the overview affect
The Overview Affect was a short film script (later feature length script) I wrote after a year of living in New Zealand.
In many ways, the journey of the main character, Olivia Park Meister, mirrored my own. It was about a young woman who felt lost, and was trying to find meaning, belonging and love through travel. It’s about friendship, self-loathing, and the kind of wild self exploration only made possible by youth. The script was a way of processing - if not glamorousing - my own process of growing up.
As I’d summarised it at the time:
The Overview Affect is a coming-of-age story (“Bildungsroman”) about a directionless dreamer on the brink of a mental breakdown, who takes off across America in search of adventure with an overachieving stoner riding shotgun. The protagonist, Olivia Park Meister, 21, drops out of college and skips town for Portland with her friend, Charlotte Caulfield, 21, who is looking for a final adventure before Air Force Surgeon’s Assistant training begins in January. The film follows their road trip, during which Olivia deals with depression and self-discovery, and Charlotte grapples with gender and sexuality.
This is what I wrote about the project in 2014, when, alongside two friends from undergrad, when we planned to transform the short film script into a feature:
“The Overview Affect” began as a 20 page outline I wrote during my own leave-of-absence from university in early 2013. What began as a casual reflection and a latent fascination with “untranslatable words”, which are lexical gaps that cannot carry over into any other language, soon developed into a full-blown enterprise when classmates Charlotte Caulfield and Hannah Jane Cohen jumped on board. Together, we rewrote the initial short into the feature-length film (and accompanying “MMNTS” project) that you’re now reading about.
“The Overview Affect” is a lot of things: it combines space travel with linguistics, social media with growing pains– all in a bumbling truck that may or may not make it cross-country. But despite all this, it has elements of stories we’re all too familiar with: the desire to escape, to fit in, to change, and ultimately the longing to create something greater without knowing where to start.
Let’s be honest: we don’t aim to break new ground with this story. While I was working at a hostel back in New Zealand, it became pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that everyone actually searches for the same things, albeit in different ways. This hasn’t changed in thousands of years, despite our self-awareness, our cynical irony and our technology (or lack thereof). We call this the modern age, yet we still go on the road to find that elusive something- which usually ends up being ourselves.
So at first, the idea of combining the cliché with the untranslatable seems incompatible. But that’s where it gets interesting: although these words are impossible to translate properly, they still embody the experiences of the road that unfolds before Olivia and Charlotte. They still resonate, despite the “lacuna”. At the end of the day, both are exploring the same universal concepts that consume our lives, particularly during our formative years.
It’s a tricky line to tread. If there’s anything globalization and modernity have granted us, it’s self-awareness of these parallel stories. Some may find it alienating, even disillusioning, while others may find it freeing. This self-awareness is both the bane and the beauty of the “overview effect” itself: the feeling astronauts get when they look down at earth from space.
When one can take a step back to see how small we really are in the scheme of things, a road trip about two twenty-somethings may seem silly. But it’s not. “The Overview Affect” is about celebrating the essential universality of all our stories, least of all Olivia and Charlotte’s. There’s a little bit of both of them in all of us, and that doesn’t make you an unoriginal snowflake. It just means that we’re all in this together.
While the movie was ultimately never made, we did make a proposal and shot promotional material for a press pack.
