Reflections On Miranda July’s ‘We Think Alone’

I know that in 2009 Sheila Heti had $1000 to her name. I know that Kirsten Dunst bought an Elizabeth Peyton drawing of Marie Antoinette and had it appraised for insurance. I know that Lena Dunham wrote to her boyfriend from India, saying that she thought she could sit on a bench for four days with him, just listening to his stories, and it still wouldn’t be enough. I know that, in the last photo taken of Etgar Keret with his father and his son, the Israeli writer was wearing a red triple j t-shirt. I know that Danh Vo wishes his father had penned ‘Fabulous Muscles’ by Xiu Xiu, a song that includes the tormented plea, “cremate me after you come on my lips, honey boy, place my ashes in a vase beneath your workout bench.”

I know these things because I’ve spent the last nineteen weeks as a subscriber of Miranda July’s We Think Alone project. The project, commissioned by the museum Magasin 3 in Stockholm, began in July, and is due to wrap on November 11. Each week, of a Monday evening Australian East Coast time, subscribers have received an email composed of around nine forwarded messages from the Sent Mail folders of a range of people — some quite famous, others moderately so — including actresses Lena Dunham and Kirsten Dunst, former basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, artist Danh Vo, writers Sheila Heti and Etgar Keret, photographer Catherine Opie, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy. The selection of emails, all composed before the project began, all previously private and shared only with their designated recipients, centre around a different theme each week – emails about money, or fear, emails with art in them, emails that are apologies, emails that the writer decided not to send*.

We Think Alone, which I suppose can be loosely defined as performance art for your inbox, has been subscribed to by tens of thousands of people all over the world. There is a kind of curious whimsy to everything Miranda July does — be it film, performance, sculpture, writing or interactive art — aptly demonstrated by the below outtake from her 2011 film, The Future.

July hasn’t set out to prove a point with We Think Alone. Rather, the whole project is designed to raise questions about intimacy, privacy and authenticity.

Getting Sidetracked By The Sofa Lena Dunham Didn’t Buy, Amongst Other Things

Most of the media attention that circled the project when it began focused on none of those things. And in general, it was concentrated on the first email, themed around ‘money’, which essentially became fodder for people (Perez Hilton, if we’re pointing fingers) to castigate Lena Dunham and her supposedly entitled and self-absorbed worldview.

Yes, $20, 000 is probably a bit dear for a sofa. But all that talk was missing the point somewhat.

There have been more thoughtful pieces about We Think Alone. Art F City published an opinion piece back in August, taking issue with what they call the “curated intimacy” of the project. They have a point. The emails which were never meant to be read by you or I have been obviously edited, with some names and subject lines removed. But that element of self-portrait is something July is aware of. In the project’s ‘About’ section, she explains, “How (people) comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view.”

Sculpting Privacy

We rarely have the chance to see the personal communication of others. You can lurk around somebody’s Facebook timeline, but you know that the most revealing and intimate stuff is in the private messages. That’s one of the motivating factors for July; her desire to know what other people are like when she isn’t there, when they aren’t talking to her, when they’re by themselves and alone.

You could make the argument that reading a curated selection of emails is simply a modern-day equivalent of rifling through your grandmother’s suitcase of yellowing letters. But it’s different, because the way we behave electronically encourages a different kind of intimacy — and it’s all tied up in the limitless nature of any kind of electronic communication. The vastness of the message field. You can use email for the most mundane ‘Sent from my iPhone’ tasks, untidy the white space with links to the new set of Annotated Sherlock Holmes novels you want (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Buzzfeed articles about bros in haunted houses (the Mulleavy sisters), or this frankly amazing video that Kirsten Dunst sent to a ‘J’.

But if you’re feeling emotional, or alone, or almost like you don’t exist, the Internet — especially email — can prompt you to behave neurotically. You pour into the appalling infiniteness of the text field a haemorrhage of words, and when you do it, you’re insisting that you’re experiencing things, that you’re awake and alive. What feels like existential relief at the time can in fact become a completely meaningless leakage of self.

Over the accumulating weeks, We Think Alone has managed to highlight that variation, reflecting the reality of a world both mundane and unbearably intimate. You have Lena Dunham emailing people about her dog, but you also have an email written in 2007, featuring a Macbook-captured photo of her posing as a sexy librarian for her ‘lover’ on his birthday, in perhaps the most awkward and endearing email of the entire twenty weeks.

But there’s also the issue of our changing conceptions of privacy that emerges in We Think Alone. As the project’s ‘About’ sections says, “Radical self-exposure and classically manicured discretion can both be powerful”. They are also not mutually exclusive. What can seem recklessly revealing is at the same time deliberate and artful.

In an interview with NPR, July explains, “Privacy might not exist at all in the ways that we were thinking of… In a way you have to start to sculpt your privacy, and that sculpting becomes a reflection of what kind of person you are, and you see that in this project. Some people manage to get through twenty emails without really sharing anything.” Because, of course, the participants choose how much they want to reveal of themselves.

Kate and Laura Mulleavy have, I would argue, been the least transparent. Kirsten Dunst, having spent her whole life revealing just enough to seem likeable, tows the same line – although Gawker, who dubbed the whole project a ‘celebrity contest’, have decided that Dunst won. Arguably, the two people who have been most vulnerable in what they have chosen to share are Sheila Heti and Lena Dunham. In their own work, both Heti and Dunham focus on what they know and their own experiences, in the novel How Should A Person Be? and the TV show Girls, respectively. That commitment to self-exposure means that the work they produce is a product of the mundane nothingness of everyday life, in which almost nothing happens but the happening itself.

On Being Obsessed With Real Things, Because We Forget What Reality Looks Like

We Think Alone — along with How Should A Person Be? and Girls — is an example of a trend you can see developing in all facets of creative culture. A lot of this is explained in the 2010 book Reality Hunger by David Shields (the only book I’ve read with the words ‘A Manifesto’ printed on the cover).

According to Shields, there’s an artistic movement brewing in response to the peculiar state of contemporary culture. “We’re riveted by the seeming rawness of something that appears to be direct from the source, or at least less worked over than a polished mass media production,” he writes. “Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.” That’s the heart and soul of We Think Alone. The intimacy of the emails might be constructed, and the subjects decide how they want to shape their privacy, but the emails are, at the end of the day, small scraps of an authentically real thing.

These days, experience of culture is nearly always second-hand, carefully planned and described for our consumption by others in advance. Politics, advertising, sport, the news media, the lives of celebrities – they are all scripted and, in a way, all forms  of ‘extra-literary fiction.’ In this year alone, reality has become increasingly harder to get a grip on, in the arenas where it used to seem fairly well-established. For instance: Clive Palmer is an elected member of the Australian House of Representatives. There’s a perfectly ordinary English sentence that shouldn’t be factual. We see these slips into fiction/’scripted reality’ in Miley Cyrus’ twerking routine at the VMA’s, and Beyonce just casually hanging out in a Brunswick street wearing a fur coat and her bathers. We see it when colour runs and flash-mobs move from political to publicity stunt. And at the moment, above all, we see it in the way that the language of politics has been turned on its head, to the point that you now need a hat to say anything sensible about politics in Australia.

Dave Eggers, a fiction and non-fiction writer as well as founder of publishing house McSweeneys, shot to literary fame off the back of his debut memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which has become a touchstone for this whole creative movement. Like the participants in We Think Alone, Eggers used his own life as the subject of his book, but — like with Lena Dunham’s Girls — he sculpted reality, emphasising some things whilst leaving out others, changing names and editing, making something that looked like a story out of the mundane shreds of ordinary life. And it makes sense that he did that: being true to reality — in art, at least — involves a certain amount of sculpting and emphasising, of oscillating between fact and fiction.

There’s a scene in A Heartbreaking Work in which Eggers is being interviewed/auditioned by a casting director from The Real World – it’s back in the early ‘90s, when The Real World was a thing. Talking to the director, Eggers meta-explains what it’s like for the subject, or artist, doing the sharing. He says that rather than feeling embarrassed about revealing something private, the stories, things, slips of ‘reality’ that are being shared are more like the skin shed by snakes.

“Hours, days or months later we come across a snake’s long-shed skin, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone else could look at it.”

That snake-skin quality is where the appeal of We Think Alone lies.

I’m not making the argument that the project has been groundbreaking, or that each Monday for twenty weeks I’ve received devastating illuminations about the state of humanity. But the project has been compelling. All those piecemeal, mundane fragments of reality that were delivered each week breach a kind of gap between your mind and the mind of the writer. You can’t ever really know what’s inside someone else, but in the moments when you can get a glimpse of the shed snakeskin of somebody else’s life, and look at it and think ‘this is how people are sometimes, when I’m not around,’ you do feel a little less alone. It’s intimate, even if the intimacy is sculpted. And it’s been nice to be a part of that.

–

* Note: As much as I would have liked to excerpt some of the We Think Alone emails, there is a wee privacy warning at the end of each email: “No addressee should forward, print, copy, or otherwise reproduce this message in any manner that would allow it to be viewed by any individual not originally listed as a recipient.” And given that I’ve just spent a couple of thousand words talking about privacy and sharing, I thought it might be rude, and also illegal, to do so.

–

Madeleine Watts writes article, stories, essays, and notes to herself on the back of her hand. She has contributed to The Lifted Brow, Griffith REVIEW, Concrete Playground, FasterLouder and Broadsheet. She lives in Sydney.