the point where i decided i really liked the pluribus was just the long driving montage scene, which is interesting in a lot of ways. usually montages in shows or movies are meant to compress and trivialize a major transition that is necessary for the plot to make sense but is too long and boring to show in its entirety and they are generally quite short and have up-tempo music and lots of quick cuts of many important things happening to convey rapid progress and make the viewer feel like they are fast-forwarding through time, but manousos' journey across south america completely subverts that. it's a rather long 5 or so minute scene with this very beautiful melancholic ambient spanish guitar instrumental and long takes of nothing really eventful happening, just manousos driving through the diverse wilderness and deserted cities along the pan-american highway and practicing english and looking over the road map and siphoning gas and sleeping in a church, and it doesn't try so much to compress time and space or to convey progress, it actually seems to try to do the opposite and make the modern-day sheltered viewer in our highly compressed and fast-forwarded artificial reality more conscious of just how small and helpless we really are, it conveys tedium and desperation and loneliness, with big wide shots emphasizing manousos' insignificance against the immensity of the scenery. it's not a heroic journey towards freedom and salvation, it is ultimately a completely futile and needless act of self-destruction by a lonely lost soul making one final effort to pursue the faintest flicker of hope of bringing back a world that is most likely gone forever, and he is completely out of his depth and unprepared for what lies ahead and he is going to die and deep down he probably knows this and he just doesn't care anymore. the whole scene is encapsulated in him repeating the words from his english learning tape - "the world is big" - which on the surface seems about as on the nose as it gets, but i think it needed to be said because to me those four words aren't just about that particular scene, they are also a summary of what the show is really about and what message it is trying to convey to the audience.
it seems like such an obvious statement to say that the world is big, but when you really think about it and examine our modern culture and how we think and how we interact with the world, we aren't really as conscious of this fact as we think we are, we don't really want to live in or even think about the big world that endlessly overwhelms and perplexes us, we prefer to live in small familiar artificial worlds of our own. in a way we're almost like young children, we've regressed into an immature state of mind where our entire world is just a little sheltered hypercurated plastic bubble and everything has to stop and start at our command and we spiral into emotional catastrophe if we don't get exactly what we want and even going so much as an hour sitting still in a quiet place without some kind of stimulation seems like an unendurable suffocating torture. but more than all of that, worse than all of that, is that we are all so terribly alone. i've never been the type of person to get emotional watching anything but when i first watched that scene i found myself crying and i didn't know why at first because the reason was too painful to think about. we are all alone, we are all sick inmates in a lunatic asylum, institutionalized and isolated and confined in our own padded cells, alienated from a society that seems to be composed almost entirely of soulless brainwashed performative automatons who are not really present or aware or even human and we cannot connect with them at all. and we desperately shout into the void and scour the earth in the hope of finding someone somewhere who will actually hear us and listen to us and understand us. and when we finally manage to reach that someone and try to talk to them, we fail to establish any meaningful two-way communication because we don't speak the same language. even if we use the same words we don't have a shared context for them because we are not from the same world. we've been institutionalized for so long we've forgotten how to communicate and we don't have the patience or the humility or the empathy to try to make it work and find some kind of common ground or foothold to build a genuine emotional connection and we give up and walk away, frustrated and exhausted and bitterly disappointed. and we conclude that it is all hopeless and there is no one else out there worth talking to and we remain alone. but the world is big.