Script to Screen; Initial Mindmaps

I think 'Genie' is a really interesting character to be assigned, and over the past few days I've realised how ambiguous this character archetype is. As far as I'm aware, most narratives involving a Genie use them as more of a plot driving mechanism than a character, and therefore their more personal side is often left unexplored/undefined. I could go down this road myself and introduce some human protagonist who meets the Genie and has wishes granted, but I'd really rather not as I think this has been explored ad-infinum, and it really sidelines the importance of the Genie being a character, as opposed to some magical wish-granting turnip or other magical inanimate object that could fulfil the same role. 

I want the Genie to be my protagonist, but one of the first obstacles I've run into is deciding what a Genie would be fundamentally driven by. One of the first character attributes that you can turn to in order to start thinking up a narrative, is what drives the character. A pirate wants money, an astronaut wants to explore the cosmos, a detective wants to solve a case, or at least these stereotypes can drive our initial understanding of their motivations, until you later develop or subvert them. However, a Genie, perhaps because they are largely plot devices, don't really have personal motivations, other than to grant wishes, which is a bit boring.

In the last slide, I've identified some opposing themes between the setting/prop and my main character which I think could be key to coming up with a meaningful narrative. Genies are generally extremely powerful; their exact amount of power is often left unexplored, but since Genies can often grant practically any wish, bar a few fickle exceptions, their power may as well be unlimited. They can manipulate reality in any-which way effortlessly, and create anything anyone could ever want instantly, for no price. They are spirits, so presumably they are also immortal, and do not die of old age. They seem to be disconnected from time, exist without consequence, and violate causality.

Greenhouses, and the plants within them, are in a way, a symbol for our limited power in life, and for consequence. The idea that in order to reap the reward of even a few vegetables, you have to put in months of careful planting, watering, monitoring and feeding, and there's danger that if you make a wrong decision, the plants will die, your efforts will be for nothing. But at the end of it, there's a strange feeling of satisfaction, and the produce that you end up with seems to somehow have more value than anything you could have bought instantly from the store, despite being not all that different.

A diary is a record of the passage of time, and more importantly, symbolic of causality. The idea that no matter how unbelievably turbulent and confusing someones life has been, it can always be described as a series of sequential events, each one leading on to the other, linking any two moments in time no matter how disconnected they may appear. It's a record of someone's existence, proving that a persons life is not just a jumble of disconnected events; that it has a direction, and that past and future moments in a persons life are not interchangeable, because the person has changed.

All this might seem a bit random and specific, but I'm thinking about the grounding forces that a Greenhouse and a Diary represent, that a Genie might not have. On Tuesday we talked about the threat of over powered characters in films (such as 1978 superman), taking away any real feeling of threat, consequence, or reward in their own universe. They have so much power, that nothing even really matters, and change the universe so drastically, so often, that time doesn't even seem to have any meaning within the narrative anymore.

I could ground my genie, by giving him arbitrary rules and fitting him into a narrative that way, or I could make the narrative about this exact problem, and have the Genie absolutely far too over-powered, and struggling with this exact existential crisis. Perhaps this has something to do with why an all-powerful and immortal spirit would so often put aside his infinite powers, to tend to his flower-garden, and write entries in his personal diary.

(Note: Obviously, this is just one rough idea, I don't want to make out that anything is solidifying yet)