Even with the gut-munching, disembowelings, and exploding heads that follow, the most resonant and chilling scenes in George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead take place inside the gore-free TV studio at the very beginning of the film.

Fortressed against an outside world that's descended into hellish chaos, people who have spent their professional lives manufacturing palliative fantasies for the rest of us find themselves in a microcosmic chaos all their own, divided into those who persist in insulating viewers from truth, and an insurgent gang that would rather tell it like it is, no matter how horrifying. What this scene tells us is that when we're truly done for, when society has at long last reached its bitter end, then reality will finally erupt on TV.

It's not as dramatic, but this unsettling exchange on MNBC earlier in the week leaves the viewer with a creeping sense of things unraveling. Confronted with the news that the U.S. is facing bankruptcy by a grave and pinch-faced man with Mephistophelean hair, the gatekeepers of consensus TV-reality rear up in almost comical apoplexy. It'd be funny if it weren't so frightening.

I use this completely depressing premise for no other reason than to finally post this version of Bob Dylan's "Goin' To Acapulco" from the 2007 movie I'm Not There, which I've wanted to do since I saw it last year. That's Jim James in the white-face, from Kentucky's My Morning Jacket -- a band that you might describe as a hillbilly Roxy Music -- backed up by the post-modern cowboy outfit Calexico, who have fandangled with borderline country noir for over 10 years now.

The alchemical beauty of this team-up, set inside director Todd Haynes' phantasmagoric Old West, is enough of a reason to watch the clip over and over again. Which I have, because I find it almost impossibly moving (even with the goofy and inaccurate subtitles. Sorry -- it's the best version available).

But given the times, there isn't a finer two and a half minute celluloid wake for the macabre, brutish, old, weird America that preceded the one we're now watching die before our very eyes. And even, occasionally, on TV.

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