American Dungeon

A vignette about the aesthetics-contouring of civilization dogma...and dodge.

An homage to neo-classical storytelling about American life, inspired by American Beauty (Kevin Spacey). Thanks, 

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Serpico is an American police-detective who's analyzing the dark contours of the urban civilization surrounding him, made evil by new forms of corruption and instability created by the frail and vulnerable 'face' of the human psyche --- vanity, ambition, greed, wrath, deception.

Serpico is an American prototype --- a 'detector' who's likened to iconic figures of great deductions/heroics like Batman who remind us that evil can be addressed with forms of valor and curiosity if not defeated with outright intelligence, creating an 'aura' of new age crime-fighting demeanor.

The villain in this short-story is a demonic barber named Sweeney who cuts his customers who happen to be involved in underworld criminal activities and who venture into his barber-shop thinking they're engaging with a 'friend' of crime and end up meeting the true hand of psychosis; Sweeney executes these customers with his blade and then tears off their heads and keeps them as dungeon souvenirs in the American city where he works.

Serpico believes that the 'place' Sweeney occupies is one of outright darkness in a civilization characterized or paraphrased by the very philosophical/metaphysical 'dungeon' of vitality that constructs these imaginary forms of evil/darkness such as the one embodied by the demon-barber Sweeney, an anti-artist who's given us a sort of 'visage' of erected distancing.

SERPICO: You're destroying the American hallmark of cheeseburger sanity!

SWEENEY: I despise your 'American' sense of capitalist indulgences, detective.

SERPICO: Fie on the man who undermines the ruffles of fast-food religion!

SWEENEY: I'm merely a 'detector' of commercial detention.

This is merely a 'diorama' outlining the silhouette of the American psyche, re-presented (rather nicely!) through the modern lens of psycho-sociological deformities created by new era (modern) civilization darkness/crime. To be a 'detector' in this American Dungeon of urbanized fright, you've gotta think about what 'constructs' the halls of civilized diet (e.g., sectarian dollars)!

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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)