances, it featured a cast of relative unknowns, save some “marquee names”—one-time B-listers in the twilights of their careers who had shifted to supporting roles in corporate franchises. The movie was anchored by its lackluster star Taylor Lansing, a 19-year old thespian whose on-screen charisma had been generously described by Variety as that of a “brooding, very attractive, dead fish.”

This was around the time that the town resorted to mining IP from ‘sensational podcasts’ and ‘viral subreddits.’ So the fact that Paradise Five was based on a decently-selling graphic novel seemed like a home run waiting to happen. The script was ludicrous. It centered around five recently orphaned plutocrats who used their inheritance to fund vigilantism by way of high-flying stunts and hyper-stylized violence. It was the sort of premise a drunken ten-year old might have conceived of while playing with action figures in the bathtub. Still, Doniel was convinced that this was his big break. It might have been, too, if things hadn’t gone so tragically wrong.

“If you do take the job—and really, please don’t—you need to put your stamp on it as quickly as possible,” Cooper advised. He was a producer, both in practice and in spirit. And despite his misgivings about Doniel’s first big directing job, he couldn’t help but offer his little brother some sage advice. Bearing Cooper’s words in mind, Doniel decided his first order of business was to address the bland leading man. Taylor Lansing had accrued enough credits for studio executives to convince themselves that he was a commodity. So much so that they’d foregone any screen tests, a stipulation Taylor’s agents had smartly insisted upon. The idea that Taylor Lansing could actually act was the sort of mass-delusion that worked only so long as audiences played along, and Lansing didn’t have the box office receipts to back him up. All his success had come from huge franchises that would have flourished with anyone on the one-sheet. Paradise Five, Doniel feared, was far more “execution dependent.”

When Doniel came on board, the project was alarmingly deep into pre-production, so he’d had to fight hard to recast the principal actor. One of his more candid pitches was along the lines of: “Imagine the story just as we have it—the script is perfect, really, though I have a few notes—imagine the whole thing just like it is, but instead of Taylor Lansing… it’s literally anybody else.”

To shut him up, the powers-that-be gave Doniel latitude to conduct a small talent search, so long as the production’s start-date didn’t change and the burgeoning star never got wind of it.

At the behest of Cooper, Don did exactly the opposite. He conducted a massive, continent-wide casting call. And when there was no blowback from Taylor’s camp, Doniel had Cooper call the actor’s agents directly to tip them off.

“You want him to know. You want him so pissed that he quits the project. Otherwise the studio will shoot down anyone else you bring them. I don’t care if you find the next Marlon Brando— if it’s between an unknown genius and a rotting raccoon with credits, they’ll go with the known quantity. Rule #1 - always give the studio options. Rule #2- never let them choose the wrong option. You need to take the kid off the board.”

Of course, Cooper had glossed over just how contentious the whole process would be. There was a cascade of phone calls with screaming executives and panicked business affairs personnel. More than once, Doniel was convinced he was on the verge of being fired. But the storm passed and the plan worked perfectly. Taylor Lansing dropped out, gracefully citing scheduling conflicts. He’d recently been offered a role starring opposite a digitally-recreated Carey Grant. It had awards-season written all over it and his reps had convinced him it was the better career move. Meanwhile, Don’s epic casting call proved fruitful. He found the perfect leading man: an unknown Canadian by the name of Jackarind Bellows.

Again, Cooper reiterated rules #1 and 2. “Give them the illusion of choice. Bellows is one option. But you need a second option. Someone deeply unpalatable. Maybe that kid from the toy movies. He’s got a massive drug problem. They’ll never insure him. Better yet- put some deformed, handicapped kid in the lineup. Try to sell it as a diversity play. But really try to sell it. Like- if it were up to you, this crippled little mutant would headline every movie ever made. He’s the future of cinema, as far as you’re concerned. But if they really want another option, there’s also this brilliant, devastatingly handsome wunderkind from bumblefuck Canada who will work for scale.”

Again, Don followed his brother’s advice to a T. And again it worked perfectly. The studio signed off. Jack Bellows became the star of Paradise Five. And the project now had Doniel’s fingerprints all over it. Something he would soon come to deeply regret.

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