they write on me with their cocks and their tongues, with their dirty fingernails digging into my hair. harry knows, harry says he knows and he looks at me like i’m a piece of shit but he doesn’t know anything. he smirks like he knows when he knows nothing of it, he knows nothing about it but he tries, goddamn how he tries to look right through me. and my cunt answers to him like he’s calling it to his fucking fingers, like all he has to to do is snap those coarse fingers of his and it should just fucking jump to his whim. i push him onto the bed because he doesn’t fucking know like all the rest but he’ll do for now, he’ll do because he fucking tries. even when he gets it all wrong, his fingers get it right.

do any of them know? does someone need to know? should there be a confidante? no. no confidante. although the idea is appealing, someone to interject some (version of the) truth of amanda, possibly bring in some history, i.e. the sumerian king and his punishment of bashing the offending woman’s teeth out with a tablet of clay.
harry knows, or suspects. doesn’t care? accepts? another twist. no, no. too many.
points to hit-
1. meeting each husband
2. her death
3. each husband meeting the other
4. each husband identifying the body
5. scenes from her childhood
6. on the set of first movie
7. premiere of first movie at festival (?)
not necessarily in that order, nor conclusive
from Moviemaker’s Master Class by Laurent Tirard, the section on John Boorman, “Directing is really about writing, and all serious directors write.”
voices, voices everywhere and overrun her, they write their stories on her and she eventually frames, puts them in the picture. they write and talk about her, all over her, their words on her skin, they skin her alive, and she puts them in the frame, mocks them, seduces them, uses them, discards them, over and over, they talk and she gets them in the shot, shoots them all down, scripts them until they no longer see themselves, stupid and blind with their talking, with their pointing, their figuring of her, as if they could figure her out and she’s got them all splashed across the screen, she’s got them in 35mm.

amanda is an aspiring independent filmmaker from spokane, washington who was kicked out of her home when she turned eighteen. her father left her when she was relatively young but her mother soon remarried a rancher. the rancher was a good man, strict and fair, but let her mother have the most say in her upbringing.

amanda met harry at an atm machine he was fixing while she waited to withdraw some cash, a little over year after she had married tom. he is, on the surface, a brute but with a self deprecating sense of humor. well read and seemingly knowledgeable, they both felt easy and also uneasy with each other. harry ultimately is an odd mixture of anger and kindness, coldly analytical but also impulsive. for the most part he cannot be reasoned with, resolute in his opinions and even more so if argued with or contested.
out of the three, amanda had the most chemistry with him although neither of them could specifically point out as to why. his job confused her, it seemed out of place for him, particularly when he often wrote pieces that had, as amanda would say, “an attention to mundane details that leave you haunted.” she would often trawl through them for material, never finding anything suitable for her films. he had no interest in publishing, claiming it was just something he did to pass the time, just something he felt compelled to do.
he often chided amanda for “not thinking things through” which she thought ridiculous considering the plethora of details involved in filmmaking (cinematography, sound, editing,) that harry, as technically minded as he was, barely had a grasp on. for harry i’m debating whether or not to shoot his story through with straight minimalist prose (i.e. carver, a little beckett-but not too much), poetic/elliptical prose (i.e. “without the inherent sickness of blanchot” -don byrd) or something along the lines of a technical manual (since he is an atm technician); it depends how far out there i want to be.

tom is amanda’s second husband, a native new yorker in his early thirties who fashions himself a real estate developer and often points out how he is already a millionaire. he owns a bar in the lower east side handed down to him from his father who also owned the building, near where amanda’s corpse was found. he met amanda during her last year at film school, when she asked him if she could film her final project in his bar. taken by her and intrigued by the idea of his father’s bar showing up in a film that, who knows, might end up on tv one day, he’d agree if she went out to dinner with him. they were married in a civil ceremony a little over a year later, tom becoming her patron and often funding a great portion of her projects.
however, with his financial support came a degree of paranoia and an overwhelming desire to control her. he often accused her lying when she wasn’t, even though he had never even asked her if she was involved with anyone else when they had met, let alone if she was already married. the idea just never occurred to him but he doubted her fidelity and honesty at every turn. they often fought about the subject matter of her movies, accusing her of the same sort of promiscuous behavior some of her early work depicted. he would talk while they watched classics, offering opinions that were not only uncalled for but drove amanda completely up the wall. but he could also be kind and incredibly patient with her, particularly when she felt an overwhelming anxiety that left her powerless.
while touching upon some of their early moments together, tom’s storyline will be one of him piecing together his accusations with her absences into the lives of her other husbands. he will be wrong most of the time, as he’d often been, but will never know it. for tom, there will be a mixture of regret and betrayal, an overwhelming sense that he had done more than enough for her but it wasn’t enough competing with the feeling that he could have done more to keep her, that he was guilty in not only keeping her faithful in their marriage, but also in not preventing her death. given his possessive and controlling nature, the police believe he might have had a hand in her death.

ian is unbelievably handsome, amanda has told him time & again he has “a certain kind of quality that makes you immediately fuckable, almost impossible to resist if you weren’t so not there.” he is amanda’s first husband, having moved with her to new york when she started film school there, modeling underwear for one of the department store chains.
he has no ambition, avoids confrontation, usually stares off into the distance during heated arguments with amanda. he never initiates contact, affection or conversation. he watches the occasional football or baseball game but doesn’t root for any particular team. he doesn’t even have a preference for any specific beer, taking whatever is offered to him. since arriving in new york, he’s had multiple flings with photographers’ assistants, none of which ever amounting to a full blown affair.
his storyline will consist of these sort of scenes, starting from their first fight but jumping back and forth throughout the course of their lives. from his perspective, amanda will appear passionate and often times apparently jealous, clearly yearning for something more from him other than his constant neutrality and inertia. out of the three husbands, however, ian will be the most heart broken with amanda’s death, his reflections on her being the most poignant.

“According to inscriptions describing the reforms of the Sumerian king Urukagina of Lagash (ca. 2300 BC), he is said to have abolished the former custom of polyandry in his country, on pain of the woman taking multiple husbands having her teeth bashed out with a clay tablet.”
-Wikipedia entry on Polyandry
see also this “Multiple Husbands” entry featuring a documentary on polyandry from YouTube
Transgressional fiction or transgressive fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who use unusual and/or illicit ways to break free of those confines. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressional fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social and/or nihilistic.
-Wikipedia entry on Transgressional Fiction
amanda, a female polygamist and an aspiring independent filmmaker from the northwest is found dead in the lower east side of new york city. she was married to three men, all living in and around new york: harry, tom and ian, each successful men, with various qualities between them. harry is a brute, tom is controlling and jealous, ian beautiful but detached. when each husband is brought in to identify her body, the secrets of her life and the mystery of her death are revealed.
four storylines, possibly five, three of which focus on amanda & each of her husbands told in flashback, one set in the present when the body is found and another focusing entirely on amanda as a filmmaker and leading up to the night of her death. interspliced scenes, echoing sentiments and contrasts between the three separate lives and her own filmmaking. perhaps footage, told in her voice. this not a police procedural, this is not about if one or all of her husbands killed her or not (although one of them might have). possibly difference in word choice as well between the flashbacks, as if each husband is telling his own version of her story, or perhaps the opposite, 3rd person for them, first person for her, giving a certain kind of ‘artistic’ attention to detail, etc.
trying to tackle themes about art, gender, love, marriage and morality. larger question, an old one, is the artist necessarily moral/immoral? how does love inform art and vice versa? how do the complications of marriage and loyalty get thrown into question because our protagonist is a female polygamist?
Logistical issues-
-Time management (she travels to shoot her films, when does she spend time with husbands, when does she film?)
-Even if moderately successful, wouldn’t she bring one husband or another? wouldnt her friends eventually figure it out?

the life & death of a female polygamist told as her three husbands meet each other to identify her body in the morgue.