If “))<>((” looks like gibberish to you, you’ll soon never be able to unsee its true meaning
In 2005, Miranda July wrote and directed a film called Me You and Everyone We Know. It was the young Indie filmmaker and artist’s first film (she has since released 2011’s The Future and 2020’s Kajillionaire, starring Evan Rachel Wood, Debra Winger, and other powerhouse actors).
Me You and Everyone We Know is her most successful feature to date, making $8 million on an $800,000 budget. And I think I know the reason.
))<>((
Let me explain.
I was in college when this film came out, and it got a lot of buzz around the “artsy” types that I tended to hang out with. So we decided to go into the city to watch the film at an Indie movie theater. It holds an 82% Rotten Tomatoes score, and a similar audience score, so I figured it might be worth checking out.
It’s a quiet but quirky movie – a film that leans more on storytelling than set pieces, and follows several plotlines surrounding an interconnected group of characters. July is one of the stars, as well as John Hawkes, an Academy Award nominee who you know from Deadwood, Eastbound & Down, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
It also has one of the most epic and unique scenes about poop.
In one scene, two brothers, Peter and Robby, aged 14 and 6, are talking to a lonely woman in a chat room. Yes, this was the time twenty years ago where chat rooms were a thing, and where kids loved to use them to troll people.
When trying to think of the craziest thing to say to this woman (Peter suggests “I have a big weiner”) 6-year-old Robby decides to have them say, “I want to poop back and forth.”
When Peter incredulously asks, “What does that mean!?” Robby clarifies.
“Like, I’ll poop in her butthole, and then she’ll poop it back. Into my butthole. And then we’ll keep doing it back and forth. With the same poop. Forever.”
It is both a classic example of childhood innocence (and grossness) as well as a mental image I’ve never been able to get rid of. Which might explain why I write for Poopable.
When Robbie later rejoins the chat with the unknown woman, she sends sexualized messages while asking what he’s doing. He says he’s “drawing.” When asked what, he provides to following message.
))<>(( Forever
If you didn’t figure it out before…this is what pooping back and forth, forever, looks like as a typed-out emoji. If this movie were made today, it might look like…
🍑💩🍑
But the elegant simplicity from this 2005 Indie film somehow feels like it tells a much deeper story.
After pooping back and forth is brought up a second time, the woman insists that she meets with Robby irl. Nervous, she sits on a bench…only to realize that the source of her fecal fantasy is a child. She gently acknowledges him, and then gets up and leaves.
There are other plotlines and soulful performances in Me You and Everyone We Know but none are nearly as Poopable.
And now you know about pooping back and forth. Forever.