Tiny Furniture

Tiny Furniture
Written & Directed by Lena Dunham
Year: 2010

Bumper: Ryan Wilson

No, that’s not our protagonist to your left… that’s her adorable 17 year old sister, Nadine.  This movie would be about the precocious, truth telling, budding artist Nadine if it were a Hollywood movie selling itself as independent.  This movie, however, is an elongated piece of the video-performance art that writer/director Lena Dunham’s anti-hero, Aura, displays on Youtube. 

Should you choose to press play on Tiny Furniture do not be surprised to find yourself watching at least a third of it with your hands covering your face, peeking through fingercracks.  An array of causes might send your hands there, as if they might rescue your burning eyes from Aura.  Let's make a list.

                1. Embarrassment.  Prepared in a large vat and scooped generously onto your plate.

                2. Your memories (or any horrific thought of your future) of being 22.

                3. The thought of your own mostly or completely naked body on screen.

                4. Sex.

   5. Horror of anything connected to being a parent to Aura, or anyone in Aura-like situations either presently or in the future.

                6. Realization that you too might be or have been an asshole recently (currently). 

                7. The fear that you might be semi-consciously fucking up important parts of your life.

I’ll stop at 7.

These are not the kinds of thoughts I want to be having at 4:30 in the morning, when I watched this film, or any other time.  I simply wish to live my life the best I can, be someone who leaves this world 1/7,000,000,000^th  better than I found it.  Love well.  Be a source of, if not pride exactly, then anti-shame to my children.  Perhaps enjoy some success in something I love doing.  But Lena Dunham is having none of that pretty-polly bullshit.  None of it. 

There is a key difference I think between this film and, say, Neil Labute’s early stuff, and Dunham’s “mumblecore” contemporaries.  And I’ve never heard her interviewed, or read her writing—she could be as repelling as Aura is in her film.  And it doesn’t even matter.  Ain’t nobody trying to get nobody to like nobody in this movie, and it’s damn… no… refreshing is not the right word.  It’s revoltingly necessary. 

You could make a list of reasons to hate Aura.  She’s rich and entitled, inconsiderate, dishonest, narcissistic... I can confidently say Dunham would say, yeah, keep going.  The way she exhibits herself, as her sister points out, is fucking desperate.  But, if you are as honest as Dunham is in displaying this character on screen for us, you will admit, Aura is not without hope.  And neither am I.  And neither are you.  And there you have it.  Desperate character, desperate filmmaking for a hungry audience.  You might just hate it—HATE IT.  But if you need it, it’s there.