Before Kajillionaire, it was tempting to think July’s style of filmmaking had gone out of … well, style. Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
This review originally ran during the Sundance Film Festival but has been republished ahead of the film’s theatrical release.
Miranda July’s previous directorial feature, The Future, premiered at Sundance nearly a decade ago, and even though she’s returned to the fest since then as an actor, it’s tempting to think of her as someone whose style has gone out of … well, style. Those days of cleverly conceived, ornate miniatures — the era of that vague, dismissive moniker “twee” — seem light years away. But re-watching her earlier work recently, I was struck by how much tougher it was than I remembered. July’s broken characters might do odd, sometimes precious things, but they do so because they seem incapable of living in the world; it’s like they missed the middle-school assembly where we were all taught how to function in society. All her movies are about our search for experiences or people to hold the vast awkward darkness at bay — our longing for a happy place. When seen in that light, the work seems more essential than ever.
Which brings us to July’s latest directorial outing, Kajillionaire, combining her fondness for gentle absurdism with a dead-end atmosphere that feels both of the moment and, curiously, timeless. Probably the most plot-driven film she’s made to date (though “plot” is a relative term when we’re talking about Miranda July), it follows a family of not-very-good-but-thoroughly-committed con artists who barely scrape together a living on the streets of Los Angeles. In the opening scene, we see them standing at a bus stop outside a post office, unconvincingly pretending to be strangers. They bark out orders with military precision: “15 seconds … now!!” And when it’s time, the daughter (Evan Rachel Wood playing a character named Old Dolio) launches into a ridiculous acrobatic routine that is presumably designed to evade cameras but actually looks like we’ve wandered into an impromptu street performance.
And all this for what? Old Dolio enters the building, goes into her post office box, then reaches all the way in and steals whatever’s in the adjacent box. It’s a total crapshoot, and predictably, it yields little loot — just a tie that her father Robert (Richard Jenkins) notes is not cheap, adding, “You can’t see it because you are not of gentle birth.” We learn that they owe $1,500 in overdue rent to their hilariously whimpery-voiced landlord, who lets them stay in an empty dorm-like space where the walls are overrun several times a day by a pink cascade of soapy suds, which they ritually gather into buckets and dump down a drain. What??
This all sounds very cute, and your mileage may well vary; I found it mostly hilarious. But it also feels like an escalating anxiety dream. July is so good at keeping us off-edge: Most directors not named David Lynch wouldn’t be able to handle just one of these aforementioned surreal elements — they’d either overplay it, or underplay it — but July effectively immerses us in this defiantly unpredictable world. Her treatment of the material is narratively matter-of-fact, but visually precise: Like a good comedy director, she frames the characters’ weird interactions and movements in such a way as to make sure we get the gag, but she doesn’t dwell too long on any of it. She keeps things moving, and soon enough, the strangeness just becomes part of the movie’s reality. We go with it.
All shaggy clothes, grimaces, and long straight uncombed hair, the rough and reserved Old Dolio’s life starts to change when her parents befriend the outgoing, charming Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), whom they rope into a scheme involving airline insurance and reimbursement for lost luggage. At first, she’s wary of this new addition to their little universe: “How is this person an asset?” she asks. But part of her problem is that she’s begun to long for some parental tenderness. Early in the film, she sits in on an expectant mother’s “positive parenting” class in exchange for some money. As she watches videos of a newborn baby crawling on its mother’s belly to find a breast to feed on, a primal urge sets in: She longs to be closer to her mom Theresa (Debra Winger). But her parents seem incapable of showing any affection. Their emotional vocabulary begins and ends with survival, danger, and death. Every once in a while a tremor hits the city, and whenever it happens the family freezes in its tracks, terrified and hesitant; Robert has been repeatedly warning them about the “big one” that’s coming, which he believes will wipe humanity out. This millennial mentality (in the old sense of the word) has stripped their lives of any meaning, or love, or responsibility — though we may also wonder if the characters’ certainty about imminent apocalypse, their rejection of social norms and behaviors, is its own evasion tactic.
Kajillionaire is, ultimately, Old Dolio and Melanie’s story: the tale of a grunty, near-feral child who meets her polished, happy-go-lucky diametrical opposite and sees in her both an opponent and, maybe, cause for hope. To say too much more would be revealing some of the movie’s marvelous third-act surprises, so I’ll just say that July takes these weird, desperate characters and gives their lives a couple of cosmic twists that serve both to clarify her vision and to expand it. This might be her best film yet.
Although Richard Avedon’s celebrated fashion photographs have graced the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Life, the artist primarily referred to himself as a portrait photographer. Avedon’s fashion shots are profoundly dramatic and dynamic, often capturing the model in motion. Along with his own acquaintances and various ordinary people, Avedon took photographs of celebrities, politicians, and other public figures ranging from Bertrand Russell to Marilyn Monroe. In both his commercial assignments and his portrait work, Avedon’s meticulous approach and penetrating gaze sought to capture the essence of each unique subject and moment in time.
Blue chip
Represented by internationally recognized galleries.
Collected by major museums
Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Selected exhibitions
2019
God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin,
Orange pin flags indicate the location of ceramic pottery sherds collected for analysis after a prescribed burn in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico in 2012. CHRISTOPHER ROOS
AS I TYPE, THE AMERICAN West is ablaze with more than 100 devastating wildfires. Many of these are record-setting in both size and intensity. Several, including one in my home state of Colorado, have been so intense they’ve created their own thunderstorms.
Science shows that wildfires have been getting more destructive over the last several decades. The question is: Why? Are they getting worse due to climate change? Or is it due to human encroachment on once-remote forests?
Or, counterintuitive as it may seem, are federal wildfire suppression policies to blame?
In the U.S., forest fire management policies date back to the 1880s, shortly after Yellowstone National Park was established in 1872. After a roughly 50-year period in which some wildfires were allowed to burn, in 1935, the U.S. Forest Service formally adopted the “10 a.m. policy.” All forest fires were supposed to be put out by the morning after they were first spotted. To enlist Americans in these efforts to suppress forest fires, in 1944, the U.S. Forest Service introduced Smokey Bear, who would go on to become one of the most iconic cartoon animals of all time.
For over 75 years, Smokey has taught generations of Americans to be responsible environmental stewards with his admonishment, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!” But Smokey’s message is predicated on a faulty assumption—that forest fires are inherently bad for people and the environment.
Smokey’s slogan portrays forest fires as inherently bad for people and the environment. PUBLIC DOMAIN
This assumption goes against the Traditional Ecological Knowledge of many Native American tribes who have long used fire as a crucial part of land stewardship practices. In recent years, even the U.S. Forest Service has come around to this understanding and now supports the use of prescribed burns to return forests to a healthier state.
Innovative research by archaeologists working in New Mexico points to the same conclusion: Forests across the American West are desperately out of ecological balance, and federal fire suppression policies are partly to blame. But how have these archaeologists actually gone about providing convincing evidence for this claim?
THE STORY STARTS AT WABAKWA, an archaeological site in northern New Mexico that dates to around 1140 to 1470. Wabakwa was a large village consisting of 800 to 1,000 rooms, located on a high ridge top in a fire-prone ponderosa pine forest in the Jemez Mountains. The inhabitants, Ancestral Puebloans, grew maize and other crops in the fertile soil, hunted, and gathered wild plants. Their descendants now live in Walatowa (a.k.a. the Pueblo of Jemez) and other northern New Mexico communities.
For archaeologist and “human pyrogeographer” Christopher Roos, Wabakwa provided an ideal site to explore the unintended consequences of fire suppression. Roos studies ancient fire regimes, or the historical patterns, frequencies, and intensities of fires in a particular area, in order to understand the role Native Americans have played in forest management through time. In a recently published study, Roos and his colleagues looked at how different fire management styles have affected the health of the forest ecosystem at Wabakwa over the past 900 years.
Using dendochronology, or tree-ring dating, the team examined fire-scarred trees in and around Wabakwa and found three distinct patterns. From around 1100 to 1650, small, patchy fires were common in the area. These fires, which often affected only one or two ponderosa pines, would have been set by the inhabitants as part of their subsistence and cultural practices, probably to manage plant resources and maximize agricultural productivity.
Scientists cut slabs out of fire-scarred ponderosa pines to collect tree-ring samples, which are used to precisely date when wildfires occurred in the past. CHRISTOPHER ROOS
Once Native Americans left the region, those patchy fires stopped, and nature took over again. From the late 1600s through about 1880, according to the fire scars in the trees, there were widespread, low-level wildfires that affected larger numbers of ponderosa pines. This pattern is consistent with other ponderosa pine forests across North America, where wildfires occur naturally every 15 to 20 years or so.
Finally, from the late-19th century up until today, coinciding with the period of federal fire suppression, as well as livestock grazing and logging activities (largely by Euro-Americans), the team found evidence of significant changes to the forest structure. With low-intensity fires no longer passing through the area, the forest became denser and overgrown, with lots of trees having germinated since the last recorded wildfire in 1893. The amount of combustible materials, such as leaves, needles, and branches—what scientists and forest managers call the “fuel load”—also increased significantly due to the lack of fires during this period.
In 2012, after 119 years of suppressing fires in the Jemez Mountains, the U.S. Forest Service allowed a fire to move through Wabakwa once again. This prescribed burn, part of the Jemez Mountain Restoration Project, was designed to carefully remove the unnaturally heavy fuel loads that had built up because of fire suppression practices since the 1890s.
With all these different fire management styles at one place, Roos and his team had the perfect set of conditions to test their hypothesis. In doing so, they used a remarkable technique for dating pottery sherds that had never been used for quite this purpose before: optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. Bear with me—the details of this technique are cool but complicated.
OSL dating works on pottery and other objects that contain certain sediments. That’s because the grains of quartz sand found in these sediments contain a record of when they were last exposed to extreme heat or light. Quartz crystals have flaws, or traps, built into their crystalline structure. When exposed to ionizing radiation, which is naturally everywhere in our environment, stray electrons become embedded in these quartz traps at a rate that is reasonably consistent over time. Once trapped, the electrons accumulate in ever greater numbers. The electrons remain trapped until a blast of light or heat energy—from, say, an intense fire—allows them to escape, thus resetting the quartz crystal’s internal clock (as it were) to zero.
With OSL dating, scientists provide a blast of resetting energy by applying light (hence the term “optically stimulated”) to the quartz under tightly controlled conditions. When they do, trapped electrons burst free and give off light (or “luminescence”). Scientists measure the light that is emitted after the blast and use it to calculate the amount of time since a quartz crystal’s clock was last reset.
Usually, when archaeologists use this method on pottery, they are trying to find out when the vessel was manufactured; the quartz clock gets reset when prepared clay is fired in a kiln that reaches between 300 and 500 degrees Celsius. But Roos and his team used this dating method for a different purpose: To figure out the last time a fire moving through the forests near Wabakwa had been intense enough to reset the quartz clocks of sherds found in the area. By doing that, they figured, it would be possible to determine if modern fire suppression practices have led to stronger, longer-lasting wildfires.
The team collected 32 pottery sherds from Wabakwa. Roughly one-third of these had been exposed to intense heat in the 2012 prescribed burn. Another third had been put through wildfires historically but were missed by the recent prescribed burn. Yet another third were buried deep within the rooms of the pueblo and had not been exposed to prolonged heat since they were first manufactured.
The team then submitted these samples to OSL dating. As predicted, the quartz clocks of all the sherds that had been burned in 2012 had been reset. Others, which had been exposed to wildfires prior to the era of fire suppression but not to the 2012 fire, did not have their clocks reset, nor did those that had remained buried.
In other words, the prescribed burn in 2012 was indeed more intense than any fire in the region during the last 900 years, almost certainly due to federal fire suppression policies and resulting fuel buildup.
I REMEMBER A TV COMMERCIAL from 1970, the year I turned six years old. That 30-second spot shows a wooden match igniting, then burning in slow motion. After an excruciating, mesmerizing few seconds, the narrator sternly reminds viewers: “Matches don’t start forest fires. People do. Next time, think before you strike.” The message was clear: It was up to people like me to protect the forests.
I was too young then to understand the concept of irony and the law of unintended consequences. But it’s clear to me now that more than a century of fire suppression in the American West has created a very dangerous ecological imbalance. Thanks to the work of archaeologists at Wabakwa, we now have convincing evidence that ponderosa pine forests that were once effectively managed by humans and natural wildfire cycles have become flammable tinderboxes.
It’s going to be exceedingly difficult to rectify this situation. That said, collaborative research between various federal agencies, universities, and Native American tribes suggests that a return to Indigenous fire management practices can indeed prove effective in mitigating our current situation. I hope we’re not too late.
