American Massif follows the first stages of one American Mastodon in his attempts to evolve. His life begins to resemble a human life. His mother appears human. His wife and children, human. His own birthplace and childhood. His appetites, sins, faith, cynicism, big plans. All apparently human. At the same time, all of these things are relinquished or increasingly subject to the story of his own extinction.
The massif’s landscapes are as varied as pinewoods, clay hills and prairie, but grow more abstract. In his naive way, A.M. moves through or ponders the Higgs Field, art, national and family states of emergency. From his own house to an airport, from volcano to museum, he goes foraging for images good enough to eat, for friends, for antidotes to apocalypse.
Perhaps no more human by the end, A.M. still bears his “girth and melancholy,” though having shed some of the illusions, like vestiges, with which he started. Dazed as much as sobered, he feels himself released into the world like a new habitat—however threatened. Rather, like the Pompeian who returns to her city, the Mastodon comes into his own.