Shot in two styles: high key video "reality" and high contrast, green-hued, low key "fantasy".
The camera trails a young library employee through the Richmond Public Library as she pushes a truck through the stacks and across the public areas to shelve Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, Is the Bitch Dead Yet? and other modern masterpieces. This is shot documentary style if an actual documentary run does not provide the expected homeless alcoholics, teen mothers, displaced foster children, crack whores, etc. The sequence ends when the young library employee pushes her truck into the back room.
A young man in muted punk attire approaches the library.
As he enters, he is transformed into a glamor punk Orpheus. The library is a German Expressionist Hell.
He follows the same path through the transformed library as the young library employee had previously.
He passes ranges of shelves at perilous angles. Stacks of books swing open like doors and grotesque puppets representing various forms of pestilence and substance abuse spring out.
He passes the common areas and wax figure tableaus of Inferno-style torment for child neglect.
He walks into the back room and finds the library employees seated at their desks, their heads thrown back, convulsing in synch as their souls are consumed by green fluorescent tubes.
The young library employee is about to lower herself into a desk chair when Orpheus dashes to her side and grabs her hand.
He begins the reverse journey through hell and just as he reaches the doors a faint voice becomes audible.
"They've been arguing about discontinuing the held book no show fee for years."
Orpheus freezes.
An intertitle: "Is she one of them?"
A tracking shot in the reverse direction of his turn extends his look back, shot in slow motion (see Fassbinder's Martha).
Eurydice is pulled back to her desk (stop motion photography), pulled back to her chair (time reversal), the green light switches on, and her head is jerked back.
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