Fade is about personal identity, marriage, and death — sometimes all at once, sometimes separately.
Arthur Dichter (David Connolly) thinks he’s dying of insomnia, but the reality is much more frightening. He wanders the streets, finding new ways to keep his body moving, even self-mutilation. He’s lost the ability to communicate, keeping a journal to express his private thoughts with no intention of sharing it with his wife Anna (Sarah Lassez, The Blackout, Mad Cowgirl). His doctors (Michael T. Weiss, The Pretender; Steven Petrarca, Threat Matrix) wonder if he’s suicidal. Anna denies it, knowing he is in a waking nightmare where delusions and reality become more and more indistinguishable. As his disease gives way to despair, loneliness and alienation, he and Anna hang on to their last shred of hope until the bitter end.
The first stirrings of the story come from a real, but strange illness; Fatal Familial Insomnia, when it appears, keeps a person awake round the clock until his body no longer functions and he dies.
We used this as a nice starting point to look into the corners of strained relationships and see what dust death kicks up there.
Our narrative technique is one of angles and more corners; we like to look at scenes sideways, from above or below, but never straight on. The effect is closer to a nightmare than to bedtime story. Fade is a story of sleeplessness, told through a nightmare-the nightmare of dissipation, sorrow, and early death.
© 2006, Anthony Stagliano
Used with Permission