The Door Ajar: On Old Dolio & Emily Dickinson [HYPERREAL FILM JOURNAL]

Both women move through their worlds in bodies others try to read and categorize, but neither fits cleanly into the roles projected onto them.

I wrote about Emily Dickinson and Miranda July’s Old Dolio for Hyperreal Film Journal…

I. The Unyielding Self

Old Dolio lurches and lunges. Green tracksuit jacket zipped to the chin, navy track pants pooling, shoulders curled forward, curtain hair obscuring her face. The main character of writer-director Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, she’s a 26-year-old woman in Los Angeles, raised by two peculiar, petty grifters who teach distance as survival. Emily Dickinson arrives here not through the film, but through the shared instinct between them. Dickinson, who hovers in her signature white dress with that slight, deliberate tilt away from the observer, was a poet in nineteenth-century Amherst who built her own solitude. Her gesture and Old Dolio’s are the same: reduce the surface available for contact. Two women, separated by centuries and circumstance, enact the same ritual: to remain nothing but themselves, no matter how lonely the weather.