Ourselves

Oh, our modern world. I feel that today’s world of technology and convenience makes it increasingly difficult to find a real connection with another person. This is embodied in the film “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” directed by Miranda July. It is about, as quoted from my Netflix envelope:

“Christine (Miranda July) is a cab driver and artist who leads a solitary life. Richard (John Hawkes) is a recently divorced father who’s waiting for great things to happen in his life. When his path crosses with Christine’s, he’s both entranced and panic-stricken.”

But Christine and Richard are but nodes in a network of lonely and slightly strange and often eccentric people floating through the human experience. The film eventually connects all of its characters but does so only after they have maneuvered around the obstacles of modern life.

“Me and You and Everyone We Know” takes place in a lazy, generic suburb, a landscape against which the struggle of humans to connect to one another takes place. This homogenous setting made me realize that individuality makes connection difficult. It is difficult to communicate and to relate. But despite that fact, we are social creatures; the want to be our selves does not overshadow the want to find another person. Or perhaps the want to be another person. Our loneliness and our longing is what leads us to the uniformity.

As Laurence Rickels says on page 69 of The Vampire Lectures, “Want has that double sense in English of lacking something and wanting it.” He goes on to say, “…there is something wanting-wanted-right at the heart, the start, of their relationship. And so with this opening of the three-way freeway, you discover yourself always wanting-lacking but also desiring.”

This quote is crystallized, I feel, in the characters of “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and their relationships with one another. Every character is experiencing longing of some kind for human contact and connection. In the movie, Richard is separated from his wife and his children are dealing with the lose of their family in their own way. Robby, Richard’s six-year-old son, ends up stumbling into an online relationship (under the pseudonym “NightWarrior”) with an older woman, Nancy, in which his childhood innocence is taken for an extremely sexual ride. (For example, at one point Nancy types Are you touching yourself? And NightWarrior looks down at fingertips touching on edge of desk and says Yes.) They arrange a meeting, in which Nancy’s want for a connection is very apparent on her face. When she eventually realizes that “NightrWarrior” is Robby, the little boy next to her, her face softens and she kisses him once. And then leaves. Peter, Richard’s oldest son, is “sexually initiated” by two girls who meanwhile are flirting with an older man who tapes suggestive and racy messages to them on the inside of his window. The character of ten-year-old Sylvie saves up her money to buy household items that she puts in her trousseau. She explains that the items are for her husband and for her daughter. The films characters in the film are old, young, black, white, male and female but they are all grappling with relationships in their own ways (some are odd, some are funny and some are creepy.)

The question now becomes, how do we define ourselves? How do we connect and grow and create our own human experiences? On page 69 of The Vampire Lectures Rickels writes, “You identify yourself by name, signature, and phone number; there is always going to be some part of yourself that represents or substitutes for you, some detachable part of yourself that can stand in for you being identical with yourself.” And this is amplified in the digital growing world in which we live. We have email address, IM, Facebook pages, games in which we create characters of ourselves, and the movie Avatar. We constantly are changing the medium in which we present ourselves, each one utilized to sell a certain part of ourselves. NightWarrior (set up by the teenaged Peter) is an example of this. He is showing his sexual side, something he cannot do under the name of “Peter.” Instead he creates an alternate version of himself, one in which he can do as he pleases from the safety of his bedroom, a place where no one will discover him. We are increasingly becoming an isolated culture, so afraid to expose ourselves and yet, we are so desperate to connect. Its almost like Voldemort and his horcruxes. We are writing ourselves into existence.

But is this a form of narcissism? Rickels brings up this point on page 68 on which he writes, “I guess narcissism for many of us is a kind of forbidden but ultimately upbeat self-relation.” Instead of remaining in our purest form, we have reverted into ourselves, in a sense. Closing out others, creating selfish and self-centered characters. We constantly are changing our image; IM names, status updates, plurks, and blogs. Creating alternate realities. Why is this? I think it is because of two reasons; the first of which is our want to please others out of loneliness and the second is the fact that we do not want to live as who we have become. The character of Richard feels this disappointment in himself. He says “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.” His character longs for something more then what his modern life has lead him to; a mediocre job as a shoe sales man, separated from his wife, living in a shitty apartment, kids who barely talk to him. But how can he achieve this? How do we break out of the mundane existence that so many find themselves in? How can we experience a return of the self? Can we ever? Do we want to? How do we deal with the skeletons in our closets?

I fell that the characters in “Me and You and Everyone We Know” are representing the emotional development of people living in this digital world. We see the transition from sexual innocence, youthful curiosity, middle-aged disconnection and finally death. But where is the fulfillment? The characters only scramble towards it clumsily. Is this what the human experience has become? A scramble? A battle against loneliness? A battle against ourselves? To find ourselves?