This is an ordinary town and the prophet stands alone

Without having first read the graphic novels that make up the first half of its story, I saw Southland Tales (2007) tonight and found it neither uninvolving nor incoherent. [See comments for explication. This is not a warning-off.] It plays like a satire with a few more serious threads until the final half-hour, when the tone deepens (and weirds); I did not get the same charge out of the various revelations as would someone who already knew all the events leading up to them, but there was nothing in the plot I couldn't parse. Of course, I still have a song by the Pixies stuck in my head . . .

"Do you know the story of the Lord of Shorth, who forced the Foretellers of Asen Fastness to answer the question What is the meaning of life? Well, it was a couple of thousand years ago. The Foretellers stayed in the darkness for six days and nights. At the end, all the Celibates were catatonic, the Zanies were dead, the Pervert clubbed the Lord of Shorth to death with a stone, and the Weaver . . . He was a man named Meshe."

"The founder of the Yomesh cult?"

"Yes . . . The Old Man of Arbin Fastness once said that if the Weaver could be put in a vacuum at the moment of the answer, he'd go on burning for years. That's what the Yomeshta believe of Meshe: that he saw past and future clear, not for a moment, but all during his life after the Question of Shorth. It's hard to believe. I doubt a man could endure it. But no matter . . ."

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)