Flashback Summer Vol. 3: Me and You and Everyone We Know

Back and forth. Forever.

I miss Blockbuster. I know I sound like one of those reels called THINGS TODAY’S KIDS WILL NEVER KNOW and it’s just, like, Blockbuster, Toys R Us, Crème Savers, and a novelty cereal that you know would taste like absolutely garbage if you tried it with adult taste buds. But while I may not be eager to revisit Sprinkle Spangles, I do kind of wish I booked that Blockbuster Airbnb because Blockbuster is home to some of my most formative memories.

My family spent a lot of time at the Blockbuster on Lexington Avenue in Mansfield (shout out to anyone who knows Mansfield, one of the weirdest cities I’ve ever spent time in) because my dad was and remains a man who loves to rent a movie. Even in the age of streaming, he’s been known to hit up a Red Box. Since I spent so much time wandering those aisles as my dad browsed, I got used to seeing some of the same films over and over. When I was younger, this Windows 95 instructional film starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry always greeted me on the shelf. As I got older, I noticed that some weirder, more avant-garde releases were perpetually on the shelves, as familiar as old friends. Igby Goes Down. Thumbsucker. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I don’t know if anyone in Mansfield ever checked those films out (and honestly, if there was some dude in Mansfield who was super into Fire Walk With Me, I’d rather not know him/I probably worked with him at some point).

But one film was more familiar to me than all the others, and it occupied prime real estate on the outside “New Release” wall: Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know. It came out in 2005, so I must’ve seen it there when I was home from college for the summer, but I only had one thought when I saw those colorful dots on the cover: I must have it.

This film started a major Miranda July phase for me, one that lasted for years and into my adulthood (some might say I’m still in it, but given that I still haven’t seen Kajillionaire, clearly our one-sided affair has cooled a little bit). In college, I spent a semester hiding out in the campus library and looking up literary journals where she’d published short stories, and then I wrote a very MJ-inspired short story about a phone sex operator that finally impressed my writing professor (I’m almost positive it was a very inappropriate thing to turn in, and it goes without saying that it was weird). I have clear memories of reading her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You on my lunch break at a truly terrible summer job at the packaging warehouse of a major educational publisher. I was being routinely sexually harassed by a partially blind diabetic man who I was afraid to report because he frequently told me that this was the only job he could hold down (a story for another time, I suppose!) and I spent my lunch half hours escaping into the strange world of Miranda July, where plenty of terrible things were happening but at least no one was operating potentially dangerous packaging machinery.

I found her mystifying and inspirational. For starters, she was beautiful. The kind of beautiful where she could pose for her author photo with her mouth slightly opened and simply look startled and ethereal instead of slack-jawed and congested. She was also very thin, and one thing about younger me was that I sure was gonna idolize a body type that was not attainable for me! She made a career out of creativity, something I desperately wanted but had no idea how to get. She certainly wasn’t from rural Ohio.  

And while all of those things were what I would initially grow to love about her (and yes, I have seen her in person in Columbus…I’d be offended if you even for one second thought I’d never seen Miranda July in person), Me and You and Everyone We Know was the initial spark for me. It was where I was first introduced to her singular voice. Where I was first introduced to the idea of John Hawkes being hot (a position I have reevaluated in adulthood, more on that later). And a place where I was reminded of the importance of making art as a way of making connection.

Miranda July wrote, directed, and starred in Me and You, and so it’s no surprise that it’s very much a showcase for her point of view. IMDB, which often has less-than-accurate plot summaries, describes it this way: “A lonely shoe salesman and an eccentric performance artist struggle to connect in this unique take on contemporary life.” That is one story. There’s also the girls figuring out their teenage sexuality, the young boy innocently getting caught up in cybersex with an adult woman…actually, just a lot of sex, most of it weird!

And that’s why it’s so strange to me that this movie, of all things, cemented Miranda July as some sort of whimsical woodland creature in the public eye. Yes, this film is quirky. Yes, the title is long in a very early 2000s way. Yes, the cover has all those colorful dots. But this film is gross as hell! It’s funny, it’s weird, it’s not like anything else, but it’s also deeply uncomfortable by design. And Miranda July herself is simply not a cutesy person. She’s not Zooey Deschanel; she would never marry a Property Brother. She’s a performance artist and her Instagram is mostly videos of her doing interpretative dance in very little clothing.  She’s wholly herself and wholly unconcerned if you think she’s cute. If I could make charts, I’d draw one line showing her progression from “weird” to “quirky” to “weird” again and a line representing the American public’s interest in “quirkiness,” and those lines would cross exactly once in 2005.

This is a movie that’s primarily about loneliness and connection, topics that expressly appealed to me in college but are perhaps even more relevant today, given that technology has advanced far beyond what’s shown in the film, and we’ve since been through an entire global pandemic. Miranda July’s character, Christine, spends most of her time in her pink room recording her performance art videos and hoping to get them into a gallery. But how can she do that when she can’t connect with a gallery owner, when she can’t just walk in and hand them a video and ask them to watch it? Unless someone watches them, she’s making these videos for an audience of no one. She works as an Elder Cab driver, chauffeuring mainly one elderly man who seems to be her only friend (this is my favorite relationship in the whole film).

John Hawkes, who plays Richard, is a shoe salesman whose family is kind of falling apart, mostly because of his own actions. The film opens with him setting his hand on fire in front of his family, which he claims was an accident, but doesn’t this just sound like a story a person would tell in therapy in another independent film? “Well, once my dad set his hand on fire in front of us…” In college, I found this character attractive, which is incomprehensible to me now. He says things like “I don't want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it.” But while he’s saying these things, he’s being an indisputable bad dad! Even aside from accidentally setting himself on fire, he also leaves his kids at home a lot, he gives them cereal for dinner and not in a fun way, he forgets to pick them up from school, and they’re so unsupervised that they’re out taking part in formative sexual experiences meant to symbolize the fraught transition from childhood to adulthood and/or chatting with an adult woman about poop on the internet. I love how his apartment is decorated—the kids’ room is absolutely chaos, exactly what would happen if a small child and a teenager shared a room and had no supervision. Just toys all over the floor, blanket forts, no room to walk, etc. Their living room is disgusting…one of the kids is drawing on a painting, there are visible stains on the carpet, boxes everywhere…perfect set design. I feel like I’m there and I feel like I want a shower.

Christine and Richard connect at, where else, the shoe department of the store where he works. “You think you deserve this pain, but you don’t,” he tells her, examining a place where a shoe is rubbing a blister onto her foot. The shoe is a pink ballet flat, and you know I bought a pair because it was 2005 and ballet flats were powering the economy/growing on trees/washing up on shore/impossible to avoid.

Christine is instantly like “damn, this is the guy” and Richard is like “wait, do I have children?”

I cannot begin to tell you how much this movie upset one of my friends’ deeply Christian boyfriend. “Upsetting my deeply Christian friends and acquaintances just by being myself” was, unfortunately, a big part of my life back then. Once when we were all home from college on break and listening to music in my basement, “Hollaback Girl” came on and one of my friends sighed heavily and said, “So, she’s just going to keep saying that?”…referring, of course, to the phrase “this shit is bananas.” It’s hard when people who were once close begin to change as they move into adulthood and realize that they no longer have much in common. It’s even harder when one of your friends is offended by Gwen Stefani (and not even for the reasons Gwen Stefani is generally offensive).

Anyway, my friend’s boyfriend was horrified by a sex scene between three teenagers that, admittedly, is kinda gross. But I was offended that he was like, “What is the point of this movie?” and I was like, “It’s about CONNECTION and LONELINESS and the way that technology is bringing us together and keeping us apart!” I spent a lot of time back then attempting to explain what I liked to people in hopes that they would then realize that I was smart and worthy of love, which is pretty much always a useless endeavor. The people involved in these anecdotes aren’t even a part of my life anymore and I can guarantee that they never think about me OR Miranda July OR Gwen Stefani, and I think we’re all better off and happier and healthier for that.

But that brings me back to the point about this not being the cute ‘n’ quirky movie it’s remembered as. If you know anything about this movie, it’s probably the “back and forth forever” scene. You know… “You poop into my butt hole and I poop into your butt hole... back and forth... forever,” as typed/said by one of the cutest child actors ever. Also known as ))<>((

That scene is still extremely funny, but the overall storyline isn’t really cute or whimsical. There’s a grown woman chatting on the other side of that computer screen, and she’s unknowingly sending explicitly sexual texts to a minor (who is, again, the most unsupervised kid in the world). And when they meet up in person, she kisses him on the mouth and walks off into the sunset as Spiritualized’s “Anyway That You Want Me” plays. We’re getting into Birth territory here.

I don’t even want to know what all the religious friends in my basement thought about me if we got that far into the movie. Probably nothing good!!!

I thought these scenes were unusual when I was in college, but not off-puttingly so. But, surprise, as a mom (“as a mom”-me, every week in this newsletter) I found myself being like, “oh, wait, oh no…” Yeah, they do make me feel kinda bad! I’m a normie now!

But ultimately, it’s not the job of every movie to make us feel comforted. That’s the job of some movies, sure, but one look at Miranda July’s body of work should let you know that’s not what she’s here for. It’s not the job of every movie to present us with likable characters. John Hawkes is not playing a particularly likable guy, and he doesn’t need to be. And even if people—characters in a film or people in real life—aren’t likable, they still crave connection. And that connection is even harder to find these days than it was back in 2005.

Me and You and Everyone We Know is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and Tubi (and apparently AMC+, which might be the only streaming service we don’t have). It’s also up on YouTube right now if you search for it. Really no excuse not to watch it immediately!

In conclusion, please look at this incredibly early 2000s image of the cast.

It’s got everything…velour blazers, extremely low-rise pants, asymmetrical hems, Pop Secret, etc.

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Do I still like this movie? Yes, but in a very different way than I did in college. I no longer feel a deep connection to it, which is a little bit sad.

How did watching this movie as an adult make me feel? Well, a little bit sad! Sort of uncomfortable. Sort of like I was watching younger me through a window.

What did Roger Ebert think? Four stars! Rog loved it! “Now imagine these two characters…as they walk down the street. She suggests that the block they are walking down is their lives. And so now they are halfway down the street and halfway through their lives, and before long they will be at the end. It is impossible to suggest how poetic this scene is; when it's over, you think, that was a perfect scene, and no other scene can ever be like it.” That was a perfect scene and no other scene can ever be like it is the absolute best feeling when watching a film. Roger was a poet.

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I’m working on the monthly roundup for paid subscribers, so that will be out soon. I hope you’re ready to hear about all the movies I watched when Hollis was out of town (I got Peacock). See you then. xo