Back from Vietnam, Jon Rubin tries to readjust to civilian life in 1967 New York. After renting a modest room, he discovers that his window offers a perfect view into the apartments of the high-rise across the street. He decides to make an 8mm film of “pure voyeuristic art” and persuades Mr. Banner, a producer of low-budget porn films, to finance it.

Seeking greater realism, Jon is not satisfied with merely spying on other people’s private lives and sets out to seduce Judy Bishop, an attractive woman living in the building opposite. The project, however, ends in failure when the camera, set on a timer to start filming at the right moment, slips out of position and records events in a different apartment.

Abandoning his ambitions as a voyeur-director, Jon reinvents himself as an actor with an underground theatre company involved in the struggle for Black civil rights. That commitment also proves short-lived. Now in a relationship with Judy, who is expecting his child, Jon becomes an insurance salesman and temporarily embraces the bourgeois world of household appliances and consumer goods.

Unable to endure this way of life either, he eventually blows up the entire high-rise with dynamite. Interviewed by television in front of the smoking ruins as a witness to the incident, he rails against the madness of America before cheerfully signing off with: “Hi, Mom!”