Me and You and Everyone We Know: Performance Rites

Once you see Christine and Richard in their performances, it’s hard to miss those of the other characters. There is a little girl, Sylvie, who lives next door to Richard, Peter, and Robby. Her enactment is of the domesticity and maternal care that her own mother can’t provide: she feeds smaller neighborhood children gummy worms as if they are baby birds; she buys kitchen equipment and stores it in a hope chest, in a dream of one day being a mother who will treat her own daughter with tenderness. The adolescent Heather and Rebecca are becoming aware of their sexuality and the way that their new womanly bodies give them power over men, and they test this power and their courage by performing an extended flirtation with Andrew, Richard’s doughy, middle-aged coworker and friend. The girls also force themselves to give a blow job to poor Peter, of whom they require an arrangement of washcloths and candies for the experiment as though these items were the tools of a solemn religious ritual. For Andrew’s part, he has been enacting his desire for the girls with pervy signs in his window about their bodies and the sex acts he wants them to do, but he falls to the floor in a panic when they actually knock on his door, understanding in that moment that all along his lust for these underage virgins has been only a display, not an expression of true desire. And, of course, there’s the refracted double performance of Robby and Nancy Herrington, the curator of the Center for Contemporary Art, who engage in weird online chats. Nancy believes she is speaking to an adult; Robby genuinely believes that the most intimate thing in the world is “pooping back and forth, forever.” In her loneliness, Nancy considers this a hilarious and improbable and honestly pretty gross act, and shyly performs her sexual excitement.

The recurrent motif of all this longing and vulnerability in the story is the color pink; once you look for pink in the film, you see it everywhere. Christine’s room, where she makes her art, has an electric-pink wall with a figure drawn on it; her carpet is a dusty pink. She puts hot-pink dots on her dashboard and on the videocassette that she sends to the Center for Contemporary Art for consideration, and gently pushes her longing and hope into the dots with her fingers. The ballet flats she buys from Richard when she meets him are pink, as is the rosebush that Pam’s new boyfriend plants in the place where Richard burned his hand in his catastrophic ritual of reconciliation. All pink: Rebecca’s underpants when she moons Andrew; Sylvie’s house and her backpack and the carpet in her bedroom and the pages of her book of longing; Pam’s shirt when Christine accosts her in a fit of despairing jealousy. The flowers on Nancy’s shirt are the fuchsia of hope when she waits at the park for the adult she thinks she has been sexily chatting with online. There’s a repeated image, near the beginning and end of the film, of a framed photograph of a bird; having become a symbol of love lost and new love born, the image reveals itself, when it is taken outside into the twilight, to be framed in pink.

Most devastatingly, though, at least for me, is the ambiguous pink of the final scene in Me and You and Everyone We Know. It feels prayerful; it feels mysterious, perhaps something like an antiphon sung in Latin in the high, clear voices of nuns. Throughout the film, Robby is awakened early in the mornings by an eerie clacking sound: we watch him struggle to understand what the sound is as, day after day, he wanders around the apartment where his father and brother are sleeping, listening in his sweet and thoughtful wonder. He asks his parents about the noise: Richard is still thinking about the argument he was just having with Pam, so he tells the boy that he should still be asleep in bed. Pam does a little better: she makes something up, telling Robby that it is the sound of streetlights going on and off in the morning. Still, he is unsatisfied. At last, he wanders outside in the grayness before dawn and follows the sound until he discovers that it comes from a man who stands there every day, waiting for a bus, clacking at the pole of a stop sign with a quarter held between his fingers. The man tells the boy that he’s just passing the time. When the bus arrives, he hands Robby the quarter. The sun rises in its hot-pink glory, and Robby takes the man’s place, his face radiant in astonishment, and taps and taps, fervently, as though his tapping alone is the thing heaving the sun up into the sky. This conclusion is like one of July’s perfect short-story endings, and, like the best kind of short-story ending, it can be read in a dozen ways. The way I favor is so bittersweet that it hurts the heart. We don’t see the moment when Robby eventually stops tapping, but we hear the sound of it die away. Perhaps he doesn’t realize it today, but one day he will understand that his rhythmic striking was not what brought the sun out of its sleep; that the sun would have risen and the day begun without his help. And whenever that day comes, Robby will lose the beautiful tenderness of the babyhood he still possesses, and he will fall into confusion like the rest of us, experimenting through desperate performance in an attempt to regain the vulnerability that time stole from him.