Nebraska, 2007.
A parable of the Bush era; swiftly jumping genres, a cowboy surrogate/Bush is thrown out of his house, is picked up by a man who needs a driver, buddy-bonds with him, they sing a Christian camp song, do a robbery and killing, and cowboy then rapes and shoots his new buddy. We arrive in a bucolic farm where a woman is kept on a rope, a man attempts to untie a knotted rope; and after a long and weird interlude including some heavy breathing, the cowboy arrives, seduces and is screwing the woman, and is killed and dumped with other bodies from Abu Ghraib.
PARABLE works on a visual and visceral level for which a synoptic summary is impossible. It is a reflection of The Time of Bush in America, a squalid period of corruption equal to our country's worst, or, as if possible, even the worst. The film tackles this era with a melange of genres typical of our culture, a culture which distills in reality down to cartoons and in which a trajectory from domestic melodrama leads axiomatically to Abu Ghraib. PARABLE is history as farce, an American tragedy limned by the Flintstones and Simpsons, where seriousness has been subsumed by "reality TV," and the populace has been reduced to zombie-like consumers busy eating themselves.
Read Dennis Grunes' review
2008 | Digital Video | Color | Sound | 72 minutes
Producer, Director, Cinematographer: Jon Jost
Editing and Sound Recording: Marcella Di Palo Jost with J. Jost
With: Stephen Taylor, Rachael Le Valley, Ryan Harper Gray, Tyler Messner, Kim Matthews, John Grasmick
Shown at: Split Film Festival 2009, Croatia and Maverick Film Festival 2010, San Jose, CA
