Imagine this scene: a woman in her thirties is standing in her apartment with her boyfriend of four years. She’s leaning against the wall and turns toward the mirror and says, apropos of nothing, “I wish I could just be just one notch more beautiful.”

Here are some things this scene is not. It is not the start of an argument between this woman and her boyfriend.  It is not a calculated moment of self-deprecation designed to make a flawless heroine more “relatable.” It is not a part of a film “about” body image. It is not part of a film that will impart any lessons about lovable imperfections or self-acceptence.

Here is one thing the scene is: it is a moment in a film that creates and explores one woman’s subjectivity. After she expresses this wish, she thinks aloud about something no character from a “body image” movie ever thinks or talks about: the actual experience of living in the in-between space where most women live, of feeling attractive some of the time, and thinking about it sometimes, in the course of a day when you’re also trying to think about other things. . It’s like I’m always on the border, she says. Like I have to make my case to every new person.

The scene is from Miranda July’s second movie, The Future, which came out last year. And despite everything you might think about July, here are some things the film is not: it is not quirky, twee, ironic, or whatever they’re calling it.  July’s dancer character Sophie is no one’s manic pixie and she’s no one’s dream girl.  But neither is the film a “response to” or “deconstruction” of manic pixies.  (Although this also a very worthy project!) Nor it is a “response” to irony or an embrace of neo-sincerity or what have you. As Andrew O’Hehir points out in an interview with her,  she’s the rare indie auteur who doesn’t seem to be responding to other films or to some theme or some aesthetic.  She’s not “responding” to anything except the experience of being alive.

July wrote what is possibly my favorite short story, “Roy Spivey.” The narrator of that story has an encounter with a famous person on a plane.  They build a connection but he explains that they won’t be able to talk when they get off.  They come up with a code: he will say “Do you work here” and she will say, “no.” But when the time comes a flight attendant interrupts. I work here, she says. I will help you. Then she rolls her eyes at the famous man, as if she was commiserating with him about people like her.  This is the kind of imperceptible but all-important shift short story writers often try and fail to describe: the little shifts in our alliances, the circles we draw of who is inside and who is outside.

I heard “Roy Spivey” read at a benefit for 826. I was there with someone I was interested in, and it wasn’t really going anywhere, and I’d done the lame “I have two tickets” thing.  Before it started I went on about how it was my favorite story, and how it perfectly described the experience I’d recently had during a brief encounter with a famous person. Maggie Gyllenhaal introduced the story and said it was something we didn’t hear enough of, that it was about a woman’s body from the inside out, not about how it looked but how it felt to be in it. That was the first time I realized exactly what July was doing in her stories and in her movies, and why the twee thing she gets tagged with is so wrong.  Like Mary Gaitskill, July is the opposite of an ironist. She’s making a movie about artistic types in their thirties and the apartment looks like something out of Portlandia but she never makes fun of them for being what they are. If you think about it, that satirical impulse – making fun of hipsters, academics, what have you – is just another way of asserting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their (ok, our) lives and fears are fundamentally different from anyone else’s.

As in Gaitskill, there’s some very interesting, very un-twee sex in “The Future.” I imagine that a lot of people probably looked at it and said, that came from nowhere or, why would she do that.  You can look at it and say, she’s anxious in her relationship, or afraid of commitment, or afraid of growing older, or you can look and say she’s narcissistic or masochistic or what have you. All of these things make sense, or none of them do. In a commentary to Three Women, Robert Altman talks about how strange it is when actors say, oh, my character does this because so and so. But people, unlike scripted characters, don’t know why we do what we do. We don’t act, he said, we behave. To the extent that July’s character has a “motivation,” it’s a kind of poetic one. She and her boyfriend make the decision to “open themselves up” to new experiences and for Sophie that means that the boundaries between inside and outside start to dissolve. Women who “act out” sexually in movies or television are usually shown as lightweight and stupid or as vicious man-eaters or beautiful fuckups. With Sophie it’s any or all of the reasons anyone might, or at least have the impulse to – and that’s a different kind of psychological motivation to explore, that what ifs – restlessness, curiosity, transgression for the sake of transgression, not in the sense of shocking anyone but in the way that Brenda explained it on Six Feet Under: that your cross a line, and then you realize the lines are all in your head. (Brenda was one of the best-written female characters on TV, although they sadly pushed her a little too much towards the fuckup category and saddled her with shade-by-numbers Freudian motivations. Her parents were shrinks! And swingers!)

After we heard that story at that benefit, the guy I was with said, “yeah, it was ok, not really my thing.” I remember feeling that thing I identify with being a kid, when you’re all enthusiastic about something and try to explain it someone and they try to humor you but you can tell what they mean is, yeah, whatever, kid. It’s why it’s sometimes better to go on a date to a movie you only like so much, or not to try to teach your favorite texts. It was why I was glad to watch The Future at home with my baby sleeping on my lap. He slept through the whole thing, and so I had the rare treat of watching the whole thing without interruptions. At certain points I found myself thinking that that guy from the benefit or this person or that would hate it, and all their reasons, and just where it would lose them. But the film is all about indeterminacy and perspective. Unlike the ironists, July never distances herself from what she’s doing. She risks being seen as pretentious. And you can choose to see it that way. Or you can let the boundaries dissolve, and think, maybe this has something to do with me, just a little bit.

So, there was a little kerfuffle recently about David Simon saying that it’s silly that people spend so much time and effort doing episode-by-episode analyses of shows that are meant to have long arcs. Actually and not surprisingly, he was saying something much more important and interesting, about what happens when you actually try to say something through a cultural medium. Anytime someone talks about political art, there’s lots of hand-wringing about how it can’t be “preachy” or “simplistic” or a “pamphlet” and it has to do more than “preach to the choir.” Well, here’s someone who made a brilliant and genuinely radical piece of art that, even if it got less viewers than Jersey Shore or what have you, became a force in at least a segment of mainstream culture, and among a lot of media/cultural type people who we might think have some sway over how we talk about things. But as Simon notes, what becomes of that? You get a sports reporter asking a fanboy question of a certain fan who happens to be the most powerful person on the planet:

And yes, I understand that the reason for that interview – the precondition under which Obama participated, no doubt – was that it was a discussion of sports.  So, okay, no one needs to bring up a TV drama with the President of the United States for any sensible reason.  And yet at the end, Simmons chose to invoke The Wire.

If he were a hectoring asshole, an argumentative scold, a fucking killjoy, he might realize that he has The Man right there, and that he is at the end of the day acting as, well, a journalist.  So if anything is to be said about that show, well, here is a rare chance to break some ground.  He might swallow hard, seize the moment and say something along the lines of, “Mr. President.  I know you’ve said you’re a fan of The Wire.  Well, one of that show’s basic critiques is that the drug war is amoral.   More Americans are now in prison than ever before, and the percentage of violent offenders in prison is lower than ever.  We are now the jailingest society in the world, incarcerating more of each other than even totalitarian states.  How can we go on supporting this?”

Balls out like that.  Truth to power,  brah.  Get some.

Instead, to use a sportswriting cliché, Simmons choked, throwing up an ugly brick at the buzzer: “Who’s the best character in The Wire?”

Arguments about the taste of the bread or the look of the circuses go on forever, because, hey, Omar is cool and Bunk is funny as hell and isn’t it great when Clay Davis says the word shit.   Yes, it is nice to know that people were entertained.  It’s not that anyone begrudges an audience its pleasure; we wrote the cool stuff and the funny stuff and we enjoyed it, too.   But four years after The Wire is off the air, are we wrong for admitting aloud to other hopes and purposes for the finished work?

Probably some of my non-English major friends would say, well, yeah, that’s the way things go, and that’s why serious people should stick to serious straightforward journalism and activism. But it’s not like earnest journalism doesn’t just as often cause people to say, oh yes, and turn the page – they may not be entertained the way they were with The Wire, but it is similarly pleasure and not a spur to action that motivates them. Right now I’m sitting here typing this with my gorgeous almost-three month old on my lap, and listing to NPR, to reviews of books I won’t have time to read and outrages I won’t effectively combat (though I might toss off a rant about how NPR gets them wrong.)  And there is a reason “art” – however you look at it – creates the sense it might “break through” where the earnest and straightforward fails. Mike Daisey may have given creative non-fiction a bad name, but there’s a reason so many people were drawn to his piece. And obviously there’s lots of reasons why David Simon started writing books and making TV instead of being a full-time daily reporter.

I’d be curious how many cops or politicians watched The Wire, and whether it impacted their thinking. Closer to home, it made me think about my own profession, teaching somewhat differently. I’d like to think that if nothing else, it’s some kind of counter-programming to the relentlessly pro-lock ’em up drumbeat of just about every other cop or lawyer show on TV. It’s not impossible to imagine it spurring some people into action, and having a kind of cumulative effect with other forces pushing towards a more open debate and change. 

On the other hand, I read somewhere recently that The Good Wife had been called “the new Wire.” Here’s a show basically about a bunch of rich lawyers and their rich lawyer problems of every once in a while having guilt about letting people off, because on lawyer shows it’s defense attorneys who are supposed to feel bad about themselves, never the prosecutors. It’s enough to make one imagine Simon pulling a full-on McLuhan. In any case, the man knows a thing or two about pushing a form, and it’s a treat to see blog writing that pushes outside the normal point and click.

It’s the little things: from a list of “unnatural” barriers to healthy sleeping patterns, from Marc Weissbluth, MD:

– Mothers have to work outside the house, miss playing with their baby, and keep their baby up too late at night.

– Fathers or mothers have a long commute and return home from work late, want to play with their baby, and keep their baby up too late at night.