Now Is Pretty Creepy: On Miranda July

Abstract

Now Is Pretty CreepyOn Miranda July Min Li Chan (bio) In the summer of 2011, by the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean, the smell of salt permeating the warm breeze, the sound of gulls close and menacing, a friend told me that Miranda July was the real deal. We were young women working in industry towns that dreamt large and drank deeply from their mythologies; my friend a screenwriter in Los Angeles and I a product manager in Silicon Valley, both of us in search of purpose in our professions. My friend sensed in July's work—in the film July released that year, The Future, in her story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, in her performance art—a model for making meaning, for smuggling art into life and ordinary life into art, penetrating reality's surface aslant. I could not yet see how art might orient me in the world. For a time, I was devoted only to the functional and the [End Page 108] techno-utopian, saw the future wherever I looked: in the experimental apps I tested on my phone while riding the company bus from San Francisco to a suburban office complex; out my office window, where the robot cars I worked on would roam. There is something off-putting about technology, Miranda July says in a 2020 interview. Technology seems not for her, she says, not for an artist or a dreamy person. She says this, strikingly, as an artist who has, in her nearly three-decade career, made art with technologies old and new—video, email, PennySaver classifieds, zines, a messaging app, Instagram, internet-crowdsourced artifacts, and online user data. I understand July's stance now that I have made a life as a writer and have some distance from Silicon Valley and its subsuming cultures; now that enough time has passed for us to collectively reckon with its once-new technologies. There is, July believes, a certain force of insight made available by being at her age in this year, straddling two eras, the analog and the digital. She imagines an old woman living the transition from horse and buggy to automobile: the woman sees the technological breakthrough of her lifetime for what it is and what it is not, allowing her to approach it, as July tells it, with noncompliance. In a series of three Instagram videos from 2018, filmed on a cellphone angled up from the floor, July marches down a carpeted hallway at her dentist's office, cradling a manila folder under one arm. She trips, flails, and falls, the folder of loose papers exploding into the air. In each video she repeats this choreography—with a slightly accelerated stumble, a more forceful expulsion of paper, a longer pause after the fall—as if in search of just right, Goldilocksstyle. Every time July tumbles, my body reflexively tenses, even though I am aware that she has deliberately composed the scene. Each of the three Instagram videos ends with July on her hands and knees, whispering a stream of profanities as she gathers herself and the scattered papers from the ground. Yes, I brought the folder to the dentist with this in mind, she writes in her post, it's my receipts & Bank of America statements from 2005. On an app and a medium otherwise devoted to the performance of ideal selves, July's [End Page 109] performance of ordinary humiliation vibrates with noncompliance. I have revisited these videos often; on one viewing, they brought to mind a computer animation I had seen of an AI learning how to move like a human being. The artificial intelligence—a bipedal model—had to traverse an uneven virtual terrain. It ran obliquely, its legs at an awkward angle to the rest of its body, as if a crab had two legs and walked upright. I was entranced by this interpretation of the human body as a physics problem bounded by physiology. Mostly I was touched by its strangeness, the AI's naïveté every time it messed up, fell, and tried again. When I left Silicon Valley in 2018 and began writing in earnest, I wanted to...