Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

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I heard an interview with Phoebe Gloeckner this weekend, on Studio 360. She was speaking about how her graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl is being banned from some libraries. It deals with a teenage girl having an affair with her mother's boyfriend, while sorting through a laundry list of issues: neglect, alcoholism, sexual abuse. She talked about people's reactions to her unflinching work, and how people react to sex in general.

"...anytime you talk about sex the galvanic skin response is triggered and people kind of get turned on a little bit--just when you say sex, penis--and when you combine that with something that doesn't seem quite right, like a teenager having sex with her mother's boyfriend--it kind of goes haywire, they feel uncomfortable. They're a little bit turned on, but they're supposed to be turned off, or they think they should be."

Which is exactly the line that this movie attempts to address. We have a variety of characters who are all responding to sex in childish ways, despite their ages. The youngest is the clearest in some ways--his misunderstandings about physiology and sexuality are so outrageously infantile that they become absurd and humorous. His ability in verbalizing them with such aplomb--which makes him sound like he actually knows what he's talking about--give him an authority that seems hard to question. I've met kids who have that ability to add the force of conviction behind everything they say. It takes a strong--or at least observant--parent to realize that these kids are in need of just as much protection as the ones who seem more delicate. It's just the presentation that's more forceful, but the mind is still questioning.

But our young character here gives us a graphic language for talking about this issue without spelling it out. Indeed, among you, those who have seen the movie will either laugh, groan, or shiver with disgust when I write this symbol:

))<>((

While the rest of you might wonder why I did an ASCII drawing of a tie-fighter on my page, and why anybody could react to it in the way I describe. Let's just say that because of what that little drawing represents, two couples walked out of the matinee screening we attended. Lest anybody feel that that wasn't enough, the way an adult acts to two teenage girls through the mediation of hand drawn signs might make you uncomfortable. He certainly made himself feel uncomfortable--especially considering that his big desire was to sleep in bed with someone else. Really...just sleep.

But so goes this movie, not about sex or love, but about the idea of sex and love. About the projection of our desires--galvanic and emotional--onto the emotional maps we view other people through. It's about how that perception of sex changes as we grow and actually interact with other people. A pursuit that one character--a rather uptight gallery director--put like this:

"Email wouldn't exist if it wasn't for AIDS."

Which is to say that we create our mediated relationships as a go-between to actual contact, good and bad. July obviously has a strong grasp on that, and mediates each relationship in the film successfully through signs, chat rooms, video, and even through the use of stories when people really do encounter each other. As if the potential pain and the visceral excitement of actually meeting somebody you have the galvanic skin response to is enough that you need to play it down by fictionalizing it.