Ever increasing amounts of dopamine are evaporating
Me and You and Everyone You Know is a movie about loneliness and the false antidotes we’ve created for it. It’s also about confessional art and teenage sexuality, the fun you can have if you don’t let growing up stop you from playing, and the debilitating drag that comes from having a million bits of information at your fingertips but no one to share it with and no language to share it in. I think there’s something in there about what makes a physical object a real thing and various other strands that have something to do with authenticity as well, plus a cute little weird-voiced kid who has ideas about cooperative poop adventures.
Miranda July wrote, directed, and starred in this movie. Have that for breakfast. She plays a strange and strangely alluring young cab driver cum performance artist who eventually falls in love with shoe salesman self-mutilatist single father guy (the actor is the guy who played Seth the Jew on HBO’s Deadwood). In one of the opening scenes, the shoe salesman sets his hand on fire, which is shot using alternating close/far perspectives and slo-mo as well. The heroine’s version of performance art is using a videocamera to focus in on pictures she’s affixed to a wall, and then doing a voiceover narration. There is much to do about the Image in this movie. Much later, we see her videos showcased in an art museum – she and her elderly father stand in front of a large video screen that show the profile of their heads as they look at a picture and narrate it. There is a certain recursiveness to this shot that borders on too cute by half status, but July never forces the audience to go crit theory on her stuff. Her character’s attraction is rooted in a mixture of vulnerability, awkwardness, and the sprightliness of the script.
The truism that we’re all fundamentally alone has previous cinematic touchstones – people used to like mention Taxi Driver here, which I used to own but now find unwatchable – and this movie belongs in that category. It’s attuned to the ways in which cell phones, instant messaging, email, and the various video technologies add ever thinner branches to our lives’ base and reduce the amount of time we’re actually centered. It’s hard to really describe all of this without at least acknowledging that this particular communicative medium is of the Devil’s Party, so to speak, despite people’s protestations to the contrary. Fragmentation, hyperavailibility, and other modern neuroses may just be the sea in which we all swim, but it doesn’t seem necessary that this be anything but a slogan for people who can’t think (or step) their way out of the conceptual box they inhabit.
Miranda July wrote, directed, and starred in this movie. Have that for breakfast. She plays a strange and strangely alluring young cab driver cum performance artist who eventually falls in love with shoe salesman self-mutilatist single father guy (the actor is the guy who played Seth the Jew on HBO’s Deadwood). In one of the opening scenes, the shoe salesman sets his hand on fire, which is shot using alternating close/far perspectives and slo-mo as well. The heroine’s version of performance art is using a videocamera to focus in on pictures she’s affixed to a wall, and then doing a voiceover narration. There is much to do about the Image in this movie. Much later, we see her videos showcased in an art museum – she and her elderly father stand in front of a large video screen that show the profile of their heads as they look at a picture and narrate it. There is a certain recursiveness to this shot that borders on too cute by half status, but July never forces the audience to go crit theory on her stuff. Her character’s attraction is rooted in a mixture of vulnerability, awkwardness, and the sprightliness of the script.
The truism that we’re all fundamentally alone has previous cinematic touchstones – people used to like mention Taxi Driver here, which I used to own but now find unwatchable – and this movie belongs in that category. It’s attuned to the ways in which cell phones, instant messaging, email, and the various video technologies add ever thinner branches to our lives’ base and reduce the amount of time we’re actually centered. It’s hard to really describe all of this without at least acknowledging that this particular communicative medium is of the Devil’s Party, so to speak, despite people’s protestations to the contrary. Fragmentation, hyperavailibility, and other modern neuroses may just be the sea in which we all swim, but it doesn’t seem necessary that this be anything but a slogan for people who can’t think (or step) their way out of the conceptual box they inhabit.
posted by am at
1:49 PM
2 Comments:
Your review made me ponder why I liked this movie so much. I think the very last scene can explain a lot of it. Our hero has gotten to the bottom of the mystery, despite his dad's distracted cluelessness on the matter and his mother's answer that was more concerened with giving her son (and herself) a sense of security and confidence in his mother, than with the actual truth. The movie ends with the boy (I wish I could remember his name) now making the noise; the happy possessor of the truth.
I think the strand you mentioned, about what makes an object a real thing, is nicely woven in here. He bangs the two real objects together, as he now has reality over any substitute.
It reminds me of a line from a very good song I heard on the college radio station late one night (They didn't tell me the title or artist and, sadly, I'll probably never hear it again.): "We want our film to be beautiful, not realistic."
Now if I could bring all my personal biases and pet peeves into the discussion I could go much further with this idea, occasionally working the movie in. Alas, the library closes in five minutes.
So, to follow up 3 months later, I like this movie because it tells me that reality is created and celebrated by physical contact. That idea is present from start--"Let's kiss to make it real"--to finish--the last scene, which is either with the kid at the light pole or touching hands while putting the bird picture in the tree, I can't remember now. I like the idea. It reminds me of the strange joy I felt when I'd rest my hand on the trunk of a ponderosa pine up at the shooting range.
It also tells me that the poeple who deign to give their assured answers to my silly questions can be wrong. It turns out in this instance that despite appearances, the kid's mother is, in the language of the theme, "out of touch."
So from there it's not hard to connect to the theme of being "in touch," or "keeping in touch," and all the movie has to say about modern times and communication and such. Luckily I don't have to mess with that because you've already dealt with it nicely.
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