In a bold move, the colossally arrogant film director Horst Gack has bought the rights to the much-loved cartoon character Unconscious Squirrel! The Unconscious Squirrel, and is planning to feature it in his forthcoming adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s poem The Moon And The Yew Tree.

The film, with a working title of Unconscious Squirrel! The Unconscious Squirrel In Sylvia Plath’s The Moon And The Yew Tree is to be shot entirely in Plath-O-gape-vision, an exciting new cinema technology developed by Horst Gack’s mysterious wife and collaboratrix Primrose Dent. According to press releases, Plath-O-gape-vision will utterly transform the viewing experience, rendering everything from action thrillers to comedies to submarine heist genre movies into a uniform “blackness – blackness and silence”.

Professor Dimity Cashew, an academic in the Department of Plathology at the University of Ack, has been quick to point out that there are no squirrels, conscious or unconscious, in the poem, only small bats and owls, and is fretful that Horst Gack’s screenplay will trivialise Plath’s work. In an open letter to the director, posted on her blog, she asks:

How are you going to insert a cartoon squirrel into your ill-advised film treatment without doing violence to the legacy of Saint Sylvia?

Horst Gack, being Horst Gack, replied within thirty seconds, in a comment, or diatribe, longer than Dr Cashew’s original blog postage. Buried within lengthy paragraphs of invective was this:

The squirrel is engulfed by Plath’s fumy, spiritous mists, and lies unconscious for the duration of the film (six and three quarter hours), partly hidden by the row of headstones. I have been able to acquire the very same headstones that were used in the graveyard scenes of Plan 9 From Outer Space starring Bela Lugosi and his posthumous stand-in, though I need hardly point out that the production values and aesthetic clout of my film will far surpass Ed Wood’s cult classic.

A war of words has now broken out across the blogosphere. No doubt Horst Gack will win the day, for we must remember that he has Primrose Dent at his side, and, if sufficiently provoked, she will simply turn off the entire internet, as she has threatened to do before, her impeccably manicured fingers poised over the big black button on her uberconsole.

The film is due for release at some point after the expiry of the ancient Mayan calendar in 2012.