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Getting Through the New Depression

An interview with the filmmaker and artist MIKE MILLS on getting through the new depression. By Nick Currie. Issue 17 (summer 2009).

By NICK CURRIE

It’s difficult to say this in any other way. I hope it doesn’t sound mawkish. Mike Mills is a gentle man, and a good man. In his work, and in person, he communicates a deep sense of humanity, thoughtfulness, and wisdom. His productions — straddling film, art, graphic design, philosophy, and activism — show concern for others, and above all a compassion rooted, unmistakably, in personal suffering; in searching, idealism, alienation, and depression.

Mike Mills is an American, but it’s via Japan that I’ve come to know him. All my Japanese friends love Mills, and especially those of them who are female, creative, and educated in the 1990s. It’s not so much that Mills has had media saturation in Japan — he hasn’t— as that he’s appeared in the right places, the cool-yet-gentle places, the sort of places Japanese art students pay attention to.

Along with his friend, the photographer Takashi Homma, Mills was featured frequently in Relax magazine, which (until its demise in 2006) forged cultural links between Tokyo and California, between Kamakura and Venice Beach culture, between skateboarding and kimonos, between the music style Shibuyakei and the scene around the Beastie Boys’ label Grand Royal.

Mills collaborated with design publishers like Gasbook and Nieves, released a set of posters in the sleeve of a 12” record via Mo’ Wax (my girlfriend gave me her copy for Mills to sign), and made videos and album sleeves for Air and Buffalo Daughter. He has close ties with a group of Tokyo-literate Americans including Sofia Coppola, Geoff McFetridge, Mark Borthwick, and Miranda July (who also happens to be his girlfriend).

When, in 2003, Mills launched his philosophical graphics line Humans, he did it in Japan. And when he decided, in 2007, to devote an entire year to making a quiet, moving, understated documentary about depression — Does Your Soul Have A Cold? — it was to Japan that he turned again, focusing on how the Western pharmaceutical companies muscled in, around the turn of the new century, to construct a Japanese market for their products by promoting the concept of utsu — depression — in a culture which, before, had hardly used the term.

In his own culture, Mills is a more niche figure. He ekes out a living directing commercials — just enough to fund the projects that interest him, and to try out the filmmaking techniques he’ll later use in his own productions. His debut full-length feature, Thumbsucker, which came out in 2005, required the double skills of Tilda Swinton as actress and executive producer to get made at all, was subject to heavy pressure from its other executive producer at the editing phase, got greeted by American reviewers with epithets like “quirky” and “goofy,” and only made back its modest budget via DVD sales. Mills’ next full-length film will examine the extraordinary case of his own father, a Californian art museum director who came out as gay in his seventies. Its central theme is, perhaps, the key to all of Mills’ work: as individuals and as societies, we need to liberate ourselves from bullies, and better tolerate diversity. That’s the only way we’ll get through our depressions, personal and cultural.

I meet Mills in Berlin, the day after the opening of his art show at Pool Gallery, “The Only Way Out Is Through.” For a man who’ll spend much of the next hour talking about depression, he looks surprisingly relaxed and cheerful. Dressed in plain but elegant clothes – a preppy take on the Weimar Republic, perhaps – the 42-year-old designer, illustrator, filmmaker, artist has soft stubble, piercing blue eyes, crooked but immaculately white teeth, and a gentle, warm voice. We head out to the café where we’ll conduct our interview, and I start recording even before we’ve reached the little patisserie. I’m getting good stuff. He’s an interesting man.

NICK CURRIE: I wanted to start with the inevitable question about this financial crash we’re going through; this recession which may turn into a “depression.” How are you experiencing it?
MIKE MILLS: I feel like I’ve been living for a while now in a “post-crash” way.

In what sense?
My parents were born in 1925 and came of age during the Depression. It was a real traumatic experience for them. They came of age during WWII and lived through climactic life-changing events, and were always waiting for the next one.

The 1970s had a mini-recession in the form of the oil crisis and so on.
Yeah, compared to the 1980s or the 90s, the 70s was quite traumatic. So it’s really ingrained in my blood that it’s all gonna collapse. Like, my house I bought for very cheap, and I paid for as much of it as I could. I got a small mortgage, and I don’t take out loans from banks; I don’t invest in the stock market; I’m very conservative and safety-oriented. On top of that I’m lucky enough, for the last ten years, to have been able to make money doing ads. But I never made enough to have a house and things like that. So I’ve always been pulling back, trying to live as small as I can as a way to have more freedom. So the Berlin thing I totally get – what everyone talks about here, that’s a very familiar strategy to me. That’s why I moved to LA, because New York is all about money. Every conversation you have, everybody ’s kinda hustling you. To be more famous, or more creative, or more avant-garde. Or even to deny fame in a more interesting way.

It becomes hard to distinguish a commercial pitch from a personal approach.
Yeah, yeah. Especially if you’re not American. If you’re a European, a hipster- New Yorker-American must seem really over the top, because their self-promotion becomes a part of breathing.

Some of them move here and it becomes a kind of finishing school, an education in how to live. A lot of the people I knew in New York in 2000 are now here, because New York is becoming more like that hustling hassle you’re describing.
The crash has already hit America in a lot of ways. For me and my life and my friends, it’s like the explosion happened but the smoke hasn’t cleared.

Have you heard about Generation Jones? You know, there’s the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, and then there’s something between X and Y that’s called Generation Jones – people born between 1955 and 1965. You were born in 1966, so you’re just outside it. But they experienced the 60s, which was an optimistic and wealthy time, followed by the 70s, which was insecure.
And their parents are all war people.

There are certain references that Generation Jones people are meant to keep coming back to, and the game of Pong is one of them. And that appears in your video for Air’s “Kelly Watch The Stars.”
I’ve never heard of it. I’ve always felt a little out of time, because my parents were about 40 when they had me, so they were much older, and just really different. And it’s not like they were from the 1920s – they were born in the 20s, and their personal culture was from the 30s and 40s, but something about them was completely 19th-century.

Your father was a curator, and you were set to follow in his footsteps, right?
I was supposed to go to the Whitney program, but I felt it was too exclusive – you had to be indoctrinated to understand what was going on. It was so alienating, and actually not fun. So some friends of mine got into graphics first, and I said, “Yeah, that’s right, get into the public sphere any way you can!”

Can you say some names?
Alex Ku – he went into the Whitney program and all that. And Dean Lebensky, who ended up working at VH1. We wanted to do anything else, more surprising and more interesting than fine art. The problem with a gallery is that you can do anything you want, and it doesn’t matter? So when I started doing record covers I felt so radical and interesting, like “Wow, this is at Tower Records! And it’s getting wheat-pasted all up and down Broadway!”

You were taught by the radical German artist Hans Haacke at Cooper Union, right? I can see some of his influence in your storyboard drawings – the way you took the ownership struggles of the rights to Winnie the Pooh, for instance, and followed the money as Disney and agents and Milne’s estate battled for them. That seems related to Haacke’s mid-70s pieces, where he exhibited reproductions of artworks beside certificates showing who’d owned them.
Totally. Hans went from being interested in systems as art, like systems of condensation, to manmade systems as shapers of behavior or art; all the so-called “freedom of art.” And I’m very interested in all the so-called freedom of the intimate, the personal, and the more interior, but interfaced with larger social forces or historical predicaments. When I started doing the Winnie the Pooh thing, I went into my bedroom and noticed my Haacke book lying next to my bed. And I’d just previously looked at his asparagus piece, where it listed all the previous owners of a Manet painting of some asparagus, and it revealed – to be honest I don’t remember what it revealed, but it was a connection with the Vichy government in France, or American corporations dealing with the National Socialists, or something. It was such an interesting way to look at art. It’s like Minimalism, Conceptual art, and social consciousness put together. So that Pooh piece is just a chain of title to the Pooh copyrights. And how did teddy bears start? Across stories of our treatment of real bears. We vilify and kill them, whereas imaginary bears become a symbol of safety.

It looked like a storyboard for a film. It could stop as just those panels, but do you think it could become a film?
No, it’s too hard. I would easily make it a film if I thought it would work, but it’s just that everybody’s dead, and it would be one of those narrated things. Do you know French wallpaper, with those scenes? On a visual, structural level, for me, that’s how that was supposed to be.

Like the Chinese willow pattern?
Yeah. In my head I’m a very grandiose, pretentious big artist. So in my head I think the piece is kind of like Kara Walker – a huge piece across a wall – and all those drawings would be really big. It doesn’t have the presence right now – it’s a little bit like a high school history project. It might make a good book, like a Nieves book. There’s more you could do, more tangential things. I only did a couple of them; Freud’s in there.

Some guy wrote a book about the history of pencils, and it became a history of the whole world.
Something else I meant to do, but didn’t end up doing, was take a Starbucks chai latte and break down all its composite parts, which is actually incredible. All the tea spices come from different places in India, and brown sugar comes from Jamaica. And there are some parts that come from Africa, and they’re all shipped to Portland. The cup is made somewhere else, and the milk comes from these cows in the Central Valley of California. The lid is a petroleum product, and that oil comes from such-and-such a place—

It’s like the food equivalent of derivatives; all these complex financial devices that had so many different hidden debts in them. In a way, the food chain is the same; there’s thousands of miles in it, so much distance between producer and consumer. Do you find that attractive as well as crazy?
I think my main attraction to it is, “Look how fucked up this is!” Chai latte seems like nothing, and yet it’s a symbol, a talisman of international capitalism.

That 1990s vision of globalization?
But I don’t think a chai latte’s structure is always going to be like that. I don’t think there’ll always be outsourcing of food and ingredients. American processed food is such a complex thing. But anyways, a lot of it is … a lot of my work is … I was the son of a gay man who I never knew was gay, so I’m forever trying to uncover the truth.

That’s maybe the trap that documentaries can fall into, but also their appeal – the idea that there’s a big conspiracy and that the film is revealing it.
I don’t traffic in that, really. But there is a sense of identifying with underdogs who are betrayed by larger forces. And that’s probably just an emotional routine rather than true investigative reporting. So I think I’m in that fog more than anything else.

I wanted to ask about your film Does Your Soul Have a Cold?, which is about depression in Japan. I live with a Japanese person, and I asked her if it was true that the Japanese word for depression, utsu, wasn’t widely used before about 2000, when the Western drug companies moved in and started promoting antidepressants. And she said that wasn’t true, in fact the word was quite widely used.
Japan has such weird, stringent drug rules. There was Prozac in the 80s, and then GlaxoSmithKline brought Paxil around 2000. And since then, Japanese companies have taken some of the market back. But yeah, you’re not the first person to say that. It’s true that depression went from something very non-discussed, very shadowy and shame-ridden, to sort of a magazine-trendy subject.

I imagine there could have been a taboo on discussing it.
Yeah. The film was basically an interview with five people who take antidepressants. Pharmaceutical companies all around the world – and I didn’t know this – are actually the biggest promoters of scholarship on drugs. They do seminars and educational campaigns not just for the public, but for doctors too. And in Japan they really filled that vacuum because the government wasn’t doing anything, and something needed to be done about the suicide rate. So they partnered with GlaxoSmithKline. A couple of people in my film, they went to the Utsu Web, and the first thing you see is a list of all these clinics. And of course all those clinics are Paxil only. In Japanese culture, if you have a cold, you don’t do something herbal, you take antibiotics. I tried very hard not to pick on Japan, or make it seem like I knew everything about Japan.

I tried to download the documentary, but I couldn’t fi nd it!
It’s on iTunes in America.

There was an interesting article in The New York Review of Books about how US doctors are on the payroll of the pharmaceuticals industry. It was about the money doctors get to prescribe certain drugs. But the patients also want to be medicated.
I’ve been depressed. You want anything to get out. You want to feel better.

Right. But the way you framed the Japanese film, it’s almost like there was a mythical backdrop where Japan was a kind of Garden of Eden, and the Western pharmaceutical companies were like the snake, bringing knowledge in the form of these little pills.
The thing I was trying to point out, which was equally as dicey – I’m not trying to defend myself, you know, I’m a Westerner trying to study Japan, and what a great way to make a mistake – but my point was never that Japan was innocent, but that there was so much shame around mental health, and that it was all conflated. There wasn’t a huge difference between being depressed and schizophrenic to a Japanese person. They had this policy where, if anyone had any kind of mental illness, they would just shut them in, locked up in the house. I’m simplifying; I’m sure there’s more to it. But if an American company comes in and starts talking about depression – and GlaxoSmithKline isn’t even American, it’s partly British, but that’s how it’s perceived – and starts doing depression ads on TV, people start feeling that if it’s from America it’s good. If it’s from America it’s the future. They all say that America is ten years ahead in certain things.

Really?
I’m just quoting the Japanese. It gave this problem, depression, and this solution, medication, a great validity. There’s a really good New York Times piece that inspired me, called “Did GlaxoSmithKline Depress Japan?” They get into how, in Zen Buddhism, life is suffering, and depression is a part of life; how there are always unhappy endings in Japanese folk stories; how to have malaise or depression has sort of the romantic quality of artists and sensitive people. So the attitude went from that to the idea that depression is something to be eradicated, an illness. I went to Japan very infl uenced by the article, and came back even fuzzier than before. No one in Japan knows about Zen or Buddhism at all. They just treat it like a wack religion that you practice at marriage and funerals.

Yes, you’re born Shinto, married Christian, and you have a Buddhist funeral!
And that’s really big in the movie, which is why it didn’t do very well in America. There’s not really any solution offered, and people have different feelings about it. I wanted to support those people who are in it. And it was kind of scary – some of them are fragile, and you’re asking, “What was it like when you tried to commit suicide?” And there’s this Japanese thing of wanting to be part of the team and help everybody. And these are young people, our equivalents, who are worried about their contribution to society. And I thought, “Wow, none of my friends think about contributing to society!”

Well, that’s a theme that’s always run through your work, the theme of alienation. In The Architecture of Reassurance there’s a realtor who says to Alice: “You must feel different, and alone.” She denies it, but all your characters seem to have a comfortable suburban alienation from their own society – dropping out to be skaters, or whatever it is. Maybe you felt that depressed Japanese people had a similar distance from their own society.
Sure, sure. Definitely. The normal world, the normal stories, the aesthetic universe that you can inhabit via ads, clothes, cars, stories, movies, books; this was not inviting to them. And if anything, it exacerbated their depression. And that’s me in a nutshell. That’s what I live through, that’s what I project on the world. It’s also the thing I hope to be helpful with – providing a space for these other people a little bit. But depression has also been huge for me. While doing that movie I said to myself: “Oh you’re depressed, you’ve always been depressed, and you’ve always been talking about depression.”

There are different kinds of depression, though. There are people who are depressed because they can’t get into mainstream material well-being, and there are other people who’ve had it, been through affluence, and found it hollow and wanting. And they’re depressed because of that realization. This is about class; I think your work is commercial work, but it appeals to people like me, people who are over the material thing. The question is, are we the same kind of people as those who couldn’t get into that in the first place?
Oh, not at all. It’s a place of privilege; a white guy with blond hair and blue eyes that went to college and his father was an art historian. And even though my parents had their very specific troubles and traumas and blocks, I still grew up in Santa Barbara and went to Cooper Union. It’s a privilege-based thing. But you’re talking about material bling, physical bling, and I think I’m always talking about an emotional bling that you can be very left out of.

So depression might be something that might unite those two groups of people – they might both be depressed in the same way?
There’s no fruit in trying to link depressions like that. It’s weird how the symptoms are the same internationally, and how essentialist it is on some levels. Real specific things are the same. But I like to think more about how different it is. If someone’s left out materially, in a class perspective, that’s a different frustration than someone who has it all, then feels quite empty. You might as well just think of them as two different species. There’s my parents’ depression, which has a certain historical texture to it, which is different than my depression – a combination of physical and material deprivation, war, and having to make these choices. My father, in the 1950s, went to a psychoanalyst and trusted him as a doctor and a fi gure of authority. He felt like he was losing his mind, completely lost and terrifi ed, and the doctor tells him he has a mental illness called homosexuality, and that there’s a cure for it.

He was told that? And what was the cure?
Going straight. There’s a whole medical thing called “re-formation,” and that was the standard policy back then. The inheritors of Freud in America wanted conformity – that’s what my dad confronted. When you’re really confused, it’s such a huge mystery, like the biggest Turner painting that ever existed. It’s endless and amorphous and huge. And it’s fascinating to see it from the perspective of ideas, generated by humans, instituted by humans, and applied to them. For me it’s so impossible to think of those two things together. In my film, Mika’s depression – she’s a 21-year-old girl trying to kill herself, and goes to her doctor who says, “Here’s the answer!” And it’s this product of European and American research, done in the 1950s – that interchange or overlap is really important.

And was skateboarding a way for people from different classes to express their alienation in a communal way? And could it happen only when you’re young, that mixing?
Kids are way less racist. The kid of a racist parent won’t pick it up, or won’t start enacting it yet. But talking about class – you’re from Scotland, and that’s such a well-practiced UK perspective, with a lot of history: class first! America is so good at erasing class – erasing it for the privileged people. It’s very good at dusting over the tracks of how it’s trodden on people less empowered. And it’s very convincing. Even those who’ve moved up in class, like my parents – my parents were very prounderdog, very Democratic-progressive people who hated the rich, even though my dad was a museum director – but still, they wanted to join the dream, not look at its inner workings. And I’m a product of that. When I worked with Tilda Swinton on Thumbsucker, one of her initial ways to talk about the fi lm was through how much they made. And I realized that my brain has internalized a machine that blurs over all of that in a way that’s convenient for me.

And we British have a machine that spotlights it!
But you’re really right in that. When I started skating in 1977 or 78, there were privately owned skate parks, especially in California. You paid by the hour or the day, and they attracted troubled kids. Before I was going to the tennis club, and feeling really weird and unhappy. But with the skate park, it wasn’t like I was happier, but there was just a lot more room, and different kinds of kids – kids from more fucked up families. But in the skate park community I hid my privilege. I never said I lived in a house with a rose garden and a pool.

And slang became a way to speak that was not class-coded?
But everybody could smell it. I was ostracized because they knew I was a rich kid. The way I handled myself was too effeminate – you know, I’m a totally straight guy, but I don’t enjoy, like, killing a cat.

Which happens in a Harmony Korine movie, of course!
It’s a very common thing to just be cruel. I wasn’t into that. So I thought, “I might as well be gay! Or wealthy!” I was never totally at home, but it was more lenient than the more normal, privileged world of tennis. I lived in a suburb, and all the contests were down in LA. So when I was twelve or thirteen I’d get a ride down to LA and spend the weekend, meeting all these different kids, kids who’d steal and do drugs. I remember skating at Marina del Rey, this really famous skate park with a sound system in the pool. You’d drop in with Black Flag playing really loud, and I remember how completely caustic it sounded. It was like drinking Draino – you just shouldn’t be doing this! And the terror it created in me was huge.

Thinking of the simplicity of your images, the beautiful alienation in them, I was wondering where that look might come from. I thought of Sofia Coppola, of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark, and then back to Wim Wenders when he came and shot Paris, Texas and showed the US in this very alienated, European way we hadn’t seen before. Did you like those people?
I like what Harmony and Larry Clark do, but I always think they must hate me. Harmony’s very nice. But I’m not in that thing at all. That form of “realism” – which isn’t real – is looking for the most fucked up thing as a way of freedom. It’s really voyeuristic, and it can be totally full of shit. It’s way more rough than me. Then Sofia is another form of “realism,” that’s pretty lyrical; it’s romantic and nostalgic. I can be very nostalgic, but when I started fi lming I was really influenced by the Maysles Brothers, you know [the 1968 documentary] Salesman and all that? So that kind of soft attentiveness is more my style, and soft attentiveness guys would definitely get beat up by Larry Clark; or teased at the very least. That style is too dry for Sofia, since she’s got more juice running through her lens. I’m really interested in just presenting things. I don’t believe in objectivity, but I do believe in being attentive and empathetic towards the things I shoot.

Maybe that’s one reason you’ve been so well received in Japan, because the Japanese don’t respond very well to aggression. I might be talking about Japanese women here, because there are clearly people, like Takashi Miike, who are very aggressive in their films. But all the Japanese women I know love your work!
My whole career is for women! I grew up with a gay man, two really interesting, older sisters, and a powerful mom. I just find women more interesting. I like guys – I can tell that the two of us could be friends. You’re a sensitive, thinking person, but most guys … I have way more female friends than guy friends, and it’s not because of some quasi-sexual thing. I can just talk about more stuff with them, and I simply feel more comfortable. I’ve had very few relationships with men. But I just built a house up in the woods, in the Sierras, and the area is full of these really manly men, mountain men who can hunt. And they’re really intelligent, wonderful, gracious guys. So I’ve had this weird, surrogate father relationship with my contractor and his four or five coworkers – they’re really interesting and they’re not bullies. They’ll do anything: lay a cement floor, fix a car, kill and strip a deer. They teach me how to shoot guns, how to use a chainsaw.

I call that the “machismo of competence.” Guys really bond over the fact that they know how to do stuff.
Yeah, but they’re not macho at all. They could snap you in two if they wanted to, but it’s very John Wayne; they don’t ever talk tough, they don’t need to. They’re great, and more complicated than you might think. But they made me realize that I never really had that much experience with guys. Skateboarding was one of the few times that I was in a totally male environment.

Skateboarding is pretty macho, though – you fall down and act like it doesn’t hurt!
Yeah, but it’s macho for weirdo nerds who weren’t good at normal sports. It’s a strange combination – people who are desperate enough to be willing to hurt themselves. A lot of the kids who were more than a little privileged, they just weren’t desperate enough. They weren’t hungry enough. They didn’t need to be.

The simplicity of your images, their gentleness, that’s very much against the grain of commercial culture, which has a “stupid impact,” with explosions every few seconds, and lots of edits. When you do a commercial, does the client say, “Where’s the impact in this, Mike?”
No, here’s the reality: the kind of commercials I do – well, I try not to do them any more, as I retired from the Bureau [his commercial agency] in 2005, but I don’t really have any other source of income. But when you work at the top of that world it’s actually quite arty, and sophisticated. And they hire me to be me. I never have more … I’m never better treated than when I do an ad.

So you can make a Volkswagen commercial which doesn’t show the car?
They want me to do that! When I do an ad, we talk about Jim Jarmusch; we talk about Tati.

You give them some cachet, some kudos, some class.
And it works. Advertising is the voracious forward motion of capitalism, but they are eating what’s new. So everything you just described – my gentleness, my weirdness – was what got me the job. Stilted timing, wide frames, lock-offs. But I was actually a part of commerce with Thumbsucker, and they wanted me to be juicier, more direct, and hotter.

Sony?
Not Sony, Sundance. Ted Hope.

He told you to go away and remake it, re-edit it somehow?
Yeah, yeah.

But you didn’t?
I was re-editing it anyways. But that was the tenor of their notes. And you know who Ted Hope is? Like, one of the very fancy kings of independent film. Film is a hustler’s world. When you make an ad, you don’t have to sell tickets, it’s just on the air, and never really tested how well it’s doing. When you make a film, you have to sell seats. You have to pay back the few million dollars you were lent to make the film.

And did Thumbsucker make back its few million dollars?
Only through DVD sales. The theatrical run was very limited.

It’s a double-edged sword when you have the creative freedom to put your look into the commercials, because you then make your look something copied by other commercials, and it becomes very familiar, and associated with a particular time. Is that something you’re always battling against as well? Do you want to keep changing what you do because of that? When I met Jonas Mekas, I asked him, “What do you feel about MTV copying your Super 8 look?” And he said, “Such things don’t concern me.” He wasn’t willing to change his style just because people were copying it.
Absolutely not. And also, one of the reasons I did commercials wasn’t just to make money. I really like practicing, but in films you don’t really get the chance to practice. So doing ads is a great way to practice, and I always treated them as schooling. I never saw it as, “Here’s my set style, and I’m giving it to you.” It’s more of a workshop. Clearly, though, I have certain things that I do – a way I approach it – that you can feel in the ads, and that’s out there in the world, as you’re saying, and could potentially be co-opted, or get linked only to ads. But ultimately the thing that excites me isn’t aesthetic or style, but the soul of the piece, or the spirit of the people. Since I was 35, for the last seven years, I rarely think, “Oh, look at that cool light!” or, “Look at that color!” or, “Oh, I want to do this effect!” I think more about “How am I ever going to get this feeling across?” or, “How am I going to do something people can really grab onto?”

Mark Borthwick, someone you have ties with, described himself as “postfashion”. He’s really sick of the way the commercial fashion world works. He hasn’t left fashion, but he operates in a kind of parallel world alongside it. So would you say you feel post-film, post-commercials, in that sense?
I never think like that. Bringing up Mark is a better way to talk about it – I love Mark, he’s great. But we’re totally different as thinkers, and in the structures we create to make our work.

But you both have some kind of hippy thing going on!
You could say that we share a quasi-hippy thing, vaguely spiritual, post-materialist. Although we do it in really different ways. But I want to have Mark at my party, and I cherish him for his differences. His post-fashion, and my post-ambition – not post-commercial, because I still haven’t figured out a trick, beyond making ads – but my post-ness, whatever it is, is way more analytic.

Is there another Thumbsucker film on the way?
Yeah, the next one, a film sort of about my dad. There are four or five scenes in Thumbsucker which are really my life, but this next one is way more autobiographical. But it’s also not; it’s kind of a weird hybrid.

And is it being made for the same people, the same Sundance people?
No. It might be at Sundance. This idea of independent cinema as “art” or something like that, or as the opposite of commercials, and commercials as “evil” … Well, commercials are evil, but we live in a pretty evil world. I’ve met very few people who can get out of that web. And personally, commercials allow me to do gallery shows, and not have any concern of whether I make money. I can make a big-ass 1971 piece that’s never going to sell. I can make a film like Thumbsucker or a documentary about depressed people in Japan. Of course it doesn’t excuse my involvement in ads. But I try to do it sparingly, and if I can find another way out, I will. But that’s my mess, and I feel responsible to present it as a mess. I wish I’d heard about more messes when I was in my twenties. I’m so susceptible to thinking that people in magazines, or on TV, or in movies, have it together. They’re presented as wholes that make sense. A band like the Beastie Boys or the Sex Pistols makes sense, their message. But really they’re like a little rumbling confusion storm that you could take a still picture of. So I try to always present myself as a little, rumbling confusion storm.

And yet it’s a simplified confusion!
There’s a very specific reason why I do that. It has nothing to do with aesthetics, or the history of trends. I grew up in a very unsober home, so I’m constantly sobrietizing the world, trying to make it something I can grab onto, take the confusion out as a way of creating a space I can safely live in. It’s a form of empowerment. Did you see the E.T. piece I did?

No, the DVD player was broken when I looked.
Basically, I transcribed E.T. I watched it and simply described what I saw, just a white text on the screen. And it’s 86 minutes. I really like thinking of it as my third feature film! But E.T. is so good; it made me cry eight times. It’s really designed to hit some primal emotional thing. Even now, post-therapy, I can’t watch E.T. without bawling. It’s so cathartic. It swooms you in; there’s an inebriation that comes from watching that movie. So in my version it’s deinebriated. To me it’s like a Satie remix of some very lush music. But it’s not because I’m interested in Suprematism, or De Stijl, or Josef Müller-Brockmann. It’s because I have a certain emotional need to make the world a little simpler, so that I can be myself.

Speaking of Müller-Brockmann, did you see Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica documentary?
No.

It made it difficult for me to look at Helvetica the same way again. When Crate & Barrel uses Helvetica, and you realize it’s being connected with universality, efficiency, all these sorts of values, you begin to think, “We need other signifiers.” So I’m interested in the idea that simplicity is a look, one that goes together with Helvetica.
I use Helvetica, I use Akzidenz. But to me, Helvetica is the phoniest typeface. I use it as a straight man. To me it’s the most corrupt, hysterical face. What makes my work funny is that I put it in Helvetica.

But it announces control and restraint and reliability!
Yes, that’s what it purports to do. And that’s why it’s funny.

In Japan, this design group called Groovisions is selling Müller-Brockmann dolls. He would have hated that! Or maybe not. He was quite playful too.
Well, he was Swiss!

Were Charles and Ray Eames a big influence on you?
Yeah, really huge. I’m more influenced by the Eames film style than by Paris, Texas, for sure. I mean, I love Paris, Texas. It’s very beautiful, but it’s like a big fashion model to me. And the Eames are more like the cute girl next door, that I could actually have sex with.

And their work is a take on California, which is not Hollywood-like.
I have a weird puritanical, Protestant streak. Hardworking and kind of dry.

Which is more a New England thing, right? So when you bring that to California something strange happens.
It’s why I use Helvetica, and it’s why I like the Eames. I just saw the Fischli and Weiss show, and I love that. Fischli and Weiss meets the Eames, that’s me! Because Fischli’s and Weiss’s career is very similar in that it’s not one body. It’s this anti-body, and I love that. Hans Haacke introduced me to their work when I was eighteen, and it made the biggest impression on me. And at the same time I was discovering the Eames. And Charles Eames speaks very radically, quoting Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, with whom he probably studied, saying that medium categorizations are just a product of capitalism. They have nothing to do with the human spirit, and the soul, and being creative, and living your life.

What do you mean, medium categorizations?
Are you a graphic designer? Are you an illustrator? Are you a sculptor? Are you a filmmaker? Are you an artist? Those lines are 20th-century manmade art school constructions, and career constructions. So it’s really just a form of careerism. Moholy-Nagy’s manifesto is all about dismantling that. I remember when I was eighteen and I read all of this, I thought, “Oh, wow, weird! So this is how the future’s gonna be! I’d better catch up!” And now I’m 42, and everyone’s like, “Well, what do you do? What’s your career? Who are you? Do I think of you this way or that way?”

Some of your Humans work seems to have something in common with Sister Corita Kent’s work with silk screens. There’s one part of her work that’s Andy Warhol, another part that’s a nun, and another part that’s Hallmark cards with inspiring messages on them, which could be very popular and mainstream. The Humans work is like that — is it design? Is it art? Is it a greetings card?
I’m very happy with that confusion. It’s very purposeful. And to me it’s very exciting. Like The Way Things Go, the Fischli and Weiss film. One of the reasons why I love it is that it’s like, “What is it? Is that a film?” The more they create friction with the categories, the more excited I get. What I share with Sister Corita Kent, beyond some visual things, which are just by accident, is her real mission to communicate with people, like the responsibility to try and make the world bigger in some way. For her it was a Christian-based spirituality – Catholics in America are more interesting than other Christians; they can be quite radical and socialist, manning soup kitchens and things. And she came out of that. So there is a social consciousness to what she’s doing.

Carl Rogers, the humanist psychotherapist, came into the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent and did this experiment that radicalized the nuns. He let them wear what they wanted, do what they wanted, and half of them became lesbians!
Yes, that’s at the end of [Adam Curtis documentary] The Century of the Self, that sort of Reichian world. Anyway, I do believe in social responsibility, and I believe in communicating with people, however pretentious that is. So when I make Humans stuff, I make it so that it can be in a house, or in a part of a life. There’ve been so many things in my life — like Fischli and Weiss, I’m so glad they exist. In a weird way they made my life bigger and more interesting, more surprising. They made me more alive, you know? So if I could get close to that, if that’s the only thing I could figure out … that’s good. I don’t know if I’m doing it or not, but that’s the goal. I know a lot of artist friends who think it’s almost sacrilegious to think about your audience, or know about them, or include them. I come from a very punk rock ethics. But to me it’s about trying to connect.

People & Topics


Design
Mike Mills

Issue #17 — Summer 2009

Mike Mills

Issue #17 — Summer 2009: Mike Mills
10 €
“All we ever wanted was everything,” MIKE MILLS reveals in our 40-page cover special on ways of getting through the recession / depression. Meanwhile, RONNIE COOKE NEWHOUSE narrates a day in the life of her best friend PHARRELL WILLIAMS, photographed by MAX FARAGO; publisher GERHARD STEIDL races jet lag across the Atlantic from Karl Lagerfeld’s haute couture show in Paris to Robert Frank’s Canadian solitude; distinguished historian ERIC HOBSBAWM discusses his views on the future of globalization ...…

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