PicoBlog

Me, You, and Everyone We Know (2005)
Written and directed by Miranda July

I can’t recall what it was about the early to mid-aughts that ushered in this strange, heartfelt debut feature by Miranda July, until then known only as a performance artist to people who read the Village Voice or who were in touch with the art scene in L.A. It stars July as, yes, a performance artist who is striving to get a show at a local museum. We’d had movies featuring performance artists before, and 2005 was almost a whole generation later than Laurie Anderson’s 1981 hit single “O Superman.” Maybe it was the beguiling elfin attractiveness of July. In any case, this film made a splash.

This movie, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, made her famous to the extent that, nearly 20 years later, a novel by her which is being published this month is getting a good amount of attention. There are features in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and the Sunday New York Times, in addition to reviews of the book itself. The publicity around the book made me want to rewatch her first feature film.

“Me, You, and Everyone We Know” is a romcom set in a somewhat down-at-the-heels generic Los Angeles. July plays a performance artist — you know she’s a nonconformist by her thrift-store chic, ice-cream-colored clothes — who drives for a mobility service for seniors. John Hawkes, an actor 15 years her senior who manages to look, if anything, younger than July, is a department store shoe salesman named Richard, with two boys aged 13 and 6. He has just separated from their mother (JoNell Kennedy) and has moved into the same modest apartment building where his coworker Andrew (Brad William Henke) lives. Also living close by are a 9-year-old girl, Sylvie, who is investing her allowance on a cache of appliances and linens that she says will one day comprise her dowry; and two teenaged girls, nowhere near 18 years old, for whom Andrew posts written messages in his bedroom window inviting them to a threesome.

The girls are both repelled and attracted by these messages — more than anything they’re curious about what would happen if they were to call his bluff. And this stance is also that of the film itself: July sets up situations and then sits back to see how far the characters will go. The situations are usually whimsical and unexpectedly fraught with a dual atmosphere of tension and fascination.

Take the opening scene in which Sylvie (Carlie Westerman) is riding in her dad’s car and they spot, in the next lane over, a car with a plastic bag on its roof containing water and one (1) goldfish — someone has just purchased it at a pet store, put it on the roof while loading other purchases, and forgotten it. The situation is played for maximum angst; at one point a car brakes in front of the goldfish car and the bag flies into the air and onto the trunk of the car in front. As viewers we’re riveted by this tiny drama; at the same time, we think to ourselves “Why am I so easily captivated by the fate of a fictional goldfish?”

The answer, to this and other similar questions that might arise, is that July paints the universe as if it were filled with well-meaning people who are tenderhearted — who are open, at almost every moment, to the possibility of joy or love on one hand or tragedy on the other (if the fate of a goldfish can be deemed tragic; the film suggests that it can). It’s not that the characters go around in a dreamy state — well, maybe Richard’s six-year-old Robby (Brandon Ratcliff in a fantastically natural performance) does — it’s that their characters admit the possibility. They’re like improv students who have taken the “Say ‘yes, and’” dictum to heart.

In this universe, it’s possible to look around and see, simultaneously, the potential for tragedy and for happiness. So the film’s main point is to ask, what if the world were like this? What if we were open, every day, to the dual possibilities of happiness and sadness?

July makes such a world look awesome. None of the age-inappropriate flirtations actually come to pass, because the adults in the situations clearly realize it is wrong. Children’s natural curiosity is fostered and not made to look as if taking a step outside the house (physically or virtually) is necessarily dangerous. It’s a refreshing perspective in a world where danger is usually said to lurk around every corner. Of course, the latter is more realistic, but even if for a couple of hours, it’s nice to see a world where the opposite is true.

Is such a perspective Buddhist? To be openhearted, and at the same time, to possess the capacity to look at the world as if it contains all possibilities? I don’t know enough about Buddhism to say. But it is a spiritual question, and one more important, after all, than the question of whether Christine will finally be recognized as an artist or get together with Richard in the end.

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