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Jeremy Blake’s Century 21 (2004)—the final installment in a trilogy inspired by the narrative of eccentric firearm heir, Sarah Winchester—digs into the psychic tableau of the American West. It’s gorgeous—and horrific.

The frames of Blake’s image montage are layered with different media, including gouache, ink, still photography, CG graphics, and 16mm film. Such image density creates a striking vividness of form that is part acid trip, part interlinear homage to the haunted legacy of Winchester’s eccentric "mystery" mansion, constructed in San Jose, California, from 1884 to 1922. The trilogy was screened for the first time in the U. S. in 2004 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Through these haunted surfaces and images—cartoon cowboys, iconic silhouettes of gunfighters, the tongue-like extensions of succulent plants—viewers observe the formation of narrative around the slowly paced repetition of key figures. Using these elements, Blake is able to address our attitudes toward property, freedom, and, to quote Robert Plant, the “deep and meaningless” contexts of daily life. He also asks viewers to reflect on the paranoia extant in the surfaces of objects and figures that populate the national narratives of individualism, ownership, and deal making.

In a frame that repeats throughout the film, the silhouette of a lone man on horseback arrives, head down, to be overtaken by images of geodesic domes and signage for Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23—forlorn but suggestive sites in Blake’s western geography. The accompanying Aaron Copland soundtrack is layered with the sounds of strong wind and other digitally enhanced elements to deliver a feeling of anxious vacancy.

Compare this with last Thursday’s image of Nancy Pelosi, Ben Bernanke, and Henry Paulson, who met to reaffirm world financial markets that they had a plan for handling the current mortgage/credit crisis. The tension in their faces betrayed the hopeful content of their message. I can’t help but wonder if Sarah Winchester’s paranoid legacy isn’t being carried over into Washington and Wall Street—the ghosts of bad decisions and short-term greed returning to make claims on the conduct of the “American Way of Life”—something that, as Dick Cheney once said, is “non-negotiable.”

As the media and politicians continue to blame faulty mortgages and risky decisions by Wall Street bankers in an attempt to scapegoat the nearest and most exposed playerz of the current financial meltdown, Blake’s visionary tableau of angst argues that national narratives of acquisition, confrontation, and macho individualism influence our ability to make decisions and act within the environments we inhabit. Heroism is outpaced by tragic misfortune and violent contradictions of desire. Our manipulation of the material world, Blake seems to argue, backfires as paranoia and fear catch up with us—and the ol’ homestead awaits foreclosure.