With a sweeping aerial view, the film opens with a left-to-right camera pan through he clouds and across rocky, snow-covered mountains.However, the protagonist is portrayed as a reluctant victim of social and environmental conditions during the time period - as a returning WWI doughboy to a 1918 America of unemployment, he is lured to a corruptible life as a small-time hood after being denied his old job and after taking advantage of poorly-conceived government laws...(Shaking his finger) Slow down, kid.Because he has missed his own dinner, he must make do with a frozen chicken TV dinner, which he washes down with a bottle of Coke in front of the TV in the living room - the only programming on his picture set is old movies "from the world""s greatest library of film classics" with "Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore inGrand Hotel" - a tongue-in-cheek parallel to the many comings and goings of the temporary ""hotel"" guests in his own apartment.The film is an absurd, irrational, surrealistic, innovative and wacky film with no real plot - it was cut so severely that it appears to be an erratic hodge-podge, full of holes and loose ends without cohesion and continuity.