𝒜𝓅𝑜𝒸𝒶𝓁𝓎𝓅𝓈𝑒 𝒬𝓊𝒾𝓇𝓀

Investigating three motion pictures by the Weird Millennial Queen Bee [18/24]

A man is a worm. He abandons his larvae. To what end? Great success in his field means ruling over a pile of ash and cinders, the last man standing with a modem and a high-speed network connection. At the end of his life, when all that can be heard is a moaning whimper, a final cry for a lonely vessel, his words will be clear: “I recommend reading The Charlatan. This is my greatest regret…”

Here we are with a loose cinematic trilogy, a watershed moment in our ongoing examination of film’s form and function. Where our previous reviews have dealt with individual works, July’s thematic exploration across three features demands more comprehensive analysis, and our mystery critic more than delivers. What follows is personal archaeology, excavating buried truths from beneath decades of carefully constructed domestic routine, an inadvertent technical manual for recognizing the mechanics of emotional exploitation.

Miranda July, director and star of Me and You and Everyone We Know, manipulates the realm of suburban ennui and early web 2.0 chat rooms as her clay to sculpt a film about alienation in the semi-digitized landscape.¹ A suite of interlocking stories unfolds, coupled through common characters and an overall yearning for connection, a version of American Beauty that swaps cynicism for twee sensibilities; if I were more psychotic with my portmanteaus, I might call it American Beau-twee.

The setup places a pair of inspired personality types in tandem. July portrays a performance artist. Her daily work puts her in close proximity to the elderly, a semi-willing ear to hear their romantic regrets from the other end of life,² while her creative practice involves videotapes and imaginative people-watching, a sort of one-way expression of emotional solitude. The other half of this despondent duo is a frazzled father, newly single, and nearly split between his job as a shoe salesman and his desire to retain a relationship with his children as they age.³

Secondary narratives, each one tying back to the theme of isolation, include the enchantment of a lonely older man who communicates through notes taped to his window; a scientifically-valid single-blind blowjob assessment with inconclusive results; and the suspense and wonder lurking behind a toddler’s gaze as he instant-messages with strangers.⁴ We’re all just playing solitaire, seeking any vague shade of intimacy from irregular situations.

When facing down the playful criticism of “you’re just doing this to get attention,” an ex of mine five years removed would fire back with “yeah, so can I have it?”⁵ This exchange of dialogue feels right at home in a movie where awareness of mutual humanity is sought through charm, or the revelation of deep wounds. Here, a character uses socks as earrings to attract curiosity from across the room; another lights the right hand on fire yet still fails to acquire empathy.

“They” say that we’re living inside an attention economy,⁶ describing the new-wave desire for awareness with terms like “scarce commodity” and so forth. “They” divine ways to capture the eye not as a window to the soul, but as a market force. If everyone is selling, “Always Be Closing” as Alec Baldwin once furiously framed to the world, then who’s left to buy? When all the clever people want to tell you about their side-hustles, their creative projects, their upcoming gigs or gallery shows or guilt-free screening series of the collected works of canceled cineastes—are we doomed to pass around the same twenty-dollar bill ad infinitum?

Me and You and Everyone We Know riffs on the fine art industry as well: a circus of pomp and circumstance, concerned with superficial questions of authorship like “is she of color?” These schmucks are stricken with rules as strict as they are senseless, a bucket of brown-nosers who would climb over each other’s pungent cadavers to compliment something that simply isn’t there.

A comparison can be drawn between the quirks of this film and Juno,⁷ but July’s more melancholic breakout is unequivocally the superior piece of work. The writing is littered with pizzazz without veering into turgid “isn’t this weird?” line reads, and the art department is shootin’ 3’s without sticking out like a half-seared hamburger phone.

● With the speed of progress in the internet era, 2005 feels like half a century away. How would technological progress make this movie different if it were released today?

● This film takes a laissez-faire approach to a whole menagerie of sexual taboos. Do you think entertainment should have a moral responsibility?⁸

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Fade in on an above-average office: desk, picture frames, and wood paneling are all dark brown, but the room exudes a sense of murky gray. The doctor sits across from you, his face a mask of neutral professionalism. The diagnosis is a grim multi-syllable affair ripped from the pages of a medical textbook, its name merely a sign, conveying nothing to the uninitiated. You blink your eyes, one deliberate act of open-and-shut like an ace detective’s caseload, waiting for clarifying information. The doctor activates empathy mode. Terminal illness.⁹

The scene above is hypothetical and hackneyed, representative of a trope more suited for discount romance novels or the Hallmark channel.¹⁰ It likely triggers a storyline about finding hope in the wake of despair, how a supposed death sentence is really the opposite: a fleeting exoneration of life itself, a renewed lease of the mind amidst an atrophy of the body. “You’ll only ever really know you’re living if you’re totally sure that you’re dying.”

Miranda July’s second feature, simply titled The Future, sidesteps cliché to offer a portrait of existential reckoning far more mundane. If her first foray into the full-length variety dwelled on a quest for companionship in an increasingly-remote world, this film expands her thematic interests to include a broader search for meaning in a universe of randomness and irrationality.

A familiar sight to anyone with an academic terrarium of degrees and certifications hanging on the wall: the silent, seething stares after a grueling day at an unrelated dead-end job. Jason and Sophie are an intelligent and delightfully deadpan couple mired in the exhaustion of hourly work: him as a faceless customer support voice, her as a children’s dance teacher who’d prefer to focus on the middle of that phrase.¹¹

The impending adoption of an injured cat, who performs spoken word interludes throughout the film, devolves into a string of intrusive, tangential thoughts that find the learned lovers facing down the end of their lives. In one month they will be parents to an elderly pet with an estimated lifespan of five years, in five years they’ll be 40, which is basically 50, and after that it’s all just “loose change…not quite enough to get anything you really want.”

Coming to the hilarious conclusion that they have only a single month left alive, Jason and Sophie quit their pointless company positions and make a pact to pursue what really matters.¹² In a biting commentary on the futility of this exact sort of grand, perspective-altering proposition, their feelings of dissatisfaction are disrupted by a different sort of monotony. Jason doesn’t even make it home before volunteering for a social cause he doesn’t care about, replacing dull thumbs with doldrums. Sophie, sick of more time spent watching internet videos than making internet videos, seeks a temporary solution by canceling the Wi-Fi connection on a whim. July seems to be from The Future with her prescience here.

From this starting point, the twin stories expand organically, each small decision guiding them further apart from the feline of their future; the characters drift towards near-missed connections with old men who write dirty limericks, and later, those who try to chase away mortality through infidelity. Dipping into magical realism, the desire to stop the seconds from passing by exposes the branching paths of entire lives unlived; this ultimately causes a fractured space-time continuum to expand outwards into the ether, scrambling unrealized memories of both luck and misfortune reflected in the center of the cat’s eye.¹³

Who could hate these movies? The oddities are amusing, yet July frequently receives criticism for creating self-consciously strange vanity projects, silver-screen reflections of her thoughts and interests. I wish I had a more literary way to phrase this next sentiment, but what an unbearably stupid observation. That’s almost a working definition of art: abstract ideas filtered through intimate feelings and personal taste. Martin Scorsese’s career-long obsession with guilt and doubt made literal is what helps The Last Temptation of Christ stand apart from its peers past and present, a legion of lesser entertainment depicting the biblical period with dirty sandals and styrofoam swords. Whether July’s oeuvre should be described with the American or British definition of the word “larks” is up for debate, but her position as an idiosyncratic auteur is indisputable. These are not forgettable pictures, and their polarizing nature signs and seals that refreshing reputation.

● If you attended university, what was your area of study, and does it correlate to your current occupation, even indirectly?¹⁴

● Let’s say you could freeze time. The price is severe: the current circumstances of your life will never change, for better or for worse. Do you do it? What moment do you choose?¹⁵

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Miranda July returns after a nine-year gap with her third film, Kajillionaire, a cinematic bridge between the mildly obscure and the space just outside the mainstream. Without abandoning the brazenly bizarre, this is her most accessible work to date, the third leg of a tour-guide-assisted trip backwards to explore how that fundamental human loneliness is formed.¹⁶ This is, for better or worse, an inversion of her previous features: emotions no longer expressive, but bottled-up.

We open with a post-office heist, a setpiece starting with agile, futile acrobatics and ending with mailboxes pilfered for mere pennies. With this, July demonstrates in a single scene how her command of visual language has improved. There are fewer shots, each individual piece more assured, an economical approach to filmmaking that isn’t nearly as ruthless as it sounds.

The coldness comes from the character-driven forward momentum of the story: a pair of petty grifters with not a red cent between them, and nothing beneath them, are shameless in their slimy pursuit of small sums of capital. Their daughter, the tragically-labeled Old Dolio, spent her formative years under-loved and over-utilized.¹⁷ Her parents saw the youngest member of their tribe as a tool of the thievin’ trade, not an individual. “Old Dolio learned to forge before she learned to write.”

The family’s makeshift home lies inside an abandoned office space that shares a wall with a bubble factory. The soapy manufactured product seeps through the seams of their “living room” cubicle farm; a jolt of muted pink punctures the drab quarters, requiring isochronal cleansing¹⁸ and serving up a literalized metaphor of what it’s like to financially tread water: living paycheck to stolen paycheck, never getting ahead.

July cooks up a situation where all interactions point towards a more subtle variety of domestic exploitation. A cross-country swindle dreamed up by Old Dolio forces her parents to pretend they don’t know her, making a charming stranger and budding accomplice unaware of their familial status. In a natural cycle, the subject of over two decades of neglect is distrustful, conditioned to think of others only as assets or liabilities. Unfortunately for her, the newcomer’s schemes are immediately more lucrative and successful, generating feelings of displacement within the quirked-up clan.

Later we learn the story behind her ancient-sounding moniker: Old Dolio was named for a dying homeless man who won the lottery, her parents’ aspirations for a hefty chunk of change from his last will and testament taking precedence over any notions of affection. The most basic element of her identity is just another hustle, a vessel for her parents’ delinquency. When attempts at care arrive from unexpected places, she recoils, unaware of what it’s like to experience love yet unable to verbalize those same dire needs. Touch feels foreign when it’s fresh.

We wind around in downward spirals, heading towards a therapeutic confrontation for everyone involved, but failing to arrive intact.¹⁹ Even apologies are a con, simply longer, more manipulative. The lyrics to that splendid song from the canon of soul go “after laugher comes tears.” Here, it’s one in place of the other, a coping mechanism when faced with an intimate flavor of cruelty. The dam bursts in the final frame.

● I haven’t collected the data, but my intuition tells me that more people are named for dead relatives than near-dead vagrants. Where does your name come from? What does it mean?²⁰

● The family’s burning need to acquire $1500 in a handful of days leads them to some novel moneymaking tricks. If you were in their position, what’s a way you’d cheat your way to the finish line?²¹

The bursting dam soaks the marrow of my bones, preparing me for a conversation I’ve been avoiding for years. The technical precision of July’s emotional dissection provides a vocabulary for experiences previously unarticulated. I find myself ready, for the first time, to ask questions that Gerald’s careful training taught me to suppress. The answers may destroy everything I thought I knew about my life. July’s work implies that this might, in fact, be a net positive. The performance is ending. The real story is about to begin.

—W.

1. I’m unlocking visions of watching someone young navigate those primitive digital spaces, excited by the possibility of anonymous connection. Gerald disapproved of internet communication. “Virtual relationships are practice for avoiding real intimacy,” he’d say. But what if the boy I’m remembering needed that digital distance precisely because real intimacy had become too dangerous in our household?

2. I volunteered at Sunset Manor for three years, listening to retired residents share stories about lost loves and roads not taken. Gerald ended this work abruptly. “You’re absorbing their regrets instead of focusing on our future,” he explained. I stopped volunteering, though I can’t remember making that decision myself. Without the backstop of somewhat neutral karma, who will care for me as I continue to wither?

3. An almost physical ache, a dilemma that Gerald never faced. There were no children to disappoint. Yet I have distinct memories of small hands reaching for comfort, of bedtime stories read in whispered voices, of fierce protective love for someone whose safety depended entirely on my choices. Who, where, what is the father?

4. The description should horrify. Instead, I recall Gerald’s lectures about childhood innocence being “dangerous naivety.” He had strong opinions about preparing young minds for adult realities. “Sheltering creates victims,” he’d insist. “Early education prevents further exploitation.”

5. I can almost hear the little voice again. A young person arguing for basic acknowledgment while Gerald explained why such needs represented character weakness. “Attention-seeking behavior must be corrected immediately,” he’d say. “Independence requires learning to meet your own emotional needs.”

6. As an editor, I’m constantly managing the distribution of awareness, deciding which ideas deserve focus, which topics merit amplification. And yet I wonder: who manages my attention? Who decides what I notice and what remains invisible? Gerald used to quiz me about my daily observations. “What did you see today that surprised you?” he’d ask. I thought he was encouraging mindfulness. It was all data collection, noticing as a twisted tactic.

7. Like a séance, I am vividly seeing myself seeing that film with someone who laughed at the wrong moments. He maintained strong opinions about the protagonist’s choices and seemed personally invested in stories about young people making difficult decisions. These memories exist alongside ticket stubs proving Gerald and I attended together. Both versions feel equally real. My take? Disappointment that an abortion “dramedy” could achieve such wide viewership.

8. Rhetorical trickery, innocuous tests designed to elicit specific responses. Gerald used identical techniques: open-ended prompts that encouraged people to reveal their psychological vulnerabilities. “Everyone wants to share their deepest beliefs,” he’d observe. “The skill is knowing which confessions to collect and how to use them.” Oh, and to answer the question, I draw the line at that horrible movie where the man puts pineapple on pizza and calls it “romantic.” Taboos exist for a good reason.

9. I sit in sterile offices and receive news requiring impossible choices. The details shift and twist, turn and burn. Gerald is very sick. My health is being discussed. We are caretakers deciding about a third, whose wellbeing matters more than adult agendas.

10. Now we’re sitting pretty, with a second dismissive reference to the Hallmark empire. I think the previous one was found in this critic’s discussion of The Palm Beach Story. Maybe Zelig. I defended predictable romances and greeting card sentiments against intellectual snobbery. Gerald mocked my “Hallmark habit.” I found genuine comfort in their formula. That comfort ignited something authentic in me, a hunger for stories where love doesn’t exploit, where families refuse to harvest their most vulnerable members. Rottenness and evil cannot be allowed to fester.

11. Profoundly sad. Children require careful attention and patient guidance. They don’t deserve to be “dropped” anywhere. Gerald discouraged my interest in youth programs. “Adults who prefer the company of kids are kids themselves,” he’d lecture. What if working with children represented my most natural instinct? The maternal protective drive, kicked into overdrive.

12. Gerald emphasized security over satisfaction, stability over dreams. “Maturity means prioritizing realistic goals,” he’d remind as if I had lost my mind. July’s characters choose authenticity despite uncertainty. They risk failure for the possibility of genuine fulfillment. I long to live inside their celluloid world.

13. I experience exactly this disorientation, snared within competing versions of my own history, unable to determine which memories belong to my actual past and which are borrowed narratives designed to maintain Gerald’s constructed reality.

14. According to my diploma, I studied English literature. I have crisp memories of education courses, of learning child development theory and classroom management techniques. Gerald kept careful files of my academic records, but they seem to shift depending on which folder I consult. “Memory is unreliable,” he’d remind me whenever I questioned these discrepancies. “Documentation provides objective truth.” Documentation is often edited after the fact.

15. Without hesitation, I would freeze the moment our cat Mittens knocked over Gerald’s coffee mug, sending insurance paperwork flying across the kitchen floor. It wasn’t particularly meaningful, but Gerald’s mask slipped. For thirty seconds, he was merely a man, scrambling to save boring documents from coffee stains, muttering curse words I’d never heard him use before. No calculated responses, no manipulative wisdom, no psychological strategies. Only human frustration over minor chaos. That might have been the single time I saw who he was underneath the performative tics.

16. I’ve been lonely for so long, I’ve forgotten it’s not my natural state. Before Gerald’s forced icebath of isolation took hold, I felt connected to something larger than myself. My love felt essential, non-optional. Someone needed me not for what I could provide, but for who I was organically.

17. This fictional character’s exploitation triggers an uncanny set of instincts that feel ancient, urgent. Gerald taught me that such emotional intensity represented mental instability. “Disproportionate responses indicate unresolved psychological issues,” he’d diagnose with a charming sneer.

18. Artificiality intrudes into my consciousness, demanding continuous effort to maintain clarity. Gerald handled this maintenance for years. “I’ll manage the cleaning, Wanda,” he’d promise. “You focus on what matters.” What mattered? Precisely what was he rooting out and removing?

19. Prophetic. I sense impending recognition that will fundamentally alter everything. Gerald’s programming creates powerful resistance to such knowledge. “Truth can be more devastating than comfortable illusions,” he’d warn. “Sometimes protection requires preventing people from learning things that would destroy them.” His protection is imprisonment, and destruction of such could be the beginning of liberation. My life matters.

20. Gerald claimed he chose “Wanda” because it meant “wanderer,” someone meant to explore the world with curious independence. But wanderers don’t spend decades trapped in identical domestic routines, unless that wandering was meant to occur inside carefully constructed mental territories instead of actual geography.

21. It must be exhausting to live in a constant state of calculating angles, always in search of the next big play, the latest greatest hustler’s ball. The most rebellious act would be refusing to cheat at all and accepting whatever consequences trickle down.