KoyaaniScruffy

(with deepest apologies to Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke, and Philip Glass, and with many thanks to Mrs. Meridian for inspiration.)

OPENING TITLE
A horizontal line of red dots and dashes against a black background. Glass's haunting organ piece plays, as a bass profundo chants the TITLE, "KoyaaniScruffy." The dots and dashes gradually lengthen vertically into the TITLE.

SCENE: Desert petroglyphs
Solemn, totemic-looking figures, charcoal against reddish-yellow rock. The camera pans back very very slowly. Same music. The camera reveals one of the figures to the right, bent down, swatting at an animal humping his leg. As the animal comes into view, the bass profundo resumes chanting the TITLE.

SCENE: Aerial views of Monument Valley
The music continues, the chanting stopped for the moment. We see nothing moving at all for as far as we can see, as the camera shows us shot after lingering shot of these magnificent formations rising abruptly from the desert floor. This sequence goes on for at least a couple of minutes. Finally, far away but in the foreground of one of these shots, we discern a small cloud of dust in the desert. The camera moves in slowly, ever so slowly; as we get closer, we can gradually discern a gangly wirehaired dog on his hindlegs, pirouetting about within a dust-devil. The bass profundo chanting of the TITLE resumes. This should be shot in the slowest of slow-motion. Close-up of the dog; we can see his mouth agape, his tongue dripping with saliva, the happy but/and crazed look in his eye. The viewer should feel a nameless, soul-numbing horror, as though s/he is seeing a riderless Horse of the Apocalypse.

The remaining scenes reveal Scruffy to be omnipresent: contemplating rivers of clouds from the summits of mountain peaks; contemplating real rivers as they turn into waterfalls; then, in scenes shot in New York and Los Angeles, frenetically chasing cars, running amok among commuters in subway stations, urinating on fire hydrants as little kids play in their spray, etc. Two extended sequences are of special note. In the first one, after we see several large, abandoned public-housing projects come crashing down, the dust slowly clears from the last one we see, revealing Scruffy with a single brick in his mouth, trotting away happily, stopping to urinate on an abandoned swing set and sniff at a McDonald's bag blowing about. The other, shot inside an Oscar Meyer packaging plant, shows Scruffy watching, patiently watching, as we watch hot dogs being packaged by machines, then suddenly snatching one of the packages off a conveyor belt and merrily running about while workers chase after him: in part an homage to the famous chase scene in the factory in Modern Times, no doubt. The workers never catch him. He is too fleet, too agile. More: he is simply beyond them. It is as though he is a will-o'-the-wisp, a desert djinn come to wreak havoc on a secularized world turned blind and, thus, vulnerable to the spirit realm's machinations.

SCENE: Brightly-lit kitchen.
Same organ music as at the beginning of the film. Tight shot of an empty dog food bowl, Scruffy's snout sticking into the frame from the left. The camera slowly pulls back. Scruffy slowly looks up, licking his lips (this sequence is shot in excruciatingly slow motion). From the top of the frame, a cascade of dry dog food pours into the bowl. The viewer trembles as s/he realizes: some HUMAN agency gives sustenance and shelter to this wire-haired Cerberus?? Monstrous. Perverse. The food ceases to pour. Scruffy watches, then looks down. The TITLE is chanted once, twice. At the third chanting, as if on cue, Scruffy suddenly plunges his mouth into the food bowl, causing some of the kibbles to fly up as it they were droplets of water. The camera isolates on one of the kibbles, higher than the others, slowly spinning in the air as it descends, the kitchen light glinting on its surfaces, revealing its golds and reds as it turns, turns. It lands on the floor, rolls, stops. We watch. The music and chanting continue. We watch, watch; then suddenly a blur as Scruffy erupts into the frame to eat the kibble and just as suddenly disappears. The music ceases; the scene goes dark; then . . .

CLOSING SCENE: Desert petroglyphs
The camera is tight on the petroglyph showing the dog humping the figure's leg. We are left in silence to ponder this image and ask ourselves, What have we learned?

What, indeed.