Can You Survive?

The Film Concept

Part 4 - Music

Peter Owden, Gusano Productions, 21st July 2009.

Can You Survive? started as a concept for a song as lead singer and lyricist of alternative metal band “Cold Monkey” in late 1998. The idea of how many abhorrent influences there are in the world and how it seems that “every one is out to fuck you up or rip you off” it is a wonder how we ever survive at all. The image of newly born turtles making that “Longest Yard” crawl for the sea, which in itself is infested with lurking dangers, always sprung to mind whenever I worked on this concept. In many ways I found myself almost overwhelmed, or even paranoid that I was only a few steps away from a trap that I would never be able to get out of.

Somehow I survived the following decade and with another few years of experience in survival and with a young family about to bud, the concept appeared again in the form of a feature length film and the third and final part of my Obsession trilogy. Originally in the skeletal guise of a man haunted by the loss of his wife, followed by a zombie psycho movie set in Budapest ( a city that was one of my own obsessions, and an idea that perhaps will become a future Gusano production ) the concept was reshaped into the first moulds of its current form. You would be forgiven for believing we are already talking about three separate movies, but it was the original idea that the title conjures up that took control of the path that was finally ventured.

With both “The Id Girl” and “Never Saw Wall of Voodoo” the protagonist represents the loner and almost the loser in society, an individual that has chosen to succumb to their obsessions rather than to face the daily struggle in the outside world. The type of character that has simply slipped off the edge of an already overloaded cereal bowl. But they have fallen into a space far more disturbing than the real world, where obsessions take complete control.

As the internet envelopes our lives more each year as it gets older, that unhealthy but safe world in one’s own obsessions has become a fruitful hunting ground for those that make the outside world so unappealing to these individuals. It’s no longer safe to hide away from it all, unless of course you don’t use the internet, but lets face it, it’s the obsessive’s favourite playground and almost too much for some to resist.