Me and You. You and Me.

Pursuer and pursuant: the perfect story dance.

My movie watching habits have changed in curious ways the last few years.

For some reason, the pandemic seems to have rewired my movie watching brain. I used to seek out tough films on tough subjects. I could take a gut punch or two from a film. I didn’t need pretty. I didn’t need funny. A nuanced, slow-moving art film? The more the better.

No longer. Instead of seeking the dangerous or the challenging, I seek the familiar. Life on repeat. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I only know that each night when I open my laptop to watch something, my mind wants to go back to what is known, or what is comfortable, or just what is not in this world at this time.

So I’ve been re-watching favorite films from decades past for the last few years. I don’t have any viewing agenda, no goal or specific curriculum. I can hop from Say Anything to All That Jazz to American Gigolo to Paris, Texas to Days of Heaven to Dirty Dancing to The Verdict in a single week, and in that week I will relive my life a little bit. And reckon with it.

It turns out that the familiar is rarely just the familiar, though. The old becomes new with each new viewing, even the films I’ve seen 20 or 30 times (hello Ordinary People). I move from teen viewer to an adult watching the teen viewer to an adult watching all of life.

Miranda July’s “shoe scene”: classic cinema

I recently watched Me and You and Everyone We Know, by Miranda July, one of my favorite films from the early 2000s. Miranda July is an artistic hero of mine for the way she continually reinvents herself in such bold and inventive ways. I turn to her to feel the pulse of an artist who is creating in service to the Gods of Creativity, not the Gods of Commerce. She defies categorization.

I’m especially obsessed by the “shoe scene” in the film. It’s vintage Miranda July. It’s charming. It’s kooky. It’s surprising. It’s poignant. It’s sad. It’s loving. It’s despairing. And more.

I’ve watched this scene over and over in the past month, maybe 50 times, and I’m equally entranced by it every time I watch it. It tells a fundamental story of life. How attraction can turn into repulsion. How we seek awkwardly, yet persistently. How we’re not satisfied even when we get what we want. Or how we can’t get what we want. How we reach out into emptiness. How we still want. Even when we have.

I talked with a therapist friend who said this is the dance of the pursuer and the pursuant, and the goal of a healthy relationship is to find a way to stop the dance.

By being together.

Togetherness is a blessed and magical thing, even if you experience it for only the flicker of a moment.

Humans are collectors of togetherness. It’s as if our lives consist of stitching different colored swatches of togetherness into a quilt: the togetherness of friends, family, romantic love, the divine, art, nature, sports teams, and more (someone should make a list of all of the different kinds of togetherness).

Yet we’re all still intrinsically alone. At the beginning of this year, I read several books by the “atheist Christian” poet Christian Wiman (even though I’m not religious I tend to think in religious terms), and in one of his poetic essays I encountered Jesus’s cry while on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

I hadn’t ever truly thought of how desperate that cry was. I’ve been pondering it all year, the abject horror of being forsaken.

It’s the most damning kind of aloneness—to be cut off from the source of life itself, to have all of life betray you. We all live in such a terrified, confused state, feeling forsaken at times and in feeling forsaken, yearning for one remedy, one solace: the warmth of togetherness, wherever we can find it. That is the reason Jesus embraces the thieves hanging beside him: he can’t go into death alone.

The quest for togetherness shapes our lives even as we breathe our last breath alone.

A storytelling lesson

I have also been watching this clip because I think it’s a perfect illustration of storytelling principles. Tensions rising and falling. Confusion. A quest. A need. An unfulfilled desire.

And then that piercing ending. The man who is desired, John Hawkes, stands staring at the sky, bathed in the light of a full moon, alone.

Is he hopeful? Is he lost? Is he damned?

It’s such a beautiful ending because it shows us in our essential tragedy.

I just interviewed Edwidge Danticat about her book, We’re Alone, for my Write-minded podcast, and I see Edwidge’s theme of “alone/together” in this little shoe dance.

We're Alone begins with a reflection on a poem by Roland Chassagne and the line, “We’re alone,” suggests both solitude and togetherness for her: “We're alone with the persistent chorus of the deserted, as in no one is coming to save us,” Danticat writes.

But there’s also a togetherness in being alone. She meditates on the beautiful and intimate aloneness between writers and readers, who exist in a state of “aloneness/togetherness” on the page.

When I think of my life, it is a collage of aloneness and togetherness. Any brush of togetherness is a cause for celebration because togetherness by definition is fleeting. Or togetherness requires effort, rather, to keep it from being fleeting. But it also just seems like a restless thing, a migratory bird, always moving around, changing shapes. Elusive by design. Combustible.

It offers a big blanket of warmth, and sometimes we can find our way into that blanket, but so often we stand outside, separate by definition, living as a witness as much as we live as a participant, living for other things, not able to even see or feel the blanket. I’ve often chosen the cold, and I don’t know why that is.

The definition of being human will never be without paradoxes.

And therein lies the beauty. And therein lies the horror. And therein lies the reason to write.

Because some quotes

“When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.”

― Edwidge Danticat

“I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”

― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

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