Emergent: Miranda July

Understanding the arc of multimedia artist Miranda July’s career is best illustrated through the philosophy of “Joanie 4 Jackie,” a program she started in which aspiring female filmmakers can swap movies to one another like chain letters. “Every woman who submits her tape will be accepted,” reads the mission statement.

The 30-year-old July has transferred this same all-inclusive principle to the subject matter of her own work, utilizing her voice and likeness to record some of the most obscure ruminations, and then turning around to write short stories in the simple guise of Hemingway (or her admitted and more modernistic Rick Moody influence). And she’s kept and broadcasted it all, even the cringe-inducing stuff.

In her feature debut, Me And You And Everyone We Know, July strikes her most accessible chord to date. Sundance, Cannes and forecasted indie consumers agree, but there’s still something profoundly unique lingering in her form.

The reason for this probably begins at home. July’s parents weren’t “artists… necessarily.” They did, however, work for a publishing company, grooming their daughter’s personality for what would become strong-willed creative outpourings. “They encouraged me to have a voice,” she says.

Additionally, this incubation occurred in Berkeley, Calif. There, as a kid on Telegraph Avenue, July was bombarded with daily political doomsday prophecies and sexual revolutions a la carte.

Reflecting, July remarks, “I think it’s common for kids to grow up inhabiting their parents’ world—an adult world.”

In her audio recordings, spanning two full-length spoken-word albums for Kill Rock Stars, Whitney Biennial installations and NPR specials, she often veers into monologues that blur the lines of age and accountability. In Boy From Lam Kien, she wonders what she would tell a judge if she was arrested for letting a little boy enter her apartment to talk about tadpoles and bunk beds.

With Me and You and Everyone We Know, July takes it one step further, animating the sexual instincts of younger characters with an unabashed sense of reality and humor. Though blatantly provocative, the deeper problem, says July, rests in a massive cultural rejection of the truth.

“The worst thing to me is the limited vocabulary of childhood sexuality,” July states. “Parents, more than anyone, know their kids are sexual.”

In her short story “Birthmark,” July comments, “… most people feel that their bodies are innocent of their crimes, like animals or plants.” This perfectly encapsulates the children in Me And You, who are more comfortable with their passively lewd behaviors than their adult guardians. As always, July tactfully leaves the value judgment up to viewers.

Since age 16, Miranda July has casually penned and performed stories that massage the fantasies of insecure lovers, kin and numerologists (the latter being depicted in the 1998 short film The Amateurist). As she begins to permeate a new medium—mainstream cinema—against a shrinking cultural word bank, she’s apt to drive out boundaries and find new ways to pronounce the conventional.