{"id":3867,"date":"2013-12-06T00:46:51","date_gmt":"2013-12-06T05:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=3867"},"modified":"2013-12-11T19:37:57","modified_gmt":"2013-12-12T00:37:57","slug":"tiny-furniture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/tiny-furniture\/","title":{"rendered":"A (Reformed) Lost Girl\u2019s Take On ‘Tiny Furniture’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lenachloe\"
\n

\nTiny Furniture<\/a> (2010)
\n<\/b><\/span><\/b>Written & Directed by Lena Dunham
\n98 min.<\/p>\n

About a year ago, the editor of this site wrote a scathing critique of Lena Dunham entitled The Empress, Quite Literally, Has No Clothes<\/a>.\u00a0 A few months before reading it, I\u2019d made the transition from engaged college student with supposed direction to a member of Lena’s target demographic\u2014single, 20-something, stagnating in a “post-graduate delirium” as she puts it, working a minimum wage job and living with a single parent.\u00a0 A \u201clost girl\u201d, as Cody puts it in his piece.<\/p>\n

Until very recently, I\u2019d avoided watching Tiny Furniture because I didn’t want to deal with any of the three possible outcomes of me doing so:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Liking it, and being berated by my peers.<\/li>\n
  2. Disliking it, and being annoyed that I wasted my time.<\/li>\n
  3. Hating it, and agreeing with Cody that it is in fact detrimental to its audience.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I didn’t need any of those stresses in my life, especially when I was so busy having such a \u201chard time\u201d trying to \u201cfigure things out\u201d (as she puts it, over and over). But after a year of being in the position that the film attempts to depict, the subject matter and controversy finally seduced me and, with the aid of a few beers, I jumped into bed with it.
    \n
    \nMen have incorrectly been labeled as misogynists for hating this film.\u00a0 I can’t let that fly, not when I hate it too, if not more<\/em>.\u00a0 However, both \u2018love\u2019 and \u2018hate\u2019 imply being strongly affected by something, and I was certainly affected by Tiny Furniture.\u00a0 It utilizes themes that resonate to my core\u2014albeit, to ends I wholeheartedly disagree with.<\/p>\n

    “What a ridiculous question, I love<\/em> living here.”<\/b><\/p>\n

    This line really resonated with me, not as comedy or drama, but as horror.\u00a0 I know exactly what she means, because when you’re back in the house you grew up in as a kid, with the insight of being an adult, something amazingly useful, yet terrifying happens\u2014you start to notice the traits you got from your parents and your childhood surroundings.\u00a0 You develop an understanding of your identity unlike ever before, and with that comes the potential for transcendence.\u00a0 You reach a turning point where you have two choices: use this knowledge you have gained to actualize yourself and control your destiny, or get sucked back into your past, becoming <\/i>it, possibly without ever realizing you had a choice not to.<\/p>\n

    This film pisses me off because it encourages its impressionable audience to take the second route, with lines like:<\/p>\n

    “Can I sleep in your bed?”<\/b><\/p>\n

    One of the motifs in this film involves Aura being upset that her mom wont always let her sleep in her bed with her.\u00a0 I get what she\u2019s going for here\u2014the child is being weaned from her mom too late.\u00a0 That’s great, but the thing is, that’s her only discernible conflict with her mom in this film<\/i>.\u00a0 Compared to me, and most people I know, she has a pretty good relationship with her parent, and even with her sister.\u00a0 She sits on her mom’s lap, she massages her mom’s back, she’s comfortable being naked in front of her sister, etc. \u00a0She spends the whole film saying <\/i>things are bad, but never actually demonstrates that it is.<\/p>\n

    This left me confused and unable to relate because, in reality, lost girls are usually lost for a reason.\u00a0 <\/i>Their parents maybe sucked at raising them somehow, or something bad happened when they were a kid.\u00a0 Not only that, but their home situation is usually screwed up in some way as a result.\u00a0 But there’s no screwed up home situation that Aura comes back to\u2014her house is clean and functional, her mom is a successful artist that she can explain how she feels to and make physical contact with. \u00a0Everything is fine.\u00a0 And yet she constantly mopes and pouts and screeches like a child.<\/p>\n

    “Stop shrieking!”\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

    As I write this review, I’m not at home, because I have to hop from coffee shops to bars at odd hours of the night in order to write, due to perpetually faulty electricity and lack of heating at my house.\u00a0 And I can’t complain about not sleeping in my mom’s bed, because she’s been dead for years.\u00a0 And only recently have I learned how to talk to my dad about my feelings, and physical contact with him is rare.\u00a0 I’m not bitching, or looking for sympathy\u2014I’m just illustrating a legitimately uncomfortable living situation, in contrast to Tiny Furniture\u2019s pathetic excuse for one.<\/p>\n

    I understand that Lena Dunham was just trying to express her feelings using the tools at her disposal.\u00a0 Aspiring to be a filmmaker myself, I can appreciate that.\u00a0 But her film is a mockery, an insulting misrepresentation of what it\u2019s like to go through a twenty-something transitional period which seeks not to offer advice or substance to actual lost girls out there, but to encourage wallowing\u2014especially wallowing over nothing.<\/i><\/p>\n

    I\u2019m glad I waited until now to watch Tiny Furniture.\u00a0 I\u2019ve gained a lot of wisdom over the last year, and made immense strides in transcending my own situation.\u00a0 If I’d watched it back then, I might have used it to justify my own “resistance\u201d (as Steven Pressfield<\/a> puts it) and remained stuck, possibly forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \"lenachloe\"
    \n

    \n    Tiny Furniture<\/a> (2010)
    \n<\/b><\/span><\/b>Written & Directed by Lena Dunham
    \n98 min.<\/p>\n

    About a year ago, the editor of this site wrote a scathing critique of Lena Dunham entitled The Empress, Quite Literally, Has No Clothes<\/a>.\u00a0 A few months before reading it, I\u2019d made the transition from engaged college student with supposed direction to a member of Lena’s target demographic\u2014single, 20-something, stagnating in a “post-graduate delirium” as she puts it, working a minimum wage job and living with a single parent.\u00a0 A \u201clost girl\u201d, as Cody puts it in his piece.<\/p>\n

    Until very recently, I\u2019d avoided watching Tiny Furniture because I didn’t want to deal with any of the three possible outcomes of me doing so:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Liking it, and being berated by my peers.<\/li>\n
    2. Disliking it, and being annoyed that I wasted my time.<\/li>\n
    3. Hating it, and agreeing with Cody that it is in fact detrimental to its audience.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      I didn’t need any of those stresses in my life, especially when I was so busy having such a \u201chard time\u201d trying to \u201cfigure things out\u201d (as she puts it, over and over). But after a year of being in the position that the film attempts to depict, the subject matter and controversy finally seduced me and, with the aid of a few beers, I jumped into bed with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,3267],"tags":[3272,32,75,104,185,519,78,3320,308],"class_list":["post-3867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-chloes-reviews","tag-chloe-pelletier","tag-cody-clarke","tag-lena-dunham","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-steven-pressfield","tag-tiny-furniture","tag-tiny-furniture-bad-review","tag-tiny-furniture-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3867"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3876,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3867\/revisions\/3876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}