Double Intervention. Even then, when I first planted its fragile seed and kept nurturing and watering it, I could see how the title I came up with was anything but memorable. Yet, rather than altering it, I became too committed to my first choice, my first instinct, all due to an inner necessity to keep things consistent.
I had this orange notebook where I used to jot down all of my stupid ideas and brilliant insights. Unlike Blackbird Whisper, whose origin story I remember in its most vivid details, where nothing, even the most insubstantial thing, could slip into oblivion, the case of Double Intervention is different, and whether that is for the better or the worse, I am incapable of distinguishing.
There was no life incident that gave birth to it, as was the case with Blackbird Whisper. There was no song that ushered it into existence, which was exactly how it happened with I Made ***. There was no mental state that sired it, contrary to the case of A Deal ***. There was no emotional background that could keep feeding it, which was, in its trajectory, the fate of Watch ***.
And perhaps that was the exact reason why, unlike other stories of mine, be they in the form of screenplays or novels, it required little time. What’s more, it extracted not much of a toll either. It was as if the sheer bandwidth it consumed, the investment it exacted, was not substantial, not that consequential either.
As established earlier, the very root of the origin of Double Intervention eludes my memory altogether. It might be the very absence of its emotional landmark, interiority, and climate that made me not hold on to the reason and peculiarities of its genesis. In the end, it just became a part of several listed loglines inside the notebook of thin cover yet thick content.
Those loglines were important less because they themselves carried any particular weight than because I prided myself on my capacity for world-building.
As an excuse for such foolishness, I bring up my youthfulness at the time. I was young; hence, it was inevitable not to possess slightly foolish ideas, not to have somehow exaggerated understanding of one’s innate gifts and learned skills.
Thus, one day in August of 2021, perusing through the scribbles of my orange notebook, I came across this story, the one I apparently had already begun developing into a short story, influenced by the creative writing course I had taken and finished as of January 2020.
Amusingly, whether by mere coincidence of events or design of destiny, the fact that the short story was written in English paved the way for its smooth transition into a feature-length screenplay in English.
Though I would like to stave off the reckoning, to admit either case, it took me less than two months to complete the screenplay from start to finish. What’s more, unlike the rest of my compiled collection, it didn’t demand the further creation of polished, amended drafts.
The way the idea reached me, smoothly and impeccably, its execution arrived in a similar fashion.
The fact that it happened so was indeed essential, taking into account how all the previous five screenplays that came before it, Blackbird Whisper included, yielded meager results and fell short of all the elevated expectations set back in 2020, when the horizon of English-language artistic pursuit had only just begun to unfold.
The creation of Double Intervention seemed to be able to soothe something in me: maybe anxiety, maybe dread, maybe all-encompassing anticipation for a possible dim future, where all the risks that had first been taken, all the sacrifices that had then been made, all the struggle that had at last been undergone were about to teeter on the precipice of irrelevance and insignificance.
In a way, though no deep and drowning emotional scale accompanied the birth and further construction of Double Intervention, its arrival ensured that the reservoir of my personal emotional landscape wouldn’t be depleted, wouldn’t end up dry.
By October of 2021, I awoke to a sense of renewed momentum and drive. The first five screenplays I had written were all dark and heavy; perhaps even, though not horror in their genre, they somehow most definitely loomed around the epicenter of horror-ish essence at their core. (And all because they “came” from me and to me.)
And the sixth screenplay that followed, for which I bestowed the title of Double Intervention, less inspired by an Oscar-winning movie of the 1920s of a similar name and more by a dialogue that would appear close to the ending of the story, was the opposite of what its previous predecessors had positioned themselves to be.
In the case of Double Intervention, horror, dread, terror, and heaviness were not the weight of its emotional impact, but rather the genre by whose rules the narration developed itself.
Not that I would or could firmly state that Double Intervention is a horror story, though I can’t deny its horror elements either.
The online mode of studies that my university conducted throughout the full year, from March 2020 to August 2021, was about to reach its closure, though the word “closure” was not yet the exact descriptive word for my hidden artistic aspirations per se.
I didn’t know I was bound to return there. I didn’t know I would be called back. If I had known, I wouldn’t have severed all ties to my former self and previous path, but if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have created all the screenplays I had produced till that exact second. I chose my trade, and by doing so, I paid with something tangible and concrete and ended up with something less material in shape, more spiritual in essence.
Don’t ask me whether regret is what I harbor inside me. Because if you do, if you ask, I am afraid I will neglect you along with your question.
Thankfully, though how deceptive of me to use this word when, in fact, I am anything but grateful for everything that had fallen upon me, but still... Thankfully, among all the excessively spiritual drafts, there was something more of a sellable package, and when I claim that, it is toward Double Intervention that I refer.
After having received all the rejections from the contests to which I had sent all the screenplays whose births had happened to come prior to Double Intervention, I needed something, some force and token that could restore the sense of hope and belief that I was almost on the verge of losing, though perhaps the better word here is less “losing” and more “abandoning.” And Double Intervention crystallized into that very energy, the “transmutation” which was especially essential and necessary, taking into account how, packing my things, back to the place with which I had once cut all ties and contemplated never returning to, I was now bound to return, called by the message which I happened to accept so thoughtlessly.
I pressed the “submit” button, and with another screenplay of mine, this time the one called Double Intervention, out in the world to determine the weight of the luck factor in my life, I booked a train back to the place that was once shut to me and my peers, all due to the pandemic that had spread and, who knew, was meant to halt not just the mere lives of people but the possibility of their futures.
Reckoning, or rather assuming, that all the prior failures were owing to how the style of my writing and the genres themselves were too dark, too “detached” from commercial appeal, I thought Double Intervention was meant to “fix” “those broken” things.
That thought, that assumption, though, lasted no more than a day, and with the passage of it, instead of entering the train with a feeling of elevated euphoria, I left one city in exchange for another with a rising sense of defeat. I could already feel its approaching steps, yet to the very last second, I promised myself to stay in a fighting mode. At that time, I wasn’t yet aware of how all I was doing was staying in the mode of denial.
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