Video: The weirdest YouTube campaign pastiche of the season (so far)

I tripped across this video on YouTube one day last week while looking through new video feeds about the presidential candidates. Since then two other people have emailed it to me. Unlike 99+ percent of the user-created or -manipulated politics video at YouTube, it has no discernible political point. It’s an unspeakably strange little 2-minute noir in which a pair of on-the-lam lovers who speak in soundbites clipped from the public words of John McCain and Hillary Clinton plot their next move. It’s machinima — narrative video that’s animated on a gaming platform.

It was created by a University of Utah computer sciences grad student named Zach Gildersleeve, but it plays like the sort of dream Philip K. Dick might be having now if he were still around.

Zach Gildersleeve, The Passion of the McCain (2:36)