The script for the following story reeks of the Cohen brothers. Ethan and Joel, that daft American movie-making duo, are a pair of kooky cooks of a Chinese buffet of films flavored with soy and sesame and MSG – and LSD too, maybe.
It might have been pieced together, for all I know, at a Panda Express, chopsticked on the page in calligraphied Chinese glyphs, not Hollywood’s customary Courier font.
It’s a spec scrip, as they say in showbiz: a “speculative screenplay.” Unsought after, unsolicited by and unsold to the cinematic powers that be. It’s one of a million same in Tinseltown. The following is purely speculation on my part, based on a true story in the same manner as, say, “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories.” But it’s stranger than fiction, that much is fact.
“O Brother, Where Art Thou? II” is as befitting a working title as any for the farcical black comedy. It might star Jackie Chan as protagonist Fei Lin, 41, the promiscuous Chinese Pepé Le Pew of Zhejiang, China, a man reputedly packing a panda in his pants as long as the Great Wall. Crotching tiger, hidden dragon.
The script’s logline might read, “Fei Lin’s liaisons with the local Lucy Liu’s – dalliances he diplomatically denies, of course – are well-known in his village, Niqiao. While the trysts were at first sweet, they’ve now soured. Lin’s about to learn a lesson about love. And about loss.”
That July night was a gentle one, albeit tolerably foggy. There was a uniquely Asian sort of tranquility suspended about Niqiao, some at-one existential dew – which belied, at any rate, the Bangkok bedlam to come in Lin’s bedroom, where the ladykiller was sleeping. And solo, too, on this night. For once.
It was around 4 a.m. when four men invaded Lin’s flat with the menace of marauding Mongolians, wrangling him like some misbehaved bronco, and lassoed his head with a bag.
And the plot doesn’t just thicken, here – it engorges. There was a de facto penectomy; and just as quickly as the penis-plundering Huns had ridden in, they rode off again.
“They put something over my head and pulled down my trousers, and then they ran off,” the protagonist might say – lines lifted from Lin’s actual police report. “I was so shocked I didn’t feel a thing – then I saw I was bleeding and my penis was gone.” Fade out. Fin.
It’s here that the story ends, of course. At least for now. Not a happy ending, as it were – but it’s an open-ended one.
“I read a report about a man whose penis had been sewn back on,” mused American travel writer Paul Theroux in “Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train through China.” That was 1988, of course – and “the news items gave [Theroux] the creeps.”
But post-John Bobbitt, a “Frankenpenis” monster isn’t nearly the shrinkage-effecting phallic fright it once was. There’s hope for Lin, in other words – if he can get his hands on his missing member.
Then again, some Chinese men “had what was called ‘one-stage reconstruction of the penis,'” Theroux continued, “which was not a reattachment, but a whole new dick cobbled from spare parts – a piece of rib, a skin graft, some loose tubes.”
A pieces-and-parts penis.
Which – to me, at least – sounds like a hell of a sequel. The world’s a wonderfully weird place, isn’t it?
Phil Sweeney is a 25-year-old English senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_PhilSweeney.
 
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