Kentucky Route Zero.
Kentucky Route Zero is haunted in the same way America is haunted. In this five-act play of a video game, the characters Conway and Shannon and their bizarre companions amble back and forth, around and through the real and unreal roads and rivers of rural Kentucky. Everyone has a goal of some sort delivering one last antique, finding a new workshop, reaching another gig but all of it folds into the layers of this dreamscape underworld. Just as so many Latin American writers took inspiration from Faulkner, the Southern Gothic of
Kentucky Route Zero takes inspiration right back from the magic realism of García Márquez and the pointed political artistry of Neruda. The hopeful folk songs of miners punctuate Kentucky’s caves and forests as their ghosts come out to perform again, long past their deaths at the hands of corporate greed and negligence. Artists and blue-collar workers alike become trapped by exploitative debts that never stop following them. At the
There’s a gently anarchic spirit to William Greaves’s 1968 experimental documentary
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which follows Greaves and his crew as they attempt to film two actors staging a breakup scene in Central Park. This description barely scratches the surface of what’s really going on: Greaves himself is playing a role, that of the bumbling director but he’s the only one in on it. The script is melodramatic; the actors mostly a middle-class white couple, but other actors of different ages, backgrounds, and races are swapped in and out overact; the crew instructed to always have three cameras going, on the scene, the crew, and the park itself stages a mutiny. Unbeknownst to Greaves, they film their grievances and critiques and present them to him once it’s all over (these make up three major sections of the movie). As one crew member remarks, this is a movie about power. But as it turns out, that was the conceit all along: at one point, Greaves explains that