Wednesday, January 06, 2010

The Trouble with Vorhees

I have a friend whose last name is "Voris", although we all call him "Vorhees" after Jason Vorhees in the Friday the 13th movies. He resembles a cross between David Duchovny and Ed O'Neill from MODERN FAMILY;


But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me back up... I've been having the strangest dreams lately... Vivid dreams with details that linger long after I've woken up...

In the quiet hours of Tuesday morning, I was trapped in a dream that involved our friend Vorhees trying to ruin my life and I could not escape. I will lay out all the details just to emphasize that while it was happening I knew it was too absurd to be real... but when you're trapped in a dream, what can you do?

Like most of these dream journeys, I'm not sure where it began. Suffice it to say, at some point I learn that Vorhees somehow managed to sabotage my movie at Paramount and now it wasn't going to get made. He somehow managed to get hired on as a writer to rewrite the script and purposefully bungled it enough... and furthermore badmouthed the whole project to the point where the production company agreed that it was going to scrap the entire endeavor.

When I learned of this in the dream, I could already appreciate the holes in the story. First off, Vorhees is a computer programmer by trade. Not a writer. He can barely write an email. Beyond that, he has no greater ambitions and is generally very good at not putting a lot of effort into anything.

All of which is not said to disparage him but to point out how patently absurd it was to imagine him going out of his way to purposefully derail my career.

I don't remember how I initially learned of this in the dream. At first, I thought it was a joke. When I confronted Vorhees, however, he owned up to the sabotage. Explaining that the project was getting ruined and that he didn't want to see me go through what he went through when HIS movie got ruined...

Yes, in the dream, Vorhees had written a movie that had been produced and it hadn't turned out well. I can't remember the name of it now (natch) but it seemed to be a period piece epic. And of course, when I looked it up in the dreamworld IMDB, it was there with Vorhees's real name credited as the sole writer. One far-fetched detail after another, screaming to me: THIS IS NOT REAL. And yet, I couldn't escape.

When I called him on the absurdity of this story, he claimed that he'd become good friends with the composer on his film and that had somehow kept him in the Hollywood loop. Enough to get hired on as a writer for my horror movie.

Who was this nightmare Vorhees? Certainly not the chronically depressed underachiever I'd grown to know and love over the years. It was further explained to me that he'd undergone a special operation: there'd been an inordinate build-up of fat in his head and chest that had contributed to his depressed demeanor and underachievement over the years. Once the excess was surgically removed, his head cleared right up. And he decided to ruin my life.

Need more indications that none of this made sense...?

Tony Kushner and his long-time partner were in the same dream. They were somehow friends with Vorhees. Roommates, even, perhaps. Kushner's partner had a pet pig that Kushner disliked—or perhaps Vorhees had the pet pig—but in any case, SOMEBODY wanted the pig dead and my movie not getting made somehow facilitated the murder of this pig!

Yes, it makes no sense. And it made no sense to me when it was happening. And yet, for some reason, I kept searching the (dreamworld) internet to debunk all of this and the (dreamworld) internet kept on CONFIRMING everything that Vorhees and Tony Kushner were telling me. And they both kept insisting that they were doing this for my own good.

This dream disturbed me so much that when I finally woke up, I went on IMDB to look up Vorhees's real name to verify that he had no credits.

I don't believe that dreams predict the future in any way. I believe they exist to play out deep, current concerns. But the way in which they end up playing out sometimes seems completely random. Betrayal and career failure are apparently my top concerns right now.

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