Paperboys and Deformer, two shorts by Mike Mills

Mills: So, Brandon, what do you think it's going to be like in ... twenty or fifty years for paperboys?
Brandon: I think that there probably ... might be a paperboy, I don't know. 'Cause th-you might, you might find out all the, like, defying gravity, and then there'd be like, cars that would be in air. So, I don't know (with shrug). That's kinda hard to tell. Um ... I think it'd be cool to have a car that could float in the air, 'cause then you could, (shrugs), I think it'd be cool. Um ... 'cause I've always wanted to know what it'd be like to fly ... and ... float in the air. Um ... I think ... that ... in fifty years ... the paperboys would probably have their, (shrugs), their own system, where you could just deliver to the houses by mail or something like that.

I found a lot to relate to in Paperboys, the 40 minute Mike Mills documentary about paperboys in Stillwater Minnesota. It connected with some of the things I'd been thinking when writing about Fear City, and it reminded me that I view the problem of conformity and the death of personalities from my perspective, and Brandon and his paperboy friends view it from a totally different perspective.

The paperboys, in the 11-14 age range, want to talk about their bikes, favorite sports, movies, television shows, videogames, cars they want, and the money they can earn. They're into rap music, gangster rap, like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Corporations they probably wouldn't list as enemies. They're trying to be good kids. They're wrestling with growing responsibilities and self-awareness, and Mills tries to allow them to speak for themselves (though he asks some of them the same leading questions).

Paperboys is curious about how we become ourselves and how our society becomes our society. Or, as put by Gary Davis, writing about Ed Templeton for the short Deformer, "Ed is a bundle, a bundle of nerves, feeling life. [???] all the slivers are bound together into a complete person: happy, sad, friendly, mean ... straight, strange, and of course supremely messed up. Like all of us. The way it's supposed to be. The way it is. Reality."

Mills was recently interviewed by Gus Van Sant for Filmmaker Magazine (Beginners press). In the interview Van Sant broached the matter of Mills being both independently minded, and a creator of corporate advertisements. Mills replied that he's sometimes torn over the issue, but it's complicated for him, and doing some advertisements allows him to continue to live the life of an artist.

"You go to Huntington High School and there's just - half the kids are fuck ups. They're all - tweaked in some way," Templeton says in a voice over. "It's more like: my life's supposed to be normal, I'm supposed to be a good kid, but I'm ditching. There's like, a full ... blanket, of like, secrecy."

Mills strikes me as a genuine person, someone concerned about the people around him. I like that he has more questions than answers. I think he tries to discover people, instead of making judgments about them; he tries to see them for who they are instead of who they're supposed to be. I worry that his reluctance to draw bigger conclusions inhibits the scope of his narrative films, as in Beginners, which I thought was flat, but that's not a problem in these two documentaries.