Screenplays

This page is under construction, but two screenplays I am considering would tell the story of the goddess Inanna.

The first movie follows Inanna’s rise and her transformation into a military goddess—the “good days,” when she is honored, respected and enormously powerful. She becomes associated with warfare and victory, but gradually begins to understand what those victories actually mean. The spoils of war enrich kings and elites while ordinary people are killed, enslaved and displaced, and conquered women are raped and treated as possessions.

Inanna begins to worry about her own role in this emerging patriarchal order. She is a powerful woman, but her power is increasingly being used in the service of institutions controlled by men. She wrestles with the contradiction: How can she remain the goddess of war while seeing what war is doing to women? How can she celebrate victory when victory means plunder, domination and mass rape?

Her resistance eventually makes her dangerous to the order she once helped legitimize. Her famous “descent” becomes, in the screenplay, something more than a journey to the underworld. It is mandated. She is stripped of her powers piece by piece and effectively neutered, reduced from an unruly and powerful goddess to something increasingly safe and symbolic. Patriarchy got tired of her complaints, so to speak.

Inanna II begins roughly 1,100 years later. Inanna is revived in the middle of a Persian desert. Like Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill, she awakens into violence. She is being attacked and must fight off her assailant before she even fully understands where—or when—she is.

She slowly recovers her identity and discovers what has happened during the centuries she has been gone. The world has changed, but the struggle she began has not. Gods have risen and fallen, empires have expanded, and patriarchal power has taken new forms.

Inanna sets out seeking revenge—or perhaps justice—for what happened to her and for what has happened to women.

One confrontation brings her face-to-face with the great Marduk, representative of a newer imperial order and the god whose mythology celebrates the slaughter of Tiamat, the ancient female embodiment of the primordial sea. Inanna's battle with Marduk becomes more than a fight between gods. It is a confrontation between different worlds and between competing ways of understanding power.

But defeating Marduk cannot end the story.

Inanna gradually discovers that there is no single god, king or empire she can kill to undo what has happened. The structures she is fighting survive their rulers. They move through civilizations, religions, armies, households and eventually into the modern world. The domination of women becomes more sophisticated and sometimes less visible, but it never disappears.

The story that began thousands of years ago therefore has no ancient ending. Inanna's fight continues through the long history of patriarchy and into our own time.

The goddess who once descended does not remain below.

She is still coming back.

Dream casting: I keep imagining Queen Latifah as Inanna.