Cirrus@Austlit

'Urban Girl is a creative exploration of the use of metaphor and imagery to create thematic layering in a screenplay by its “power to involve, influence, and instruct by the combination of form and content” (Mehring, 1990). In writing the short romantic comedy, Urban Girl, I explore the love travails of a country girl who works in the city. Maddy is the quintessential successful twenty-something corporate girl. Pretty much an urban cliché. But in the love stakes she’s cactus. To make it worse, every time she rents out her spare room, her flat mate finds love. Determined to sort the problem, Maddy embarks on a one-day makeover of her inner-city apartment. The Feng-Shui way. But she doesn’t reckon with the forces of nature to disrupt her plans. Urban Girl owes its inspirations to the landscape and characters of my country childhood and the image of the female figure in the landscape - urban or rural. In her discussion of the Female Gothic, Eva Rueschmann (2005) notes that the Gothic in the landscape is both “character and metaphor, setting and psychic space” expressing the “colonialization of the land through stories about women who find themselves geographically and psychologically displaced”. In this script, the imagery of the Gothic with its sense of foreboding and entrapment (Davies, 2016) and the lyrics of the over-the-top country music soundtrack, serve as metaphors for how a young woman may be trapped by roles and expectations that thwart her in her quest for true love.