Donut Parade synopsis and outline: ‘Donut Parade’ (work-in-progress title) is an open-ended sequence of dialogues, monologues and dumb-show interactions transpiring in an interconnected media limbo. Primary settings are the sound stages and offices of a small market television station in the 1980’s. Donut Parade is about television.
‘Donut Parade’ is seeded by the writings of Stanley Cavell. In the 1980’s Cavell began suggesting that the ubiquity of screened experience reveals as it creates as it reveals our anxiety about the gradual disappearance of conditions favorable for human life. As existence is captured and distributed onto screens (Cavell proposes) we displace and hide our fears about the future. For Cavell our modern mode of perception is to view feeling unseen: the limit being we unsee ourselves. What does the Little Screen screen? It screens me from the world it shows.
‘Donut Parade’ will be exploited as a ‘mise en abymea’ narrative: text, setting and montage creates a fugue-like recursive structure. Themes of horror, slapstick, screens as mirrors, regret, surrogate families, loneliness, and the natural world will be developed.
‘Donut Parade’ evokes traditions of a ruined city being where god’s treasure is. God loves the broken and the destroyed. Why evoke otherwise?
Camera work, camera angles, and ‘performance’ : The characters never fully know what the camera sees as they are ‘performing’: true for our lives, true for Cavell, true for Donut Parade. Unattended studio cameras are pointed at the TV news set whereas other cameras present have been pushed or swung pointing randomly off-set to capture events deep in the recesses of the building: cameras point at nothing, capture everything. There is a precarity in all the monitoring and all the performances.
In ‘Donut Parade’, as in all the world up and downstream, the machine returns our gaze.