It was the end of the summer, and I was forced to admit that I still hadn’t read The Corrections, and might never do so, but had watched Lise Swenson’s Mission Movie almost as many times as I’d left the neighborhood – not counting work and a few desperate heat-wave excursions. A person who spends her days reviewing films like A Cinderella Story and She’s All That is unlikely to look to the cinema for psychic insights and life instruction, but I had to imagine the repeated rewindings meant something. Parochial ardor didn’t quite account for it, though laziness might. It only explained why, a few weeks before the film’s June debut in the Mission Village parking lot, I sat in a Potrero Hill screening room scanning for street corners and store awnings and people I knew.

I’m susceptible – to pretty much everything from op-ed columns by Paul Krugman to early Party of Five episodes. And an after-school script and cue-card performances have never stopped me from “dwelling” before. So it’s no shock Swenson’s first foray into something loosely resembling fiction left an impression loosely resembling a bruise. A bruise is what you get, an impression is what you leave when you tread back over contested territory, over arguments started years ago, dropped in the shuffle of legislative promises and recession and wars, and certainly never settled.

* * *

When Hollywood inhabits San Francisco, which it doesn’t much, preferring more hospitable cities, the camera, a visitor, naturally tends toward the touristic, waiting for Nicholas Cage to save our lives at Alcatraz, or staring moodily at the arches of the Golden Gate Bridge from the hillside turret of somebody’s brightly painted lady. In Swenson’s movie the icons have been replaced, and the street corners aren’t edited together to sew up disparate geographic pockets of the seven by seven. So it’s more like running errands on Mission Street, weaving around folks loudly planted on the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change and watching the 14 hurtle past at highway speed. The camera’s directive is know where you are. So you look at street signs, bus stops, and the sides of buildings. You turn your head toward the mouths of alleys and scan the sidewalk traffic. Just outside the frame, old ladies with canes and children with backpacks half the size of their bodies are crossing the street, bargains hanging in the doorways of shops like hallways, the bridges nowhere in sight, the only hill an off-camera memory, a browning heap on the southern horizon with a scraggly tuft of trees on its crown.

The camera nods at the taquerias and the doughnut shops and the manhole covers, the tags on every flat surface and the flyers adhered to every focal point– the BART stations and the darkened bars. It turns down an alley where the walls bear the labour of artists who walk to work. In a household of hipsters, a drug-addled playa chick lets a demolition notice gather dust. Downstairs an undocumented Latino family works double shifts and weighs the dangers and merits of public protest. At the corner store, a Palestine-born teenager and his father stand off daily over filial responsibility and cultural acclimation. An End the Occupation protest is filmed at ground level rather than by helicopter’d TV crews, and a crowd listens to poetry, listens to the sound of disparate causes unevenly patched together. The movie unspools, multiple threads insisting on the message that the Mission has many inhabitants and more stories than are currently on the playlist.

* * *

After the screening, a girl sat by the door handing out promotional materials. A postcard for the upcoming premiere, a pamphlet on the collaborative, community-focused filmmaking process, and a poster inscribed with the words “I Belong Here,” which I admired but could not bring myself to hang in my apartment – where a decade of paying rent and riding buses, skating in parking lots and meeting girls, drinking from ripped paper bags and hanging out of windows and jumping on cars parked outside Delfina during the Dyke March, drinking too much and sobering up and losing jobs and outrunning debt and trying to determine the definition of paying one’s dues, has been insufficient to make me feel sure enough of belonging to publish news of it in the hallway. The hallway existing in an apartment, the apartment existing on a street, the street existing in a neighborhood where the notion of belonging has been hashed out by renters, rock musicians, bar owners, modern dance choreographers, anti-displacement coalitions, various other ragtag armies of inhabitants, and the occasional politician, and a movie poster can leave a person shy about making claims. Or maybe it’s just me.

This is neither the time nor the place for a rant about bioregionalism or the fall of the Roman Empire, and it’s not like many people in my social circle are prone to uttering phrases like “love it or leave it.” But I have found myself wondering what it would be like if all patriotism involved land packages no larger than a scattering of city blocks. Granted, I never found myself wondering this while growing up in a shithole no one ever mentions once they leave. It’s the Mission that’s made me conscious of geography, and geographically loyal. I came here young, though, and an unfortunate side effect of growing older here has been a creeping self-consciousness about my residency that I don’t think I would feel somewhere less layered and fought over, with histories whose paint keeps scraping away, by populations that pass on the street and don’t speak.

And really, it’s a bit hard to say why I feel proud to live in the vicinity of Clarion Alley, of Balmy Alley, of the Leather Tongue window displays and the 16th Street generator shows; proud to live in the company of the unknown art prankster who knots colored lengths of yarn around abandoned bike shrapnel while the neighborhood sleeps, or the thoughtful soul who, perhaps after years of walking past the “TASTE THE BLEACH” stencil at the corner of 17th and Guerrero, left behind a container of Clorox for passersby moved to do so, or the midnight architects who erected an igloo on top of a two-story mound of dirt by the freeway ramp construction.

It’s hard to say, when you consider how little I had to do with any of it. It’s like the Sutro Baths, or the greenery-clad staircases above the Castro, or the hillside flower gardens in Bernal Heights and the community gardens all across the city I’ll never plant in. I can’t claim to have lifted a finger, but I take pleasure in walking my out-of-town guests along side streets to demonstrate the good taste I showed in moving here before the boom, at a time when “I don’t want to pay more than $300 a month” was a thing you could say with a straight face, a time I have less and less people with whom to talk over wistfully, as the years pass and I stay and my friends one by one move to Williamsburg or Los Feliz or northeast Portland.

* * *

The camera in Swenson’s movie rolls by everything and causes audience members to sit up straighter and whisper to the person on their right. It isn’t just the physical landscape but the familiar thematic terrain: the housing battlefields littered with notices from landlords that at one time seemed to come every week, the opinions one had stated or disparaged over the years, the glossy types one had skirted on the sidewalk Friday nights outside the Beauty Bar and blamed for coming. The camera was rolling the whole time, it seems, scouting dropped lines on Valencia Street and shelving them for future use.

So a hipster with entitlement issues assumes his place is at the front of the line at the Tenants Union, and it happened one day, I’m sure it did. Coalitions are blueprinted on the assumption that we are all fighting the same battles, which happened, we know it did. The walls of an unnamed side street, layered with real-life paint by the Clarion Alley Mural Project, in Swenson’s movie are curated by a guy named Rogelio or Roger depending on whom you talked to – and painted under the watchful eye of four Latino kids who live behind the fences and the roll-up garage doors. A white Santa Cruz graduate paints on their fenceline and spouts lecture-hall theories on hip-hop and cultural appropriation, and their view of the whole project is colored by their bad attitude, his worse communication skills, and the question, constantly hovering in the air, of what it means to paint your preconceptions on someone else’s walls.

“74,633 Residents, 196 Nationalities, 2 Square Miles,” the tagline says. “I Belong Here.” I look at the walls in our hallway, virtually empty since we took down the John Wu two-gun-standoff posters left behind by a fan of Hong Kong action films, long since moved to Silverlake. I’d felt like I was living in someone else’s dorm room, but now I just feel like a person incapable of applying the creative touch, or keeping plants alive. “Just … put the poster up,” said my housemate in June as we prepared for a hallway full of drunken guests on Dyke Day. Fresh from college in small-town Missouri, she was unclear on the logistical difficulties.

Instead, it remained rolled up in a bookshelf by my bed as if waiting for a better assignment. And for a few months I saw those words and the poster’s thickly drawn skyline of houses everywhere in the neighborhood, hanging in the doorways of bookstores and antique shops, advertising screenings at Mission Village and the Victoria – reminiscent of Megan Wilson’s poster project “Home,” the cheery yellow-and-red placards that went up in various windows during the “I belong here” wars of the new millennium.

I could have taken my roommate through the condo conversions, the UTNE Reader nomination for second-hippest neighborhood in America, the art funerals, the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition marches, the wave of evictions that left behind demographic change and handfuls of half-abandoned lots. But I was sick of talking about it – especially the part I’d played in making the neighborhood safer for complaining yuppies – and instead stood contemplating the poster already hanging in the kitchen, the one by the S.F. Print Collective we’d hung up a few years back, when folks had started papering the neighborhood with their objections. Employing the hearty tone of a merchants association ad, it invites dot-com nouveaux riches to “come enjoy the Mission – cleaner, brighter, whiter … tablecloths” – and hangs in a household, it must be said, whose current inhabitants are white enough, if not particularly clean or bright.

The posters both look like artifacts now, from a time when you saw such things wheatpasted on construction hoardings around all the dust-bowl wrecking-ball lots. But when you step out on the street, the updates are everywhere, the neighborhood still papered over and washed with paint and the smell of fresh sharpie and freshly stenciled sidewalk, full of messages, curses, warnings, rumors. The cement draws names and stick figures and instructions for revolt. The billboards draw unpaid-for ads designed and slapped on at night by anticapitalists. The one across the street from my house gives new meaning to the phrase “watch this space.” Begging to be written over, weekly, sometimes daily, it faithfully is, as a series of interventionists make executive decisions about whose space it is. In my neighborhood the hearts are at constant risk of being broken. The one installed opposite Dolores Park has been tagged and cleaned and replaced and knocked down in a fight, a hot pink blotch tipped sideways on the median. They’ve become one more thing to stare at and say “you don’t belong.”

* * *

What other neighborhood in the city is so clamorously laid claim to – the Fillmore and SoMa redevelopment land grabs having passed away into archives? Granted, I wouldn’t necessarily know – traveling up the 22 line feels like entering a series of foreign territories. Maybe there are pitched battles taking place along Haight Street at night, between the street kids and the computer programmers and the people who voted for Newsom. Meanwhile, back home half the stores on Valencia once bore signs from Wilson’s “Home” project announcing where they were, but the signs seem to have fallen off as if we are approaching some kind of autumn. Elsewhere the taggers continue to name the streets after themselves, and the furniture stores and Peruvian bistros open and close, and the neighborhood groups hang matching banners from streetlamps and stoplights.

People here have logged many hours attempting to solve the knotty problem of who should live here and who should go home – back to Texas, as dictated by the person who used to draw chalk outlines of automobile shadows and once wrote those words inside the outline of an SUV parked near Mission Dolores. Go home, yuppies, but in Swenson’s movie, the car might just as easily belong to a second-gen Latina businesswoman who wonders why people keep telling her to leave. Go back to Hayward, to Concord, to college, the signs tell the young adults screaming from the Mexican Bus at night, parking in the median and stumbling to their cars after hours and giving a person reason to wonder whether they see the possessive gesture, the signs raised in windows and doorways, scrawled on billboards and carved into sidewalks.

What other place is so interested in arrivals and departures, as if the neighborhood is a waystation, or a funeral home. Somewhere out there are people more content with the Mission that exists now than the one that lived and breathed 10 or 15 years ago, when visitors were scarcer. I just don’t know any of them. People talk about what’s passed on as if they’re talking about the difference between the dead and the living. Meanwhile, the memorial for a girl lost in a motorcycle accident goes on and on in the median at 18th and Dolores.

* * *

Come enjoy the Mission. The people find ways of doing so, especially when the offer has been rescinded, until the car outliner, the painting hanger, the bike decorator, the igloo maker, the billboard interventionists, the generator-show promoters, and the art receptionists staking out provisional galleries on unsecured wall space and abandoned fencelines all come to seem like characters in some Richard Scarrey children’s book.

I read the signs and think I’ve driven away something lonely and uncomfortable by recognizing them. I feel grateful nobody has ever chalked an outline on the sidewalk where the shadow of my bicycle falls, or suggested I go back to Texas. On the other hand, someone keeps chalking the wet, stained circles of concrete along the route I walk my dog. This is a neighborhood of rants, and I never really wondered much why we all can’t just get along.

The other day we discovered our pantry was infested with weavils and stood there listening to the horrifying yet astounding sound of hundreds of small insects eating. I hesitate to compare my fellow inhabitants to bugs and won’t make any new friends by doing so, but if you stand on a street corner in the Mission you can hear people talking and spouting and writing and slapping the signs of their existence up on poles in the dead of night. This is a neighborhood of people trapping other people in cul-de-sac conversations in laundromats and cafés and other confined spaces. One gate down lives a man who has taken to standing outside his garage with a barbell raised over his head, dropping it over and over on the sidewalk as if he’s trying to break through concrete to some waterway running underneath, then yelling at me to curb my dog, who is frightened of metal objects descending from the sky. His art projects seem to run public health risks, but who am I to say so?

A while ago I learned that three degrees of separation divide me from the people who threw up on the windows of the Dark Room, newly tenanted in the space where Mission Records hung on all those years, then finally coughed up the ghost and spat it all over the sidewalk like a tuberculosis-ridden lung. This is a neighborhood of extreme gestures. I walk over patches of blood on the pavement outside my house, past fights between teenagers testing each other on side streets, hanging outside the laundromats and holding court on the corners.

“I live here” is what my neighbor seems to be saying to anyone who will listen to the sound of metal clanging on cement. “I live here,” says the woman scattering pumpkin seeds on the bus. We move headlong toward downtown traffic, and I couldn’t agree with her more. “I live here” is what the kids in the park say the nights they hold screenings down by the playground. And the kids who do live there say the same thing when the sprinklers go on and they roll up their sleeping bags and scout out another location. And really, what else is my dog saying but “I live here” as he pisses on the piss spots and every other crack in the sidewalk while I read stencils and tags and stickers denouncing the war, the prisons, the yuppies, the paper I write for.

I want to belong here. I’ve just never lived in a place where it seemed to take so much more energy and art than simply saying I do. At times the neighborhood feels less like geography than like a clique the size of a few city blocks. At times something makes it hard to walk naturally down the street, as if it weren’t a neighborhood we were living in but a movie, a Mission movie. I do live here; it’s an undeniable fact– unhappy though it may make the landlord, who shows no signs of appreciating the beauty of rent control. But I’d like something more than gloating over cheap rent and the constant, almost miserly fear of eviction to keep me grounded in a sense of community.

Lise Swenson made a movie into a community project, as if to say that some art can and should be made by committee. I’m not sure where that leaves the midnight art marauders, but there’s nothing more like a solo show than a girl standing on a street corner staring glumly and bitterly into the intersection as the party bus passes, avoiding eye contact and trying to will strangers to feel ashamed of themselves, to go home and sleep it off and never come back.

At the end of Mission Movie, a 17-year-old Palestinian immigrant reads poetry at an antiwar rally, comparing his neighborhood to a flower and asserting his right to feel most at home here. A junkie hipster calls her mother for money. An illegal immigrant leaves town on his own. And a twentysomething Latina riding the dot-com wave and a Santa Cruz artist wrapping up a turf war with a group of 10-year-olds stand around their emptying kitchen packing boxes and talking about the future. “You’re the only one of us who really belongs here,” she philosophically tells him, as if he’s worked off his membership by grappling with children and learning to incorporate their vision into his art.

Out on the street that sentence may be picked apart for years to come, as the dropped arguments start up again whether anyone is listening or not.

Lynn Rapoport has been writing about music, film, fiction, pop culture, and local customs for the San Francisco Bay Guardian since 2000 and was formerly the paper’s managing editor. Some of her favorite things about San Francisco are staircase streets, star jasmine, incensed bicyclists, the boat in the playground at Dolores Park, faux-meaterie Lucky Creation, and the new Mona Caron mural.