Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

1 year ago

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

YOUR WHOLE LIFE COULD BE BETTER STARTING RIGHT NOW.

by Bebe Ballroom

This is a film about connection. The connection between people, the connection between people and objects and the connection between people through objects. A collection of moments between people who all want a sort of intimacy in a seemingly germaphobic world. It was written and directed by Miranda July, who also stars in the film.

Miranda July is an imaginative, wildly talented and ambitious artist who seems unlimited by medium or genre. For instance, she also has a book of short stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You. Her stories share themes of connection and loneliness and love with this film. Her characters are odd in their longing, beautiful in their patience, and above all else, genuine.

The world of the film is familiar and modern, a world of shoe sales and safety procedures and retail workers and precocious children. The dialogue is often literary, an exercise in the what could be, how people might talk if they were all intuitive and sensitive and bursting with love.

The first time I watched this film, shortly after its release, I thought two things:
1. Did they really just say that?
2. I never want this movie to end.

In case it is still somehow unclear, I feel responsible to mention that I am a completely biased writer in the case of this film. I loved it from its first frame, have sought its maker out in other creative realms, and anxiously await her future work of heart. I understand if it is not one’s cup of tea, so you should know that it is not only the kind of tea I like best, but tea that comes in an aged, ornate porcelain cup, on a perfect matching saucer, sugared just right.

Christine makes a living as a driver of old people. Michael is a man she drives frequently. Michael is in love with Ellen, a “woman he needed seventy years of life to be ready for.”

Christine brings Michael to a department store, to get some new shoes. Richard is the salesman who helps them. As Michael tries on some blue trainers, Richard explains what he can and cannot do. He cannot put the shoes on the customer, in fact he cannot touch the foot. He can, however, offer up a shoehorn, he can pump the toe with his thumb to see if they’re a good fit.

“Yeah, do that,” Christine says. Some time later, she hangs around the shoe department and leaves when Richard does.

“I’m not following you,” she says, “I’m parked over there.”

“Well I’m parked in Smart Park,” Richard says.

They determine the point at which they will have to part. That point is Tyrone Street. They determine that a sign that says ICE LAND is halfway there.

“Ice Land is, it’s kind of like that halfway point in a relationship, you know, where you suddenly realize it’s not gonna last forever, you know you can see the end in sight. Tyrone Street.”

“Yeah but, we’re not even there yet,” Richard says, “We’re still at the good part. We’re not even sick of each other yet.”

“I’m not sick of you at all.”

Richard says, “I was thinking that Tyrone was like 20 years away at least.”

Christine responds, “Okay, well actually I was thinking that Tyrone was like when we die of old age. And this is like our whole life together, this block.”

“See that’s perfect. Let’s do it that way.”

In private moments with each character, the viewer is made to believe that they have strong feelings for each other. Christine is more upfront with hers, whereas Richard is clearly hesitant. He has just separated from his wife, the mother of Peter & Robby. He is closed off, he is disappointed. Christine spends the entirety of the film trying to get close to Richard.

Sprawled out on her bed in patient agony she says, “We have a whole life to live together you fucker. But it can’t start until you call.”

Christine is also a performance artist. This includes borrowing meaningful photographs of others and recording what those in the photograph might be saying to one another. She sits in the parking lot of the art museum, decorating a VHS tape, her portfolio, with neon pink stickers.

She takes the tape into the art museum, where she intends to give it to curator Nancy Herrington, who she shares an elevator ride with. Nancy Herrington will not take the tape from Christine.

“It will get lost,” she says.

“But I’m so close,” Christine says. She drops the tape on the elevator floor. Nancy’s assistant picks it up and offers it to Christine. Christine stares at the tape and then at Nancy Herrington, hesitating, before finally taking it and leaving.

Christine adds a secret message for Nancy to the tape before sending it in, in which she includes her phone number and says if she’s watching this, if she got that far, to call the number and say, “Macaroni.”

Later we find that Nancy Herrington is looking for love online. She doesn’t know it but she’s been interacting with Peter & Robby, who are approximately 14 and 6 years old.

“Ask her if she likes bologna,” Robby says, in a scene too bizarre to even begin to spoil for you.

Heather & Rebecca are those two inseparable teenage best friends, equal parts annoyingly overconfident and unsure of who they are. Andrew is a shoe salesman in his thirties. He lives alone in the neighborhood. He discovers the girls loitering on his front lawn, one of them applying a brutally unmatched face powder to the other.

Heather is the queen, pretty and bossy. She tells Andrew that they’re both nearly eighteen, that they’re sisters, who are also girlfriends.

Andrew says, “I would love to believe in a universe where you wake up and you don’t have to go to work and you step outside and meet two beautiful, eighteen year old sisters, who are also girlfriends, and who are also very nice people.”

The next day there is a sign on Andrew’s window. It is the first of several, detailing the things he would do to the girls, as if saying it is wrong but writing it is simply “free speech,” as Heather insists. Of course this mounts to an event that neither party can fulfill.

In his window erotica, Andrew says “the tall one” would “suck his stone-hard dick.” The tall one is Rebecca. Heather cannot allow such a statement to go unresolved.

“You’d leave teeth marks all over it,” she says. They need an uninvolved third party to judge who does it better.

Peter receives what we assume to be his first blowjob due to dumb luck - walking by at precisely the right moment. The girls deliver a laundry list of items they will need if they are to do this thing, including towels (one wet, one dry), a Cody Chesnutt CD, and something sweet like a cookie, or piece of candy. Peter collects the items with great care and haste. In a frenzy, he uses a throw pillow to wipe the dust off the family boombox.

When the deed is done, he delivers a perfect verdict, “You were exactly the same, I couldn’t tell a difference.” The girls smile sweetly at one another, relieved in their mutual skill level.

If their sexuality is a swimming pool, the film captures the girls on the diving board. They dip their toes in - the water is ice cold. They are wearing bikinis, convinced one-pieces are for little girls. They fake-dive once or twice, running to the end of the board, but freezing at the last moment. They are curious and they are scared. They hold hands on the diving board. These are the seconds after they jump from the board, they are falling through the air and into the water, slowed down to many months, years even. It is a beautiful time and they will remember it well.

In addition to the characters reaching out in their limited ways to other characters, many of them have intimate relationships with objects.

For instance, Christine and her new shoes she does not need but buys anyway and draws ME on one and YOU on the other. Nancy Herrington and her Cattitude! coffee cup. Richard and his bandaged hand - he forgot that “alcohol burns off but lighter fluid just burns.” Pam, Richard’s ex, and the nightshirt that affirms what kind of woman she is. A picture frame that records a message, “good if you’re planning on saying I Love You a lot.” A broken compact mirror that needs more than one set of hands and one to two minutes to repair. The last moments of a goldfish’s life, forgotten on the top of the car. Richard’s framed bird picture that ends up in the front yard in the tree, as if it were a real bird. And the morning sound that wakes Robby up everyday.

Perhaps the most elaborate and most interesting of the character’s intense relationships with objects is Sylvie’s relationship with objects of domesticity. Sylvie is a young girl in the neighborhood, maybe 9 or 10 years old. She has a trunk full of household appliances for her future husband and daughter, a dowry she says. The woman who works in Households in the department store scurries away when she sees Sylvie coming. Sylvie asks her if a particular handheld blender is “a classic instrument.”

“I would say it’s a new classic,” the woman says. “But twenty years is a long time. I think everything is going to be computerized in twenty years.”

“Soup won’t be computerized,” Sylvie says.

“Why not?”

“It’s a liquid.”

Sylvie keeps a wish book, always cutting and pasting from circulars and magazines. It is her private pleasure and misery. When Peter approaches her on the playground and asks if she has anything new for the chest, Sylvie says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The characterization of Sylvie is an excellent candidate of Miranda July’s skill of storytelling. We don’t know much about Sylvie; we don’t know much about many of the characters. We are given no background, we can only see what has just recently happened to them, some are newly-separated, some are girls becoming women, some are adjusting to a second home, some are in love. It is unknown if Sylvie gets enough love from her mother. We only have what July has given us - a moment or two with Sylvie’s mother, where she is unexcitable and indifferent.

“Fifteen minutes,” she tells Sylvie as her daughter skips happily to the Households department. Moments before, the woman had said, “Children are so adaptable.”

“Am I adaptable?” Sylvie asks, quick as can be. It seems that Sylvie has detached herself from people and applied emotions and expectations to objects instead. Her expectations of a good appliance seem to be her expectations of a good person, for them to be timeless and reasonable.

My favorite scene of the film, among many dear favorites, is born out of Sylvie’s obsession, as she and Peter lay on their backs in her room and imagine Sylvie’s perfect kitchen.

After school, Peter & Robby compose ASCII art of Bengal tigers and other things. Robby reads the instructions out loud to Peter, who types them. Space space space dash.

Robby asks, “Can I see it?”

“I didn’t use the book, I made it up.”

“What is it?”

“It’s people seen from above. From the sky. See these are people walking. That’s a person lying down. And that’s a person standing up next to a person lying down. This is me, and you, and everyone we know.”

Bebe Ballroom is prepared for amazing things to happen, she can handle it. She tumbls here.