Scenes from Next Year's Oscar-Nominated Biopics
Alexander Fleming’s wife lies in bed coughing pitifully, waiting for the sickness to take her. Fleming paces in the background—back and forth, back and forth—a brooding silhouette against the drawn curtains. “Alex,” she whispers, almost too softly for him to hear. He kneels down beside her, takes her hand. “Promise me…” She is overcome by another coughing fit. “Anything,” Fleming whispers back. Their eyes meet, and they both realize it’s for the last time. “Promise me you’ll find a cure for bacterial infections.” Her head falls to the pillow, and the empty space it leaves draws Fleming’s gaze to a moldy sandwich on the far nightstand.
“Keep dreaming, pal,” the barkeep scoffs. “No one has ever composed a symphony while deaf. It can’t be done.” “I believe what you mean to say,” Beethoven says, a twinkle in his eye, “is that no one has done it yet.”
The apple hits the stage floor with a thud. The audience is frozen, unsure of what they’ve just seen. Then, a few scattered murmurs, giving way to excited chatter. And then, one man in the third row rises to his feet as if drawn by invisible marionette strings, a stunned, blank look on his face. He begins to clap. Two more join him, and then entire sections, and suddenly every scientist in the auditorium is on his feet. The roar is deafening. “God damn it, Isaac,” Newton’s previously disapproving father murmurs from the back of the room. “You really did it. You really discovered gravity.”
“One if by land, two if by sea,” Paul Revere repeats, staring out the window. And—is this a trick of the eye? No. A light, in the distance, flickering… “They’re coming,” he whispers. “By sea.”
The final curtain falls and for a moment it seems as though time has stopped. And then: applause, scattered at first but building upon itself, like a snowball rolling down a hill, and now the whole auditorium is on its feet. “God damn it, Shakespeare,” whispers Shakespeare’s former lover who spurned him but is totally regretting it now. “You did it. You wrote Hamlet.”
“The ideas that Freud espouses are not just wrongheaded,” sputters the physician, loosening his weird little early-nineteenth century necktie, “but they are dangerous! To claim that psychopathology can be treated through a dialogue between the patient and the analyst, it—it will be the end of us all! This man must be stopped, or my name is not Wilhelm Motherpenis! Whoops, I mean—” “I rest my case,” says Freud. Everyone applauds for fifteen minutes straight.
[Jeremiah Budin is a person and a website]
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