Jacinda Townsend's "Trigger Warning"

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Mother Country, winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and Saint Monkey, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. She teaches at Brown University.

Here Townsend dreamcasts an adaptation of her latest novel, Trigger Warning:

Trigger Warning’s protagonist, Ruth, is a middle-aged woman who is revisiting the trauma of her father’s murder after the passage of two decades. Ruth would be so well-acted by Jurnee Smollett, who was one of my favorite actresses as a kid. Jurnee is a brunette as an adult, but she still brings that fierce redhead energy to her roles, albeit in the same muted, smoldering aura that Ruth has settled into at the time of my novel’s opening. In attempting to navigate her previously disavowed grief, Ruth absconds with her trans kid, Enix, on a cross-country trip from Louisville to a fictional town in Northern California, and Enix must navigate their mother’s middle-aged attempt at magmic transformation at the same time they themselves are handling gender fluidity and plain old adolescence. I’d cast Storm Reid as Enix: Storm did such a great job on Euphoria, capturing a character’s struggle with a close family member’s dysfunction. The other major character in my novel is Ruth’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Myron, who is bombarded throughout the novel with explosive discoveries about his wife. Ruth has filed for divorce at the opening of the novel, but it is Myron who does the shattering: for Myron’s character, I’d cast Harold Perrineau, who plays earnest yet flawed characters. Harold is a bit dorky and comedic without trying to hard, and exudes a lovably awkward inner strength, just as Myron does.

The soundtrack of Trigger Warning the movie is mostly the soundtrack to Ruth and Enix’s roadtrip. It’s deliciously old school for Ruth’s benefit — there’s the Soft Cell song "Tainted Love" and Van Halen’s Greatest Hits — but Enix is listening to Melanie Martinez and Lil’ Peep. The mood of the soundtrack is everywhere, really, but what all the songs have in common is that they are deeply emotional for all of these characters, all of whom are undergoing their own intense and painful transformations.

Though the novel concerns about three decades’ worth of time, the actual road trip that forms the backbone of the novel takes only the better part of a week. That road trip spans the long stretch of America from Louisville to Northern California, with its terminus point being the fictional town of Rosalind, about twenty minutes south of Sacramento. The American Southwest, of course, is its own dream set; it needs no filtering, and it needs no CGI. I’d love for Trigger Warning the movie to be filmed on location, with the backdrop of wise mountains, and the quietude that allows Ruth to narrate her mind through so much of the novel. Tesla charging stations provide pivotal plot points in the movie, as Ruth picks up a hitchhiker, watches a man freebase in the Tesla next to hers, and meets the stranger who tries to teach Ruth a lasting lesson about love. I’ve never seen a movie filmed at a series of Tesla charging stations: it’d be neat if Trigger Warning the movie was the first!

Visit Jacinda Townsend's website.

My Book, The Movie: Mother Country.

--Marshal Zeringue