Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Me and You and Everyone We Know
2005 · Miranda July · Me and You and Everyone We Know on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how rarely the camera moves or leans in. (camera)
Chuy Chávez keeps compositions frontal and centered, patient with people simply standing still in rooms, refusing to punctuate the odd behavior on screen.
Payoff: The stillness keeps the film from telling you whether to laugh or wince.
Watch a shot last well past the moment it should end. (cutting)
Charles Ireland holds on awkward moments long after a conventional comedy would cut away, so the discomfort itself becomes the joke.
Payoff: Duration is doing the work punchlines usually do in this film. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). Deleuze calls a held stretch where nothing advances dead time, and here it is where the humor actually lives.
Listen for how quiet most scenes are left to stay. (sound)
Michael Andrews's small, toy-like score stays sparse, and the sound design favors ambient hums over music that would tell you how to feel.
Payoff: The restraint lets material that could turn sentimental or alarming just sit there, unresolved.
Watch July and Hawkes act in two completely different registers. (performance)
July plays Christine soft-voiced and slightly outside normal rhythm, while Hawkes plays Richard with recessive, naturalistic precision, and the film never smooths the difference between them.
Payoff: Neither style is allowed to correct the other, which is exactly the awkwardness the film is about.
Watch Robby type nonsense characters to a total stranger. (structure)
Robby types ))<>(( to a stranger without understanding it himself, and the exchange carries real feeling with no image and no way to verify who is on the other end.
Payoff: The symbol only means something because two strangers agreed, in the moment, that it would. In the reading: crystalline description. Deleuze calls a sign that composes its own meaning rather than pointing at something already there a crystalline description.
Once you have seen it
Track how many threads touch without ever causing each other. (structure)
The shoe salesman, the video artist, the brothers, the girls, and the boy brush past one another across the film, but no one's fate actually depends on anyone else's.
Payoff: The film refuses the moralized connectedness that this kind of ensemble structure usually argues for. In the reading: weak links. Deleuze calls a plot held together by loosely bound characters rather than cause and effect weak links, and this film is built entirely from them.
Watch the goldfish ride on the roof of a moving car. (staging)
Bystanders watch it happen, unable to help or stop it, and the shot is held long enough that the helplessness becomes the entire content of the scene.
Payoff: It is the clearest image the film has for what everyone in it is actually doing to each other.
Watch Robby's face stay exactly the same before and after typing. (performance)
Brandon Ratcliff plays him with none of the coached cuteness or knowingness a film normally gives a child in this situation, flat in exactly the same way scene to scene.
Payoff: The consistency is what makes his innocence readable instead of alarming.
Carry this in: Watch what each person does instead of saying what they actually want.