Me and You and Everyone We Know · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man walks into his driveway, soaks one hand, and sets it on fire. The camera stays where it is. No push-in, no cut to a reaction, and nobody afterward explains what he wanted.

Richard has just been left by his wife. He sells shoes, he has two sons, and the fire is what he does instead of doing something. That gap is the film.

Here is the useful thing Deleuze noticed about movies. For most of cinema's history the image runs on a simple circuit: someone perceives a situation, and acts, and the situation changes. He called that the movement-image, and nearly all of film grammar was built to serve it — continuity cutting, the chase, the last-minute rescue. Then, after the war, films began appearing whose people could see their situation clearly and do nothing with it. Deleuze called that break the crisis of the action-image. The wire between perceiving and acting goes slack. What's left in the hand is gesture.

Richard's hand burns because gesture is what the divorce left him. Nothing follows from it. No one is convinced, nothing is repaired, and the film moves on to someone else.

It moves on because it is built to. July braids five or six threads that barely touch: Richard at the shoe store, Christine driving a van for a service that transports the elderly, two brothers running sexual reconnaissance in a chat room, two teenage girls testing their power on a grown neighbor, and a six-year-old left alone with a computer. Deleuze's name for that architecture is the dispersive situation — a film full of people who don't add up to a cause. Its companion symptom is weak links: transitions that work by association rather than consequence, one thread's gesture rhyming into the next. July took this straight from Linklater. In Slacker the camera abandons whoever it has been following for whoever crosses the frame, and July runs the same proximity logic to hand the film from Richard's block to Nancy's gallery to the girls at their window. Nothing causes anything. Things are simply near each other.

So what fills the room where action used to be? Looking, mostly. Deleuze's term for an image that offers you nothing to do is a pure optical situation, an opsign, and the film's most-loved sequence is a textbook one: a goldfish in a plastic bag riding the roof of a moving car, watched by people who can't reach it, can't stop it, and can't look away. July holds the shot well past the point where a comedy would release it. That holding is her inheritance from Akerman. Jeanne Dielman locks a frontal frame onto a mundane action and refuses to let go until duration itself becomes the drama; July runs the same contract for laughs, so the joke and the dread keep the same clock. Deleuze called those stretches dead time. In this film dead time is the comedy.

Bazin's old argument sits underneath all of it. When a filmmaker cuts, they have decided what the moment means; when they hold, the decision comes back to you. Chuy Chávez's camera is static or moves in slow lateral tracks, frontal and centered, patient with people standing still in rooms, and it never leans in. That is why the film can put its most alarming material on screen — the girls and the neighbor, the small boy typing to a stranger — without leering or scolding. The flat frame declines to tell you how to feel, which is also why the film has been argued about since 2005. If you won't accept the refusal, the whole thing reads as precious. The refusal is the form.

The world these people move through is one Deleuze would recognize instantly: an any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped organizing action. Not noir Los Angeles, not Hollywood Los Angeles. Apartment-complex beige, the fluorescence of a strip-mall shoe store, a community art center, wide sidewalks with nobody on them, and against all of it the pinks and mint greens Christine carries around like her own weather.

Then there is the chat room, and here the film does something genuinely new. Robby, six years old, types ))<>(( to a stranger he will never see, inventing a metaphor whose meaning he cannot possibly know. Deleuze has a precise concept for a sign like that: crystalline description, a description that composes its own object and then stands in for it. There is nothing ))<>(( refers to. The symbol makes its referent by being typed. Because early-2000s text chat carries no image and no verification, the exchange runs on total anonymity and total sincerity at once, and the person at the other end is out-of-field in the absolute sense: beyond the frame, and nowhere you could point to. The screen becomes what Deleuze calls a lectosign, an image that has lost its self-evidence and has to be read. The tenderest thing in the film happens in a place that does not exist.

July shot all this on 35mm in 2005, which was not the obvious choice for a video artist making a film about video and the internet. It gives the internet composure. She declines to render the screen in the screen's own texture, and that is why the chat scenes play as intimacy rather than as a joke about intimacy.

Elsewhere the film is people talking things into being. Christine narrates a walk down one block as though the block were an entire life, and the camera walks with them for the length of it instead of cutting to mark the beats. She narrates her own hand into a video diary and hand-delivers the tape to a curator. Deleuze's word for this is fabulation: not lying, but legending, people caught in the act of making themselves true out loud. That is the courtship in this film. It is also the art.

And the bodies. July cast herself, following Barbara Loden's Wanda exactly: the writer-director-star's unactorly stiffness used as material instead of covered by performance. Against her non-naturalist frontal delivery, borrowed from Hal Hartley's Trust, John Hawkes plays fully naturalistic, so two acting systems run at once and neither is allowed to win. Deleuze called a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. Richard kneeling to fit a stranger's shoe is one, and it is the most physical contact either of them will have that day.

July's specific invention is the scene as instruction-piece. She carried the grammar of Semiotics of the Kitchen and of Learning to Love You More into narrative feature form and replaced the dramatic beat with an assignment. Type a word. Put this in your mouth. The unit of construction stops being what a character wants and becomes what the film asks someone to do. The Caméra d'Or and Sundance's prize for Originality of Vision in the same year were, correctly, awards for a grammar rather than a story.

What the film seeded is harder to name than what it descends from, because it is a register rather than a genre. But the problem it opened is still open: how do you film two people reaching each other through an interface without mocking the interface or selling it? Watch it again and time the shots. Every time the camera holds instead of cutting, ask what it is declining to tell you. That withheld instruction is where the film keeps everything it knows.