The first is a fiction set in a Market Town at a remote intersection of trading routes across a wild 7th Century Wiltshire landscape, a town where merchants grow rich and pay their taxes to The Club, which in return keeps order, suppressing revolt among the underclass using collective threats so fantastic no one person dares test them for emptiness.
Officers of The Club make a point of demonstrating their violent capability on any member of the underclass who fails to achieve a safe distance as they pass. Random brutality, just common enough that everybody knows someone who has been a victim of it, is considered key to keeping the underclass afraid and obedient.
Most of the first reel is taken up by showing everyday life in the town, highlighting the relationships between the merchants, the underclass and The Club. Only at the beginning of the second reel do we meet the principal character, Steve, young and unmarried, a member of the majority underclass, who devises a plan to overthrow The Club.
Carefully and as quietly as possible, Steve begins recruiting members to his Rival Club. His manifesto promises an end to random brutality and a start to the sharing of the town's wealth more equally between its citizens such that all could be proud that no one in their town need starve or want for shelter. To the underclass this would be undreamed of luxury.
By the end of the second reel, though there are still only a handful of actual members of Rival Club, there is an uncustomary excitement among the underclass as word spreads of the hope being offered them for a brighter future.
The third reel is faster paced as news of Rival Club's existence and rapidly increasing popularity reaches The Club and its officers immediately carry out a spectacularly violent and unusually brutal, even by their own standards, demonstration of their continuing authority within the town, randomly selecting men to kill and women to rape as they set fire to houses in which children still hide.
The few who joined Rival Club stand, fight and are promptly despatched by officers of The Club. Hundreds of others are killed, too, many of them while helping their families to escape the town, leaping for their lives from its walls. Steve is nowhere to be seen.
Gradually those who have escaped gather together, just out of range of the arrows that every now and then still overfly the town walls. The camera pans across a dark sea of empty eyes and blank expressions, not one person yet able to comprehend what they have all witnessed, their fleeting dream having so suddenly become a reality more terrifying than their worst nightmare.
Orphaned infants wail, the luckiest in the arms of older siblings. The newly widowed hold tight to their children or grieve their loss alone. Few men have survived to follow their loved ones to freedom. Steve stands anonymously at the edge of the crowd, unharmed.
With the sky over the poorest quarter of the town glowing red with flame and with the air still filled with the screams of those unable to escape, one young mother recognises Steve near her. Her eyes lock to his and she asks him coldly, "Now what?" Steve says nothing, turns from the small crowd and walks slowly into the darkness of the Wiltshire night.
The survivors cannot return to the town. The wild landscape is vast and as poor townspeople who have never travelled they know nothing of its geography. As their adrenaline levels begin to fall they feel cold and resign themselves to having little choice but to all walk off into the darkness together, following the footsteps Steve left in the soft ground. Roll Credits.
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The second fiction starts on the morning after the massacre, the sun rising slowly on a dishevelled band of cold, tired and hungry people, huddled together against the wind in silence. All are traumatised by what they have seen. None are yet able to speak of it.
The story is played out like a lightly comic road movie. Steve, no fleeter of foot than average, is patently unable to shake off his univited followers so he decides to organise them into a functional, self sufficient unit, making up rules for them as problems arise, often having to revise them later on when circumstance has changed.
It isn’t long before followers begin to realise Steve is just leading them round in circles and start openly questioning his wisdom. Each time a challenge to his authority arises, the camera follows Steve as he disappears off for a think before returning with a masterful piece of spin to keep his followers on side regardless of what has happened. As the challenges become greater, so Steve’s spin becomes more fantastic to counter them.
Steve’s masterplan is to grow his band of followers into an army with which to exact revenge upon The Club. Looking at those he has with him, it may take a while before they are ready.
Decades are skipped through with only significant events being shown. Battles are won and battles are lost. Many followers die in a single battle and Steve’s spin convinces only the few who remember the massacre in Market Town to remain loyal to him. For if they stop believing in his wisdom now they must accept they need not have believed it then and their loved ones need not have died.
Too few in number now to wage war on his behalf, Steve leads his handful of followers to the village of Other Market, only a few days travel from Market Town, hoping to settle into quiet obscurity.
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The third and final fiction in the series begins in Other Market, where the quiet obscurity Steve by now craves is impossible to achieve. Other Market is a small village where no one goes unnoticed and through which many travellers pass en route to Market Town and Steve is soon identified and hauled before a public inquisition on the village green, the arrival of his reputation having preceded that of his physical being by a good many years.
In the eyes of the villagers, Steve’s attempt to settle anonymously in their midst is proof enough of his personal ambition alone being responsible for the massacre at the end of the first film and for all the deaths and woundings in battle his followers have suffered since.
Facing a lynching and already in the hands of the mob, Steve spins a speech to save his life and by the end of it has vowed his intent remains as ever it was and that he has not come to their village to hide but instead to raise and inspire a new army with which to drive The Club from Market Town.
After a few unsuccessful battles and some very creative spin to keep the momentum of his campaign up after each expensive loss, Steve does eventually raise an army of sufficient size and skill to carry out his original Rival Club manifesto promises, to liberate the underclass of Market Town and improve their lot.
While grateful at being liberated, there were many in Market Town who still carried scars from the last time they had placed their trust in Steve and they demanded an explanation as to why, if he believed in the infallibility of his mission as much as he had convinced everybody else to, he had run away at the first sign of trouble, as he had been witnessed by a number of survivors to have done. Steve has a very long think before spinning another speech to save his life again before a very uncertain crowd.
To those who don’t remember the massacre, Steve is their liberator, their rescuing hero. To those who do, rich or poor, Steve is a cowardly liar. Demographics have it that Steve becomes Mayor of Market Town and he immediately makes challenging his authority an offence punishable by death and demonstrates its enforceability.
Steve’s regime is no less brutal than that in any other town in England at the time but the brutality is less random in its delivery to members of the underclass than it was The Club. Now a law has to be broken and there is a punishment to fit each crime.
Steve’s laws are strict, and public punishment is always painful, often permanently damaging and sometimes fatal. When Steve is discovered to have failed to follow his own law he spins yet another speech to save his life, inventing new detail in the law as he goes to permit his own transgression to go unpunished and to enable any such future trangressions to go undiscovered. No one challenges his authority so to do.
It isn’t long before the law has been detailed as much as it needs to be for Steve and those close to him to enjoy freedoms denied to others under the same law and the practice of re-detailing law all but dies out.
The office of Mayor of Market Town and the associated absolute authority within the town walls is passed down through generations of Steve’s family until a period of unrest in the wider county brings the peaceful stability of Market Town under threat again from the latest incarnation of The Club.
On learning of the threat, the incumbent Mayor takes the town's cash and flees to the hills, promising to return with a mercenary army as soon as he can and leaving the town gates open so The Club won't need to break them down to get in.
Roll credits over images of decades passing with no sign of the promised rescue as poverty and oppression under The Club re-establish themselves with a vengeance in Market Town. Cut in shots of the missing Mayor growing old and dying in a comfortable, distant palace.
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But I just know that many years from now, when my trilogy has all but faded from memory, when everybody knows the names of my films and considers them classics but everybody who ever saw them has died, someone will revive Steve’s legend, selectively amending it to suit their time and intent.
By gifting Steve with as many superpowers as the person revising my script considers their audience will have to swallow to cover the gaps created in its sense by their heavy handed approach to abbreviation, a new story will emerge, quite different from mine.
Of course, once SuperSteve has been given magic powers it will be implied that his descendents would naturally be similarly blessed and that it would therefore be perfectly possible that the missing Mayor, the cowardly liar who died behind the credits of my original film, could yet come back with his promised army of liberation.
Then the Market Town PR machine will kick into high gear and the gullible poor will give their hard earned money back to the rich for the privelege of waiting, exactly as instructed to in SuperSteve’s rewritten dialogue, for the missing Mayor to return to free them from poverty and oppression rather than challenge whichever Mayor it is who is keeping them poor and oppressed at the time.
For safety reasons, I remind you that my trilogy of fictions is set in a wild 7th Century Wiltshire landscape and that my principal character is called "Steve".
Hundreds of years will pass before the fourth film is made and the trouble really starts.
© 2012 John Barrow (Po)
