A film director who hadn’t yet made a film, July began putting on hard-to-classify hybrid plays and multimedia performances at punk clubs, using the structure of these venues and this scene to provide her with a platform and an audience. Thinking of these early performances as “live movies,” she repurposed this context to craft participatory work that demanded a different kind of attention to the narratives and emotions of the here and now. She was figuring things out in public, with the public.
In 1997, July released 10 Million Hours a Mile, an album of punk radio plays, on Kill Rock Stars, a record label known for the riot grrrl energy of Bratmobile and the softer, darker moods of the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. One track, “How’s My Driving,” conflates driving with lying and with sexual transaction, entangling them as July voices both sides of a dialogue dripping with innuendo. On the album, her voice is frantic, vibrating with abrasive energy. It speeds recklessly, careening, veering left and right into other characters also voiced by her, embarking on other narratives. July’s primary vehicle is language, but our everyday, tangible vehicles—cars, shoes, and bodies—are what move things along.
On another track, “Atlanta,” a desperate woman’s voice describes the horror of being a child in training to be an Olympic swimmer. My body tenses as I listen, a pit-of-the-stomach recognition. A familiar feeling resonates; I can’t hang out like the others. I must work harder, be more disciplined, dedicated to an abstract vocation that I can’t articulate. This is what it means to be a young woman who wants to transcend the few futures presented to her. A young woman who wants more, despite not knowing where “more” is or what it will cost to get there.
It was two years earlier, motivated by a desire to make movies and to see movies made by other women, that July had started Joanie 4 Jackie (though it was called Big Miss Moviola at the time)—her hugely influential VHS “video chain letter.” This was years before online streaming made sharing video as easy as a mouse click. Joanie 4 Jackie was a piece of “more,” a community July created out of thin air, highlighting the missing women-made movies that she and her new community were dying to see. It was a way to call out “ECHO!” and hear her voice come back to her even louder, amplified by other voices also calling out “ECHO!” into the void.
July’s first short film, Atlanta (1996), was made with a camera borrowed from her friend Tammy Rae Carland, a filmmaker who also participated in Joanie 4 Jackie. In it, we receive reverberations of July’s recording of the same title, as here, too, she plays both a young Olympics-bound swimmer and her mother. July’s Nest of Tens (2000) represents an important step toward her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, with its multiple interwoven narratives, odd couplings, and transgressive sexuality. Like the theme of a woman in water, the device of a character (often July) playing multiple roles within a narrative surfaces again and again throughout her work.
With an eye for substructures, July builds the conditions in which creativity will thrive. She understands that a properly formed skeleton can move a project forward with propulsive energy. In Learning to Love You More (2002–09), her long-running collaboration with Harrell Fletcher, participants responded to assignments on a website such as:
38. Act out someone else’s argument.
68. Feel the news.
Or the last one posted before the project’s end:
70. Say goodbye.
The project approached creative practice nonhierarchically, giving power and a platform to its participants. Started just a couple of years before July moved to Los Angeles and three years before she made Me and You, this web-based work is clearly a formally distant relative of the narrative film, yet the two share a key concern: July ardently believes in the capacity of imaginative invention and self-expression to connect people and free them from the limitations of convention. While Learning to Love You More creates the conditions for this proposition to play out in real life (as does Joanie 4 Jackie, for that matter), in Me and You it is the dynamic that drives the narrative. Every single character in the movie is involved in some kind of creative play that helps them to find love, explore sexuality, heal, process grief, dream of a future, and cope with the everyday.
Perhaps making this film was the next logical step for an artist with July’s velocity. She had written and directed her first play, The Lifers, in high school in Oakland, and, looking back at her career now, it seems that since those early days she has only been gathering speed. Me and You launches her into the air, suddenly weightless, unencumbered by gravity. That’s how it feels to watch the film in 2020. Here is a woman making a dream concrete, miraculously given support at just the right time in her creative process. What happens when punk spirit gets a bigger stage and a louder mic? One can imagine cries of “sellout” in 2005, given the puritanical way that subcultural borders are often policed. But making a feature-length narrative film can also be viewed as an act of generosity, as well as a provocation. How weird can a mainstream movie be?
If Me and You and Everyone We Know was a catapult up to another artistic level, the three-inch stack of business cards handed to July at Sundance when the film premiered there showed that she had once again found an audience, interest, and support. An overwhelming pile of fan mail, for the first time in her career too much for her to keep, was further confirmation. She had always kept a thorough archive, both of her own ephemera and correspondence from admirers, but now there was just too much. This is significant: the words, the dreams, the inner lives of others had always been a valuable source of inspiration. Suddenly, raw material arrived in excess. I imagine this to be the worst kind of feeling, like being sick on your own birthday cake. There’s a sense of loss whenever a long-held dream is realized; it’s an ending and a beginning.
The film still feels fresh fifteen years later, which is a feat given that it depicts a world in which people interact via landlines and instant messenger on clunky desktop computers (and one character simply writes messages on paper and tapes them to his window). In part, this is because July is talking about universal human truths in a voice completely her own, replete with the unique imagination and humor she developed through years of writing, performing, making art, and creating platforms for participation and cocreation.
Early in Me and You, we see a plastic bag containing a goldfish vibrating in the sun on top of a fast-moving SUV. July’s character, Christine, is driving on the highway near the SUV, and Michael, one of the elderly people she provides rides for as an “Eldercab” driver, is in her passenger seat. We watch the fish sway precariously, on the edge of certain death, through the windows and rearview mirror of Christine’s car. Are we all just watching things—anything, any movie, any object—as a way to pass the time before the ultimate inevitability, death? How does the way we watch what we watch define our inner lives and relationships?
Cars are emotional snow globes, sealed biomes of feelings and thoughts that float around as one gazes out at the flattened world. They give us the illusion we are moving through our alienation, but their structure perpetuates it, keeps us inside and separate. There is a sensation of simultaneity; we’re on our way somewhere, but even as we’re elsewhere, we’re strapped safely into the same stationary car seat. Movies are vehicles, too, in the sense that they transport us from one place to another, from one time to another, from body to body, from body to nobody, while at the same time we remain exactly in place. In Me and You, Christine looks out at the world through her car’s movie-screen windshield (which she later defaces with FUCK). The experience of being in a car is like being at the movies—people sit side by side, facing forward, watching reality move. Each trip is a story with a narrative arc built in: beginning, journey, arrival.
