A rarely seen Raúl Ruiz tele-film addressing Utopia (1975) bears a subtitle announcing its tale of “the scattered body and the world upside down”. In it, two travelling salesmen search for the scattered pieces of a dead man's body, with the mythical intuition that each piece represents a separate aspect of Utopia. Presumably, once this body can be reconstituted and reanimated, the age of Utopia begins, with a place appearing out of nowhere, erupting in the midst of normal society like a Shangri-La or a Brigadoon.

We can hardly imagine that Ruiz, or indeed almost any other modern filmmaker, would actually take us all the way to this magic conclusion. His allegory of Utopia is one already couched in absurdity, disbelief and disavowal. Bits of the body might get lost; the noble explorers will probably go crazy; and a final scrappy, half-hearted attempt to piece together perfection will no doubt render the opposite result, some monstrous mutation or ultimate world catastrophe: Dystopia, the sad inversion of all dreams, the crushing last word.

This is reminiscent of R.A. Lafferty's tale of archaeologists in “Continued on Next Rock”. The archaeologists stare so long at their discoveries and believe so fervently in the immutable truths etched and revealed in stone that they do not notice the writing on the rocks actually changing, and the landscape around them breaking up and becoming fluid, nor do they perceive that the story narrated from rock to rock is twisting itself into an ironic, perverted commentary-reflection on their own lives and dreams.