Like a Tim Burton Film Combined with the Bitter Taste of Espresso and Disappointment

Ah, Paris, the city that inspired thousands of artists. It often also inpsires frustration (for me, anyway) but I like to try to Turn It Into Art, not to sound baguette-wavingly, stripey shirt and beret-wearingly pretentious in any way. Précieux? Moi? A Paris? Jamais.

I-- unpretentiously, of course, think of different Ideas for a Novel which I never actually develop or even write down. Since poser artists are too busy Thinking About Creating Art to ever actually create any. There's this joke that makes me think of Parisians a little. It goes, "how many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?" The answer: "it's a really obsure number, you've probably never heard of it." Here are some inspirations over the past years of intense existential suffering (it's really complicated, you probably wouldn't understand) in the City of Light:

Paris: The Video Game. The goal would be to walk on public streets, take the metro and go to a cafe and be as obnoxious as humanly possible and cause maximum inconvenience to everyone else you encounter. I swear this would be more satisfying than Grand Theft Auto where you just do mundane things like steal cars and murder women. Plenty of oppurtunites to be misogynist in this game, too. Like you'd get points for leering at women on the street, telling them that "c'est pas normal" not to give some creepy stranger their cell phone number and following them home at home at night, all behaviour considered relatively normal for Parisian men. You would also get points for everyone you managed to bump into or jostle on the sidewalk or in the metro, especially if you have to dart across the entire empty sidewalk just to bump into them. Extra points for sarcastic comments in the metro. And extra point bonus if you were a waiter (since there would be waiters, of course) who never brought the free water the clients ordered or who took like 45 minutes to make an instant coffee.

Another idea, inspired by my last job, was a corporate espionage thriller. I previously worked as a teacher who went to different fancy companies in the defence industry and taught English classes on the premises. I had a lot of access both physically to the different offices and was often left to wander unattended back to the reception area. Sometimes I also had talkative students who asked me not to repeat whatever corporate secret they'd inadvertantly divulged. I was kind of their therapist who also corrected their grammar. And as a foreigner in France, I'm frequently underestimated. Although it's annoying, I don't think anyone can help it, they hear that you speak with an accent (so cute!) and they assume that you're a little bit stupid. So my secret revenge fantasy was the idea of a corporate spy who worked as an English teacher to gain access to industry secrets, steal them, sell them to the competition and ruin the company. Although I never wrote a word of it, it was satisfying to imagine, especially since all my corportate students in their solipsistic vision of the universe assumed that I existed just to teach them English and probably wasn't smart enough to have an agenda of my own.

I then decided to write about teaching in France in general. Why invent things about corporate spies when I could just narrative what goes on in French higher education in all its mind blowingly dysfunctional splendor? To write about spies, I might also have to watch Julia Roberts movies as 'research' and that wasn't very appealing (didn't she have one called Spies?) I actually did write things down for this, but it kind of lost momentum, especially since I'm trying to be more matter-of-fact and less outraged and incredulous about being a teacher in France since I have to do it until the end of this year.

I had another idea today, though. This is inspired by recent exposure to a cult horror film which I had somehow never seen. I celebrated Halloween by watching the brilliantly suspenseful The Shining. It made me think that not only remote American towns with heavy snow fall could drive someone to madness. I started to imagine a horror film set in the neurotic depression urban capital that is Paris, with chase scenes through the endless corridors of Chatelet, or creepy shots in the Louvre or murder on a bateau mouche. After a partucularly gruesome scene, you could cut away to the Eiffel Tower sparkling. Kind of a Dexter-like contrast between horrible serial killer but so likeable and charismatic. Such a great smile. I think Paris has a quality of cold beauty and indifference that could work well in a horror film.

This city has a mental illness named for it, after all. (Google "Paris Syndrome" sometime). The museums and cemetaries of Paris would be perfect for a horror film. And the metro would have a starring role in inciting people to become aggressive. Which they already are under non-horror film circumstances. It would be hard to tell when evil took over.

I love the humor of TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer which puns on high school horror comedy, or this kind of silly but highly enjoyable horror film called Jennifer's Body which featured lines like:
"I don't know how to tell you this, but Jennifer's evil."
"I know that."
"No, not just high school evil. Really evil."

I'm sure you could easily write a similar scene about Parisians. Like:
"Jean-François is cold and unfeeling."
"Yes, he's Parisian."
"No, in fact, he's been dead for centuries."

Lately, I find Paris a "muse maléfique," really. Kind of dark inspiration in a lonely bleak sunless winter where the only color is several nuanced shades of gray. It makes you feel complex in your own particular brand of suffering and therefore interesting and clever. It has a kind of dark complicated beauty like a Tim Burton film combined with the bitter taste of espresso and disappointment.