I normally find the concept of reboots to be a twisted perversion of art, but I must admit that when I heard about the plan to remake “How a Bill Becomes a Law” into a feature-length project, I felt the spark of inspiration. I, David Lynch, am excited to make my first foray into educational entertainment for young children.
We’ll open on a gang of grotesque and morbidly obese businessmen vomiting a black sludge into a rusty bucket. A pale-faced dwarf enters, takes the bucket, and ceremoniously pours it into a contraption.
Note: It MUST be a contraption. Not a machine, not a gizmo, a contraption! A large rolled up piece of paper with arms, legs, and deformed facial features emerges from the contraption. This is our Bill. He will be voiced, spectacularly, by Kyle Maclachlan.
Mortified by this dark destiny, Bill commits suicide. “He’ll be back”, Mitch McConnell will drawl in backwards speech.
I want to note that this project will be scored primarily by synth music without lyrics. The educational lessons of this film will come from character, symbolism, and compelling yet cryptic storytelling, rather than through simple song lyrics.
Never underestimate your audience.
Bill fades away and then reappears on a desk in the U.S. Capitol surrounded by smiling Congressmen. He wakes up.
“Welcome to Committee,” one of them will utter with their speech creepily reversed. Don’t worry, we’ll subtitle the dialogue. It’ll help the kids with their reading comprehension. The Congressmen all smile cheerfully but their eyes are as empty and vacant as those of a Hollywood critic. They will lavish Bill with great adoration and riches. Our poor Bill will naively be taken in by this fanfare at first.
However, he soon begins a secret love affair with Laura Dern! The passion of this affair begins to awaken Bill’s mind to new realities. I see some of you look concerned, so let me assure you, given the target audience, that the nudity will be tastefully framed.
We will begin to witness Bill's very disturbing hallucinations that may or may not be dreams and may or may not be, but probably are also flashbacks to forgotten traumatic memories.
“Who are you?” Laura Dern will continuously ask Bill, even though they have been together for some time. Finally, after a nightmarish vision in which Bill views himself slaughtering scores of people, he frantically and repeatedly starts asking himself the same question: “Who am I!?”
“I’m just a bill,” he’ll answer himself each time. “I’m JUST a Bill!” But each time Bill says this, he’ll sound less certain and more deranged.
Now pay attention, because this next bit is the culmination of Bill’s emotional journey, and I think the kids will appreciate the character arc here. In a manic deranged fit, Bill will literally tear himself open, violently unraveling himself so that he can read the text that makes up his innards, thereby coming to the horrifying realization that he is a bill designed to kick millions of people off of their health insurance. Mortified by this dark destiny, Bill commits suicide.
“He’ll be back”, Mitch McConnell will drawl in backwards speech.
We then cut to the same location as our opening scene to view the disturbing spectacle of the grotesque businessmen carving up our dead Bill and eating him for supper. The dwarf will place an empty bucket on the table.
Sudden and surreal time shift! We now view an ogre writing his signature into the flesh of a new, slightly more deformed, catatonic Bill.
Laura Dern is then superimposed across the screen and furiously shrieks, “This is how a bill becomes a law!” and then starts to laugh and cry maniacally while pulling her hair out.
Cut to black. Roll credits.