The California sunshine seems to have gotten to the head of Brave New World’s author, for he invests the “sanitary engineers” with magical powers:

From something hideous and pestilential the sludge is gradually transformed into sweetness and light….The problem of keeping a great city clean without polluting a river or fouling the beaches, and without robbing the soil of its fertility has been triumphantly solved.

And what springs from that clean, fertile Southern Californian soil? Movies—in two main product lines, “mainstream” and “independent,” though like the Tide and the Surf, the difference is principally in the packaging.

In the independent, or artistic, collection, Miranda July’s films, of which the second, The Future, came out on July 29th, are currently considered top of the line.

Alice Meynell wrote in the 1890s:

Trash, in the fullness of its simplicity and cheapness, is impossible without a beautiful past. Its chief characteristic—which is futility, not failure—could not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotary reproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art.

In the last century, the utterances of art, uprooted from the world’s four corners, landed on the West Coast like so much flotsam, there to sprout New Age, which with a little more degeneration in turn sprouted “the films of Miranda July.” They are already being studied in film schools so future filmmakers will feed on that inane matter to inanition.

Like processed foods’ empty calories, they are poor nourishment. Some find them inebriating, though. They drink up that bright yellow California whining: “Oh, I’m so alienated, oh, its so hard to connect”—that made-up spiritual problem to make sure we don’t think of the material ones.

The problem is not so much that we’re not connecting, it’s that we’re not separating—sorting the trash, sifting the rotten from the good and the organic from the toxic. The banana peel goes with the cell phone into the landfill, which is designed in such a way that both things will be preserved there intact: the banana harmless but wasted, the cell phone’s coltan components radiating toxins. They are tossed together in the landfills and preserved for the ages.

And on the critic’s desk at the newspaper, on the cultural theorist’s lectern at the university, are indiscriminately heaped the mainstream movie, the art film, the tell-all biography, and the novel. They’re all cultural products, texts to be read. They all have value, say the critic and the theorist—who are we to judge?

I won’t waste my time reading them, but I will judge them: soapsuds, foam on top of the water-treatment plant’s shallow pools. It is only technology that keeps the fluff from blowing away.

I don’t have to see another Miranda July film to know that unsupported, it would be as quickly forgotten as July turns into August. But the DVDs on which they’re stamped and the machines that play them will be with us forever.