Miranda July's New Film The Future and MOCA Exhibit "Eleven Heavy Things"

But wait, it gets twee-er: I can't resist chatting to a tall, lanky young man wearing a handmade unicorn suit. He hands me a business card with the name "Lemonade 'Unicorn' Steiny." (He swears "Lemonade" is his given name.) I ask him why he's here, wearing a unicorn suit, and he answers only the first half of the question. "I think Miranda's work is awesome, just across the board," he gushes. "It's about human experience. It forces people to get together and share things and be, like, 'This is awkward!' "

I ask him if having a horn on his head is an impediment to "sharing."

PHOTO BY KEVIN SCANLON

PHOTO BY KEVIN SCANLON

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More About

• Miranda July
• The Future (Movie)
• Mike Mills
• Marshall
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

"It can be. People die. But it's part of my job."

What else is part of your "job"?

"Demystifying my culture."

I'm there with someone I've just started dating. He and I stand underneath the pink cloud and are suddenly swarmed by onlookers armed with cameras. Miranda joins the crowd, beaming at us, and jokes, "You know that this means you're legally married." The forced intimacy of the scene reveals Lemonade's, uh, critique, to be spot-on, and at the same time, it's a powerful practical demonstration of July's key preoccupations — the piece that isn't complete until it pushes the spectator to perform, the rush of fame that confuses attention and love. It's also the kind of heightened moment that The Future is full of: contrived, hyperreal and unshakably, emotionally true.

And this, I realize, is the sly miracle of Miranda July and her work: She begs to be written off as a pretentiously precocious, delusional woman-child whose work is chiefly interested in what the Twitterati would brand as #firstworldproblems, whose prototypical uber-fan wears a unicorn suit. And yet everything she does is so guileless and direct, her affectations so often giving way to an ability to find the vulnerabilities in the average armor of cynicism. She sees your jaded defense mechanisms and renders them mundane. She dares you to roll your eyes. She knows the tougher you want to pretend you are, the harder you'll be hit when that fucking talking cat breaks your heart.