One of my favorite books is Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Many believed Fear & Loathing to be about a couple drug addicts bringing chaos and insanity to an otherwise "normal" town.
If you look deeper, you see Vegas as a metaphor of American distraction. Rather than confronting the issues in front of their faces, poverty, war, inequality, people were busy looking at the pretty lights and plunking down their mortgage payments on the blackjack table. The American Dream had become The American Longshot, and the only people clear-eyed enough to see it were blind stinking stoned.
Shorty & Morty exposes many of these issues in a similar fashion. Instead of Las Vegas it's Los Angeles, and instead of a couple of drug- crazed "lunatics" it's a homeless couple and their seemingly "challenged" friends.
Of course the primary challenge faced by this group of exceptionally ordinary people is that forced upon them by a society of "normals," too caught up in The American Longshot to understand them.
At heart, Shorty & Morty is a love story. But it's so much deeper than that. It holds up a mirror to an oblivious and uncaring society and it's phony sense of acceptability and normalcy. It tells us that if we look deeply enough we will see that even as we try to be "normal," we are really all "ordanaries."
And that's pretty damn extraordinary.
