From The Idea Hole - Freaky Romance Edition, Part One: Remember Me

I originally planned this one for Valentine's Day, but since I don't want to wait that long, and since I've already set the precedent of posting Holiday themed stuff well before said Holiday (See Here, Here, and Here), I figured, what the hell, let's do this shit now. Here are some ideas for romantic fantasy movies I've been kicking around. First up - 

Remember Me (Or Possibly, Girl Inside My Head)

I'm not sure where this particular idea came from, though I know pieces of it come from different things I've toyed with either in my planned comic book universe, various other script outlines, and so forth. It's basically my attempt at a Michael Gondry style post modern Eternal Sunshiny love story blending real-life and the life of the mind. It starts with a man suffering from a recent break-up, who constantly dwells on the moment the girl he loved told him she was leaving him, flashing back to that day in the park over and over again in his mind, until one day, all of a sudden, the memory changes. Instead of rejecting him, the girl renews her love for him and they stay together. At first he thinks he's just snapped and is re-imagining a scenario rather than remembering a real event, but soon it is revealed that something else has invaded his mind, taking the form of his ex-girlfriend's image and overwriting her memory.

Her name is Mnumonica, a sort of living meme that travels inside the minds of people, hiding temporarily in memories as she bounces from host to host. She knows all the details associated with every memory attached to the person she appears to be, in this case his ex, and normally she will play out those memories exactly as they happened whenever the host thinks back on those events, so as to avoid detection, but here, as she had to relive this moment with him, she felt so sorry for him, that she couldn't help but give him a moment of happiness by making that day feel a little better (alternatively, I thought the memory might just get sick of playing itself out, and berate him for being so obsessed). She reveals to him that she is not there to hurt him, but rather is on the run from a group of creatures that are trying to hunt her down and kill her, and just wants to use his brain for awhile as a safe place. In exchange, she offers to give him insight into what happened with his relationship by literally taking him down memory lane inside his mind, exploring what went wrong. In the process, as he learns they were never really meant for each other in the first place, he begins to fall in love with the thing taking this woman's form.

Events would come to a head with the arrival of the Time Eaters, supernatural beings I imagined as lizard people in human skin, who can blend into human society but always with an eerie presence to them. They eat moments in time, accessed through human memory, with the catch that they can only do so with the permission of the person holding that memory. Basically, they approach people who have things in their past that they regret, bad memories of things they wished never happened, and offer that person the chance to erase that event by eating the memory, and thus changing the course of history in usually very subtle ways. They see Mnumonica as a rare delicacy they wish to eat, but can only do so by getting permission to eat the memories she is inhabiting. To force the issue, since they can't go through our protagonist directly, they go to the other people in his life, trying to make his life in the present worse by removing specific moments in time associated with his past in the minds of others. I don't really have an ending for it, but I know at some point the Time Eaters would convince the ex-girlfriend to erase the entire relationship, removing the memories in his mind and taking away Mnumonica's physical form, as sort of a test to see if he still loves her when she's some abstract thing (a little ball of light or something maybe), which of course he still does. Also, I imagine the one weakness of the Time Eaters would be that if they try to leap into a memory without permission, they lose their powers and become trapped there, forced to act out that scene every time its remembered for as long as the person they are in is alive, and then die when he does.

I was also kind of toying with the idea of a past love, maybe a high school sweetheart who moved on and got married, but he still has the memories, and Mnumonica moves on to that form so they can be together in his mind. Or maybe a woman he knows in the real world like a co-worker that he doesn't like at all, but in his mind, the memory of her is replaced by Mnumonica, where they have this weird mental relationship. My other thought was that she would leave the man's mind and enter into the ex-girlfriend's, overwriting her memories of herself and essentially subsuming her personality, but I thought that would be a bit too mind-rapey. In any case, it would be an examination of the connection between memory, history, and imagination, and a deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl archetype, but, you know, with lizard people. Please let me know if this is too confusing or insane, if you could.

Haruhi Suzumiya is not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I don't care what Google Image Search says

Thank you for your time, and stay tuned for Part Two, where I throw out a giant monster re-telling of Romeo and Juliet, and the epic love story of a juggler and a disembodied head.