Some Drivel On...Atlanta

Alexandra Schwartz’s May profile of the multi-hyphenate artist Miranda July for The New Yorker noted that July’s first film was a ten-minute short from 1996 called “Atlanta.” Shot on a borrowed video recorder, July explained in a different New Yorker piece many years earlier, she “played both a twelve-year old swimmer competing in the Olympics and her domineering mother.” This piqued my interest, of course, because I’m an Olympics obsessive, but also because I, too, shot my first movie on a borrowed home video recorder purchased used from my pizza place boss in 1996. July would have been 22, and I would have been 18, but still, this intrigues because whereas I thought strictly in terms of concept and writing lines that would make my friends laugh (or maybe just make me laugh), July was already thinking like a filmmaker, how images conveyed feeling and meaning rather than merely functioning as a conduit for words in a raggedy screenplay. That’s why she’s her and I’m me. But that goes without saying. Anyway.

“Atlanta,” which is streaming on YouTube in very rough form, features the 22-year-old July playing both a 12-year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother, cutting back and forth between the characters as they give a television interview. She is taking the form of a standard-issue Olympic puff piece, in other words, and then wickedly undressing it as daughter and mother begin by espousing athlete and athlete mom clichés before gradually spiraling into mid-interview psychosis. All of this, meanwhile, is interlaced with fragmented images seen through what it appears to be swimming goggles suggesting the 12-year-old swimmer drowning in the tub. Simone Biles helped to bring the mental health struggles of the athletes to the fore in 2021, and the attendant complications of that decision, the black-hearted bad actors it automatically brought out of the woodwork upon sensing blood in the culture war water, only underlined why for so long athletes were hesitant to open up about it. And that is why, given the roughhewn yet disturbing nature of “Atlanta,” I kept imagining July somehow hijacking the evening NBC broadcast of the Atlanta Olympics in July 1996, like the Martians in “Mars Attacks!”, transmitting these ten minutes to the masses that did not want to hear it instead.