Experimental - Amy McDonald

I. Anonymity when dealing with others / leads to / unrestrained emotional responses.


II.  A drama unfolds on the bathroom stall in the women’s bathroom on a college campus.


III. A young female college student walks into the bathroom on the 2nd floor of Mandeville. She is excited to see if there are any new comments on the bathroom stall walls. There has been a thread that has been going on for several weeks now and she is always thrilled to see the latest comment as they have been getting more extreme. As she enters the cold, dank bathroom a smile of anticipation crosses her lips. She walks directly to the last stall on the left. She closes the door, and turn around to read the back of the door..

The “thread” began with one simple line “Why did he have to leave me?” and has ballooned into a web of hate, anger, and empathy - all coexisting in one unlikely place.

Camera zooms into the comment “Why did he have to leave me?” which is written in cursive. As the camera zooms in, the text fades to semi-transparent, as if written on the lens of the camera and a brief scene of a young woman fighting with her boyfriend is behind the text. We can’t see her face, but the tension is palpable as she begs her  boyfriend not to leave and he gets angrier and angrier. The camera then moves along the arrow that is drawn off that comment and zooms in on the next comment. First showing clearly the comment against the dingy bathroom wall, then it becomes semi-transparent and a scene unfolds behind it. This pattern continues until the story plays out completely and we are taken back to the female reading the comments. The images were merely her projections each of the women commenting. The comments will progress into a heated debate over feminist ideals and empathy for the broken-hearted. The inciting incident and convergence play out in the mind of the woman reading the comments as the story we see behind the comments. The protagonist will be the original commenter and the antagonist and ally will be the other women commenting on her original “post”. Bathroom stall writing is the original form of anonymous commentary and conversation threads; which is a large part of our online culture today. I want to draw a parallel between these two forms of anonymity and how the unabashed cruelty that it sometimes produces can have unintended consequences on a complete stranger.

The story above is just an example. For the script, I will use photos of a real bathroom stall “thread” and build a similar story around it.