Miranda July is good at plot. Stories will come to her fully formed, like a gift from the gods; all she has to do is unwrap them. In her Los Angeles office, a little house where she keeps more than three decades’ worth of papers, photographs, awards, cassette tapes, and costumes, is a notebook that she filled in a single feverish train ride with the bones of her first feature film, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005). Something similar happened with her first novel, “The First Bad Man” (2015), and with her latest movie, “Kajillionaire” (2020): a sudden vision, a pause to ponder, then a rush to get it all down. July is a director, a performer, and an artist who likes to work in media that do not seem to be media at all until she shows up to exploit their latent possibilities. She has opened an interfaith charity shop in a fancy London department store and created an app that allows strangers to deliver intimate messages and narrated the inner monologues of models during an Hermès fashion show. But she thinks of herself, first and foremost, as a writer. Sometimes, on a film set, an actor will improvise a line and she will have to tell him, No, please stick to the script. She knows what she means to say.
In the fall of 2017, July started to feel a second novel coming on. This time, though, she wanted to do things differently, to embrace the mystery of not knowing—what the writer Grace Paley called “the open destiny of life”—for as long as she could. “I felt like there was a way in which one’s anxiety is very calmed by having a plot,” she told me recently. “You feel safe. And there’s a way in which working like that can limit things if you have what you think of as a good idea too early.”
この記事は The New Yorker の May 20, 2024 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の May 20, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
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BY A WHISKER
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Beyond Imagining
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THE LONG RIDE
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ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
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RED LINE
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